sossalemaire

This movie's a disaster. Yes, it shows french suburbs the way they are. But that's the only good thing you can say about it ; frankly, how can you be interested in seeing almost 2 hours of stupid suburban kids yelling at each other, insulting each other all the time ? French critics are ecstatic, this movie has won 4 cesars (french equivalent for the Oscars), but it's just a dull vision of dull people. I've seen enough of that verbal and physical violence myself to get any pleasure from this deeply boring movie.

I've read critics saying it was a refreshing vision about french suburbs. I guess they think it's refreshing because you don't see drugs or guns, and it is "in" to say that these kids have some sort of raw inner strength only waiting to be applied to something good. Yeah, think again, they're really that violent at each other, but they don't study Marivaux in real life...

Watch it at your own risks.

This documentary was rather good, though examples are very politically oriented (What about some goulag images from Russia or death penalty in China instead of these japanese people killing chinese, french soldiers during civil war in Algeria and nazis?). The answer to the main question, why are there so many murders with guns in the US, is barely given; there are just some hints, mildly supported by not that accurate examples and statistics. Also, some facts are just plain false, many dates for example.

But what strikes me in this movie is something that I had already seen in "Mars attacks!" (which I hated). This movie is seen as very disturbing in the US, like "Mars attacks" was, though it only states the obvious, using statistics and news available to anybody reading a newspaper regularly; it was just the same in Mars attacks, in which there was no subtility at all in the critic of american society. The thesis defended by the author are not revolutionary either. So are you that bad informed in the US? Are you so manipulated by the media that this simple documentary stating public facts available to anybody disturbs you that much? How can it be that in a country with a very strong local political power (compared to France, the example I know best), you're so little interested in the life of your community that obvious facts like that are unseen? This question seems much more interesting to me than the debate about the freedom to have a gun: as a french man, who made his military service time, and used a weapon during that time, I can tell you that there's no question for me that weapons should be forbidden. The power you feel when using a weapon seems so dangerous to me, it seems so easy to be attracted by this "dark side", it's frightening. So please, even if Michael Moore has as many stupid ideas as he has good ones, don't forget to listen to the good ones, your society will only get better...

I'm gonna write it in english, though I doubt many people outside France have the occasion to see it...

I was introduced to this movie by a french TV show talking about DVDs, done by a rather funny guy who is used to bashing "navets" as we call bad movies in french. He said that while seeing the movie, he could imagine the producers discussing about making a teen movie with some pretty girls (check), gross scenes (check), a guy masturbating with some food (check), to ride the wave of American Pie. So I told myself it would be a "navet" to remember. In the end, I think the producer scene imagined by that guy was quite realistic; but the director managed to make an enjoyable movie with it, with weak or boring moments (some scenes seemed to be there just to make the movie a little longer), but with good moments. The actors are lovable, not always very good, but at worst adequate. Armelle Deutsch is great (she's just my type, that helps...). It's not an "all out attack" comedy; there are calm moments, and actually a much much better understanding of how young people manage their love lives than american pie. That's the kind of movie that I can't help liking, though I see many flaws in it (acting, directing, mandatory scenes for the genre that are just boring). Thus, I give it a 5/10.