The Foreigner

As the movie shows, now, I live through something extraordinary. I am making a memory that will worm me when I get old. Because life without memories flies away as the wind does. Or at least in the movie is said so.

At its middle I decided to write because it was a participant in a contest for Bulgarian movies. At its end I decided to wrote about it because of what it was. I do not forget to note that it was recommended to me by a close friend but I haven't the courage to watch home production. I will note also that I am writing on a piece of paper with a pencil because my battery went down. And I miss only the candle.

Because of that contest I wondered why our people do not make movies about foreign countries or at least talking about them. Naturally I throw aside this idea as impossible.

And here! In this movie! Staging is good (on times hand shooting is beyond the measures, but not so much), acting is good, french speech is receiving. The atmosphere can warm your heart. In general, a movie able to give a lesson to most of us. At least I say it. Bravo! A movie that succeeded to change the meaning of songs. In life there are songs and is up to us which will sing - the sad or the cheer ones.

I note: one of the elderly family couples reminds me of the couple in "Shrek" about which I will add what people say. It is not important that you are a monster. It is important to find a monster like you that will love you. The end.

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I am a Bulgarian and was pleasantly surprised when I saw this movie at the cinema. I did not have very high expectations to start with, as generally I am not a fan of comedies, but this one is an extremely fresh and amusing motion picture with fantastic music. I went out of the cinema with a big smile on my face. A must see gem! Congratulations to Niki Iliev for the great story and the beautiful way the whole movie was shot. The casting is great, too. The film is humorous, unpredictable and keeps the viewer's attention till the end. One thing is for sure - you cannot get bored or yawn while watching it, at least if your are a Bulgarian. However, you may not be able to stop laughing - that is what happened to me while I was watching "The foreigner".

Unfortunately, I will strongly disagree with the current review of this film.

I am disappointed from this movie's script where dialectic-ism is used in a very flat, inappropriate and completely irritating way. The characters are underdeveloped, insufficient and much more work and complexity is needed to ignite someone's feelings. Actors play is on a very low level and inappropriately selected for their images. Some of the good features of the movie are the selected music and camera work. Otherwise, I had a pretty bad time trying to stay focused and watch the film.

There are a lot of things which really made strong impact, such as the shaky camera, the inadequate editing and the sound effects. The plot didn't make any sense and the acting is terrible most of the time. I took in mind that the movie is directed by Niki Iliev, who graduated in film directing and the set is financed by private companies, which probably limited the budget, but a more careful consideration of some scenes would have been useful.

The plot brought up questions such as how communication is so poor among family members, business partners and how come the people from the two villages are so unaware of what is happening around them. And at the same time girls have perfect manicure and make up all the time, some of them are even following the fashion trends. Providing that the natives in the movie live a rural life, they dress classy for their standard of living. GPS navigation doesn't exist.

The action scenes in the movie can be characterized as a parody and a parallel with action scenes from Bollywood can be made. The director, as an actor, showed great kicks and punches but they were miles away from the desired targets spots.

In terms of after effects, low- quality SFX were used and more detailed work on audio should have been great. The ambient sounds and the non- diegetic music is rubbish. Heightened FX are partly used, rather inadequate songs are chosen to do that instead. Some songs were not referenced like the other 3 songs circulating in the set. Perhaps of copyrights? A good idea should have been to collect "buzz tracks" on location, rather using ready- made ones. There is great software which can compensate for shaky camera footage.

As a summary it would be a great production if it was made by final year students. Good camera motion. Ridiculous plot.

I'm not really into French movies and watch them only for particular cast members, and since THE FOREIGNER starred one of my favourites but in a supporting role, I gave it a try... with disastrous results. If you wanna know why, read my following text.

Gerard is a French man who came in Bulgary for business reasons and once there he falls for a feisty Bulgarian village girl named Sanya. Following his heart Gerard starts to look for the village where Sanya lives despite he doesn't know the language and the habits of the people living there. And of course, Gerard will end up in various embarassing situations that thankfully I forgot because they were too cringeworthy.

What ruined the movie for me is that the lead looked like a big doofus that ended in trouble after trouble because of that village girl, and after a while you simply can't care for him anymore. And the more time passed, the film became duller and dumber. Also, while I am a fan of Christopher Lambert, not only he was for some minutes for saying his occasional line, but he looked like he didn't wanted to be in this movie in the first place... who can blame him? I can only assume they picked him because since the cast is made of unknown names his name alone could have made it marketable, but wrong! Not only his talent was wasted but his appearence wasn't worth of saving this mess.

Overall a misguided comedy that must have been written in a room full of hamsters... very, very dumb hamsters. By the way, not only this has a score of 6,7 but most reviews that give it 1s and others that give it 9s and 10s. While the 1s are probably a bit too low the 9s and 10s would imply that this is a perfect movie, which clearly isn't. Perhaps they were written by folks involved with the movie, who knows and who cares?