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Ponky0512
Reviews
The Wrong Missy (2020)
The Wrong Movie
There's some good humour in this rom-com but a lot of it is overplayed or as predictable as the storyline. The biggest issue is Spade playing what I think is meant to be a thirty-something character when he's very obviously past his mid-fifties. The twenty-year age difference between him and Lauren Lapkus is starkly apparent and doesn't work.
Maison du bonheur (2017)
Trite and self-serving
What a disappointment. As a lover of Paris, I was looking forward to see what I thought was going to be an artistic look at Parisian architecture as viewed by a fascinating long-time resident of a classic apartment in the city's core. My heart sank as the film began with the director's lament about going to a place where something really very terrible and horrible had happened to her years earlier. Great. Another film about a filmmaker making a film about themselves making a film. Please! If you aren't Michael Moore or the late great Agnès Varda don't attempt this style. Stay behind the camera. Unfortunately, Juliane Sellam, the subject of the film, is not any more interesting. A shallow individual obsessed with her looks (we first see her having a manicure), Sellam has nothing interesting to say about her vocation, her apartment building (the purported subject of the documentary) or even her city. Perhaps that's why Bohdanowicz chose to profile her; Sellam almost makes the filmmaker seem appealing. But not quite. Even when Bohdanowicz takes us to the scene of the oblique crime (or whatever trauma it was) she frustrates the audience with her refusal to detail what exactly happened. While I have sympathy, I am unable to understand why the filmmaker even mentions her past experience if she's not going to expand on the event. It serves only to confound the viewer and has no connection to the film's topic, such as it is. Similarly, a tearful tale about a disappointing éclair is frustrating, almost wrath-inducing. You're in Paris eating a pastry for goodness sake and all you can do is complain?
To be fair, a some of the film look lovely, like when she is out exploring the city, but this doesn't happen often enough to save the film from either of these annoying people. There are far too few of these shots, or of what the title promises, maisons and bonheur. I was left feeling like the victim of a weird, hedonistic and confusing hoax. Please Ms. Bohdanowicz, don't use documentary film as your therapist. Save your mysterious angst for your Twitter feed. Actually don't. Stay away from story-telling altogether.
Departure (2019)
Good looking flawed thriller
Many of these reviewers (especially the odious "writer" with his run-on sentences) must have some personal axes to grind with regard to this series. Complaints about Irish stereotypes and poor research seem to have been written by an insular group of self-important experts. The script, while admittedly derivative, is more than passable and, despite some redundant dialogue, is occasionally quite clever. And while there are definitely uneven performances, ongoing criticisms that the characters are both "wooden" and "over-acted" make little sense. It's either one of the other.
The director seems to have been from the world of photography and stunts and was possibly more interested in those elements than the cast. Admittedly there is disappointing acting by Dougray Scott and Tamara Duarte and many of the periphery characters, not to mention some embarrassing accents. However they are made up for by the performances of Panjabi, Sasha Roiz, Evan Buliung and especially Rebecca Lidiard.
The look of the show is really inspired with sweeping shots of London and a unique shiny office set. The stunts and the scenes of the plane crash, and the various flashbacks and conjectures are really quite impressive, as are a lot of the interesting shots. I look forward to more of this and finding out "whodunnit".