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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 24, 2023 14:56:30 GMT
It looked like a closet compared to Notre Dame.
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Post by onlyMark on Nov 24, 2023 15:07:06 GMT
The Church of England does tend to be less ostentatious than the Catholic Church.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 24, 2023 15:47:01 GMT
Well, then they shouldn't have taken it over from the Catholics in 1558.
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Post by onlyMark on Nov 24, 2023 16:09:23 GMT
It was a handy thing to take over rather than going to the cost of building a new one.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 24, 2023 16:56:58 GMT
They could have used it store grain or shelter cattle like the French did after the Revolution. A non ostentatious wooden building would have been fine for worship.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 24, 2023 17:57:17 GMT
One major French complaint about the movie is that no mention is made of the fact that Joséphine was six years older than Napoléon. She had already had two children, but the movie implies that she is not fertile although she had simply gone through menopause (which also happened much sooner back then). Since the actress is 13 years younger than Joaquin Phoenix, it looks like something is wrong with her. More sexism in cinema!
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Post by onlyMark on Nov 24, 2023 18:52:26 GMT
"A non ostentatious wooden building would have been fine for worship." No need to do that when we had a perfectly good "pre-loved" church going begging.
In that film, does it show anything about him being in Egypt?
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 24, 2023 18:59:39 GMT
Yes, it even shows him shooting cannonballs at the pyramids. Ridiculous! (He rushes back from Egypt when he learns that Joséphine is screwing around.)
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 25, 2023 18:22:11 GMT
I cleansed my brain of Napoléon by going to see Mars Express today. It is also about world dominattion but a different owrld where humans and androids and various other robots cohabit. However, some of those annoying marginal radical humans want to free the electronic brains of their electronic brethren with some truly remarkable and chaotic consequences.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 27, 2023 18:00:38 GMT
The Belgian actress Virginie Efira has become the top actress in France over the past 3 years or so as the previous generation (Isabelle Adjani, Isabelle Huppert..) fades away. She won the César for best actress in 2023 for which she also won the Belgian Magritte award, which she had already won in 2017. Her nominations for these and other awards in recent years are amazing.
Anyway, my bet is on Virgine Efira to win Best Actress at the Césars again in 2024 for Rien à perdre (Nothing to Lose). She plays a single mother with two children, slowly sinking into poverty. The son is a teenager who comes back from music practice late one night and discovers that his little brother has set the kitchen on fire tryng to make french fries because he was hungry. Second degree burns. Everything goes downhill from there -- the police and the hospital are obliged to report the incident and the child protection agency takes the little boy away into foster care. This happens everywhere and most of us usually approve, but the mother goes ballistic, which is the whole point of the movie.
It is interesting to note that Belgian actor Arieh Worthalter also plays a major role as the mother's totally fuck-up brother, and he has a major chance at the next César awards as best actor for Le procès Goldman from a few months ago. Wallonia has totally taken over French cinema.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 28, 2023 21:10:49 GMT
La Vénus d'Argent (Spirit of Ecstasy en anglais)is a rather perplexing film about a young woman who grew up in housing for the gendarmerie with a single father who is always busy. She has to take care of her two younger siblings, but she wants to work in the world of finance. He ex boyfriend is a soldier, but their relationship ended badly. He still loves her, too bad for him. She gets sucked into a finance company that wants to send her to Singapore. Unfortunately, her recruiter and his office suddenly disappear the day before she is supposed to leave. Nothing goes right, but even more unfortunate for her, I had no sympathy with her goals.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 29, 2023 16:31:30 GMT
Et la fête continue! (And the party goes on)is inspired by current politics in Marseille with the startng poing being the tragic collapse of two residential buildings in the heart of Marseille in 2018. About 8 people died, but the most important point is that the buildings were owned by the city of Marseille, like lots of other buildings. It caused such a scandal that dozens of other buildings were immediately condemned and something like 2000 people are still living in "temporary" accommodations.
Anyway, director Robert Guédiguian is a French cinema institution. He is from Marseille, a communist, and of Armenian heritage, elements found in all of his movies. But they are always warm community pieces and you love the characters immediately, especially since he always uses mostly the same actors in different configuations and we are very familiar with them.
Rosa works in a hospital but is a community sparkplug. She is always in group meetings, organising the painting of a nursery school courtyard or other neighbourhood events. She has a bit of post menopausal romance and also has to help her brother who has found his soulmate, except that she is unfortunately not Armenian and turns out not to be fertile although her fiancé wants nine children. Basically all of the elements of your usual Jewish comedy.
I know I didn't make it clear, but it is a very nice movie.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 30, 2023 15:36:21 GMT
Le temps d'aimer (Eng. title Along Came Love) spans about 25 uncomfortable years, starting with French women who slept with German soldiers having their heads shaven and often being paraded naked through the streets while people spit on them. The movie presents plenty of archival footage, including some that were not considered nice enough to show us in the past. Anyway, Madeleine (Anaïs Demoustier) is one of these women and even had a child. Some time has passed and she is working as a waitress in a beachfront restaurant in Brittany where nobody knows her past. She meets a nice young man, François (Vincent Lacoste). He is gentle and cultivated and apparently quite wealthy. While there is no huge spark, they clearly need each other and get married. A few years go by and they have moved on to Châteauroux with its huge American army base. They have a bar that is very popular with American servicemen and make friends with a GI called Jimmy. He is very attracted to Madeleine and she has been a bit frustrated anyway, because lovemaking with her husband, at least in one scene, appears to be more a case of him hugging her tight while she masturbates. One night Jimmy is too drunk to return to base so he ends up in their bed. The inevitable happens with Madeleine, but when François wants to join in, Jimmy spurns him.
A few years later, the couple is living in Paris and have had a daughter in addition to the boy. Life is very comfortable because François is an archeology professor at the Sorbonne, and his brother bought his half of the family factory for a shitload of money. They are entering calm middle aged life, but then the police show up to arrest François. The father of a 20-year old minor has filed charged for illegal behaviour. The most shocking thing is that the age of majority was 21 until 1974. While heterosexual relations were possible starting at age 15, minors could not engage in homosexual activity, especially with adults.
And so life goes downhill for the couple from there. François is immediately fired by the university and things are not looking good for the trial. On top of that the son has been aching to know more about his biological father for years and has reached the rebellious age. Can things end well? Don't count on it.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 30, 2023 17:16:13 GMT
After his excellent documentary about Anselm Kiefer (reply #391 on the documentary thread), now we have the new Japanese movie by Wim Wenders, Perfect Days. It is about a man whose job is to clean toilets in Tokyo. He is clearly very erudite and from a good family, but this is the life that he has chosen. There is very little dialogue in the movie but lots of scrubbing. Also lots of little observations about ordinary people with bodily functions. He also goes to the bathhouse, the laundromat the local greasy spoon, and it is all fascinating.
Kôji Yakusho is a major film star in Japan and he won the award for best actor at the Cannes film festival. His serenity and joy for life is incredible in the movie.
People applauded at the end, and this was a 9am screening in a typical cinema.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 2, 2023 22:17:07 GMT
The Braid (La Tresse) is perhaps the most "women's movie" that I have ever seen. French author Lætitia Colombani wrote the novel and also directed the film, but it is a French/Canadian/Italian/Belgian coproduction in English, Italian and Hindi.
It's about 3 women who don't know each other. Smita is an Indian Untouchable. Her husband hunts rats which they roast for dinner and her job is collecting faeces from toilets and taking them to the fields for fertilizer. This job repulses her (not hard to believe). She wants to send her young daughter to school, but when she finally manages to do so, the teacher just wants the little girl to sweep the classroom because that's all the untouchables are good for.
This is too much for Smita, so she runs away with her daughter for a place where life will be better (but where?). She even abandons her husband, who runs after the bus unsuccessfully. Things do not go well. When they take a train, the little girl needs to pee, but the toilet is permanently occupied by someone who refuses to get out. At a brief stop, the girl is peeing in the bushes but the train suddenly leaves and they miss it. They sleep on an overpass because there are no more trains, and everything is stolen.
Meanwhile, Giulia is a young woman whose father runs a hair factory for wigs. But all of the other similar places have closed and they are near bankruptcy. It is the last place using exclusively Italian hair. They are in dire straits, because the father has a stroke and is in a coma in the hospital. Then he dies. Her mother wants to marry her off to a rich family because the doltish son is in love with her. This is out of the question for Giulia. She has met a nice Sikh immigrant and there is mutual attraction.
As for Sarah, she is a top lawyer in a firm but she suddenly discovers that she has breast cancer. She has to hide this from her colleagues because it is a cutthroat office and her 15 years of perfect service would be totally ruined if they perceive a weakness in her. And yes, of course they find out. Chemo is next.
Of course the whole point of the movie is to talk about what happens to hair. And also what incredible shit women must endure through no fault of their own. And of course women are outraged and horrified by this story. Also a few kind hearted men.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 8, 2023 18:34:23 GMT
Ladj Ly won numerous awards 4 years ago with his amazingly gritty Les Misérables about some of the worst conditions in the suburbs of Paris. Now he is back with a follow up movie -- Bâtiment 5 -- about the same suburbs. Can we call this a Christmas movie? The new mayor of the city (the last mayor died unexpectedly) uses Christmas as the day to expel all of the residents from an apartment block. There was a fire in one of the flats, and the building is in such bad condition that he decides an emergency evacuation is required. The real reason is because the resident-owners were refusing an offer of 15,000 euros to buy their apartments even though many had spent 300,000 euros and went into debt for many years to buy them in the first place. "But your building is in such bad condition now that the apartments are worthless."
Ladj Ly bases this movie on his own experience, and apparently the movie was filmed in the building in which he grew up. Yes, of course there are also a lot of fictional elements, but still...
It is not quite as dramatic as Les Misérables but still more dramatic than 95% of other movies.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 8, 2023 18:51:52 GMT
I liked the previous films of Italian director Alice Rohrwacher, but I confess that La Chimera did nothing for me. It has great reviews with people raving about it, but I was really bored. Josh O'Connor (speaking Italian) is a tomb raider in Tuscany hunting for artifacts for resale. When there aren't enough artifacts, some of the locals have ways of manufacturing them. Their lives just did not interest me.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 9, 2023 21:40:49 GMT
In Levante, Sofia is an extremely promising volleyball star on the junior team. A big championship match is coming up, requiring new medical certificates. But Sofia has just found out the she is pregnant at age 17. Oops. She sees about getting an abortion, but this is not possible where she is living. Uruguay provides abortions for its citizens and Sofia is half Uruguayan through her decesed mother but never bothered to get the papers to prove it since she was born and raised in Brazil. When her father finds out about the situation, he is furious at first but then becomes supportive. They even drive to Uruguay, but no luck since there is not enough time to get the papers.
Word has spread about Sofia's condition and they are surrounded by evangelical neighbours who are 100% against abortion. Vandals even destroy the father's honey business and paint messages on the wall (Bible verses indicating that they are going to hell.).
Things get really bad. The world of Bolsinaro...
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 12, 2023 15:41:03 GMT
L'Enfant du paradis is 72 minutes of concentrated discomfort. Yazid is a struggling actor finally pulling out of a slump in his career. He has a few bit parts usually playing a thug or a dealer, and that's better than nothing. But he still drinks too much, uses drugs too much and is on terrible terms with the mother of his 16 year old son. He has a new love interest, but things are too complicated to go on like this, especially since he is still haunted by his mother's death (with excerpts of the actor's home movies included).
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 12, 2023 16:00:27 GMT
Soudain seuls ("Suddenly alone") is totally harrowing. It's about a couple on a sailing adventure in the extreme south seas, not too faar from Antarctica. Ben has spotted a small uninhabited island on the map which he would love to see before they return home. Laura doesn't really care but is not against the idea. They find the island and take their little zodiac on shore. They find an old abandoned whaling station in ruins, all very atmospheric, and they light a fire to spend the night. But an expected violent storm hits the island, making the night pretty miseable. Even worse, their sailboat has completely disappeared the next morning. Sunken or adrift? There is no way of knowing.
And so we have a shipwreck movie. No food, no communications. They survive by boiling small mussels they collect and move on to killing and eating a penguin, even though they don't really want to. We are spared nothing of how disgusting it is to gut a penguin and pull it to pieces. After weeks, they finally spot a ship in the distance one night. Ben tries to reach it in the zodiac but quickly runs out of fuel on the rough seas. It still takes him days to finally get back to the island with a leg destroyed. Then things get really tough.
There are only two people in the movie, which was actually filmed in Iceland rather than the Antarctic. Looked like a pretty tough shoot to me.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 13, 2023 14:16:32 GMT
It took a bit of an effort for me not to run screaming out of the cinema during the first five minutes of Wonka. It knew it was a musical, but I didn't expect it to be a 1960s musical (My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins...). Once I got over that, I was almost able to enjoy it, and I have to give Timothée Chalamet credit for this. Not only does he have a good voice, but he plunged sincerely into the story when he could have done a wink-wink-this-is-all-a-big-joke treatment of the character. You also have to consider the fact that this is Christmas movie made for children under the age of 10. But the sets and cinematography were outstanding, and yes there were a few little crumbs for adult viewers making it clear that chocolate is a drug with addicts and dealers.
As is usually the case with this kind of movie, the trailer hides the musical aspect of the proceedings or a lot of parents would stay away.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 13, 2023 14:35:00 GMT
Les trois mousquetaires: Milady is part 2 of the movie just now being released in the United States (D'Artagnan). It is a very efficient swashbuckler again, but I just didn't enjoy it as much as the first one due to lack of surprise. Also this is a considerably darker movie (along the lines of The Empire Strikes Back) and bad things happen. Although it was never mentioned before, the end of this movie sets up (the possibility of) a sequel, just like the Marvel movies. I'm sure they're going to wait to see how this one does before they make a final decision. The first one was a smash hit in France and around the world, but this one needs to be as well because in two years, the budgets will have doubled as well as the salaries of the actors.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 14, 2023 16:50:07 GMT
I didn't know anything about the Austrian film Eismayer, and it was definitely an eye opener since it is a true story. Drill sergeant Charles Eismayer was one of the toughest men in the Austrian army and he made the lives of recruits a living hell. One of the ones he was the toughest on was Mario Falak, who was one of the best recruits but who was quite defiant and made no secret of his homosexuality. Before long, we learn that Eismayer is a closeted homosexual who is soon secretly obsessed by Falak. Eismayer comes out to his wife, who leaves him with their son. This opens the door to a relationship with Falak, which is intense and secret. Then Eismayer gets lung cancer and dies recovers with Falak to help him, turning out to be as severe in rules of hygiene as Eismayer was in training. There are some commitment issues, but finally the two get together for good. In fact, they even got married on the military base in full ceremonial uniform. The closing titles say that they are still both in the military and there were a number of photos of the real Charles Eismayer and the real Mario Falak to validate the story. I was glad for the happy ending (and continuation of their lives).
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 17, 2023 19:13:31 GMT
Alexander Payne is not a very prolific film director, and that's a good thing. His films are generally excellent, but they are hard to digest. He talks about ordinary people, generally not very likeable and always annoying. This isn't what most people want to see at the cinema. I think his big success was Sideways back in 2004; about two annoying friends making a tour of the California wine country. This time he brings us The Holdovers, terrible title, retitled Winter Break in France, not much better.
It's about an exclusive boys boarding school in the northeastern United States, where rich people get rid of their inconvenient sons. On top of that, the movie takes place in 1970, a horrible time for anybody who remembers it. It is Christmas vacation and only a few boys have not been picked up by their families for various reasons. There is also a disgraced teacher (we don't know why) who is stuck their to babysit them for two weeks, and also the school cook, who is staying there because she is mourning her son who has just been killed in Vietnam.
That all sounds pretty depressing, right? And it absolutely is. All but one boy disappears by magic when a rich father shows up in his helicopter. That son convinces his father to take them all on a fabulous ski vacation, but the final boy can't go because they did not manage to contact his parents. And then things become completely grim.
This movie is excellent and depressing.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 19, 2023 18:52:56 GMT
In 1993, Australian director Rolf de Heer made the movie Bad Boy Bubby, which is possibly the most shocking movie that I have ever seen, and that's saying a lot. 30 years later he has given us The Survival of Kindness which is frankly not much more comforting.
A woman is abandoned in a cage in the middle of a desert. We don't know why. She tries to break out, but the cage is very solid. Nevertheless she finally succeeds and wanders through a total dystopia. What has happened to the world? Since she is only wearing a burlap shift, she takes the clothes from a mummified cadaver, which is her first upgrade. She encounters other people who are barely alive but always hostile. After going through ruined isolated buildings, she makes her way to an abandoned town. She gets new clothes there from the mannequins of a small military museum. She finally meets two nice young people, who seemed to me to be an Indonesian brother and sister, but since there is absolutely no dialogue in the movie. You just have to guess. They are living in what might be a train museum.
But it's time to move along through the desolate landscape with hanging cadavers, various corpses and evil people from whom to hide because they shoot you even if you just cough (covid movie?).
Things just get worse and worse until the end of the movie which is the worst of all.
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Post by mickthecactus on Dec 19, 2023 19:50:23 GMT
I think I’ll stick to the Muppets....
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Post by bixaorellana on Dec 20, 2023 2:34:39 GMT
Typical of Kerouac's viewing -- more sappy, feel-good pap. Guess this one was his kiddy Christmas special fare.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 20, 2023 3:14:18 GMT
Yes, Wonka was definitely a movie denouncing severe addiction.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 20, 2023 21:20:46 GMT
Today I made a partially political choice by going to see Ma France à moi ("My France") because there was a vote last night in the national assembly to aprove a potentially despicable law concerning immigrants. It's the current trend in Europe to pander to ignorant public opinion. But I won't get into that here.
It's about a well off recent widow who takes in an Afghan refugee in a programme where 'normal' people can volunteer to house refugees. It is not a match made in heaven because Fanny Ardant is rather ignorant on the subject, and the Afghan Reza is not at all accustomed not just to France but to bourgeois Parisian France. She has all sorts of fancy plans right from the start, but he is exhausted and just needs to sleep.
Then things get better. She gets him a job as a waiter in the café/restaurant of which she is part owner and he catches on quickly, including the place settings. He was an interpreter for the French army in Afghanistan, so his French is already pretty good. But he wants more out of life and would like to attend the prestigious political science school with just a 5% chance of acceptance. Fanny Ardant considers this to be unrealistic, not something for recent refugees.
On top of that, her son shows up. He is an investment banker in New York and thinks his mother is a bit off her rocker with all of this refugee crap. And Reza is living in his bedroom and wearing some of this dead father's clothes, which is not satisfactory at all.
But this is supposed to be a heartwarming movie, so of course things get settled in the end.
I thought that Fanny Ardant was overdoing it all, except for this one important detail -- the director Benoît Cohen wrote a book about precisely what his mother did when he was an investment banker in New York, and this is it, down to every detail. A humbling revelation.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 27, 2023 13:39:39 GMT
****.. La fille de son père (No Love Lost). Bittersweet French comedy about a young single father (daughter born when he was 20) getting ready to leave the nest, and he's not ready. Nahuel Prréz Biscayart continues to impress me because he couldn't speak a word of French when he started making movies in France. He had to learn all of his dialogue phonetically. Now you can't tell that he isn't French.
***.. Munch. Norwegian biopic about the tormented drug addled artist, played by 4 different actors covering 4 periods and places of his life. The closing credits showed the Munch museum and really made me want to visit. It also became clear that Munch and Van Gogh may have had similar mental problems because their weird wonderful colourful skies are extremely similar.
****. Los colonos (The Settlers). Chilean extremely cruel true story of an English army captain and an Texan mercenary who were hired to perform genocide on the indigenous population of Tierra del Fuego at the end of the 19th century for a rich Chilean landowner. We are spared nothing -- the killings, the rapes, the torture -- all for the glory of the new Chilean republic.
**... Vermines. French horror movie about what happens in a dilapidated housing complex when the spiders get loose.
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