Posts tagged France
“Amour” Is Difficult, but Thought-Provoking
0February 10, 2013
“Difficult, but Thought-Provoking”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Amour means “love,” “affection,” or “passion” in French, and although the film has dialogue in French with English subtitles and it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Feature, it was not submitted by France, but rather by Austria.
The reason is that the director, Michael Haneke, is Austrian, not French, and so one could say that not everything is at it seems with this film, which goes for the simple story itself.
The film was also nominated for four other Academy Awards, Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, and Actress, and in 2012 it won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, which suggests that this is a well-respected, classy film.
But not everything is as it seems.
For example, you might believe you already know how it ends from reading about it and especially from seeing the opening scene.
But there is much more to it than that an old woman dies.
The woman is Anne, she has a stroke at the beginning of the film, and when she returns home, she says to her husband, Georges, “Promise me one thing. Never take me back to the hospital.”
She is partially paralyzed on the right side of her body, and as Georges begins to care for her at home and as Anne’s condition becomes worse, keeping that promise becomes more and more difficult.
The action occurs almost entirely inside their apartment in Paris, and although other characters come and go, the events consist mostly of Georges’s problems taking care of Anne as her physical condition gets worse.
It sounds boring, doesn’t it, especially since you believe you already know how it is going to end.
But not everything is as it seems.
For example, there are a couple of scenes that end with a planned shock to the audience, and one you might not have seen coming. There are also a couple of scenes that have to have been either fantasizing by one of the characters or the result of the director and screenwriter playing with the audience.
However, after the film is over, you realize that thinking about these scenes adds depth and meaning to the film.
In other words, keep remembering that not everything is as it seems with this award-winning film.
Amour is difficult to watch, but also very thought-provoking.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
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“Rust and Bone” Is French Murkiness
0January 29, 2013
“French Murkiness”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Rust and Bone is a French film, and sometimes that is all that needs to be said, but in this case that describes only half of it.
It stars Marion Cotillard, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the 2007 La Vie en Rose, in which she portrayed French songstress Edith Piaf.
In this film, she plays an orca trainer at a Marineland in the south of France who has a tragic accident.
When the film opens, we see a man named Ali traveling with his five-year-old son, Sam, on a train to southern France.
Once they arrive, they go to his sister’s house, whom he hasn’t seen in five years, where she is living with another man, Richard.
When Anna gets home from work as a store clerk, Richard says to her, “Some reunion. Not kissing your brother?”
We don’t know the reason that Ali and Sam have moved to stay with Anna and Richard, but it could very well be that Ali has fallen on hard times.
Ali gets a job as a bouncer at a nightclub, and one night he meets Stephanie, rescuing her from a fight and afterwards taking her back to her home, where he treats his bloodied hands by putting them in ice.
Then Stephanie has an accident where she works at Marineland, and she loses both her legs below the knees.
About four months later, she calls Ali, and he comes to visit her. She now gets around by a wheelchair, and Ali takes her out to the beach, where he goes swimming and convinces her to go swimming, too.
So, the rest of the film is about the growing relationship between these two people. She is physically crippled, and he is emotionally crippled.
Ali changes jobs, and eventually he makes extra money by fighting in underground kickboxing fights, which he is successful at and which fascinates Stephanie.
Stephanie gets some artificial legs and is able to get around more easily, but Ali gets into trouble where he is working as a security guard, and he has to leave town.
However, even though Cotillard has received praise for this film, you might ask what the point is, especially with the phony ending.
Rust and Bone might be to your liking, or you might think it is just French murkiness.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
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Rust and Bone – Movie Trailer
0January 21, 2013
A struggling single father helps a beautiful whale trainer recover her will to live following a terrible accident that leaves her confined to a wheelchair. Lonely and destitute, Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) leaves the north of France for his sister’s house in Antibes after becoming the sole guardian of his estranged five-year-old son Sam. When Ali lands a job as a bouncer in a nearby nightclub, things quickly start to look up for the itinerant father and son. Then one night, after breaking up a fight in the club, Ali meets the radiant Stephanie (Marion Cotillard), and slips her his number after dropping her off safely at home. Though Stephanie’s position on the high end of the social spectrum makes romance an unlikely prospect for the pair, a tragic accident at Marineland robs her of her legs, and finds her reaching out in desperation to Ali. Her spirit broken by the same tragedy that took her legs, Stephanie gradually finds the courage to go on living trough transcendent moments spent with Ali — a man with precious little pity, but an enormous love of life.
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Jann Scotts Journal: December 7 1941 71 years later : My dad landed on Omaha Beach on D-day plus 14
0December 9, 2012
Jann Scott’s Journal is the story and life of Boulder Icon and talk host Jann Scott. He has been in print, on radio and on TV in boulder since 1989. Some consider him the voice of Boulder’s soul.
“President Franklin D. Roosevelt: Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”
I had written about this previously in My Life in Boulder
My Father Joseph M Scott I would be 102 if he were still alive today, but he was there on the beaches of Normandy on June 20th 1944.
“Oh I was in the war alright and I wasn’t in the rear with the gear either. I was right up front in the fighting getting shot at everyday. I was a dog face private first class. They tried to make me a Sargent . I didn’t want any part of it. I was 31 years old, while most of the guys were in there 20′s . I mean, Christ guys my age were Majors and Colonels. When I joined I was president of a company. I had a business, a wife and a family and I wanted to get back to them. So I was mostly concerned with staying alive. Yes, they wanted me to go to Officers Candidate school, but that meant I would have to stay in for another year. I didn’t know if I was going to get out of there alive. A lot of guys I was with were getting killed. Eventually I did get wounded and that was bad enough. I was in hospital for 6 months and it took me a few years to convalesce.
What was it like ? You don’t want to know about that. All you need to know is that a lot of men went there to do a job to rid the world of the scourge and get back home. That’s what we did. There was no glory in it.There was just a lot of pain and suffering that I never want you to see.”
My Dad did join Patton’s 3rd Army on August 1 and was soon wounded in the push across France. He never liked to talk about it, but he was a real war hero. He had ribbons and medals. He qualified expert in the M-1 carbine, M-1 Garand, The BAR, the 38 and the 1911 Colt 45. He was dead shot and everybody wanted to be with him. He did become squad leader and was awarded a battlefield officers commission just before he was wounded. He insisted on turning it down but to no avail. However, he refused to sew on his 2nd LT bar. “Hell no I didn’t want to become an officer. They are the first person the Germans killed.” But the Army forced it on him after all of the officers in his company were killed.
The war had a bad effect on him. He saw a lot of killing. One thing that troubled him were all of the civilians who were wandering, starving and lost. “You are so lucky to live in America”, You never had to live through that. ”
I know I am. We all are. God bless you dad and thanks for your sacrifice.
Jann Scott’s Journal
Boulder, Colorado
In the heart of America
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“Looper” about Time-Travel Assassins
0October 11, 2012
“Time-Travel Assassins”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Looper is a pretty good movie about time travel that uses the classic paradoxes about time travel, but doesn’t bother going into too much detail trying to explain them.
That is why they are called “paradoxes.”
Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as Joe, and Bruce Willis stars as Joe, too. I mean, “also,” not the number “2,” because they are both playing the same person. So, let me call the Willis character Old Joe.
The story begins in 2044 in Kansas, and Joe is an assassin for the mob 30 years in the future who is called a “looper.”
You see, even though time travel is illegal in the future, the mob uses it in order to get rid of people they want killed. If people are killed in the past, then they never existed in the future, right?
Then Joe tells us in a voice-over that the mob boss of the future, who is called The Rainmaker, is closing all the loops by sending his assassins’ future selves back in time to be killed by their younger selves, and he says, “This is called ‘letting your loop run’; it’s not a good thing.”
Joe is notified of the time that a victim will show up, and it occurs out in a field where Joe has already made disposing of the body easy. The victim suddenly appears with a hood on, and Joe blasts the person with his weapon, a blunderbuss that can’t hit anything over 15 yards.
Joe is paid with bars of silver strapped to the victims’ bodies, and he is saving for his future and learning French, because he plans to retire and move to France.
However, Joe knows about “closing the loop,” and so he is not completely surprised when Old Joe shows up as a victim.
Then we get some flash-forwards into the future that explain Old Joe’s life and how he suddenly shows up in 2044 in Kansas, but in different circumstances from Joe’s other victims that allows Old Joe to escape from Joe.
And so the rest of the movie is about both Joes trying to kill his other self in order to get out of the dilemma he is in, which also involves a Kansas woman named Ana, played by Emily Blunt.
Looper closes all the loops and then manages to end.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
