Not only did this taught me about this massacre I didn't know about, but it's also a very poignant depiction of it. Dennis Villeneuve is such an excellent director.
Why is Sean Connery, from Scotland, playing a Russian officer? Why do the Russians even speak English. Alright I quibble. Actually, the first few dialogs of the movie are in Russian but then they switch to English on the word « Armageddon », which is the same in English and in Russian, and also a Michael Bay movie, although this has nothing to do with this trivia.
This is probably the saddest movie I've ever seen. One of the peculiar aspect of it is that it's a drama about people turning against an innocent man, but there is no one you can truly blame for this behavior. It's just a human relationships total clusterfuck with heart-wrenching consequences. It conveys such strong emotions. This is what I look for in cinema.
What is remarkable with this movie, apart from being an excellent drama in a first place, is how contemporary the camera work is. It's unbelievable that this was shot in 1941.
Best movie from Denis Villeneuve in my opinion. Not as epic or ambitious than Blade Runner 2049 or stuff like that, but it is such a powerful and solid thriller.
The second Michael Bay's escape from his Transformers franchise jail happens to be a pretty effective action flick. As expected there is zero subtlety in the treatment of an actual event, to the point where defending a military base against terrorists looks like defending it against zombies. Very cool.
One of the best recent horror movie. The concept is original, it goes directly against the traditional codes of the genre, and the director plays with our nerves by distilling such a frightening atmosphere even in normal scene.
This is the worst Pixar movie, which means it's an average animated movie. You couldn't make the story any less dull in its themes and morale and some moments are particularly awkward. Apparently the production suffered big turmoil, with major story revisions, turn-over in the crew, and so on. It shows.
The fundamental problem is that the implementation doesn't bring any more details than the abstraction. You have characters in the brain that are supposed to be the « internals » of the high-level emotional result and it just turns out that those characters are… emotions. Well thanks but this is useless, I can see the emotions directly by looking at the girl's face and reactions. The movie gets it when Joy gets lost out of the headquarters which therefore creates a depressive state in Riley. Here we have a non-trivial low-level mechanism that creates a high-level emotion. I also just moderately liked the sort of catalog of the different brain places (memories, abstraction, etc). It's like we're on an educative attraction for kids about psychology in Disneyland.
I would have said that the legal approach to the facts, with the ruling and the defense from the officer, is too didactic. But this is actually written so well and acted so well that I accept it as it is. And it's excellent.
Thursday 28 July 2016
permalinkOnce you accept the fact that this is nowhere near the elegance of the Steven Spielberg ones, but just a dummy blockbuster, it can be quite enjoyable.