Saturday, July 27, 2019
Friday, July 26, 2019
Wrong Elements (2016)
Victims of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army speak up in novelist Jonathan Littell's documentary.
Although it's solely victims and perpetrators retelling the atrocities and no explicit images, this documentary very well manages to give a harrowing picture of a genocide still ongoing.
Tamara Drewe (2010)
A young newspaper writer returns to her hometown in the English countryside, where her childhood home is being prepped for sale.
Meandering country town satire, only sporadically amusing.
Maltin***: "Constantly surprising lark of a film...Well cast and filmed on a beautiful location."
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
First Lines: Glen David Gold - Carter Beats The Devil
On Friday, August third, 1923, the morning after President Harding's death, reporters followed the widow, the Vice President, and Charles Carter, the magician.
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
Merci pour le chocolat (2000)
A young woman discovers that she may have been switched at birth and presents herself to her possible father And slowly discovers the dark secrets that connect her family with his.
Typical for its director this is a meticulously made satire of French/Swiss bourgeois society with a somewhat puzzling plot and an unexciting ending.
On re-watching: I still agree with my initial opinion; the ending is a bit disappointing.
Halliwell*: "Icy, ambiguous thriller that exposes the passionate screts that underlie an apparently conventional bourgeois family."
Maltin**1/2: "Subdued psychological thriller is mostly nuanced talk, with Chabrol favorite Huppert well suited to the role of perverse matriarch."
Universal Soldier (1992)
Private Luc Deveraux and his sadistic sergeant, Andrew Scott, got killed in Vietnam. The army uses their bodies for a secret project - reanimating dead soldiers as deadly obedient cyborgs. However, their memories come back too.
Well-made, but silly action vehicle for its two muscle men would like to be as good as The Terminator, but isn't by a far cry.
Halliwell (no star): "Science-fiction hokum intended to boost the appeal of its two action stars, done with enough energy and containing more than enough mayhem to appeal to fans of action movies."
Maltin**: "Van Damme and Lundgren - well, it's not exactly Tracy and March in INHERIT THE WIND. Hunks are well cast as rival cyborgs...Has the requisite number of explosions. The director sly keeps the grocery store Muzak going during Lundgren's one big emoting scene - right after he eats raw meat from a bin."
Monday, July 22, 2019
First Lines: Ken MacLeod - Dark Light
Rawliston sprawls; from space it's a grubby smudge, its smoke staining the glassy clarity of the atmosphere along fifty kilometres of coastline.
