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Plumski
Reviews
La casa de papel (2017)
Loses its way
Like so many TV shows with a core high concept, once it gets into its stride it ties itself into so many logical knots and procedural dead ends that it eventually loses itself in its own complexity. The set up in the first few episodes, inter-cutting the planning and the execution of the plan , works very well, but then the plot depends on the professor being incredibly lucky, and the police exceptionally stupid Much of his plan revolves around the police following their internal procedures to the letter - except of course for when the plot demands that they behave irresponsibly and do not. Sure, let's allow a stranger into the HQ, or to enter a crime scene without protective clothing? Let's drink alcohol on duty, let's not have a clear line f command for when he boss is off to rest or have sex. Let's spend so long suspecting the existence of a human mole but not try to identify them, rather than suspect the existence of a bug?
Why did the professor's lessons not include anything about keeping his team's spirits together anticipating that they would start to argue, and make serous mistakes - apart from the few that are part of his plan?
As a two hour film or maybe a 6-episode series this could have been truly great but the knots it ties itself into by multiplying the twists are just too much to get out of.
Oh, and for such a mastermind with all the disguises, how come the professor only has one pair of fairly distinctively unfashionable glasses, and keeps his very identifiable beard? That annoyed me from the very beginning.
That said, the series did pull me in very effectively and Ienjoyed wasting my time in its company.
Nos enfants nous accuseront (2008)
Fails to convince, far too long.
There is an interesting film to be made about this subject, perhaps even a great one, but this isn't it.
It throws out random facts and assumptions like confetti but fails to connect any of them, and none of them are made to stick.
Do we all eat too much processed food? Sure. Do kids in particular nowadays eat far to much food of dubious nutritional value? Sure. Has there been an increase in incidences of various illnesses, in particular cancer, over recent decades? Sure. Is the French countryside beautiful? Definitely. Are kids cute? Most of the time. Are these facts *connected* in any kind of causal relationship? Unsure. Does this film provide any evidence at all that they are connected? Nope, not even slightly. Is the only answer to all these questions organic farming? Not based on any of the material suggested here.
This film wants to do for conventional modern mass farming what Supersize Me did for fast food. But unlike Morgan Spurlock in that film, Jaud is lacking a central idea, a basic structural model with a clear end, to hold everything together. The fact that the village has already decided to have the communal kitchens go organic is not inherently strong enough.
I would have liked to see - or learn about - an earlier period, the battles the mayor had to go through to convince his town council, parents and others that going organic was a good idea and a worthwhile experiment. Instead we are shown the (limited) effect of the decision on the elementary school children and their new vegetable garden, and the kids learning Yannick Noah's environmental anthem "Aux arbres citoyens" and performing it at the village summer fête complete with rather alarming fist-waving.
We learn nothing of the kids' home lives - in particular, were the benefits of their organic lunch being undone by what they ate at home? At the little survey towards the end of the year covered by the film, it's clear that only a small minority of the kids have organic meals at home. That said, apart from one grumpy looking boy, the children all embrace their new organic school meals with wild enthusiasm - especially one little girl who appears over and again as the project's flag waver. I was left wondering just whose child she is.
One other thing bothers me. The film opens with scenes from a conference held at UNESCO in Paris, clips from whose alarmist presentations punctuate the pictures of village life through the rest of the film. Judging by other reviews I have read here and elsewhere, the audience has always assumed this to be an official UN event, an assumption the film readily invites. It was actually organised by a collection of NGOs led by ARTAC, a French campaigning group devoted to investigating environmental causes of cancers, which was the guiding force behind the Paris Appeal from 2004 calling for the banning of cancer-inducing chemicals. See more at artac.info.
All of this is very worthy, but the film does not actually substantiate any claim that the products used in non-organic farming (and in particular the ones shown in the film) do irrefutably cause cancer, and so the relevance of the conference is somewhat questionable.
The film is also much too long and includes extended sequences of no value whatsoever to the subject, in particular scenes of the kids' idyllic life in the fields. As a half hour item on a TV documentary strand it would have been worthy of my time and attention, but as a feature film? No thanks. I felt my time was wasted.
U-571 (2000)
Another opinion...
(WARNING: Plot Spoilers Aplenty!)
For probably the first time in my life, I went to see a movie today about which I knew absolutely nothing - had read no reviews, had seen no trailers, hadn't seen any publicity of any kind. I had 2.5 hours to kill, so I went to the nearest cinema and saw whatever was starting. It happened to be U-571. I'd enjoyed all the other sub movies (The Enemy Below, Das Boot, Crimson Tide, Hunt for Red October, etc.) so I settled down to enjoy this one.
Boy, was I disappointed!
Movie-going fans of Star Trek might know that one the best episodes of the original 60s series, "Balance of Terror", was a transposition of the plot and characters of the classic sub movie "The Enemy Below". The two are equally classics of their genre, and both shine primarily because of excellent scripts and some wonderful acting.
By comparison, U-571 ran like a transposition of the corniest elements of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The producers and writers also seem to have borrowed the automatic Star Trek plot-and-script generator.
First we have the baddies (or rather, single baddie), truly evil, with no compassion, humanity or other redeeming characteristics whatsoever (unlike his crewman, who hesitates before firing on the dinghy-load of escapees).
Then we have our hero, dashing and roaring to go, who hasn't been promoted (with a conversation taken straight from several TNG episodes: "you can't take command until you're able to send a man to his death without hesitation"). <somebody give me a bowl, I'm gonna puke!>
The moment that scene happened, I knew *exactly* how the film was going to end! Lo and behold, the great denouement is our heroic Lieutenant all but ordering a crewman to sacrifice himself for the mission.
And another exchange straight out of bad militaristic sci-fi: As soon as our hero answers "I don't know" to a question from a crewman, the next scene came as no surprise to me, as the Chief calmly tells him he can't show any weakness in front of his crew. <a bowl's not enough, I need a bucket!>
Plot & Script-by-numbers doesn't begin to describe the awfulness of this movie's approach to story-telling. When the crew discuss the fate of an earlier sub which dived deeper than it was designed to, surely it came as no surprise that our valiant crew would be obliged into just such action? (of course, as our hero is THE Hero, he will survive unscathed...
As a (mild) claustrophobic, one of the reasons I like sub movies is because the enclosed space remains a theme throughout well-made movies of the genre. This one had no such feeling (yes, the cramped spaces were shown, but we the audience had no actual feel for it!)
OK, the SFX were exemplary and the set pieces weren't bad. But the utter monotony with which they appeared in sequence like an old jigsaw puzzle one can put together in one's sleep (the original skipper's death, the argument over whether to fire or not to fire, the cat-and-mouse game with the German destroyer dropping depth charges, the blocked torpedo tube), the ham-fisted acting from the experienced members of the cast who should have known better, and that music rising to crescendi of cheap emotion to make up for the lack of direction, acting or cinematography when filming human beings, left me desperately wanting to get home to pull Das Boot off the shelf and watch a submarine war movie that knew what it was doing, filmed by a director who knew how to direct and written with a little flair and originality. Three people sitting in front of me in the half-empty cinema had the right idea: they walked out after an hour of this cliche'd rubbish.
And I won't even go into the historical inaccuracies, slightly corrected by the "tribute" at the end of the film.
If I had to give this film a score out of ten, I'll be generous in awarding it a 3.