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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 13, 2019 16:33:59 GMT
Coincidentally, the other day a friend of mine was urging me for the second time to watch any Israeli tv drama, comedy, or soap. She claims they are all well-done and compelling. French television just bought this Israeli series, but the trailer does not indicate sufficiently whether it is any good or not.
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Post by bixaorellana on Apr 13, 2019 17:50:46 GMT
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Post by rikita on Apr 14, 2019 22:40:01 GMT
we went to see "Pettson and Findus" today - originally a Swedish movie (after a Swedish book series that is very popular here), but I'll post the trailer in German, as we watched it in German ... It was cute, though sometimes the background looked a bit too "clean" (it was made to look like in the picture books or a theatre stage), and as with many children's movies, i thought it was a bit long for the age group for which it was intended. still, even my two year old nephew enjoyed it, until he fell asleep towards the end of the movie ...
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Post by rikita on Apr 18, 2019 23:12:16 GMT
Tanguy le Retour is the follow-up to a major French success from 17 years ago. The first Tanguy was about an adult son (named Tanguy) who returns to the nest at age 27 to the horror of his parents. The whole movie revolves around their evil plans to get rid of him. Ha ha, you're supposed to laugh because it's a comedy. I didn't like it. And so in the new movie, Tanguy is back at age 44 along with his 16 year old daughter. He has been living in China all this time, but his wife walked out on him for another man. And so the movie is about trying to get rid of him again. Ha ha ha. Interestingly enough, about a quarter of the movie is in Chinese, which makes me think that the first one might have been a hit in China. Anyway, I didn't like any more than the first one. You may wonder why I went to see it. It's because I used to be the English teacher of the actor who plays the father, André Dussollier. yeah i remember seeing the first one at the movie theatre when it came out, together with my godmother. everyone seemed to enjoy it, except for my godmother and me ...
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Post by rikita on Apr 23, 2019 23:12:52 GMT
the kid who would be king looks fun. maybe i can watch it with agnes in a few years ...
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Post by bixaorellana on Apr 24, 2019 1:45:12 GMT
I saw it and it was cute, although a little repetitive. The scary death creatures on horseback look exactly like the White Walkers on their horses except not as well done and they're fiery red and black instead of the icy blues, whites, & grays of the White Walkers. I would think it would definitely be too scary for someone Agnes's age.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 24, 2019 12:02:16 GMT
I survived all 181 minutes of Endgame, unlike two of the major characters. It is always interesting to see a movie like that in a sold out house, especially at 9 a.m. They applauded, they cheered, they cried, they laughed while I just sat there like a lump. The young woman sitting next to me almost turned it into a 4DX experience because she was crying her eyes out to the point where it was shaking my seat. Women particularly appreciate this movie, because it is the strong women who save the day, led by Captain Marvel. They were screeching just like when somebody like Ryan Gosling appears on Ellen.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 3, 2019 15:21:15 GMT
I have seen fewer movies recently as we have entered the desert preceding the Cannes film festival. Movies sure to be selected or even just hoping to be selected have been held back, so that leaves us with minor movies and the total shit from the bottom of the barrel.
In the total shit department, I saw Amos Gitai's A Tramway in Jerusalem. This could have been good -- Amos Gitai is a good director and Jerusalem is a fascinating city. But the movie went absolutely nowhere while the tram itself went from one end of the city to the other. It was just a bunch of boring vignettes -- couples arguing, musicians playing, foreigners foreigning, a father and his son, a rabbi explaining points of the Torah. It was totally excruciating. The only thing that I found interesting was that it is almost the same model of tram as my local one in Paris.
I also saw two French "social" movies -- Victor et Célia about hairdressers trying to finance their own salon and finding countless obstacles, and Mais vous êtes fous, the true story of a couple who had their children taken away because one of the daughters had a seizure that turned out to be a cocaine overdose. It came to light that the father was secretly a cocaine addict and even though he had been very careful at home, he was using so much cocaine that he couldn't pee it out anymore and it was oozing out of his pores, which is how he contaminated his daughter. It's the sort of detail that you could never believe if it were not a true story.
L'Adieu à la Nuit (Farewell to the Night) is the new excellent André Téchiné movie starring Catherine Deneuve. She is taking care of her young adult grandson for a little while before he goes to live in Canada. But before long, she finds out that he has converted to Islam (because of his girlfriend) of the worst kind, and they are planning to join ISIS in Syria to kill infidels. They have discussions along the line of "do they provide the guns or do we have to pay extra for them?" The grandmother decides that she has to do everything in her power to stop this project.
I also saw the sequel to a movie that was very popular about 8 years ago. It was about a group of friends getting together in their perfect coastal house at Cap Ferret as they were having their age 40 crises -- laughter, tears, misunderstandings... all of that usual crap. I didn't like it, but it was a smash success. The new one Nous finirons ensemble picks up after years have gone by. They haven't seen each other as much as some of them would have liked. Laughter, tears, misunderstanding... I didn't like them any more at age 50 than at age 40.
I wasn't enamoured of the movie I saw today either, but I learned a lot. It's the Guatemalan movie Tremblores, which contains both earth tremors and a total disuption of a family. The 40 year old father is in total family disgrace at the beginning of the movie, but it is not clear why. The parents are there, the in-laws are there, brothers and sisters and of course his wife. It turns out that he has been caught in a relationship with another man. Big deal, but apparently Guatemala is one of the most homophobic countries in the Western Hemisphere and on top of that, absolutely all of the family are evangelical Christians. The man gets thrown out of the house, is fired from his job and is banned from seeing his children. His love interest does not seem to be terribly reliable either. Anyway, he is so unhappy that he goes to the church for conversion therapy, and I will not even try to describe how horrible this appears to be in Guatemala. I am actually a bit relieved that I found the movie not to be all that well done -- I didn't believe in any of the relationships or situations. None of the actors had any chemistry. So the depressing ending didn't affect me all that much. (No, nobody dies -- that would have been too easy.)
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Post by kerouac2 on May 4, 2019 20:34:55 GMT
God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya is one of the finest feminist films that I have seen in a long time. It's about a somewhat chubby 32 year old unemployed woman who unexpectedly does something that only men are allowed to do. She dives after a cross in a river and recovers it before all of the young studs can get their hands on it. It is not a law -- it is a tradition, and that is the important point. The priest wants her to give back her prize. The young men say that she "stole" it, but the priest refuses to lie -- he knows that she did not steal it. The police are involved, especially after a lynch mob forms. Do they follow the orders of the church? No, but Petrunya did something that isn't done. Is she under arrest at the police station? Not really, but she had better not leave. Petrunya holds her ground. Hurray for Macedonian cinema.
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Post by whatagain on May 5, 2019 13:18:38 GMT
Seems interesting indeed.
We went to see lors corgys de la reine. Bof.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 13, 2019 18:56:29 GMT
I haven't seen too many movies lately for a technical reason -- about a month before the Cannes film festival, the reputedly excellent movies dry up in the hope of being selected. Cannes will not select any movies already released in France before the festival. So the distributors empty their dustbin at that time -- lots of movies with no commercial potential which have been sitting on the shelf all year. Quite a few of them were presented in various sections at the previous Cannes festival, and this is their only chance to get seen. But of course, there are also tiny movies with unknown actors, and sometimes they are interesting.
Anyway, this is what I have seen recently --
Les Météorites -- tiny French film about a teenage girl working in a dinosaur amusement park in southwest France when she is not working on the family farm with her brother. Boring job, boring life. But she meets the local bad boy. Everybody warns her away from him, including the guy's sister. So of course the inevitable happens. The title? At the beginning of the movie, she sees a shooting star and hears the crash over the mountains. She takes this as a sign that her life must change. At the end of the film, she finally finds the crater. I thought the movie was nice but insignificant.
Versus - another tiny French film. A young guy is beaten to a pulp by thugs on a bus. He goes to recover at his aunt's place in the south of France. Everything seems all right except for his constant flashbacks of the aggression. Then he starts killing people. I wasn't expecting that, since I knew nothing about the movie, but I should have guessed that something awful would be happening due to the -12 rating.
Gloria Bell - This is the American remake of the fantastic Chilean film Gloria. Frankly, Julianne Moore does her best, but she is absolutely no match for the original with the fabulous Paulina Garcia. Since the first movie was so good, they hired the same director for the remake, but it just doesn't work, in my opinion. Gloria is a divorced middle aged woman who refuses to give up on life and enjoys going to dance clubs. The new movie isn't quite a copy scene for scene, but somehow I just could not believe the American Gloria whereas the Chilean Gloria was perfect.
I didn't know what to expect from Les Crevettes Pailletés (The Shiny Shrimps in English). It is the semi-true story of a water polo team that participated in the Gay Games in Croatia. In the movie, an Olympic swimming star makes a homophobic comment in a television interview. The swimming federation punishes him by forcing him to coach the gay water polo team if he wants to have any chance of being selected for the next world swimming championships. He isn't particularly homophobic but not a big fan either, and the team in question, besides being atrociously bad, is pretty much a caricature of flamboyant gayness.
Obviously, it is a feel-good movie about accepting different people and lifestyles. In spite of quite a few cringe worthy moments, I pretty much liked it. It seems to be doing very well at the box office. The Shiny Shrimps team did indeed compete in the Gay Games in Croatia, as depicted in the closing credits.
I confess that I was a bit bored by the Argentinian movie El amor menos pensado (An Unexpected Love in English). A couple breaks up after their adult son goes off to university in Spain. The son was holding the couple together, and now they don't have much in common anymore. So they go their separate ways over a few years (boring years to me). Meanwhile the son had a Vietnamese girlfriend and ends up going to Hanoi. Ricardo Darin is one of the best Argentinian actors, but this movie did nothing for me. I think even the trailer is pretty boring.
Meanwhile, I thought the Swedish film Becoming Astrid was refreshing. It's about the children's author Astrid Lindgren (Pippi Longstocking, etc.). There are no bad people in it, even though there are a few difficult situations. She had a child out of wedlock at a time when that was not acceptable and the father turned out not to be reliable, even though it was because he was trapped in his marriage by an apparently vindictive wife. The opening and closing scenes moved me the most, showing the very old Astrid opening her countless letters from children all over the world thanking her for her books about children overcoming adversity.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 16, 2019 20:15:32 GMT
I had forgotten to mention that I had seen The Curse of La Llorona, but it is also possible that my brain had just erased it since it is a piece of shit. It is just a non stop "jump scare" movie. Every time you turn around, the horrible woman is there with her claws out. As usual, they left a little window of possibility for a sequel, but the reviews were so awful, that I think we might be safe for once.
I saw the new Jim Jarmusch movie that opened the Cannes film festival. I thought The Dead Don't Die was pretty crummy, but it has a remarkable cast. It is a zombie comedy except for not being funny.
For something a bit different, I saw the Brazilian movie Tinta Bruta / Hard Paint. It's about a young man who got kicked out of school because he, uh, poked out the eye of a nasty classmate in a fight. Since he has nothing better to do, he has become "Neon Boy" on a porn website. He rubs fluorescent paint over his body under a black light and masturbates for the paying public, sometimes quite a bit more. His sister and grandmother are okay with this, but we always knew that Porto Alegre was one of the most socially advanced cities in the world. Obviously, there are other complications, including a web rival who has been copying his technique and lowering his viewership. Frankly, who would have ever imagined that one day there would be movies about subjects like this?
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Post by bixaorellana on May 17, 2019 8:38:46 GMT
Jesus Christ -- you really will go to see anything! I am beyond shattered that Jim Jarmusch would fall so low and be so enabled by such a high-class cast. (Did I catch a glimpse of Linda Blair in the trailer?)
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Post by kerouac2 on May 17, 2019 14:26:24 GMT
Guilty as charged about seeing anything, and today's evidence was the Argentinian movie Muere, monstruo, muere (two different English titles -- Die Monster Die or Murder Me, Monster). It is a horror movie, but the biggest horror is having to sit through it. Several people walked out but from boredom rather than gore. It was one of the most sluggish movies that I have seen in a long time in spite of the abundance of decapitated corpses. I try to eke something useful from every movie and in this movie it was the stark landscape of wet and cold Argentina up against the Andes -- a real change from Buenos Aires. The plot is not entirely clear, which suggests that the second English title is more appropriate, even more so because (spoiler!) the monster never dies in the movie. And was it even a monster or just a pathetic creature? We only got to see it in the last ten minutes or so, and the art department was clearly working overtime. Its head with a huge floppy vagina thing full of teeth. (One is a bit reminded of the American film Teeth in which the girl had a fanged vagina that painfully removed the penises of bad men, but this was much bigger.) And its long long tail is obviously a penis, complete with glans and pee hole. Most of the heads were ripped off by the tail wrapping around the neck, although in the early scenes it looked more like a tentacle from Possession. Anyway, all's well that ends well. The hero is only missing an arm as the movie ends. I have a complaint about the Argentinian police, though. They touch absolutely everything with their bare hands, even the icky stuff. Not professional!
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Post by kerouac2 on May 18, 2019 12:27:32 GMT
So, I saw the new Almodóvar, definitely one of his best. Dolor y Gloria (Pain and Glory) is very peaceful and calm, and Antonio Banderas is sensational. Maybe it will finally be Almodóvar's year at Cannes.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 22, 2019 13:05:00 GMT
So, I saw a bad movie, a weird movie and a distressing movie. Long Shot was just bad. Seth Rogen, Charlize Theron. I find most French comedies very stupid, but this was just as bad if not worse. I think a movie has to have a beginning premise that is at least a tiny bit believable, and this certainly didn't have one. Unemployed journalist falls in love with his former babysitter, who just happens to be Secretary of State and presidential candidate. Seth Rogen gets (his own) sperm in his beard. Tous les dieux du ciel (All the Gods in the Sky) starts off with what happoened 20 years ago. Brother and little sister play with a revolver. Little sister blows her own face off. In the present, the brother is still taking care of his sister, not very well, since most of the time she is lying graphically naked on a barren bed with her hideously scarred face. Also he feeds her things like raw fish heads that he has put in the blender, mixed with her medication. She has mournful eyes and does not communicate. Meanwhile the brother makes crop circles to attract aliens to come and rescue them. Loses his job in no time, and the authorities want to take his sister away. There is also a hypersexual 9 year old girl who hangs around and complicates things. She enjoys putting makeup on the sister. "Now you're pretty!" I kept thinking that the special effect makeup on the sister was amazing for such an obviously low budget film, but when I got home, I googled the actress and she really looks like that except for some fake scars that they added. Yikes. Click here to see what Mélanie Gaydos really looks like. She suffers from ectodermic dysplasia, a genetic disease. In real life, she is a fashion model. The upsetting movie was Le jeune Ahmed (Young Ahmed), the new movie from the Dardenne brothers, who have already won the Palme d'Or at Cannes twice. It's about a 13 year old Muslim fanatic. His family doesn't know why he suddenly became that way, nor does his teacher, except that they do -- he is under the influence of an imam who has taught him that he must pray at exactly the correct times, that he must not touch a woman, not even wear a short sleeved t-shirt, etc. There is a debate at school, because the teacher, a modern Muslim, wants to provide extracurricular Arabic classes with more useful vocabulary than what is in the Koran. "The classes given at the mosque are fine, but the vocabulary is antiquated and doesn't teach any of the modern words needed in daily life." Some of the Muslim parents agree, but others are against it. "If this were a Muslim country, it would be fine, but in a country like Belgium, outside learning will water down the teachings at the mosque and Islam will disappear." A couple of days later, Ahmed takes matters into his own hands and tries to stab the teacher with a kitchen knife. Although she is not seriously injured, Ahmed gets locked up in a deradicalization centre. The people there are kind and helpful but they are also apostates and infidels. There is also a dog, but dogs are haram. The friendly dog licks Ahmed's hand one day and he immediately has to go cleanse himself after having been defiled. The young actor is remarkable. He is totally closed down and unsmiling during the entire movie, which takes a lot of control at that age (unless you are a parent!). I would like to say that the movie has a happy ending, but... well, I guess there is a little hope, but nothing is certain.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 25, 2019 20:49:44 GMT
Well, of the movies that I saw recently, Antonio Banderas won best actor at the Cannes festival for Pain and Glory, and the Dardenne brothers won best director for Young Ahmed. There is no best editing prize at Cannes, but I absolutely would have given it to Sibyl.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 27, 2019 19:08:41 GMT
So, I saw Une part d'ombre (The Benefit of the Doubt), a Franco-Belgian murder mystery with Fabrizio Rongione. He is an ordinary guy with a few money problems. He goes to the Vosges with friends for a weekend, but at the same time a woman is murdered. She was a jeweller carrying money, and he was the last person who saw her. The police question him, and then they question him again... and again, and his friends start to have doubts abut him, and so does his wife. Very interesting to see how people you count on can abandon you.
I also saw the new Claude Lelouch movie Les plus belles années d'une vie. It continues the story of A Man and a Woman... 52 years later. Frankly, it is depressing and no one should want to see what has become of these characters. Jean-Louis Trintignant is at death's door in a wheelchair in the most luxurious nursing home in the world, moving solidly into dementia. Anouk Aimee is withered but still okay and goes to see him after his son begs her to do so. I do not have a heart of stone, so I was moved by certain things in the movie, but it should never have been made. It was all the more heartbreaking to see it interspersed with scenes from the original movie.
And yes, I went to see the new version of Aladdin. Since I didn't see the original version even if I had heard most of the songs, I did not have any negative nostalgia about it. Most of the visual effects were lovely, but there is absolutely no way to make you believe any sort of flying carpet scene, nor can I accept a flying carpet acting like a sidekick. Will Smith sort of embarrassed me most of the time, but he was just being Will Smith -- there is no remedy for that. Mena Massoud playing Aladdin was outstanding. At least they understood at Disney that ethnic characters are much better if they are of the correct ethnicity.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 30, 2019 13:37:06 GMT
Rocketman made me cringe from time to time -- the "clown" factor but also just the clothes that people wore in the 70's and 80's (including me). What were they thinking? One thing that I liked about the movie is that it showed what a total jerk Elton John was, a very unlikeable adult, and that is even more impressive when you know that Elton John produced the movie. Taron Egerton was remarkable, and I also quite liked Jamie Bell as Bernie Taupin. Would not have recognised him for at least 40 minutes if I hadn't already known it was he.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 5, 2019 13:11:57 GMT
Korean director Bong Joon Ho's Parasite is one of the rare film that won the Palme d'Or in Cannes by unanimous vote, and I have to say that it was richly deserved. It takes you to places where few movies have taken you before (although if you saw things like The Host or Snowpiercer, you might have an idea of how the director's mind works). It's about a very poor family living near the luxurious residence of an extremely rich family. The poor people are more or less scammers, which brought the interesting thought to my mind that last year's Palme d'Or was Shoplifters by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda which was about a poor family of thieves. Poverty is a common theme at Cannes, where the filthy rich love to gather.
Anyway, this movie is one of those movies where hired assassins will dispose of you if you reveal what happens. But basically the poor family infiltrates the rich family. First, the son is hired as the English teacher with fake diplomas for the teen daughter. Then the daughter becomes an "art therapist" for the younger son. Before long, the whole family is working for the rich people under false pretences. And then everything goes awry but not at all for any reason that you might imagine.
Obviously, the trailer reveals absolutely nothing.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 5, 2019 13:18:13 GMT
OMG, I had never seen the English subtitle trailer before I posted it. It is utterly different from the trailer in France.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 13, 2019 18:09:52 GMT
Venise n'est pas en Italie is a rather insignificant but not unpleasant movie about teenage love. Boy falls in love with girl, but they are from completely different worlds. His family lives in a trailer and she is from the haute bourgeoisie. Obviously, he doesn't tell her where he lives. She is a talented harpist and invites him to see her concert in Venice during the school holidays. Obviously (since this is supposed to be a comedy), his parents are totally embarrassing trailer trash. He can't find a way to get to Venice so his lovely parents decide "We'll go with you -- we'll drive there." The trailer eventually ends up in the poor peoples' campground across from Venice, and the plot goes on from there. I was delighted to see the scenes of Venice, including the areas like the campground which were not quite as picturesque. The movie is based on a French bestseller. It didn't convince me to buy the book, but I must admit that I am intrigued.
Les Particules is a strange little Franco-Swiss movie that takes place on the Franco-Swiss border. They live right over the CERN, which as you know is one of the biggest scientific projects in the world, operating the incredible Hadron collider, a 27-kilometre underground ring that runs under the Franco-Swiss border. 8000 scientists from 60 different countries work there. Anyway, this is not the subject of the movie although we get to see a school field trip there. The movie is about what might be happening above ground. A teenager and his friends are trying to live their teenage lives, but one of them seems to be seeing and experiencing things. One of the others disappears on a camping trip... Odd things may or may not be happening due to all of the weird science in the air. The movie never tells you.
Piranhas (Italian title - La paranza dei bambini) is about teenagers in Naples who crave what the local Mafia is getting and decide that they want to replace them. Good idea or not? Frankly, this movie disappointed me, because it was slow and did not engage me. However, the lead actor was remarkable.
L'autre continent is an intriguing Franco-Taiwanese film. Two young French people meet each other in Taipei. She speaks 5 languages and he speaks about 17, because he is sort of autistic and doesn't like to reveal himself. Obviously they fall in love, but then he becomes very ill with some sort of leukemia which seems to have Alzheimerish after effects once he has been treated in France. He doesn't even know where he is anymore. Not good news for a couple.
Greta is an amusing chance to see Isabelle Huppert at her most evil. Quite predictable but clearly a lot of fun for the actresses.
And of course Men in Black International is a load of horseshit. I don't think I will ever forget them for how fake and incorrect the Eiffel Tower set is, not to mention Marrakesh. American movies really seem to count on the spectators knowing nothing about the world.
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Post by rikita on Jun 13, 2019 22:19:19 GMT
forgot to write that we watched "how to train your dragon 3" recently ... a. really wanted to see it, so we had to hurry to watch part two at home before part three is out of the theatres, and we managed ... i liked it better than part two, though i liked part one best ...
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 13, 2019 22:47:20 GMT
I think I'm going to be forced to see the Venice comedy and the first Train Your Dragon.
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Post by rikita on Jun 13, 2019 23:19:33 GMT
why forced? i enjoyed the first how to train your dragon (but then, i like that kind of movie) ...
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 14, 2019 0:18:42 GMT
It's because I dither a bunch before committing to a movie, Rikita. I hate to be disappointd! I've been circling How to Train Your Dragon & your saying you liked it means I'll take the plunge. See?
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 14, 2019 13:21:39 GMT
Today I saw a stupid movie about an organic egg farmer who battles Big Business by making YouTube videos acting out scenes from Cyrano de Bergerac with his pet chicken.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Jun 14, 2019 19:53:59 GMT
How to Train your Dragon is excellent...I'm not a huge cartoon fan aside from Up and a few others but I really liked HTTYD....
Today I took my niece to see Rocketman and really enjoyed it. In fact my niece had to keep shushing me because I was singing along. I was a huge fan of Elton John in my teens and he was the first artist that I saw live (in 1974). I found the 'musical' format more appealing than expected and deffo better than a 'biopic' The lead has a good voice...not quite Elton but he was believable...whilst not attempting an impersonation. It was moving, uncomfortable, funny and entertaining. I go to the cinema so rarely these days so I'm glad that I enjoyed the film so much.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 14, 2019 20:13:24 GMT
All of the critics seem to have claimed that Rocketman is a superior movie to Bohemian Rhapsody, and I agree.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 15, 2019 17:42:35 GMT
Interesting! After Bohemian Rhapsody, I was very leery of Rocketman, but you two have convinced me it's worth seeing.
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