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Reviews
Hiroshima mon amour (1959)
Appalling
Now and then I decide to watch "classic" movies with no other reason than being able to say I watched them if someone brings the names up at the dinner table. So, on a frosty Sunday evening I picked Hiroshima Mon Amour and set out to see what the big fuss was all about (read the previous comments here on IMDb and you'll know what I mean). Suffice to say that this movie stands out as self-indulgent and pretentious even among French movies. The pseudo-pedantic poetry, the acting, the feeble storyline, the camera angles, the music... everything adds up to make this an almost perfect instrument of cinematographic torture. Avoid this piece of junk even if you are serving a lifetime prison sentence or cast away in a remote island. I would gladly through myself in the arms of a Gestapo interrogator rather than go through the whole 90 minutes of this atrocity again. Horrific.
Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? (2008)
Plain, lame, predictable
This could have been a good documentary or a good comedy. Unfortunately it's neither.
Interviewing the folk on the street is a nice touch but it hardly gives you the whole picture, you need facts and evidence to put together a documentary. We are not even told who Osama Bin Laden is, how old he is, what he did in life or his putative trail. About the places he visits, little and nothing. What's the capital of Jordan? To be entertaining you need to be witty and cunning but this guy is very far from being the brightest light bulb in the tanning bed. He is lame and boring and just walks around with a translator all the time, even though we see him taking Farsi and Pashto lessons early on. And the cheesiness of him whispering "I miss you so much" on the phone is unspeakable - Oprah could not have done it worse. Dude, why didn't you pick another time to travel? If you want a good travelogue about the most dysfunctional places on Earth, read Absurdistan by Aussie journalist Eric Cambpell. That's a gritty and compelling account of life on the very edge, by someone who was taken to places by his job, not by...by... why the hell did Morgan Spurlock set out anyway?
Paris (2008)
A parody of a French movie
If a French movie was sarcastically depicted in, say, The Simpsons, it would be this one. Starting with the title: "Paris". Kind of annoying if you happen to have seen "Inside Paris", "Paris Je T'Aime" and "Two Days in Paris" in the last 4 months. Well, I didn't expect much from this one and it still managed to disappoint me. A good director takes many stories and makes them converge into a convincing, well thought out plot. Here there are many stories, but they dissolve into Nothing, with a capital N. And way too many characters too, most of them thoroughly superficial and of no consequence at all. The movie is a succession of empty clichés about life ('seize the day') and about France (with the mandatory 'buy a baguette at the boulangerie' scene repeated ad nauseam) which slowly build up into an annoying and pretentious self-parody of a thoughtful movie. Juliette Binoche contributes her usual 'cow watching the train pass by' attitude and overall none of the characters inspire the least empathy. Actually, 5 minutes into the movie you couldn't care less what will or won't happen to them from there on. After an hour, nothing relevant has happened and you begin to wonder why you didn't say yes to that dinner party with your friends. Relief comes with the end titles, after 2h10 which feel like a teaser of Eternity. I'm not into car-chase and explosion movies, I do get my fix of Jim Jarmusch or Werner Herzog now and then. But this movie is definitely a must. A must-avoid. Trust me, you can do much better things with those 2 hours. I give it 3 points just because it's got decent music and interesting cameos of Paris. But all in all, forget it.