Check out this car for sale:
Too Young To Live This Old
The beautiful and talented Jennah Bell with John Forbid, I dig it… love the dance routine too.
Movies Watched -- Paris, 13th District (2021)
In French. 105 minute running time … I like Jacques Audiard … he made A Prophet, which I loved, and Dheepan, which I also really liked … but I wasn’t super thrilled with this. I guess the 13th District of Paris is filled with public housing maybe? So you have a lot of immigrants in one spot … it features a Chinese girl, a black guy, and a French white woman … the last is a sex cam worker / law student / real estate agent … the black guy is a teacher and the Chinese girl works in a call center and later a Chinese restaurant .. it’s about how their lives intersect, esp. their sex lives, and how things work out or don’t. Sort of a Millennial movie. I wouldn’t recommend it but John Farr did.
Post-right-swipe coitus joy
Movies Watched -- Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (2021)
In Hungarian. 95 minute running time. Beautiful Hungarian woman, a neurosurgeon in New Jersey goes back to Hungary to chase a guy she met at a conference, but he claims not to recognize her, is she losing her mind? … bit of a weird one, and I wasn’t super thrilled… it was a movie made by a woman for women, maybe? It’s not bad, it’s just not recommended, though John Farr liked it.
Movies Watched -- The Automat (2021)
Documentary. 79 minute running time. Made by someone named Lisa Hurwitz who somehow tapped into the Jewish network and got Mel Brooks and Ruth Bader Ginsburg involved … interesting story, the rise and fall of a restaurant business… was Mr. Horn a homosexual? It would explain the great style of the Automats with the white marble-topped tables … good, fresh food from a central commissary, a neat model … the death of the inner city via suburbanization meant the death of the Automat, but there was a glorious era for them. I enjoyed it. This was a John Farr reco.
Movies Watched -- Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020)
In Bosnian. 101 minute running time… movie about the war in Yugoslavia and how incompetent and ineffective the “UN Peacekeepers” were there … a real indictment … I didn’t realize there were mass murders of Bosnian Muslim men and boys in cold blood by Bosnian Serbs … awful stuff and only 25 years ago or so … the ending is a real kick in the teeth as you see Aida still lives among the men who committed atrocities (no spoilers) as the years go by … it reminded me of how in China the people who persecuted the intellectuals and others during the Cultural Revolution still live side by side with their victims to this day … depressing. This was a John Farr reco.
Put them on the list
Movies Watched -- Nitram (2021)
112 minute running time and I surely could have cut out 12 minutes to tighten it up … this was a horror movie, just very hard to watch … the backstory of a mass shooting in Tasmania in 1996 … the mentally ill man (three years younger than me), his screwed-up parents, the Mikado-loving heiress who took him in … it’s all just awful to watch… the movie is well-made, but it’s just a horrible, horrible story. This was a John Farr reco and a major downer.
Laughing at my pain.
Movies Watched -- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
165 minute running time, that’s right, TWO HOURS AND FORTY FIVE MINUTES long … so it’s an epic of sorts. It’s a cute gimmick, the man born old and ages in reverse … it wasn’t terrible, his life, his loves, but you’d really have to be in the mood to watch something that long. Not a green-go, boring in a way, no idea why the nearly-always-correct Rex Reed thought it was one of the greatest movies ever made.
Nothing lasts
Movies Watched -- Kimi (2022)
89 minute running time so the perfect length, but I paid $6 to stream this and sorely regret it. It’s a modern tech “thriller” with texting bubbles and various other gimmicks which annoyed me … kind of a dumb boring story in the end … the girl who plays the lead has a very interesting face, her Mom is black in the movie so I assume she’s a mulatto (“the daughter of singer/actor Lenny Kravitz and actress Lisa Bonet” … ah, that explains things, including how she got the part) … briefly touches on contemporary issues of homeless encampments in Seattle and rape/sexual assault/MeToo stuff and COVID and isolation and mental health, but who cares. Not recommended, John Farr did me dirty on this one:
Kimi, turn off the bad movie
Movies Watched -- The Worst Person in the World (2022)
In Norwegian. 128 minute running time so probably 30 minutes too long, but this was a talk, talk, talk movie … the life of a Millennial Norwegian girl and her relationships … this was made by Joachim Trier, a handsome bastard who also made Thelma (which I liked) and Reprise (which I wasn’t thrilled about). This movie is pretty intense at times, it’s about as un-Hollywood a movie as you can imagine (you know, sensitive, intelligent, etc.)
The lead actress is beautiful and Norway is so rich that even if you are a clerk in a bookstore or a barista, you are able to live in a comfortable, light-filled apartment in central Oslo, it seems. I think Millennial women will really love this one, maybe women of all ages, and thoughtful gentlemen like me. I can’t give it a green-go because of the length. Would be a challenge to cut out a full 30 minutes to make it right, the filmmakers should have been less self-indulgent and tried to make it tighter.
John Farr liked it too: “Will Julie ever figure herself out?”
Ha det!