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jogatype8918
Reviews
Black Mama White Mama (1973)
If you like Coffy and Foxxy Brown, BMWM is for you!
If you come into BMWM with some background in the films P Grier has been in and have your expectations exactly where they should be (ready for silliness, lots of female nudity, overt sexual tones throughout and a purposeful lack of seriousness), then you'll enjoy this film. Even the opening scene with Markov staring at her soon-to-be sister-in-arms working the prisons' fields sets off an absurd tone that is hard to beat!
Tying things up at the end seems to be the films' weak point and while it does tie things up, it seems that having a brutal all out gunfight, which is almost a parody of itself since you have 20 people unloading dozens upon dozens of clips every minute with one guy rather unsuccessfully launching grenades into the battle arena with the camera capturing his look of concentration upon each successive fire, is the path of least resistance.
An enjoyable, easy-to-watch movie that will feel like a comfortable warm blanket!
Retour à Séoul (2022)
Please spare yourself unless you need to be reminded what a truly subpar movie is like
Seeing the trailer, I was expecting a sort of thriller and/or fantastical movie with IIRC a twist or something that would alter the movie.
In actuality what I got was an egotistical and miserable mess of a person who, perhaps we're supposed to take it from this angle, is this way due to being adopted as a baby and never understanding who she is even after arriving to Korea and trying to figure things out for herself. Needless to say, meeting her father and eventually her mother don't change who she is at all and it seems that she's a train wreck because that's just who she is.
Whoever did the editing or decided on it should be harshly reprimanded. Dancing sequences that add absolutely nothing lasting for 2-3 minutes? And the random almost-lesbian moments? (Ohhhh is it cause she misses her mom, I'd be shocked if that wasn't the reason, but what a dumb way to put that on the screen) It took me about 45 minutes to an hour to get totally fed up with the film after which I realized that it had been a VERY long time since I had had such a negative visceral reaction to a movie.
The script was terrible, the plot and the way it was fleshed out was terrible (the intense focus on her birthday, bringing up the question she always asks herself "did my mother ever think about me?" while chatting with a French daddy (aww she misses her father too I suppose) which turns into a Tindr hookup), her acting was atrocious (though for the most part the supporting actors did a good job though that could be just due to an easy comparison), editing was not harsh enough (it easily could have been 1h30 or just not made at all). (Also perhaps we can blame the poor acting on the script as well)
I can appreciate that being adopted and essentially abandoned by your parents as a child is an incredible burden, but the way this was portrayed in the movie resulted in no sympathy nor even understanding. Her out of control drinking just seemed to be her way of letting loose and the same goes for her "random" outbursts which were obnoxious, not funny in any shape or form, and after a point made me roll my eyes especially her telling her French beau "I could wipe you off the earth whenever I want (or something like that, I imagine due to the trauma of being abandoned by her parents but my god something so inept hasn't been uttered like that in a while), an allusion to her using the missiles she sells to be used for war? Ha, and then she proceeds to, after saying during dinner she doesn't drink or eat meat, to get totally plastered and wake up in an alleyway. Yes we understand you're toxic and an asshole to everyone and yes apparently even to this bf? Who flew 12-14 hours from France to meet your estranged father? Gimme a break, no one deserves that kind of treatment and yes everyone is struggling with different things by the way so don't feel entitled to act out.
Also, the movie of course needed to go back and forth between Korean French and English but the levels were all over the place and at times particularly poor to the degree that it didn't add to the complexity of this multilingual environment, but subtracted from it and made the film worse off overall since it seemed that the actors were in real time slowly translating for each other
I know movies don't need to have a point or a message to them, but this movie just makes me want to scream WHY? Why did you do this at all? I imagine it must be somewhat autobiographical, but there are plenty of other messed up characters in movies who at least make you acknowledge their struggle or potentially even sympathize. This movie shows a trash person trashing on everything around here into at least her early 30's with nothing at all to show for it.
The idea of this movie isn't bad, but once it turned into a script, got actors and was filmed, it was an unmitigated disaster. Movies don't all need to have a message, but this one did - maybe it's stop being an asshole?
On the other hand, hating some this much has made me feel quite alive and has allowed me to be reminded of what good cinema is supposed to feel and look like.
Dogfight (1991)
a fleeting feeling
While the characters that were created for Taylor and Phoenix to play were (IMHO) two-dimensional, the performances by both took these roles above and beyond and turned them into something that, while at times bordered on cliché phrases used by either a girl into the music of the 60's, or a jarhead, as it were, were utterly believable and seemingly natural.
Also, on a different note, I was taken aback by how River slipped into this role so seamlessly. It was great to have seen some movies of his and to think I had a sort of grasp on potential roles, being type-cast, but then to see him in this and see how he truly made the role his own, and how he came across, no, he was, so very genuine.