Category Archives: Choose Life

The Smiling Madame Beudet

Posted on by
7

Madame Beudet (Germaine Dermoz) lives an unhappy live being mocked and tormented by her husband (Alexandre Arquillière). He works all day as a cloth merchant and ignores his wife when he comes home. He arranges tickets for them for the theatre to a performance of Faust but, when she declines to go, he pretends he will kill himself with a gun he keeps in a top drawer. Evidently he keeps the gun unloaded and uses this trick often to mock his wife. However, when he goes to the show with his associate and his wife (Jean D’Yd & Madeleine Guitty), Mrs. Beudet loads the gun in the hope that the next time he pulls the stunt he’ll follow through and kill himself.
the-smiling-madame-beudet Continue reading →

Garden State

Posted on by
5

Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) is in a listless daze, working as a waiter/failed actor at a Vietnamese restaurant in Los Angeles when he receives a message from his father (Ian Holm) that his mother has died. Andrew returns home to New Jersey for the funeral, and ends up staying for a few days that will apparently change his life forever.
bar Continue reading →

Katniss Sniddlegrass and the Cauldron of Mockingjays

Posted on by
5

Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers everywhere!

Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) lives in the world of Panem, and land rife with civil unrest. 74 years ago Panem, which is split into twelve working-class districts and one wealthy capitalist Capitol, was host to an uprising, during which the unruly numbered districts were defeated by the Capitol’s military powers, and during which District 13 was destroyed. As penance for this act, every year the Capitol holds an annual Hunger Games, for which a boy and girl aged 12 to 18 from each district are randomly selected, trained, presented to the public and thrown into a specially made arena to fight it out to the death, until only one player survives. Katniss lives in District 12, and the when her younger sister Primrose (Willow Shields) is picked in her first draw, Katniss volunteers in her stead. Her male counterpart is Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), a baker who only tangentially knows Katniss. Katniss asks her friend Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth) to look after her sister and emotionally frail mother (Paula Malcomson).
Jennifer Lawrence stars as 'Katniss Everdeen' in THE HUNGER GAMES.
Continue reading →

Nashville

Posted on by
1

This review was originally written as part of my USA Road Trip at French Toast Sunday.

In Nashville, Tennessee, the birth-place of country music, several story arcs cross paths and words over 5 days, leading up to a big musical celebration and presidential election rally.N1 Continue reading →

Sans Soleil

Posted on by
9

According to Wikipedia, Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (literally translating as “Sunless”) is ” meditation on the human nature of memory,” so it seems only fitting how little I can remember of this film. As such this a review I’ll be writing more to cross it off than to say I’ve seen it, as what little I can recall is not something I wish to experience again.  sans_soleil
 Continue reading →

Vivre sa Vie

Posted on by
3

This review was originally written for Blueprint: Review.

Over the course of twelve chapters we experience the life of Nana (Karina), an aspiring actress and shop assistant who turns to prostitution when her acting career fails to take off.

There comes a point where you have to just sit back and declare that some things aren’t for you. You’ve tried them, often numerous times, but always with a similar, less than stellar result. No matter how hard you try, it’s just not something you can get on board with. And so it is with me and the cinema of the French New Wave. It’s not the worst I’ve seen – I’d possibly hand that crown to Godard’s À Bout de Souffle – but Vivre sa Vie comes close. It strikes me as a film in which the director is actively challenging the audience to pay attention, providing as he does multiple occasions where surely only the most fervent of viewers can remain engaged. Throughout this film we witness an entire letter being hand written, word by word, with the camera focussed intently on the letter. A poem is recited, in full. A conversation is had with French philosopher Brice Parain. And through all the ambling, overly self reflective, ponderous yet vapid naval gazing I struggle to maintain a grip on my conscious state as Godard hints at, but never fully embraces a narrative.
vivre-sa-vie Continue reading →

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Posted on by
6

Three scantily clad go-go dancers go drag racing in the desert when they encounter a young couple. Varla (Tura Satana), the leader of the dancers, challengers the man (Ray Barlow) to a race and, when it appears he will win, she runs him off the road. The two start fighting, after Varla goads him into hitting her, and she soon kills him, forcing them to kidnap his bikini-clad girlfriend Linda (Susan Bernard). When the girls stop at a petrol station, they hear of an isolated house inhabited by a wheelchair-bound old man (Stuart Lancaster) and his two sons, Kirk (Paul Trinka) and his mentally handicapped but physically impressive young brother, known only as The Vegetable (Dennis Busch). Apparently somewhere in that house there is a large sum of money, which Varla will stop at nothing to acquire.
fasterdirectsunlight Continue reading →

Insurgent

Posted on by
2

In a nonsense dystopia where people are separated into groups based on their personalities, four people are on the run as fugitives from the state, after rebelling in the previous film. These people are Tris (Shailene Woodley), her love interest Four (Theo James), her brother Caleb (Ansel Engort) and a dick called Peter (Miles Teller). They’ve been hiding out amongst the forgiving and generally pleasant Amity faction, but when Peter sells out the others, Caleb heads back to his home in Erudite, leaving Tris and Four to go on the run, passing from faction to faction in an attempt to raise an army against the evil Erudite, led by Jeanine (Kate Winslet) and her army of Dauntless, led by Eric (Jai Courtney) and Max (Mekhi Phifer).  insurgent-xlarge Continue reading →

El Topo

Posted on by
3

A black-clad gunslinger travelling with a naked seven year old boy comes across a slaughtered village, and seeks out the perpetrators, intending to enact vengeance on behalf of the victims. Upon finding the men responsible, the man deals out some justice before moving on, swapping the kid for an adult women, who promises to love him if he can defeat the four great masters living in the desert. Later, he finds himself trying to dig a tunnel into a cavern, but first must earn money by performing street comedy.
maxresdefault Continue reading →