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shrithe
Reviews
LazyTown (2002)
Well, I enjoy it, but my opinion is likely not the one you're looking for.
One of the other commenters on here said: "A prepubescent girl going camping alone with a grown man not related to her and sleeping in the same tent...I'm ashamed to say that we live in a day and age where we have to nit pick children's shows and think bad thoughts about this kind of thing, but it is what it is, and it's not right."
All I have to say is that's it's a good thing that this parent isn't aware of the internet following which has sprung up around this show. If you think the subtext in the show is bad, you should see what bored nerds photoshop into it.
At any rate, the show's fun, the internet humor makes it better, and I'm not at all the target audience of this show.
Hyènes (1992)
Should have been good.
I don't understand the glowing reviews for this movie. I suspect the previous reviewers don't actually know Durrenmat's actual work. What makes Den Besuch Der Alten Dame, the original play, work is it's humorous qualities. Durrenmatt believed that true tragedy no longer resonated properly with audiences, so he created a black comedy of epic proportions. It's grim, certainly, but it's also absurd and with a few characters who are over the top just the right amount. In Hyenas, all humor is gone. This movie attempts to be pure tragedy and, as Durrenmatt believed such an attempt would, it fails.
The movie does have it's virtues. The actress playing Ramatou is wonderfully stoic, and it suits the character. Setting it in rural Africa was a brilliant idea as well. The movie as a whole though is dry, slow paced, and often times grating (the two castrated characters are the comic relief in the play, and in the movie they've been turned into whimpering, horrible things, for example).
It's too bad. The American adaptation from the 60s stays truer to the play than this movie does, not in the details, but in spirit and tone. See that one instead. For that matter, it also has a major symbolic motif from the play that's entirely lacking here. When the American film version of a European play is better than a french version of the same play, something has gone terribly wrong. I give this movie a three, for the few things it did get right.