Trou de moviemoire

I watched an obscene number of films over New Year, but ask me to name them and I'm wracking my brain. The penultimate one was La Tourneuse de Pages with Catherine Frot - a French film about revenge. Revenge served cold after exquisite planning and meticulous execution. Added to that was a lovely score of music - Catherine Frot plays a professional pianist,  a magnificent country manor with indoor basement pool set 40km from Paris, and a delicious suspense throughout.

The one after that was L'Ivresse du Pouvoir which I didn't really understand. It was another French film - we'd run out of foreign action/thrillers by then - which was very much inspired by the Elf Affair. Isabelle Huppart plays a Juge d'Instruction who goes after big business corruption, abuse and political influence. A bit lacking in action... I sat through it as it sailed over my head.

I'm now in deep water trying to remember what else we saw. I know I have a bad memory but this is fairly recent history, and it's not like 'you seen one film, you seen them all' as they were all different. Come to think of it, many were not very good which is maybe why I'm having such difficulty remembering their titles.

I was going through a real 'chill in front of the tele' mode - didn't want to go to Nice, didn't want to go out, just wanted to plant myself on my lovely comfy sofa, heating on, and wallow in front of the tele. Preferably with my TWDB. Must be a mid-winter thing - it saps the energy, especially after the excitement of Christmas, travel and accompanying organisation.

It's no good, my memory is still a blank. I haven't even been able to shock myself into memory recovery, or shame my lazy brain cells into activity. No, they are all, themselves, sitting with their feet up watching tele in the cosy recesses of my skull. Try to stir things up a bit and they're out on strike threatening to wipe out the rather delicious memories of New Year's Eve and provoking flashbacks of my divorce years. The buggers.

So, while I would love to share with you my film reviews of the last week of 2009, I'm afraid that's all you're gonna get. The rest left no obvious mark on my conscious mind, so that rather puts them in their place, n'est-ce pas.

The next time we decide to rent a film, we're going to try and find one from the Le Point list which includes Benjamin Button, LOL, La Première Etoile, Neuilly Sa Mère, Very Bad Trip, Un Prophète, Slumdog Millionaire, Welcome, Irène etc. I may even remember enough to write a review of the less obvious ones. Yeah.

Film Review - 2012

I came out of the cinema this evening quite blown away by 2012. It was the first thing that my eldest had wanted to see since his birthday in September, so a late treat, but worth it.

The special effects are just stupendous. We were sitting in the second row so got the full blast, as it were, of the vastness of everything. The cinema was pretty packed and it was a good thing I'd reserved because I'm not sure we would have got in otherwise. The boys sat munching popcorn and drinking soda as the world was demolished before their eyes.

The story is fairly simple. Divorced father of two kids finds out about the end of the world due to excessive sunspot activity and sets out to save his family including his ex-wife and her new boyfriend. I won't spoil it by saying who'is still standing at the end, but it's no particular surprise.

I had some favourite moments. The first is when the family is in a Russian container aircraft full of luxury cars belonging to an oligarch. It's just about to crash and they all, including the Russian, his two boys and his chick, jump in a Bentley so they can drive out of the aircraft while it's still moving. The car won't start despite the hero's attempts with the key. Then the oligarch shouts for silence silence and says "Engine start..." the engine starts and he looks around and says "démarrage automatique, c'est ça qui m'a seduit" (yes, we watched it in French) with a beautific smile on his face.

The second was when a whole load of world leaders and powerful types were filing onto the vessels, and the engineer hero looks at them all, including a sheikh with his entourage and asks what the criteria for entering on the vessel is. He's told it's a genetic advantage for rebuilding the world. He looks at the sheikh and says "what's his genetic advantage?" and is told "money". I chuckled at that one.

I enjoy the simple pleasure of watching a disaster movie. This one doesn't have any great message, and some of the sincerety scenes are a bit predictable, but you do get a whole load of movie for your money. Recommended for breathtaking light entertainment.

Zavet

'Into the Wild', a movie with Sean Penn is the must-see film of the moment it seems. Pal B and I tried to get to see it last night, in the original version at the Diagonale cinema natch, but it was sold out.

What to do then? Give up and go to the pub? Go home? It was 6pm so too early for dinner which meant that food was out except for a MacDo. We opted for watching another movie and settled on a little Serbian something 'Promets-moi' (Promise me) directed by Emir Kusturica (never heard of him). It was not quite what I had expected.

The basic storyline is that an old bloke is living with his grandson, Tsane, in a tiny hamlet on a Serbian mountain. The only other inhabitant is the schoolteacher who is quickly made redundant by a bureaucrat from the town because she only has one pupil. Fearing imminent death, the grandfather sends his teenage grandson to the nearest town with instructions to sell the cow, buy an icon, a souvenir and bring back a wife. Despite many adventures, he manages this and the ending is happy.

Within the story are a number of themes. One is pulleys and traps. The grandfather is an inventive chap and likes to keep intruders out of his hamlet with various traps in the road that cars fall into thus discouraging an invasion...

Another theme is bestiality. Yes, I know... odd... You don't actually see it, of course, but it is more than evoked from within sheds. Tsane gets into trouble with some bandits who decide to steal his cow so they can use it for their own bestial ends. Luckily Tsane has found a couple of 'extended brothers' who help him combat the bandits and retrieve the cow which he then sells to buy the icon. A turkey is another target, and remarks are made about a wild boar...

Tsane finds a lovely girl to fall in love with and rescue from an imminent forced career as a prostitute and they escape in the boot of a Trabant driven by the brothers, and set to getting down to some serious nooky. It's all rather under-age too...

The most amusing theme is the love of the bureaucrat for the teacher who, herself, loves the grandfather. On arriving at the hamlet the bureaucrat's car ends up in a trap. When he next visits, he's fixed a bull-rack to his Trabant, and still ends up in a trap. The following visit sees him wooing her from the top of the road with his stretch limo Trabant complete with fridge and leather seats. She's impressed only to make the grandfather jealous.

All this bucolic clowning about finishes with two weddings, a funeral (some neighbour) and a final battle with the bandits which ends with the leader disappearing into a trap door.

The movie is odd, but is accompanied by a brilliant soundtrack of bouncy folksy music which adds greatly to the picaresque joviality of the story. Think Monty Python on speed and you'll have a idea of just how crazy it was. It didn't inspire me to rush out to watch the next Emir-directed Serbian movie that comes to town however...