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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 15, 2020 17:30:33 GMT
Frankly, I did not really like the Kazakh movie A Dark, Dark Man. It's about a young corrupt policeman who comes across even more corrupt and evil people than he. An intrepid female reporter interferes and is dealt with. This is the second movie that I have seen by Adilkhan Yerzhanov but I liked the other one better (The Gentle Indifference of the World) because it was a bit less grim.
I guess the rest of you do not spend much time seeing these movies, right?
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 16, 2020 17:03:57 GMT
The Danish movie Druk is strangely called Drunk in French speaking countries but Another Round in English speaking countries. Some people seem to think that it is a comedy (as though Thomas Winterburg were capable of making a comedy!). I did hear some people in the audience laughing while my skin was crawling.
Mads Mikkelsen and his friends are bored high school teachers who get together to relax from time to time. One of them mentions a Norwegian theory that things would be much better if adults had 0.5% alcohol in their system at all times. Needless to say, when they put this to the test, things go downhill rapidly after a primary illusion of improvement. (Mads is a less boring history teacher and one of his colleagues is a more sensitive sports teacher...)
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 18, 2020 18:59:02 GMT
I got around to seeing an American move yesterday, not because it attracted me but because one of the multiplexes decdided to go back to showing movies in the morning. They had been starting at 14:00 since the end of lockdown, but no that we have a curfew beginning at 21:00, they had to cancel their evening shows.
So I saw Liam Neeson in Honest Thief (weirdly titled The Good Criminal in France). It started out fine but became totally outlandish about half way through, illogical, badly done, ridiculous... Apparently, that makes no differnece at all as long as it is exciting, and it definitely kept moving along at a breakneck pace. I always find car chases ridiculous, but this time the worst element was the shootout. In a small living room, at least 50 bullets are exchanged with the inevitable (likeable) person killed almost immediately, just a flesh wound to the hero and nothing to Mr. Bad Guy (who, I will admit, had already been slightly wounded earlier).
They need to make better bullets or send all of these people to the firing range more often.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 20, 2020 8:32:35 GMT
The Italian movie Spaccapietre is exceedingly dismal. It's about agricultural labourers working in slavelike conditions and it makes a movie by the Taviana brothers seem like a Disney feature. The little boy loses his mother right from the start, he and his one-eyed father have to move into a windowless storeroom next to the African workers' horrible shanties, which burn, killing one of them whose body is disposed of in a ditch, the owners are perverts who make a woman gut a pig, strip naked, and be hosed down... Okay fine, but the movie had a -12 rating and from experience I knew that nothing had happened yet to justify the rating, so something horrible was going to happen. It finally did.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 22, 2020 15:33:33 GMT
Last Words is a very haunting movie by American director Jonathan Nossiter. It's a Franco-Italian coproduction in Italian and English, with a bit a German and a large part of Wolof (?) since the main character and narrator is French actor Kalipha Touray, of African origin. (But Africa disappeared completely beneath the ocean.)
It takes place in 2085 when the world has been destroyed. Kal and his sister are living in the ruins of Paris, thinking they are alone in the world. But they run into a gang of wild boys, who want to know if the baby in the sister's body is a girl or a boy. They kill the sister to cut the baby out of her body to see. Not a nice thing to do.
Kal finds rotting film cannisters from the Bologna cinémathèque. The little strips of celluloid inside intrigue him. He has never seen anything like it, so he sets out in a trek. He has nothing better to do in the dead world. In Bologna, he finds Nick Nolte living in the brick basement of the cinémathèque and discovers cinema with a rickety projector powered by a bicycle. He is completely fascinated by these strange images.
There is an indication that there are people somewhere in the ruins of Athens, so they decide to go there with their cart and some film equipment. All of the countryside does not resemble Europe as we know it -- just totally arid landscapes with absolutely no vegetation (A lot of the movie was filmed in the Moroccan desert.). The only food is tinned powder because 'real' food disappeared many years earlier.
They finally get to Athens, and there is a group of almost 300 people, led by Charlotte Rampling and Stellan Skarsgård, a former doctor. They grow things, but all of the plants are toxic and the sea is brown. However, everybody is thrilled to see bits and pieces of movies projected on a sheet every night.
Then things go downhill, not just the naked cannibals, but there is still a virus killing everybody and the colony is sood reduced to almost nothing.
This is how the world ends once and for all.
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Post by bjd on Oct 22, 2020 17:08:37 GMT
Don't you ever feel the need to see something a little bit cheerful? It seems the last films you mention are all extremely dreary and depressing.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 22, 2020 18:09:55 GMT
I see the vast majority of the French comedies, but since they are unexportable, there is not much point in mentioning them here. Yesterday I saw the absolutely remarkable Adieu les Cons by Albert Dupontel, although it must be admitted that he has a dark sense of humour.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 23, 2020 13:33:42 GMT
So, I went to see Miss, about a young man who works in a boxing club who wants to become Miss France. The actor Alexandre Wetter is quite convincing. Normally he is a fashion model. Thibault de Montalembert as an aging transvestite prostitute is pretty horrifying.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 24, 2020 14:46:02 GMT
So, I went to see the lovely Korean movie Peninsula today. I think at least 5000 zombies got puréed during the movie. But now I know where coronavirus is headed.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 26, 2020 15:25:35 GMT
Yesterday I went to see Petit Vampire by Joann Sfar, based on his own graphic novel for children. Previously, he made the excellent The Rabbi's Cat, based on his series of graphic novels for adults. This movie is about a 10 year old boy who has been 10 years old for 300 years because when you become one of the living dead, your age never changes. He is really bored because in current times, the only leisure he has is to watch the same horror movies over and over again. He lives in a haunted mansion in a safe bubble, which he is not allowed to leave. There are lots of other creatures living there. One of his friends is a sort of simpleton who was put togther from the body parts of a lot of different people. He is sad because he has no parents -- just pieces of parents.
Anyway, the little vampire sneaks out one day because one of the things he would like to do the most is go to school with other kids. He ends up meeting a living boy, Michel, who is just as bored as he is even though he is not 300 years old. He is an orphan living with his grandparents. They become inseparable best friends but of course face a lot of supernatural problems.
The style of the movie is simple 2D animation with a resemblance to what the incredible filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki has done and does not depend of fabulous CGI but just fabulous imagination.
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 26, 2020 22:30:03 GMT
That looks great for both kids and adults -- fun scary, not really scary scary.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 27, 2020 16:38:42 GMT
Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky has made movies in 5 languages, ranging from Uncle Vanya to Tango & Cash. This time it is the Italian movie Il Peccato which is just called Michel-Ange in France, but the international English language title is Sin. It covers some of the more tormented years of Michelangelo's life (Perhaps all of thm were tormented -- I don't know.) Florence and Rome are mazes of filth and the Carrara quarries are stunningly vast. The movie spends enough time there to make you appreciate how unimaginably difficult it was to roll huge blocks of marble on logs, particularly on steep slopes with everybody in danger of getting crushed at any moment. The Medicis and their rivals are all terrible people. After 2h14, anybody who thought it might be appealing to live in Italy back then will definitely change their mind. The ragged and dirty sumptuous costumes were also worthy of note.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 28, 2020 15:19:02 GMT
This morning I saw the French film Garçon Chiffon (literally "rag boy" but the English title of the movie is "My Best Part"). It is directed by and also stars Nicolas Maury, one of the favourite characters in the series Call My Agent. While it is not really autobiographical, it incorporates a number of elements of his real life, which endear him to some people and creep out others -- an extremely sensitive hyper jealous gay man who runs for comfort at his mother's house after breaking up with his boyfriend. Maury does not spare himself in the movie and bares more than just his soul a number of times. It would have been one of the films in competition this year if the Cannes film festival had taken place.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 7, 2020 18:01:32 GMT
Okay, the last movie I saw before the cinemas shut down again was ADN (DNA) by Maïwenn. It's about an extended family with an Algerian grandfather who was the cement of the family. When he dies in his nursing home, the family begins to unravel. They bicker about the coffin, they bicker about inheritance... the usual stuff. Half of the family does not want any sort of religious service because the family was never religious and the others want a Muslim service because he had started praying again as death approached. The main character is a granddaughter, Neige, played by Maïwenn herself, who loved her grandfather more than anyone else. She want to honour him by finding out more about her roots and takes a MyHeritage DNA test (that's the same company that I used. ). Although she thinks she should be 25% North African, the results only give her around 13% with a much bigger chunk from Iberia. She is disappointed but persists and decides to get an Algerian passport, not an easy thing to do. Passport in hand after a lot of complications, she looks at the incredible view of Algiers from the sea as the ferry approaches the coast. While the movie is not really autobiographical, it stays pretty close to Maïwenn's own life and uses her own DNA test. In real life, she has obtained an Algerian passport...
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Post by rikita on Dec 20, 2020 0:46:44 GMT
a. and i (and two of my brother's and my brother k's wife and kids) went to the cinema when it was still open (seems ages ago now), on the last day before it closed. was the fullest i have seen it for a children's movie in ages, though still there was enough space to keep the required four free seats between each party ... anyway, the movie based on the second part of the jim knopf books by michael ende (the same guy who wrote the neverending story) - a very popular story in germany. i liked it, my brother, who is a big fan of the books, complained a bit about different things they left out ... for the story of both books, you can look here: wikipedia page on jim button
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 20, 2020 4:53:10 GMT
Ha, so it wa.sq the same thing everywhere - cinemas were much fuller on the very last day before closing.
Children's movies (all movies really) seem to have much more sophisticated production values these days even when they are not exported. Of course now they really do end up with an export market of sorts since they also have long TV and VOD careers all over the world with so many channels needing content of all kinds.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 19, 2021 14:06:00 GMT
Today I went to see Falling, the first film directed by Viggo Mortensen. In keeping with his Scandinavian roots, it is grim and dead serious. It concerns a faithful (I prefer not to say 'loving') who collects his father at the father's New York farm at his request. He can't handle the farm anymore and would like a place in California with easier upkeep and to be close to both his son and daughter. However, he is sinking into dementia and by the time he arrives, he has already completely changed his mind about wanting to be there. Also he is totally homophobic and racist, so the fact that his son is married to a man of Asian origin does not set well. The fireworks don't take long to start in a cross between Bergman and Vinterberg. The actor playing the father was excellently awful, a mix of Clint Eastwood and Max von Sydow. As a director, Mortensen pushed his point too hard and overused flashbacks, but it is still worth seeing.
The American and French trailers are so different that it's like two different movies.
French trailer
American trailer
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Post by kerouac2 on May 20, 2021 11:30:25 GMT
I saw Quentin Dupieux's Mandibules. He makes only weird movies and this one is no exception. Two complete dimwit slackers steal a car and find a giant fly in the boot. Their adventures begin... The fly is wonderful, even if it eats the little dog.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 21, 2021 15:40:04 GMT
Today I saw Le Dernier Voyage, which was absolute crap, even though the visual effects were not too bad for a low budget French science fiction movie. However, the idea of the Eiffel Tower being tipped over like a toy model is ridiculous when you know that even Godzilla might be able to rip off the top but that the feet will stay firmly planted in the ground no matter what.
Jean Reno must have had a lot of back taxes due to need to appear (briefly) in this.
The trailer makes it look much better than it really is. There were just 2 of us at the 8 a.m. show.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 22, 2021 11:12:17 GMT
So I saw Envole-moi (Fly Me Away), which was over-the-top goody goody, but I knew that already from the reviews and the director who is specialised in that sort of movie. This is the remake of a German movie Dieses bescheuerte Herz, theoretically a true story, but in terms of what I saw, I'm pretty sure that the only thing a little close to the truth was the starting premise: a totally irresponsible young man is forced by his doctor father to be the carer of a very sick boy, or else be thrown out of the house with absolutely no money. I don't need to tell you what happens, although I approve of the fact that there was no death scene. It just jumps ahead to the formally irresponsible young man entering medical school a bit late. Actually, the only reason I wanted to see the movie was to see if Victor Belmondo (grandson of Jean-Paul) could act. Well, he didn't strain himself. I'lll go get an insulin shot now.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 23, 2021 15:04:59 GMT
Slalom got quite good reviews and has been noticed because the subject it topical -- men taking advantage of vulnerable girls. In this case it's a skier and her coach, who takes control of her more and more, and she doesn't really resist although you can see that she wants to. Just like all of the things that have been said about unwanted sex acts (which many would classify as rape, obviously), you can see that she is paralyzed by an authoritarian older man. He obviously cares about her and is eaten up with guilt, but still...
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Post by kerouac2 on May 25, 2021 17:21:22 GMT
After taking a day off, I went to see an aging Emmanuelle Béart (age 57) in L'Etreinte. It is a rather slow movie about a recently widowed woman who has become a university student in Versailles in German studies. This is a rather small section (as it is everywhere in France except Alsace), so it doesn't take her long to befriend some of the other students. To their credit, they don't reject her because of her age and invite her to various activities which end up troubling her -- a wild student party, a midnight swimming pool invasion which turns into an orgy for most of them and other such things. Her closest student friend is a gay guy who takes PrEP every time he goes out in case he has unprotected sex, but he is not really a happy person. Anyway, all of this sex has awakened her own desires, so she ends up on dating sites and discovers that (guess what?) all men in her age group are losers or liars (or both). Some might say that this is true for men in all age groups. Finally, after a rather extreme escape and a rescue by the gay friend, she leaves the university and decides to move on... to what? (This is both the charm and the frustration of many French movies -- you never know where their lives are going next.)
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Post by kerouac2 on May 26, 2021 14:12:50 GMT
So, I saw The Father today although it was not at the top of my list. I must say that I preferred Olivia Colman's more nuanced performance to the extreme hamming by Anthony Hopkins. I thought that the shifting realities were well done, since it is shown from the father's points of view, and his mind us going fast. What happened to that person I just saw? Why is it a different person now? Or maybe they were never there? Why does that woman claim that she is my daughter? All of that was quite realistic to anybody who has dealt with people with fully developed Alzheimer's.
It's a shame that it is almost never possible to adapt a play and not have it look like a filmed play. Actually, there was another French movie (Florida) a few years ago which was freely adapted from the same play, but it strayed so much from the play that it was unrecognizable as an adaptation. Because of the success of The Father, Florian Zeller is going to adapt another one of his plays -- The Son -- into another English language movie. I saw the play a few years ago, and it was quite impressive, as Florian Zeller's plays always are. He has had up to three plays on the Paris stage simultenously in the past. The next movie will star Hugh Jackman. Wait and see... Zeller will have more experience then.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 27, 2021 17:27:33 GMT
The movie I saw today was the absolute epitome of everything I seek in cinema. Si le vent tombe (English title: Should the Wind Drop) is about a French technician going to a country that doesn't exist to do something that is impossible. Except that Nagorno-Karabakh really exists except in the eyes of the world. He is sent there to make an audit of Stepanakert Airport, which also really exists. It was built by the Soviets in 1974 and closed in 1991 when the first war there broke out. (As one of the characters tells the French guy, "None of you in Europe paid attention because you were all interested in the war in Yugoslavia.") Now the authorities want to open it again, but it needs to be certified first -- security, equipment, qualification of the staff...
It is an 8 hour road trip from Yerevan, and that is the one and only road to get there. The French technician begins his work, but it is immediately obviously that many things are wrong -- particularly the little boy who keeps crossing the runway with the huge water bottles that he can hardly carry. No security, holes in the fences. The little boy turns out to be a major character because we follow him around quite a bit. He sells his water, by the jug, by the pitcher, by the glass or sometimes just a swig from one of his bottles. He has lots of regular customers, including patients in the totally dilapidated hospital from which he gets thrown out by a nurse ("Stop coming here with your contaminated water or I'm going to call the police!"). Later on, somebody asks him if he is still getting his water from the hidden spring with such difficult access. He confirms it, but soon afterwards we see that he is just filling his bottles in the restrooms of the airport.
Anyway, the French guy continues his mission in impossible circumstances. He wants to know why he is provided with no information about how planes can circle back to the landing strip in case of a weather emergency or something. "Planes never circle back. The pilots know they have to land." Why? Because the airport is too close to the border and there is not enough room for them to circle without crossing the border of Azerbaidjan, which will shoot them down immediately. Meanwhile, a local TV crew tries to follow him around because a foreigner in town is the most exciting event since the last war.
There is a taxi ride into town, where the hotel is, and the driver points out how beautiful the town is now, even though it was destroyed in 1992. To our eyes it is of course not beautiful at all. But the fact that it is there at all is admirable.
Anyway, this movie showed me a place about which I know almost nothing, a culture struggling to be modern while being stuck in the past, people who know they can be killed at any moment by people who are just the same as them, and an overwhelming desire to be seen by the world. They are convinced that if the airport opens with flights to Yerevan and Moscow or maybe even Paris they will really exist at last. Until then, no -- nobody gives a fuck.
And of course I salute the courage of a filmmaker who stuck to her project since 2014, managed to film it in 2018 and had it released at last in 2021. Of course since then there was another war in Karabakh, which lost a lot of its territory to Azerbaijan again...
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Post by kerouac2 on May 28, 2021 13:53:01 GMT
Vers la Bataille (Towards the Battle) was an interesting movie. It is a French western set in Mexico in 1863. It's about a French photographer who became famous for his early photos of Paris who wanted to go and photograph the Franco-Mexican war. The problem is that he is lost and can't find the war. He has a huge amount of heavy equipment, if you know anything about photography that long ago -- a huge box camera with an equally huge wooden tripod, glass plates to fix the images, bottles of chemicals to develop the results and all of the usual stuff -- weapons, clothings, food, water... He is using two pack horses and they can barely manage. It doesn't take very long for everything to go wrong. Robbed, injured... But he persists and recovers a lot of his stuff and also ends up with a Mexican helper. He encounters a few French soldiers, mostly renegades and deserters but he can't find any battles... until at last he finds the French army and they are horrible. They are also using an American photographer who ran away from Gettysburg and who is making photos with fake dead people and other accessories...
This does not end well. It was far from a perfect movie, but the scenery was wonderful and the setting was really quite convincing. However, it is a Franco-Colombian coproduction and it was filmed in Colombia.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 30, 2021 18:52:27 GMT
Méandre (Meander) proves once again that shitty low budget horror movies can still stress you out. The synopsis says it all:
These tubes are basically like the air vents we have seen in so many other movies with people crawling through them, except when they turn into fleshy disgusting intestine-like tunnels.
I confess that I had to repress an urge to leave the cinema since I had a claustrophobic reaction although not as bad as in Buried when the whole movie took place in a coffin underground with Ryan Reynolds equipped with just a mobile phone with a dying battery to provide a bit of light.
Anyway, this woman crawls from place to place in these ducts, having to avoid being burned to death, killed in an acid vat, drowning in underwater ducts and being chased by a horrible monster. And why? We never find out.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 31, 2021 15:46:53 GMT
In spite of the huge backlog of movies waiting to be released, I have almost run out of this week's selection of new movies and feared the I might be forced to go and see Promising Young Woman, the trailer of which repulses me. So today I jumped on Hospitalité, a Japanese film that actually dates from 2010 but which had never been released outside of Japan even though it played the festival circuit in 2011.
It's about a tranquil family in Tokyo with a small printing business which slowly but surely goes into total turmoil when a guy shows up to incrust himself in the family. He starts working there, moves in, joined by his non-Japanese wife (who first says that she is from Brazil but later tells another person that she is from Bosnia -- same difference since all non-Asians look alike). The guy saves the owner's wife from a sort of blackmail scheme from her half-brother, but then he gets the half-brother hired at the printing company too. The climax is reached when he moves in about 20 illegal aliens -- Europeans, Americans, Africans -- who all cohabit in a friendly way with the original family (even though they are horrified). Clearly this cannot continue, and finally a stop is put to it. I suspect that this movie was released now because it probably inspired the Korean Cannes and Oscar winner Parasite last year. But in this one there is no blood, which is nice.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 1, 2021 9:30:18 GMT
Today I saw a disappointing Belgian movie know by a multitude of titles. It has only been released in France so far, so there is plenty of time for them to decide on a unified title. Here it is called Sons of Philadephia but it is promoted as The Sound of Philadephia in most of the world and it looks like the U.S. title Brothers by Blood will win in the end, because, hey, blood will pull in the people who are attracted to this sort of movie. The only reason I went to see it was because of Matthias Schoenaerts, and he really needs to steer clear of those roles in the future.
This movie has every gangster movie cliché in the book: rival Italian and Irish crime families, boxing rings, horse races, dark bars, invisible submissive women, holes dug in the forest and surprise gunfire. Give me a break.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 8, 2021 16:56:35 GMT
For the moment, I will only talk about movies that I really liked since the flood of movies suppressed by covid has a lot of crap mixed in.
Des hommes was a really interesting movie about French veterans of the Algerian war of independence. The structure of the movie is challenging since it begins with the current day survivors before moving into flashbacks. Gérard Depardieu plays a totally horrible person, feared and despised by his entire village, including his cousin who lived through the same events. There is also his sister (Catherine Frot) who tries to keep him under control during his alcohol fuelled outbursts and who tries to defend him a bit, as indefensible as he is.
The flashbacks show the two cousins back around 1960 patrolling the Algerian outback, with both sides committing despicable atrocities. The Gérard Depardieu character is the nicer and more gentle one writing heartrending letters to his sister. The other cousin is more the type to just follow orders and not question what the French army is doing.
Things get worse and worse, and it becomes quite difficult to watch, particularly at the time of independence which consists of a lot of archival footage showing the expulsion or murder of the remaining pieds noirs, who never had any home other than Algeria.
The other good movie is Villa Caprice, concerning which I had my doubts, but I ended up being more or less enthralled by it. It is about a top business tycoon being prosecuted for corruption who chooses the best and flashiest lawyer in France to defend him. Interestingly enough, the best and flashiest lawyer in France has become the Minister of Justice, a post which he had said he would never accept, and which horrified many of his colleagues, adversaries and quite a bit of public opinion because as a lawyer, he (brilliantly) defended some of the foulest criminals in the country. Anyway, back to this totally fictional movie. The two men play a cat-and-mouse game. The tycoon uses all of his powers of seduction to make sure that they lawyer is on his side, including multiple invitations to the magnificent Villa Caprice. Is it working? The tycoon has to spend a week in prison in the meantime but gets out due to the lawyer's talent, but the lawyer has other issues in his life (dying father, attraction to a piece of bait that has been placed in his path), nd the end of the movie was not really what I expected.
no English subtitles this time, sorry...
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 9, 2021 18:54:59 GMT
I thought that Nomadland was wonderful and deserved every award that it won. Obviously Frances McDormand, no question about that. And then I realised that I had been at least partially hoodwinked.
Everybody is too nice in this movie. There are no bad people even though they sometimes face bad situations. It looked like real life at first (especially the non professionals recreating their real lives), but it is just too good to be true.
I like feel-good movies but I am a bit disappointed when I feel that I have been tricked.
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