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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 10, 2022 11:33:10 GMT
After just a few films, Jordan Peele is definitely the director to watch these days. Nope. Holy shit!
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 12, 2022 15:42:25 GMT
La très très grande classe is a French comedy of a genre that is probably even more popular in France than in the United States: tough school, terrible students who turn out not to be so bad after all when faced with real problems. Here we have a teacher completely disrespected by her class, but she has finally been approved for a transfer to the Lycée français in Barcelona. So she finally tells her students how much she despises them back, and they are a bit shocked for the first time. Unfortunately, her transfer is "suspended" the very next day pending the study of a competitor for Barcelona with diplomatic backing, an evil witch from a nearby Catholic school (If I say Audrey Fleurot, some people here will understand immediately.). And she has to face her class again the very next day. Obviously, things work out in the end, as they must in movies like this, and the teacher, who is not at all a beauty queen, also gets the hot guy who sees her heart rather than her body (a bit hard to believe, but I approve of the thought.).
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 17, 2022 15:54:29 GMT
I have actually been appreciating the French movie desert in August and did not go to the movies for 3 days. The only problem is that they will open the floodgates in two weeks and then there will be too many things to see.
Today, I went to see Vesper, a Franco-Lithuanian dystopian science fiction movie, a genre which will probably not persist. A young teen (Vesper) looks after her paralyzed father in a remote forest area. But he is usually with her in the form of a floating ball that talks. The forest is not remote enough because you would not believe the number of fistfights that take place in this area, I'm not sure why. They all seem to want to kill each other but for some reason nobody dies. In other areas, there is an elite living in floating fortresses or something. I don't know why (or even if) the elite don't like the people on the ground -- we never see them. Anyway, Vesper is involved in "bio-hacking" to get seeds that will feed everybody. I never even understood why they were needed, because the forest looked quite lush to me, even though near the end there seem to be some hostile alien plants that can kill people. How did they get there? Bad people come and kill the father and blow up the house, but Vesper has her seeds and escapes with some sort of blonde android girl who should be there. With other refugees (?) they make it to a big camp in the forest, and Vesper throws her seeds to the wind. What the fuck?
I can only imagine that there was a plan to make a series of movies, but I just don't see that happening because this one was too awful.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 18, 2022 15:54:36 GMT
Where the Crawdads Sing has had mostly bad reviews (34% positive on Rotten Tomatoes compared to 100% for Vesper), but I am a sucker for sagas that continue for years with all of the obligatory sorrows and a few joys that these stories contain. And on top of that, anything filmed in the Louisiana bayou country (filling in for much less lush North Carolina) gets extra points from me. The story was totally predictable (who cares?), the nasty people were very nasty and the good people were very good. No nuances here. I must give a special mention to sleaze bag Harris Dickinson whose career I have been following for some time, particularly since I watched The King's Man again yesterday in which he is the noblest of noble sons. I first took note of him when he was starting out and played a gay hustler at Coney Island in Beach Rats -- the most impressive thing about this being that he is from London but was totally convincing as a lowlife New Yorker. Okay, I had major doubts about his accent in Crawdads, but he tried really hard. One thing about the movie -- I did not like the syrupy Hollywood score, and I totally despised the closing credits song by Taylor Swift.
I have not read the novel, so I do not have the slightest idea if it was betrayed or not in this adaptation.
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Post by htmb on Aug 18, 2022 16:06:53 GMT
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 18, 2022 18:48:30 GMT
Unfortunately, the NYT blocks me behind their paywall.
However, it only took a moment to find all of the information on the subject. Seems like a tempest in a teapot to me. Even if the author (or her husband) killed somebody in Zambia, the plot of the movie goes in a completely different direction. So if Zambia gets its hands on them, it isn't because of the book or the movie.
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 19, 2022 1:36:05 GMT
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 19, 2022 12:50:18 GMT
La Verónica is a very dark Chilean film made using an unusual technique. Every scene of the movie is a head shot of the main character, and everybody else appears either in the background or beside her or as an off screen voice. Veronica is an internet influencer, married to a popular football player, and she lives for Instagram, Facebook, etc. To get an advertising contract, she has to get up to 2 million suscribers, and she will stop at nothing to do it. Unfortunately she has a dark secret in her past which is bound to come out sooner or later.
It is particularly cruel when making selfies with her BFFs in all of those ridiculous poses that all of those people do. She often orders them to "look stupid" because that makes a better vacuous picture. She does one over again "because you looked like you were thinking."
This is all very nasty and will never be seen by the sort of people who need to see it.
The French trailer has a somewhat different view of the film.
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Post by rikita on Aug 21, 2022 19:24:00 GMT
I have actually been appreciating the French movie desert in August and did not go to the movies for 3 days. The only problem is that they will open the floodgates in two weeks and then there will be too many things to see. Today, I went to see Vesper, a Franco-Lithuanian dystopian science fiction movie, a genre which will probably not persist. A young teen (Vesper) looks after her paralyzed father in a remote forest area. But he is usually with her in the form of a floating ball that talks. The forest is not remote enough because you would not believe the number of fistfights that take place in this area, I'm not sure why. They all seem to want to kill each other but for some reason nobody dies. In other areas, there is an elite living in floating fortresses or something. I don't know why (or even if) the elite don't like the people on the ground -- we never see them. Anyway, Vesper is involved in "bio-hacking" to get seeds that will feed everybody. I never even understood why they were needed, because the forest looked quite lush to me, even though near the end there seem to be some hostile alien plants that can kill people. How did they get there? Bad people come and kill the father and blow up the house, but Vesper has her seeds and escapes with some sort of blonde android girl who should be there. With other refugees (?) they make it to a big camp in the forest, and Vesper throws her seeds to the wind. What the fuck? I can only imagine that there was a plan to make a series of movies, but I just don't see that happening because this one was too awful. in some parts of Germany, a "Vesper" is a small meal or snack. So, the name sounds really odd to me as a name of a person ...
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Post by onlyMark on Aug 21, 2022 20:11:35 GMT
Vespers also means evening prayers.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 23, 2022 15:04:36 GMT
America Latina is a claustrophobic creepy movie by the Italian D'Innocenzo twins. A happily married dentist with two daughters and an elegant house discovers a girl tied up and gagged in his abandoned basement space. He has no idea how she got there and wants to release her and call the police, but she shrieks so loudly that he gets scared and gags her again. What if he is involved somehow? He has a friend with whom he drinks heavily and sometimes he doesn't remember the night before. Or maybe his friend did it? He tells his family that there is a flood in the basement and that he has locked it for safety reasons until a plumber can come. Things just get worse and worse... At one point he digs a grave in the middle of nowhere, and that's never a good sign.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 24, 2022 11:38:04 GMT
La dérive des continents (vers le sud) / Continental Drift (to the South) is a Swiss movie which does not have nice things to say about how the EU handles migrants. It focuses on a French aid worker (Isabelle Carré) who is stuck with organising a visit by Macron and Merkel to a refugee camps in 2020. It is supposed to look unscheduled and authentic, so the EU workers work like crazy to make everything fake. It is a very nice camp with excellent infrastructure on a former NATO military installation, so they look for an empty parcel of land to set up some miserable tents, to which they add garbage. A French speaking refugee has been recruited for a fake registration interview, but he speaks perfect French (he is actually a literary translator), so that won't do either. They want someone who can barely express himself with simple workds and a lot of mistakes.
There is a secondary plot where the French aid worker runs into her estranged son who is working for an alternative NGO which opposes most of that the EU is doing. The young man has a lot of issues with his mother, who left home after the divorce and the discovery that she was a lesbian.
Well, Merkel and Macron never come and the entire continent goes into lockdown due to covid.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 7, 2022 15:38:02 GMT
La Dégustation is the sort of movie that seems to me to be made for export for spectators who are in love with certain aspects of French culture, in this case the wines of Burgundy. I was bored from start to finish even though the totally competent actors did their best. Isabelle Carré and Bernard Campan made a sensational movie together long ago (2002) called Se souvenir des belles choses (Beautiful memories) about a 30 year old woman with precocious Alzheimer's. Carré won a César for best actress back then. So here they are again with no César on the horizon. Campan has a lovely wine boutique and Carré is involved in church charities. They get together after a few obstacles. Big deal.
I actually went to see Everything Everywhere All at Once in 4DX. It nearly knocked me out of my seat several times (literally rather than psychologically), and I have to say the 4DX really overdoes the effects most of the time. Why rattle your nerves when somebody is just knocking on the door? You already know that it is about a Chinese laundromat owner who is plunged into the multiverse, much much better than that Marvel Doctor Strange crap. Unfortunately, I am unable to explain the plot. The universe where everybody had hot dog fingers really creeped me out. Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis are excellent.
Le Visiteur du Futur is not good but it is extremely enjoyable to certain categories of young French viewers (as evidenced by today's screening) because it is full of cameos by French YouTube superstars (nobodies to the rest of the world). Actually, I found the special effects rather impressive for a cheap French movie. Some people are plucked from the present to show them how awful the world has become 500 years later due to that stupid nuclear power plant. Can anything be done to change the past?
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 8, 2022 15:45:29 GMT
Kompromat is a very effective thriller based on a true story that was in the French press for several months. The head of the Alliance Française in Irkutsk (Siberia) is suddenly arrested on a fake charge of paedophilia because somebody at the FSB (ex-KGB) hated him. He is suddenly thrown in prison and beaten to a pulp by the other prisoners (because that's what you do with a paedo). But then he is put in a solitary cell for protection and finally released to go home with an electronic ankle bracelet. The French embassy in Moscow has no time for this sort of crap and doesn't do much. With just a couple Russian allies, he finds out that it is certain that he will be convicted on the totally fake charges for 10 to 15 years of hard labour. The advice: RUN! Easier said than done, although he discovers that wrapping your ankle bracelet in aluminium foil screws up Russian technology. He tries to get to Mongolia and fails and then he manages to sneak into the French Embassy in Moscow, which is not thrilled at all (because Russia is very important and you don't want to piss them off). But he might be stuck there forever (like Julian Assange in London), so he has to sneak out of there and try to get to... Estonia.
Of course, I already knew that he succeeded but the suspense of the film is very efficient. Most of it was filmed in Lithuania.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 10, 2022 15:03:18 GMT
Revoir Paris (Paris Memories) is a very painful film for Parisian audiences. It is about a woman who survived a terrorist attack in a café, on a night when several cafés were attacked. She has forgotten what happened that night but needs to find out. Little by little, it comes back in flashes, real or imagined? It was a horrible night, both in reality and in fiction.
Rodéo is about a tough motorcycle girl. She wants to join the guys doing their wheelies and other dangerous maneuvers on abandoned roads. They want her to stay at home and be a girl. Well, that's not going to happen. She muscles her way into the group, especially since she is good at stealing motorcycles for resale and/or spare parts. She meets a lot of bad people, even worse than the first ones. Luckily it ends well because she crashes her chopper and burns to death. Problem solved.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 11, 2022 17:18:45 GMT
La Page Blanche (The Blank Page) is adapted from a novel and is the sort of "charming comedy" that makes me cringe too often thinking about the real life aspects of the situation. A young woman suddenly loses her memory for no apparent reason. She is sitting on a bench and then "who am I? where do I live? where do I work?" Luckily, she has enough things in her bag to find the address of her apartment, but that doesn't help much. She doesn't know the password of her computer or the name of her cat. Obviously, she gets a few clues and tries to improvise her life. She finally tells a colleague about her problem but "you always ignored me before! Your friends were those other two." Also there is a colleague with whom she is clearly sleeping and who grabs her immediately in the staff elevator, but there are enough other clues to make her wonder if she is a slut.
Things like this do not amuse me. Little by little, she finds sufficient things to put her life back together, the traumatic event that caused this problem, etc... And she falls in love with the right guy after considerable hesitation.
This feels like perfect fodder for an American remake to me.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 14, 2022 18:41:57 GMT
See How They Run is appallingly boring and horribly acted. Only Saoirse Ronan is excellent and shines through the shit.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 15, 2022 5:22:28 GMT
Tout le monde aime Jeanne is a mostly boring Franco-Portuguese comedy. I didn't care what happeed to any of the characters, but the scenes of Lisbon were nice. It looked to me like the kind of movie that certain actors accept to make just to be on holiday instead of really working. (The purported plot is that Jeanne has to empty and sell her mother's apartment in Lisbon where she grew up.)
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 15, 2022 19:49:11 GMT
I was not personally enthralled by 3000 Years of Longing, but the acting and the visual effects were excellent. It's just that a love story between an old maid (?) and a djinn is a little hard to digest. The djinn tells (and shows) all sorts of stories of his unsuccessful attempts to obtain his freedom in the past. They are all rather extravagant of course, and now here he is with Tilda Swinton in Istanbul. And she doesn't want to make wishes (she is weird -- I couldn't stop thinking of the various ways that I would phrase my own wishes.). Oh well, I guess it is all for the best in the end.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 18, 2022 17:12:20 GMT
Sometimes I hate WTF movies and sometimes I love them. I loved Tout Fout le Camp ("everything's going to shit" athough I believe that the official English language title is "Thick and Thin." It's about a small time reporter in Amiens sent to interview an extremely marginal politician. And then their adventure starts, going to Berck on the coast where they encounter a weird brother and sister, and then they all break into an isolated manor. There is vomiting, bullet wounds, a crazed grocer and confused police. Just to give you an idea of how marginal this movie is, the two main characters at the beginning of the trailer really look like that in real life.
Chronique d'une liaison passagère (Diary of a Fleeting Affair) is about the traditional French theme of having a love affair with someone other than your spouse, but it is treated very differently and is full of surprises. The man is very much aware that he is not a heartthrob but this doesn't stop the woman at all. They see each other once a week and then more often, not always for sex because they enjoy spending time together. Obviously there is no way that this is going to work. This movie will do well overseas.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 20, 2022 12:32:49 GMT
Fogo-Fátuo is a strange Portuguese movie about a deposed royal family living in the forest. The son, a prince, wants to be a fireman, and that's where it all turns into a gay musical before finally ending in the year 2069.
Mia Hansen-Løve has made a number of tepid civilised movies, well planned and executed. The last one was Bergman Island, which I'm sure I mentioned here some time back. She was at the screening last night and said that this movie was not like her others because it was urgent and personal Un beau matin (One Fine Morning) is about a young woman whose father is in the downward spiral of degenerative cognitive decline. It's not Alzheimer's but it might as well be. She seems to be the most affected by the situation even though other family members are there to help. She is raising her daughter alone and has a frustrating love affair with a married man. So what else is new? I can attest that all of the nursing home and hospital scenes were completely accurate. They display their real names, and I have been to them. And the patients/residents that you see are the real ones (dutifully listed in the final credits). Yes, it is a nightmare, but it is also real life. A saw no reason for Léa Seydoux to be so upset about it, but I guess it's the age difference. When I faced all of that I was much older so I wasn't as shocked. Léa can't even take her father to the toilet and has to get someone to do it for her. It's still an excellent movie, and I sympathise very much with Mia Hansen-Løve, even though she isn't as unique a she seems to think that she is.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 21, 2022 16:52:13 GMT
Don't Worry Darling was much too creepy and upsetting for me to appreciate it. Perhaps women should be prevented from making movies. (This is a joke.) It is sort of a mix of The Truman Show, The Stepford Wives and one of the more nightmarish episodes of Black Mirror. I wonder how many Harry Styles fans will be tricked into seeing it.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 22, 2022 13:29:38 GMT
Les enfants des autres (Other People's Children) is another "woman's film." And I don't mean a rom-com but basically a movie that could only be made by a woman. It's about the desire for maternity at age 40 and settling for being the maternal figure of her lover's daughter. Except that the daughter still has a mother whom she sees every week. The creates the kind of torment that some men might understand but they could never make an authentic movie about it. Escpecially since once a strong bond has been established, what happens when the father dumps you? Ouch.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 27, 2022 15:26:55 GMT
A propos de Joan (About Joan) is a rather non commercial movie starring Isabelle Huppert, but she is such a star in Europe that she can do whatever she wants, very much including non commercial movies. The plot unfolds in non chronological order where we see Joan as a young pickpocketer in Ireland, a young unwed mother, a successful book editor in Germany and France. Obviously she has complicated relationships with her Irish lover, her German lover and her son, who drifts in and out of her life... She also has a mother who abandoned her to live in Japan. I was fascinated but it is not for everybody. And the devastating plot surprise will not please everybody.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 30, 2022 17:13:23 GMT
Triangle of Sadness richly deserved its Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival. It totally spit-roasted the rich and the beautiful, basically all of the people who attend such festivals. In spite of its length (2h30) I already feel a need for a second viewing.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 30, 2022 19:04:39 GMT
Jumeaux mais pas trop (Sort of twins) is one of those silly French comedies that gets more and more serious as it progresses. A young (white) right wing politician running for office suddenly discovers that he has a black twin brother with a completely different social status. How this happens is explained but it not really important for the plot. But one thing that grates is the fact the the white one was raised in a wealthy family while the black one was dumped in an orphanage. Obviously, this is the crux of the movie.
Both of them investigate their past, but the answers are even less satisfying. It turns out that the white one was adopted, too -- he was just luckier. But they are still twins. Finding their birth mother doesn't really help...
Oh, I just can't explain it all, but it wasn't bad. Definitely fodder for an American remake except for the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito were also twins once (I never saw that movie), so that might be enough for the American public.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 30, 2022 19:25:54 GMT
Maria Rêve with the immense Karin Viard is a relatively minor film, but it is charming and the most important point for me was that it was filmed in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. This building along the Seine has always fascinated me, partly because it is historic but even more so because two of my friends were students there, and they never told me anything about it, perhaps because neither of them later pursued a career in art (one is the financial officer of a suburban high school after three years in Mulhouse and the other is a webmaster of the Bibliothèque de France). Anyway, this movie finally showed all of the inner workings of the Beaux Arts, the classrooms, the workrooms and all of the hidden areas.
As for this movie, a cleaning woman joins the staff and it is clearly a totally different world for her. She is married to a very ordinary Portuguese worker but finds herself attracted the a very ordinary head janitor. Not really what one would expect in a rom-com.
It is an excellent movie.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 2, 2022 16:10:49 GMT
Poppy Field is a rather unexpected Romanian movie which has nothing to do with poppies or fields unless there is some symbolism that I am missing. It is about a Romanian gendarme with a variable sexuality who is visited by his French Muslim boyfriend. But this has very little to do with the plot, because 90% of the movie takes place in a downtown cinema where the police have been called. Conservative Orthodox demonstrators have interrupted the screening of a lesbian movie. One of the spectators recognises the gendarme as a former relation and gets a bit roughed up by him because it is out of the question to be outed in front of his colleagues (or anyone else for that matter). Nobody is really sure what happened to get a bloody nose, but the guy wants to file a complaint. The gendarme's colleagues want to protect him because they believe that it is a trumped up charge, but the police chief is not as relaxed. Anyway, the director has apparently worked mostly in theatre, and this is his first film, which looks like a filmed play since everybody is stuck in the same place during the entire film in groups of 2 or 3.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 4, 2022 16:58:41 GMT
The genre of "school" movies continues to flourish in France, but La Cour des Miracles is a bit different. It is in the common setting of an underprivileged suburban school close to Paris, but this time the focus is on the staff rather than the students. They are upset (at least some of them) that a bourgeois development is being built right next door with its own school, and they will continue to have all of the kids from immigrant families while the other school will fill with white gentrified "Parisians."
A new ecologically motivated teacher says that they just need to make their school more attractive by creating a Green ecological school. Reaction is mixed among the staff, but most of them finally sign on. The school is transformed with chickens, a vegetable garden, a recycling centre, etc. It becomes a lovely place.
But you know what? The film is quite realistic and not a single one of the new kids comes to their school after the summer holidays. Oh well.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 4, 2022 17:37:19 GMT
Le soleil de trop près is a painful movie set in Roubaix about a woman and her schizophrenic brother. She and her husband are housing him after his release from the hospital. He acts almost normal when he is on his medication, even though it needs to be doubled at one point. But just like most schizophrenics, when he feels normal he thinks that maybe he can stop his pills. Wrong move.
Movies like this stress me out even more than horror movies because at least in a horror movie you know that something awful is going to happen, often more than once. In this kind of movie, your dread just keeps increasing and you keep imagining all sorts of terrible possibilities without knowing if they will really happen.
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