|
Post by kerouac2 on Feb 22, 2024 21:12:03 GMT
Bruno Dumont is not your typical film director. He started his career making shockingly brutal dramas to the extent that he had to use some body doubles from the porn industry for certain scenes. Then his career settled down, and his movies are just weird, sometimes good, sometimes bad. But they are always filmed in his region of the Pas de Calais along the North Sea, a very poor area.
L'Empire pushes the envelope on weirdness. Two galactic empires are fighting over the planet. Their leaders look like they created their outfits from a thrift store and their reasons for taking over are hard to understand. The locals are just as confused;
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Feb 22, 2024 21:28:23 GMT
Die Theorie von Allem (The Universal Theory) is an extremely odd Swiss (Austrian? German?) movie that takes place in the Alps in 1962. There is a physics conference with various austere scientists, a mysterious pianist and also student Johannes, who is trying to present his paper on something or other. He is quickly rejected, but that doesn't stop the mysterious cloud formations, the abandoned uraniam mine that nobody talks about or any of the strange goings on of the participants. Jhannes is told to mind his own business, which of course he doesn't, and at the same time he bome obsesses with the French (?) hotel pianist who seems just as mixed up in all this mess as eveerybody else. I think I would need to see this movie at least 3 times to understand it, but it fascinated me.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Feb 25, 2024 19:19:35 GMT
I knew that Maison de Retraite 2 would be bad, and it did not disappoint on that count. I probably saw the first one too, but what attracted me this time was seeing a lot of old time actors, maybe for the last time. The premise is preposterous of course. In the first movie, they managed to create a perfect retirement home + orphanage where everything is perfect. And Gérard Depardieu died, which is always a good thing. So of course this time they get evicted by bad people. Naturally, the end is a triumph of good over evil.
Au fil des saisons is a sort of cinematographic UFO. But basically is is just a potpourri of cancer movies, farming movies, and estranged relatives getting together ovies. Charlie is a young woman who has returned to the farm to take care of cancer mom. And then grandma shoWs up out of nowhere, having abandoned her daughter shortly after birth. She is a sort of new age hippie who has never lived by the rules. All of this purportedly takes place somewhere in the United States and what makes it slightly interesting is that grandma is played by Catherine Deneuve.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Feb 26, 2024 18:03:05 GMT
I confess that I knew nothing about Le Successeur (The Successor) even though I had seen the trailer without paying attention. I just knew that Marc-André Grondin was the main character, and he is a Québec actor that I like. He moved on to a promising career in France and then mostly disappeared. I am sorry to say this, but I sort of think that it went along with losing most of his hair. He was a relatively cute young actor, and now he is just a bald man.
Anyway, he is the head of a fashion house in Paris but returns to Montréal when he learns that his father has just died. They were estranged, but he still has to take care of everything. There is a bit of embarrassing interaction with the locals since he doesn't want to tell them how much he hated his father, but this happens to a lot of people.
Before selling the house, he has to go through all of his father's stuff. Most of it is normal, and then he goes down to the basement. There he discovers something so horrible that he gets sick and also pisses himself. Does he go to the police? No, he does something even more horrible. He tries to act normal at things like the cremation but then he discovers the most horrible thing of all. I was not expecting this.
So that's how it goes when you are expecting a normal movie and are served something else.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Feb 27, 2024 19:29:56 GMT
Les Derniers Hommes (The Last Men) is a nightmare based on a true event. The Japanese have occupied Indochina since 1940 but there are still some French garrisons around the edges. They are told to evacuate in 1945, but there is no transportation available for a small one in southern Laos where they keep legionnaires "unfit for combat" in a forgotten place. They have to make it to the Chinese border to safety on their own if they want to survive. Everybody knows that this is impossible.
But about 20 of them head off anyway, leaving two of the weakest behind (at their request). They march through a really awful jungle (I recognised it immediately as Guiana, since French cinema always films the most awful tropical conditions in Guiana, but okay, let's call it Laos.) These guys are alcoholics, psychotics, renegades, etc. so of course in no time one of them has stolen the medical supply of morphine. Then they start dying, some in Japanese attacks and some in accidents or disease. The guy that the tiger attacks actually survives.
A group of four deserts the others because they are fed up, and near the end there are only seven left. Another attack and two more die crossing the Mekong. After about two and a half months, the remaining few finally get to China but not to the French base. There are some British troops being evacuated but there are only two seats left on the plane which is going to Calcutta. The two youngest troops get the seats, but the plane crashes on takeoff, killing everybody.
Was this going to be one of those movies like American horror movies where only one person is alive at the end? Almost...
I found this movie very well done and was impressed that it starred total unknowns, at least for French audiences. Since it was the Legion, there was a Pole, a Portuguese, a Spaniard, a German, etc. When they signed on to the film, they were probably thinking "hey two months in South America! Cool" Little did they know how awful the filming conditions would be.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Feb 28, 2024 19:29:37 GMT
Even though I see quite a few of them, albeit fewer and fewer in recent times, most blockbusters do not appeal to me. However, today I went to see Dune part 2 and liked it very much. It is serious and not silly and covers a number of issues of importance these days, notably ecology and fanatical dictators. Unfortunately, being a "spectacle" it does stoop to a lot of the usual crap. Here we are in the year 10,000+ with remarkable weapons available and yet they prefer swordfighting whenever possible, just like in Star Wars. WTF?
Nevertheless, the battle scenes are kept to a minimum and are replaced by a lot of intense acing. Zendaya was really remarkable and Timothée Chalamet was pretty good, too. On the down side, Austin Butler played such a nefarious villain that even Darth Vader would have run away to hide. Unfortunately, even though he did his best not to do it, every now and then he sounded like Elvis.
I have major doubts about the ending. This was meant to be a two part movie but obviously there will be more since it ends abruptly at a dramatic high point. When will they get these people back together for the sequel?
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Mar 2, 2024 15:24:19 GMT
Il n'y a pas d'ombre dans le désert (There's No Shade in the Desert) is an Israeli movie about the children of Holocaust survivors attending a trial in Tel Aviv. The father of one and the mother of another are supposed to testify so their nearly middle aged children are there, too. (This seems to take place around 2005.) Who cares about the trial, though? The son recognises the woman from when they met at Primo Levi's funeral in Turin and he never forgot her. But did they really meet or is he fantasizing from material in the books she has written? There's only one way to find out -- kidnap her and drive her to the desert. Things do not go as planned.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Mar 6, 2024 15:13:02 GMT
Inshallah a Boy is an interesting Jordanian movie about the oppression of women. Nawal is suddenly widowed and faced with her brother and brother-in-law. As a woman, she has practically no rights, so the brother-in-law wants to confiscate her daughter and raise her because there's no way a single woman can do such a thing, and on top of that she is only half owner of the flat even though she paid for most of it (but there is no paper proof of that). So the men want to sell and maybe give her some of the money before throwing her out on the street, but that's that.
Nawal works as a carer for a wealthy woman with Alzheimer's. It is a Christian family which doesn't pay any more attention to Nawal than to their Filipina housekeeper. However, the 30ish daughter of the family often confides in Nawal because her husband is always cheating on her. She also just got pregnant and doesn't want the baby. This gives Nawal and idea because one solution to her problem would be to have a male son, which would protect her from the other men of the family, and she lied and said she was pregnant to hold them off. She asks the rich pregnant woman if she could get a pregnancy test using Nawal's name. "Okay, but you have to do something for me, too." She needs to find an abortion, illegal in Jordan.
Nawal organises the abortion, even though the woman isn't happy about it. "Couldn't you find a cleaner place?" The cost is 1500 dinars (2000 euros -- I looked it up.). The doctor says that he'll do it unless he detects a heartbeat, ortherwise it would be haram. The women wonder about this since isn't an abortion already haram? Well, there's haram and then there's really bad haram...
The woman's mother finds out (she is the daughter of the Alzheimer lady) and fires Nawal on the spot. On top of that, the authorities say that Nawal's pregrancy test isn't valid bacause it was done in a private clinic. For a legal matter, it needs to be done in a government clinic.
And things keep going downhill. It was gripping and also extremely informative. You would not believe how often Nawal had to put on and take off her veil.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Mar 7, 2024 4:00:51 GMT
The Sweet East starts out as a high school trip to Washington D.C. but it turns into Alice in Wonderland on drugs. Lilian leaves her boring group in a restaurant just as a guy storms in to shoot up the place, claiming that it is the headquarters of a paedophile Democratic conspiracy headquarters. and ends up with some sort of ecological cyber punk group. All of their food comes from dumpster diving or just trash bins around the city, which is pretty much the same as their politics. She goes with them to a political protest in a park, but they go to the wrong place. A random man helps her when she gets lost. "You have nothing to worry about. I live alone." He actually seems harmless, excapt for being a right wing university professor with ties to skinhead nazi militants. She decides to get the hell out, but not before taking the bag of skinhead money. She runs into film director Molly who immediately casts her in her film, some sort of period piece in the forest starring Ian (Jacob Elordi). She is photoed with Ian and ends up on the cover of the paparazzi magazines. The angry skinheads come looking for her and massacre everyone (Jacob Elordi's head explodes!). She escapes and is taken in by Ahmad who is in some sort of Islamic aerobics community. Ahmad hides her in an outbuilding for a certain amount of time, but she eventually discovers newspapers that say that the skinheads have been arrested and Ahmad has been lying to her. She escapes in the snow and is rescured by a weird monk in a sort of Dracula's castle. He calls the police and she gets sent home, where she doesn't tell anybody what happened. Watching television, she sees that a stadium with 65,000 people has been attacked with thousands of deaths. the movie leaves us with words along the line that "everything will happen sooner or later."
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Mar 7, 2024 16:48:16 GMT
The German film Das Lehrerzimmer (The Teachers' Lounge in englischer Sprache) is quite remarkable and represents Germany at the Oscars in a couple days. It shows life in a totally normal junior high school and it seemed completely accurate to me, even if I only have French comparisons. An incident happens in the school and the staff automatically suspect the student with the most troubled past. This degenerates very fast, with the students taking the other side. The young teacher tries her best to be objective, but it is incredibly difficult. A lot of the staff and a lot of the students turn against her. I am so glad that my teaching experience was very short, but I still have new information often from my friend who still fights the battle for justice in his school, and the news is not good.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Mar 8, 2024 18:27:11 GMT
Ravel's Boléro is arguably the most famous piece of music in the world, if only because it lasts 17 minutes and is playing somewhere in the world every 15 minutes, which means there is no moment when it is not playing somewhere.
It's surprising that I am not aware of any Maurice Ravel biopic over the years, but now we have Anne Fontaine's Boléro. I learned a lot about him, even though the final credits admit that poetic licence had to be used at certain times. How many other Ravel compositions do we know? Not much, in my case, so the movie was excellent for hearing some of them.
He was from a good Basque family, so there was no financial struggle, but also there was no great success. He attempted to win the prestigious Prix de Rome for young composers 5 times and lost every time. He was also a very slow composer and never listened to anybody except himself, which made things even slower since he was never satisfied and often tossed what he had just composed. He toured the United States to great success in 1928 for a fee of $10,000 and unlimited cigarettes. He also toured most of Europe because the audiences loved him even though the critics often did not.
He was apparently aloof to just about everyone, because there were a number of women surrounding him, but there never seemed to be any passion. When he would visit the obligatory whorehouses, it was never for sex but just to get them to try on gloves or things like that. No men in his life either, apparently, however, but since he never married there is speculation about that.
Anyway, he finally got roped into composing a ballet for Russian dancer Ida Rubenstein, who constantly harrassed him but who appeared to be just as patient as all of the other women surrounding him. And so he finally managed to produce the Boléro.
After that, it was all downhill with dementia and such. Rats. He died at age 62.
Since Netflix was a co-producer of the movie, it should be available in quite a few places soon.
|
|
|
Post by mickthecactus on Mar 8, 2024 18:34:09 GMT
That was very interesting. Thanks!
|
|
|
Post by patricklondon on Mar 8, 2024 19:32:15 GMT
Apparently, Ravel became fed up with forever being tied to Bolero. I'm afraid my most recent cinema movie brings the cultural tone down: Wicked Little Letters is a dramatised account of the scandal, in the early 1920s in a normally quiet and sedate town, of a series of obscenely abusive letters sent, initially, to an ultra-respectable god-fearing woman. She accuses her rackety foul-mouthed neighbour, who ends up being sent to prison. But not everyone is convinced of her guilt, chiefly the only woman police officer in the area, and there are of course twists in the tale. It all turns on the clash of expectations over the status of women, but for connoisseurs of swearing, there is also much comedy as the language is solemnly rehearsed and cogitated over in court and among the self-righteous. Olivia Colman is the god-fearing initial recipient of the letters and Jessie Buckley the neighbour, with a number of other A-list actors in support. There's a decidedly NSFW trailer on YouTube... My blog | My photos | My video clips | My Librivox recordings"too literate to be spam"
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Mar 9, 2024 18:24:42 GMT
Vincent Lindon is a French actor who was just in "ordinary" movies before Welcome in 2009 about an Afghan migrant trying to swim to England from Calais. It had such an impact that the laws about spontaneously helping migrants were changed.
Since then, he has basically only made "socially important" movies, and Comme un fils (Like a Son) is one of them. Jacques is a high school teacher who burned out and quit his job after an ugly incident with some students who refused to hear about the Shoah. The YouTube video of the altercation got more than a million views and destroyed him.
So he living an unemployed life when one evening he is shopping for groceries when 3 Roma teens raid the store. He manages to stop one of them who gets arrested although the police tell him that the kid will just be released the next morning beause he is a minor. The kid some back in a few days and burgles his house, making a mess. But he is so exhausted that Jacques finds him asleep or passed out on a bed. He has clearly been brutalised, so Jacques calls a doctor friend who confirms that he is covered with bruises and other injuries and is clearly undernourished.
Jacques feeds him (an enormous amount of pasta) and they begin to communicate, mostly in English. The kid is illiterate but has learned English from YouTube. Then he leaves, but he comes back and he leaves again... He is suspicious of Jacques' motives, although he is just a widower whose daughter lives in Toronto.
The kid, Viktor, is forced by his uncle to steal and gets beaten every time he doesn't bring back enough money or merchandise. And he is also a half breed -- half Rom and half Romanian -- despised by both communities.
Jacques begins to tame him and also starts to teach him to read and write. Obviously things cannot go smoothly. However, Viktor knows a lot about the Shoah from his own point of view. "That man hated gypsies."
One interesting thing that I read about the movie was that the director auditioned Rom teens (of which there are hundreds in Paris) and then realised that he was not doing them a favour. Many movies (not just French ones) have used street kids in starring roles over the years, and just about all of them sink back into nothingness after living the best six or eight weeks of their lives. That's pretty much what happened to the Afghan star of Welcome, even though he was fabulous. It is a totally cruel fate. So the director went to Romania and visited acting schools to find Viktor. At least in acting schools, they know what they're getting into and that it is not as easy as it looks.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Mar 14, 2024 19:34:03 GMT
I probably did not appreciate La Vie de ma mère (international title: This is My Mother) as much as I should have, beause it hit a little too close to home. It's about a florist in his 30s whose mother escapes from her psychiatric facility. She is bipolar and had stopped taking her medication. She is in manic (happy) phase, but everybody knows that it won't last. His mission is to try to appease her until he can get her back to the clinic. At every moment, at a service station, in a restaurant, in a bar, there is the risk that she will suddenly go out of control. I definitely felt the stress of trying to keep things under control. It never works.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Mar 14, 2024 19:52:41 GMT
C'è ancora domani (There's Still Tomorrow) was the Italian megahit of the year, crushing both Oppenheimer and Barbie, and it has finally been released in France. It takes place in Rome just after WW2 and shows an ordinary family trying to get by. But is it an ordinary family? The man is a complete macho who brutalises his wife. She does everything that she can, takes care of the house and children, cleans a rich woman's house, does ironing, works in an umbrella workshop, but it is never enough. She is running all the time. Often, her husband beats her, but this is wrong according to her father in law who tells his son "You beat her too often, so she just gets used to it. You have to beat her less often but really hurt her so that she will understand." Things just seem to get worse and worse, but she meets a helpful American GI (because the American MPs are still controlling the city), even though they don't speak the same language. The love of her youth is also in the area, even though he is about to give up and move north where the salaries are better. What is going to happen?
It must be pointed out that this is a tragicomedy in the style of Ettore Scola and the balance between tragedy and comedy is amazing. I understood completely why it swept away the American blockbuster even though this will not happen in other countries.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Mar 15, 2024 18:57:12 GMT
La nouvelle femme is a rather unusual French movie because it is mostly in Italian and is basically a biopic about Maria Montessori, which will apparently just be called Montessori in a number of other countries. There is a sort of link to the movie mentioned just above because of course we are in a society that refuses to take women seriously. As for the plot, a wealthy French woman comes to see Montessori because she has a young daughter who is not normal, and that is what Montessori is working on at the time. In fact, Montessori herself has a child with the same problem. Both of them have present their child as niece/nephew because it is unthinkable to give birth so such an abomination oneself. The scientific term of the time for them is "idiots" and the mission is to find out if children suffering from idiocy can be taught anything.
And so we see lots of children with severe learning disabilities. Just from their features (you know what I mean), you can tell that some of the children are authentically handicapped while some of the others are probably actors (I did not investigate).
I did not find the movie entirely successful, but it is worth seeing to find out a bit more about how Montessori started. She was one of the rarest doctors of her time and did not marry the father of her child because married women were supposed to stop working immediately.
Why hasn't a movie been made about Maria Montessori before now? Or has it?
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Mar 15, 2024 19:08:04 GMT
Oh, the beginning of this interview with the director has excerpts with English subtitles so it might interest a couple of you. The director also says that the child actors were indeed handicapped and also gives the historical information that mental disabilities at the time were considered to be caused by poverty, because the rich people were so much better at hiding their deficient children.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Mar 16, 2024 18:13:45 GMT
I wasn't expecting much from Les rois de la piste but I was intrigued by its prestigious cast: Fanny Ardant, Mathieu Kassovitz and Nicolas Duvauchelle among others. It's a crime caper with Fanny Ardant being the mother of the band. They steal and swindle as best they can, but they are small timers. The grandson (Ben Attal, Serge Gainsbourg's grandson) gets caught during a collective burglary and spneds 3 years in prison. He is angry because nobody visited him, not even his father. But he gets sucked back into the gang in no time. One of them disappeared after the botched burglary, but he apparently stole an extremely expensive painting, not knowing what it was worth but just because he liked it. The police are still after it and have been watching the family all this time. One of them is pretending to be a casino whore since Mathieu Kassovitz has a security job there. She takes her whoring to heart.
They finally find Nicolas Duvauchelle living in Brittany, but he has become a trans woman. There is no change in his voice or his looks, and having long hair and a dress is never going to make Nicolas Duvauchelle look like a woman. But the village has accepted him, where he happily runs a bookstore. The family will never leave him along, nor will the police...
I found it quite entertaining in spite of or because of its ridiculous pretext. After all, Fanny Ardant is always great.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Mar 16, 2024 18:33:47 GMT
I was tempted to put Chroniques de Téhéran (Terrestrial Verses) in the documentary category, but it is indeed a work of fiction that doesn't look like one. It shows 9 people facing Iranian bureaucracy for multiple reasons -- the little girl would would like to wear red or pink, but the school uniform must be a delightful black or grey, the man who wants to call his son David, but this is not an acceptable name in Iran, the job interview where the interviewer wants to know if the applicant has sufficient knowedge of the Koran, the man with a tattoo, which is not good in Iran, but what if it is a transcription of the greatest Iranian poet? These people are all up shit creek and we get to see each one for 5 minutes in unconnected stories.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Mar 22, 2024 11:50:32 GMT
Hors Saison (Out of Season) has Guillaume Canet as a famous actor who has burned out (not too far from the truth). He flees to a thalassotherapy institute in Normandy. He meets up with an old love (Italian actress Alba Rorhwacher). Passion smoulders like a wet firecracker. I was bored. The director normally makes excellent political films, and he should stick to that.
Bis Repetita is a rather unusual but acceptably silly comedy. Louise Bourgoin is a disenchanted teacher of Latin and her sullen students have no interest in it either, except maybe the one who is in love with her. There are only 5 students in the class anyway since Latin is in decline in all schools. Anyway, she has reached an agreement with her students that she will give them all good grades if they leave her alone and don't make trouble. All of them -- teacher and students -- spend all of their class time scrolling on their phones.
And then the bomb drops. The students have such good grades in Latin that they have been designated by the government to represent France at the international Latin competition in Naples. Oops! They all go to Naples, along with the nephew of the high school principal, a major nerd and lover of Latin. Naturally every single student from around the world is a nerdy geek.
Time for things to get uncomfortable. It was a really clever movie.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Mar 22, 2024 20:25:20 GMT
In the abstract, Wicked Little Letters seemed to be an interesting idea. The people in town begin to receive horrendous poison pen letters. There is a national uproar because they are so foul. (True story apparently, in the 1920s). Frankly, to me it seemed to be a tempest in a teapot (perhaps because I am looking at it 100 years later) I got bored. As for the actors, they seemed to be absolutely delighted to be able to spew such foul words reading the letters. It's kind of a shame that tha trailer is so censored.
Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant (Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person) is an unusual movie from Québec. A vampire family has a problem because their daughter doesn't want to kill people to get fed. She lives off the blood pouches in the refrigerator, but the parents are getting fed up. They send her to live with her restrictive cousin. "Don't worry, I won't feed her!") And the refrigerator is indeed chained up. So poor Sasha goes out hunting anyway even though the idea of killing people disgusts her. But she comes across suicidal Paul, who can't manage to kill himself as he would like. It is love at first sight, but even then she doesn't want to bite him (because she loves him).
Will they find a solution to the dilemma?
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Mar 25, 2024 18:30:12 GMT
I knew that Karaoké would be completely silly but I liked both stars (Michelle Laroque and Ivorian actress Claudia Tagbo) so I went to see it anyway. It concerns an opera diva who disgraces herself by speaking the truth when drunk, which goes viral of course, and she is fired. The African chambermaid at her hotel takes her in. The diva has lived in hotels almost her entire life and has no place to stay. Obviously a comedic situation and of course the chambermaid is a karaoke fan and drags the diva to one of her performances. Totally out of tune, and of course the diva has never heard any of these pop songs anyway.
No point in explaining how they end up at the karaoke world championship in Tokyo. You can figure it out for yourselves. One thing that I enjoyed was that in the karaoke sequences, the movie displayed the lyrics just like on a karaoke screen. This permitted me to find out the actual lyrics of a lot of pop songs to which I had never really paid attention.
In from the Side is a British rugby movie. So far so good, except it might disturb certain spectators that it is a gay rugby team. This is not mentioned at any time, but it is immediately obviously from the bars they go to after the matches. The plot is totally trite. Two players fall for each other. They are both in a relationship which they hide from their partner. Actually, I found some of the secondary characters more interesting -- the jolly fat guy who always tries to fix problems and the young drunk who is in love with one of them who rejects him but who is always protecting him, holding his head while he pukes and trying to look after him as best he can. There is no happy ending and plenty of regrets. Just like in many of real lives.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Mar 25, 2024 23:23:14 GMT
I would totally watch Karaoké. There is a need for happy, silly movies that put people in good moods.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Mar 27, 2024 17:07:16 GMT
I was very impressed by the Hungarian movie Magyarázat mindenre (L'affaire Abel Trem in French and Explanation for Everything in English). It's about a high school student who inexplicably fails his oral baccalaureat exam in history. He just goes blank and can't say anything, even though the exam panel goes out of their way to give him a second chance. His girlfriend doesn't understand, and his parents are mortified, especially his father ("Everybody in the family has passed the baccalaureat, even your retarded cousin!") The only explanation that he can come up with is that there was a nationalist rosette on his jacket coat (because you dress nicely for this exam in Hungary), and his teacher asked him why he was wearing it. ("Because I forgot it was there." Everybody wears the rosette for the National Day in the spring, but only Viktor Orbàn supporters wear it regularly. He hadn't worn that jacket since the holiday.)
And there's the rub. When he mentions what happened, his father is convinced that he was failed because of his leftist history teacher. This gets repeated around and in no time there is an article about it, and it becomes a national issue, even though the teacher is not at fault -- it was just a random comment to break the kid out of his mutism in front of the panel.
Things become intense. Abel Trem's girlfriend breaks up with him, the teacher risks being fired, the father is in a frenzy. One of the best things about the movie to me was a scene where the father argues with the teacher about Hungarian politics. I learned many more things than just the general impression that "Viktor Orbàn is bad." Abel is rescheduled for a new baccalauraeat exam, except that the news media are invited to watch -- 20 reporters and TV crews crowded into the room. The horror, the horror! Abel walks out. Ick.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Mar 28, 2024 20:58:57 GMT
After a Hungarian high school, it was time to return to a French high school and things were predictably worse. Pas de vagues (literally 'don't make waves' but the English title will apparently be The Good Teacher) is about a nice young teacher played by François Civil in a predictably rough high school in the suburbs of Paris. It's a true story and probably truer than usual because the director used to be a high school teacher and this happened to him.
Some of his students are pretty nightmarish but others clearly try to listen to what is being taught. Since I spent one year as a high school teacher, I know the feeling. Anyway, there is a super introverted girl who thinks that he is coming on to her. She even files an official complaint and goes to the police. He tries to take this in stride and tries to talk to her, but it is clearly impossible. And he doesn't get much support from his colleagues, because he's the new guy and hasn't taken enough distance from his students yet.
And then it just goes down a horrible spiral. His class finds out that he is actually gay (don't post anything on social media!) and of course this makes things even worse. And yet he bravely forges on.
I would like to say that this finally comes to a happy end, but instead I just got a very bad feeling in my guts.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Mar 29, 2024 15:11:41 GMT
La Promesse Verte (The Green Deal) is a militant film about the danger of palm oil destroying the planet. Sometimes it is a bit too militant and preachy, but it remains a pretty good thriller.
Martin is a student preparing a thesis about the destruction of the Indonesian forest due to the palm oil industry, but since there is no way to get official permission from the government, he arrives as a volunteer for a medical NGO in the area. This does not stop him from quickly seeing the horrors that are happening (murders, villages burning, etc.). When he tries to escape with the evidence, he is arrested for drug trafficking and thrown in jail. Sentenced to death, which is normal for Indonesia.
His mother in France starts her own investigation, comes to Indonesia, finds out how corrupt things are, including in France. At one point she goes through her pantry and finds out all of the products she has that contain palm oil, not just food but also cosmetics.
Will she save her son? It is proven very quickly that after 20 years of not executing any foreigner for drug offences, Indonesia has changed.
Obviously this movie was not filmed in Indonesia but in Thailand, with just a few establishing shots to show Jakarta.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Apr 1, 2024 10:49:09 GMT
Firebrand by Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz gives us a glimpse into the horrors of the British royal family, not the current one but Henry VIII and his final wife Katherine Parr. She is not happy when he has her childhood friend burned at the stake and she is pretty much next on the list. She saves her skin by being pregnant for the time being, but then she has a miscarriage. Oops. Meanwhile the king has a leg that is rotting away and everybody gags with the smell when they are in the same room (remind you of anybody?). Jude Law wore a scent of blood, fecal matter and sweat for the role so the others were not really acting. I am obliged to say that I found this movie distasteful because I find all royal matters distasteful.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Apr 1, 2024 18:48:14 GMT
Unlike you, this kind of historical drama pulls me in like a moth to a flame. Finding a trailer for it is difficult, perhaps because it won't be released until June. The one you posted is "unavailable", so I've posted another below. Jude Law was a surprising choice to play the fat old king *, but in the trailer he does look the part. My biggest question is why is Alicia Vikander, a fine actress, whispering? This is a a fairly new and intensely irritating affectation that until now has mostly been taken up by male actors. It must stop. Anyway, it appears that critics are so far not much enamored by the movie. Question: after films have early airings in venues such as Cannes and get bad reviews, are they then re-worked before official release? *Henry was not even 55 1/2 years old when he died. Here are some fun facts about Henry, his icky legs, his obesity (he weighed almost 400 lbs at his death), medicine back then, and even a menu of what he ate while living in Eltham Palace.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Apr 1, 2024 20:14:37 GMT
That link was a lot more interesting than I found the movie to be, and it certainly explains why the horrible leg wounds were inflicted on the spectators.
Yes, reviews were very mixed, and I would not at all be surprised if they edit a new version before release in the US/UK. I found the running time of 2 hours to be a bit trying and when you think of all of the scenes that were certainly deleted along the way, they must have a lot of material with which they can work.
Of course just about everybody acclaimed Jude Law's unexpected transformation.
|
|