I remember no lack of whelm. I first and last saw it when it was pretty new to VHS, and in less than ideal circumstances, but I was twisted and turned and surprised.
-Wade
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Yesterday I rewatched Les aventures extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-Sec. It’s well in the running for my favourite Luc Besson film, up there with The Fifth Element.
Fun adventure movie, manages a really good pace. Really carried by Louise Bourgoin’s excellent performance in the lead role. She has a gift for rapid-fire almost screwball comedy dialogue in French. I’m impressed how she manages to play Adèle as pushy in a charming way, and amused how she spends most of the film with this sort of “I’m surrounded by idiots” gaze.
Yeah! I looove movies made by him.
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I’ve seen my fair share, haha. Fifth Element and Adèle Blanc-Sec are his best for me. Saw Nikita and Léon too. I thought Valérian was oddly a misfire; I didn’t like the two lead actors and didn’t think they did a good job. Fifth Element was already kinda doing this thing better. Subway was… interesting for an early effort. Lucy… had some good moments, but really would’ve been improved with the removal of one line from it. XD
I still consider Subway extraordinarily good. 5th Element is a cool, big opus. And Leon is phantastic. That movie about time-traveling knights is from him, too, or?
I don’t know Adele and Nikita, but I guess the latter is about a woman getting a second life as agent or killer?
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Subway
Subway is one of my favorite films and I’ve only seen it once in its entirety. I first saw the ending in French on TV in the 2010s, so I was mostly watching it for the visuals and music (I can kind of read French subtitles).
I couldn’t find a decent copy online but it finally went onto streaming services a while ago and I watched it last year.
I’m not really into action but the use of music is great and the dinner scene is fun. It’s part of a small genre called Cinema du look. I watched it alongside “Boy Meets Girl” (1984).
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Wow, two big favourers of Subway!
I remember this as a film I couldn’t stand when I saw it about three decades ago, and planned not to see again. When given the opportunity to see it again within the past few months (it appeared on Tubi) I was able to stick to my plan 
-Wade
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I’m afraid I don’t know what that one is. … it’s not Arthur and the Minimoys, is it?
Yes, that’s what Nikita is about. It also has Jean Reno in basically the same role he played in Léon, hahaha!
I was curious about the Cinéma du look as well, and that’s how I got to it. It did have a good soundtrack, and I was kinda amused at the plot point that they recruited an English-language singer to stage a concert in a subway, lol.
Otherwise, I think the pacing was a bit too slow for me and it started to lose me in the middle.
I also tried Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva but I didn’t finish it. I think that’s the point when I satisfied my curiosity about Cinéma du look. 
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I looked it up. It’s Les Visiteurs. I guess it’s “The Visitors” in English. And it’s not by Luc Besson.
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Whoa, I know that movie! I saw it too! I think it’s because Jean Reno was in it. XD
I did see a few films produced by Besson, but not directed by him. Taxi was by Gérard Pirès. That’s a really good action movie. I like it a lot. The performances there are really good. Samy Naceri is a great unflappable super-driver, Frédéric Diefenthal makes a great hapless cop, and Marion Cotillard is great as the frustrated but playful girlfriend.
What I really liked about Taxi is the small moments that either developed the characters or advanced the comedy. Émilien blowing up at Daniel for not telling him the owner of the garage they’re staking out is an insomniac. Lilly and Camille getting high on hash brownies when Émilien and Daniel come home too late from their detective work. Daniel taunting the German drivers. Camille telling Daniel that Émilien’s father failed his driver’s exam 19 times and in the end they gave him a license out of pity. Émilien and Daniel talking on the couch and realising they went to the same Jules Ferry lycée, and wondering if they could’ve been friends in school. Émilien admitting that he finished school with grades so bad “only the police would take me”.
I feel like the other Taxi films just kinda repeated the first one to diminishing returns, when they could’ve developed the characters and their relationships more. Hey, at least Daniel and Lilly did marry in the end. 
District 13 was really good, I liked that one too.
Never tried Wasabi. Maybe I should?
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Yeah, I saw Taxi, too, and I think it’s great. Very fast, very silly, totally over the top, but that is part of the fun.
Edit: It’s a common sports to make bad sequel movies, just to milk the cash cow a bit more. I hate that.
Late last night I stumbled across State of the Union 2, written by Nick Hornby and directed by Stephen Frears. I thought I was watching a short film (which is why I’m mentioning it in this thread), but later found out that it’s actually a series of 10-minute vignettes that were played all together for that night’s programming.
The astonishing Brendan Gleeson and the incomparable Patricia Clarkson play a couple meeting in a coffee-shop where they have a ten-minute chat right before they go up to see their wedding-therapist.
Sweet-and-sour heartbreaking comedy.
State of the Union (British TV series) - Wikipedia
Yes. She is. Always.
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I vaguely remember seeing her in the Édith Piaf biopic and… honestly I think she had more fun playing Lilly. XD
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I saw Alien Romulus tonight. It is very well-executed and the best Alien film since – Resurrection? (1997) Yet still has a lot to hold it back from my 8+ out of 10 range.
Above all, the Alien space is smallish, and has been played out extensively over seven to nine films (only nine if we include the AvPs in there). There are few things left to surprise an audience with. I felt this strongly and increasingly for half the film, which culminates in a silly exposition dump that the characters don’t even react to with sufficient surprise. Characterisation is a weak area in general.
In its second half, the film manages to come up with a lot of inventive daring-do, action and horror sequences, even if they’re still like a ‘best of’ of Alien films. It certainly doesn’t reek of the depressing creative conservatism that sank JJ Abrams’s Star Wars episodes.
Btw, in some of its broadest moves, this film was anticipated by @DrkStarr 's 2022 IF Into The Sun.
If you want to know whether Alien Romulus connects to the weird and unsuccessful Prometheus strand of Aliens - yep, it does eventually. This is both the source of one of the good surprises, but also necessarily brings across some of the poorly worked out (non)sense of those two movies.
-Wade
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Incredible movie. I first saw it in the early 2000s. It haunted me until I watched it again a few years ago. Not as impactful the second time; the spell broke a little–just a little. But still a masterpiece.
I eventually watched all of the Wong Kar-wai movies that I could get my hands on. Ashes of Time and My Blueberry Nights are the only two left on my list. Now I feel the urge to try tracking them down again!
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I’ve only watched Chungking Express, and I liked that. Faye Wong did a really good job in her role.
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Movies I watched this weekend:
Amazon Women on the Moon - enjoyed it. Surprisingly fun. I thought they’d blown their load early because the Monique Gabrielle sketch was the funniest, but it managed to keep me watching up 'til the end. One of the sketches seems to predict the awfulness of dating websites quite well. XD
The Tit and the Moon - best Spanish film I ever saw. (Also the only one, but eh. XD) Definitely gonna be one of my favourite movies now.
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Huh, I have a rating for this on IMDB, indicating I’ve seen it, but having just watched the trailer a moment ago, it didn’t jog a single memory. Either I rated it by mistake or it just left no impact.
If I did see it it would’ve been on VHS thirty years ago, and it looks like I’d really enjoy it now. I’ve seen thousands more real B movies since then, and I know who all the directors and actors are, including Monique Gabrielle. I was pretty unimpressed watching the extras on Deathstalker II and seeing both the director and male lead being pretty disrespectful towards her, both at the time of filming and years later.
-Wade
I think Happy Together was about the first film I saw the first time I went to Sydney Film Festival. I remember the look and the trailer, but any film that uses the song Happy Together in the trailer – that tends to wipe my memory of the film. All that happens when I think of the film is I hear that song banging in my head and I visualise the trailer.
-Wade
I just rewatched The Mist (2007) for the first time since I saw it at the cinema. The film left a big impression on me over the years, though I also remember a lot of annoying things about it. But any querulousness is eclipsed in the long run by the monsters. I think this is pretty much the best serious, frightening multiple-monster movie that there is. The creatures are believable and repulsive, scary, disgusting, and the gore is clear and the trauma on people upsetting. I read just now that the movie frightened Stephen King. I remembered the spider scene vividly from the original viewing and it repulsed me again tonight.
So what’s in the ‘bad’ – Well, a lot of the character communication scenes strike me as too unbelievable. It’s just in the script, the way some characters can rant on and on without being interrupted. And the preacher character is too much. She eats too much space and energy in the film. Though I do feel while watching it I can almost generate King’s prose describing her character.
The ending is cruel beyond measure. In fact it got me thinking, while I have no particular feel about the 2000s as a film era, I was able to see a film as bleak as this one in wide release in 2007. Today? The ending alone – they wouldn’t do it. A serious, solidly budgeted major studio horror movie with monsters and gore and an adult cast? No chance today.
The film is full of people committing suicide, too. This is tied in with the cruelty of the ending, though my friend I saw it with back in the daydid not buy the suicides of certain characters, and I’m still not sure I do either. But I feel kind of like that doesnt matter. This ending is so deliberately trying to pulverise, you can ignore the nuances.
Does get me interested in trying the IF of the novella, which is supposedly a special kind of failure as detailed in the 50 Years of Text Games book.
-Wade
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