Just a Question of Love. Christian Faure. 2000.

Oh, I thought this was a movie by that Hong Kong guy… Wong Kar-wai? Yes.

It’s not.

Oh! It’s an old-style French movie about young gay romance. Yay? It feels like it comes from a different century. Which it does, if you’re one of those weirdos that start counting at year one instead of year zero.

The DVD transfer is odd: The bit rate is 50% lower than on normal DVDs and whenever the camera pans, everything goes all choppy.

Incisive:

Anyway, aside from the fact that the main guy was fugly, it was pretty good

It’s a sweet movie, but it’s difficult not to be impatient with this type of narrative now.

Allen writes such naturalistic dialogue. Of course, here it’s supposed to be awful…

See?

Melinda and Melinda. Woody Allen. 2004.

I bought a box set of Woody Allen movies (I know; boo hiss), and this can probably be termed late-stage Allen? I stopped following him like a decade earlier, because I felt that all his movies were about the same set of upper west Manhattan dwellers that didn’t really interest me that much. Crimes and Misdemeanors (from 1989) may have been the last one I saw? I may be wrong.

But somehow, I think this is one I’ve seen before. It’s super-meta: There’s a framing story where a bunch of screen writers are speculating about how to make an anecdote into either a comedy or a tragedy, and we get to see the different takes on the different scenes.

Except for the meta bits (which are kinda exhilarating at times), this movie is everything I stopped watching Allen for. Characters I have no interest in and actors that are doing cosplays of Allen’s 70s movies. (Except Chiwetel Ejiofor, who has nobody to cosplay.) This movie has the added disincentive of having a bunch of stand up comedians popping by.

Does the Belgian police really wear those red arm bands? That’s just bizarre.

Are those armbands for real!? I tried googling them but came up blank.

The Treatment. Hans Herbots. 2014.

Eep. This is a movie I bought at random for my one-movie-per-country blog series, but I didn’t watch it because it looked like it was New French (only Belgian) Extreme Cinema.

But I’m giving it a try now in case I was wrong… but I’m ready to bail if it get too grisly.

It starts off with a paedophile frolicking with a boy in a field.

*sigh*

Hm… but is this more of a police procedural? It’s very dark. I mean, everything is risibly in need of more light bulbs: Nurses are working under 2W lamps…

Hey! Almost all the tomatoes like it.

It really is a police procedural. If it hadn’t been for the extreme levels of (thankfully only implied (so far, I’m writing this at the 20 minute mark)) horrors, it could have been a BBC TV series. It’s got all the clichés, with the investigator having his own daemons; the retired cop with the clues; going rogue; ad nauseam (and I mean that literally).

OK, now there’s an autopsy and I skipped forwards a bit.

This is a competently made thriller, but it’s kinda ridic. It’s so over the top. The only way this movie even remotely works is by bludgeoning the audience with the horrors shown and alluded to.