Pirates of the Caribbean

Johnny Depp is as usual (which is a compliment) and perhaps even better, Keira Knighley is beautiful, and Orlando Bloom doesn't exist. Minuses : the story takes a long time to really start up, and it's sometimes filled with disgusting Disneyish heart-wrenching violin-backed impossible-love scenes (The ones that make you laugh instead of cry, urgh!) ; moreover, you can most of the times predict what will happen five minutes later. Pluses : all the rest, which is a lot.

Not a bad one, very entertaining I would say.

X-Men 3

Preliminary note : I've never read the comics so I wouldn't be able to say if the movie is true to the comics'story. That being said, Woah!, many many changes happen in this episode of the X-men, too much changes actually. I found it not to be as good as the previous episodes : I think it lies in the fact that the epic dimension of the battle between mutants and men is not too well rendered, and the central character of this episode, Jean Gray, is definitely not as charismatic as Wolverine or Mystique.

Trying to picture in an hour something as extraordinay as a political and civil war, while following a defined set of characters in their individual or collective actions demands great control on the way the story is built. I personnaly find that the scope the movie is trying to cover is way too large and thus, while trying to do "too much", it does "not enough".

However, for those who like them, it's nice to meet the X-men again.

La Curée

"La Curée" est le second livre de la série des Rongon-Macquart de Zola. La curée est un terme de chasse qui désigne le moment où les chiens se jètent sur la bête coincée pour la dépecer.

Ici, les chiens, ce sont Aristide Rougon, dit Saccard, second fils de Pierre Rougon, et ses accolytes, et la victime, c'est Paris : si Paris est le Paris que l'on connait, c'est en grande partie due aux aménagements d'Haussman sous le second Empire. La percée des grands boulevards dans Paris et les travaux titanesques qui en ont résultés ont été l'occasion d'une spéculation particulière sur les terrains et biens immobiliers se trouvant sur le tracé de ces futurs boulevards. Ainsi des fortunes rapides se sont faites sur le dos de la ville de Paris, en proie à tous ces chiens prêts à acheter à bas prix, à revendre à des prix exhorbitants, à exproprier à tour de bras. Tout ce que cette activité peut compter de déversement d'argent et de luxe, de débauche, de corruption, de détournement et d'abus de biens est décrit dans ce livre, ce qui lui valu un scandale lors de sa parution.

Zola se plaît à découper les agissements de l'empire, tel Saccard découpant Paris sur la butte Montmartre.

[SPOILER COMING...]

La Curée, c'est l'histoire de Saccard, qui arrive pauvre à Paris, et qui enrage et bouillonne dans sa misère. Il veut jouir vite et fort et, attendant patiemment son heure (et la mort de sa femme), il va épouser Renée. Renée lui apporte deux choses : une forte dot qui va permettre à Saccard de décoller et une femme extraordinairement belle, un passe-partout dans les milieux auxquels Saccard aspire. Ensuite, c'est le déchaînement des appétits de Saccard ; il aime l'argent, il use de toutes les fraudes et intrigues possibles pour en gagner et ne regarde pas quand il dépense, presque désintéressé. C'est le fleuve d'or arrosant Paris que décrit Zola, prenant sa source dans les coffres de Saccard, qui met toute son énergie à les remplir aussi vite qu'il les vide.

La Curée, c'est aussi l'histoire de Renée, qui quitte l'austère hôtel de son père, et qui découvre brutalement une vie de débauche, sans aucun interdit. Renée est jeune, belle et insouciante : bientôt, sa vie n'est plus faite que de robes sublimes (et très chères), de ragots mondains, d'amants, d'autant plus que Saccard paie toutes ses factures et ferme les yeux sur tous ses écarts. Mais rapidement, la belle se lasse et il lui en faut plus : elle s'amourache alors de Maxime, fils mou et androgyne de Saccard que son père a fait venir à Paris. L'inceste, la domination de cet être asexué la grise, elle s'y perd totalement et l'arrêt brutal de cette relation, la renonciation facile de Maxime, et l'indifférence de Saccard l'achèvera. Renée cherchait des limites et elle n'en trouva pas. L'indifférence tue.

Bon, prochaine lecture, le troisième livre des Rougon-Macquart, "Le Ventre de Paris", mais je crois que je vais lire un truc un peu plus "léger" d'ici là...

The Butterfly Effect

My first reaction after the beginning of the movie was : hey, that's Kelso from "That Seventies Show". I used to watch this show some years ago and it was fun.
Apparently, Kelso (Ashton Kutcher) has grown up and he's able to do more than looking stupid (don't get me wrong, I think he does that well too ;) )

I had never heard of the movie before watching it and I think that if you can accept the idea that the main character can alter his past (kind of like "Back to the Future, but without the DeLorean) you can get into the movie. There are a couple of strange and even illogic things (he can change the past but come back into the same reality.... that's not the same theory as Doc/Emmett Brown...) but I wasn't in the mood for thinking too much about it :)

Overall, I really enjoyed it, well organized, well directed, nice effects, OK actors. I even think this movie has "the little something" that makes a movie a really good movie.

[EDIT and SPOILER]
I've read some comments around the web and apparently, there are several endings to the movie. I've seen the version where Evan goes back to the womb to strangle himself. My understanding of the ending is that the two stillborn children his mother had had before him did the same thing Evan does, which is why she has not been able to have kids with Evan's father. Afterwards though, she meets another man and is able to have a "normal" child... My two cents...

Shaun of the Dead

Shaun: [in concerned tone] Mum, have you been bitten?
Barbara: No, but Philip has.
Shaun: Oh, OK.
Ed: [concerned] What's going on?
Shaun: We might have to kill my step-dad.
Ed: Oh, OK.

Aaahhh, this was the good zombie movie I had been waiting for. It keeps the rules of the genre while not taking itself seriously. It's not always very subtle (fart jokes inside) but it's hilarious... You gotta love the moment when they just throw anything at the zombie-girl in the backyard, I just laughed out loud in my quiet train.

To sum it up, Shaun is a loser; a small employee with no other goal in life than to have his pint of beer every evening at the local pub with his best friend Ed who is even more a loser than he is since he's got no job, and just spend his days and nights squatting his friend's couch playing video games. Shaun's also got a beautiful girlfriend who's getting a bit tired of waiting for him to grow up and a mom with whom he has a complicated relationship.

And just when the world around him is filling up with zombies (?!), he decides to sort his life out.

Go see this movie for a good time. Period.

Rosemary's Baby

I watched Polanski's Rosemary's Baby yesterday and I must confess that I was pretty excited about it, since I had read a couple of rather good reviews about it. Well, I am disappointed : the movie is more than 2 hours long, nothing really happens in the first half and it falls flat at the end... There's some nice tension at some point and then : PFEWWWWwwww... The end cannot be called an end, there's just nothing, no explanation, nothing to think about, 'hail Satan' being the only thing the author could come up with; it reminds me of a good gripping book by Stephen King that ends with aliens coming from outer space to destroy earth and the hero killing them with a screwdriver and a banana.
Somewhere in the middle of the ovie, when it began to be interesting, I was prepared to trade the slow start for a good end but it's just not really worth it.

I would definitely not recommend it.

[EDIT]
After I wrote this, I browsed around and saw nothing but "best this" and "most that"... Well, it still didn't scare me nor compelled me to any feeling and the end is still bad.

Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma

Worst. Movie. Ever.

Not that it has no story to tell or is badly directed, but it is so horrible and so crude that it is simply not possible to watch it without flinching. Pasolini must have been the most devious person on earth... I can find nothing, and will never be able to agree with people that find good reasons (philosophy, voyeurism or other) for making this movie.

If you like to endlessly endure footage of rape and torture, this is for you, but if you are a human being, stay away!

Narutomania

When I left my last position in France Telecom, my collegues (well hinted by my wife) offered me the first 7 volumes of the manga "Naruto". Naruto is a very famous best seller and before reading it, I thought that it was on the same level as dragon ball, so I had never bothered. Well, since I know every detail of Sangoku's story, I guess that what has was to happen next was obvious. So in the last 3 weeks I've bought the following volumes up to the 20th, read them at the speed of light, twice, and am craving to buy the other ones.... But I've got to restrain myself, since money doesn't grow on trees.
That's why I was standing today at lunch in the Virgin bookstore close to my workplace reading the 21st volume, to discover what would happen next...
So, yes, I guess I'm addicted to Naruto.

Robert des Noms Propres

Ce qu'il y a de bien avec les livres d'Amélie Nothomb, c'est qu'on sait qu'on ne passera pas 6 mois à les lire : il n'y a pas beaucoup de pages.
Parce contre, ce qui n'est pas bien avec les livres d'Amélie Nothomb, c'est que ces quelques pages, on sait qu'on va devoir les lire d'une traite.

Le Robert des Noms Propres n'échappe pas à cette habitude ; pourtant, je n'ai pas bien compris le pourquoi du titre (un truc d'artiste certainement) et le "pitch" en contre couverture du livre n'a pas grand rapport avec le contenu dudit livre (ou alors une fois de plus, je ne l'ai pas compris). La naissance de Plectrude est entourée de violence (sa mère tue son père, va en prison, accouche et se suicide, et tout ça dans les premières pages du roman) mais, receuillie par sa tante, elle l'ignorera ; d'un comportement souvent extrême, elle se jètera à corps perdu dans la danse jusqu'à l'auto-destruction... je n'en raconterai pas plus.

Finalement, il n'y a pas grande différence entre l'idée avancée par Amélie Nothomb, qui sous-entend que Plectrude hérite entièrement son caractère de celui de sa mère et que ses actes en découlent, et l'approche de Zola dans les Rougon-Macquart, qui fait se mélanger les qualités et les tares au gré de l'arbre généalogique, très peu de personnages échappant à la névrose originelle de la tante Dide.

Lord of War

Yuri Orlov to Jack Valentine:

And while the biggest arms dealer in the world is your boss... the President of the United States, who ships more merchandise in a day than I do in a year... sometimes it's embarrassing to have his fingerprints on the guns.
(...)
So... you call me evil, but unfortunaly for you, I'm a necessary evil

Watching this movie is like a reminder to get you out of your daily thoughts : the world that we live in is a mirror picture of what we are : in human acts, there is a lot of black, a lot of grey and very little white; and the whiter the acts, the surer you can be that they are only demagogy brought up to cover the worst.

So, back to the plot: this guy, Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage in a rather good performance), sells arms the way he would sell candy or diet coke: with a great marketing slab, profit & loss, etc... Since he is the main character, and since you are shown the details of his personal life, you are brought to sympathize with him, although he is the worst bastard earth ever produced : that's the strength of the movie : you can "understand" his worst decisions. Another strength is the fact that there is no or little bloodshed; most of it is suggested or not shown (but you know about it all the same...).
A great movie, with a crude and horrifying message : it's worth the time you'll lose to watch it. Oh, and the introduction sequence is a blast!

A Year in the Merde

Since this book is about France from an English point of view, I'll quick review it in English and French.

A Year in the Merde covers the not-so-fictive story of an Englishman in Paris. The author, Stephen Clarke has spent several years in France and has had many experiences in the differences between the two countries... So, wrapping them in his verve, he tells us the story of Paul West, who is hired by a French company to open tea salons. Paul will collide with all the details that that us French people so endearing and so unpleasant and the parisian life will reveal surreal to him.
This book is very funny, I've even had fits of laughter reading it (people look strangely at you when you laugh for no apparent reason in a very quiet train...). At length, the style can be a bit "heavy" but when speaking of French specificities, I think he's got it right.
For French readers who aren't afraid of a little original critic...

A year in the Merde raconte l'histoire pas-si-fictive-que-ça d'un Anglais à Paris. L'auteur, Stephen Clarke, a passé plusieurs années en France et a beaucoup d'expérience des différences entre les deux pays. Colorant ses expériences avec sa verve, il nous raconte l'histoire de Paul West, embauché par une boîte française pour ouvrir une chaine de salons de thé. Paul va se heurter à tous ces détails qui rendent les français si attachants et insupportables et la vie parisienne va se révéler complètement surréaliste.
Ce livre est très drôle, j'ai même eu des éclats de rire en le lisant (et eu des regards étranges de la part des passagers du wagon calme dans lequel je me trouvais à ce moment...). A la longue, le style est un peu lourd, mais je pense qu'il vise juste quand il parle des spécificités françaises.
Pour les lecteurs français qui n'ont pas peur d'un peu de critique originale...