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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 18, 2022 5:32:36 GMT
Feathers won the principal prize for the Critics' Week at the last Cannes film festival. It is one of the grittiest movies I've seen in a long time. It takes place in some nameless Egyptian hell hole where a devoted mother tries to take care of her two young sons plus her additional baby. Their flat is a hovel with filthy walls, dilapidated kitchen and smoke from the factory next door constantly wafting into the principal window. Their clothes always look filthy even though the mother is constantly doing laundry.
Then there's the father. He works at the factory and gathers often with his cronies. The family is mostly an afterthought except when he is showing off. He plans a big party for the eldest son's 4th birthday and even hires a magician for entertainment. The magician does the usual simple tricks and then moves on to the big one. The father gets into a wooden case and the lid is closed. When the case is opened, the father has been replaced by a chicken. Ha ha ha, everyone is dazzled. But when the case is closed and reopened, it's still a chicken. The father has disappeared no matter how many times the magician reopens the case.
Life goes downhill from there even though it had already pretty much reached rock bottom. The rent is not paid, the appliances are confiscated. The only help comes from the lecher that the father used to work with. The mother spends her meager funds on witch doctors, and also pays a veterinarian when the chicken gets sick. She gets a number of shitty jobs but not at the factory because women are not allowed there. They do however hire the 4 year old son to do stuff.
It looked like there would be no way out. And there wasn't.
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Post by breeze on Apr 18, 2022 11:46:12 GMT
kerouac, I seem to remember you saw the movie Girlhood/Bande de Filles? We recently watched it and I tried to find your comments on the movie but I can't.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 18, 2022 12:32:42 GMT
I clearly saw it since I gave it a (quite good) rating on IMDb, but the search function did not unearth it here. So I searched back here to movies I saw in October 2014 but no luck.
So this post won't be a complete loss, here is the trailer, which should indicate that French movies are not what people like Woody Allen think.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 18, 2022 13:14:28 GMT
I thought I had seen the tough films of the week, and then I saw Vortex by Gaspard Noé. He is known for extreme movies, generally forbidden to viewers under the age of 16 for very good reasons. This movie can be seen by everybody because it is a simple family film about an aging couple, Dario Argento (Italian horror film director in his first acting role ever) and Françoise Lebrun (legendary actress of the New Wave). The movie is entirely in split screen so that you can see what each person is doing at all times. They get up and pee, she makes coffee and he drinks it. Then she goes out wandering, leaving the door open, because she is suffering from dementia. She explores the hardware store and then the grocery store for no particular reason. He finds her and chastises her, brings her home. Their apartment is a total Caparnaum with piles of books everywhere, overflowing trash, a huge stock of medecine... She used to be a psychiatrist and writes her own (dangerous) prescriptions. He was a writer or movie critic, you're never really sure. He also has a (probably former) mistress whom he calls. She barely ever speaks, probably because they have said it all in their 50+ years of marriage.
It is a total relief when their son shows up for a visit. He loves them and tries his best, but he is a piece of work, too. When he dares to tell them that they need help, perhaps a nursing home where they can still live together with (some of) their stuff, the father flies into a rage and says "if anybody needs help here, you're the one who should be in a clinic!" We learn that the son's wife is currently in a facility, which is why he is taking his little boy with him everywhere, and that he himself has a dedicated social worker and was once in a psychiatric hospital after being interned by his parents.
What a wonderful family. Everything in this movie hurts (2 and a half hours!) and on top of that, the dialogue was improvised which makes it more authentic and unbearable. When they have tears in their eyes, they are real tears.
When one side of the split screen finally goes dark, it is a relief. But not really.
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Post by breeze on Apr 18, 2022 13:50:33 GMT
kerouac, when I couldn't find your review of Girlhood here, I checked the NYT, Guardian, and Washington Post reviews.
We're still thinking about the movie.
The American-style football scene at the beginning baffles us. It doesn't fit with anything in the rest of the young women's lives. It seemed to be a one-off. Were they players or spectators? And who would go to the expense of providing uniforms and training for such a niche sport, even more so for a women's team?
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Post by bixaorellana on Apr 20, 2022 4:28:35 GMT
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 20, 2022 15:13:16 GMT
Okay, I went to see The Lost City today. I knew it was a bunch of silly crap but that's what I was in the mood for after the previous grim movies that I saw. Since Sandra Bullock is the last remaining queen of screwball comedies, one of the French reviews suggested that they be renamed screwbullock comedies.
Bullock delivers the goods and dwarf actor Daniel Radcliffe is appropriately evil (One of the other characters says "I thought it was a child until I saw he had a beard."). Channing Tatum is always excellent at playing dumb studs, and Brad Pitt's small role is exceptional.
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Post by breeze on Apr 20, 2022 22:12:50 GMT
bixa, thanks for the link to that article about the film. The author found the same things to appreciate in the film that I did. Always nice to find someone who expresses your opinion better than you could.
The football scene isn't explained there, or anywhere that I can find, but that's just a sidelight. I'm still thinking about the rest of the film.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 21, 2022 16:33:51 GMT
Le monde après nous (The World After Us) is a tiny gentle and fragile movie about a young man trying to survive in Paris, find love and not alienate everybody around him. Labidi is trying to write a novel while biking around the city for Deliveroo. He finds a girl, who is a student, and they get together. He is sleeping on the floor of a friend's studio apartment, which is not practical for a love life. He finds a flat, even though he can't afford it and then he finds he can't write anymore, even though he has a possible book contract... The whole movie is a tightrope and you expect him to fall off at any moment. But he persists and persists and persists... There are no miracles, but I love this kind of movie.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 24, 2022 11:28:27 GMT
The Croatian movie Murina is one of the most boring that I have seen in recent month. Teenage girl angst, strict father, useless mother and rich friend of the family. Oops.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 24, 2022 11:36:18 GMT
I saw CODA on the big screen because Pathé produced it and forced Apple TV to allow it to be shown in cinemas in France... but only for one weekend. It was quite faithful to the original French movie but I am sorry to say, as is generally the case, the remake is not as good as the original. I found Marlee Matlin particularly dull. In any case, I don't think it really deserved the Oscar for best picture, even though yes, it was good, but the more I think about it, the worse it gets. It's a movie that stresses singing and the singing was crap as was the choice of songs.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 26, 2022 14:03:09 GMT
I can't say that I hate Nicolas Cage even though he has made loads of trashy films just to pay the bills, but he has also made some amazing movies and absolutely deserved the Oscar for best actor for Leaving Las Vegas. I will have to place The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent in the trashy file because even though the idea of a self parody should be a gold mine for him, the screenplay is poorly written with lots of boring moments, and it is also clear that he resisted making fun of himself as much as would have been needed. It's also a cheap production with cheap action scenes. The best thing to be said for its cheapness is that it was filmed in Dubrovnik, which is always photogenic. People who love Nicolas Cage will probably love him anyway, and people who hate him will find more than enough to hate, so the rest of us are left out in the cold.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 28, 2022 10:35:27 GMT
Operation Mincemeat was quite well done in a dreary sort of way. Dreary because London was dreary in 1943 and just about all of the movie was in ugly office full of people smoking cigarettes. Colin Firth is always good in his stoic roles. And of course since it is a true story, that increases the interest. War stories seem to resonate more now to those of us born after the last big war, because current events have supplied us with elements of life in those times that we were lacking.
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 28, 2022 10:49:15 GMT
Downton Abbey II is really quite a good movie in my opinion. I still have no idea who any of these people are and I immediately forgot anything that I may have learned in the first feature film. And I also don't understand why anybody would live like this and why the servants do not revolt about the way they are treated (there must be special breeding centres for servants). But the plot was clever with two main elements -- the new villa in France and the film crew making a movie back home in the main shack. The only thing that annoyed me a little was at the end, after having opened about 15 subplots, each and every one of them was wrapped up a little too neatly before the end. At least Maggie Smith finally died (spoiler). I assume that if there is a Downton Abbey III, they will have to put the family in total financial ruin and sell off all of the furniture. But for all I know, that might have already been done in the original television series.
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Post by onlyMark on Apr 28, 2022 11:02:08 GMT
Is there a reason why you don't mention that there is a spoiler until after you tell what it is?
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Post by kerouac2 on Apr 28, 2022 12:32:48 GMT
Simple contrariness. It's not exactly a suspense movie. And I said nothing about the woman with cancer, the birth out of wedlock, the infidelity and the gay hookup.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 4, 2022 14:12:51 GMT
Sentinelle Sud was a much better movie than I expected. Soldiers returning from Afghanistan with PTSD are always depressing and movies about them never end well, but I am a Niels Schneider fan, so I wanted to see it anyway. Christian had a crummy childhood in foster homes until he was placed with Mounir into a home with a loving Kabyle woman. They consider themselves to be brothers and often speak Kabylian with each other, especially when they argue. They joined the army together and both went to Afghanistan, where something awful happened. Mounir was partially crippled and another comrade, Henri, became catatonic. So clearly things are not going to be fun.
It's the sort of movie where you can seen the tension building up and up and up (Schneider was extraordinary) and you fear that the inevitable explosion will come at any moment and be devastating.
But you know what? The end wasn't so bad after all, at least for Christian.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 4, 2022 14:55:03 GMT
Ténor is a feel-good movie and I love feel-good movies when they are not too stupid. This one passed the test for the scenario, but it was the director's first movie, so there were some clumsy scenes. It was also the first acting role of Mohammed Belkhir, a former The Voice contestant in France, and he pulled it off brilliantly. It's about Antoine, who lives in one of the rougher suburbs of Paris with his MMA fighting brother. He is a good student in accounting (which he hates) and a sushi delivery man, but his real love is beat box and rap. And of course his life changes when he makes a delivery one day to the Paris opera. In real life the actor (who goes by the name MB14), really is a major rapper and beat boxer but he has also discovered a passion for opera. There's not much of it in the trailer, but there is plenty in the movie, and it is his real voice.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 5, 2022 17:31:36 GMT
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is a total piece of shit. No surprise there. And there is just nothing likeable about Doctor Strange as a person.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 13, 2022 18:11:06 GMT
x Babysitter - hated this movie from Québec based on a play, never understood the point of it. ** Petite Leçon d'Amour - charming but unimportant French movie about a high school teacher being stalked by a free-spirited woman who found his folder in a café, including some distressing information. * Miss Marx - Belgo-Italian movie about the daughter of Karl Marx and her wild political life. The movie was not wild enough. She committed suicide in 1898. ** Les Passagers de la Nuit - a French family saga in the 1980s. I very much liked the previous film by this director, but I just never was able to get interested in this family. x On Sourit pour la Photo - a rather pathetic French family comedy. The marriage is falling apart but the father manages to impose a remake of their vacation in Greece in 1980, even forcing the adult children to go along. *** Tom - French movie about a mother living with her young son in a trailer in the forest. Mystery man appears, totally unwanted. It is the kid's father, fresh out of prison. And then there is the old lady in her crumbling house to whom the boy become attached. **** Tranchées - amazing documentary filmed two years ago about Ukrainian soldiers in their trenches in the Dombas, before the current war. *** Nitram - Australian movie about Martin Bryant the the Port Arthur massacre in 1996. Caleb Landry Jones won the award for best actor at last year's Cannes festival for this movie. I immediately looked up the details after seeing the movie, and it is quite accurate, even though the story is condensed about 80% from the actual events.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 29, 2022 16:37:59 GMT
* Hit the Road - Iranian road movie. I love road movies but this one did not thrill me. The family is going some place for a night of spectacular stars in the sky, where they camp out with a lot of other people. I liked that part but not really the trip to get there. ** Les Folies Fermières - gentle French comedy which would have been ridiculous if it were not based on a true story. A bankrupt farmer creates a rural cabaret (not a very good one) in his barn to save his farm. Mostly amateur acts which have fallen on hard times perform before rural folks who are just happy that something is happening in their village. During the closing credits, there were a lot of photos of the real farmer and his real cabaret to prove that they didn't make this up. ** The Duke - British comedy about a real event totally unknown outside of the UK. In 1961 a portrait of the Duke of Wellington was stolen from the National Gallery in London. Kempton Bunton goes on trial and confesses, but the trial is just as entertaining as the Johnny Depp trial. ** L'été nucléaire - French drama about a group of young people who hole up in a farm near the Nogent-sur-Seine nuclear power plant where there has been a serious accident. What impressed me about this movie is that it looks like it was made with a budget of about 200 euros but it manages to remain suspenseful. x The Northman - super production about nasty Vikings. Plenty of decapitations and other bloody events. * Crimes of the Future - David Cronenberg's latest weirdness. People are growing strange and useless internal organs which are sometimes removed and put into other people. It is rather illegal (as it should be) but this doesn't seem to stop any of them. x Don Juan - a French musical about an actor playing Don Juan and unhappy in love. *** Frère et Soeur - French drama about an estranged brother and sister who absolutely despise each other. They haven't seen each other for 15 years but their parents are in a horrific traffic accident. The mother ends up dying and the brother and sister finally speak but do not really reconcile. * Men on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown - French comedy about men on the verge of a nervous breakdown who are forced to go on some sort of nature therapy for several days. Badly written but well acted and we all love seeing manly men losing their manliness. *** Birds of America - documentary about American wildlife going to hell in a handbasket aong the Mississippi River ** Los Fuertes - Chilean movie that takes place in the wet and cold south. Lucas is about to go to architecture school in Canada but visits his sister before leaving. He unexpectedly falls in love with a local fisherman, Antonio, and well, you know... Frankly, it was the scenery that I found stunning.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 29, 2022 16:41:10 GMT
I have no intention of seeing Top Gun, for anybody wondering about that.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on May 29, 2022 17:10:36 GMT
I think I've only ever seen one Tom Cruise film..that was a science fiction one....Oblivion I think...
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Post by kerouac2 on May 29, 2022 17:14:32 GMT
But Tom also saved the world in Spielberg's War of the Worlds in 2005.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on May 29, 2022 17:18:32 GMT
Forgot about that one...2 then
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 1, 2022 12:08:09 GMT
Broadway is a definitely odd Greek movie about pickpockets living in an abandoned theatre. A young pole dancer runs away from her life and ends up with this band of misfits. There is also an extremely injured mystery man who has been collected by these people. He must not be recognised by any of the people looking for him, so when he recovers he ends up working as a cross-dressing street dancer while the others lift valuables out of the pockets of the assembled crowds. Obviously things are not really that simple, what with jealousy in the group, murderous gangland types and the monkey, not to mention the invasion of giant cockroaches and a stint in prison. It is a rather clumsy movie by a new director, but he has enough ideas to imply that he will surely succeed in the future.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 4, 2022 21:42:24 GMT
Jurassic World Dominion seemed to me like it lasted 5 hours instead of just two and a half, not because it was boring (it wasn't) but I don't know how they managed to fit so much ridiculous action in such a short period.
I did think that the initial premise was interesting. Since all of those creatures keep escaping in every movie, they have now spread across the entire world. Sometimes they are just minor pests and sometimes they are a real problem. As a co-producer of the movie, Malta took a real beating.
Anyway, the main group ended up in the Dolomites at the finish so whenever they make a sequel, it will probably start in Italy.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 8, 2022 18:15:44 GMT
* C'est Magnifique! -- This claims to be a cross between Amélie Poulain and Forrest Gump. A man is raised by his adoptive parents in a totally isolated area until the day they are killed by a falling tree, which also destroys the house. They also owned a house in Lyon, so the guy goes there, but he knows nothing about using money, paying for things, all of the usual stuff. Naturally, he meets a kindly woman with her own problems and things work out, even if he also knows nothing about sex. Ridiculous but goodhearted.
x Competencia oficial -- a Spanish billionaire finances a movie production because he wants to win awards. Three top stars are hired to ensure success. Penelope Cruz, Antonio Banderas and Oscar Martinez are all good, but I found the movie totally boring and pointless.
** Petite Fleur -- very odd Franco-Argentinian co-production. The Argentinian husband is fired in the first scene, so he becomes the househusband taking care of the newborn baby while his wife goes to work (he can hardly speak a word of French and is pretty much unemployable in Clermont-Ferrand). He soon meets a friendly neighbour but accidentally kills him. This is a bit worrisome. Even though he tries to erase all traces, he is pretty sure he is going to be arrested and go to prison. However, a couple days later, the neighbour is there again. So he starts killing him every Thursday after a good glass of wine and some classic jazz. The English language title of this movie is "15 Way to Kill Your Neighbour." It got a bit tiresome but ws pretty clever most of the way through.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 11, 2022 12:48:01 GMT
Alex Garland definitely has a sick mind and Men provides all the proof that you need. Young widow rents a beautiful country house to get over the trauma of her recent loss, even though she was about to divorce her husband. Things go downhill from there. There are definitely some ick! moments such as when a madman sticks his hand through the letter slot in the front door. Our lovely widow has already armed herself with the biggest kitchen knife and sticks it through the hand. The madman still pull his hand out of the slot as the knife slices it completely in two. Of course the trailer shows nothing.
After seeing that yesterday, I needed to purge my mind with a Japanese animé today, so I went to see Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko (Gyokou no Nikuko-chan). Nikuko is a grossly fat woman who has had a tough time in life. She has loved all of the wrong men who all ran off with her money each time. Each time she moved to a new city to begin again. Then she met a very nice man, but he disappeared without even taking her money. She tried to track him down to a fishing village, but she never found him again. Nevertheless she decides to settle there with her daughter Kikuko and gets a job in a restaurant, which is in perfect harmony with her love of eating.
The movie is more about the daughter, her school friends who are not always very nice. She is very attracted to a boy with OCD. His face contorts into awful grimaces from time to time, so he is not exactly the most popular kid in school. Kikuko worries about the fact that she has not yet had period and that her chest remains flat, real life problems that Disney or Dreamworks prefer not to address. Then she gets appendicitis. There is an upsetting flashback to the mother's early adulthood when she was working in the "adult" entertainment industry in Thailand. Kikuko is actually the daughter of her roommate who couldn't face having a baby and abandoned it. That's why mother and daughter do not look a bit alike. Anyway, the villagers come through to help and the mother might have found love again.
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Post by whatagain on Jun 13, 2022 8:14:06 GMT
I went to the movies this week end. I saw Dr Strange, a Marvel. I am not a fan of marvels, really not but i like Dr Strange and ... a marvel who doesn't want to live but is immortal.
Anyway, the movie was splendid. Fun, a lot of special effects, not too stupid or morale inducing.
Some scenes are real gems, like the ine in which music is used to attack the other with the actual notes/tunes ? Becoming kind of darts.
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