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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 6, 2020 19:20:34 GMT
Since my tastes are rather eclectic, yesterday I went to see Onward. It is good but far from perfect. I always forget who the voice actors are (or didn't even see the information ahead of time), so I spent a lot of time halfway through the movie trying to figure out the voices. I decided that one of the characters was Seth Rogen but in fact it was Chris Pratt. The other guy was Tom Holland, sounding even younger than he usually does since his character was supposed to be 16 years old. There were lots of good ideas in the movie but also some plot points of limited interest.
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Post by rikita on Mar 7, 2020 23:11:17 GMT
agnes and i went today to see "Lassie - Eine abenteuerliche Reise" based (losely, probably) on "Lassie come home" ... the movie was allright, a bit kitsch sometimes, but still fun enough to watch - though maybe geared at slightly older kids than agnes, as she got a bit bored in between (we were alone in the theater, and she took the opportunity to walk aroudn a bit and try out different seats)
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 9, 2020 7:11:02 GMT
I got around to seeing Dark Waters yesterday. It is the sort of subject that American cinema does best.
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Post by rikita on Mar 9, 2020 22:24:37 GMT
Since my tastes are rather eclectic, yesterday I went to see Onward. It is good but far from perfect. I always forget who the voice actors are (or didn't even see the information ahead of time), so I spent a lot of time halfway through the movie trying to figure out the voices. I decided that one of the characters was Seth Rogen but in fact it was Chris Pratt. The other guy was Tom Holland, sounding even younger than he usually does since his character was supposed to be 16 years old. There were lots of good ideas in the movie but also some plot points of limited interest. i'd like to see that one. when i was in the theatre with agnes, for a short moment i actually considered staying there and watching that movie, as it started 20 minutes after the other one ended. but then, didn't want to teach my child to cheat, and also, i think she might be a bit small for it and get scared ...
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 10, 2020 19:13:37 GMT
The Invisible Man was pretty low on my list of things to see, but somehow i got to that point today. It is scary as shit quite a bit of the time. After all, what can be worse than being watched, stalked, attacked by someone who is invisible? Yes, of course it is explained how the invisibility is achieved and obviously it is not really convincing, and there are plenty of other plot holes, but there is no point in quibbling. I knew what I was getting into.
The scariest part for me was that the possible option of a sequel was revealed at the end. I don't need a sequel.
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 12, 2020 18:45:04 GMT
I was very impressed by the Tunisian movie Un Fils (A Son). The basic plot could take place in any country. A well-off couple are on a trip to Tataouine with their young son, but this is 2011 just after the Arab Spring, so there are Islamic terrorists around. They get caught in the crossfire of an attack on Tunisian soldiers, and the son is seriously injured. At the hospital they are told that the son will need a liver transplant because his liver was pretty much destroyed. Tunisian law only permits organ donation within the same family. The mother is incompatible because she has a different blood type and the father… is not the biological father, it is discovered.
The kid is 11 years old and the mother has had not contact with the other guy since her night of weakness. The father is furious and is already planning a divorce but he loves his son dearly. What about the organ black market? Someone offers a liver for 150,000 dinars (I looked it up -- 47,500 euros, a fortune, obviously). They cut up child refugees in Libya, which is having a civil war…
Terrible situation.
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Post by mickthecactus on Mar 12, 2020 19:23:47 GMT
Sounds another bundle of laughs. Just what we need at present..
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 14, 2020 15:13:46 GMT
The Irish-Danish-Belgian film Vivarium was much creepier than I expected. Jesse Eisenberg and his girlfriend Imogen Poots are looking to buy a house and visit a housing development where all of the houses are identical. The real estate agent abandons them and they discover that they are completely unable to find their way out -- no matter how much they drive around, they always end up at the same house. Since they are trapped, they end up living there because they have no choice. (Food is delivered in mystery boxes.) One day a baby is delivered. Yikes. And things go downhill from there. The trailer does not show the downhill part…
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 22, 2020 15:40:18 GMT
So, I returned to the movies today at last and saw Filles de Joie (Working Girls in English). It is about 3 ordinary prostitutes who live in Roubaix with their normal family life, but as soon as the kids are in school they drive to the whorehouse just across the Belgian border in Mouscron where they work. We are shown very little of their actual work, but we get to see the clean up activities -- washing out body cavities, changing the bath towel on the bed, spraying air freshener around. Not very glamourous, to be honest. And then they have to go back home and deal with out-of-control children, ex-husbands, creepy mothers… I obviously cannot call it a comedy, but it isn't exactly a tragedy either.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 22, 2020 16:08:08 GMT
Looks like a well-made movie, although I would think ultimately somewhat depressing.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 23, 2020 14:27:05 GMT
I saw the German movie Systemsprenger (English title - System Crasher, French title - Benni). It's about a wild, violent, out-of-control girl called Benni (real name Bernadette, which she hates). Her mother can't take care of her because she has two other children, so Benni went into foster care, but the foster homes could not handle her. She goes into uncontrollable rages unexpectedly, attacks and destroys… Blood flows regularly. Now she is in a special centre for troubled children. She seems to like the woman running it and learns to like the special educator who is supposed to take her to school and sit in the class all day just in case. She hates school and even proves that she can break tempered glass when provoked. The centre looks for other places that might accept her, but they end up with 37 refusals due to her file. They would like to put her into a 'closed' centre, but she is too young to be legally confined. And of course one of the things that she does regularly is to run away.
This is one of the most tense movies that I have seen in a long time, because even when things are calm, you expect the worst at any moment, and it usually happens. I was sort of reminded of Linda Blair in The Exorcist, but this young German actress was far more extraordinary. She is adorable when she is in a good mood but beyond scary when she is annoyed. I came out of the movie totally shell shocked. The trailer is totally mild compared to what happens in the movie (funnily enough, that also goes for the movie I saw yesterday).
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Post by rikita on Jun 23, 2020 22:25:16 GMT
hm, the part in the trailer when he tells her to try out the echo and she calls "mama" made me kind of sad just now ...
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 23, 2020 22:34:45 GMT
Her constant desire is to go home to mama all through the movie.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 24, 2020 13:02:16 GMT
I had a couple of misgivings about going to see Radioactive. It had been released just before lockdown, so it is one of the movies that was brought back this week. It's basically a biopic about Marie Curie, but it's in English. The producers probably gave Franco-Iranian director Marjane Satrapi no choice. Then again, her first movie, the animated feature Persepolis about her childhood in Tehran was mostly in French. She is quite an eclectic director, though, because her movie The Voices was quite an eye-opener. I still have a t-shirt from the premiere in my closet which I will never wear because it has a big photo of Ryan Reynolds with the caption "Did you fuck the bitch?"
Anyway, Radioactive was better than I expected because there were shifts in time which showed Hiroshima, Chernobyl, the Nevada desert and some hospital treatments in the 1950's. So it wasn't just a period piece in corsets and frilly dresses. As you probably know, Marie Curie had a tough time in the scientific world in spite of her two Nobel prizes. Most of us probably do not know that she had an intense sex drive as well, except for the common knowledge that just about all scientific geniuses are sex fiends. I also didn't know how Pierre Curie had died, so now I do. Then of course there is the anti-Polish xenophobic public rage against her after she steals the man of another woman. She is even accused of being a dirty Jew even though she was Catholic. Oh well, that's all water under the bridge now.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 25, 2020 18:53:49 GMT
Today I saw the very minor French film Jeunesse Sauvage about very bad young men doing very bad things, all with huge overdoses of testosterone. "This will not end well," I told myself, and I was correct. But I liked the picturesque setting in Sète.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 26, 2020 16:51:25 GMT
And so today was a little Swiss film called Der Läufer (Midnight Runner in France and English speaking countries, apparently). The plot seems trivial at first, but it becomes more and more gripping. Jonas is a minor running star, hoping to qualify for the Swiss team in the Olympics, but he has been somewhat perturbed by the death of his brother. Nevertheless, he keeps in training, even when he isn't supposed to after a minor injury, and he works in a restaurant the rest of the time. He and his girlfriend are looking for a new apartment, but he seems less interested in this than she is. There is also a nice young woman at the restaurant in whom he is interested, but things get crappy when she discovers that he already has a girlfriend and even crappier when he and his girlfriend break up. He starts random purse snatching when he is out running at night due to insomnia. One purse, two purses, three purses… he's not even doing it for the money because he just keeps them all locked in a drawer. Sometimes he mails back their personal papers with a brief apology. But one night, one of them dies…
What makes this movie really disturbing is that it is based on a true story and we never know what demons possessed him to do this.
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Post by rikita on Jun 26, 2020 23:31:53 GMT
i wrote something about that movie for work, recently, without having actually seen it yet. recorded it afterwards, though, and will watch it when i get around to it ...
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 27, 2020 14:08:16 GMT
So, today I saw the Peruvian movie Canción sin nombre (Song Without a Name). It's about a poor pregnant woman called Georgina who goes to a clinic that has been advertising totally free maternity services. This sort of deal can't be passed up when it's the middle of the economic crisis in 1988 with 400% inflation and you are selling potatoes in the street, just two or three at a time. So she has the baby at this rather run down clinic. Everything seems to go well, but the baby is taken away "to the hospital" and they make Georgina leave, even though she is in hysterics wanting to see her baby. The next day the clinic is gone as though it had never existed, because it was all a baby stealing fraud. She tries to go to the police and other official services, but absolutely nobody will listen to her or her companion. They are just ignorant Indians and don't count in society. Georgina is determined, though, and she finally barges into a newspaper office. They are about to throw her out ("You don't have a visitor's pass!"), but a journalist decides to talk to her. He is even assigned to investigate because just about every single news item in the paper is about the economic catastrophe and the Shining Path, which is perpetrating terrorist attacks across the country. But the journalist doesn't have much luck either, even though he has a few contacts, who are always too busy to talk to him the moment they find out the case is about an indigenous peasant girl. Georgina continues her tragic life, selling potatoes (her companion has left) and marching in various religious processions looking like the unhappiest woman on earth. And since this isn't a 1st world movie with a tearjerking happy ending, that's pretty much how we leave her at the end of the movie. Even the journalist abandons her when he receives death threats for a totally different reason ("We're going to get you and your boyfriend, faggot!"). Although the movie doesn't tell the story of a specific person, it is based on true events. Lots of babies were stolen and sold abroad in those days… For anyone interested: Cannes festival 2019 interview
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 29, 2020 12:28:48 GMT
So, I saw Mr. Jones today (French title: L'ombre de Staline). The story it tells is amazing and also it is amazing that such a non commercial movie could ever be made. This must be box office poison. What's really horrible is that it portrays censorship, intimidation and alternative facts in a way that modern people would never think possible -- except that all of the same things are still happening in 2020. I was particularly impressed by the cinematography and its obvious hommage to Eisenstein for certain scenes.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 29, 2020 12:35:51 GMT
I confess that the idea of "offical North American trailer" perturbed me, so I went looking for others.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 1, 2020 12:42:46 GMT
Several new movies which appeal to me were released today, but instead I decided to spend 3 hours and 3 minutes viewing Apocalypse Now Final Cut on a huge screen. I don't regret it. The first release in 1979 lasted 2h27 and had two different endings -- the black screen or the exploding jungle. Coppola wanted just the black screen, but the distributors wanted a spectacular (and skewed) ending. I also saw Apocalypse Now Redux when it came out in 2001. It added 49 minutes to the movie (3h16), the main scenes being the second appearance of the Playboy bunnies as whores and the long French plantation scene, as well as Colonel Kurtz reading Time Magazine. American audiences didn't really care for it since it desecrated the honour of Playboy bunnies and most of the French plantation sequence was in French about French colonial politics and how the Americans had learned nothing from everything the French did wrong. And so now this final (?) version cuts out the Playboy whore scene, part of the French colonial scene (too long) and Kurtz reading Time magazine. We still get to see Martin Sheen go to bed and smoke opium with the sexy French colonial widow (Aurore Clément). And this version ends with the correct black screen.
Tomorrow I'll see something new.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 2, 2020 13:19:45 GMT
So, I went to see Les Parfums, pleasant light fare.
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Post by htmb on Jul 2, 2020 13:39:59 GMT
Looks like something I’d enjoy.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 2, 2020 13:49:10 GMT
Yes, you probably would.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 3, 2020 14:31:45 GMT
Jumbo is a Franco-Luxo-Belgian movie and it is definitely one of the oddest ones that I have seen in a long time. A young woman works as an after hours cleaner in a small amusement park. She falls in love with one of the rides, not in the sense of "this is the funnest ride ever!" but in the sense rolling around in ecstasy in motor oil in the dead of night. She is a shy girl and therefore discreet about her new love, but both her mother and her boss find out, and they find it pretty peculiar, leading to a certain amount of conflict. A few people felt the need to walk out before the end, so they will never never know about the wedding scene at the end between the girl and her love.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 4, 2020 12:42:44 GMT
Today's movie the rather disturbing Lingua Franca (French title Brooklyn Secret) is directed by Filipina director Isabel Sandoval, who also plays the lead role. Olivia is an illegal Filipina immigrant who works as a full time caregiver for an old babushka at Brighton Beach (where else?). The old lady appears to be in early Alzheimer's and definitely needs someone to fix her meals and wash her, so that's what Olivia does. Meanwhile, the prodigal grandson Alex returns to Brooklyn after some time in Ohio, and he moves into the house, too, because he has to earn his keep. The old Russian woman had two caregivers, but the other one is gone now. Alex is pretty much a shiftless recovering alcoholic, except he isn't quite recovering some of the time. He also works at a meatpacking place. But he dearly loves his grandmother and tries his best to do his part, although Olivia often has to supervise or correct him.
Okay, the two young people start to get along well, but Olivia is really worried about being deported from Trump's America, which is what happened to the other caregiver. She has a Filipina friend who has been trying to set up a marriage for papers ($5,000) but it falls through. Alex is falling more and more in love with her and it doesn't even seem to bother him when he discovers that she is transgender (by snooping at her passport). Ah, love can be so complicated.
The director was formerly Vincent Sandoval, so she really knew her subject.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 10, 2020 10:31:36 GMT
This is the best ever time to go to the movies since nobody wants to release any blockbusters and the multiplexes have to find things to put on all of their screen. The place I go to the most often (27 screens) is using one of the screens for "Forbidden Hollywood" and is showing movies that date from before the rigid implementation of the Hays Code in 1934. So today I saw -- on a big screen! -- Employees' Entrance from 1933.
It's about a horrible department store manager, who seems quite similar to the current POTUS. There is a short prologue showing his rise until everything goes bad in 1929. His favourite words are "You're fired!" even when people have been working there for 20 or 30 years. In comes sweet little Loretta Young looking for a job. Well, he screws her the very first night. She gets over it, though (no #MeToo movement apparently), and works as a fashion model for disgusting rich women. That's where the Nice Young Man spots her and falls in love. He is rising in the company and becomes the assistant of the repulsive manager, who controls him 24/7. He mustn't get married because women are useless according to his boss. But he secretly marries Loretta anyway. It doesn't take long for her to start feeling neglected, and they have a spat at the annual employee party at a big hotel. They both get drunk separately and guess what? The awful manager screws her again.
At one point, the manager is in danger because the board of directors is getting fed up with his methods and they are planning on canning him. But hey, he knows what to do and keeps control in the end. Yay, the American dream! Meanwhile, Loretta and her husband leave the store, leave the city and plan to start over their lieves from naught. All this in just 75 minutes.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 14, 2020 14:23:28 GMT
I saw the new movie by François Ozon Eté 85. Usually his movies are excellent, but this one did nothing for me.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 15, 2020 16:14:54 GMT
I don't often mention French comedies that I have seen, because comedies are among the most difficult films to export and rarely do well in other countries (with a few exceptions).
Also, In France there are certain films that do well in the cities and others that are successful in rural areas. While Bordeaux is not at all a rural area, the movie Tout Simplement Noir (Simply Black) is such a Parisian UFO that I was very curious to see it far from Paris. It is sort of a fake documentary about a struggling black comedian who wants to make a movie. He uses his real name and all of the people who appear in the movie (a huge number of famous black celebrities plus some other people from different ethnicities) also use their real names.
The main thing to know about Jean-Pascal Zadi is that his teeth are nothing like teeth that you have seen. "My mother called me Cro-Magnon" is something he has said in interviews. One wonders why nothing was ever done to fix his teeth, but that is none of our business. The basic plot of the movie is that he is going everywhere in the black Paris media world to gain support for a Black Men's demonstration. Naturally, he is shot down almost immediately by black women. I did not find the movie as funny as I would have liked, but there are certain irresistable scenes, for example when (black) director Lucien Jean-Baptiste gets into a fight with (black) director Fabrice Eboué about the movies that they have made to pander to the French white audience, and everything is completely authentic. The first one made a movie (with a recent sequel) about a black family going on a ski holiday in the Alps. The other one made a time travel comedy about two black men suddenly being sent back to Martinique in slave days.
In the fight, they both lash out with all of the totally valid points on what is awful about these two subjects before rolling on the floor trying to strangle each other. In another scene, there is a rap star who is criticising the demonstration project, and Zadi says (totally truthfully) that it is questionable to accept the opinion of the "favourite rap star of middle school students."
The main thing I wondered about this movie is whether Americans would ever dare to broach such a subject, especially using real personalities saying horrible things (Oprah, Spike Lee, Morgan Freeman, etc.). No English subtitles on the trailer, obviously.
Today, I saw Divorce Club, which I find extremely likely for an American remake. It's the same crappy theme of divorced men (and women) going wild, but the scenario is amazingly well written (something which all of the critics said as well). It starts off with a normal nice guy being dumped by his wife (classic) for her boss. Almost at the same time he runs into his university roommate from many years ago, also recently divorced. The roommate has become super rich and lives in a huge mansion. Since he is lonely, he gets his unhappy friend to move in with him and after a few other things, the place suddenly becomes the hedonistic "divorce club" with Playboy mansion type parties all the time. Totally stupid and over the top, but as I said earlier -- incredibly well written, so it should be picked up quickly by the remake mercenaries.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 15, 2020 16:24:50 GMT
I suppose I should mention that Tout Simplement Noir is currently the #1 movie in France.
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