Dear friend,
here’s a very delayed round-up of a week that happened oh so long ago.
Voir la Mer, written and directed by Patrice Leconte, France, 2011 - ⭐⭐
As they’re leaving on a trip to the southwest of France to see their mother (mère), two brothers from Burgundy, meet a blond young woman who wants to leave behind an abusive man, so they take her on board so she can see the sea (mer) for the first time. The pun mère/mer is as smart as the film gets, otherwise focussing on how the woman manipulates the men around her with her smile, but she’s so sexy and happy to share that none of them cares.
After the first twenty minutes, the highest stakes in the film are represented by a challenge to eat three biscuits in one minute or less. The ending is so protracted (including the very last scene) that you might think the film wouldn’t get funding if it lasted less than 90 minutes.
This is the first film I’ve watched by the rather renowned French director Patrice Leconte. I hope his other films are better.
The Long Walk, directed by Francis Lawrence, written by JT Mollner based on Stephen King/Richard Bachman’s novel, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The director of most Hunger Games addresses a different story in the ’last teen standing’ dystopian genre, with a screenplay by the Strange Darling screenwriter.
The result is a very tense, quite gory film that gives both Licorice Pizza’s Cooper Hoffman (one is allowed to imagine a time when he’s no longer ’the son of Philip Seymour’) and Alien Romulus’ David Jonsson another chance to shine, in addition to giving Mark Hamill his second big-screen role this year.
And, after One Battle After Another, another story about the bravery of standing up to fascism.
Insidious: Chapter 2, directed by James Wan, co-written with Leigh Whannell, US, 2013 - ⭐⭐⭐ (up from ⭐⭐½)
Chapter 2 is back on Netflix, so I gladly rewatched it. I am a bit more positive this time around, or maybe it’s just an increased level of affection for these characters, but I feel the same about it as after the first watch: it’s a story that tries to find something to do to its characters for so long, and veers so dangerously into Amityville territory, until finally it settles on the Back to the Future 2 approach that makes it so satisfying - but only in the last twenty minutes.
Elio, directed by Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi and Adrian Molina, co-written with Julia Cho, Mark Hammer and Mike Jones, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐
I’ll be honest, three weeks have passed since I watched this film and I already don’t remember it that much. What I do recall is that it felt like it was constantly changing its focus between the title character and its bug-like friend, that it took some diversions (does the whole cloning thing affect anything in the end?) and that the ending seemed to be a whole other idea tacked on.
The character design reminded me a lot of A Bug’s Life and Monsters, Inc., and while the end of the first act features some interesting visuals, the overall feeling is that of an okay film that didn’t have anything new to say.