Cybernethics / Cybernéthique

Ratatouille (2007) - Excellent! ( Note: 9.5 - Lire la critique... )
Renaissance (2006) - Immonde! ( Note: 3 - Lire la critique... )

A bunch of lowlifes blame society for their own self-inflicted wounds.

Misdirected angst, stupid lyrics and insignificant songs can't be saved by the energy of the actors who work hard for big bucks on Broadway and Hollywood. As usual, the real moral of the movie is the opposite of its superficial moral. Socialists make me puke.

Note: 4

WBZ promised a free movie after sunset at the Hatch Shell on the Esplanade. June 23rd: A young boy finds the golden wrapper and wins a tour through a magnificent chocolate factory, owned by the world's most unusual candy maker! claimed the trailer. The skies were clear, however the weather had been wet in the afternoon. Therefore worried viewers called the announced WBZ hotline to be told that the movie would be shown Come rain or come shine. And so I was among the few hopeful people who went there and brought food for a nice evening. Now guess what: the sun never shines after sunset. So we were quite disappointed to find that the only eggs to hatch there were the mosquitoes'. That's when I realized the food I had brought was myself, and the actual guests were the midges. I expected to be a diner and a spectator, I was the dinner and the spectacle. WBZ: I want my money back!

To complete this series of quick movie reviews, here's for animation movies I saw this year.

Nausicaa, 1984 ( Note:8 )
Mind Game, 2004 ( Note: 8.5 )
Shrek, 2001 ( Note: 5.5 )
Pom Poko, 1994 ( Note: 7.0 )
Corpse Bride, 2005 ( Note: 7.0 )

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 2005 ( Note: 6 )
Run, Lola, Run, 1998 ( Note: 4.5 )
Team America, 2004 ( Note: 5 )
Robot Stories, 2003 ( Note: 7 )
Moulin Rouge!, 2001 ( Note: 7.5 )
Sin City, 2005 ( Note: 7.5 )

The Constant Gardener

Nice pictures, nice actors, but my, what a heap of leftist nonsense.

( Read more... )

Note: 4

My friend Jay initiated me to Bollywood movies. Here's the deal so far.

( Read the reviews... )

The wrap-up: what's funny about all this kind of indian movies is that traditional culture is so controversial that the authors avoid ever discussing any specific of it, particularly so with two main opposing religions and zillions of sects that could gather violence against the authors of any movie that would go past censorship. This leaves western civilization as the culture by default of indian movie: something neutral, that doesn't force any belief upon you, and is thinly wrapped in little enjoyable bits of local folklore. No, there is no open defense of western civilization, of its actual culture, of its values; it is just civilization winning by corrupting the mores of backwards tribes with the technical advances that liberate individuals.

By trying to be consensual so as to sell more, filmmakers are forced to avoid evil -- to the point of lying in a historical movie. The largest the market, the least evil they can afford, because all evil has victims, and all victims are diminished market. Of course, sometimes, seeking justice against yet unpunished criminals also creates victims of sorts, which means a diminished market, and so movie-makers will never actively seek justice against bad guys; they might just spit on bad guys who have already been punished -- or on good guys too good to make any opposition. Thus, mass-market movies are seldom the vanguard of good, they often partake in some limited insidious evil, but they are mainly the average bulk of a civilizing process. The same can be said of all mass-market things: the average bulk of an immensely good process -- civilization.

In the last few months, I saw the following movies.

Harold and Maude, 1971

A very touching movie. Dark humor, sadness, true love, albeit unlikely, and kind of a didactic movie. Very good acting and direction. As in many self-claimed convention-blowing movies, there are a few cheap shots (notably against the military), but all in all a good movie. Now if you tried swapping genders, you'd see that this movie doesn't prove much.
Note: 6

Look at me, 2004

The original french title is Comme une image. A good social satire. A bit slow paced, like all such movies, but that's the way it works. The story is articulated neatly enough to avoid repetition, yet manages to keep things true sounding enough to be believable. As with other movies by that couple, it won't try to issue judgments for you: you're able to say asshole yourself. Of course, the implicit judgment is fully intended, but the authors will rest their case on the verisimilitude of the story; you tell which parts of their story you think is believable or too cliché.
Note: 6

Spanglish, 2004

A poor mexican single mother becomes the housemaid of a successful american family. An unfathomable abyss of political correctness. It raises a few potentially interesting issues, but doesn't dare deal with any of them. Hollywood smoothness makes a muddle out of morality. And the acting is oh so conventional. An illustration of the moral bankruptcy of the goodthinking democrats. What a waste of film!
Note: 3

Lawn Dogs, 1997

A young girl who's recovering from an open heart operation shuns the people from her cosy suburbia, and seeks the friendship of the lawnmower boy, whose shack in the forest she equates with Baba Yaga's house. Revolt without anything worthwhile to revolt. Poetry here and there that's not enough to create an atmosphere. It's nicely shot, nicely played, but the story is rather thin.
Note: 4

In those weeks without posting, I've accumulated a huge backlog. I'll start pouring the overspill with some movies seen this year...

The Monkey King

An early Stephen Chow movie, loosely based on the legend of the Monkey King: the Monkey King, a trickster god, is ordered by the Celestial Emperor to atone by accompanying a buddhist monk on his quest to India. The Monkey King does his best to evade his fate, in a two-episode epic with many characters and a complex plot meant for a chinese public. Lots of cheap special effects and vulgar chinese humor, for a result too artificial for a westerner. Still somewhat enjoyable, though. And we already get to see Stephen Chow in his forever role: the trickster superhero who is turned good in the end by higher forces.
Note: 4.5

Kung Fu Hustle.

Zoom to quite a few years later, and give Stephen Chow access to computer generated special effects. You get this great fun movie, with rhythm and martial arts. It doesn't have to make too much sense -- it will just to exhilarate you. And so far, so good. I still prefer the unpredictable God of Cookery: A great story beats special effects any day. But hey, the Hustle was pretty good already!
Note: 7.0

I quite liked the initial movie Spiderman, which was a didactic story about a geek whiz kid who discovers his moral choices make a difference (and other people's too). But this sequel is more than disappointing: where the first issue was an original ode to morality, this second issue is a boring cliché that instead that promotes a form of moral lunacy, of inversion of values, of philosophical absurdity -- the seed of madness, which leads its individual or collective victims to self-destruction.

( Read more... )

Since several friends did recommend this movie, including David Madore, and despite the gripes of Lew Rockwell, I went to watch I, Robot this weekend with my cousin. As was expected, it is quite far from being an immortal chef d'œuvre, but it's indeed a rather well-realized action flick. However, it is only in the very end, and with a twist, that it turns out to be somewhat faithful to the claimed inspiration from Isaac Asimov, and not at all with the original Robot series. Beware: big spoilers ahead.

( Read more for spoilers... )

The Naoshima contemporary art museum epitomizes this saying by Tom Stoppard:

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship. Imagination without skill is contemporary art.

My! Even my uncle Quoc does better art than this! These pieces are to art as schoolboy jokes are to literature. They may be funny if that's your kind of humor and you've never heard them before, but to present that for art is an insult to intelligence. If it's art you're interested in, don't bother with the exhibits, the only valuable work of art here is the building by Tadao Ando. Now, if you happen to be there already, pay a visit to the annex, open between 12:00 and 13:30; otherwise, you may skip Naoshima altogether, your time will be better spent in some other place. On the other hand, if you're an aesthetic relativist, do go there and relish at the heights of creativity presented there: this way, you'll help keep better places clean from your stench.

As usual, lots of nice people there, sadly mobilized to catter for this joke of an art. I made an encounter with a promising potential, but in which I had a block; I didn't know/want to take the consequence of this block and either unblock or disengage soon enough, but I tried to get the most out of it, and that together with the works of mostly mindless art found there inspired this haiku:

Mind too much unlearn
But don't fall and undermind
You'd burn your time too

( Read more... ) in the big mansion of the uncle who hosts me, with the WiFi router in a central location, I could walk around the whole house with my other uncle's iPAQ 5555, and stay connected to the Internet the whole time through ( Read more... )

Dans notre Espace de Francitude Génial (EFG), tout le monde apprend à l'école et dans les médias à haïr le libéralisme, cette bête immonde qui dévore nos vies, dixit la religion officielle. Cependant, les idées libérales sont systématiquement censurées, et le peu qui échappe à la censure est systématiquement déformé. Aussi, chacun apprend à mettre sous l'étiquette libéral tout ce qu'il déteste, avec pour seule contrainte de ne jamais s'en prendre directement aux valeurs officielles de la religion officielle, le socialisme. Mais comme tout ce que connaît l'Homo Collectivus Gallus (HCG) est socialisme, ce qu'il déteste se trouve n'être que sous-produit de ce socialisme! Ainsi, l'image du libéral honni est en fait la projection des névroses du socialiste. C'est pourquoi les omniprésentes vociférations de haine à l'encontre du libéralisme, dont le principe rappelle les deux minutes de la haine quotidiennes de 1984, ont pour résultat assez cocasse de révéler les démons qui hantent des esprits corrompus par le socialisme.

( Lire la suite... )

Le mois dernier, j'ai vu Un américain bien tranquille, un excellent film superbement interprété par un acteur que j'apprécie énormément, Michael Caine. Mais aussi une oeuvre de propagande communiste la plus vile, dont l'objet est de faire endosser aux vietnamiens nationalistes et aux américains les meurtres systématiques d'innocents et autres crimes atroces des communistes. À vomir.

Dans le même genre, un film récent que je n'irai pas voir, Hero, paraît-il magnifique, et qui se termine sur une apologie de la dictature totalitaire, de la soumission au Pouvoir sans lequel il n'y aurait paraît-il que le Chaos (oh! le bel anérisme).

Bon sang! encore une fois, l'éloquence au service du Mal. Soupir.