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Le hasard et la violence (1974)
Yin & Yang & Yves.
A tragic love story, strangely reminiscent of the ancient yet perennial echoes of oriental philosophy.
A random act of gratuitous violence causes the protagonist to meet his heart's chosen one, thus becoming the source of the blossoming romance gradually developing between the two, only for a similar event, whose cruelty can only be matched by its senselessness, to finally put an end to any possible future they might have ever shared together.
Paraphrasing the Book of Job, fate gave, fate took away, may fate's name be blessed.
Making a Murderer (2015)
Series Pilot Seemingly Riddled with Baseless Assumptions and Flawed Reasoning.
As far as I was personally able to ascertain, the series pilot seemed so densely packed with a plethora of baseless assumptions, and heavily riddled with flawed reasoning skills, to the point to which I felt intellectually compelled to abandon all plans of ever watching the rest of the first season, after viewing just one episode, being completely and utterly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of questionable conclusions. Since I do not particularly enjoy posting spoilers, I hereby spare the reader their rather lengthy list; suffice is it to say, however, that they should be straightforwardly apparent to anyone viewing the pilot with a critical eye, through an objective lens.
Given its sky-high mark on this very site, along with a whole host of awards, won at various film festivals, I can only assume that the production eventually rewarded those that were psychologically able to muster or soldier through it, despite the constant onslaught of logical fallacies and unsound arguments permeating its first episode, for their enormous amount of patience and martyr-like resilience, as a cool morning breeze delighting heated young lovers after an exhaustingly arduous night of passion; personally, I found its powers of inference and intellectual prowess significantly less impressive.
Regardless of its ultimate truth value or popularity, a bad start or flawed pilot constitutes an unpardonable sin in matters of film making, for precisely this very reason: deterring potential viewers from ever engaging the movie or series; this is particularly relevant in a capitalist world of sales and marketing, where books are de facto judged by their proverbial cover; or, in this case, by their prologue.
Not being especially fond of posting low marks on productions I personally deem or perceive as somewhat subpar, I am thereby content with offering this hopefully constructive criticism, in good faith, with the intent of being received as such.
Deterrence (1999)
Trump: The Movie.
Ever had the feeling that life is just one long B-movie ? Well, thanks to a certain inflammatory rhetoric adopted by the Forty-Fifth Leader of the Free World during the summer of his first year in office, this particular low-budget production was on the brink of becoming one of the first fulfilled apocalyptic prophecies outside the Book of Revelation. Indeed, as two legendary Jewish sages of the Sixties famously sang, "the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls" - or, in this case, inscribed on celluloid. A rather dark and ironic twist on the age-old adage of life imitating art. "Make America Afraid Again" - and drag the rest of humanity along for the ride, while you're at it. As it currently stands, the review-page counts about eighty entries, all stemming from before the above-mentioned event(s) even took place, roughly half of which are rather harsh, basically trashing the film as being somewhat implausible, to say the very least. I sincerely wonder whether these reviewers (whose fairness, astute and intelligent observations, depth of insight, and power of perception I in no way doubt, by the way) still feel the same way today, in light of everything that came to pass in the meantime on the world's political stage.
Better Things (2008)
Dark: no sugar.
An utterly dark and depressing movie: which is also probably why I've enjoyed it so much... Its theme easily reminds us of "Requiem For A Dream" or "Trainspotting" (another British masterpiece); its heavy, discomforting atmosphere of deep sadness and unrecoverable loss, as well as its long, silent frames of bleak, grief-stricken faces, marked by unspeakable pain and suffering, are reminiscent of "Another Day"; and its overall "dragged out" or "self indulgent" artistic approach is evocative of "Elephant", or Bela Tarr's "Satantango". This film is nothing less than a raw and torturous foray into the very heart of darkness and despair; its main subject, as set forth in the very first lines of the movie, is nothing else than the excruciating agony of existence, from whose unbearable hollowness or emptiness the characters seek shelter in drugs, lust, or isolation. From this perspective alone, an obvious link can be drawn to Louis Malle's "The Fire Within", a masterpiece of the 1960's French New Wave cinema, or to its modern-day Nordic 'remake', "Oslo, August 31". Then again, it is obviously not a film for everyone, and neither are those mentioned above, to whom this movie is more or less comparable... After all, not everybody enjoys his or her cup of coffee dark, with NO sugar...