|
Post by lagatta on Oct 6, 2021 23:24:02 GMT
They need some sardonic, sarcatic Londoners.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Oct 7, 2021 13:06:18 GMT
I was quite impressed by Mon Légionnaire (English title: Our Men) although I didn't know what to expect. It is just a minor film but it packed in lots of information about patrolling the desert in Mali, life in a desert camp where you shower with just one bottle of water and also the life of the wives waiting back in Corsica. It was all very real and unpretty. The tours of duty in Mali last four months, if you survive.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Oct 11, 2021 12:53:45 GMT
Gaza Mon Amour is a delightful Palestinian movie by the Nasser brothers, Arab and Tarzan, about aging fisherman Issa who quietly falls in love with a woman he has spotted at the market, Siham, played by the legendary Hiam Abbass. The fisherman's sister would prefer to set him up with a selection of possible spouses, all with more money than Siham, who, to make matters worse, has an adult divorced daughter with "naked hair."
Meanwhile, one day Issa pulls up an ancient phallic statue of Apollo in his net instead of fish. He takes it home, but it is really heavy. He drops it on its erect penis which breaks off. The authorities come and confiscate the statue, but the police are upset because one of them informs the others that if you have a statue in a room, angels may not enter. Luckily the museum is very interested, if only somebody could find that missing penis.
I also learned lots of things about living in Gaza, such as how the power goes on and off unexpectedly so you always have an electric torch on hand to be able to go on with your business.
|
|
|
Post by lagatta on Oct 11, 2021 13:58:19 GMT
Yes, I'd love to see that film, hope it comes here. For many years we had an Arab film festival, and I was involved in it, but I don't know if it is still going on. There is a repertory cinema near me that screens quite a few "world films".
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Oct 12, 2021 13:21:02 GMT
Schwesterlein (My Little Sister) is a grim tale about a twin brother and sister. He is dying of cancer, and she is doing everything possible to take care of him. Marthe Keller is their bad mother. Lisa, the sister, has other battles at the same time. She moved with her husband and children from Berlin to Switzerland because it was a great leap for her husband's career, as he is the director of a top international school. She had to give up her writing projects because of her brother, also being a full time mother of two kids, but she is also a part time teacher in the school, which she absolutely does not want her children to attend with "rich Qataris and the offspring of Russian billionaires." The dying brother, who was a flamboyant gay actor, is hard to keep under control as well. Things do not end well.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Oct 14, 2021 13:08:49 GMT
Eiffel could have been a good movie. Great set decoration, great costumes, excellent construction scenes... Unfortunately, half of the movie was wasted on the useless love story. They need to redo it right.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Oct 14, 2021 16:10:23 GMT
The Norwegian movie Verdens verste menneske won the Best Actress award at the Cannes film festival. The English language (and international) title is the literal translation "The Worst Person in the World" but France chose a different title "Julie (en 12 chapitres)" which actually also appears as a subtitle to the movie title on the screen, except that it says "12 chapters with a prologue and an epilogue."
So what is it about? It follows Julie for 4 years in her attempts to find happiness, love and a career and not succeeding very well. This does not at all make her the worst person in the world, she is in fact pretty adorable, so I oppose the official title. She makes a lot of mistakes, but so do her partners. Her parents are of no help either. Anders Danielsen Lie, the inevitable alter ego of the director Joachim Trier, is mistreated as he always is, and I always feel sorry for him. (Thank god he also makes French movies.)
I liked this movie, but it really shows that younger generations are just as fucked up as their predecessors.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Oct 18, 2021 13:04:56 GMT
The Translator is a clumsy but not worthless Syrian movie that takes place during the Syrian version of the Arab Spring in 2011, except as we all know the Arab Spring didn't succeed there and became the civil war that has continued for 10 years already. Sami had to claim asylum in Australia back during the Sydney Olympic games because he deliberately mistranslated an interview with a Syrian athlete on live television and infuriated the regime. But now he has to sneak back into Syria to help family members who are at great risk. Well, Syria is not the place to be and things go horribly wrong.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Oct 19, 2021 17:46:10 GMT
Cigare au miel (Honey Cigar - the name of a rolled wafer Algerian pastry) takes place in 1994 and is about an upper middle class girl, Salma, with Algerian parents. She goes to a business school (these are party schools just like in the US), gets drunk a lot, loses her virginity, goes through the atrocious hazing rituals, gets raped by a young banker that her parents set her up with. These are just minor details of life, no big deal. Simmering in the background is the religious turmoil in Algeria, so far and yet so close. They have a spectacular Christmas tree and drink whisky and fine wines with the Aïd couscous feast, just like normal French Maghrebis, but the parents have not lost all of their traditional values, and there is plenty of family to worry about back in Algeria. At Salma's insistance they make a family trip to Algeria, and that's when the parents break up. The mother is a gynecologist and decides to stay in Algiers. "They need me here. The men refuse to let their wives consult a male doctor."
Salma returns to France with her father and life goes on. Zoé Adjani is quite a good actress. She is the niece of the other one.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Oct 20, 2021 13:46:33 GMT
Illusions Perdues (Lost Illusions) is considered by many to be Balzac's masterpiece and Gaumont has made it into a superproduction, reduced in size and making it startlingly modern while remaining faithful to the period of the Restoration. It talks about fake news in a cutthroat newspaper business, people who will stop at nothing for money and a precursor of Twitter in the form of carrier pigeons spreading misinformation around Europe. Sound familiar? I am generally not a fan of historical movies, but I found this to be sensational, and I was not at all disturbed by the fact that it lasted two and a half hours.
|
|
|
Post by tod2 on Oct 21, 2021 7:38:12 GMT
I would love that movie. Unless it comes on Netflix I will never see it. Sub=titles and all.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Oct 21, 2021 12:38:11 GMT
The Swedish movie Pleasure is a bit of a change of pace. It is about Bella, who leaves Sweden to become a porn star in Los Angeles, basically because she loves sex. Well, guess what? It isn't as glamourous as we all thought it was. She is housed in a sort of porn girls boarding house, relatively sleazy and dirty (the inside of the refrigerzator!). But Bella likes the work, at least at the beginning. After her first scene, she grabs her phone to take selfies with sperm dripping off her face to share with friends back home. ("Guess what I just did!") Anyway, she thinks she is willing to do anything but balks at a brutal rape and humiliation scene, not morally but because they are slapping her and choking her too hard. To get back in the good graces of the producers, she trains hard with a series of anal plugs and manages to film a double anal penetration with two well endowed black men. Then there is no stopping her, if this is the life she really wants... The director says that this was a difficult film to make (no joke!). It took her a year and a half to find an actress for the principal role. Out of 2000 aspiring actresses, she met with 600 of them until she found the person. Naturally, a lot of the actors in Los Angeles are real porn stars and used their usual stage names for the film. This movie has a 16 rating in France rather than an 18 rating because it does not show any actual non simulated sex -- it is always just out of frame. However, there is no lack of body parts in full glory. I don't think that I would recommend this movie for everybody.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Oct 22, 2021 17:04:20 GMT
Today's movie was one you really have to grip into and not let go because it explores to absolute gutter of life. François Creton is an active voice actor (animated films) but more rarely in normal films. You will understand is you watch the trailer below. Although Les Héroïques is a fiction, it contains quite a few authentic elements of the actor's life -- the AA meetings, the stuggle to find a job when you have no diplomas. His real son plays his son in the movie, which I find admirable. It must be so difficult to have such a father, who looks too much like Charles Manson.
As for the plot, the guy is scraping bottom but he has a new son 10 months old and tries to achieve his sporadic paternal duties even though he split from the mother at birth. His adult son helps him more than is reasonable, but blood ties are very important. His father is dying and needs help too. Anything that can go wrong goes wrong. You cannot imagine how relieved I was when the movie ended not too badly since it was so close to real life.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Oct 26, 2021 18:02:20 GMT
Kimby was lucky to see this movie before I did, and First Cow is definitely excellent. (Kimby's review here at post #3493) piqued everybody's interest, but I was already a Kelly Reichardt fan ever since her first movie River of Grass, a road movie without a road, but also Old Joy (two 40ish friends take a trip to some hot springs that are closed, but that doesn't stop them), and of course Wendy and Lucy, in which unemployed Lucy is driving to Alaska with her dog Wendy where she might get a job in a cannery. She is broke and is arrested for shoplifting dog food. And the car breaks down. Wendy is impounded in the meantime... All of these movies take place in Oregon. Anyway, back to First Cow. Kimby told us the basic plot, but I was very impressed by the depiction of the Oregon Territory. In westerns, we always see these Hollywood frontier towns which are a bit rustic but look liveable. But the settlement in this movie is not even a shantytown. It looks more like one of the most primitive refugee camps in Africa with hovels built out of crap, ready to fall down at any moment. The trappers who live there temporarily come from all over the world and don't particularly like each other. From a scene at the very beginning of the movie, we know it is not going to end well, but that doesn't stop us from hoping. I will quibble with one detail, which I quibble with about all the time concerning movies from all over the world. When you are living in extreme poverty (and even if you're not), I just do not believe that you will keep candles burning in every corner of the room for no reason at all (except that the DP thinks it looks better). The rich guy even had some candles burning in his house in the middle of the night for no reason. One little candle lantern okay, to help people find their way to the outhouse in the middle of the night since there was so much intestinal distress in those days, but not candles burning in the corridor! The waste! France is the only country in the world so far where First Cow has been released for the big screen due to the pandemic, and Kelly Reichardt even made the trip to France for that reason. Also the Pompidou Centre has been having a retrospective of all of her previous films during the whole month of October.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Oct 27, 2021 11:19:52 GMT
The French Dispatch tries too hard to be clever and quirky. And no matter how much Wes Anderson loves France, he just gets so many things wrong. This isn't really important since 95% of the people seeing the movie outside of France won't know that anything is wrong. But in terms of "clever and quirky" I would just ask anybody who has seen both Amélie and The French Dispatch to decide which movie is more authentic in spite of all of the outlandish events.
Wes Anderson's set design is always brilliant, though. I hope that some of his miniatures make it to the miniature museum in Lyon, where I already saw his miniatures of Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Grand Budapest Hotel.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Oct 31, 2021 14:17:37 GMT
* Lui (Him) - Guillaume Canet isolates himself on a remote island in Brittany and finds himself invaded by his wife, his lover, his best friend, his parents and other mental demons, none of whom are really there. ** La Fracture (The Divide) - Marina Foïs (rhymes with Joyce) breaks up with Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi but still goes to help her in the hospital when Valeria fucks up her knee in a fall. Meanwhile, Pio Marmai has driven his truck across France to participate in a yellow vest demonstration but gets his leg fucked up with fragments of a tear gas grenade and ends up in the same hospital. Pio and Valeria do not get along in the ER. Meanwhile the hospital is surrounded by battling demonstrators and police, and the hospital staff is on strike (but still on duty since they do not have the right to strike). The glowing beacon of this movie is nurse Aïssatou Diallo Sagna who is a real nurse and not an actress. ** Barbaque (Some Like It Rare) - Struggling butchers Fabrice Eboué and Marina Foïs (rhymes with Joyce) run over a vegan by accident. Since their shop had just been attacked by a militant vegan group, they don't dare call the police, so they decide to cut up the body and dispose of it. But their dog eats the testicles with such gusto and after some accidental ham is made, they get sidetracked into a new venture. They say it is Iranian pork, obtained from a refugee who escaped with a few pigs after the revolution. But they sell their stock so quickly that they need to find more product and infiltrate vegan circles to get more victims... **** Last Night in Soho - I did not expect this movie to be so intelligent and clever since it turns into a very bloody horror movie. Eloise goes to London to study at a fashion school. She herself is a bit old fashioned and is very attracted to London in the 60s. And suddenly she finds herself in that period, sort of in the body of Sandie, but not really. Sandie is trying hard to make it as a singer but has the misfortune to run into Matt Smith, a pimp. Things quickly go downhill. I'm usually quite good at guessing who the real villain is, but I was surprised this time.
The Dario Argento colour scheme was excellent.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Nov 2, 2021 17:38:51 GMT
The excellent Iranian movie Le Pardon (Forgiveness) is strangely titled Ballad of a White Cow in English. There is no cow in the movie, just the symbolic image of one (with no explanation of the symbolism).
Mina's husband was unjustly accused of murder and executed. So she is alone with her deaf daughter, while her father-in-law tries to obtain custody of the daughter, because a woman alone is not fit to raise a child. A year later the real murderer is arrested, so she has the right to receive blood money ("the standard amount for an adult male"), but she is still struggling after having been evicted from her apartment. The owner had seen a man entering her apartment, and even though it was her brother-in-law, it is scandalous.
A nice man shows up to help her. He says he knew her husband, and he finds her a new apartment at a low rental rate and helps her in many other ways. In fact, he is one of the judges who sentenced her husband to death (his first conviction), and he is overcome by remorse.
And then things get complicated... Whenever anything bad happens in Iran, it is explained away as being "the will of god."
The movie is banned in Iran.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Nov 3, 2021 16:05:45 GMT
Jacques Audiard is one of my favourite directors (A Prophet, Rust and Bone, Dheepan, etc.) so I rushed to see Les Olympiades (Paris 13th District in English because foreign people might think it is a sports movie otherwise). It follows the lives of three people who interact at various times -- a French Chinese girl, a black high school teacher, and a 32 year old "late" university student. It is in black and white, which suits the Olympiades neighbourhood perfectly. All three of these people are totally frustrated and, guess what, they relieve their frustration with sex. Still, it is an excellent movie.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Nov 4, 2021 16:21:45 GMT
Compartment Number 6 is a Finnish movie that takes place in an underdetermined time in Russia, probably around 1990. It won the Grand Prix (that's 2nd place) at Cannes this year. Laura is a Finnish archeology student living with her Russian girlfriend in Moscow. They are supposed to take the train to Murmansk in the Arctic Circle to see the famous petroglyphs that are found there (No, I've never heard of them either.). Irina, the girlfriend, bails at the last minute. She clearly prefers her bourgeois Moscow life and parties. So Laura leaves on this 2000 kilometre train trip alone.
In compartment number six of the train Laura ends up with sharing with Vadim, a hard drinking skinhead going to Murmansk to work in the mines... It goes without saying that they do not appreciate each other's company at all. Will they fall in love? Will they kill each other? What happens is amazing and unexpected.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Nov 5, 2021 17:23:06 GMT
Eternals is a load of horseshit of course. Or I might just be old and stupid and not capable of understanding the multiverse (until it is supplanted by the metaverse). Once again it seems like just an excuse for incredible special effects, and what was happening was complete mumbo jumbo to me. And as usual, even when you have incredible super powers, it all boils down to fistfights and sword fights, whether or not you have laser eyes, fireball hands or super strength and the ability to fly.
I am of course left completely perplexed by how an eternal can be deaf and need to use sign language and oblige all of the other eternals to use sign language, too. Couldn't they just project text messages into the air? As for the gay eternal, I don't know what the point was. Nobody other's sexual status was mentioned at any time.
Oh, Chloé Zhao, after your Oscar for best director of Nomadland last year, why oh why did you sell out for this kind of movie? Banned in China anyway for the gay character.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Nov 6, 2021 20:39:40 GMT
Movies in which the main character is accused of something for which he is not really guilty are always upsetting, and Albatros is no exception. Laurent is a gendarme in Etretat and quite a good one. We see his interventions in all sorts of situations from child molestation to a teen riding his motorbike without a helmet to just a guy who has drunk too much and doesn't want to leave the bar. But one case is about a farmer who is doing his absolute best to follow the rules but who is falling short. The authorities are going to close him down and he becomes suicidal. When Laurent tries to help him, he accidentally kills him. Xavier Beauvois is an excellent director who does not shy away from harsh realities. As for Laurent, he takes his sailboat out with the intention for going to Nova Scotia, a lifelong dream. Easier said than done.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Nov 7, 2021 20:50:01 GMT
Burning Casablanca is a rather surprising Moroccan movie about a heavy metal rock star and a whore. Unfortunately it is too long and not much happens until the shooting starts.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Nov 11, 2021 8:33:14 GMT
Si on chantait is the title of the a popular song by Julien Clerc, so "if we sang" becomes the leitmotiv of factory workers whose factory closed. They create a song delivery service for people to declare their love, their revenge, or to cheer up grandma in her nursing home. Naturally it gets off to a slow start, but little by little people are charmed by the idea. Then the bickering begins. This movie is completely unexportable to non French speaking countries since they would be infamiliar with the song, but I can easily imagine it being adapted with local content.
Une vie démente (English title: Madly in Life) is a movie that could only be Belgian since it shows a totally wild vision of life. In many of these scenes absolutely everything matches -- the clothes worn by the couple, their bedsheets, the wallpaper, the lampshades, the laptop case, the mobile phone... and it is all presented as though this were completely normal. The couple would like to have a child, but all of a sudden the guy's mother starts sinking into dementia. He spends so much time trying to keep her out of trouble and then caring for her and then hiring a live-in carer that there is no time for the couple to have a baby anymore, so they break up. The movie is totally full of humour at all times, but the mother is heartbreaking even when she is hilarious. I guess you have to have lived through this yourself to really appreciate it.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Nov 11, 2021 19:02:40 GMT
I found A Good Man somewhat stunning. It is a French movie in spite of its title and shows us a couple, Benjamin and Aude, who would like to have childrn, but it turns out that the wife is not able to have a child. So her male companion says that he will bear the child, because he is a trans man who has not yet completed his transition. (This is a true story by the way in case you are wondering.) Benjamin's mother has never accepted his new identity, and his brother has tried to be supportive, but only up to a point. Aude is tormented by the idea, as much as she wants to have a family. Benjamin stops his testosterone treatment to becombe fertile again. Then they have to go to Belgium for insemination because French law was still backwards in those days (it only recently changed).
He hides is pregnancy as long as possible because nobody else knows, not even his best friend. And his relations with his wife deteriorate until she leaves him. Couples breaking up during pregnancy is a classic, without even being trans.
I thought the movie was brilliant for bringing up all sorts of subject that we never think about, even though the world is changing.
And of course the actress who plays the trans man was amazing.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Nov 11, 2021 19:16:10 GMT
It should be mentioned that the star, Noémie Merlant, is also one of the stars of the movie Les Olympiades, which I also discussed recently. Compare her look in the two.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Nov 12, 2021 19:21:36 GMT
Valérie Lemercier is very famous in France as a comedian, actress, singer and director. So in my opinion, she was absolutely the wrong person to star in the new film she directed, Aline. I just couldn't stop seeing her and could never imagine the character she played, which was a fully acknowledged carbon copy of Céline Dion. On top of that, digital effects were used to put her face on the character starting at age 7, and it was frankly creepy.
And yet the movie isn't terrible. It is a sincere homage to Céline Dion, gives an unflinching portrayal of her huge family and the opposition to her marriage to the "old man." It might do very well in international markets. She did not do her own singing in the movie but was dubbed by a very talented singer.
I must also complain a bit about the fact that the story begins before Céline's Aline's birth and continues beyond the death of her husband, yet it lasts "only" 2h09. This was more than enough for watching a movie, but it really gives short shrift to so many events, such as the rise of her career, the birth of her children and the death of loved ones.
The movie was supposed to be released just before the first lockdown, and then another date was set which also had to be cancelled, and now it is finally on the screens of France. Obviously Céline Dion must have seen it (it was reported that her family has seen it), but I will be very curious if she ever makes a statement about what she thinks of the movie.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Nov 13, 2021 22:30:27 GMT
I have always liked Nanni Moretti, but his recent films have interested me less. Tre Piani reversed that trend today because I loved it. It follows the lives of the bourgeois residents on three floors of a building in Rome. This is Nanni Moretti after all, so the people are kind of fucked up in their heads. But the movie remains tender and understanding, well most of the time, for what they are going through.
|
|
|
Post by lagatta on Nov 13, 2021 23:58:43 GMT
Si on chantait is a very popular song here for karaoke, events etc, so I imagine it will be popular here, and not only for the art house crowd. Idem the small-town factory closing story.
I can't stand Céline Dion, so I'll doubt I'll endure that unless it's on the télé and I'm eating, drinking and laughing with a gang of friends. I suppose the ridiculously large Catholic families here might be amusing for those enlightened places that discovered the "small family idea" earlier on.
I loved Nanni Moretti, and one of my friends did her master's thesis on him, but like k2 have been unimpressed with his recent work.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Nov 15, 2021 14:33:50 GMT
I'm sure that Haute Couture must be considered a chick flick although it is not a rom-com. I'm not sure if it insults women's intelligence, but it kind of insulted mine. I dunno, maybe some people don't have a problem believing that a purse snatcher who feels a bit guilty would be offered by the victim an apprenticeship the very next day at Dior with no opposition from anybody even though the woman is being forced into retirement. The thief has delicate hands, and apparently that's all you need, no education, no motivation and total disdain of the richer classes. And then of course everything fits into place with very few hiccups. And the girl even gets herself a guy just by exchanging significant glances, even though this was not an important plot point.
And yet I found the movie somewhat interesting because it was shot in a disaffected government ministry dressed up to look like the Dior sewing workshops, fancy but fading old rooms full of sweaty seamstresses. There is even someone to spray perfume around from time to time (Miss Dior) to hide the smell of perspiration. So they sew lace and they sew beads and they hem silk and satin and it all looks like tough boring work for women with delicate hands. And you hardly ever see a finished product, so that must be how their lives are.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Nov 16, 2021 10:49:55 GMT
Cry Macho is pathetic. Clint Eastwood is pathetic.
|
|