hard2xplain
A rejoint janv. 2002
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Évaluation de hard2xplain
It's good, but not 'genius' by any stretch of the imagination (as has been the reception here by fans and in the press generally). Like American Beauty, it's essentially a mix-and-match box of platitudes couched in sentimentality and depending on your viewpoint, great or really naff artistic pretence. The characters are formulaic (the teenage daughter... HOW many glossy American dramas have we seen that character in lately? The Sopranos and 24 to name but two) and the setting in dysfunctional-Suburbia is now a bit of a cliche. The surreal sequences are just sort of Ally Mcbeal with dead people. Beneath the surface (admitedly a really good looking surface - especially the opening credits which are beautiful) and its setting in a funeral home it's not really that original and quite formulaic.
However every week i still find myself watching the series, and enjoying it. There's a couple of great ideas (such as the death at the start of each episode, and channelling David's subconscious through the personality-filter of the recently deceased) as well as the high production values which raise it above the level of most other series on the box today or in the recent past.
However every week i still find myself watching the series, and enjoying it. There's a couple of great ideas (such as the death at the start of each episode, and channelling David's subconscious through the personality-filter of the recently deceased) as well as the high production values which raise it above the level of most other series on the box today or in the recent past.
I have a love / hate relationship with Jackass. I know its a load of useless crap thats probably killing thousands of braincells every time I watch it - but at the same time some of it, is frankly damn funny!
Its gutter entertainment for sure, but as gutter entertainment goes its one of the best! Although saying that, once you have seen about 5 or more episodes it starts to get a bit boring and repetitive - the phrase 'one trick pony' springs to mind, unfortunately
Its gutter entertainment for sure, but as gutter entertainment goes its one of the best! Although saying that, once you have seen about 5 or more episodes it starts to get a bit boring and repetitive - the phrase 'one trick pony' springs to mind, unfortunately
Moviemakers when filming French based films have traditionally tended to sentimentalise the people' through the celebration of les petits gens, the little people of Pagnol and Clair as well as more recently the fantastical Parisian wonderland environments of Amelie and Moulin Rouge. With La Haine, young director Mathieu Kassovitz took the flipside of this and gave an illustration of the awfulness of life in the depressed blue-collar areas of Paris
La Haine (Hate') begins after a night of rioting on a dismal housing estate on the northern outskirts of Paris and focuses on 24 hours in the lives of three close friends aged around 20. They are Vince (Vincent Cassel), an explosive working-class Jew, Hubert (Hubert Kounde), a handsome, soft-spoken black, and Said (Said Taghmaoui), a mercurial streetwise Arab. With little hopes or prospect of regular employment due to where they come from, the trio drift aimlessly, engaging in petty theft, and seething with aggressive resentment against an uncaring world. L'Avenir c'est nous (We Are the Future) is the ironic slogan on the estate's playground, but this is a film about people who believe they have no future.
The quality of the performances from the 3 main actors, their conviction, the way they interact with one another and the vigour and fluency of Kassovitz's script and direction make this a very special movie indeed. Its full of action, detail, unexpected incidents and quirky humour. For instance, the boys have a bizarre encounter in a public lavatory in central Paris with a diminutive survivor of the Gulag that is as puzzling to them as it is to us. Does the story the Gulag survivor tells them have a deeper meaning than on the surface? Of course it does, and importantly this film makes you think as to what the metaphor means. Throughout violence is always on the point of erupting. There are constant confrontations with a brutal, racist police force, and Vince has a 44 Magnum revolver that a plainclothes cop lost during the riots, which we know will eventually be used on someone. However none of this ever descends into mere gratuitous violence like so many Hollywood films
La Haine presents a state of affairs of the alienation faced by many young people in the projects' in France, and all over the world. It doesn't offer any solutions, though the point is forcibly made that in France, as elsewhere, parts of the police force are part of the problem rather than the solution. Of course, much of what we are shown is familiar to us from British and American films .
The strength of the film is that it neither glamorises nor patronises its characters. They hate their life because it's boring, and they despise the society that's created it for them, together with parks, football fields and a few mod cons with which to comfort them. In particular, they hate the police, who hate them right back. The film's other major achievement is to show in a tangible and very expressive way how a cycle of distrust and anger is created on both sides of this awful divide, so that there is very little anyone can do about it. In other words violence and hate breeds more violence and hate.
A criticism that could be levelled is that in the US / UK versions the sub-titles don't help, pushing what is very authentic dialogue into something more like cliché, as well as pointless miss-translations that occur. However this is just a minor thing, and does not and should not reflect at all on the film itself.
This certainly is one of the greatest films of the 1990s. Its one of those rare films that you will think about for the days and weeks after not solely about the film itself, but on wider issues such as society, poverty and racism.
La Haine (Hate') begins after a night of rioting on a dismal housing estate on the northern outskirts of Paris and focuses on 24 hours in the lives of three close friends aged around 20. They are Vince (Vincent Cassel), an explosive working-class Jew, Hubert (Hubert Kounde), a handsome, soft-spoken black, and Said (Said Taghmaoui), a mercurial streetwise Arab. With little hopes or prospect of regular employment due to where they come from, the trio drift aimlessly, engaging in petty theft, and seething with aggressive resentment against an uncaring world. L'Avenir c'est nous (We Are the Future) is the ironic slogan on the estate's playground, but this is a film about people who believe they have no future.
The quality of the performances from the 3 main actors, their conviction, the way they interact with one another and the vigour and fluency of Kassovitz's script and direction make this a very special movie indeed. Its full of action, detail, unexpected incidents and quirky humour. For instance, the boys have a bizarre encounter in a public lavatory in central Paris with a diminutive survivor of the Gulag that is as puzzling to them as it is to us. Does the story the Gulag survivor tells them have a deeper meaning than on the surface? Of course it does, and importantly this film makes you think as to what the metaphor means. Throughout violence is always on the point of erupting. There are constant confrontations with a brutal, racist police force, and Vince has a 44 Magnum revolver that a plainclothes cop lost during the riots, which we know will eventually be used on someone. However none of this ever descends into mere gratuitous violence like so many Hollywood films
La Haine presents a state of affairs of the alienation faced by many young people in the projects' in France, and all over the world. It doesn't offer any solutions, though the point is forcibly made that in France, as elsewhere, parts of the police force are part of the problem rather than the solution. Of course, much of what we are shown is familiar to us from British and American films .
The strength of the film is that it neither glamorises nor patronises its characters. They hate their life because it's boring, and they despise the society that's created it for them, together with parks, football fields and a few mod cons with which to comfort them. In particular, they hate the police, who hate them right back. The film's other major achievement is to show in a tangible and very expressive way how a cycle of distrust and anger is created on both sides of this awful divide, so that there is very little anyone can do about it. In other words violence and hate breeds more violence and hate.
A criticism that could be levelled is that in the US / UK versions the sub-titles don't help, pushing what is very authentic dialogue into something more like cliché, as well as pointless miss-translations that occur. However this is just a minor thing, and does not and should not reflect at all on the film itself.
This certainly is one of the greatest films of the 1990s. Its one of those rare films that you will think about for the days and weeks after not solely about the film itself, but on wider issues such as society, poverty and racism.