Mr. Film

"Get Out Your Handkerchiefs" is an excellent piece of storytelling and a refreshing film. It flows freely and is full of interesting and engaging twists, one of which is surprising but serves well in tying it all together.

Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere play two gentlemen at the mercy of an oddly ailing woman, Solange. Doctors are no help, and the two men obviously mean little to her, but they keep at it and decide that what she needs is a child, which she cannot give birth to.

Things happen and as the story unfolds, it brings the viewer in closer and examines happiness from an offbeat angle. If nothing else, "Get Out Your Handkerchiefs" is fun and engaging and should not be missed.

I have heard people laud this film for it's writing, it's directing, and it's casting. It's directing was fair at best, and it's writing was poor. Only the decisions to cast Norton and Furlong for the two leading roles were good. This movie suffers from organizational problems i.e. jumping from year to year like hopscotch, spending an extremely short amount of time on important scenes and vice versa, etc. Aside from the fact that it was interesting, the film was overdone and sophomoric. Only Norton's performance deserves any praise.

"The Official Story" won the Academy Award for best foreign film, but I do not believe it deserved it. The film is based in Argentina when the government dictatorship was making may people very angry, let us say. While public protests and outcries are at their peak, the mother of an adopted girl named Gaby, a child of a couple who was killed by the government, finds a woman who may well be her grandmother. The film follows a very melodramatic course as the mother and father prioritize.

Overall, the film is borderline good (I gave it a seven). The brooding mother, trying to figure things out about her daughter, brought little to the table in acting, in my opinion. I found the familiar relations between the father and his kin much more interesting than the slowly developing daughter conflict. There are better films dealing with similar topics, and if this film was made in 1986, "Ran" should have crushed it for best foreign film.