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ianlesnevski
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L'astronaute (2022)
A dissapointment
This review contains spoilers!
I love astronaut movies like Ad Astra, The Fist Man, The Martian etc. I was expecting more from a title called "The Astronaut".
First of all the scientific and engineering implausibility of the film made me not take this story seriously. The rocket, the space training and the flight were presented in away that I felt it to be a satire of space exploration rather than a serious depiction of it. Live stream from a Go Pro orbiting Earth to a Van? Leaving the spaceship by opening the door and making all the air go out for good? All this felt a bit too much for my taste.
Then the depiction of the crew that makes the rocket doesn't seem like a realistic group of French/ Belgian people from 21st century. They all wear old-school clothes, have houses like in the 19th century farmers from the past. Despite that they can assemble a rocket and achieve what Musk have achieved with millions of dollars of budget and not from the first attempt.
For me all this unfortunately felt satiric and not touching despite the very good cast and overall very good direction and actors performance.
Birds of Paradise (2021)
Good potential, but overall shallow and cliched story
This movie is well shot and with a good soundtrack. Cinematography is quite impressive. We see ballerinas shot in a marvelous, intimate, erotic and sometimes even scary way. We see strong emotions, visions and hallucinations shot in a creative way.
Diana Silvers and Kristine Froseth (whom I liked quite a bit in Looking For Alaska Hulu exclusive) are very decent in their performance. The story revolves around the themes of strong and merciless competitiveness in art, friendship, real/ fake identity, gender roles. A second time I see Kristine Froseth play a dramatic role that has the theme of a (possible) suicide after Looking for Alaska. Drama in this movie is convincing and strong.
Now let me jump to the bad part - the script/ the story. From time to time the script evidently uses one of the hundreds of ballet/dancing cliches in the most lazy and cringe worthy way. We have a ballerina who is talented but somehow her physique is not quite delicate for ballet - check. A demonic bad ballet teacher who speaks french - check. A ballerina should make the choice between classic and modern dancing - check. Most of these look like copies of things we've seen before in much more than one movie and I really wanted some more creativeness and originality in this department.
It is only towards the end where the movie steps out of its boring and stereotypical ideas and goes a bit deeper into the motivation of the heroines, their inner thoughts and feelings. In this regard, the ending is superb in every way.
A solid 8 from me.