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Post by whatagain on Jun 23, 2023 20:14:47 GMT
Wie in 99 Luftballons von Nena. Neun une neunzig …
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 24, 2023 11:34:50 GMT
I clearly have poor judgement after a week away from the cinema. I was looking for something light to get back in my routine and made the mistake of seeing No Hard Feelings because Jennifer Lawrence is an excellent actress. Well, she seems to have poor judgement sometimes too for making this kind of shit. She's a struggling and somewhat slutty worker recruited by rich helicopter parents to screw their introverted son before he goes to university. So already the plot is trite and has been done many times before. Everything is awkward and embarrassing, and this is supposed to make it funny. But I am a gentle and kind soul who finds awkward and embarrassing situations extremely uncomfortable. However, the audience laughed regularly, so I am forced to suppose that there are a lot of crude and cruel people in this world.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 24, 2023 21:30:33 GMT
Yikes ~ really bad! Okay, I did laugh when he sprayed her, but guess I just needed a chuckle. (watched trailer, not movie) But Matthew Broderick?! What was he thinking? And Jennifer, Jennifer, Jennifer -- you're so much better than that.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 25, 2023 16:05:07 GMT
I made another bad choice today, but I already knew that it would be bad. Wes Anderson is completely capable of making good movies, but he has recently gone on a crazy tangent where he thinks that anything quirky is good. The French Dispatch was already annoying, but I found Asteroid City to be nearly unbearable with its need to be weird about everything. I do like his use of wacky sets, but the people are just as wacky and impossible (for me) to like. As for the plot, he really needs to get a new person to write the scenario.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 25, 2023 19:45:41 GMT
*sigh* I already agreed with every word of your post above, but watching the trailer had me borderline hating Wes Anderson. Even the sets in it are so cutesily, self-consciously Wes Anderson-y.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 26, 2023 12:41:04 GMT
Nezouh is an absolutely remarkable Syrian movie about war, family and love. What more can you ask for? Mutaz lives in Damascus in a flat that he bought 20 years ago, and he is not about to abandon it even though there have been orders to evacuate the neighbourhood as the civil war rages. "Nothing's going to happen here!" Then the bomb falls and leaves the building in pieces, very much like those places we have seen in Ukraine recently. The daughter Zeina has a big round hole in the ceiling of her bedroom, and everything is covered with rubble. "No problem," says Dad. He'll patch everything up in no time. The priority of course is to cover the gaping holes where the windows with sheets so that nobody can see the women (Zeina and her mother, the other 3 daughters having already wed and left).
There is just one family left across the street, and so the Hot Boy and Zeina start staring at each other. In no time, he is up on her roof at night so they can talk all night, and he even brings a knotted rope so she can crawl up on the roof with him. He has a video projector, a satellite phone and a drone among other things because he was the geek of the media club and he kept all of the goodies when the others evacuated.
The situation in Damascus gets worse and worse, but the father goes absolutely ballistic whenever the words "refugee camp" are mentioned. "I will never be a refugee!"
But, you know how it goes. The mother and Zeina finally leave without him with the help of the Hot Boy (Amer) who even knows where the tunnel to the other (safe) sector can be found. Dad finally comes running after them. Mom will have none of this bullshit, but Zeine really loves her father even though he is a complete jerk.
In the end, they've heard that Europe is not a bad place and they can probably get a place on one of those little boats to go there...
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 27, 2023 12:10:14 GMT
Just about everything you need to know about the Argentinian movie Pornomelancolia is in the title. Lalo is a Mexican factory worker not enthused by his job, but one night while he is scrolling a gay sex app, there is an ad to be in a movie. And before you know it, he is playing Emiliano Zapata in a movie where he screws Pancho Villa and just about everybody else. There is a lot less flesh on view in the movie than one might expect (no real sex) but still enough for a -16 age restriction in French cinemas. Even as he becomes a sex influencer on the social networks, he is morose and lonely.
One thing that makes this a little more than the usual work of fiction is the fact that the character Lalo Santos is played by himself, Lalo Santos, or @lalooaxaca on social media.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 28, 2023 14:01:42 GMT
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny brings the series to a satisfactory end and is not totally horrible, even though that's another 150 minutes of the dying embers of my brain that I am never getting back. One of the biggest surprises is that the scenes with the de-aged Indy are remarkably well done and not creepy. Plus, we have eels instead of snakes, dangerous races through narrow streets where you break everything and maybe kill a few people, a tunnel full of giant tarantulas and millipedes which pops up for no reason at all, treacherous companions; all of the necessary bases are touched. And to prove that Indy will not be doing on any more adventures, there is a scene at home in his boxer shorts, and a he really is an 80 year old man with folds of floppy skin everywhere. The movie will do well at the box office.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 30, 2023 15:17:43 GMT
In Passages by American director Ira Sachs, Franz Rogowski and Ben Whishaw have been together for 15 years and are now married and living in Paris. Franz is a movie director and Ben works in graphic design. Franz is extravagant and hyperactive while Ben is calm and discreet. How did their couple last for 15 years? Bring on Adèle Exarchopoulos. She is at a party where Franz stays when Ben decides to go home and go to bed. After being out all night, Franz announces proudly to Ben "I slept with a woman last night!" Ben is a bit less enthusiastic than Franz would have wished but he has probably become used to this sort of behaviour over the years. The new relationship develops while the marriage begins to crumble. But there is still a bit of hot sex for old times sake. Obviously, in the end Franz is all alone, but he is the sort of person who will quickly find new relationahips...
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 1, 2023 17:38:12 GMT
I have always liked Nanni Moretti as a director, but in recent years some of his films were not as good as I would prefer. With Il sol dell'avvenire (A Brighter Tomorrow) he is defiintely back on track. He plays a director making a movie about the reaction of the Italian Communist Party to the Soviet invasion of Budapest in 1956 to put an end to the uprising. The subject does not interest everybody and even some of the film crew don't know that there were Italian communists. His wife is his producer but she is fed up with him and has decided to leave him. A French guy is financing the project until he is hauled off by the police as a crook. That leaves possible Korean investors. The principal actress always wants to improvise, which is poison to the director. And since the movie centers on a Hungarian circus troupe that has been invited by the local Communist party to perform, even that is a huge problem. They had to hire some elephants for the movie, but the German elephants don't get along with the French elephants...
It is a delightful nightmare and frankly becomes Felliniesque as it progresses. It made me realise how much I miss Fellini.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 2, 2023 13:47:12 GMT
Rheingold by German director Fatih Akin is as rough and tough as his movies always are. And this one is a true story so wild that it would be totally rejected as fiction. It is about German rapper Xatar, who was born to a bourgeois Iranian Kurdish family. The movie begins before he is born. His father is a musician and composer and his mother is a musician. They have to flee during the Iranian revolution and end up in Syria, where the mother gives birth alone in a cave infested with bats. the parents are later in a Syrian prison but are sent to Iraq by the French Red Cross, where they are also thrown in prison, but finally they get to a refugee camp in France. Kurdish diplomats get them settled in Germany where things are "better" and Xatar (real name Giwar) grows up with his sister among lots of other immigrant refugees.
This is just about the first 20% of the movie and you are already out of breath about all of the things that have happened.
Giwar grows up, but as a teenager he starts dealing drugs and making cassette copies of porn movies, which gets him expelled from school. He has a drug dealing problem when one of the customers refuses to pay, and he is badly beaten up by all of the guy's friends. This makes him determined to learn how to become a street fighter, and he tracks every one of them down to beat the shit out of them.
Okay, I'll stop the plot there, but later he lives in Amsterdam for awhile to escape prosecution in Germany and finally returns to Germany. Stupid bad things get him in prison again, and it is there that he starts recording rap music and becomes a star. (Gee, without the plot details that makes it sound pretty ridiculous.)
Fatih Akin, as usual, spares us none of the nasty scenes -- torture, teeth pulling, brutal fights, bullets in the brain...
I was worn out after 2h18, but it was excellent if you can stand it. Currently 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 4, 2023 13:16:04 GMT
Taking a wide step away from a lot of my usual fare, today I went to see Disney Pixar's Elemental. A lot of the visuals were delightful, but it's the same old Romeo & Juliet story that has been told a thousand times. Using fire and water as the characters was no different from if they had used furry animals, insects or fish. A lot of the word play was a collection of real groaners. I made a point of seeing the French version because I knew that Adèle Exarcharpolous and Vincent Lacoste did the dubbing, and they were both excellent.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 5, 2023 15:35:46 GMT
Yo Mama would normally have been a totally forgettable summer comedy, but it seemed incredibly topical today. It is about 3 struggling mothers in the poor suburbs (Sarcelles) who discover that their 3 sons have made a rather shocking rap video even if they are still pre-teens. They mothers try everything to get their children to grow up with good values, but the kids never listen to anything. There are worries that the situation could degenerate in the area, with riots, looting and general mayhem (where did they get such an idea?). So the mothers decided to fight back in a way that their sons will listen to them -- by making a rap video themselves. They get help from the bad girl niece of one of them who knows all of the vulgar words to use, etc.
Naturally, since this is a comedy, the mothers' video goes viral and even attracts professional attention. The kids are mortified, as kids that age always are when their mothers draw attention to themselves.
Just like in the real world, it all works out in the end and there are no riots or fires.
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Post by whatagain on Jul 5, 2023 15:43:41 GMT
Seems already politically correct as one mother is black one white and the last nord-africain. I Hope one of the kids is gay.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 5, 2023 15:55:11 GMT
Actually, that is one detail that is totally authentic and which most people from other countries do not understand. There are very few specific ethnic groups in the suburbs of Paris, and the various affinities are generally created by the profession of the parents (truck drivers, supermarket cashiers, factory workers...). The main "immigrant" group (even if it is 2nd or 3rd generation) is Portuguese, followed by North African and sub-Saharan African, with of course a few ethnic French mixed in (often because of mixed marriages regarding which France is apparently the world champion). Most of the various youth gangs (?) include Muslims, Jews and Christians because it is more based on which building you live in rather than where your parents come from. And of course the vast majority go to the same school, which also ensures a certain cohesion.
The movie is supposedly based on a true event, but I have not looked it up to see if it is really true.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 6, 2023 16:38:16 GMT
Une Nuit (Strangers by Night en anglais) is the total stereotype of excruciatingly boring French movies that are all talk and no action (or plot). Nathalie and Aymeric don't know each other but have an argument on the metro because she bumped into him during rush hour. Six minutes later they have a quick fuck in a photo booth and then they wander around Paris for the entire night, crashng a party, going to a restaurant, visiting a swingers' club, wandering in the Bois de Vincennes... And they talk talk talk. It's only 91 minutes long, but it felt like about 4 hours to me. Both actors are excellent in other things they do, so this makes it even more annoying.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 7, 2023 14:15:17 GMT
Master Gardener is such a complete piece of horseshit I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Narvel is the gardener with a mysterious past. He works for Norma in the big house and services her when necessary. At Norma's request, he takes on her great niece as an apprentice. She is supposed to be a bad girl, but she is sweet and obedient and does a good job (impossible to believe in any case). Director Paul Schrader (who wrote Taxi Driver for chrissake!) wanted Zendaya for that part but couldn't afford her. Norma (Sigourney Weaver) is a total nut case and probably the most interesting character. Joel Edgerton just stays stoic with wooden narration and even more wooden acting. There are several meal and diner scenes, but nobody actually eats or drinks anything. That drives me crazy, especially when Narvel says things like "this is really delicious" and they both get up and leave with their plates full. Then, since it's a Paul Schrader movie, awful things have to happen, and the meanies come and wreck the garden. How awful is that? It was filmed in St. Francisville, Louisiana.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jul 7, 2023 17:43:20 GMT
It was filmed in St. Francisville, Louisiana. !!!!!And you're just now telling me this?! I could have swooped in early and stolen that part right out from under Sigourney Weaver. Betcha I work cheaper than she does. Love that the crazy older lady is named Norma -- a nod to Sunset Boulevard? Looked at the trailer & recognize the locations. Tots drive in appears to be where Sonic is, although they must have used CGI to get that look. Was the movie as dark as the trailer -- I could barely see it. Director Paul Schrader (who wrote Taxi Driver for chrissake!) Not so surprising when you consider that he had wholesome blonde Cybill Shepherd cheerfully agreeing to go out with Travis Bickle, who was already manifesting signs of creepiness when he asked her out. Having the women in this movie demanding sex from the (yes, very wooden -- does he ever move his lips?) gardener is more of same. Thank you for seeing crap like this so you can warn the rest of us away from it.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 7, 2023 17:53:34 GMT
I looked up what St. Francisville has in terms of major gardens, and it is clearly the Afton Villa gardens. However, the house there burned down in the 1960s, so the manor in the movie is clearly something else.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jul 8, 2023 0:09:15 GMT
The plantation house is Greenwood, which also burnt back when. I remember when it was being rebuilt, because people from all over who'd visited the house as tourists sent in photos to help in the reconstruction. 64parishes.org/entry/greenwood-plantationI vividly remember when Afton Villa burnt. A childhood friend of mine, one day older than I, lived there with her parents. After the house burnt, they moved into a gardener's house that was on the property. I can remember visiting that normal-sized house which was full of huge furniture rescued from the big house. My friend's mother said that watching the big rose window over the entrance burn and melt was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 9, 2023 12:20:27 GMT
En los márgenes (A contretemps en francés, On the Fringe en inglés) is a painfully realistic depiction of the eviction procedures in Spain. It follows three situations -- an immigrant woman and her daughter, a worker estranged from his elderly mother, and a woman losing her apartment because she can't get another bank loan. The main characters are Luis Tosar, who is social lawyer Rafa, a total fuck-up, always late, always losing his car keys, saddled with his sulking stepson because he missed the bus for the one week trip to somewhere (Rafa's fault). He runs around Madrid like crazy trying to help, delivering a butane tank, tracking down the immigrant mother because her daughter has been taken by the police, missing an important medical appointment with his wife... Nothing goes right. The other important character is Azucena, played by Penélope Cruz with shitty hair and no makeup (refreshing!) who is supposed to be evicted the next morning. But she is not going down without a fight and attends meetings with associations specialised in such matters.
There is not much in the way of a happy ending and at the end, there is information on the screen saying that 400,000 people were evictged in Spain last year, more than 100 a day.
Just in case French subtitles help...
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 12, 2023 12:05:47 GMT
Zhì chi (Limbo in English although the title means 'wisdom tooth') is a totally grueling Hong Kong movie about a manhunt for a serial killer. It makes a movie like Seven seem like a holiday in Disneyworld because the Hong Kong it portrays is a horrible trashy dump. Seasoned cop and young cop are on the track of a guy who likes to kill and rape young women, cutting off a hand and keeping it as a trophy. The cops don't really get along but then they don't really have a choice. While hunting for women in trouble, they encounter a young female car thief and the older guy beats the absolute shit out of her, to the horror of his colleague. It appears that she was responsible for a car crash which put the cop's wife into a permanent coma. She ends up being bait for the serial killer, who beats the shit out of her, too, and then he rapes her, and then he tries to cut off her hand with a shovel. (Rated -16 in France) About the only good thing that happens in the movie is that the young cop gets his tooth knocked out because he has been suffering from a raging toothache the entire time, which doesn't help his law enforcement skills very much either.
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Post by rikita on Jul 12, 2023 20:01:07 GMT
The Romanian animated film The Island is everything that animation should be, with no limits and no need to follow a logical story line. Robinson lives alone on an island in the Mediterranean. He helps migrants trying to cross the sea. One day he saves Friday, the only survivor of his shipwreck. But there is also a pirate, a mermaid and merciless Mother Nature. All sorts of trash floats on the sea, and there are radar dishes and strange contraptions on land. They go off on various adventures, leaving Friday to fend for himself. He grows magnificent tomatoes which always get stolen by an evil capitalist. So he goes on the sea himself to help migrants. Should I mention that it is a sort of musical but not really? with ada milea ... could hear her voice in the trailer ...
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 13, 2023 15:43:18 GMT
No international title yet, but I'm pretty sure that Les Algues Vertes will be given a more gripping title than "Green Seaweed." It's a true story about the dirty agricultural secrets of Brittany. The French know that Brittany has the most polluted water in France, but tourists are sold a natural unspoilt paradise. A young investigative journalist became so intrigued by the cover up of 3 people dying from the fumes of decomposing seaweed and also a lot of animals that she decided to dig deeper. The people with pig farms or big domains that use a lot of fertilizer are openly hostile, and most of the other people are keeping their mouths shut, even the families of victims. But she persists for years and never lets go, even after 20 years.
Unfortunately, things in France do not turn out as nicely as in Erin Brockovich or Dark Waters or other such movies. There have been some small victories and some major defeats. Perhaps this movie will change things, but we're not getting our hope up too much.
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Post by whatagain on Jul 13, 2023 18:47:53 GMT
Indeed we heard a lot about it then less now. Supposedly linked to phosphate no ?
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Post by bixaorellana on Jul 13, 2023 20:27:34 GMT
Supposedly linked to phosphate no ? I believe that phosphates are also in clothes detergent (or at least used to be), which of course winds up in waterways and ground water.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 13, 2023 20:59:30 GMT
The nitrates in fertilizer and pig shit lead to the decomposing seaweed emitting hydrogen sulfide, which is the toxic gas that killed people and animals on the beach. Although no children died, they were most at risk since they breathe much closer to the ground.
Meanwhile, very few people in Brittany drink tap water because of nitrate contamination from pesticides.
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Post by bjd on Jul 14, 2023 5:55:36 GMT
Phosphates were removed from detergent decades ago, at least in industrialized countries. I think those green algae on the beaches in Brittany were caused by something else. In any case, the most productive agricultural areas in France are the most polluted and the farmers are among those who are most against any environmental cleanup.
In the coastal Basque area these days there is some micro-alga that is polluting the water and causing problems. Beaches in Biarritz and south were closed for several weeks because even breathing the air near the beaches was deemed unhealthy.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 15, 2023 17:56:47 GMT
Le Retour (Homecoming) by Catherine Corsini is a strangely controversial film. I say "strangely" because I see nothing controversial about in terms of contemporary French cinema. It's about a mother returning to Corsica with her two daughters to work as a nanny for a wealthy family while giving the girls a nice summer holiday. She left Corsica under somewhat mysterious circumstances and a number of secrets need to be revealed in the course of the movie. The girls are 15 and 18 and are in constant competition and conflict even though they love each other. They settle into a summer beach routine and meet the local young people, some very nice and some not so nice. The mother is really quite tolerant but a major reason is because she knows she has no control over them.
The movie was apparently controversial because of a sex scene with the younger girl. There was nothing graphic about it, and it seemed completely normal to me. Are the French becoming prudes? Maybe what bothered some of them was the older daughter discovering that she is a lesbian? The age of sexual majority in France is 15, so what's the big deal?
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 16, 2023 16:38:27 GMT
Some people here may suspect that I am not a big fan of most mainstream blockbusters. But even though I dragged my feet a bit, I finally subjected myself to Dead Reckoning - Part 1 today, know to the world as just Mission Impossible. I have to admit that I find new things to hate every time I see one of these movies. The very first thing (even before the opening titles) was in the Russian submarine where it all begins (and -- spoiler! -- where it will all clearly end in part 2). The Russian sailors all speak English to each other in a freestyle exercise of every bad fake Russian accent you have ever heard. And yet when we move on to Rome and Venice, the Italians speak Italian, and on the Orient Express, Tom Cruise and one of the baddies even speak French to each other. Aren't the Italians and the French intelligent enough to speak English?
As for the plot, it is just as bad as Indiana Jones or the Avengers or some of the other silly recent adventure movies. They have to unite two parts of a key, and if they do so, they can rule the world (with computers, of course). The only problem is that nobody seems to know how to use the key if they put it together.
There are fake bombs with those scary red countdown timers, gun battles where nobody ever seems to be hit even though the set is destroyed, a car chase in Rome with a vintage Fiat 500 from 40 years ago, not even a new model, but which nevertheless can outrun the police and the baddies without even getting a scratch until the end of the chase, even driving down the Spanish Steps and around the Colosseum while at least 50 cars and 100 motorcycles are destroyed, along with walls, parapets and sculptures.
Absolutely everybody is out to kill Tom Cruise except Simon Pegg and the black guy. Simon Pegg is truly amazing because he manages to collect Tom from the most improbable places, such as when he lands in a parachute in the Austrian Alps and yet Simon is waiting for him right where he lands with a car even though there are no roads.
And of course my #1 pet peeve in all of these movies was on display. These people all have incredible firepower but whether they are Guardians of the Galaxy, Jedi or just old Tom Cruise, there are countless fistfights. Just shoot the bastards. Actually, quite a few people were stabbed in this movie, so maybe knives are making a comeback. Very conveniently, there is not a single drop of blood in spite of all the mayhem and death, so you can take your small offspring to see it, just like The Little Mermaid.
My intelligence was insulted so much that it is going to take me awhile to recover.
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