Nothing compares to being swang gently and driven by a woman...pilot...
TAROM has understood that sometimes gorgeous blond babes with longer than life legs could be used for their brains also, with much more effectiveness! So the blond bomb shell in question made me land smoothly in a lively Thessaloniki that was only preparing for a wide wide wild week-end to come...
This Film Festival has long ago (53 years) proved its sobriety, its depth, its infailible taste in its choice of films and guests, and has established itself for GOOD as the most daring and outbursting in all Southern Europe!!!!
Day one:
LE CAPITAL by Master Costa Gavras( Directed by Costa-Gavras. Starring Gabriel Byrne, Gad Elmaleh), a bank boardroom thriller in which French finance comes under threat from American invaders.
The story is off the rack, but the plotters’ suits are well-tailored.
It kept me on the chair for 2h, at 9 am, which is in itself a personal combat. But this time I was really sucked in it.
The story is off the rack, but the plotters’ suits are well-tailored.
It kept me on the chair for 2h, at 9 am, which is in itself a personal combat. But this time I was really sucked in it.
Capital opens as sex, wealth and power collide.
The CEO of Phenix Bank collapses in agony on the golf course. The cause is a testicular tumor.
But LE CAPITAL is definitely a film that lingers in the memory, in spite of being rather irritating to watch.
But LE CAPITAL is definitely a film that lingers in the memory, in spite of being rather irritating to watch.
The villain of the piece in this update on the evils of capitalism is the international banking system, coldly unveiled in its unseen operations with predatory shareholders and brutal funders.
Tourneuil’s challenge is to keep his bank, corrupt and nepotistic as it might be, from going the way of American institutions that fire employees en masse and starve those who still have jobs.
Costa-Gavras is no stranger to conspiracy tales.
This one brings some visual movement to dull corporate meetings. It follows the numerous knives that the ensemble of financiers stick into each other.
Most of those characters come as stereotypes.
Gabriel Byrne is a greedy cost-cutting investor, determined to call the shots from Miami in a boat filled with bikini-girls. Hyppolite Girardot is a weak and sleek executive.
The mesmerizing model Liya Kebede plays Nassim, a runway siren without a genuine bone in her body, who strings a willing Tourneuil along.
This one brings some visual movement to dull corporate meetings. It follows the numerous knives that the ensemble of financiers stick into each other.
Most of those characters come as stereotypes.
Gabriel Byrne is a greedy cost-cutting investor, determined to call the shots from Miami in a boat filled with bikini-girls. Hyppolite Girardot is a weak and sleek executive.
The mesmerizing model Liya Kebede plays Nassim, a runway siren without a genuine bone in her body, who strings a willing Tourneuil along.
Sadly, based on this performance, Kebede doesn’t have much acting talent in that sublime body.
Filmed by Eric Gautier, a cinematographer with solid thriller values, the boiling intrigue does experiment with story-telling.
There are, for instance, explosions of emotions that Tourneuil suppresses before he responds with calm, something that turns the film more into a comedy than of a sober plaidoyer!
Filmed by Eric Gautier, a cinematographer with solid thriller values, the boiling intrigue does experiment with story-telling.
There are, for instance, explosions of emotions that Tourneuil suppresses before he responds with calm, something that turns the film more into a comedy than of a sober plaidoyer!
Yet the battle for control of the bank builds to an unsurprising maneuver that might be called a Margin Call moment, as Tourneuil calls his enemies’ bluff when he lets shares drop intentionally.
Costa-Gavras’s CEO protagonist is younger than his corrupt colleagues, although the uncharismatic Elmaleh isn’t helped by his efforts to speak in an American accent, which sounds like a Richard Gere comic imitation.
Costa-Gavras’s CEO protagonist is younger than his corrupt colleagues, although the uncharismatic Elmaleh isn’t helped by his efforts to speak in an American accent, which sounds like a Richard Gere comic imitation.
The hero of Capital ends up only slightly less compromised than his elders.
His main Achileas tendons are the stockholder demands and an uncontrollable lust for Nassim. A lust and a consumption that might make Dominique Straus Kahn blush (or arrouse) in at least one scene.
His main Achileas tendons are the stockholder demands and an uncontrollable lust for Nassim. A lust and a consumption that might make Dominique Straus Kahn blush (or arrouse) in at least one scene.
Costa-Gavras is hypnotizing the audience with the message that executives can’t be expected to preserve their values, given the system in which they’re working.
His movie doesn’t tell us much more than that, and a lot less than what we can read in the newspaper.
But right now I am more tantalized by a very emotional, yet minimalistic, poetical yet ultra dramatic film: REBELLE ( War Witch) ( Canada 2012, 90 min, DIRECTOR Kim Nguyen, CAST Rachel Mwanza, Alain Bastien, Serge Kanyinda, Ralph Prosper, Mizinga Mwinga, WORLD SALES Films Distribution)
After a day when I vomited my mental guts watching images of german 80 years old people having spongious sex (!!!!!!), or a gorgeous looking japanese male actor installing a cheap clownesque acting in another very boring and missionary film....
Beginning as a hard-edged depiction of children abducted in an African village and forced to become child soldiers, the story quickly expands into multiple layers,
from hallucinatory to familial.
The journey is never easy for Komona, one of the abducted children, said to have magic in her because she manages to survive a barrage of bullets in a jungle ambush.
However, director Kim Nguyen gives us far more than a film of hardship.
It is a film with rich, detailed views of both African fighting and the daily life that goes on around it.
It is a film with rich, detailed views of both African fighting and the daily life that goes on around it.
Some of the characters still seem like archetypes, but Rachel Mwanza’s performance as Komona beautifully carries us into all the different facets of Africa that Nguyen tries to explore.
At the same time, as Komona takes on the role of a stubborn survivalist, escaping forced marriage to a gang-leader and finding her way back home, "War Witch" develops into a thoroughly suspenseful tale that advances its themes instead of simplifying them.
When Komona sees the ghosts of her murderers relatives, it's not a supernatural twist, but rather Nguyen's manifestation of the fears of this vulnerable protagonist.
Abounding with tribal sights and sounds, "War Witch" is capitalizing on the spiritual elegance of African rituals.
But the film is also the scene of a very delicate teen love story, where its protagonists, however horrors have they endured, are evolving with pudicity, with the charming tenderness of their childish innocence and age!
It all touches pure Expressionism and, by emphasizing her environment, "War Witch" universalizes her story!
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