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georgiaboy
Reviews
Rêves de poussière (2006)
Personal experiences in the Sahel
I was able to see this film at the Sundance Film Festival, where the director afterward made poignant commentary on the film, his first work. The movie is set in northern Burkina Faso, where a man from neighboring Niger unexpectedly shows up to work long, hard hours in a gold mine for basically nothing. He has evidently experienced some tragedy in the past, which often haunts him as he goes about his daily tasks. The film explores the man's ability to cope with past mistakes while ensuring a better future for those around him.
The film itself is beautifully filmed on location, mostly with Burkinabe or other west Africans. The film does a good job of capturing the misery that is most Burkinabe's lives. The director wanted to send the message that Burkina Faso, like many African nations, has the opportunity to be wealthy, but has problems with foreign intervention and greed, and local corruption. This theme is heavy throughout the movie. However, the film does run a bit slow, with many instances of scenes where nothing is going on for several minutes. If you are an artsy, foreign film lover, than you will probably like this film. If not, it is unlikely that it will capture your attention.
Bicentennial Man (1999)
Annoying
This movie really was poorly thought out. The entire concept was forced and political. The original point of the book was to portray the joy of being a human and having that privilege. Instead, we have some outrageous messages thrown into a messy story line. First of all is the movie's main focus on promoting the idea that man can be created by some crack scientist just as easily as God or even evolution. This theme was way too played out. In addition, the end of the movie where there is a "world court" that took it upon themselves to decide that a robot was just as much of a human as anyone else. How nice of them. I'm guessing that they had decided around fifty years earlier that a cockroach also had as many rights. And then there is the nice closing line where the movie assumes that this piece of junk metal thing was going to heaven or some other afterlife. What complete rubbish. It wasn't even an entertaining extremist anti-humanist film. The whole sex thing with the robot was also very forced and unnecessary. It was just put in to be even more anti-religion, etc. Watch it if you want.