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Showing posts from October, 2019

243. Brazilian directors Juliano Dornelles’ and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film “Bacurau” (2019): Structurally similar to Hollywood films but refreshingly different in presenting a realistic canvas of Brazilian characters and contemporary problems of that wonderful, diverse country

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T he first impression of a viewer of Bacurau would be that it is structured in many ways similar to any recent Tarantino film or the way a traditional Hollywood Western is assembled: the bad guys making the life of the good people a living hell until the good people get external help to rid the bad guys while the audience experiences a cathartic orgy of violence and gore towards the end of the film, when the good people emerge victorious over the evil characters.  Is Bacurau a film that offers much more than that? The Cannes film festival jury thought it was the second best film in competition, sharing the honour with Les Miserables (2019), a film that had little to do with Victor Hugo. Was Bacurau less impressive than the Korean film Parasite , a film that won the top honour at the Cannes festival in the same category, which also had a similar orgy of violence at its end? Debatable, indeed, because Parasite deals with economic disparity in urban life while Bacurau deals with ...

242. Israeli director Nadav Lapid’s French/Israeli film “Synonymes” (Synonyms) (2019): A disturbing tale of extreme alienation and nihilism, contrasting the social realities of Israel with that of France

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S ynonyms ’ protagonist Yoav (Tom Mercier) is an Israeli Jew who grew up with his parents in Israel and has been through the mandatory military training and perfected his skills to the extent he can shoot with his sophisticated automatic machine gun to rhyme with musical pieces just for the fun of it and even claims to have perforated Arab terrorists with his shooting skills. That was Yoav’s past, glimpses of which are briefly shown in the film. The Yoav you see for most of the 2 hour-long   Synonyms is a young man so disillusioned with his native land, his parents, his native tongues (Yiddish and Hebrew), and  the Israeli armed forces that he has chosen flee his country and start a new life in France by mastering the French language with the aid of a dictionary. Yoav robbed of all his belongings almost freezes to death in an empty apartment While the original script, co-written by director Nadav Lapid and another individual named Haim Lapid (who might or might not be related)...

241. Japanese filmmaker and screenplay writer Hirokazu Kore-eda’s French/English feature film “Le vérité” (The Truth) (2019): Impressive, yet not as fascinating as a few of his earlier feature films

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H irokazu Kore-eda is undoubtedly one of the most interesting film-directors alive and making films today.   His talent to write an original script is just awesome. His scripts are so diverse in subject matter and yet linked by two common threads:   family ties and importance of ethics in life. Only a few of his films have original scripts written by someone else. He is remarkably close in his treatments of varied chosen subjects to the works of Naomi Kawase, another contemporary Japanese filmmaker, who also prefers to write her own original scripts. Perhaps it is more than a coincidence that French actress Juliette Binoche is the star of both their latest films: Kore-eda’s  The Truth and Kawase’s Vision (2018).  Fabienne (Deneuve, left) is the mother and Lumir (Binoche, right) is her daughter The Truth presents a tale of an aging and reputed French actress Fabienne (Catherine Deneuve) who is rich enough to spend decades in outer space to counteract natural aging ...

240. French filmmaker and screenplay writer Stéphane Brizé’s French feature film “En Guerre” (At War) (2018): France’s equivalent of Ken Loach never fails to impress

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Those who fight might lose but those who don’t fight have already lost.                                          -- Bertolt Brecht (opening quote of the film) A t War will pale in comparison to Stéphane Brizé’s 2015 film The Measure of a Man , another film on sudden layoffs and its effect on individuals and families of workers.   Both films have the team of Brizé and Oliver Gorce as co-scriptwriters.   Both films have the same the same lead actor Vincent Lindon who can be subtle at times and be realistically bursting with raw emotions at others. However, the knockout punch at the end of the 2018 film makes the entire later film worth your time. Strike or war at a miniscule level? S téphane Brizé’s 2018 film At War  creates an incredible documentary feel for much of the early part of the film—a tale of angry factory workers facing unemployment for the rest of the...