jochen-j-smet Reviews

After Blue (2021)

Either you love it or you hate it..

[10/10 · 31 January 2024]

OK, this movie shouldn't be watched like a 'normal' movie. It should simply be watched for what it is, namely a piece of art. The scenario, who gives a damn. In most movies I do give a damn, but not in this one. Bertrand Mandico makes it quite clear you shouldn't. I read in another review that one should just let him/herself be immersed in the strange and wondrous universe created by this movie. That hits the nail.

It's a visual masterpiece, full of colours and art. The weirdness of the encounters just makes you laugh. I definitely need to rewatch this on acid.

I especially love the western kind of feeling to it.

This is truly something, instant cult!

Joker (I) (2019)

Didn't appeal to me

[5/10 · 29 January 2024]

First of all: I'm not a batman fan to begin with, so a movie solely about the origins of the vilain of that comic, nah. Not a good scoop for me. But that's very personal.

Second: there's like this wave in cinema which tries to depicture everything as realistic as possible. Space movies like Gravity and The Martian, horror movies like the remake of Child's Play and this movie too. I hate it! I want to be entertained by alien monsters like the ones in Alien and Predators, I want the ghost of a murderer possessing a doll and I want The Joker to be a lunatic vilain without a cause.

I really have no message on this drama portraying how a pitiful man became The Joker and stirred up a riot.

Napoleon (2023)

Napoleon depicted as a moron

[2/10 · 23 January 2024]

Ok, first of all: Napoleon might be one of my favourite historical figures ever. So I know a thing or two about his actual biography.

For me he was the blueprint of the enlightened despot. He aimed for making a better world, a better life for the common people by regulating as much as he could think of. And he did. The code Napoleon is still progressive in my view. However, at some point he lost it, corrupted by power. All this in a nutshell.

Now back to this movie. If I wouldn't know anything about this historical figure, and I saw this movie, I would think 'why on earth would anyone want to remember this guy?'. He was a complete moron: childish, sex obsessed and warmongering. Maybe even a loser.

I would think of this as a very American kind of view on Napoleon. Like he was the Hitler of his time and needed to be stopped. But those were other times. The way I see it, all of the nobility in the rest of Europe was sooo afraid of what happened in France, and that a low birth battlefield genius rose to power in France they wanted to destroy him no matter what. So far for the warmongering for me, the others declared war on him. In this movie one would think he was only concerned with 2 things: conquering and an heir. Rubbish! The French Revolution was something that lived among commoners throughout Europe, and for example Beethoven really believed in it. He wrote a symphony for Napoleon which he destroyed the moment he declared himself emperor, feeling betrayed. THAT's the true story. It should have been a movie in which one sees the character of Napoleon evolve.

This movie is just a summary of his key moments without character build-up. You could just open up an encyclopedia and read in a 100 lines what this movie is about. You would read he won the battle of Austerlitz and still don't know anything about the man behind.

Further on, the love between him and Josephine portrayed didn't touch me at all. Very trivial.

This is so bad it in fact deserves only 1/10, I gave 2/10 because of the cinematography.

Tonight She Comes (2016)

A weird, capturing movie

[9/10 · 19 January 2024]

I don't get why this is rated so low.

For me as a horror fan, this movie has everything my heart desires: some kills, a demon, some weirdo hillbillies, a satanic cult thing, gore...

I watched this movie some time ago, and now re-arranging my collection I stumble on it and remember a lot of it. I was really captured by it while watching. It's not really a scary movie, there are no jump-scares. Its strength is weirdness and gore, just gross, and the constant wondering of where it is going to.

Don't want to spoil, but the plot twists, there seems to be a solution through some ritual and then not.

By re-arranging my collection I try to label my movies, but this one is hard to label. Which is good, it's refreshing, it's original.