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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 19, 2018 16:00:46 GMT
Today I saw Mia Hansen-Løve's Maya, the sort of film that seems to be made personally for my own special interests. It's about Gabriel, a 30-ish war reporter. As the movie begins, he is released from being a hostage in Syria, along with a colleague. A 3rd member of the group remains hostage. The two others return to France to honours and media attention. Gabriel hates the attention, so he goes to the India of his youth.
His father was a diplomat, so he grew up in Bombay (it is still called Bombay in French) but the family also had a holiday house in Goa. While he was still young, the mother fell in love with another man, so he grew up with his diplomat father in various places around the world before ending up in Paris. Anyway, most of the movie takes place in Goa, with all of the exotic sights and the (not always) pristine beaches that we have had the privilege of seeing in reports here. He visits his godfather, an Indian hotelier who hates what Goa has become with all of the tourism and the real estate vultures. He has a pretty and intelligent daughter, Maya. Oh no. Gabriel also goes all over India on buses and motor scooters, so we see temples, step wells, markets, ruins, and all of the things that make India so amazing. He even visits his mother, who still lives in Mumbai with her new family. The movie is a total overload of anybody's travel senses.
When he leaves India, it is not hard to understand to where he is returning, with the Jordan stamp in his passport...
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Post by onlyMark on Dec 19, 2018 17:56:34 GMT
Even from the trailer it all looks so familiar. I've even got a photo of me having a shave on the street. I think I may need to see this one.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 21, 2018 17:15:41 GMT
Two period movies.
Yesterday I saw L'Empereur de Paris, about Eugène-François Vidocq, perhaps one of the most interesting personalities in French history. There have been a number of movies about him in the past (the last one starred Gérard Depardieu 18 years ago) and also some famous television series. What makes Vidocq so exceptional? He was a criminal born in 1775. At age 16, he stole his parents' money, was robbed before he could sail to America, joined a circus and then the revolutionary army, but he was dismissed after about a dozen duels. He is forced to marry a girl who claims she is pregnant, but she lied about it, so he stole her money and ran off. Then he began his life of crime. He was arrested and imprisoned so much that he escaped something like 27 times. And what happened next? The government decided that they needed a crime specialist, so Vidocq became the chief of police from 1811 to 1827. He was so efficient that 16,000 arrests were made during his reign, 3 times more than before he started his job. He resigned, went into business, lost his money, went to London and then returned, and then earned his living giving conferences.... He got cholera at age 80 and actually recovered from it while having a number of young mistresses all of whom were promised a fabulous inheritance even though he had nothing. Three years later, he finally died.
Is there not enough material for a dozen movies in Vidocq's life? So why was this new movie starring Vincent Cassel one of the most fucking boring movies that I have seen this year? Probably because they are clearly setting up a second movie (perhaps even a third) about his life. Really, I hope not. This movie ended just as he was recruited as chief of police, which is obviously too soon if one wants a complete story. Okay, it is visually stunning (one of the biggest French budgets this year). There is a scene of the construction of the Arc de Triomphe which is incredible and also scenes of the Tuileries Palace which burned in 1871. They built entire neighbourhoods for the film set, and they are all amazing. I thought the movie was total shit.
Today I saw Rupert Everett's The Happy Prince about the final years of Oscar Wilde. I found it kind of sleazy, but I think that was sort of the point of it all -- cheap cafés in Paris, cheap boys for sale in Naples, lots of getting spit in the face by haters -- but the acting was definitely excellent, and it was not boring. Nevertheless, I found the experience unsatisfactory. And yet it made me want to go to Père Lachaise cemetery soon to see his grave again.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 22, 2018 18:09:41 GMT
Continuing my habit of seeing hard hitting grim movies, today I went to see Mary Poppins Returns. It is about a grieving widower who doesn't know how to pay his bills. The bank is going to seize his house at the end of the week and throw him and his children out in the street with their rather useless housekeeper. Who continues to have a housekeeper when they are already completely broke? A severe woman drops out of the sky and takes over.
More seriously, what I found the most impressive about this movie is that it made absolutely no effort to update the style. It still uses hand drawn 2D animation just like more than 50 years ago. I would say that the only more modern touch is that the choreography was more sophisticated, plus the need for some reason to add a weird scene with Meryl Streep on a plot line that is immediately abandoned.
The movie may have given me diabetes, but it is a good antidote to the glut of CGI movies for children.
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Post by bixaorellana on Dec 22, 2018 21:08:24 GMT
Oh jesus ~ it has Dick van Dyke in it! AND Angela Lansbury! ditto puke. Do these people never retire and go away? I can proudly say that I never saw the first version either, even though it was the hottest of the hot when my younger siblings were kids, meaning that yes, I've heard the songs. And what's the deal with the child actress playing the younger Banks child -- has her growth been artificially stunted so she can have more cute kid roles longer? It seems she's in everything, and always the same age.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 22, 2018 21:38:28 GMT
One of the best things about the movie is something that disappointed some of the critics --«it has no memorable songs.»
Thank god for that! It's already bad enough to remember the songs from 54 years ago.
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Post by bixaorellana on Dec 22, 2018 23:30:32 GMT
I'm suppressing one of them even as I type.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 24, 2018 13:02:56 GMT
I found Paul Dano's Wildlife simultaneously extraordinary and unbearable. Any movie that takes place in the early 1960's gives me extreme discomfort, and this was no exception. I consoled myself by spotting an anachronism here and there -- for example the television picture that comes on immediately when you turn on the set. I clearly remember practically having enough time to go and pee in those days before anything appeared on the screen. I have always thought that Carey Mulligan was "okay" but this movie is practically 100% hers -- she is outstanding. Jake Gyllenhaal's role is quite small. The kid is very good -- a total Paul Dano clone with an expressionless gelatinous face that can't quite hide what is going on in his mind. Anyway, the movie is total box office poison, as excellent movies often are. ("I don't go see that crap -- I go to the pictures to have a good time!")
The Montana landscape is as breathtaking as ever.
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Post by bixaorellana on Dec 24, 2018 16:02:51 GMT
I can see what you mean about the movie being "simultaneously extraordinary and unbearable".
I've always been of two minds about Carey Mulligan. I can see where she is a good actress, but her face, which through no fault of her own is one of those that seems to be permanently smiling, can be disconcerting in that it doesn't always fit whatever emotion is being conveyed.
Even though I've tried and tried, there is something about Jake Gyllenhaal I find extremely off-putting, even rather repellent. If he were only cast as creepy villains, I'd totally understand that.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 24, 2018 16:30:05 GMT
Oh, this time Carey was perfect. I wanted to slap the shit out of her.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 24, 2018 16:37:45 GMT
there is something about Jake Gyllenhaal I find extremely off-putting, even rather repellent. If he were only cast as creepy villains, I'd totally understand that. Did you ever see Nightcrawler? If you find him repellent, you will find him perfect in that one.
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Post by bixaorellana on Dec 24, 2018 17:27:13 GMT
As many of my comments as you've read in this thread, you'd still think I'd go see something called Nightcrawler?
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 24, 2018 18:00:52 GMT
It's just about a news photographer.
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Post by bixaorellana on Dec 24, 2018 22:25:37 GMT
Cute. I'm dumb, but not dumb enough to click on that.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 25, 2018 20:11:50 GMT
Aquaman would hardly be worth mentioning, except for once I actually understood the (simple) plot. That is amazing in itself. Visually, it is stunning, on the same level as Avatar. It also has some clever scenes, such as when the Altanteans want to send a stern message to terreans. They create a worldwide tsunami which deposits all of the plastic garbage in the ocean onto our shores, as well as all of the warships. Yuck -- but totally authentic. There is plenty to see underwater because when Atlantis sank, it split up into seven separate kingdoms, some of which sank into fishy savagery while others invented incredible technology. Naturally, we visit all of them. If we have had so few visits from Atlanteans, it's because only a very small minority can breathe both air and water. Anyway, that's all beside the point -- none of us give a shit about Aquaman. What was a bit more interesting was it was the first time that I went to see a movie using both Screen X and 4DX presentation. Screen X is not too impressive, because it just means projecting certain scenes on the side walls at the same time as the screen. For a movie like this, that means some of the underwater panoramas with fish everywhere or else landscapes along the shore. 4DX is something else entirely. It is quite similar to some of the Disney attractions like Star Tours, but instead of lasting just 10 minutes, you are subjected to it (in this movie) for two and a half hours and without seatbelts. The seats rock in every direction, go up and down while you are sprayed with water, rained on from above, flashed at, heated when there are fires, vibrated, rumbled, not to mention puffs of smoke and various odours. A movie like Aquaman means getting literally buckets of water thrown at you. (There is a warning before the movie about wearing clothing that doesn't mind -- or else activating a button in the armrest that apparently turns off most of your personal water but not the water spraying from the ceiling.) Every time there is a blast, it blasts you right in the face, or from the side, or maybe from behind -- just what we have always dreamed of. I kept sliding out of my seat and had to push myself back in place at least twenty times, particularly when the little boat was in a hurricane or when a kraken type monster was chewing up a submarine. I do not plan to go to see a movie in 4DX again for a certain time.
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Post by bixaorellana on Dec 26, 2018 0:27:13 GMT
Dang!
I enjoyed the hell out of the trailer, that's for sure.
Okay, questions:
1) Is 2X at all convincing, or merely gimmicky and distracting?
2) Is it more or less impressive than 3D?
3) Given a choice, would have preferred the movie to be in regular 2D or one of the other fancy options?
4) It is rather chilly in Paris right now, right? How did the audience deal with leaving the movie house for the cold air outside?
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 26, 2018 5:16:12 GMT
I thought that the 4DX was overdone but of course that's because the movie is overdone -- non stop explosions, fights, bouncing vehicles, etc. I thought it was more effective in quieter scenes, such as when they were on a boat that was gently rocking on the water. The entire theatre rose up and down on the swells with them. Also the plunging and soaring were quite well done with the seats leaning forward or back to accompany the movement. I would also like to see a less wet movie to make up my opinion. Interestingly enough, in all of the underwater scenes they didn't use water sprayers because that would have been kinda stupid and switched to air blowers instead to accompany blasts. You are not actually wet at the end of the movie, because everything dries pretty quickly. I had my jacket on my lap during the movie and it felt like it had been in a very light drizzle.
My next test will have to be a movie that is in both 3D and 4DX. As for Screen X, I thought it was mostly a waste of time -- added nothing.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 26, 2018 15:13:25 GMT
To counteract blockbuster-induced cerebral degeneration, I went to see two movies more in line with my tastes.
The first one was L'Homme fidèle (A Faithful Man en anglais). It is about as French and as Parisian as you can get. A woman announces to her companion of 3 years "I'm pregnant. It's not yours." The father is their best friend from university. So the guy moves out. Nine years later, they see each other again at the friend's funeral -- he has suddenly died. She is strangely ready to take him back almost immediately ("Joseph might be yours. I just flipped a coin to decide."). While she is fixing coffee, he chats with the 8 year old boy. "She poisoned him, you know." He is a bit skeptical, but the boy says he heard everything. "But wasn't the doctor suspicious? Wasn't there an autopsy?" "She's sleeping with the doctor." It is basically a comedy, but I noticed that the audience took variable amounts of time to realise this. Once the couple are back together, the dead guy's sister appears. She has had a crush on the first guy since she was a kid, and now she is all grown up (if you consider Lily Rose Depp to be all grown up). She confronts the woman. "I want him and you have to give him to me..." The situation just gets more and more appalling, but I found it very entertaining -- and while it was exaggerated, it really does correspond to exactly the way many Parisian relationships are.
Un violent désir de bonheur (A Violent Desire for Joy) is a bit more unusual. It takes place in revolutionary times (1792) in a monestery in southern France. Revolutionary troops arrive to throw the monks out and probably burn the place down, but a young monk resists them, and they admire his rhetoric and feistiness. They are resting a bit anyway, so they take over half of the building and don't harrass the monks too much. The young monk Gabriel keeps debating with them, and they think that he should join the revolution, but he just asks to be able to stay in the monestery when everybody else is gone to take care of the olive orchard and do basic maintenance. They accept to let him do it until the end of the summer, but monk's clothes are out of the question -- he must wear a military uniform. He becomes Sergeant François. The African woman who has been accompanying the group of revolutionaries (probably for R&R) stays behind as well. It doesn't take her too long to have her way with him (he doesn't really resist). Before long the monestery becomes 'clothing optional' for both of them and they have a pretty nice summer... but happiness never lasts forever.
I thought both of the movies were excellent.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 27, 2018 15:32:57 GMT
I really wanted to like Au bout des doigts (informal English title "In Your Hands"). The story intrigues: The head of a music conservatory hears a young guy playing one of those free access pianos in a Paris train station. He wants to contact him but before he can do so, the guy runs off, chased by the police. He lives in the bad burbs and is involved in petty crime with his friends. The music guy (Lambert Wilson) finally tracks him down and manages to give him his (unwanted) business card, which proves useful when the young man is arrested during a burglary. Instead of going to prison, he is given a sentence of community service. The music guy gets him assigned a cleaning job at the conservatory. Of course he also wants him to play the piano. After initial resistence, the piano takes over, and there is a desire to get him into a major music competition. Kristin Scott-Thomas becomes his music teacher. They hate each other...
Well you can see where this is going, so I don't need to expand on the plot.
But I thought that this was one of the worst directed and worst written movies in a long time. Most of the scenes seem totally fake, even the cleaning scenes. The background action is fake, the suburban friends are fake, the conservatory conversations are fake. I was extremely annoyed. The actors do their best (did they realise that they were making shit?), but that is not enough. And yet I didn't really hate the movie -- as I said: the story is good. The actors are good. Everything else is terrible.
The trailer mostly manages to make it look like a good movie.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 30, 2018 17:15:04 GMT
Okay, I saw Bumblebee. It was okay, perhaps a bit too cute. And I remain annoyed when I see robots getting into fistfights. They have lasers and rocket launchers and god know what all, but they always end up in a fistfight. It doesn't matter whether it is Star Wars or Star Trek or Guardians of the Galaxy or any of that crap, the robots start punching each other like Rocky Balboa. WTF? Godzilla is also guilty of this, but I think he has fought some robots, too. What is wrong with the scriptwriters?
More interesting was the Brazilian movie Benzinho (odd international title Loveling). It is about a family just on the verge of lower middle class, at least an hour from Rio. The father has a miserable little roadside book and stationery store, no different from what you can see in India or Vietnam or Senegal, probably selling mostly school supplies and pens. The mother sells bolts of cloth on the sidewalk. They have four children. The eldest is Fernando, the golden boy, age 17 and a local star on the handball team. The next kid is 13 and chubby, and then there are the twins, perhaps about 8 years old. They live in a shabby house. The kitchen tap is always leaking, and the front door gets stuck so badly that they have to spend the entire movie crawling in and out of one of the windows using a stepladder. But they are building another much bigger house. The cement blocks are mostly in place, but not much else. The father would like to sell the additional "beach house" (mostly a shack), but the mother absolutely refuses. It is clearly an important place for her, perhaps her childhood home. Anyway, the movie is mostly focused on the mother, Irene, who is a total Mother Courage, but the biggest trauma is the fact that Fernando has been recruited by a German scout to go play handball professionally in Germany. The idea rips a big hole in Irene's heart, but she loves her son so much that she would never stop him. She has her own modest triumph, having finally obtained her secondary school diploma. This was one of the most heartbreaking elements for me, because she goes around distributing invitations to the graduation ceremony because she is so proud, but it is obvious that none of the people she knows gives a shit... Although it looks like I have told quite a bit of the things that happen in the movie, it is really almost nothing -- there is so much more, and no it doesn't last 3 hours. It is a standard length of 1h35. I could have watched the family for 3 hours, though.
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Post by bixaorellana on Dec 30, 2018 17:57:26 GMT
Well, I was misting up by the time I got to the end of your review, and the trailer really got to me. It looks to be a beautifully made and photographed movie as well. I looked up "benzinho" on google translate & got "hubby", but WordReference says informal (honey, sweetie), with the example, Hey, sugar, how's it going?.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 30, 2018 18:07:22 GMT
The French title is La vie comme elle vient. (Life as it comes.)
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Post by bixaorellana on Dec 30, 2018 19:04:28 GMT
I like that better than the original or the weird international one.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 1, 2019 15:10:00 GMT
I saw the Indian movie Sir, which was quite good. Of course, it isn't a "real" Indian movie because it doesn't have any song and dance numbers. The vast majority of Indians wouldn't be caught dead watching such a movie, so it was financed at least 90% by French production companies. It's about a housemaid called Ratna from a village, who works for rich people in Bombay. She didn't want to stay in the village because her family married her to some guy when she was 18 because the other family was not demanding a dowry. No wonder -- the man died after two months. As the woman says later in the movie "When you are a widow at age 19, your life is over." Her job in Bombay was finished, but the rich family called her back due to a problem -- their son was left standing at the altar by his fiancée, so he is living alone in one of the family apartments. Since rich people can't do anything, obviously he needs a maid. So Ratna returns, tiptoeing around and keeping her eyes lowered at all times. Everybody treats her like less-than-human except for the guy she's working for. He very slowly realises what a good person Ratna is and ends up falling in love with her. But this isn't Hollywood or even Bollywood, so the ending isn't at all what we would have wanted, but at least it isn't depressing.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 1, 2019 17:38:29 GMT
Today I saw Mia and the While Lion, the sort of movie that I was never meant to see because it is a holiday movie for children (buy hey, I saw The Nutcracker, Mary Poppins and other things...). Of course the worst thing for me is that it is a French movie masquerading as a South African movie, filmed in English of course, but there is no original version available in France, so I saw it dubbed into French. It must be pointed out, however, that dubbing has made incredible progress in the last 10 or 15 years, so it is not as annoying as it used to be.
What intrigued me about the movie is that it was filmed over a 3-year period so that both the girl and the lion cub grew up at the same time and there is no trickery in their relations. But no, I am never going to sleep with a lion in my bed or let it jump on the kitchen table. When the lion is still very small, nothing looks too dangerous, but when it reaches adult size, you just want to scream at the girl and say "get away from that thing -- it's going to kill you!"
As for the plot the family has a "lion farm." It raises lions to be sold to zoos or animal parks. They had spent 10 years in London after some sort of incident, but now they are back, and the girl hates it -- her whole life was in London. But since she has no friends, the lion becomes her friend. However, something evil is brewing, and it finally becomes clear. Even though the father is not officially a bad guy, he sells the lions to anybody willing to pay, and it turns out that since lion hunting is still legal in South Africa, most of the lions are going to hunting clubs where tourists slaughter them standing in a small pen.
That is the message of the movie with the necessary information at the end on where to send your money to stop this. As for the quality of the movie itself, there are too many holes in the plot to even begin to mention them, but the scenery is beautiful and the girl's authentic relationship with the lion who could bite off her head at any moment is really impressive.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 2, 2019 13:12:59 GMT
Some of you may have noticed that I enjoy a wide variety of films. Welcome to Marwen was not one of them. It is well written, well acted, visually inventive and very well filmed, but I found it CREEPY.
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Post by lagatta on Jan 2, 2019 16:15:12 GMT
There might be two films on that list I'd want to see. I'm much pickier about cinema than you are; and Montréal will never screen as many films as Paris does, though we do have several festivals including one I work on every year (Indigenous Cinema: Terres en vues) and another I have worked on (Films on art).
I never saw Mary Poppins - for one thing Dick Van Dyke's mockney accent was excruciating - but alas I do know a couple of songs from it despite my best efforts. I suppose they are setting the new version around the Crash to give it some kind of historical relevance, absurd as that is.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 2, 2019 16:33:22 GMT
Yes, the children from the first movie are now grown up and about to lose the house. But then again, who cares? Privileged wankers!
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Post by bixaorellana on Jan 2, 2019 18:43:35 GMT
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 2, 2019 19:05:52 GMT
Interesting. I was rather shocked at the American trailer that I posted, since it really did tell absolutely everything about the movie. At least the French trailer retained a lot more mystery.
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