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parispete1
Reviews
8MM (1999)
Embarrassingly bad
After watching '8 millimeters', I have a question. Why was this film made? I don't know movies, only words, so when I see words so badly used, it makes me sad. And when a good idea and good actors can't find even mediocre talent for the script or direction, my sadness is like a funeral in the rain. For poor Nick Cage, a good actor, getting mixed up in this whirlpool of weary words was a classic mistake. Why don't agents protect their actors from these talent-free zones? Surely any professional reading of this grotesque script must have revealed way in advance how badly things would turn out ... or was the paycheck simply too enormous to knock back? I'd really like to know who backed these two hours of lost time. Perhaps there's something I'm missing - like was it designed to be bad, lose money and reduce studio taxation? Hollywood does this, and it genuinely mystifies me. All I could ask myself as this thing built to its inevitably Gothic climax was ... with loads of fine writing and directing talent available ...why this?
Sånger från andra våningen (2000)
Wonderfully darkly funny and incomparably Swedish.
Possibly incomprehensible to those who have never lived in Sweden, where whole hours somehow manage to lose themselves in a meditative calm that exists nowhere else. Songs from the Second Floor is truly Ingemar Bergman meets Monty Python, as Roy Andersson non too gently deflates the pretentious, the pompous and the self important. The sparse dialogue and hugely tongue-in-cheek solemnity will either offend the spectator to the point of rage, or scratch the itch that nothing else quite reaches. I adored it. Like raw oysters, broccoli or goat milk - you'll either connect with the Roy Andersson brand of iconoclastic insanity and love this one ... or you'll hate it with a passion. There'll be no fence-sitting with this Nordic treasure.