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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 3, 2024 16:50:20 GMT
Time for something light, so I went to see the French comedy Heureux Gagnants (Lucky Winners). Sketch movies have become rare in recent decades (The Italians were the specialists in the 1970s and 80s.) so it was nice to finally see a new one. Too many simple jokes these days are stretched into boring full movie length. Naturally, since I know the local culture, I was certain that it would be cruel and of course it was. It is about winners of big lotto jackpots. In the first story, the family discovers that they have won the jackpot (checking old tickets in the glove box) but it is the very last day to claim the prize before it is invalidated. The head of the family ends up in prison after crazy driving, wrecks and taking an ambulance hostage. Next a shy young woman wins and meets the perfect man the same day. Her best friend tells her to be careful because he is sure to be a scammer. So she completely dismisses his efforts to woo her. Then she has regrets and admits to him what she was fearing. He takes her to the family mansion and proves that he is incredibly wealthy. She returns to the limousine and the guy removes the family portrait from the picture frame to reveal a rich Arab family underneath. He tells the butler as he leaves that he will be sure to send him his usual commission soon. Then there are the terrorists wearing their suicide explosives. They change their minds when they realise they are rich. Oops, those explosives are often unstable. Finally, an old man in a nursing home wins the 60 million euro jackpot and dies from shock. Two orderlies find him, figure out what happened, and plan to split the jackpot 50/50. But then another employee walks in, and then the manager of the nursing home before anybody can think of a quick lie. In the end there are 5 people getting 12 million euros each. And then the "accidents" begin...
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 3, 2024 17:03:30 GMT
Eveerybody knows that the Coen brothers made nasty movies (Fargo, No Country for Old Men, Raising Arizona, etc.). Now they have gone their separate ways and Ethan Coen is working with his obviously nasty wife. So they have come up with a movie that was unable to use its original title Drive-Away Dykes and is now titled Drive-Away Dolls until the closing credits. One woman is thrown out by her policewoman partner, probably because her sex drive was out of control while the other more demure woman just wants to change her life and go stay with her aunt in Tallahassee. They sign up for a drive-away deal (delivering somebody's car to another location) and leave just before the real people who were supposed to get the car show up. It takes awhile for them to discover, when they get a flat tyre, that the spare tyre area contains a severed head and an attaché case full of dildos.
The movie is set in the last century, so it is more complicated than it is these days to track the car, but the bad guys are after them pretty fast anyway. Wild woman wants to stop at all of the dyke bars on the East Coast and her friend can't really stop her.
The dildos turn out to be moulded from plaster casts of political celebrities (the ultra conservative senator from Florida who wants to become president, the CEO of one of the top companies in the nation, a Supreme Court judge, etc.) and end up getting used.
People get shot, beaten up, perhaps die. Fun fun fun.
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Post by mickthecactus on Apr 3, 2024 17:30:22 GMT
I liked No Country for Old Men which was surprising as it’s not my sort of thing.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 7, 2024 12:59:18 GMT
Godzilla x Kong was a total waste of time and a total waste of FX. Considering that Godzilla Minus One actually won an Oscar this year, there's no comparison.
To wash that trash out of my mind, I saw the ultra minimalist Belgian movie Il pleut dans la maison (It's Raining in the House) about a teen brother and sister living in a shithole with their mother, except that the mother is never there because she's out getting drunk or whatever. The sister is almost 18 and the brother is almost 16. She wants to move out as fast as she can and take her brother with her. He is still attached to his mother, though, while his sister has completely given up on her. The movie was clearly made for next to nothing and the director used her niece and nephew in the roles of the teens. She probably paid them with Big Macs or something. The "poor people under a magnifying glass" aspect of such movies is always good, but it starts to become unbearable after awhile.
Sidonie au Japon seems to confirm that Isabelle Huppert is going downhill in her career choices. A couple of weeks ago she was heckled on the stage for giving an inaudible performance. And while she used to make courageous choices for films made by young directors, it is now looking more like she is going for the free trips and expenses. This is a first film, and I found it extremely amateurish. I've only been to Japan twice, but I've seen dozens of Japanese movies, and a lot of things in this movie do not correspond to Japanese behaviour or psychology. The Japanese actors may have just taken the easy money and kept their mouths shut about the incongruity of it all. And August Diehl playing the dead husband? Was this just to get a bit of money out of the German film commission?
Anyway, Sidonie is a writer who has been invited to Japan by her Japanese publisher who has reprinted her first novel, so she is on a book tour around Japan. I liked that part of the movie because it is refreshing to see places that are not Tokyo. But my god, Isabelle Huppert is 71 years old now and it's time to stop pretending that she is still 30. And August Diehl as the ghost of her husband is young enough to be her son. If she had been playing someone who appears to be 71 years old, this could have made sense, because he husband should have stopped aging when he died, but this detail is never addressed. Then again, who cares?
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Post by bixaorellana on Apr 8, 2024 4:05:42 GMT
I'm so embarrassed. I recently saw a trailer for Godzilla x Kong & thought it looked pretty good. From the trailer for It's Raining in the House, the acting looks well above merely competent. Of course, it might be because I watched that trailer after the one for Sidonie in Japan, so my critical faculties were probably at low ebb.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 8, 2024 22:08:37 GMT
The Turkish movie Yurt (weird English title Dormitory) is stunning. It takes place ln the final years of the 20th century (long before Erdogan came to power). It's about Ahmet, a teenager from a wealthy family, going to a very progressive public high school. The public education in Türkiye is (was?) totally secular and this disturbs his father. So he goes to his normal school during the day but has to go to a yurt boarding school at night. A yurt is a Turkish madrassa (koranic school for the uninitiated). It is run by Islamic extremists and the principal Muslim teacher clearly doesn't like him. Most of the students don't like him either (rich kid), but he finally makes a friend. Still, things get stolen from him -- the expensive trainers, the fancy designer trousers, etc. But he keeps a low profile.
He runs away for a few days, begging his mother to stop his father from sending him back. No luck. She is a good, obedient wife. The father tries to explain to his son that he is just trying to keep him from making all of the sinful mistakes that he made. It is implied that he got rich by ignoring Islamic rules. Posters, for example, repel the angels in his room, so Bon Jovi must go. It just all keeps piling up. The religion teacher tells him that he will never enter the circle of purity, because he is sinful. And if you put your hand in a fire, you will discover that the fires of hell are ten time more painful.
This was a very upsetting movie but also super informative about the forces in opposition in Türkiye.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 9, 2024 7:58:15 GMT
After Drive My Car a year or so ago Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's Evil Does Not Exist is a complete change of pace. The village of Mizubiki is a lovely place out in unspoilt nature, but promoters have bought some land to install a glamping resort. A village meeting is hld with two repreentatives of the company, and they clearly do not understand anything about the area. If their septic tank purifies the water 90%, what about the other 10%? The villagers get their drinking water directly out of the spring. And what about the deer that migrate through there? The campsite is directly in their path. The company reps are full of Japanese smiles but no answers.
When they return to Tokyo, they are feeling pretty shitty about the project, but the manager just brushes them aside. The project was authorised, the government subsidies will soon expire of there are any delays, so full speed ahead. They can go back and make a few concessions, but nothing major. Will ecology win or lose?
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 10, 2024 11:21:36 GMT
Quelques jours pas plus (Just a Couple of Days) is yet another movie of the new refugee/migrant genre. It's about a relief organisation in my neighbourhood trying to feed and house people, but there is never enough housing available. So what else is new? Enter the protagonist, a rock journalist who is being punished for trashing his hotel room at some gig, so the newspaper puts him on general news detail, for example, the situation with Afghan refugees in Paris. He gets caught up in a police operation and receives a (minor) head injury. This makes him a hero with the organisation, so he will of course help them, right? Surely he can house one of the refugees for a few days...
And so he reluctantly does so, with them inevitably slowly warming up to each other. On top of that, the Afghan is a cook and since he has nothing better to do, he constantly cleans up the sloppy apartment. No complaints there. There's a private joke in the movie since the French guy is played by a major French pop singer. But since the character is a rock journalist, he hates French music and says that it is all shit. One thing that I thought was quite well done in the movie was presenting all of the problems of the refugees and all of the bickering and exhaustion in the relief volunteers. Usually all of that is glossed over in two minutes. My local street names are mentioned but except for a few establishing shots to show the metro stations and such, it was probably mostly filmed in Dunkerque, since a bit of the movie takes place there, too. Not a problem because even most Parisians would not recognise the real streets and every French city has a few streets that look sort of Parisian.
Another realistic thing about the movie is that there is not really a happy ending.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 10, 2024 11:58:04 GMT
Rosalie is a lovely young woman in postwar (of 1870) France. She has even gone to school, which is rare. Anyway, her father offers 15,000 francs to a very indebted café owner if he will marry her. So, what's the catch? Benoît Magimal finds out only after the marriage to Nadia Tereszkiewicz that she has a hairy chest. And a hairy everything else because she suffers from hirsutism. Her father has kept her face clean shaven all her life.
Her husband is quite angry, less against her than against her father, but the marriage is not consummated and they live in separate rooms. But since the café has no customers and the debts keep piling up, Rosalie is clever enough to know that her situation could draw in more customers if she lets her beard grow out. The husband is not happy at all, but there's no denying that the money is rolling in. She even poses for postcards, which was the thing to do back then to show unusual things.
The villagers are intrigued, repelled, curious, disgusted and everything in between. Is she really even a woman?
This is a fictionalized depiction of a true story in the east of France. The real woman, Clémentine Delait, lived a different life and worked for the Red Cross and became a mascot for the French troops during the war. She also refused a contract worth millions to go to America and display herself at Barnum's circus.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 12, 2024 7:06:19 GMT
So, Nous, les Leroy (Meet the Leroys en anglais) is one of those films designed to be a wildly popular French comedy, but I found myself too delicate to appreciate it. It's about the wife who wants a divorce, but her husband persuades her that if the whole family (two teenage kids) goes on a weekend trip to visit the important landmarks of their 20 years together, she is sure to change her mind. It is relatively well written, clever, well acted, but I do not get any joy out of scenes of public humiliation or embarrassment. Other people seem to find such things hilarious. Oh well.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 13, 2024 19:06:32 GMT
Quitter la nuit (Through the Night in Engels) is a disturbing Belgian movie about rrape, or maybe not. A police call centre receives a call from a woman in a car who is possibly being molested. Since she is sitting right next to the guy, she makes believe she is calling her sister. Both of them are convoked for questioning and, surprise, their stories contradict each other. The man is released pending further action. Of course both of them talk to their entourage, who make up their own opinions on what might have happened... or did happen. Neither is an angel and as more little bits of details come out, it gets even more confusing.
It takes two years for the case to come to trial. And finally we find out what happened. It is not satisfying.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 17, 2024 15:01:34 GMT
Et plus si affinités (And Maybe More - literal title but no official English title yet) is a remake of the Spanish movie Sentimental which was titled The People Upstairs in the United States in 2021. Anyway, it's a vicious four-person comedy (?) about a dull couple who have lost their sex drive who invite their younger neighbours for dinner to be able to gently complain about their excessive lovemaking noises. They actually don't have the nerve to bring up the subject and claim to be complaining about another neighbour who wants the dustbin room to be repainted. The other couple said "oh we thought you would want to talk about the excessive noise when we are screwing." Things go downhill from there. "Oh the shrieking woman isn't my wife; that has to be so-and-so -- she is really loud. And the guy grunting like a bull is our big Chilean friend." They say that they are swappers and have a lot of group sex. This horrifies and titillates their hosts. You can see where this is going... No, there is no sex in the movie.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 17, 2024 15:15:15 GMT
So I went to see Civil War (and got a high quality carrier bag for my effort) which is creating a certain buzz in political circles. The United States has fallen apart, maybe this year, maybe next, who knows? It looks just like what we know except that it is being ripped apart. A fascist president is in power and California and Texas seceded to create an opposing power. Director Alex Garland has explained that he used those two states to show that political opponents can unite for a common cause (like in Ukraine maybe?). Other states are "occupied" or have willingly joined one side or the other. Nothing is explained. No need. We all understand. Kirsten Dunst is brilliant as one of the reporters trying to get to Washington DC before the final insurrection.
Since neither Gerard Butler nor Channing Tatum is around to save the White House, things do not end well.
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Post by bixaorellana on Apr 17, 2024 16:35:52 GMT
I honestly don't think I could watch that, considering how upsetting just the trailer is. Too real.
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Post by whatagain on Apr 17, 2024 17:20:32 GMT
Et plus si affinités reminds me of a dinner at my brother’s and he had invited a good friend and her husband. At one point the conversation veered on the subject of mistresses and the husband was talking about how his mistress did things his wife didn’t. And the wife looking at her shoes. How strange in real life.
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Post by bixaorellana on Apr 17, 2024 23:20:40 GMT
The husband sounds like a lovely, sensitive individual.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 19, 2024 17:45:57 GMT
After the difficult times of Civil War, it was time for a silly French comedy, so I went to see Ici et Là-bas (Here and There). It's about a French guy who has lived in Senegal for the last 15 years and fell in love with a local woman, soon to have their first child. But due to French restrictions on visas for the Senegalese, he is deported for reasons of reciprocity because he doesn't have citizenship. So he winds up with a distant cousin of his girlfriend who has lived in France all his life. The cousin is whiter than white in spite of his skin colour, but he has his own problems. His employer is merging and downsizing, so he is in competition with a colleague to see who can sign the most distribution contracts for local gourmet products in the next 5 days. An added complication is that he has always worked over the phone, and his clients have never seen him in person. You can see where this is going. Since he has to leave immediately, he takes the cousin from Senegal with him on the road and they trade places when visiting customers, even though the other guy knows absolutely nothing about these products.
One thing I liked about the movie was that it showed all sorts of lovely place both in France and in Senegal.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 19, 2024 18:07:39 GMT
Amal is another devastating movie about high school, but this time it takes place in Brussels. Amal teaches French literature in what is clearly a very difficult part of Brussels. Nearly all of her students are Muslims with thin skins. They are constantly challenging her for things that are haram, especially since one of the students is also suspected of being a lesbian. She is constantly harrassed in disgusting ways, and Amal fights against this as best she can. The other teachers mostly support her but have given up on the subject of Islamic influence in the school (Amal is also of Muslim origin.). The situation degenerates more and more. In spite of staff meetings and meetings with hostile parents and individual meetings with the students, it just gets worse and worse. Amal suspects one of her colleagues of stirring shit, Nabil, who handles religious classes. She is certain that he is a Salafist extremist, but nobody is allowed to witness religious instruction or enter the classroom during such classes.
There are racist tags on the school and other buildings, and Amal's apartment is broken into and vandalised. After a suicide attempt by the homosexual student, Amal finally gets the proof that she needs to set things right, but even this is not enough.
At the end of the movie, the credits tell us that religious instruction is obligatory in the state schools of Wallonia (you choose the religion you want.) but that the Walloon parliament might be voting a low to put an end to this in 2024
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 20, 2024 18:31:49 GMT
Anybody who saw the incredible A Prophet in 2009 will recognize the ambience of Borgo, another prison movie. Melissa is a prison guard who has just moved to Corsica with her family because Paris is much too expensive. Her husband doesn't have a job and it trying to get an apprenticeship as a carpenter, unsuccessfully so far. She finds out that prisons in Corsica are different from "continental" ones. Some people say that the prisoners are watching the guards rather than the other way around. The prison also has an "open door" policy -- the cells are open during the day, and the prisoners can walk around and do whatever they want. This makes things more relaxed and more dangerous.
Melissa is not a pushover, but she tries to makes things better. She buys cartons of cigarettes and sells the packs at face value to the prisoners who were unable to obtain them through the official channels. She even buys a fan for one prisoner suffering asthma attacks due to the heat. Unfortunately, a prisoner who has been released and who seems nice with his boyish face contacts her for information that she shouldn't give. She resists, but suddenly her husband gets his carpentry placement, and it isn't a coincidence. And so she gets drawn into more and more dubious activities.
This is a very tense thriller. Will she get caught? And for doing what?
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 21, 2024 18:35:53 GMT
LaRoy, Texas (just LaRoy in France) is a bloody black comedy in the style of the Coen brothers. In a small town full of weird people. Ray finds out that his wife is cheating on him. He buys a gun to commit suicide in the parking lot of the motel where his wife is doing her nasty business, but a man jumps into his car to give him money, thinking he is the contract killer he has hired to kill somebody the next day. Things go quite screwball and quite a few people die, all in good fun.
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Post by whatagain on Apr 22, 2024 13:57:14 GMT
All in good fun 🤩
I have played with the idea of killing people if I were doomed to die at short notice. Having nothing to day and removing some scumbags before going for good. A nice fantasy.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 24, 2024 10:48:18 GMT
With Luca Guadagnino as the director, I knew that Challengers would be a bit twisted, and indeed it was. Two best friends who grew up together in tennis camps and are now professional players, and they are both in love with tennis star Zendaya. The plot goes back and forth over a period of 12 years and the situations evolve. Zendays is a very desirable penis teasing bitch. Well, maybe not, but she sure knows how to stir shit.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 25, 2024 21:09:42 GMT
Frères (Brothers) is a true story that took place just after WW2. Two brothers were abandoned by their mother at a young age. She ran off to Argentina (perhaps with a Nazi?), leaving them with another woman who was nice but getting tired of taking care of boys that were not her own. There is an accident, not their fault, but the boys run off thinking they will be sent to prison because of it. They were 5 and 7 years old. And they survived hiding in the forest for the next seven years in very grim conditions, particularly during the winter. Their mother (back from Argentina) finds them because they never strayed far from their original location. But she is not the least bit interested in being a mother, so they are separated in reform school for the next five years, because they are "wild boys" and are totally out of control when they are together.
Somehow, they manage to grow up, and one becomes a doctor while the other one is an architect. The doctor is the older brother and is not in good health because he deprived himself of everything in the wild years so that his little brother would survive. He suffers from all sorts of deficiencies and is sterile, while his younger brother now has adult children. They have obviously remained close, but the older brother disappears one day. The other one tracks him down in Canada and they live in a shack together for about four or five months. The younger brother loses his wife and children because of this. "You can find the divorce papers with your lawyer."
Finally back in France, the doctor's life is broken. He doesn't live much longer. The younger brother is still alive today at the age of 86.
Apparently a million children in France no longer had parents after the war although most of them did not have to live in the forest.
You can't make up a story like this, and it is a shame that the movie was not as gripping as the story.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 26, 2024 17:00:12 GMT
Première Affaire (First Case) show an inexperienced young lawyer getting her first taste of criminal law. She ls 26 years old but she looks like she is 20. She works for a firm that does contract law, but this is thrown in her lap as a sideline activity. The case concerns a teenager suspected of having killed a girl who was bothering his sister. He is pimply and chubby and looks as guilty as hell. He even pees himself during the first interrogation about the girl who is only misssing at that time. But a brutally murdered body is soon found, and he's not talking other than to say that he didn't do it.
The young lawyer is totally lost, but she gets some (unauthorised) help from a friendly policeman, who should not even be talking to her. Since he is played by Anders Danielsen Lie, this threw me off a bit. Although he speaks excellent French in his French movies and excellent English in his American movies, it still didn't seem logical to me that a Norwegian could be in the French police, especially since Norway is not even part of the EU. This was never explained, but I finally decided that he must have been naturalised, so why not? Anyway, they are also attracted to each other and the inevitable finally happens.
The lawyer keeps digging to try to help her client, finding out nasty things like the boy is a result of incest because his mother was sleeping with her brother. This could help the case, or could it?
All of these movies by French women directors seem much more pitiless than what poor weak male directors make.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 27, 2024 17:29:37 GMT
French horror movies are few and far between, so this one interested me for two reasons -- it has several well known French actors but it had a very limited release, whereas most horror movies (Omen reboot, Exorcist reboot, the scary doll movies...) come out in very wide release here. I skip nearly all of them now, but i wanted to see Le mangeur d'âmes (The Soul Eater), another reason being that it was filmed in the Vosges mountains, the beloved home of my grandmother.
The plot elements were as usual, but they piled up so many of them that it has one gasping. It starts with two police officers beginning conflicting investigations. Policewoman Elisabeth is investigating a horrible double death while gendarme Franck is looking for missing children. But both cases start at the same address. The crime scene is horrifying. A husband and wife seem to have killed each other for no reason at all, more than 50 stab wounds in each of them, all made with normal cutlery. The blood everywhere was worthy of Dario Argento or Quentin Tarentino. Meanwhile, Franck finds a catatonic child hiding in the cellar.
The two officers are staying at the same hotel but are not supposed to talk to each other about their cases. That is kind of hard to do, especially when things get worse very fast. There are other deaths, for example a sawmill owner who strangely decided to split his head in half on one of the saws... Yuck.
There are other deaths, strange dealings with the psychiatrist at the hospital, where the catatonic child is, masked attackers, chases in the forest...
So who is the soul eater? He is the local bogeyman from centuries ago, used by parents to make sure their kids didn't go into the forest. There's not even any information on the internet about this legend, but all of the locals are very aware of him.
After other horrible things happen, we are led to the abandoned sanatorium (of course!), at night, naturally. We had just learned that the other dead people were part of a paedo snuff movie group, but the central IP address was in the sanatorium. But what about the fact that all of these people had orgasms as they died? (The coroner found semen and vaginal secretions on all of the corpses. WTF?) Elisabeth and Franck find more or less a little movie studio with different rooms -- a classroom, a dental office, a clown room -- where the children were tortured and killed while being filmed.
Is it over yet? What about the fact that Franck is an imposter, not a gendarme at all, and has been looking for his kidnapped son? And what about Elisabeth who just got out of a mental hospital after the suicide of her harrassed daughter?
This movie had at least 3 times as many plot elements as most horror movies, and I haven't even mentioned the little plane that crashed in the forest that was full of a new synthetic drug which is not nice at all.
I very much liked the fact that the movie did not rely on the usual jump scares. Things were already bad enough!
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Post by rikita on Apr 27, 2024 21:55:33 GMT
Die Theorie von Allem ( The Universal Theory) is an extremely odd Swiss (Austrian? German?) movie ... well, according to the third video you posted, it is a german movie ...
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Post by whatagain on Apr 29, 2024 14:49:52 GMT
Reading an older review of that school in Bxl. It is true and untrue that we have mandatory religious education. We have 2 hours a week of either religion (Jewish Muslim catholic Protestant even Buddhist I think) or … morale.
There is indeed a discussion about replacing these 2 hours with what was called during a time education of nothing.
I was in morale and was most of the time religiously studying my Latin.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 29, 2024 17:03:46 GMT
well, according to the third video you posted, it is a german movie ... The ambiguity comes from the fact that it is a German-Austrian co-production that takes place in Switzerland.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 29, 2024 17:18:50 GMT
Since I was never a fan of Amy Winehouse (even though I found a few of her songs fantastic), probably I should have abstained from Back to Black, but this is one of those absurd times when I chose today's film from the movie hours. I had to have a blood test this morning and was running late, so this is the movie that I ended up seeing.
I found the actors acceptable, and Marisa Abela as Amy clearly did her best. She did most of the singing herself and it was pretty good, although her voice is probably insufficiently ravaged. Apparently she rehearsed enormously for the role. Jack O'Connell as her (temporary) husband was appropriately sleazy. I remember him from Skins and '71 but he didn't look at all the way he used to, not just the tattoos. Unfortunately, I thought the screenplay totally missed everything and I was never engaged. It was practically a Hallmark movie.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 30, 2024 15:57:53 GMT
I found The Vanishing Soldier (The French title Le Déserteur is more direct) very disturbing. Shlomi is 18 years old and is a soldier, clearly not happy with spending the night cringing in the dark during an attack by Hamas. They are next to Gaza and an attack breaks out with quite a bit of chaos. And Shlomi just runs away, not necessarily out of cowardice, but he clearly does not want to be a soldier. He makes it to Tel Aviv, but what next? He steals some stuff from a retired French couple on the beach so that he can change clothes and then he goes to see his girlfriend who works in a restaurant. She is very surprised, but he just says that he is on leave for a few days. Unfortunately, the tourists have a GPS tracker on their iPhone and find him. He has to run. He goes to see his grandmother with dementia. While he is there, there is a phone call from his mother to say that her husband (the grandmother's son) has had a heart attack and they are at the hospital. Shlomi goes there and his mother is astonished and then furious when he tells her the truth. But she is his mother so she will protect him. But he has to run away again when Israeli soldiers show up to tell his parents that their son is missing and might be dead or a hostage of Hamas. Shlomi stays on the run and other awful things happen. Meanwhile on television, there are reports that he is missing and possibly a hostage of Hamas, perhaps a new Gilad Shalit situation. As the movie progressed, I was furious with what an idiot the guy was, doing everything wrong, and at the same time I was worried for him, poor little boy forced to be an involuntary soldier. As things continued, Tsahal started to attack Gaza because of the incident. How would this end? I was fascinated by the scenes of modern life in Israel, the air raid warnings, the things exploding over the Iron Dome. When the sirens went off, people left the restaurant to go to the basement. And in a club, the techno music continued as people went, holding their drinks, to the designated secure room. What a strange country. Obviously this movie was made before October 7th.
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