Change Your Image
geemelle
Reviews
Kokuriko-zaka kara (2011)
Great background animation and scenery.
The animation of the background animation is fantastic but the story happening in the foreground left me cold. I was not at all interested in saving the Latin Quarter building and the love story was overly-complicated and melodramatic.
I loved the scenes on the ships and boats but they seemed pedestrian and did not soar.
The story of Umi and Shun would have worked better if they were about five years older and in university, but of course that would not fit with the Korean War to 1963 Yokohama timeline.
I couldn't quite get my head around how busy Uni was with doing little or no actual school work. Perhaps Grandma and the younger sister could help out around the boarding house. It took me twenty minutes into the movie until I realised that this was a boarding house and not just a big weird family.
Glass Onion (2022)
Soundless Recordings
My least favourite thing about this movie is the voice recordings. Scenes take place outside in a windy harbour, or in a vast glass room, or in a crowded bar yet nobody ever talks with the same breathy voice that I might use when talking to a lover on the other side of a bed.
Most people (and most actors) when talking with a group of people all standing several metres apart might be tempted to talk louder and enunciate. But here they mumble and retreat into their affected accents. It was either all re-recorded in a studio and added at a later date or most of the people in a scene had no idea what the others were saying.
Chef's Table: Pizza (2022)
More than ingredients and people
I come late to Chef's Table and when I started watching this series, I expected serious documentaries about pizza restaurants. Instead it is a series about the egos and pretentions of famous chefs.
Pizza is simple street food. I have eaten it on four continents. But an excellent slice does become more wonderful just because you throw some kimchee at it or buy your vegies with a handbasket at the local market.
The main contention of this series is that a restaurant is a success not because of location or value or front-end service or decor or atmosphere but solely because of the ingredients and the passion of the head chef.
I contend that any decent chef with a wood-fired oven can make a pretty good pizza at $50 a pop. What few chefs can do is provide a great street lunch for $5 or $10.
Watching this series I was reminded of glossy magazine articles that tried to convince me that one wine is worth a hundred times more than another because it was grown on the north side of the valley versus the crap that is grown on the south side.
I gave this series five stars for photography and travelogue aspects. The rest is soap opera and BS.
La Bolduc (2018)
I longed for more music
I wasn't expecting a biopic about a Canadiene singer of comic folk songs to be so depressing.
I longed for more music. I know that it was the depression in Catholic Quebec but there must have been at least some joy in the life of La Bolduc.
Mank (2020)
I liked the first 1/3
I enjoyed the movie until Mank got out of bad.
I didn't find the Sinclair for Governor stuff at all believable. The film provided no reason that Mankiewicz would go all crazy over the defeat or the way that politics was played in 1934.
I did enjoy the Marion Davies parts. A true story movie based on her and Hearst and would have been far more interesting.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Mid-way to Mid-town (2018)
Wow. Rodin, wine and Paris
As a person who visited Paris on a student trip in 1969; a person who has drank wine and strolled the Seine bridges, and as a person with a lifelong fascination with Rodin, television doesn't get better than this.
8½ (1963)
I don't get it. Good but hardly great
This movie looks wonderful. The women are stunning.
I understand why another another movie director would love it, but as a common movie goer who loves Italian films from the fifties and sixties, I simply don't understand why this is on so many top ten lists.
It has no point.
Car 54, Where Are You?: Hail to the Chief (1962)
More innocent times
Just had to make a comment after viewing the 1962 version of this episode on local late night broadcast TV. Near the beginning of the show there are clear views of two newspapers date August 8, 1962. This is two months before the Cuban missile crisis. At that time the Secret Service apparently thought it appropriate to send 'The President' through the streets in a car driven by Toody and Muldoon. The big laugh of the plot is Muldoon, a New York policeman, eating large quantities of tranquilizers and anti-depressant pills before and during driving. (Police prescription drug abuse was much funnier in those days). Near the end of the episode, JFK and Jackie are seen sitting high on the back of an open convertible. They are being driven through the pedestrian-packed streets of Manhattan while a half-dozen Secret Security men jog along-side the car. The scene evokes bitter-sweet memories of simpler times.