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huspomike
Reviews
The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012)
Very sorry; but I hate, hate, hated this flick
I regret seeing (for 5 bux) this movie, about 2 awful and truly horrible people. People who chose to live together (the plot gives no clues about whether they chose to marry one another) and procreate.
To nobody's surprise, their procreation grows up to be a curious and cute 5 or 6 year old girl, with all kinds of questions about spirituality, mortality, and the meaning of life. Because her horrible, reprehensible parents have lived their entire life as hedonists, they have no meaningful answers for their daughter's questions. They spout meaningless crap, which confuses the daughter.
A good percentage of the flick is about the selfish and boorish parents' time commitment to performing American style bluegrass music. In other words, they perform music from the 1920s and 1930s. And this is apparently shared by 5 or 6 bandmates, who do the 'music' portion of their musical act.
The Belgian movie is in either Belgian, French, or Flemish. With English subtitles, in its American presentation. The sad and cruel truth of this subtitling is that the conversation and endless arguing between the aforementioned hedonist idiots is all subtitled (which is just about enough to give most persons a headache). However, the mildly spiritual, and sometimes deep, bluegrass lyrics, in English, are *NOT* subtitled at all. Thus I missed 80% of the song lyrics and their meanings.
I have heard from other viewers that the song lyrics, when superimposed upon the plot mechanics, are quite meaningful. But I am never to learn firsthand about this, because some idiot technical translator on the post-production team decided that English song lyrics don't deserve their own subtitles. W T F, indeed.
Sorry that I do not have a better, or nicer review on this thing. I simply felt that it displayed awful people acting awful toward one another.
Recent foreign-language titles which I found worthwhile (from the same time era) include "The German Doctor" from Argentina, "Wadjda" from Saudi Arabia, and "Metro Manila" which is apparently a British production of action in the Phillipines.
Fade (2008)
spare minimalist spin-off of Uncle George's THX-1138
Well, I'll assume you all saw G. Lucas's first 'feature', "THX-1138".
Resident of bland and confining futurustic dystopia lives underground, then gains the idea that they need to see the above-ground world.
Yawn. FADE captures this notion perfectly for the first 48 of its first 70 minutes. The visual design is a bit remarkable in that the director and his production team have found a real bland generic facility in which to film; where Lucas went just a little whizz-bang with some futurism props.
FADE differs in that the life above-ground is explored in minor detail, and another existence different than that of our protagonist (Chloe374) is introduced to the audience.
As other reviewers reflected, FADE feels more like an art project than a movie or a narrative. Yet it was still good visual art, creative design and fine to look at.
Where FADE suffers is the audio engineering. Since the late 1930s, and certainly as a finished concept by the 1940s, Hollywood film production learned that actors often needed to record their lines at greater than a whispered voice. And the MPSE specialty has known forever that whispered lines need to be ramped up farrrrrrrrrrr into the audible range, and all dialogue needs solid transmission, enough to overpower the film's music portion, which is intended as a pure background or mood-establishing portion.
Director Beer and his team have found some nice musical pieces, yet I will repeat: they belong in the background, not overpowering conversation.
Yet FADE apparently occurred without the use of any audio engineering, and it suffers considerably because of this failing.
At mid-film, critical dialogue which inspires Chloe374 to look further is whispered a foot and a half across pillows upon a bed. Sadly, director Christopher Beer chose to record this dialogue as the same filmed whisper, using apparently the camera-microphone, held 4-5 feet away. Absolutely unintelligible.
Later in the progression, there is apparently more expository dialogue between Chloe374 and the beings which make their life above the surface. Again, absolutely unintelligible.
'Shots' like these were meant to drive the film/art forward, and their lack of listenable dialogue had really derailed the film/art for me.
To barely salvage the notion of continuity, the director inserted chapter-like titles such as: "Sadness, loneliness, exhaustion". These helped but didn't save the narrative.
I welcome the notion that director Beer went beyond G. Lucas's story, and showed what a train wreck the surface world seemed to be.
But the pivot of this film/art was the notion of escape or progress, and I was honestly unable to catch on to how that occurred.