Change Your Image
viennasold
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
Rhinoceros Hunting in Budapest (1997)
So bad it's awful
Watched this out of curiosity (John Cale, Nick Cave) - of course, have to admit the title attracted me as well.
This'd look like a Caro - Jeunet produced David Fincher movie that'd be aiming at weak early 80's Jarmusch / Wenders with a twist of cheap (!) Andrew Blake soft porn, affected, fake Wong Kar-wai nonchalance and self-unaware Luhrmann kitsch... Name-dropping tells it all: no personality here.
Probably some of the worst acting ever. Plot and dialogues as convincing as a light- headed, slow-on-the-uptake (and homosexual repressed) teenager's. Vulgar music video effects and cinematography and very self indulgent 90's aesthetics. This movie may tend to embody a widespread, soul-empty kind of cinema that believes - believed even stronger in the 90's -, that form is pretty self sufficient.
Can't even begin to tell how bad this is.
The Ghost Writer (2010)
Weak, half-hearted effort to try revive classic political thrillers
Although McGregor clearly stands out (which is a good thing considering he'll show during most of the movie), acting is fairly poor here - especially the women cast. Music is omnipresent (and shall I say, of little interest - ever felt like since Glass's score for 'The Hours' lots of scores just sound quite the same?), trying to fill a void. Or maybe express what the actors don't convey. Except for one line of two, the dialogues are weak.
What would have saved the film from inoffensiveness and mediocrity could have been its photography, its rhythm and the scenario itself. But the bad taste, grotesque end of the movie makes sure you leave mostly dissatisfied and feel like you've wasted your time.
All in all, 'The ghost writer' feels like a weak, half-hearted effort to try and revive classic political thrillers such as 'Z', 'The Parallax view' or 'Marathon Man'.
L'épine dans le coeur (2009)
Very poor, voyeuristic effort
Gondry's movies are usually strong because they're visually original, creative and have a unique DIY innovative edge, while reflecting genuine humanistic tendencies.
The life of the director's aunt is used here in that vein - except there's willingly little to enjoy visually: Gondry attempts to shoot a documentary and aims at a certain 'realism'. Except here, maybe because he's familiar with the cast, which would allow him to ask intimate questions to relatives in the private sphere, 'realism' becomes 'voyeurism'. Questions asked to the poor cast are just plain bad taste. And the humanistic tendencies Gondry so beautifully explored in all his previous movies are travestied in facebook-era voyeurism.
A poor, disappointing 'effort' which can evoke, quite oddly, the most sadistic of Andre Gide. Except Gide is fully aware of what he's doing - which Gondry doesn't even notice.
Coal Miner's Daughter (1980)
Very good biopic - if you're not in love with Sissy Spacek yet, well...
Biopics often feel like legends being written from scratch, bordering on lies like wishful thinking dramas. They too often stand for shadows of hyper egos that want to rewrite their own (shallow?) history and therefore often miss the rightness that would make them gripping - often miss what would make good movies out of them actually ('Walk the line', 'Ray', Purple Rain').
Well, it's not the case at all with 'Coal Miner's Daughter'. True to life, maybe because it's based on an autobiography and does not pretend to be anything else than the portrait of a woman (Spacek - seldom was an Oscar so well deserved) beautifully served in a sort of trio where the woman, her husband and her friend (Beverly D'Angelo as Patsy Cline) sing together in a fractured, sometimes dissonant choir. But a choir that always feel right, to the point, and never over-streches. Certainly because the characters themselves have their lot of complexities - but never exist through them only.
Direction and photography go along the same line: they are honest and straightforward and don't go fancy.
'Coal Miner's Daughter' is therefore very refreshing. It just feels right all the time - and is casted as brilliantly as possible, with a personal, fascinating performance from Sissy Spacek (jeez, I even do prefer her singing to Loretta Lynn's) and marvellous, 'in tune', support from Beverly D'Angelo and Tommy Lee Jones - the only trouble with the latter may well be his hair which is so weirdly dyed (!). Apart from that, awesome performance - renders love, admiration, but also cupidity, loneliness, in great style.
All in all, it's feels good to, at least, find a biopic that's a great, non over-rated movie.
La planète sauvage (1973)
A successful neo-Biblical tale praising multi-culturalism and openness
Fra Angelico and Bosch meet Chirico and Dalí in a simple, metaphorical neo-Biblical animated tale praising multi-culturalism and openness.
Terr is Adam, dismissed from Eden because of the Forbidden Fruit - Knowledge. Except here, Knowledge is the very tool that will help Terr / Adam to free himself - and his race along with him...
A socialist interpretation can also be made here (let us not forget the movies dates back to 1973): Knowledge (therefore progress - from which industrialization and urbanization derive) is the tool that will help the masses - Humans - free themselves from the elite - here, the Draags.
Recommended!
El secreto de sus ojos (2009)
Weaker than Oscar's competitor 'A prophet'
'The Secret in Their Eyes' is a decent movie. But nothing, except maybe the dialogs during the first half-hour of the movie, where Esposito acts hectic and where the friendship between him and Sandoval is nicely conveyed, nothing really stands out here - be it the plot, which might appear complex at times - simply because the scenario itself should have been tighter and, at the same time, more profound; be it the music, which is fairly cheesy and annoying; be it the acting, which is on shaky grounds (the best actor may well be supporting cast Guillermo Francella).
So if you have the choice between watching this movie and 'A Prophet', which also was a 'Best Foreign Language Film' nominee for the 2010 Oscars, I can only recommend you choose the later movie.
'The Secret in Their Eyes': 6/10 // 'A Prophet': 8/10
Michael Collins (1996)
Underrated compared to many similar-themed movies - Recommanded viewing
Actually way stronger than Ken Loach's rendering of the Irish Civil War - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460989/
Solid acting (might be candid at times but, hey, this is a genre movie), great rhythm throughout a 2-hour film, true-to-life dialogs (you do feel Neil Jordan was born in Sligo), impressive sets (how did they manage the Four Courts bombing?)
All in all, a great movie: well-made, entertaining, that never stretches too far and leaves you thinking, as Michael Collins when in Dublin Castle during the transition ceremony: 'What's in a flag...'
As I tend to like Neil Jordan's movies, and to have an interest in Irish history, I was a bit scared of being disappointed. Well, that did not happen.
La souriante Madame Beudet (1923)
Madame Bovary doesn't fancy Faust
'La souriante Madame Beudet' narrates, with great economy and visual inventiveness, two days in the life of an early-XXth century Madame Bovary. The acting here can be related to expressionism, notably for Monsieur Beudet who recalls the freaky Doctor Caligari in more ways than one.
The sharpness of the narration, deserved by the minimal plot, allows the director to focus on the important issues - namely routine, small-town bourgeois life and dreams.
The use of objects is here both highly symbolic and narrative, as the way characters interact with them tend to define the characters and emphasize on their differences - eg.: the flower pot's position on the marble table embodies on its own the wish for either order and its counterpart the routine, or the will to escape and disrupt the way things are.
Irony is here too - and used with appropriateness to serve the plot in a somewhat cruel way. The title itself, you would have understood, is fairly ironic.
All in all, 'La souriante Madame Beudet' is an impressive, highly enjoyable poem in motion - the opening scene displaying sun shades on the sea and then the Claude Debussy score is pure magic, both cinematic impressionism and visual example of what V. Woolf called 'stream of consciousness'.
7/10