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Reviews
Hyôryû-gai (2000)
Great fun
What Takashi Miike is driven by is of course shock and irreverence. And He succeeded quite well here : lots of useless violence, lots of humor (the blood of the gunfighters drawing "love" on the ground), lots of bad taste. But "Audition" was characterized by the same ingredients. Not to be taken seriously of course. It's true that the codes of the genre are destroyed, played with : the hero is non-asian, the asians (all yakuza or triad members are worthless human beings driven by sadistic and violent impulses) And the end is a jewel in itself perverting the usual codes in the same way as the rest of the picture Great fun ! (another oddity : it must be the only Japanese picture in which half of the dialogue is in Portuguese...)
The Bourne Identity (2002)
Pathetic
Shows what a poor actor Matt Damon is when there is no director behind the camera. This movie, reducing the novel (not a masterpiece but an enjoyable thriller) to its rather poor plot line is one of the most pathetic thriller I have ever seen. Makes "Spy game" look like a master piece. Only the second-unit director did some good work, the car chase is not bad. The rest can be thrown in the depths of the dustbin of movie history : ridiculously bare plot, no real character only ridiculous stereotypes, nobody to direct the actors. A thorough disaster
Les rivières pourpres (2000)
A useless film
One wonders why this picture was made at all : the plot as such is totally unbelievable if not ridiculous, the characters (experienced loner cop versus younger one, quite fascinated) quite predictable, the ending totally murky and impossible to understand (maybe after several viewings but you'd have to have a masochistic tendency for that ; the idea being you have to read the book to understand fully what it's all about)and the acting is bad. Was the basic idea to show that French film makers are able to do as well as Americans in the genre that include "Seven" and "Silence of the lambs" ? If so, it is a total failure. It was quite a success though (and has a sort of cult-status as the first French serial killer film)and, it seems, considered as a good product to export. Strange.