jerome_a_paris

I watched the movie because a friend told me about the buzz it had generated. This is usually not a good sign. So I had no expectations at all. But that movie bored the s**t out of me. It's not scary, it's not funny, it's just plain ridiculous and boring. Nothing happens, the characters are utterly annoying, I'm not sure about the acting, the situations aren't very realistic (the characters never turn the lights on after the mysterious event, but the entity does, though not all of them). In a way, I'm being unfair. It's an amateur movie, and this is how it should be treated, I guess. But it's been very well marketed by smart people who've understood they could make a huge bang for the buck by creating some buzz around it. And it's worked. A totally cheap movie with a not so good scenario and not so good actors has earned its creators huge sums of money, all astute marketing. Thumbs up for that. Thumbs down for the rest.

Zombie movies are pretty rare in French cinema, not to say non existent, so the fact that some people try to make such movies is good news. Unfortunately this one is pretty bad. It looks cheap (apparently the funding was low), the actors are not very good, I can't find any original idea, it just looks like a bunch of clichés pieced together, many things/scenes seem useless and/or absurd to me, the characters are too shallow, and no time is allotted to really develop their personality. The only good thing might be the decor, and maybe to a certain extent the makeup. The soundtrack doesn't really make sense, it's not consistent and doesn't go along well with the scenes. However bad this movie is, I hope French directors will keep trying to make zombie/horror movies, get sufficient funding for that, and will finally succeed in doing something good.

Maybe I should balance my opinion but frankly, I don't find anything to like in this movie, although maybe a few good images of Paris but still... I didn't read the book, I hope it's only the adaptation that's bad... So, I found that: - the dialogs aren't great (not to say they suck), I sometimes felt like I was watching La Cité de la Peur (which is a very good comedy)... - bad acting. Garcia's tone is very weird, tough, neutral, emotionless, which could be fine but here it sounds like he's monotonously reading a script. And the sad thing is, Garcia's acting is among the best in the movie... - a really not so good mise en scène, with ridiculous situations - a bad scenario, at least not very credible. The ending is stupid (or, again, badly adapted)