Guess what! I finally finished April’s recap! I know, right? April was the month in which I rediscovered Turner Classic Movies during a few weeks of relative dead time at school and, between that and an active month of Netflixing and theatre-going, watched a total of 24 movies. I think that’s a record. And that’s not even including the four or five rewatches. So without further ado, here are my reactions to Marie Antoinette, Band of Outsiders, Kiss Me Deadly, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, The Lives of Others, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Through a Glass Darkly, Hot Fuzz, and many others. Plus some books.
Click here to read on!
Categories: Books, Capsule Reviews, FilmTags: Avenue Montaigne, Band of Outsiders, Detective Story, District B-13, Divorce Italian Style, Douglas Sirk, Farewell My Concubine, Hot Fuzz, I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, Joan Crawford, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kiss Me Deadly, Marie Antoinette, Milan Kundera, Mildred Pierce, Moses Man of the Mountain, Paris, Paris When It Sizzles, Romanticism, Second Chorus, Seraph on the Suwanee, Sofia Coppola, The Killers, The Lives of Others, The Nutty Professor, The Proposition, The Sorrows of Young Werther, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Through a Glass Darkly, To Sir With Love, Tristram Shandy, While the City Sleeps, Written on the Wind, Zora Neale Hurston
I watched the French action film District B-13 last weekend, and though I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, it was extremely entertaining eye candy. The story is basically that a futuristic Paris has been divided into different districts, with varying levels of lawlessness. District B-13 is the worst, to the point where what’s left of the government builds a huge wall around it and keeps anyone from entering or leaving it. Inside, it’s run by a vicious crime lord and his gang. Then a cop who wants to try to clean up the district teams up with a B-13 resident currently in jail on the outside. And it goes on from there. But yeah. Story shmory. The action set pieces are totally worth the rental, if you’re into that sort of thing. Here’s my favorite, which I just had to share. This is pretty much the first sequence in the film, where the B-13 insider is trying to escape the crime lord’s thugs, and does a dazzling bit of parkour. (Parkour is basically city-running, and it’s awesome. There’s also a good parkour sequence at the beginning of Casino Royale.) The dialogue here is in English, because when I encoded the video, it took the English language track instead of the French one. Watch out for that, too, if you rent it…it defaults to English, but you want to switch it to French with English subtitles. It’s much better, trust me. Also, coarse language warning at about 1:17.
Subscribe to Comments
