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Reviews
La fabrique des sentiments (2008)
Boring and depressing
I saw this movie yesterday at the Berlinale festival with my girlfriend and we were bored to death. It starts out interesting, though. The somehow awkward situation of a speed dating is pictured, with surprising characters and portraying people who have all come with different ideas of how that could work out. From then on it all starts slowly going on a depressing way downward. We get to see that though Eloise has a successful career, she is unhappy. Then she has an affair with one guy who turns out to be an asshole, then she gets cancer, then the colleagues at work start chit-chatting about her, her granny is about to die, she starts an affair with another asshole... and all this time the movie tries to get more psychedelic to show the torment of that poor woman. And all the time I kept thinking: Hell, should a 37-year-old know that men can be untrue? That you should not invite weird underfxxxed misanthropic guys into your apartment and tease them? But we are supposed to feel empathy for her. I did not. Now you could say this is a movie that is not afraid of showing the sad truth of modern urban life. But I say it is just whiny and does not dare to make a real statement, instead follows an immature and superficial woman through all of her inner emptiness. Boring.
Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten (2007)
Disappointing
I love the music of the Clash and I love the music of Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros. I went to this movie hoping to learn about the man behind most of that. But I came out of the theatre not knowing much more about Joe than I already did after reading the entry on Wikipedia. The movie never really gets through to the person, his thoughts and feelings. What they did was to collect the little material that they had, shaky blurry videos and to interview some people about Joe Strummer at a camp fire. It turns out that most of these people knew him very little or not at all, and that the director just wanted them in the movie in order to have some more celebrities say, "Oh, he was such an inspiration to all of us". Like Bono or Johnny Depp (whom they seemingly asked to keep his pirate costume on to benefit from his current success in Pirates of the Caribbean). It seems that the director could not even wait until the body was cold before he jumped in to sell his version of "the greatest punk rocker and hippie at heart" that ever lived, sanctifying the person without really knowing enough about him.
Sure, being a fan i enjoyed seeing the images of the band, hearing the anecdotes behind the songs and such, but in the end I felt like what remained as the portrait of Joe Strummer could have easily been told in 60-90 minutes.
Go see the movie if you are a fan, otherwise better listen to some music of the Clash or even better the undeservedly unknown Mescaleros, where Joe Strummer reached the peak of his musical development before his death, melting all his rich influences together to one amazing sound.
Alexander (2004)
Epic and boring.
I liked this movie for the nice costumes and settings. The battle scenes are nice as they give you the atmosphere of a big battle. On the other hand they are very long and you do not really understand (unlike e.g. in braveheart) what the strategy is that made one side win. Mostly you see slaughtering and leaders giving orders to attack this or that. What bores me and is that this movie clearly implies that Alexanders conquest of Persia is nothing different than the latest American military interventions in the Middle East. The language suggests it and most of the time you even forget that those are Greeks, so much is their point of view identical to an American perspective: The brave Greeks come to give the Persians freedom, the coward Persian King (=Osama bin Laden) flees into the Mountains from where he wages a "guerilla war" (a modern term employed by Aristotle in an anachronistic way). Beside a series of too long battle scenes you get an insight of Alexanders political alliances and his personal motivations. That is a bit more entertaining as it tries to give the characters some individual trait and tries to give a possible reason why Alexander the great went pushing on and conquering half of Asia. It also shows how his way of making the conquered provinces his allies guaranteed a certain stability to his empire. All in all you get some nice epic shots and lots of costumes, a portrait of Alexander that makes all a bit more entertaining without providing a very elaborated story or remarkable play-acting and Americans conquering the Middle East with swords and spears.
Another thing that I find funny is that many Greeks were upset when this movie came to the theaters because it portrayed their hero as a bisexual. Any historical research would have shown the homophobic protesters that deep friendships between men that could also tend towards homosexuality were common among their ancestors.