Tubi is a free movie site, but they do have short ads during the movies. This movie is from Mongolia.
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Due to the positive Covid result l have and the need to isolate for a week, l have had the opportunity to go search for a few more movies. I saw this one, this morning.
La Pelle DellâOrso. (The Secret of The Bear). 2016 92 mins 8/10
I think something got lost in the translation from Italian, as there didnât appear to any secret attached to the bear. The bear in question is a loner that has returned after many years to terrorize the village of Coste, high in the mountains of Venetto. After its reappearance the local villagers are at a loss as to what to do next. In steps Pietro Sieff (Marco Paolini who also co-wrote the screenplay). Sieff, like the bear, is also a loner, a surly widower with a 14 year old son Domenico (Leonardo Mason). Or more correctly he can be seen as an outcast, part-time drunk and the villager loser. He takes on a bet to rid the village of the bear. He sets out alone, but his son soon decides to join him in the hunt. On the way to catch up to his father young Domenico meets Sara (Lucia Mascino) a friend of his dead mother. Their meeting has him wondering about his mother and how she died.
Pietro keeps mostly to himself, but as the pair climb higher into the mountains, they begin the process of getting to know each other better. The dialogue is sparse, as is the action. This is a movie about the development of a relationship that had looked strained when in the village. While life at the village level is harsh, the villages in the region are postcard pretty, and the towering mountain landscapes that dominate the area are stunning and memorable. Paolini is outstanding as Sieff, in a largely unsympathetic role, while Mason grows into his role more as the movie progresses. The direction is lyrical, unhurried and unobtrusive, allowing the small cast time and space in which to develop their roles. Overall, a commendable and different style of film.
Just saw your post in here. Youâre right ⊠this site is a treasure trove and the indexing helps hugely. So thanks for posting it. And I suspect thatâs me gone into the virtual cinema for the next few months.
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The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson)
I am a HUGE Anderson fan but was disappointed. Breaking the film into multiple short stories held so much promise but eventually only a couple actually rose to the occasion.
The translation is wrong.
Itâs the skin of the bear, as written, or the bear skin.
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Thanks for the clarification, I am not surprised that something was lost in translation. There was a link in their IMDB entry for this movie to a Facebook page. l clicked on that and left them a message to say l had submitted this review to IMDB, which didnât have one. l was pleasantly surprised a few hours later when they contacted me a couple of times to talk movies. It makes the Covid isolation a little easier to bear (pun intended).
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I watched two wanker-type movies yesterday on the Criterion channel.
The first was Lola, a fairly early French New Wave film by Jacques Demy. He made Les parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, in which the dialogue is entirely sung (music by Michel Legrand) and which made Catherine Deneuve a star and which I love, but Lola (Anouk AimĂ©e) is more conventional and nowhere near as good. It has a very trite plot and I didnât really care about Lola or any of the other characters.
The other was Gas Food Lodging, by Alison Anders. Iâd seen it before when it first came out in 1992 and liked it a lot, although when I watched it again last night (after Ash) there were huge sections of which I had no recollection at all. Itâs about a single mother and her two daughters who live in a trailer park outside of Laramie in Texas. The mother is played by Brooke Adams (who I fell in love with in Days of Heaven); the older daughter, who is a âdifficultâ teenager, is played by Ione Sky (Donovan Leitchâs daughter); and Donovanâs son (also called Donovan Leitch) is also in the film. Itâs a kind of female coming of age movie, I guess. Beautifully filmed by somebody called Dean Lent. It only gets 6.7 on IMDB, but Iâd give it about 7.5. There are a few slightly clunky moments, but mostly it has a lovely mood about it.
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Bizzare movie
Yes. And like a lot of David Lynch movies, goes nowhere in the end. Eraserhead is the worst Iâve seen. I mean partly seen, because Iâve made at least two genuine attempts and not managed to finish it because it was just too boring.
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I watched a few of his films about a year ago. Mulholland drive was probably the only one I liked. Still want to watch elephant man however.
You are right. Elephant Man is a great movie and should have won the Best Picture Oscar. Mulholland Drive is a great movie too, although I donât think thereâs really a coherent story in there.
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Coherent story nah probably not, but I found trying to piece it all together quite engaging and thought it was shot beautifully.
l heard so much about this movie over the years, that when l found it on DVD in China, l felt compelled to watch the whole thing. My mistake.
Lynch is one of the most overrated directors of all time.
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I completely agree. I have it on DVD. Itâs completely compelling; one of the great movies to watch, like Blade Runner and Vertigo and Days of Heaven (all for different reasons). I love the scene with the cowboy and the gormless director. (Also the one with the two women on the sofa, but again for different reasons.)
I finally got around to seeing Antonioniâs LâAvventura (The Adeventure) on video, itâs in the Criterion collection. Called an existential masterpiece now, I had visions of a Camus or Satre like plot line.
A story of rich & idle Italians around 1960 (itâs in B&W), while the cinematography is fantastic & shot placement is up there with Kubrick, it is slow paced & it appears the one & only point the director wanted to make was that rich people are basically all shallow, self interested, self serving empty vessels.
The word âennuiâ comes up in a lot of the reviews & while the film looked great, all the main characters came across as two dimensional, unlikeable types who just seem to drift along in life aimlessly without any true love or companionship.
Canât really recommend, even though Scorsese loves it, though he had a bias I believe to Antonioni & Fellini purely cause they were Italian, since his own films to me were more influenced by the French New Wave directors
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Finally caught up with Drive my Car by Hamaguchi. Go see this masterpiece. I caught it at the Rivoli in Camberwell.
I have to confess that about halfway through this three hour film I was checking my phone for the time. The first half is a bit of a slow build, very flat cinematography and little in the way of humour, so not the most entertaining ninety minutes. But then something happens and you find yourself becoming very emotionally involved with the four main characters. And the last forty minutes provides some of the most deeply touching cinema Iâve ever witnessed, culminating in a long final scene which could not have been more beautifully told.
One thing I wish Iâd done before seeing the movie was to read a synopsis of Uncle Vanya by Chekhov (not a spoiler ⊠all of the reviews refer to the link between the play and the film). The film references Chekhovâs characters and the plot of the play, and it wouldâve helped to know a bit more about Vanya ⊠see Uncle Vanya - Wikipedia
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Iâve seen two films at the French Film Festival, which started on Thursday.
The first was Lost Illusions. This is based on a trilogy of novels by Balzac and the principal character is Lucien Chardon, a poor but educated boy from the provinces, and it tells the story of his attempts to become an established poet and novelist in Paris. Itâs partly a story of a young manâs pretensions and partly a portrayal of the corrupt Parisian society of the early-mid 19th century, when the aristocracy has been reestablished after the Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon and a king was back on the throne. Itâs directed by Xavier Giannoli and stars Benjamin Voisin as Lucien. The big names in the cast are CĂ©cile de France as an aristocratic older woman with whom he has an affair and who encourages him to go to Paris and GĂ©rard DĂ©pardieu, who has a relatively small part as vulgar and cynical publisher. Itâs not for everyone, but I liked it a lot. Itâs 2Âœ hours long, and for me to be bothered with a film that length it needs to be good, and it was. Itâs not gritty realism; the style is flamboyant and exaggerated, but it gets the tone exactly right. A few people must agree because it rates 7.6 on imdb, which is damn good for a foreign language film. It had a huge budget (for France) and they used it well: it looks great on the screen. If youâre at all interested in which Batman is the best then you shouldnât bother with this film, but then youâre probably not reading this anyway.
Yesterday I saw Farewell Mr Haffman, with Daniel Auteuil, Gilles Lellouche and Sara Giraudeau and directed by Fred CavayĂ©, who made a pretty good film a while ago called Anything for Her that was remade in Hollywood as The Next Three Days with Russell Crowe. This is a Holocaust movie, and I must say Iâve seen about enough of them. This one is very well done, apart from a twist in the plot that is really hardly credible and not really necessary. Daniel Auteuil plays a Jewish jeweller in the early days of the German occupation, Lellouche plays his employee and Girardeau plays the employeeâs wife. The jeweller sends his wife and children out of Paris to the âfreeâ Vichy zone, intending to join them in a few days, and makes an agreement with the employee to pretend to sell the shop to the employee, who will treat it as his own while the war lasts, and sell it back to the jeweller when the war ends. So far so good. However the Germans crack down hard, and the jeweller canât get out of the city and has to return to the shop, where he has to live in the basement while the employee hides him. For a while this is a great success, but then the German officers discover the shop and like the jewellery and buy up big for their mistresses. The employee becomes friendly with them and makes a lot of money. His wife becomes more and more unhappy about this. Apart from the pointless and incredible plot twist, itâs pretty good, with a much neater twist at the end. The acting is really excellent; thereâs a reason why theyâre all very big stars in France.
Lost Illusions gets an 8 and Mr Haffman get a 7 from me.
One of the films at the Festival has GĂ©rard DĂ©pardieu playing Maigret. Heâs pretty gross now, but he can still act and if itâs done well, it should suit him.
In Melbourne for a couple of reunions, so wandered up to Cinema Nova for the latest Almodóvar, Parallel Mothers, with, as usual, Penélope Cruz as Janis and Rossy de Palma, and a young girl, Malena Smit playing Ana. Janis and Ana are having babies at the same time.
The side story is that Janis has become pregnant to Arturo, an anthropologist whose specialty is uncovering graves of murdered/executed victims of the Spanish Civil War. Janisâs great-grandfather was dragged away for his family dinner and shot, along with 9 other townspeople.
I donât recall AlmodĂłvar venturing into Civil War stuff and itâs very important to remember that both sides committed shocking atrocities, but we only remember the Nationalists because Francoâs dictatorship lasted nearly 40 years. Stalin sent agents who murdered lots of Republican Communists because they deemed them Trotskyists, or at least, not Stalinist enough.
My timing got out of whack when i fronted up at the Kino for Lost Illusions at 3.40. Problem was it was on at 6. The only one to fill in time was Compartment No 6 about a Finnish archaeologist living in Moscow wanting to head up to Murmansk to see the 10,000 year old petroglyphs. Her girlfriend has to pull out and the Finnish woman gets put in a sleeping compartment with a surly Russian miner. They do become more understanding of each otherâŠand Murmansk, in the Arctic Circle, can get a tad brisk in winter.
10 years ago, i would have hated this, but still, only 4/10. Russia is a miserable place. No politics whatsoever.
And followed up with Lost Illusions, a French satire with similar mood and timeframe to Les Enfants du Paradis (the 1820s, post-Napoleon, restoration of the monarchy), only ripping into the gutter media. Cecile de France was as luminous as ever and the girl playing the young actress, SalomĂ© DewaelsâŠweâll see more of herâŠwell, not most of you lot, but she does drop trou a few times. HonorĂ© de Balzac, who wrote the original story was quite biting.
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I liked Lost Illusions. It was a hit at the French Film Festival back in March. I was at dinner last night with a French woman who didnât like it; she knew the novels and thought the film was superficial. I thought it captured the spirit of French high(ish) society at the time very well, not that I actually have any first-hand knowledge of Paris in the 1830s.
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