HarryTuttle's Spontaneous Impressions - G
Gattaca
Généalogie d'un Crime
Gilda
Girl With A Pearl Earring
La Glace à Trois Faces
Gods Must Be Crazy
Goldfish Memories
Good Bye, Lenin!
A Good Lawyer's Wife
Good Men, Good Women
Gremlins

> CRIT <Gattaca
1997 - Andrew NICCOL - USA

An outcast young man cheats the system to enter a university for the genetic elite. Conversly he uses his crippled counterpart's DNA to seduce a woman. Like in Cyrano the love interest is split into 2 distinct aspects that seem to blur the feelings of the loved one who seeks here both the gene pool perfection and the sympathetic charm. Ironicaly the perfect woman who rightfuly belong to the high society falls for the imposteur. A cynical moral calling foul on blind love. The 2 men collaborate together, they swap their digital print, eyes, cardiac shape, cells, and moods. Each for their own reasons they want to deny their identity, and hide inside someone else's body. The tension develops around the permanent self-consciousness to be someone else to the last detail like fallen hair on a comb, under the oppressing scrutinity of the surrounding population judging and accusing to eradicate difference.

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> CRIT <Généalogies d'un Crime
1997 - Raoul RUIZ - France

Haunting crime story swimming into psychoanalysis satire, between Element of Crime and Mulholland Drive.

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> CRIT < Gilda
1946 - VIDOR - USA

Happy Ending Scarface with Rita Hayworth.
i was impatient to watch this old classic because of the internal reference from Mulholland Dr. The lead couple has great acting, but their love/hate attraction is overplayed to serve the narrative structure and save the suspens only... so the reactions are exagerated and little credible (coincidences, faking personalities, changing attitudes, ignorance/forgetful).
Ballin Mundson is a bit stiff, he's such a weak BIG boss (villain)... the inspector, the german blackmailers, the bodyguards are all ridiculous. that is why i refer to Hawks' Scarface that develops the same dramatic structure with a different outcome, more noir and more credible. Gilda is pushed toward fun and comedy rather than crime and suspens. i guess it's a must see for Rita Hayworth fans, because she's superbe :) but the overall interest has little point.

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> CRIT < Girl With A Pearl Earring
2003 - Peter WEBBER - UK

Dreadful! ...could a film be too beautiful? apparently yes...
why Scarlett Jonhansson has to keep her mouth half open in every single scene??? much like Frodo in LOTR, she's got 1 1/2 facial expression! such a waste of her talent. although she was a perfect cast for this role. too bad the script was so stupid... and it's not even a hollywood flick it's british!
few things that annoyed me:
- uncredible characters, weak roles, lame plot.
- the maid who helps the genius to compose his painting (!!!)
- the genius who asks the maid her opinion...
- the wife who cant stand the painter to paint female models... who is jealous of paintings (???)
- the pigmalion who fails to get the maid laid... like if anybody cared in 1660ies, when aristocrats had all powers over the poor
- the loosely sketched out love story with the butcher son, through inappropriate inserts...
this inane melodrama is an insult to the audience, it dumbs down any efforts at dramaturgy... the shots are lingering on posing faces for no reasons, even most scenes are set to frame silly faces. the cinematographer is desperately trying to reproduce the dutch light and XVII th century composition, chiara-obscuro, candel light...
the art direction was ok, and the photography well crafted... i wish they left the sets to a more competent crew to make a good film out of this. this is particularily disappointing because i was looking forward watching a film on this master painter Vermeer, with Scarett Johansson.

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> CRIT <La Glace à Trois Faces
1927 - Jean EPSTEIN - France

The Three-sided Mirror 49' - Silent Black&White (without music)
Photo : Marcel Eywinger
cast : René Ferté (Hero), Olga Day (Pearl), Suzy Pierson (Athalia), Jeanne Helbling (Lucie)

Story : (from a novel by Paul Morand) Psychological narrative avantgarde film about a wealthy young businessman who consecutively falls in love with a classy English woman (Pearl), a Russian sculptress (Athalia), and a naive working-class girl (Lucie). 3 very different women loved him, maybe a different side of him, but did he love any of them?
the narration uses well crafted flashbacks of each woman telling how the Hero seduced them, sneaked away with an excuse and never came back. so the film splits into 3 chapters and an epilogue with the man alone.
Epstein is mainly concerned by visual style, especially the last segment which is a photography masterpiece. surimposed footages, up to 3 different films, fading in and out, overlaping, sharing the corners of the frame... very graphic composition of electric wires, birds flying, roads, crowd, car speed, eyes converging, with several simultaneous actions running at fast speed, to a climaxing conclusion : the death of the hero in a car crash.

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> CRIT <The Gods Must Be Crazy
1980 - Jamie UYS - Botswana

long time i havent seen this one! but i loved it so much
one of the best comedy i ever watched!!! with touching characters, a sensible love story too, all in so out-ofd-this world environment!

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> CRIT <Goldfish Memories
2003 - Elizabeth GILL - Ireland

B-curious drama-comedy about free love in Dublin 2003.
the movie premise is this silly false factoid : "goldfishes have a 3 sec memory span". which is translated into a wonderful life without bad memories and regrets, everything is new to them, even the corners of their tank after taking a spin. it is also the best pick up line of a middle aged literature lecturer who dates his students under 20.
a dozen of characters will go through several relationship attempts and deceptions, exploring the resilience of the heart through hardship of repeated break up scenes, involving ideal dreams, pregnancy, parenthood, catholic marriage, casual sex, drunken sex, and existentialism.
this is very funny and nicely photographed, but the characters seem somehow too stereotypical and their daily sexual orientation appears to be only a convenient fad to get laid with the closest available partner... one guy says "the population is divided into 10 % gays, 10% straight, and the rest are repressed bi". so we see a gay boy sleeping with his best female friend, 2 straight girls sleeping together... funny things of the sort.
too much of a happy ending too. anyway good fun to watch on TV, or with friends for the laughs.

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> CRIT <Good Bye, Lenin!
2003 - Wolfgang BECKER - Germany

East Berlin in 1989, right before the wall falls.
Christiane lives alone with 1 daughter and 1 son, concerned by the issues around her she post claims and complaints to the communist regime, because she believes in bureaucracy. She is a wellknown figure in town and has been decorated by the party. her husband fled to West Germany and never came back. Then on, problems never stoped arising in their life.
one night her son, Alex, is arrested at a freedom march, Christiane witness the scene and falls in coma from a stroke.
Meanwhile the regime crumbles and the Berlin wall is torn apart. Capitalism take over in Berlin and Germany is re-united.
When Christiane wakes up miraculously from coma, her children hide her the truth about what happened in the past 8 months of cultural and political revolution.
The whole movie is about lies on many levels: political lies, family lies, and emotional lies, intertwined in a burelesque fashion with a witty irony. faking, conceiling, embellishing, diverting, conterfeiting, propaganda, manipulation, brainwashing... we realize the people use the same tricks with their family as the government used on the people.
the lead actor Alex (Daniel Brühl) is great. and his girlfirend, Lara, the lovely nurse student from USSR, who takes care of her mother (Chulpan Khamatova) is delicious. She had the lead in the glorious [b]Luna Papa[/b] by the tajik Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov!!! i'm happy to see her again :)
Yann Tiersen signs the soundtrack! (he composed the music from Amelie)

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> CRIT <A Good Lawyer's Wife
2004 - IM Sang-soo - South Korea

Baramnan gajok
Beautifuly executed, with a creative and restrained mise-en-scène, falling short of being a great movie by lack of a clear message. The film appears to be an assemblage of separate stories merely linked by the protagonists. This multiple context gives a richer background to the main couple crisis, without solidifying into a satisfying conclusion. Too much aimless digressions into sub-plots (each so interesting they could be a film subject of their own) underdevelopped and unable to contribute to the coherence of the main story. So we are left wondering if the film was the unfinished chronicle of a korean couple, overwhelmed by a piling of unfortunate coincidences and difficult topics... (identity crisis of an adopted child, adultary, voyeurism, alcoholism violence, war crime cemetary, North/South Korea history, eldery sexuality, terminal disease... not to mention spoilers)
So-ri Moon impersonates an emencipated housewife, in a very different role from Oasis, to see her talent in a more extraverted life: a dance professor, exhibitionist who walks around naked at home, horny and frustrated by a cheating husband, sterile mother of an adopted son. A confused lawyer who doesn't seem to have a hold of his own life, half noble, half evil, a weak personality inconsistant between work and home...
The individual stories are very nice though.
All the subtext about female sexuality, young wife or old widow, is both subversive (almost disturbing) and progressive. Notably the scene in the grandmother's bed, subtle mise-en-scène, with few words and all in the position of the bodies.
The voyeur/age-difference story is delicate and promising, although discontinuous and caricatural. A slow seduction of attraction/repulsion, all talking or all action.
The eldery disease story with confrontation to death is also quite powerful, even if sometimes heavyhanded and gory. I especially liked the performance of the son who sees his father dying, helplessly, cowardly, relying on the unconditional support of his neglected wife.
The handheld camea was too much of an unecessary stylish distraction.
I don't know anything from this director yet. I don't where these flaws (according to me) come from, but he's obviously inspired to make a very personal cinema out of a simple story.

C:+++ W:++ M:+++ I:+++ C:++

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> CRIT <Good Men, Good Women
1995 - HOU Hsiao-hsien - Taiwan

Multilayered storyline intertwining past a present to pay a homage to a woman political refugee who was captured and repressed by the chinese regime during the japanese occupation of the island of Taiwan. Her daughter who mourns the loss of her ex-lover recalls memories and historical flashbacks in parallel. Exceptional cinematography.

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> CRIT <Gremlins
1984 - Joe DANTE - USA

A strange cuddly creature spawns an evil twin if exposed to water. Mogwai is naive yet wary of the unfriendly Gremlin he gave birth to. His feelings are torn apart between love and contempt for the black sheep of his spiece. A fun and frightening take on doppelganger, the white teddy bear and the bloodthirsty monster coming from the same creature as 2 sides of a person. Like in all good horror films the evil double is vulnerable to daylight, as if everything came back to normal when we wake up, leaving all the nightmares and guilty thoughts behind, these haunting bad deeds we'd never do in plain light.

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