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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 16, 2023 16:44:58 GMT
I just remembered another detail that I absolutely despised, but there is probably no point in mentioning it.
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Post by bjd on Jul 16, 2023 17:50:04 GMT
I just remembered another detail that I absolutely despised, but there is probably no point in mentioning it. Why stop now?
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 16, 2023 18:07:06 GMT
The dialogue, oh my god the dialogue! Of course it was ridiculous, as world domination plots always are, but whenever there was a group of people -- CIA operatives, bad guys, good guys or whatever, the dialogue was delivered like a Greek chorus with each person saying just a piece of the sentence or like twins who finish each other's statement.
#1 This is very serious #2 Because the fate of the world is at stake #3 If you don't stop them #4 Millions of people will die
etc.
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Post by whatagain on Jul 18, 2023 12:42:24 GMT
Usually the hero drops his gun then fights then wins then the bad guy finds another gun tries to kill the hero who then shoots him….
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 18, 2023 14:24:24 GMT
Love Life is a contempoary Japanese movie about love and life and also death. A young couple lose their seven year old son in a bathroom accident. As usual, this is even harder on the mother. She can't even use the bathroom in their flat anymore. Luckily, the in-laws live just a couple of buildings away, and the mourning couple is welcome to bathe there. But there is a scandal at the funeral. The biological father of the dead boy shows up. We discover that he is the ex-husband who ran away 4 or 5 years ago. On top of that, he is a Korean deaf mute and is homeless. Both of the parents of the dead boy work in branches of social services, and the woman ends up helping her deaf husband because there are not many people around who know Korean sign language. And then things get complicated, especially when the in-laws move away and the woman moves her ex-husband into their empty flat.
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Post by whatagain on Jul 18, 2023 20:38:14 GMT
As usual harder for the mother.
Well this a big stereotype.
Allez, c'est bon pour une fois...
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Post by bixaorellana on Jul 19, 2023 1:08:24 GMT
As usual harder for the mother. Well this a big stereotype. THANK YOU for posting that, Whatagain! I think Kerouac's nod toward the mother was meant kindly, but it is accidentally cruel to men. Fathers -- & I mean all men who have love & nurtured a child/children, whether their own or not -- love and grieve as intensively as any mother or, indeed, any woman. Women are by tradition the nurturers, the carers, the life-givers, etc., so are supposedly those who feel most deeply. Often this is true, but it sometimes obscures the fact that men -- stereotypically strong, silent types -- feel and emotionally suffer just as intensely and sometimes more than women.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 19, 2023 2:29:38 GMT
In this case, I feel it is open to debate. The mother was there all along, and she was the one not paying enough attention to what her sons was doing and therefore maybe responsible for his death. Her husband was "just" the stepfather, so by standard (probably flawed) wisdom, was less affected by the death, especially since his own parents had been suggrsting that he have his own child soon to make it a "real" family. And the real father had abandoned his child for four years. He clearly had some mental issues so was perhaps spared a certain amount of grief before coming to his senses. As I said: open to debate. Everybody's individual experience is different.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jul 19, 2023 3:06:32 GMT
Not a debate, more a reaction to your use of the phrase "as usual". Of course in the context of the movie you saw, it's understood that you're reporting on how things were portrayed there. But the "as usual" makes it sound as though you're saying that's how it always is.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 19, 2023 3:19:47 GMT
My "as usual" was about how it usually is in the movies, which almost always tend to take the easiest path. Movies have a very conservative view of life. It's one of the reasons I try to find movies that portray things differently.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 19, 2023 11:20:38 GMT
Okay, I went to see Barbie today. It is pretty much impossible to describe and most people already know if they want to see it or nor, so I will spare you. It could have been meaner, but there really would have been no point in it. At first I was surprised that Mattel wwould finance a movie that says so many awful things about its products and the way the company is run, but then I remembered that the most important thing for them is that it is sure to make them a shitload of money, both from the movie and the sale of all of the Barbie products. Even the song Barbie Girl was used in the final credits, even though they had filed a lawsuit against it when it was first released.
You can get disciplined actors to do anything if you pay them enough.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 21, 2023 14:28:56 GMT
Okay, with a certain amount of trepidation, I went to ingest 181 minutes of Oppenheimer today. I found it to be a spy movie attached to a courtroom drama with a little slice of science stuck in the middle. And yes, it was too long, even though it was brilliantly acted. It's an important subject, but the people who need to see this sort of movie never will.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 22, 2023 15:39:18 GMT
Sous le tapis (Under the Carpet) is one of those movies that fits into the specifically French category "comédie dramatique." Is it a oomedy, is it a drama, who knows? Anyway, in this movie Odile is celebrating her birthday and has invited her adult children and their companions and offspring. But her husband suddenly and unexpectedly dies before they arrive. What to do? She hides him under the bed and tells everybody that he is just resting when they arrive and want to see him. This works with her children. The daughter is high strung and in a relationship with a self-centred jerk who is obsessed with his company bicycle race which he is doing at the same time. The son is a relaxed fuck-up sort of person who solves problems by smoking joints with his alternative girlfriend. But of course the smaller children cannot be controlled as easily, so the corpse is discovered... And then things go haywire.
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Post by Kimby on Jul 23, 2023 19:33:50 GMT
Okay, with a certain amount of trepidation, I went to ingest 181 minutes of Oppenheimer today. I found it to be a spy movie attached to a courtroom drama with a little slice of science stuck in the middle. And yes, it was too long, even though it was brilliantly acted. I plan to see this as my Dad was hired right out of college as a scientific glassblower on the Manhattan Project. It was so top secret they couldn’t tell him what he was being hired for, but the interviewer suggested Dad refer to a certain page in the physics text. It was the section discussing nuclear fission…
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 26, 2023 15:12:31 GMT
Two movies about nut cases.
Paula is the story of a troubled girl who is taken to the woods on holiday by her father who turns out to be even more troubled, a somewhat unexpected role for the boyish Finnegan Oldfield. The father has additional health issues and needs to use an oxygen tank regularly. They are completely isolated except for some lake visitor. Meanwhile, is the hippie boat rental guy dangerous? What about the boy scout camp across the lake? They seem to have some pretty strange rituals around their campfire.
But just as an example of how creepy this gets, the father decides that they have to release the pet rabbit back to nature. It's one of those fat floppy things that wouldn't survive more than two hours in the wild. Sure enough a few days later, the girl finds the disgusting cadaver in the forest and brings it home. Does Dad console her? No, he is a biologist, so he dissects it in front of her so that she can see all of the guts and other organs and touch them ("See how soft they are!"). And that is before things get really disturbing.
Sur la branche (Out on a limb becomes A Wonderful Girl for export. There are multiple nut cases in this one, but not as scary. Mimi is released from her mental facility and is supposed to report to a gardening job. Instead she goes to the law firm of a depressive lawyer and decides she is going to work there. The lawyer is clearly losing her marbles, and her clients, so she sends Mimi to get needed files from another lawyer who is having a breakdown and won't leave his flat. He is possibly the husband of the other lawyer. Against all odds, Mimi succeeds just because she is crazy and other people feel sorry for her. Then she decides to help a guy in jail who called the firm because the other inmates said it was free, having benefited from some pro bono work over the years. The guy in jail is another nut case. He might be the natural son of a rich guy in Brittany where his mother worked. But maybe not, who knows? These characters lead to a number of adventures bordering on wacky but also a bit upsetting.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 27, 2023 12:14:29 GMT
How to Blow Up a Pipeline is an absolutely fantastic ecological thriller based on a serious essay. It is a Gen-Z low budget production and that makes it all the more realistic. A group of 20-somethings with different motives but the same goal meet up in West Texas to punish the oil industry. Obviously, there is a moral dilemma. If they blow up a pipeline, are they really hurting an oil company or all of the little people who will suffer from it? The decision is that it is better to do something extreme than to just sit around and talk, which is the same conclusion that has been reached by people driven to terrorism everywhere in the world.
But will their plan succeed?
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Post by casimira on Jul 28, 2023 13:17:14 GMT
Kerouac, your review of Oppenheimer is spot on and succinct. It was too long but everything else about it was brilliant.
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Post by Kimby on Jul 29, 2023 5:32:09 GMT
BARBIE, today with two girlfriends. A fun romp, with some important messages about society.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 30, 2023 12:03:44 GMT
Un hiver en été (Summer Frost) is an excruciatingly boring waste of time and waste of good actors. There is a severe cold wave in June and everybody complains about it being freezing cold, but that's about it. It isn't even convincingly done since a lot of the scenes were clearly filmed in the winter with no leaves on the trees and other scenes have perfectly green vegetation with people wearing scarves and coats. But the weather seems to have nothing to do with the plot (or absence of plot). It is a mixture of 5 vignettes with 2 people each time having some sort of existential crisis, with a couple scenes at the end to loosely connect them. What a horrible movie!
Les Meutes (Hounds) is an excellent Moroccan thriller and/or black comedy about a father and son trying to get rid of a dead body. Hassan is a minor crook who earns a living from dog fights in the bad burbs of Casablanca. To repay a debt, he is supposed to kidnap some guy and deliver him to some other guy. He convinces his son to help although the son isn't in to any of this stuff at all. They have to borrow a van, and then they kidnap the guy, but he suffocates and dies in the trunk of the van. The other person has no interest in receiving a dead body so he sends them away and gives them the name of a guy in the middle of nowhere who should help them dispose of the corpse. But this other guy "doesn't do that anymore" so he sends them away, too. What to do? Well, there's that old drunk fisherman who owes a favour or two, so they go to the port. He reluctantly agrees to dump the body in the ocean. He goes alone with the body (it is a very small boat) but clearly got all tangled up in the weights and heavy chains and dumped himself in the water instead. The boat floats back to shore with the original corpse still in it... And of course that is far from the end of their problems...
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 31, 2023 12:50:49 GMT
I had already read that is was awful, but I was looking for something convenient and easy on the brain, so I went anyway. I can now confirm that The Haunted Mansion is the absolutely worst Disney movie that I have seen in several decades, and believe me, they have made some real stinkers over the years.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 19, 2023 15:19:49 GMT
I am increasingly losing contact with American politics because the subject interests me less and less (seems so hopeless), so I had never heard of Reality Winner and what happened to her. But today I went to see Reality and I found it jaw-dropping. I know that just about every country does shitty things, but I am so glad that I no longer live in a country that behaves this way.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 21, 2023 5:22:31 GMT
I found Animalia completely fascinating. The pregnant wife in a rich Moroccan family stays behind when the rest of the clan leaves for a big event in another city. Frankly, she is fed up with her in-laws, who look down on her. She was just a simple village girl while the family wanted someone more sophisticated for their ambitious son. But once she is alone in the house, the world seems to go weird. Supernatural things seem to be happening, strange lights in the sky, dogs sitting in a circle, birds becoming unpredictable... Military convoys go rushing around while jets fly overhead. The roads are closed.
She decides she needs to get to her husband, but it's not easy. Meanwhile, she is quite devout and prays a lot, but people seem to be flocking to mosques for not very noble reasons. It's all quite tense and beautifully filmed.
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Post by mich64 on Aug 23, 2023 16:00:44 GMT
We went to see Oppenheimer last week with my brother and sister-in-law. We went to the afternoon movie so we could have dinner together afterwards. It was my first time to an afternoon movie since I was a child! There were only about 10 other people in the theater.
For about the first 10 minutes I thought I had made a mistake, I had difficulty with how abstract it was, but then once the dialogue began the rest of the movie completely held my interest and the three hours passed so quickly. Last year we had watched a mini-series about Albert Einstein so it kind of felt like the story continued through this movie.
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 23, 2023 23:36:40 GMT
Very interesting, Mich. Honestly, what you wrote is the first thing I've read that made me think I might want to see Oppenheimer.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 24, 2023 16:45:05 GMT
Today, I decided to see an awful mindless movie, but I couldn't decide between Retribution with Liam Neeson and Hypnotic with Ben Affleck. Retribution is already the 3rd remake of this story (original by Spain, followed by Germany and South Korea), so I should have chosen it for a solid plot, but then I thought that Ben Affleck is considered to be a better actor even if he has made some real stinkers over the years, so I went to see that. What a mistake! The plot made absolutely no sense so I will not even attempt to describe it. The most awful scene comes during the final credits when it is made clear that a sequel is possible, god forbid.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 25, 2023 17:23:04 GMT
The other day I went to see Anatomie d'une chute (Anatomy of a Fall) which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year. It was extremely well done if a bit long at 2h30. I did not fall in love with the movie because I could not identify with any of the characters. It concerns a Franco-German couple living in the Alps after 10 years in London. The German woman is a writer and was very happy in London. The French husband was a failed writer who had to teach to live, but the couple decided (concession by the wife) that if they moved to France, he would be able to write and life would be cheaper in the mountains. Also they have an almost blind young son who was blinded in an accident at age 4 when the father temporarily wasn't paying attention. So there are some guilt issues too.
It sounds really interesting. The husband dies in a fall from an upper window. Or maybe he was pushed? That's the mystery. The second half of the movie is the trial of the mother a year later. Will the truth finally come out?
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 25, 2023 17:41:59 GMT
The Italian movie Vera upset me enormously, because I was unable to separate fact from fiction. Vera Gemma is a real person playing herself, ravaged by plastic surgery. She is the daughter of an immensely popular actor from spaghetti westerns of the 1960s. She has not had the same success but she is apparently well off, living in a beautiful apartment in Trastevere. Her clothing is extravagant and would look normal nowhere. One day, she is involved in an road accident where a little boy is injured (broken arm). She becomes involved with the family, the shiftless widower of a father, the loving grandmother in their crummy apartment. She helps them more and more and becomes a member of the family when she is not visiting her sister or wandering through cemeteries with Asia Argenta (another "daughter of"). And then it all goes to shit. I was horrified. I wanted to cry. A review: www.screendaily.com/reviews/vera-review/5175052.article
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 30, 2023 15:43:13 GMT
Ama Gloria is the sort of movie that you know will be heartbreaking before it even begins. Cléo is a 6 year old girl who has been cared for by Gloria ever since her mother died of cancer. She loves her intensely and it is reciprocal, but Gloria has to return home to Cape Verde for family reasons. Cléo is so crushed that her father asks if Cléo can spend part of the summer holidays with her. The answer is yes, but Gloria has a lot going on -- a daughter about to give birth, and then there is the teenage son who resents not having his mother around earlier in his life.
Still, Cléo is pretty adorable and is easily accepted, especially since it makes Gloria happy to spend time with her again. But Cape Verde is not Paris, so you often wonder what sort of accidents might happen on the shore or in other places. The baby is born, and Cléo would kind of like it to die so that Gloria could come back to France with her, but one's wishes do not always come true.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 2, 2023 15:24:31 GMT
Two completely different teenage movies. The first one was Super bourrés (Totally Wasted), which clearly followed the Judd Apatow school of filmmaking in spite of the extreme twist of taking place in extremely rural France. Janus (weird looking skinny boy) and Sam (chubby girl) have been friends since childhood. Although they are not particularly popular, they are invited to the end-of-year bash because they can get alcohol from the local store (family connections) while the other underage kids are banned. As often happens in this kind of movie, they lose the money before they can buy the booze. What to do? Maybe there is some alcohol in Janus's dead father's cellar, but first they have to find the key. They search the house and can't find anything until Sam says that they haven't looked where many women hide their most precious items, the underwear drawer. So they look in it and pull out a big dildo, but they also find the key.
In the cellar, they find a very sophisticated still and the notebook that explains all of the steps of distilling. Since Sam's family owns a plum farm where most of the plums go to waste, they have the necessary ingredients to make instant rotgut...
You don't need to know the rest if you have ever seen a Judd Apatow movie.
Alam (The Flag) is a Palestinian movie taking place in Israeli occupied Palestine. The high school is quite normal, but a number of the students are quite irritated by the fact that it flies the Israeli flag. So they make a plot to replace it one night with a Palestinian flag. This is not the easiest thing in the world. For one thing, there are the parents who absolutely want the kids to stay out of trouble, and there are the adolescent hormones at work since Tamer has his sights set on new girl Maysaâ.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 3, 2023 15:00:24 GMT
Nr 10 (#10) is one of the strangest movies that I have seen in some time. A theatre troupe in the Netherlands is rehearsing what seems to be a pretty crappy play. Their relations with each other appear to be more interesting with infidelity, revenge and a lot of sneaking around. But really who cares? Günter is the main character, no more interesting than the others. But one day when he is walking across a bridge, a stranger whispers a mysterious word into his ear. This sets off the weirdness. Meanwhile a mysterious priest has a transvestite henchman kill Günter's ailing wife to remove possible resistance to what comes next.
Günter is lured into a confessional in a church where a priest reveals that the mysterious word is linked to his mother. Günter never knew his mother because he was found abandoned in a forest as a young child and was raised by foster parents. (First we've heard of that!)
The trail leads him to a forest in Germany where there is a tiny chapel in the woods. He meets the mastermind priest and enters a cupboard with a trap door that leads down to the buried spaceship. WTF? There is a video message from his mother on the home world (obligingly translated by the alien priest), and she is still alive. Will he come to meet her at last? Yes, and he even takes his adult daughter with him since she has nothing better to do and has been wondering why she has only one lung.
The priest shows him a big warehouse (part of the spaceship) full of religious statues and paintings. He and all of his assistant priests are taking this haul to the other planet with the intention on converting the inhabitants, because they have no god and no hope of salvation. The spaceship finally rips itself out of the underground hiding place and sets off for the stars. Günter and his daughter are finding this more and more uncomfortable.
Not to worry. All of a sudden all of the ecclesiastics and their religous paraphenalia are flushed out into the void where they all die. As we admire their corpses and the countless Virgin Marys, miscellaneous saints and devotional paintings floating around in space, the final credits roll.
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