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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 31, 2020 14:20:22 GMT
Has Unhinged with Russell Crowe made it there yet? Unhinged came out last week, but it is not on my priority list. It is not impossible that I will get around to it.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 31, 2020 14:27:31 GMT
one of the kids in the movie kept saying "babykacke" - baby poo - when angry, so hopefully none of our kids copy that) Ha ha -- just about every French kid goes through a phase where " caca boudin" becomes their favourite remark concerning just about anything and it drives their parents up the wall. I think it goes away when it is totally ignored so there is no longer any pleasure in saying it.
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Post by rikita on Aug 31, 2020 14:52:50 GMT
This evening I went to a premiere of Mignonnes (English title: Cuties). It's a disturbing story about the hyper sexualization of pre-teen girls who want to copy everything they see on social media. The protagonist is a girl from from a very devout Islamic family of Senegalese origin, but of course she is very very attracted to what she sees the other girs doing at school. Interestingly enough, the entire movie was filmed in the 19th arrondissement, and the director Maimouna Doucouré grew up on Boulevard Macdonald in the 19th. And the premiere was held at the UGC multiplex located precisely on Boulevard Macdonald. The movie has already won awards at the Sundance festival and the Berlin festival. i read some discussions about the movie somewhere, i think related to it being put on netflix and the poster they used for that - where people said the movie is sexualising children and normalising that sexualisation and thus shouldn't be shown ... from what you said here, though, and what i also read in some other places, the movie is criticising the sexualisation of children, if i understand it right? how does it balance the criticism and showing exactly that which it criticizes?
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 31, 2020 14:55:42 GMT
Netflix was obliged to pull that poster immediately.
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Post by rikita on Aug 31, 2020 14:55:58 GMT
various forms of "kaka" and "kacke" are very popular with kids, here, too, though i hadn't heard any of them say "babykacke" before ... my niece had a phase where she said it a lot (and made up all kinds of combinations), so i mainly hope she wasn't reminded and ends up relapsing into that phase. then again, she just started school, so hopefully she is too much of a "big girl" for that now ...
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 3, 2020 13:35:09 GMT
I saw the unusual Chilean film Ema. It takes place in Valparaiso (made me want to go there) and stars Chilean actress Mariana Di Girólamo along with Gael Garcia Bernal and the ubiquitous Santiago Cabrera (whom I had first seen in Merlin of all things).
It's about a choreograher (Bernal) and a dancer (Di Girólamo) who adopted a Colombian boy, but they got rid of him after 10 months when he torched their apartment, seriously injuring the dancer's sister (half of her face is burned off). Nevertheless, they feel guilty about having dumped him back in the adoption pool. The couple breaks up even though they still work together with increasing tension. Frenetic sex does not seem to solve the problem as much as it is tried with various people. The end of the movie is very disturbing, but I found the dance sequences fascinating.
As is often the case, the French trailer is substantially different.
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Post by bjd on Sept 3, 2020 14:28:17 GMT
I was planning to go and see that. Our local movie theatre still hasn't reopened so I'll have to go to Bayonne.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 3, 2020 14:49:09 GMT
It's the first time since cinemas reopened that I saw a number of people walk out. The number is "3" but when there are only 15 people in the cinema, I suppose that it is a significant percentage. Not that it matters to me.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 10, 2020 10:53:19 GMT
I found Antebellum to be totally inappropriate. It insulted my intelligence as well as the entire state of Louisiana.
La Daronne is not a masterpiece either, but it was a joy to watch Isabelle Huppert being an Arab drug dealer.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 11, 2020 14:54:40 GMT
Sole is a very morose Italian movie. Ermanno is a young slacker who survives by stealing motocycles that he resells to the local scrap dealer, but then he just spends the money playing slot machines at the local bar. But his uncle and his wife are both sterile and desperately want a child. So they recruit a pregnant Polish girl, Lena, from whom to buy the baby. Ermanno will say that he is the father. Lena will just disappear with her payment. Apparently, in Italy it is relatively easy to adopt children within the same family, so Ermanno will only have to sign some papers and the deal is done.
One wonders if everything will go according to plan...
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Post by lugg on Sept 12, 2020 19:36:41 GMT
Since my phone provider has offered me six months of Disney free of charge of course I took it up. I re -watched Avatar first ; I still love this film ....hmmm what next ?
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Post by htmb on Sept 12, 2020 20:07:08 GMT
Hamilton
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 12, 2020 20:13:40 GMT
These are on big screens?
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 13, 2020 16:52:53 GMT
Today I saw the British film Rocks. It is as brutal as a movie by Ken Loach.
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Post by mickthecactus on Sept 19, 2020 20:38:01 GMT
Horse Feathers with the Marx Brothers.
How talented were they?
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Post by bixaorellana on Sept 19, 2020 21:40:22 GMT
i read some discussions about the movie somewhere, i think related to it being put on netflix and the poster they used for that - where people said the movie is sexualising children and normalising that sexualisation and thus shouldn't be shown ... from what you said here, though, and what i also read in some other places, the movie is criticising the sexualisation of children, if i understand it right? how does it balance the criticism and showing exactly that which it criticizes? Rikita, I haven't seen the movie but there is sure is a great deal of discussion about it. I saw there was an article about it in the WP today, so just looked that up ~ nine hits, from one single newspaper! www.washingtonpost.com/newssearch/?query=cuties&btn-search=&sort=Relevance&datefilter=All%20Since%202005
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 23, 2020 20:23:43 GMT
I saw Gaspard Noé's Lux Æterna today. It came with a warning, as all movies by Gaspard Noé should. This time it was warned that epilectics should not see it. Obviously that was good advice since half of it was stroboscopic.
The fact that it is only 51 minutes long is also a godsend.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 23, 2020 20:43:28 GMT
The Israeli movie Stripped totally perturbed me for an unusual and incomprehensible reason. It is full of graphic nudity and graphic sex but every single bit of that was totally blurred -- the shower scenes, the bed scenes, the sitting around naked scenes, the jerking off to computer porn scenes... It made no sense to me. And when the army recruits had their stag party with hookers to get fucked for a fee, the faces of the hookers were blurred. WTF? The movie could have been very easily been made without graphic scenes, but it wasn't. So who stepped in to censor it? I felt as though I was watching a version that hed been edited for Malaysia or Kansas. I will definitely try to investigate.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 25, 2020 15:10:06 GMT
Yesterday I saw the French film Les Apparences (Appearences) which immediately reminds one of the nasty bourgeois thrillers by Chabrol or perhaps some milder films by Hitchcock. The French couple is living in Vienna where the husband is the head of the orchestra of the opera. The wife is the head of the French library. Perfect expat life, except for the fact that the husband is having an affair which is modern times is often discovered by spying on one's spouse's telephone. The wife needs some sort of revenge, and things go downhill from there. The movie should do well on the export market, because everybody has been missing Chabrol.
Today I saw the Argentinian movie Fin de siglo (End of the Century) about a sex affair in Barcelona. An Argentinian man living in New York encounters a Spanish man who lives in Berlin. The Argentinian has rented an Airbnb, while the Spanish guy is staying with his parents during a holiday. Well, contact is quite rapid -- no need for the graphic details -- but what becomes interesting is that the Spaniard reveals that they had already met in the past 20 years ago. The flashback was the most interesting part of the movie. Will they get together again? No because the Spaniard is married to a German man and they have a daughter...
21st century movies are sometimes quite different from what we saw in the 20th century.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 26, 2020 14:02:03 GMT
Undine is an excellent German movie telling a modern version of a mythical undine. Undines were considered to be an elemental being (almost always female) associated with water. They look human but lack a soul unless they marry a human. This is not without risk for humans because in case the human is unfaithful, he must die.
So we have Undine, a charming woman who works as a guide in a cultural institute in Berlin. She breaks up with her unfaithful boyfriend (uh-oh) but quickly meets a charming new man who conveniently has a job doing underwater repair work. Perfect.
Paula Beer won the best actress award at the Berlin film festival for this. Frankly, it was not her best role, but she is such a great actress in spite of her age that they probably felt they had to give her something after her spectacular performances in Frantz, Transit and (to a less extent) in The Wolf's Call. Strangely enough, all of those roles were in French. And then there is Franz Rogowski, equally spectacular in Terence Malick's A Hidden Life, Michael Haneke's Happy End, also in Transit and my personal favourite, In the Aisles. They are probably Germany's two finest young actors.
Anyway, the plot of the movie is pretty faithful to the myth. That's a bit sad.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 1, 2020 13:40:54 GMT
Les héros ne meurent jamais (Heroes Don't Die) is a fascinating hallucinatory road trip from Paris to Bosnia-Herzegovina. Joachim is at the Aligre market one day and an old man starts yelling at him "Goran, we killed you!" The date of Goran's death is Joachim's birth date, so Joachim becomes convinced that he is the reincarnation of Goran. He is friends with a reporter who has worked in the Balkans, so they leave with a tiny camera crew to make a report? documentary? essay? about the search for the story of the dead guy. He wasn't even killed in the civil war but had died ten years before it started.
So they looking, in plenty of wrong places, including visiting Sarajevo and its pockmarked buildings, as well as the abandoned Olympic bobsleigh run which is in a forest full of land mines. Finally they start making a bit of progress and something amazing happens.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 2, 2020 14:00:09 GMT
I understand how seductive the 21st century film genre of using only webcams and screenshots can be to millenial directors -- if only because it greatly reduces the budget -- but it definitely has its limits and probably becomes a bit annoying to most, er, older spectators. So, today I went to see A coeur battant (The End of Love), an Israeli-French movie about a couple separated for visa problems. She is in Paris with the baby, and he is in Tel Aviv with his family. They promise to stay in constant contact by Skype. The film opens with hot cyber sex (i.e. masturbation and dirty talk) but things quickly become more mundane. She is an architect (but why is her young male assistant wearing one of her husband's shirts?). And he is busy with his boisterous (typically Jewish) family with lots of parental interference. His French residency visa application is bogged down, and things keep going downhill. They even stop answering each other's calls but sometimes other people click on the annoying call signal -- Roméo the 17 year old babysitter (but why is the wife out?) or the Filipino maid in Tel Aviv who probably says more than she should... It was all quite stressful.
I am increasingly impressed by French actor Arieh Worthalter, who shows up in so many movies but normally not the lead. But since he speaks French, English, Spanish, Dutch and Hebrew, he gets lots of work. I discovered him in Belgian Flemish movies.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 3, 2020 15:50:59 GMT
I am a big fan of Korean movies, but Domangchin Yeoja (The Woman Who Ran) has to be one of the most boring films that I have seen in recent times. And yet the director won the award for best director at the last Berlin film festival.
Here are two different trailers to allow you to decide for yourselves.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 6, 2020 15:09:45 GMT
I found the animated movie Josep quite moving. It is about Josep Bartoli, a Spanish republican who fled Barcelona and ended up in a French concentration camp in February 1939. Most of the movie is about the abominable conditions of the camp, even though France at least had the merit of accepting 500,000 Spanish refugees -- but most people hated them, particularly the people controlling the camps. The principal exceptions were the Senegalese soldiers assigned to the camps, since it was a job that nobody wanted.
Josep Bartoli was an illustrator and he illustrated scenes from the camp and other things he managed to see in the region, not always nice. He finally escaped from all of this in 1943 and arrived in Mexico, where he became Frida Kahlo's lover. Later he moved to the United States where he died in 1995. He became an illustrator for the Saturday Evening Post. (None of this later stuff is part of the movie.)
The movie is told from the point of view of an old dying man talking to his teenage grandson. He was one of the gendarmes assigned to the camp and showed kindness to Josep while his colleagues did things like peeing on him. People are horrible.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 6, 2020 19:01:16 GMT
Kajillionaire is one of the weirdest American movies that I have seen in a long time. And it is also very sad. I cannot even describe the plot.
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 7, 2020 17:56:11 GMT
At the risk of sounding like Spock, I have to say ~ fascinating!
Have you seen any other Miranda July movies?
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 7, 2020 18:15:31 GMT
Yes, but I have completely forgotten the one i saw. (This happens with about 70% of the movies that I see since I see so many.)
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Post by lagatta on Oct 7, 2020 19:11:15 GMT
Didn't just about everyone become Frida Kahlo's lover?
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 7, 2020 21:01:35 GMT
For a handicapped person with attendant issues and pain who died young, that girl sure did get around! For another girl who got around, go see what I just left for you in Documentaries (reply #269) anyportinastorm.proboards.com/post/349070/thread
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 14, 2020 15:04:23 GMT
Reality TV in Iran appears to be a bit more extreme than in other countries. Although the programme shown in Yalda is fictional, it is based on a show that really existed. Certain cases could be tried by the television audience instead of in court. (Judge Judy, anyone?) In the movie it is a murder case with a possible death penalty. If the millions of spectators call in to convict, the women will be executed (no, not right then then and there). If verdict goes the other way, the commercial sponsors will pay the obligatory blood money to the victim's family. I think the Donald Trump would have made a wonderful host of the American version of this show.
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