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Post by kerouac2 on Feb 13, 2019 18:11:40 GMT
The Favourite **** I definitely need to see this a second time because it is so rich in detail and nuances that I couldn't catch everything the first time. I'm sure that it helps to have liked The Lobster and The Killing of the Sacred Deer in the past, because Yórgos Lánthimos is not your every day mainstream director, but it is impossible not to be blown away by Olivia Colman.
Nicky Larson et le Parfum de Cupidon * I am not at all the target group for this movie, even though I usually appreciate the comedic talent of Philippe Lacheau. It is the parody of a manga from the 1980's. So stupid. And yet, I will say that it is very well done for the people who are familiar with the source material. I looked it up on Google, and the visuals are extremely faithful. Nicky Larson is some sort of secret agent, and he has to retrieve a chemical that can make anybody fall hopelessly in love with absolutely anybody else (just imagine -- one of the characters has a flock of ducks following him everywhere). Luckily there is an antidote. Unfortunately, there is no antidote for having seen the movie.
Beautiful Boy ** The actors were perfect, but the movie was not. I totally understand why the movie is not picking up any of the awards for which it hoped. Somehow the director (who has done great things in the past) got the wrong take on this story and removed the necessary empathy.
It is a relief to me that Timothée Chalamet is currently making a Wes Anderson movie in France and has requested to make a really French movie with François Ozon.
Qu'est-ce qu'on a encore fait au bon dieu? ** This is the sequel to one of the top French box office hits of the decade (Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait au bon dieu?). The first movie was about a wealthy conservative Catholic family with four beautiful daughters. I don't at all remember the order of the subsequent weddings, but one of the daughters married a Muslim, one married a Jew, one married a Chinese man and one married an African. Ha ha ha, right? And they all lived happily ever after... or did they? Well, in the sequel, the first baby is being born to the Franco-African couple. The baby is much darker than the French grandparents wanted. Ha ha ha? But that is not the most important part of the plot. All of the sons-in-law are fed up with how they are treated by French society (a truism), so each of the couples has decided to move to Israel, Algeria, China... and India. The African wants to become a star in Bollywood. Ha ha ha? The mission of the parents in the movie is to convince them all that France is wonderful so that they will all say. (How can anybody dare to make such a movie?) Well, I made a point of going to see it on a weekend with a full house, in my Arab-Jewish-African-Asian neighbourhood. The audience pissed itself laughing all the way through, although I am not really sure if it was the same people laughing at all times. It has to be admitted that politically incorrect, off-colour, offensive jokes will always be the funniest. I never laughed, but I may have smiled a few times.
Here is the trailer of the original movie with English subtitles.
La Dernière Folie de Claire Darling ***
This is an adaptation of the American novel Faith Bass Darling's Last Garage Sale, directed by Julie Bertuccelli, who made the magnificent Since Otar Left. Claire Darling is played by Catherine Deneuve, old wrinkled and sinking into dementia. She has decided to sell everything in her house (which is an absolute treasure trove) for absolutely nothing because she is going to die tonight. A childhood friend of her estranged daughter informs the daughter who comes running. She is played by Chiara Mastroianni (Deneuve's real life daughter). Lots of drama, childhood flashbacks, plenty of tears and not many smiles.
How to Train Your Dragon 3 **
I did not see the first two movies, but I read enough about this one to want to see it. Just like Toy Story 3, it apparently makes grown men cry. It was pointed out, though, that you really have to see all three of them to fully appreciate the last one. Oh well. So I was not fully involved in the intrigue and was not able to grasp all of the secondary characters, but of course it is tragic when you have grown up with a dragon, your best friend, and have to send it away without you in the end. I think that women just look at the weeping men and shrug their shoulders. I did not cry.
Tout ce qu'il me reste de la révolution ***
This was an absolute delight. It is about a firebrand Communist young woman, raised by devout Communists who fell by the wayside. She has a few revolutionary friends but basically everyone and the world in general are a disappointment to her. The director is also the lead actress, and she probably is a communist, but she understands how ludicrous it all is and the we are all going to hell in a handbasket.
Les drapeaux de papier (Paper Flags) ***
One thing that makes this movie amazing is that it was made by the youngest director ever to obtain the French box office advance subsidy, which is all important, particularly for first films. He is 18 years old. It's about a 30 year old man released from prison after 12 years. He shows up at the residence of his 24 year old sister, who takes him in. He is seriously fucked up, but the two clearly love each other. It's not easy though. He has regular appointments with a psychiatrist. He has wild outbursts of rage which make it very difficult to keep a job, and she is just a supermarket cashier. It is extremely intense, and it is quite an amazing feat for the director to have done this at his age.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Feb 13, 2019 18:31:49 GMT
Well I have seen the first two How To Train Your Dragon films albeit on DVD....and cried during both...so I imagine that I'll be a sobbing heap during number three
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Post by kerouac2 on Feb 13, 2019 19:10:35 GMT
Seeing it with subtitles, I learned that the French name of Hiccup is just Harold, which is kind of strange since the French word for hiccup is hoquet and would have worked just fine even when dubbed, which is how most French families will see it. On the other hand, I thought that the French name for the dragon Toothless was much better -- Croquemou -- which means "Softbite."
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Post by rikita on Feb 18, 2019 0:47:42 GMT
well thanks for telling me how it ends ... (then again, it might be a few years before i see it, so i might forget - promised a. to let her watch the first one soon, though - i think she is a bit young, but it is rated fsk 6 here, and she is six now) ... anyway, hiccup is called "hicks" in german. i suppose calling him "schluckauf" would have sounded too strange ... and toothless is "ohnezahn" (without tooth), which sounds a bit more name-like than "zahnlos" ...
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Post by kerouac2 on Feb 18, 2019 4:55:26 GMT
I wasn't really attracted to the idea of seeing Alita: Battle Angel because with all of the movies that I see, I had seen the trailer far too many times and was totally bored with it. But having just watched the DVD of Avatar again, the James Cameron connection propelled me to the cinema since he wrote the screenplay, and I even went to see the 3D version. Obviously I was impressed by the special effects, and it was also interesting to see Christoph Waltz and Mahershala Ali in such a movie. The world created for the story was spectacular, populated with so many cyborgs that I was obliged to wonder how they had lost so many limbs and who fixed them up since Christoph Waltz seemed to be just about the only technician doing charity work. The cyborgs even look down on normal humans and have slurs concerning them ("Get out of my way, meatboy!"). As for the rich and purportedly perfect world floating above the city, we'll have to wait for the next movie to see what it really looks like. As usual in this genre, machine people find nothing better to do than to get in fistfights, but at least for once it is explained that firearms are forbidden, but not huge swords for cutting off mechanical arms and legs for resale (As long as your head is intact, you can be put back together.). One of the main characters seems to have been killed at the end of the movie, but something tells me that the person will be back next time. After all, Avatar 2-3-4-5 all have the same cast listed, and I was pretty sure that at least some of them had died...
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Post by kerouac2 on Feb 18, 2019 5:10:43 GMT
Yesterday, I went to see the Icelandic film Arctic. I'm not sure who really enjoys this kind of movie apart from diehard Mads Mikkelsen fans. All I see is "suffer suffer suffer suffer" but I guess there must be some people who see an ode to the indomitable human spirit. Poor Mads apparently suffered almost as much making this movie as the character he played. At least he didn't have to learn any lines of dialogue.
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Post by kerouac2 on Feb 20, 2019 20:32:49 GMT
Today I went to see Grâce à dieu about paedophilia in the Catholic church in France. Even though it won the Silver Bear at the Berlin film festival last week, its release was nearly blocked by legal action initiated by the lawyers for the Catholic church since it uses the real name of the Archbishop of Lyon who has been covering up all of the despicable things and also the real name of the priest being prosecuted. The French courts allowed the film to be released one day before.
It should be pointed out that Lyon is a toxic hotbed of inconceivable Catholic coverups to the point that the movie was filmed under a fake title in Lyon and all of the scenes inside churches were filmed in Belgium and Luxembourg. At the end of the movie there are title cards saying that the priest's trial has not yet had a date set (after years and years and years) and that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. It is a disgusting necessity. The priest has even pleaded guilty to all charges... but still no trial.
At the end of the movie, the audience applauded. And this was the show at 8;55 a.m.
A few days ago, I went to see The Favourite again. Totally amazing. Olivia Colman is beyond belief.
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Post by kerouac2 on Feb 21, 2019 5:51:05 GMT
I remember a poll in France that informed us "18% of Catholic priests do not believe in god."
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Post by kerouac2 on Feb 21, 2019 11:16:19 GMT
Following up on yesterday's avalanche of religious hypocrisy, today I saw the South African film Die Stropers (The Harvesters) for a double does of religious mumbo jumbo. It takes place in the Free State, one of the last strongholds of Afrikaner whiteness, and of course what holds them all together is a god who implies that they are doing the right thing. Most movies in this setting are a study in unbearable bigotry, but this one isn't. The family is very nice (I never saw even one episode of Little House in the Prairie, but it looked like that kind of family to me.). The mother is an unlimited ocean of goodness and has taken in her dead sister's daughters to raise as her own. As the movie begins, the family has taken in a new teenage boy from an orphanage in the "city" (maybe Bloemfontein?). These people don't get out much, so it is hard to even imagine a city within reach. It is all just endless veldt, misty in the morning and dusty in the afternoon. Anyway, this new kid Pieter is nearly a savage. He eats with his fingers and hardly talks, and they're not even sure at first that he speaks Afrikaans because he spouts lots of English vulgarity. The kind and obedient teenage son Janno is not too happy to suddenly have a new "brother," especially a defective one. But things settle down little by little. The two teenagers have a sort of bond, but of course that would make the movie too simple. Anybody who saw Margarethe von Trotta's Die bleierne Zeit in olden times (1981) will understand that people can rub off on each other too much.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 21, 2019 13:21:18 GMT
I watched Crazy Rich Asians on the plane. Enjoyed it.
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Post by bixaorellana on Feb 22, 2019 1:53:31 GMT
Second person I know who has said that about a move that I would otherwise automatically skip. Guess I'll have to see it. I'm putting last night's viewing here because it's such a new movie, although in truth I watched it on the computer. It demands to be seen on the big screen, though. The Favourite is out and out fabulous! Ditto most of what Kerouac said about it in #1985 above. And oh god ~ Olivia Colman!!! Really, early on in the movie I was feeling sorry for the other two main actresses, thinking they'd be totally eclipsed. But they were both stellar in their roles. Whoever did the casting for the movie deserves a super special award as well. I was ecstatic to recognize Hatfield House, a childish thrill that kept on giving as I happily identified various rooms throughout the film. I noticed today that elements of the movie kept floating into my consciousness for me to turn over and over, so I think Kerouac is right in saying this film needs to be seen more than once.
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Post by bixaorellana on Feb 22, 2019 19:41:19 GMT
Again I am putting what was for me small screen viewing into the Last Movie You Saw thread because it's about a new movie. I watched Bohemian Rhapsody last night and won't say it was totally crappy, but am left with the question "why?" So much has been made of Rami Malek's performance, which probably must be considered quite good in terms of what the movie makers were trying to achieve, but in terms of true acting and artistry both the performance and the movie's purpose are lacking. I mostly agree with Kerouac's assessment (#1878), although I think his is kinder than mine. Also, I think the movie addressed the sexuality thing okay, or at least as well as they addressed everything else, which is to say very superficially. But back to why. Admittedly by now there are enough adults for whom Queen must seem like ancient history. But like so many of the mega rock bands, the images and recordings of Queen live on, as the music gets used in tv and movies and new fans discover them via youtube. And for people my age & older down through all the people who lived through the Queen era, the physical presence of Freddie Mercury in particular still seems far too vivid in our minds to bother making a whole movie where someone, no matter how talented, mimics him. Because really, that's what Malek's performance is -- mimicry, and mimicry which is lacking. True, his physical presentation of the iconic performances is amazing, but only because we're watching to see how right (or not) he gets it. Yes, he has the moves down pat, but is hampered by being a different physical type from Mercury and with an understandable inability to tap into that performer-to-audience sexuality that defined Mercury. I never for one second in the movie just sat back & accepted him as Freddie Mercury, although I found the other band members believable. For one thing, the damned teeth were a big distraction. Freddie Mercury was a handsome man with unfortunate teeth. Except in close-ups of him singing, the real Mercury just looked like a guy with buck teeth. Rami Malek's prosthesis made him look like someone holding a foreign object in his mouth. Discreet little caps on just the front teeth would have worked fine. As for the acting, Malek's impression of Mercury in general, when not in performance, seems far more arrogant, silly, and superficial than Mercury comes across in recorded interviews. That presentation mars every interaction depicted in the movie, as they all seems false, something not helped by the truly terrible script. I would say that the actress who played Mary gave it her all, but there wasn't much for her to give her all to. This made an important and interesting part of Mercury's life fall quite flat. Finally, what was up with getting the timeline wrong? Even I, not a committed Queen fan, spotted the pointless moving of some of their iconic songs from one date to another. And the Big Revelation to the band right before the Live Aid concert? Not only was that inaccurate, but the most hackneyed manipulative crap imaginable. Well, I have ranted enough, but will say that if this movie gets the Best Picture Oscar, I'm going to be really pissed off.
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Post by kerouac2 on Feb 22, 2019 20:01:20 GMT
I don't think you have to worry about that.
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Post by kerouac2 on Feb 24, 2019 11:40:16 GMT
I was feeling sorry for the other two main actresses, thinking they'd be totally eclipsed. But they were both stellar in their roles I saw an interview where Olivia Colman explained that she gave Emma Stone a little help in one of the more difficult scenes. She put a wet sponge on her crotch so that Emma Stone would have something to react to without actually sticking her fingers in her vagina.
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Post by kerouac2 on Feb 24, 2019 12:19:58 GMT
After getting major religion in the last two films that I saw, I moved on to a different sort of crime.
Paradise Beach takes us once again (it's practically a French genre) to Thailand where all of the suburban bad boys hang out. They used to all go to Spain or Morocco, but in recent years their headquarters are in Pattaya and Phuket, where there are countless bars and whorehouses and hotels run by Franco-Maghrebi and Franco-African expats who like a place where the police turn a blind eye in exchange for a little cash. Most of these movies are made by hacks who just want to cash in on the video market with lots of tits and guns, but this one was made by an almost reputable director, Xavier Durringer, and a number of quite well known character actors. Well, the end result was just as trashy as in those other movies. This one takes place in Phuket, more precisely Patong Beach. There is a prelude with a bad boy bank robbery 15 years ago. All of the gang gets away except for one -- so he goes to jail for 15 years. The others got away with the money, and so now the last one shows up in Phuket to get his share. But guess what? Those jerks spent it all on drugs, women and alcohol. It doesn't take long for blood to start flowing. In fact, not a single person survives at the end. I can only imagine that all of the actors accepted their roles to get a two month paid holiday in Thailand.
I was quite surprised by the next movie I saw -- Le Chant du Loup (The Wolf's Call). It is a political thriller with a risk of world war, in other words the kind of movie that only Americans can make, with Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Matt Damon or someone like that. For one thing, these movies cost more than $100 million to make, and the French don't have that kind of money. But I thought it held up outstandingly well, probably because it used real French navy bases and submarines. Of course, it's also true that a submarine movie doesn't give you much room to move around, so there are no expensive sets. Anyway, what was even more amazing to me was that I found the plot believable instead of being totally outlandish like when Jack Ryan or Jason Bourne are involved. It takes place in the very near future (like next Wednesday) and there are major geopolitical tensions. Russia has slightly invaded part of Finland for some reason (not the first time), and the EU is not happy. "And we can forget about the Americans getting involved," someone says. At one point, it seems that the Russians have fired a missile from the Bering Sea in the direction of France. But is it really the Russians? And does it have a nuclear warhead? Naturally, there are only about 90 minutes to find out and do something. And it turns out that the only way to stop a new world war is for one of the French submarines to destroy the other one because one of them has received irrevocable instructions to shoot its nuclear missiles and all communications have been cut off.
Finally I saw Denys Arcand's new movie La chute de l'empire américain (The Fall of the American Empire). It's about a good timid young man with a useless doctorate in philosophy who has a job delivering packages, the kind where you drive a big van and wear shorts in the summer. He happens to witness a robbery while he is delivering things somewhere -- there are two gangs and they kill each other, leaving the sacks of money lying in the parking lot. He knows he has to be careful but once he has stashed the sacks of cash, what is the first thing he does? He hires a deluxe hooker online to take care of a pressing need. And then things get complicated, but really the movie is a lot of fun (something I confess that I rarely associate with Denys Arcand), and I thought it was excellent. It talks about the situation of the homeless in Montréal and also quite a bit about money laundering. It ends with several portrait shots of the homeless in Québec who will never find a big bag of money in the street.
Even though this trailer has French subtitles, in the end it was released in France without subtitles.
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Post by mickthecactus on Feb 24, 2019 14:37:05 GMT
I was feeling sorry for the other two main actresses, thinking they'd be totally eclipsed. But they were both stellar in their roles I saw an interview where Olivia Colman explained that she gave Emma Stone a little help in one of the more difficult scenes. She put a wet sponge on her crotch so that Emma Stone would have something to react to without actually sticking her fingers in her vagina. Well, that post certainly caught my attention.
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Post by bjd on Feb 24, 2019 17:14:40 GMT
I heard on the radio that for the Wolf's Call movie, they showed it to a bunch of submarine officers in Brest. Apparently they found it extremely realistic and said the atmosphere was perfectly done.
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Post by kerouac2 on Feb 24, 2019 17:30:11 GMT
And that's exactly how it seemed to me. As for the actors, apparently most of them spent 72 hours on a short naval manoeuvre and they all said that it was impressively claustrophobic. At the Cité de la Mer in Cherbourg, I visited France's first nuclear submarine, and it made a totally lasting impression on me. I noticed one thing that was identical to the movie -- after slithering through the narrow corridors of a submarine like that, the "officer's lounge" suddenly seems huge even though it is maybe half as big as a small studio apartment.
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Post by kerouac2 on Feb 26, 2019 19:28:57 GMT
Today I saw the Italian movie Euforia by Valeria Golino. We used to see tons of Italian movies in France, at least half of which were Franco-Italian co-productions, in the 1970's. But Italy had its television big bang before France did, and the Italian movie industry totally collapsed. For years after that, only about 2 or 3 Italian movies made it to France every year, which was outrageous for such close neighbours. Things have improved a bit in this century, but I still don't feel that I see enough Italian movies.
This movie is about Matteo, played by the always excellent Riccardo Scamarcio . Luckily we see Riccardo Scamarcio in French movies relatively regularly but I find it better to observe him acting in his own language. Matteo is a hedonist who is doing VERY well in life as some sort of electronic artistic designer who globetrots for his work. But he loves his older brother Ettore, who is dying of a brain tumour. Ettore has not been informed of his condition, just knowing that he passes out sometimes, has headaches and other problems. He is a high school teacher on long term sick leave. Matteo plucks his brother out of his mother's house to bring him to Rome "where he will have the best treatment for this little cyst." There is a clash of lifestyles since Matteo earns at least 100 times more than Ettore. Nevertheless, they get along well in spite of the the constant parties and dinners in Matteo's incredible apartment with not one but two roof terraces.
Obviously, things deteriorate little by little, both medically and socially. It gets to the point where Matteo, even though he is an atheist, invents a business trip to Lourdes and wants to bring his brother with him. Ettore refuses, but later they end up in Croatia where the BVM is supposed to appear every month in some town. But they are there on the 9th and learn a bit too late that Mary only shows up on the 2nd of the month. Ettore isn't an idiot and clearly knows what is happening, and things keep going downhill.
However, I must heap praise on Valeria Golino and not just for finding the time to direct a movie with a busy acting career. She found a way to end the movie on a wonderful high point instead of plunging us into the inevitable tragedy and tears. I wish more directors did that.
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 6, 2019 15:05:22 GMT
** Jusqu'ici tout va bien (pukey English title: New Biz in the Hood). Actually not a bad social comedy. A fancy start-up media company gets caught by the tax authorities because they had benefited from tax credits for operating their business in a tough suburb. The problem is, they're not doing that at all -- they're in central Paris. They're given a very short time to put their business in the surburbs, not forgetting the 40% of the employees have to be from the area. You can see where this is going...
*** Mary Queen of Scots. The third star is for the cinematography. The rest of the movie has no big surprises. The actresses are excellent.
* Destroyer. This was sort of a confusing mess, but Nicole Kidman gave it her all. Quite violent.
*** Celle que vous croyez (Who You Think I Am). A movie of the Catfish genre of internet deception -- Juliette Binoche is a 50 year old professor (I looked up her real age -- 54) looking for love, but she decides that she is going to be 25 years old on the internet, using photos of a niece who lives on another continent. Naturally, she falls for a 25 year old man and things go from bad to worse.
*** Ash is Purest White. Chinese movie about a slightly bad girl who does 5 years in the slammer because she loves her criminal boyfriend. "The gun is mine." She goes looking for him when she gets out of jail. "I was expecting to see you when I walked out of the door." Well no, he is shacked up with a new girl and is not even living a life of crime anymore, but he is well off anyway. So she goes back to their hometown, sad but not devastated. A year or later, who comes crawling back to the hometown as well, down on his luck? Yep. The bad girl has taken over the mah jongg gambling parlour and now she is the dominant figure. She takes pity on him anyway because not only is the guy broke, but he is also in a wheelchair now. The Chinese are cruel filmmakers. Actually, I was much more fascinated by all of the scenes of these nameless shitty industrial towns (with probably populations of a million or more) and the transformation of China over the course of the movie, because it begins in 2001 and ends in 2018.
*** Le Mystère Henri Pick. A fantastic manuscript is discovered by a young editor visiting her family. She comes across it in the "library of unpublished manuscripts". It becomes a publishing sensation, but a top film critic just does not believe that it was written by the modest pizza chef whose name is on the manuscript. He makes a total arse of himself on television though and gets fired. So he has time to investigate. The movie consists of his very interesting investigation, helped by some and thwarted by others. The mystery is solved satisfactorily, but I found the ending a bit weak anyway. A shame.
*** A Land Imagined. This is a Singaporean movie that reminded me quite a bit of Wong Kar-Wai movies and also some others from Thailand and Taiwan, because it is hard to distinguish what is really happening from what is being dreamt. It was filmed mostly at night because all of the main characters suffer from insomnia, which probably explains why is all seems to be a waking dream. Singapore is shown at its absolutely ugliest because the entire movie takes place among immigrant workers at a land reclamation project far far from downtown Singapore or even any residential areas. It is all mud, gravel, sand, dirt and big noisy machines. It is purportedly about a police investigation into the disappearance of a Chinese worker, but no, that makes no difference, you just have to flow with the dream.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen any **** movies for a while.
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 7, 2019 19:18:41 GMT
I found Exfiltrés (English title: Escape from Raqqa) quite gripping, even more so because it is a true story. The real incident happened in 2015. A man takes his wife and young son to the airport for a holiday in Turkey -- he can't go because he is a nurse at a Parisian hospital. She is meeting up with a friend who is already in Istanbul. But he runs into the friend very quickly -- she has never left Paris -- and understands what has happened. His wife has gone to Syria, where her brother is already. She wants to help in a maternity ward there. In no time, she is in a niqab and locked up most of the time and it doesn't take long for her to understand that she has been tricked. But how to escape? How can her husband and other friends help her when it is impossible to go to Raqqa? It is a tough movie.
I noticed that the Syrian scenes looked grittier and more authentic than in other movies about this problem, which are almost always filmed in Morocco. But I sat through the credits and saw that the Syrian scenes were filmed in Jordan this time.
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Post by questa on Mar 9, 2019 11:47:40 GMT
I don't watch movies much, can't sit doing nothing for long enough, but last night saw "Hacksaw Ridge" (2016) directed by Mel Gibson and filmed in Australia. (watched it to see how they turned a Sydney railroad cutting into the Ridge) True story of a conscientious objector/medic doing heroic deeds.
You have probably seen it so won't bore you with details you can find online,
Just to say the battle scenes were horrifically realistic. The story was similar to "Friendly Persuasion" which I remember from aeons ago.
I may watch another movie one day!
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 11, 2019 22:55:33 GMT
I saw an advance screening of the very disturbing Israeli film Synonyms. It wasn't disturbing to me, but for a film that won the Golden Bear at the last Berlin film festival, it was amazing how many people walked out of the screening. It's about a former Israeli soldier who has decided that he destests Israel and has flown to Paris to live a new life. He refuses to speak Hebrew and only wants to live his ideal vision of France. Even when his worried father flies to Paris to try to get him to come home, he won't even speak Hebrew to him -- he speaks English. It is all very thought provoking. No English subtitled trailer yet, but here is the Israeli trailer. There are a few subtitled film clips from Berlin, though, which give a pretty good idea of the film. Here is one of them.
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Post by fumobici on Mar 12, 2019 14:43:01 GMT
I saw an advance screening of the very disturbing Israeli film Synonyms. It wasn't disturbing to me, but for a film that won the Golden Bear at the last Berlin film festival, it was amazing how many people walked out of the screening. It's about a former Israeli soldier who has decided that he destests Israel and has flown to Paris to live a new life. He refuses to speak Hebrew and only wants to live his ideal vision of France. Even when his worried father flies to Paris to try to get him to come home, he won't even speak Hebrew to him -- he speaks English. It is all very thought provoking. No English subtitled trailer yet, but here is the Israeli trailer. There are a few subtitled film clips from Berlin, though, which give a pretty good idea of the film. Here is one of them. Seems like a very odd and non-disturbing movie premise to make people walk out of a showing.
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 12, 2019 15:41:08 GMT
My guess is that since the screening was at the Pompidou Centre in the Marais, there may have been quite a few fans of more traditional Israeli movies who did not get what they had bargained for. There are a number of Israeli officials in the movie who all seem to be total thugs. (No, I will not discuss my own opinion of Israeli politics here. )
Some of the old people walking out may have also been affected by the large use of full frontal male nudity. Even though this is France, even here you can find some people who are shocked by that.
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 13, 2019 17:40:40 GMT
I was extremely disappointed by Xavier Dolan's latest film The Death and Life of John F. Donovan. He is an excellent director, even though I get tired of his personal obsessions. The problem here might have been that it was his first movie in English using major stars -- but probably not, since he speaks perfect English. But stars like Kit Harington, Natalie Portman, Kathy Bates or Susan Sarandon might react differently to a director from Québec. Their performances were all excellent, but after 2 hours and 10 minutes, I still understood almost nothing about their motivations or lives. This was extremely frustrating.
Basically, I think that he bit off more than he could chew in terms of his subject matter. Apparently the first version he made was 4 hours long and that might be the amount of time that the story deserved, even though nobody can sit through movies that long anymore, even me. (At the moment a 12-hour Argentinian movie has been released in France to fabulous reviews, cut into 4 bite-size pieces around 3 hours each, but I have not yet been able to convince myself to give it a chance.) In the case of John F. Donovan, apparently Dolan has been editing it for almost 3 years (never a good sign) and Jessica Chastain was totally cut out of the movie.
So, what is it about? A TV idol (Kit Harington, who else?) has died at age 29, maybe suicide, maybe something else. He left his series in shame, having been outed for using the services of a male prostitute but also because he had been corresponding (in total innocence) for 5 years with a young schoolboy who had written to him one day. The media world cannot imagine anything innocent about this and imagines the worst. Anyway, the movie bounces back and forth from the bullied schoolboy, both back then and also now as a 21 year old actor. And of course for the rest of the time, we follow John F. Donovan (Kit Harington) in his life of torment and deception.
Both characters have extremely complicated relations with their mothers (Susan Sarandon for Kit and Natalie Portman for the kid (the remarkable Jacob Tremblay who has already appeared in quite a few things).
The movie should have been great, but it wasn't. A total shame. The fact that I have rambled on so much about a movie that I did not like says something about the magnitude of my disappointment. Watching this trailer, I saw that it has quite a few scenes that were cut from what was released.
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 13, 2019 19:49:06 GMT
As for Captain Marvel yesterday, I kind of dozed during the first hour. Lots of stupid fighting for no discernible reason except to establish that there are two different camps. And always those fistfights when they have super powers. What's with that? The second hour was interesting and Brie Larson is an excellent actress. Lots of derivative Star Wars style space battles, though. I suppose that each new generation wants to see that sort of crap.
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 14, 2019 18:59:20 GMT
Meltem is a very minor movie, but it conveyed a multitude of messages. It's about 3 young people in their 20's, friends from restaurant school, who go on holiday on the island of Lesbos. Lesbos is sort of the Greek Lampedusa so they are quickly confronted with scenes of migrants who have washed up on the shore from Africa or the Middle East. On top of that, the girl has taken them to the house of her "almost" stepfather -- after the breakup of her parents' marriage, she had forbidden her (now dead) mother from marrying her Greek lover, even though he is a really nice guy. He has continued living in the mother's house, but the girl plans to sell it so that she and her friends can buy a food truck in France. The man is a biologist who teaches the local police how to collect DNA from the bodies of dead migrants floating in the ocean so that grieving families can obtain closure. And then the three vacationers encounter Elyas, a young guy their age. He sort of pretends to be Spanish at first, but it turns out that he is actually a Syrian refugee. He would just like to find his mother, who was separated from him on a different boat. They try to help him even though it is illegal, and then things go from bad to worse.
Meltem is the name of a cold Greek wind.
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 17, 2019 4:56:00 GMT
Sibel is a very interesting Turkish movie about a young woman who speaks only the language of whistles of the mountains, which very few people still understand. She stopped talking normally at age 5 after a terrible fever. She has a wild nature and spends nearly all of her time with her shotgun in the forest. One day she finds a man who turns out to be an army deserter for whom the authorities are looking. She injures him accidentally, so then she nurses him back to health in the depth of the forest.
Meanwhile, her father is the widowed mayor of the village, stuck with two daughters to marry off -- actually just one because Sibel isn't considered fit for marriage. Life can sometimes be a shit sandwich. The young actress is sensational.
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Post by lagatta on Mar 17, 2019 15:36:22 GMT
The director on Euforia. I'd like to see that. Also the Israeli film - I know more than one Israeli who has left there, very disappointed in their homeland. Is the other young man the protagonist's brother, friend or lover?
Dolan's latest film isn't very popular here, either.
Arcand's film draws on money laundering and paradises, but also very serious corruption here involving several political figures, on different levels of government. The mayor of Montréal had to resign, his substitute had to go to jail, and the mayor of Laval (the large suburb that is the island just north of Mtl Island) faced even more serious criminal charges, hard time and the loss of a luxury condo by the riverside that he had bought with taxpayers' money. And of course by real gangland wars here, involving the Mafia, the Hells', a Haitian gang and some others.
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