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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 5, 2024 3:53:23 GMT
Foudre (Thunder) turns the Swiss Alps in 1900 into a cauldron of desire in a very sensuous setting. After being pulled out of the convent, Elisabeth discovers better ways to spend her time. Three boys are (respectfully) after her, but they quickly move on to more concrete occupations in the fields away from the village. The elders find out and do not approve at all.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 5, 2024 4:17:25 GMT
Eat the Night is one of the first gen-Z movies that I have seen and it certainly proved to me that the world has changed. Pablo and Apolline are adolescent brother and sister living on their own. A father shows up unwelcome for Christmas, but he is really not part of the story. Pablo is a small time dealer who makes his own pills while Apo is still in school. But the main part of their lives is spent playing an online game called Darknoon. They grew up with this game. They have teamed up and kill hundreds of people every day. But one day, the Darknoon site posts a message saying that the game has run its course and will be closing down soon. This is devastating news to the online community and the countdown begins. Meanwhile, real life has to go on. Pablo gets the shit beaten out of his one day by rival dealers but is saved by Night, a supermarket employee. It is love at first sight and the two guys are soon screwing each other at every opportunity. Pablo recruits Night to help him make pills and deal them, and we are treated to a rather fascinating tutorial on how to weigh and mix the powders and then put them in a press to pop out the product in the colour and design desired. (This made it look like the directors are experts on this subject!) Business is brisk, but the bad guys are never far. Apo is feeling a bit abandoned so she has to play Darknoon by herself, wondering if her brother will at least return for the final apocalypse. Pablo ends up in prison and asks Night to look after his sister. But the end of the world is coming fast. I found all of this rather brilliant, especially the parts filmed in the cyber world. And guess what? There is not yet a trailer because I saw an advance screening (release set for 17 July). I will post the trailer as soon as it is out there.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 8, 2024 20:08:05 GMT
En attendant la nuit (For Night Will Come) is about a vampire family. They move often and are as discreet as possible and don't attack people because the mother gets jobs in blood banks. She hides away as many "unusable" contributions as possible and fills the refrigerator at home with them. The family (Mom, Dad, teenage brother and little sister) give themselves transfusions.
However the teenager is 17 and has raging hormones. At an outing with school friends, a girl injures herself and he can't stop himself from pouncing on her bleeding hand. Things go downhill rapidly. Instead of waiting for his transfusion meal, he starts guzzling blood directly out of the bags. Then mom gets sloppy beacause she has to increse her blood collection.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 11, 2024 5:50:48 GMT
Cambodian movie Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot (Meeting with Pol Pot en anglais) is a totally chilling fictionalised version of the book by American journalist Elizabeth Becker about a trip to Cambodia Democratic Kampuchea in 1978. In this movie, the three journalists are French, but the situations are the same. They arrive on a small plane from Peking (historical name) and appear to be in the middle of nowhere. There is a big flat airstrip and a semi crumbling building into which they are ushered for their stay. Besides the woman journalist (Irène Jacob), there is a black photojournalist and a diehard communist university friend of Pol Pot during their youth.
No word on when they will eventually meet Pol Pot because the "First Brother" is a very busy man, always moving around. So they are taken around to see work cooperatives which look pretty suspicious. The photojournalist manages to slip away and sees some horrible things. They find him and confiscate his film. The "school friend" doesn't say much because he prefers to give the First Brother the benefit of the doubt. They woman keeps asking annoying questions which are often met with stony silence.
They are finally taken to totally deserted Phnom Penh and meet the Brother.
One of the most fascinating things about the movie is that part of the story is told with primitive figurines instead of actors, but they are just as powerful as live action.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 11, 2024 12:40:36 GMT
The remarkable Sloveno-Serbian movie Cuvari formule (Guardians of the Formula) had me cringing a lot of the time. It's based on the true story of Yugoslav scientists in 1958 who were irradiated trying to invent a Yugoslav atomic bomb. This was extremely top secret, which is the principal reason that none of us outside of the Balkans have ever heard of it. The four victims are flown to Paris in the hope that they can be saved, even though nobody really knows what to do, but French medicine is considered far superior than that of any of the countries of Eastern Europe.
Dr. Mathé is in charge of the patients, but all he knows to do at the beginning is to give them transfusions. As time goes by, they get worse and worse. Perhaps bone marrow transplants could help, but Mathé's experiments on mice have all ended in failure -- both the donor and the recipient die. But he has a hunch that it will work on humans because they have better immune systems. Unfortunately, all of the possible volunteers leave as soon as they find out that the donors might die.
We have all heard that sucking out bone marrow is ultra painful, too, and when we finally get to see a test, it is really awful, and certainly much worse because it is 1958.
Three of the four survive in the end, and we also learn that Dr. Mathé was never awarded the Nobel Prize (probably due to secrecy) even though he was the first doctor in the world to ever transplant bone marrow, which is one of the main treatments for leukemia now and has saved millions. Oh well, there are plenty of unsung heroes out there.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 13, 2024 17:58:58 GMT
After Drive Away Dykes a few weeks ago, today I wondered if lesbian crime thrillers is going to be a new genre with Love Lies Bleeding. Kristen Stewart runs a sleazy gym and is immediately attracted to Sleazy Muscle Girl who is a drifter hoping to compete in the bodybuilding championships in Las Vegas. (We are in New Mexico in 1989.) They hook up instantly, but there are other problems, notably her sister's psycho husband and her estranged father who makes people disappear. Will love triumph in the end? In any case, there is a lot of blood to clean up.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 16, 2024 5:57:30 GMT
Juliette au printemps is of the well-known French genre of family get-togethers in the country where nothing much happens but all sorts of secrets finally come out. I suppose the nearest American equivalent would be those movies that take place at Thanksgiving gatherings. Anyway, in this one, the two adult sisters show up at their father's house (or was it their mother's house -- anyway the parents are long divorced). The parents unite for social events but snipe at each other (amusingly), one of the daughters has a nice but unexciting husband but also a chubby lover hiding in the woods, the other one has a close friend who is not really interested in women but has a close relationship with his duckling until it gets run over by a car, there is a secret of a brother who died as a child, the grandmother is drifting into dementia... Anyway this is based on a graphic novel. International title: Juliette in Spring (no surprise there).
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 17, 2024 17:20:27 GMT
Marjane Satrapi is an admirable person, having removed herself from Iran and writing the sensational graphic novel Persopolis which she later made into an excellent animated movie. However, in my opinion her movies since then have been a bit lacking. Her most daring was probably her Canadian venture The Voices starring Ryan Reynolds as an amiable serial killer in influenced by his reasonable dog and his evil cat. I went to a premiere when it came out and still have my souvenir T-shirt with a line printed on it said by the cat: "Did you fuck the bitch?" I have unfortuntely not yet found an occasion to wear it, and it's been years.
So now we have Paradis Paris (English title Dear Paris) which is yet another of those anthology movies afflicting Paris with a collection of different stories not really connected. We have a stuntman more worried about raising his son as a single father than performing the necessary dangerous stunts for the movie, And his make up man is in love with him. There is a philosophising bartender and the television personality he talks to, who is about to end his career, an aging Italian opera singer who has only a past and not a future, and a teenage girl who is a 'cutter' who is kidnapped by a weirdo who also wants to cut her. He finds scars all over her body, so he finally settles for her unsullied belly, which he cuts as he masturbates. She doesn't really enjoy this but it gets her talking and talking and talking about herself, something that her psychiatrist could never get her to do. Her kidnapper can't stand this anymore so he puts her back in the boot of his car and dumps her somewhere in Paris. (The movie received a viewer warning for this aspect of the plot.)
As in all of these anthologies, things are pretty much resolved at the end, but the movie was still a total failure in my opinion, nowhere close to Cédric Klapisch with Paris or Paris, I Love You by Olivier Assayas or any the others. But I know that this genre will not die soon.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 19, 2024 19:05:43 GMT
Maria (Being Maria for international audiences) is a biopic about Maria Schneider starting with the trauma of filming Last Tango in Paris with Marlon Brando. She was 19 years old, and #MeToo was still a long way in the future. She was spared neither by Brando or Bertolucci and her life basically went downhill from there. She went into hard line drugs with a boyfriend and it was not a pretty sight and later a girlfriend tried to help her, and it was not a pretty sight either. Unfortunately for me, I have never felt much sympathy for Maria Schneider, so I was not really moved even though all of the performances were good. Romanian actress Anamaria Vartolomei was exceptional as Maria, and Matt Dillon wzs a perfect sleazebag as Marlon Brando.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 21, 2024 17:22:27 GMT
I quite respect Jeff Nichols as a filmmaker, but I had absolutely no interest in his latest movie. Unfortunately I found myself in a neighbourhood where I had aleady seen five of the six movies at the six-screen cinema (I know that this does not happen to most of you.). And so The Bikeriders was the move that I had not seen. Expecting to be bored and repulsed, I went to see it anyway. (Don't forget that I am not paying anything for these movies other than my 20 euro a month unlimited subscription.) Well, I was bored and repulsed by the movie, but I will not fault the actors who did their best for material with almost no plot. We have a motorcycle gang in 1965 with the local leather-clad lowlife, not really dangerous. Girls back then were attracted to this. It continues to about 1975 as things become more violent and they make money off drugs and killings. So what? Everybody already knew that. The younger generation wants more money and wants to beat the shit out of people.
The movie is based on a documented photo book, and I was happy to see the authentic photos from the past during the closing credits. They were much more interesting than the movie itself.
I can attest to the fascination of a lot of people to motorcycle gangs back then. In 1966 a big group of Hell's Angels came riding through my town and and paused briefly. They were treated like movie stars by the high school kids. They could have ridden away with just about any of the girls. Maybe they did.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 22, 2024 5:55:18 GMT
Elle & lui et le reste du monde is a minor low budget movie which is clearly a test run for a new director. The plot elements are borrowed from all sorts of other movies, but it isn't too bad. Marco (Victor Belmondo) is a struggling musician who survives by filling in for a friend for an elevator emergency number. He gets a call in the middle of the night from a young woman who is trapped between floors. The technician never gets there because he is a jerk and stopped for a kebab and his van got towed away... So Marco goes to the rescue, since he has rudiments of the job requirements and the girl seems really nice (obviously). But she is gone by the time he arrives, because the lift started working again. So the movie is basically his search in the middle of the night for a girl whose name he doesn't know and can't contact. After a Chinese fish nibbling parlour, he gets arrested twice, robbed once, etc. As the movie ends, he is chatting with the girl in the metro in the early hours, but they don't know who each other is... yet.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 24, 2024 5:25:03 GMT
I thought Inside Out was excellent 9 years ago. It was original, imaginative, funny, etc. Inside Out 2 can't hold a candle to it. There were no surprises, the plot was boring, and the new emotions didn't have interesting personalities. Maybe I was just grumpy when I saw it, but I don't think so.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 24, 2024 5:37:39 GMT
The Summer with Carmen is a Greek movie about a dog called Carmen and the people who care for her. First it is Panos who gets the dog after breaking up with his boyfriend. But having a dog in Athens is as complicated as it is in any other city, so he ends up having to ask his ex Demosthenes to look after him a bit. Demos has an extremely active sex life with various people, so this isn't always convenient either. But he decides to keep the dog, Panos be damned. After his father dies, he takes the dog to his mother, and that seems to be the best place for it.
Half of the movie takes place at the nude gay beach in Athens, so the trailer doesn't really show much.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 24, 2024 15:15:27 GMT
Survivre (Survive) is a low budget catastrophe movie where the filmmakers had to be creative not to be too ridiculous. A Franco-German family of 4 who usually speak English to each other are vacationing on a yacht off the coast of Puerto Rico. They live in Miami. Everything is perfect until there start to be weird ocean currents and satellites start dropping out of the sky. This is because the magnetic current of the poles is reversing. This only takes one day, just like in other apocalypse movies. There is a terrible tempest at night and when they wake up the next morning (because you always need a good night's sleep), the yacht is high and dry. The ocean is completely gone. Lots of dead fish, though. Time to leave the yacht to look for help but there is a very bad encounter with a man with a harpoon. Anyway, the yacht was very badly damaged and blew up.
Only three of them left with the wounded bad man following them. (Why? It's not as though they have a solution to everybody's problem.) They're trying to reach a Japanese scientific mission with a bathyscaphe. Only one Japanese left, his colleagues were not properly strapped in when the shit hit the fan.
Anyway, they walk through the new desert full of dead fish, sharks, whatever. But now there are crab monsters from the abyss. We needed those. They are very hungry and seem to move in groups of several thousand. Better hurry up because the Japanese scientist has received information that the ocean will be returning in less than one week.
Okay, in spite of the ridiculous situation and the low budget, there were some good scenes of abandoned barrels of radioactive waste, a container ship with all of its contents spilled (a lot of toilets), the remains of a crashed private jet now covered with barnacles, and of course huge quantities of plastic waste.
It was filmed in the Moroccan desert and I certainly hope they cleaned up after themselves after making the movie.
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Post by whatagain on Jun 25, 2024 7:10:53 GMT
Good you don’t pay much to see those movies 🥴
Off topic since it didn’t go to the cinema but did you see ‘Sharks under the Seine’ ?
It gets French bashing but seems to make a hit. I plan to see it next week (my wife is away so I have control of the telly).
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 25, 2024 7:40:37 GMT
I have never seen a movie that was not given a theatrical release.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 26, 2024 15:53:24 GMT
Greek director Yorgos Lamthimos is known for his incredibly outrageous movies such as last year's Poor Things which got a well deserved best actress Oscar for Emma Stone, who already had one for La La Land. His new movie Kinds of Kindness is just as outrageous is not as visually dazzling as Poor Things, but it is maybe even more warped than before. Actually, it is three different movies, which explains why it runs almost three hours, three stories that have no relation to each other but which have the same cast each time. I won't even try to describe the plots, but first we have a man who follows every order given to him, including unsuccessfully killing someone, but later he pulls him out of the hospital and runs him over multiple times until the task is accomplished. Then there is the man whose wife was lost at sea, but she survives and shows up. But is she the real person? He asks her to cut off a finger and serve it to him for dinner but he is still not convinced so he tells her to cut out her liver for dinner. Obviously she dies, but then his real wife shows up. Finally the two main characters are purity cult members who need to find a woman to bring back the dead. She is supposed to be pure and to also be a twin whose sibling has died. This cuts down the possibilities quite a bit. Guess what? Although expelled from the cult for impurely receiving semen from her estranged husband who drugged her, Emma Stone finds the proper person, except that her twin is not dead. Yet.
Jesse Plemons won the prize for best actor at the Cannes film festival but was not present because I'm sure that he never believed in a million years that he would get an award for that.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 26, 2024 17:45:04 GMT
did you see ‘Sharks under the Seine’ ? Just something for you to think about, Whatagain, while watching that: Some boys swimming in a creek-fed pond in North Carolina were attacked by sharks. The pond was 126 miles from the coast. Rated R for strong/disturbing violent content, strong sexual content, full nudity and language. Isn't there a W rating for the kinds of movies you see? W for weird as all get-out.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 27, 2024 15:21:37 GMT
You convinced me to go and see a "normal" movie today, the kind that ordinary people like, looking for a good time. I admit that I have been boycotting most of the so-called blockbusters recently -- Bad Boys 8, Mad Max 17, Planet of the Apes 9, Ghostbusters 15. It's the number of sequels they made that indicates that it must be really good. So I went to see A Quiet Place: Day 1 (which is actually A Quiet Place 3). 86% rating on RT. So, Lupita Ny’ongo and her therapy cat Frodo go to the big city with their group of troubled people when the shit hits the fan. The spindly demons destroy everything, which I found really remarkable since they just look like giant spiders but they rip buildings apart and throw cars around just like Godzilla or any of the other aliens that have regularly attacked New York. In the previous two movies, which were of course more rural, they didn't trash the landscape since all they want to do is jump on people and eat them. Or do they even eat them? The movie does not really want to show us, even though they have huge unfolding mouths just like in Alien.
What people like is the cat I guess. He doesn't seem all that traumatized by the world being torn apart and people being massacred, although he does tend to run off when things get icky and you just wonder "where's the fucking cat?" or "is the cat all right?" instead of "what about those 10 people who were just killed?" But Frodo always returns as though everything is just fine. He even chases a mouse at one point, which I suppose symbolically shows us that we are all somebody's monster.
There is an evacuation plan by boat because the spiders can't swim, but Lupita prefers to go back to the pizza place that she enjoyed in Harlem when her father was still alive. She picks up an English law student along the way who tags along like a second cat. She can't get rid of him so she finally accepts his presence. Do we really care anymore since this is a prequel to the other two movies which proved that the world never got rid of the bad critters?
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 28, 2024 16:43:18 GMT
So, today I went to see the French blockbuster of the year, after last year's The Three Musketeers (in two parts). This is the 18th French remake of The Count of Monte Cristo, but I think I read somewhere that it has been made something like 42 times around the world. It is the ultimate revenge tale, so you savour every element of retribution after having spent something like 14 years in a horrible isolated prison cell.
This is not the place to give you a synopsis the the entire novel or film, but Edmond Dantès returns completely transformed as the Count of Monte-Cristo, and it is payback time. I was very impressed. The good people are good even if they are flawed, and the bad people are horrible just as bad people always are. Some of the people whom you don't want to die, die anyway.
This is the most expensive French movie of the year and runs 2h53 which passes very quickly.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 29, 2024 19:15:45 GMT
L'enfant qui mesurait le monde (The Child Who Measured the World) may have been an excellent novel (I don't know.), but I really did not feel that the movie was of much interest. However, it is a Franco-Greek production and it does do the job of selling Greece a a beautiful place to spend time. We start off in Paris where a real estate developer received a phone call in the middle of a meeting in which his role in the company is collapsing. The phone call is from Greece to tell him that his daughter has died. He hasn't been in touch with her for 14 years so he doesn't even know that she has an 11 year old son. So he rushes to the small perfect island to take care of formalities, discovers the boy and discovers that he has Asperger's. The boy obsessively counts and calculates things. Slowly but surely (very slowly in my opinion) the Parisian fish out of water learns the meaning of life.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 30, 2024 13:42:22 GMT
Camping du Lac is one of those tiny tiny tiny films that make me wonder "Who on earth financed this?" unless it was the director in person and their entire family and friends. Yet at the end of the movie the credits were just as long as any professional movie. This gave me a little flash of understanding: that's how beginners build up their CV little by little even if they were only paid 50 euros for one day of work.
Anyway these movies always fascinate me. Go figure. (But I would have felt cheated if I had to pay to see this.) A young woman's car breaks down somewhere in Brittany. The spare part won't be available for a few days, so she goes to stay at the local campground. Absolutely nothing happens there and the other people don't do anything interesting, but she watches them with fascination, as did I. There is however a local legend of a huge water creature living in the lake, so that's something to look for.
As the story progresses, interest in the creature builds with professional searches and T-shirts for sale. It become a big local tourist attraction. Meanwhile, the protagonist has found her place and even asks the garage to just sell her car if they can.
And then the lake drains, leaving just a huge mud flat. And there is a huge creature flopping around in the mud, dying. Oh dear.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 1, 2024 16:57:53 GMT
The Monk and the Gun takes us back to 2006 when some extraordinary things happened bu Bhutan. It became the last country in the world to have the internet, it got its first television station, and the king abdicated so that the citizens could vote for their future in total democracy. It's this last thing that didn't go down well because the people were apparently quite happy with the king making all of the decisions for them.
So the government sent out teams to explain how elections work and even to have 'practice' elections to give an idea of what to expect.
Meanwhile, in an extremely isolated mountain region (isn't that all they have in Bhutan?), a lama tells his assistant that he needs to find two guns in four days, before the full moon. "Why a gun? Nobody has a gun. Where can I find a gun?" But the lama says he is fully confident that his assistant will successfully accomplish his mission. So off he goes on foot, totally confused.
The government official and her staff go from village to village to explain what an election is. Nobody really understands the point of this. The lama's assistant goes around asking about guns, but nobody knows anything. But in one café, the TV is showing a James Bond movie with Daniel Craig, and he has some very impressive weapons. The assistant watches this while drinking "the black drink" from abroad (Coca-Cola).
And then we have an American who flies into Bhutan for mysterious reasons. He has a guide to drive him around. The American and his guide meet an old man with an even older rifle. "My god, it's from the Civil War! I have been looking for one for years!" He offers $75,000 for it. The old man is shocked, because the amount is far too much. He finally says that maybe he can accept $42,000 (converted to the local currency of course) but still finds the amount shocking. "We don't need money here." The buyer has to go to a bank in another town and return the next day. He explains that in his country there are more guns than people, and the interpreter adds that the 2nd sutra of the American holy script says that every American must have a gun.
But the lama's assistant turns up shortly after the others leave and sees the gun. He explains why he needs it, and man gives it to him. Even though the assistant had been given a small wad of money, the old man won't take it. "The lama has helped me all my life with his prayers, and I could never accept money." They finally decide that a gift of a bag of betel nuts is appropriate. But will he find a second gun?
And so the plot thickens, but I will not tell you the rest. This is the best movie from Bhutan that I have ever seen.
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Post by mickthecactus on Jul 1, 2024 17:23:18 GMT
Indeed. Our cinemas are so full of films from Bhutan it’s hard to choose.....
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 2, 2024 18:08:58 GMT
Les pistolets en plastique (Plastic Guns) is so outrageous it could almost be a British movie. It is a comedy based on the horrific Dupont de Ligonnès murders in Nantes in 2011. He murdered his wife and four children and also the dog and then disappeared after a couple of days (according to his credit card use). Then he disappeared and everybody has been looking for him ever since. He has been spotted hundreds of times all over the world, well maybe not because the trail always fizzles. Ha ha, what a great subject for a comedy!
So we have two weird amateur detective women who spend their free time investigating. We have a man flying to Copenhagen for a European square dancing competition. And we have a happy guy in Argentina who seems to have solved his problems back in France. The women break into the death house and get drunk. The square dancer is falsely denounced by someone and arrested by the Copenhagen police, who are the weirdest police you have ever seen. They guy in Argentina is getting married. The guy in Copenhagen is finally released, but when he goes home, the detective women are lying in wait. Among other things, they gouge an eye out with a spoon to get him to confess. Pulling an eyeball out until the optic nerve finally snaps is really disgusting.
The man in Argentina has a happy life even though a flashback showed us how he massacred his family. Nobody should do that to a little girl (or anybody else).
But it was all in good fun since it was a comedy.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 4, 2024 13:41:15 GMT
And guess what? There is not yet a trailer because I saw an advance screening (release set for 17 July). I will post the trailer as soon as it is out there.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 5, 2024 14:47:10 GMT
Pourquoi tu souris? (Why Are You Smiling?) uses the hoary convention of pairing up two completely different people until they learn to appreciate each other. In this case it is two homeless young men. One is a black French guy who pretends to be an African refugee to get free food and accommodations and the other one is an ordinary layabout who figures out that he can get the same thing by pretending to have mental issues. They prey on an overworked social work volunteer with a soft heart. I have my doubts about the comedic value of this sort of situation, but the acting is top notch and the movie almost gets away with it. Naturally the fraud is uncovered but then the three of them team up with an ultra rich nasty old lady who was just waiting for them to make her life more fun.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 5, 2024 15:17:17 GMT
Once again, now that you don't have to buy film and get it developed anymore, it seems you can make a science fictiob movie for about 73 euros. That is great for helping new talents to emerge, both as directors and actors, but it takes those of us with extra stamina to sit through some of them. So now we have Pendant ce temps sur Terre (Meanwhile on Earth) about a young woman whose brother the astronaut disappeared in space three years ago, but she is still waiting for him since there is no proof that he is dead -- he just disappeared. She likes to lie on the ground watching the stars at night, but one night some sort of message seems to come through. She can hear her brother, but there is some alien voice speaking. Maybe if she sticks this strange seed in her ear, it will improve reception. Yes it does, but then she can't get it out again, as evidenced by some pretty gross maneuvers in the bathroom the next morning. The alien voice tells her to cut it out but that her brother can be brought if she performs a rather radical task for the group of four aliens in question. She really loves her brother so... things get bad.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 8, 2024 4:21:52 GMT
Les Fantômes (Ghost Trail in English) is a murky manhunt by Hamid who is part of a secret group tracking Syrian war criminals across Germany, France and Lebanon. Hamid was a victim of torture and wants to find the man who tortured him. Obviously the movie is dead serious, but it fails to be fascinating. The characters are always whispering in libraries or restaurants and exchanging things in parks like real spies. But there is no real drama. If anything, I think that this will be a big break in French actor Adam Bessa's career.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 8, 2024 18:55:11 GMT
Elyas is France's answer to John Wick, or The Professional by Luc Besson or Rambo or any of those other movies where a single person can slaughter dozens of baddies. I am lucky enough to see so many movies that I actually go to see quite a few of them without having the slightest idea about the plot, even when I have seen the trailer. I knew that this was a "thriller" but that was about it.
Anyway it turns out that Elyas is a former French special ops soldier who was in Afghanistan, etc. But things went very wrong with a lot of deaths and he was expelled from the military for having mental problems. He has extreme PTSD with lots of medication and a psychiatrist and lives in complete seclusion as he tries to recover.
Obviously a former colleague finds him anyway and proposes a very lucrative job in personal security. It is an ultra ultra ultra rich Arab family that has secretly moved to France. Basically, it is the mother and her 13 year old daughter who have run away because the father with 7 wives has sold his daughter to a 50 year old creep as a bride. Good reason. The uncle (mother's brother) has accompanied them to help.
It is a huge luxurious enclave and there are 4 guards. Two of the are rotten. The girl is a total brat. The mother is going crazy in captivity. So there is finally a demand to go shopping. They are spotted immediately and the massacres begin...
I have rarely seen so many people killed in one of these movies. It is actually quite well done and would do American movies proud.
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