My Favorite Movies

Sweet and strong at the same time. Amazing atmophere. Beautiful shots. Not a typical vampire/horror movie. A too obvious but also classic final revenge. A cuddly last scene/open-end.

Eli is both Lolita and Peter Pan, with a bit of underlined homossexualism. Even after we see Eli´s genitals, it´s not clear that not being a girl means Eli was a boy years ago; only for those who read the book or knew about it. Why an immortal boy would be a girl in the outside world? To seduce the victims, ok, but what about Oskar? The castration wouldn´t interfere the sex between two boys... is, thus, the castration a simpler aspect of being a vampire? Will Oskar become a vampire in some point or be the next Håkan?

...

I loved it!
Eli is much much cutter than Claudia of Interview with the Vampire.

Simply lovely!!! And what a beauiful photography! It reminded me of "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory", but more arty and cutter.

How selective is our memory? What this selectiveness says about ourselves? Minimalist. Groovy. Beautifully subtle movie.

Visually strong and stunning and with a naturalistic plot, "The Flight of the Red Balloon" follows the characters and Paris´s day-by-day life. Nothing different or huge happens... that´s life just as it is.
Like in "Three Times" (unfourtanely I´m just beginning to know Hsiao-hsien Hou´s work), we see a poetically filmed slice of common life.

Albert Lamorisse ´s "The Red Balloon" is brought into the movie by the film student baby-sitter Song who films a short film about red balloons. I´m pretty sure that the first scenes where we see Simon talking to the balloon and later, alone in the metro, hiding himself from it are part of Song´s film. In "The Red Balloon" Pascal takes the bus and goes alone to school, but here we clear see that Simon never stays by himself. Also, Simon is a boy of "modern times" who likes video game and stuffs alike. When he is with the other school kids at the Musee d'Orsay (to look at the Félix Vallotton's painting "Le Ballon") and suddenly turns his head up and see the red balloon seems to be the first time he really sees the balloon (and not a "fake" one of Song´s film).

I don´t know if the boy who plays Simon is a real actor, but he talks and acts so naturally that I tend to think he is not. Speaking about acting, Juliette Binoche is simply great. With a not usual character type to her, Binoche plays Suzanne (kinda mix of her previous characters in "Jet Lag" and "Code Unkown") amazingly joyful.

After "The Triplets of Belleville", this is the first animation that really caught my attention. With rough lines (drawing), pop art visual/look and strong storyline, I just can´t stop think: to the hell with 3D!!



The only thing I didn´t like was the transition from animation to real life footage. It´s like all that artistic atmosphere get lost. I think it is exactly the objective: "wake up! this is all beautiful and cool, but it really happened. These real women crying, these houses destroyeds, all these bodys, this is true".

Astounding!

2046. A number of a hotel room. A place/ year where nothing ever changes. A place from where only one man ever returned. A sci-fiction story called 2047. A story about love or whatever it is.


The fragmentary shooting is like the story itself: life is a bunch of lost moments and memories, some of we try to hold and keep forever, and love, it end up being a college of idealizations and of what could have been.
"Love is all a matter of timing. It's no good meeting the right person too soon or too late. If I´d live in another time or place......my story might have had a very different ending".


Three movies came to my mind:

Chungking Express, for obvious reasons: Faye Wong and Tony Leung Chiu Wai costarting after ten years.

The Double Life of Veronique (or Kieslowski himself) for the stunning use of colors (specially the green and red) and for the "poetic" focus on gestures.
And Hirokazu Koreeda´s After Life, where people can choose only one memory to take to eternity.

An interesting and fascinating film... and not only for Godard´s lovers.
My favorite after À bout de souffle.

Fantastic with all that a noir film has: the loner, troubled and pessimistic protagonist; the femme fatale; the nice wife; a corrpupt world; the perfect crime.

And a long sequence entirely without dialogue or music. Amazing!

A girl is going to Paris. A watch seller. A cake as a gift. Two people connected by loneliness. Subtle humor, sadness, minimal dialogues, slow movie.



This absolutely great film also brings an homage to Truffaut and a small part of Jean-Pierre Léaud. You don´t need to know The 400 blows, but if you do, you will definitely have another view of "What Time Is It There?".

"Le philosophe et le cinéaste ont en commun une certaine manière d'être, une certaine vue du monde qui est celle d'une génération".



"This film should be called 'The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola' ".

Add a review (optional)...