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Reviews
It Must Be Heaven (2019)
Well Filmed But OH So Dull
The cinematography is great and the film has some lovely scenes, but it drags on and on. This would have been a fantastic 30 minute short film, but the scenes go on endlessly - and I know that is the point, but it doesn't make it any more enjoyable to watch. I'm glad I missed this in the cinema last week when it played here - I would have walked out. Instead, we were able to watch the film on fast forward after realizing that, three hours into the film, we had only actually gone through 45 minutes.
While the film is an interesting way to examine the subjective nature of time and how only 90 minutes can seem like eternity, it is not a great way to spend an hour and a half.
Toni Erdmann (2016)
How did this movie win ANY awards?
Ok, the acting is decent -- supposing you want to watch a movie with completely mundane, utterly banal and unlikeable characters. It's like watching a movie that's focused entirely on the boss from Office Space. The female lead is cold, unlikable, boring, and does not change even to the end of the film. The dad is an utter weirdo and I'm not sure-are we supposed to sympathize with him in some way? He's a creepy loser and none of his jokes are even remotely on point. The only thing I agreed with the female lead is that her dad is a complete deadbeat.
That's fine, having lead characters that are boring and unlikable, but the movie drags on and on and on and on. The scenes are incredibly long cuts and serve more to make you squirm in your seat with discomfort, or fall asleep from boredom. It took me 3 tries to finish the film. My wife walked out the first time after the first hour, and I stopped it too because it sucked, even though we had high hopes.
It is ABSOLUTELY not a comedy in any way. It is a drama, but not a very good drama. There's kind of a rule of thumb in writing: is this the most interesting part of your character's life? If not, then why don't you write about -that part- of their life and not this part?
Tour de Pharmacy (2017)
Not Quite Up to 7 Days in Hell
I loved 7 Days in Hell so I'd been looking forward to this for months, but it kind of fell flat even though I laughed quite hard at the trailer itself, which in my opinion gave away the best jokes of the show.
It could be because I've seen 7 Days in Hell that the humor felt somewhat less original the second time around, as a lot of the jokes are in principle the same (e.g. the balls underwear in 7 Days --> the see-through microdick suit in this one). I think it's just too short to flesh out any of the characters properly, which was done perfectly with Kit Harington and Andy Samberg in the slightly-longer 7 Days. The Lance Armstrong 'joke' was fantastic, but overplayed.
That said, I'd definitely look forward to a "series" of these, but I'm not sure I'd recommend this one to friends like I did with 7 Days.
Moonlight (2016)
An Utterly Average Film
Like many of the top-rated comments here, I did not know anything about this film going in other than it won a billion awards and every critic loved it.
It's an incredibly average coming-of-age film. Every part of it is cliché. I can only imagine that the reason it was nominated for everything is as a counterbalance to the Oscars-so-white problem last year, and for the two extremely brief (and completely inconsequential to the film) clips related to the main character's homosexuality. Seriously, it's about 45 seconds of the entire film, if you cut just those 45 seconds there would be nothing alluding to homosexuality in the entire film. If you cut those 45 seconds, I can only imagine it would have lost a tremendous amount of critics' supports, even though they're otherwise utterly irrelevant to the film's story. I guess professional critics have to worry about being branded as homophobic racists.
The casting for the main character in the third act was also jarring. Both of us spent the first 10 minutes of the last third unsure if the main character was the same guy we had been following the whole film, or someone else that was randomly thrown in. If they can bring the actor who played Grand Moff Tarkin back to life for the new Star Wars film, they could have done a much better job making Chiron resemble himself consistently across all three acts (the child and teenage actors look quite similar).
If you absolutely love coming of age dramas with utterly awkward and undeveloped protagonists, then you'll like this film. If you expected it to be special or unique, then ... watch something else.
Ali was good in it, easily the highlight of the film. Too bad he's only in the first third. He's the only character with any dialogue or character.
Seriously there is almost no development of the main character the entire film. He starts and ends an awkward, un-relatable kid who can't utter more than two words a minute.
Crépuscule des ombres (2014)
Two Films, Mashed Into One
The film starts out with background into the two different character arcs: the young Algerian growing up in the northern fringes of the Sahara, and the young Frenchman growing up in France. The movie fast forwards to the beginning of the Algerian War of Independence, which pits our two protagonists against one another.
About halfway through the film, the characters come together to get to know one another and to see the hypocrisy of both characters' sides—although being an Algerian director, it unsurprisingly focuses far more on the French hypocrisy than the Algerian independence fighters'.
After that point, the three characters who have become principle are suddenly wandering the Sahara lost. We are told that they are somewhere in Algeria, within a couple hundred km of the Moroccan border, and from their border crossing it would be not too far from Berkane. Somehow, they end up getting to Reggane a good 1000 km to the south—on a single tank of jeep fuel and a few days walking. In the meanwhile, these super marathon sprinters get to know one another and understand the other's narrative. Until it turns out at the very end that no, they actually don't, and they're all stubborn and unlikable. Then, the movie suddenly ends. The director and script writer clearly had no idea how to tie up the story, so they suddenly teleported the main characters a few hundred kilometers and deus ex machina'd an ending.
Unfortunate because the cinematography is great and the idea is underexplored for the French-Algerian War (although you can find no shortage of other films with similar motifs; Clint Eastwood's two Iwo Jima movies come to mind).
If you want to watch an Algerian film, go for it, it's not a bad film by any means, but consider turning it off as soon as the main French character goes off with the support French character and the main Algerian character into the jeep. Just quit the movie then and imagine your own ending. It'll be better than where the film actually goes.