Longmire season 2

I liked it; the fact that the truth about what happened in Denver was revealed piece by piece is interesting and captivating; Walt&Henry's friendship is what makes this show special. 
Branch is ok in this season. Vic is a good character but I really hope they won't create a love story between her and Walt, it would be so lame. She has a husband that loves her in this season, I hope it stays that way.
I love every scene with Henry.

1- Unquiet mind
Walt and Vic take a prisoner to the Feds and the serial-killer reveals the place where a kid is buried. Walt looked for him when he disappeared four years ago. The hostages free themselves, kill two feds and others and escape. They get one but the others escape with the federal doctor with them. A waitress helped him escape, in love with that serial-killer :-/
Walt goes alone up a mountain on foot to catch them, even though the prisoners have a snow-cat. Henry goes after him, and Branch joins him. The guy was looking for hidden money; Walt finds him and they fight but then stay there and almost freeze to death, but Henry finds them. Branch says “Is he dead?” - “not yet”. The killer looked it though. I don’t know how he is.
2- Carcasses
Brendan Fehr plays the husband of a soldier.
A body is found in some compost. The woman who found him had been raped by him twenty years ago, and her son is the rapist’s son, and he killed him. 
A prostitute helps Walt with some information, and in exchange he arrests her pimp.
Walt has bought Vic a new phone. Branch is worried because he can’t find Cady. He tells Walt that she’s missing and asks him where she is but he doesn’t know. She goes to talk to that Denver detective.
3- Death came in like thunder
A body is found. The dead man Marco married a girl against his brother’s will and wanted to sell his land to buy a house for two. He was poisoned via his water. His sister-in-law killed him to stop him from selling his land.
Ferg gets his picture in the paper, making it look like he’s supporting Branch for sheriff. Ferg tries to explain that they were on patrol and Branch made a stop for the campaign. Walt doesn’t seem to care, he only talks about the case. Branch’s campaign is financially helped by Jacob with a 100.000 $ donation, and now he asks information on the investigation. 
Looking for something, Walt sees Lizzy’s gift still in Vic’s drawer; she says nothing right away but gives it to him later. When he asks when did Lizzy bring it, the phone rings and Vic goes away without answering. 
The Denver detective tells Cady all about the stabbing: her mother died at the hospital, and Walt was with her. After Cady goes out the detective says: “she was either sent here by the prime suspect in my murder case to find out what I know, or she’s my new best friend”.
Walt goes to Henry: “some things happened in Denver that we never talked about” - I liked that scene in the mirror :-)  Henry:”I will not ask you to lie, it is not your job to protect me” - “it is my job and I wouldn’t have to protect you at all if you let me” - “you tried and you nearly got yourself killed in the process” - “It wasn’t your job to kill that man, that was mine to do, that was my right” - “a good woman was murdered, a bad man is dead, end of story”.
Henry seems confident that the police won’t find anything on him. A very intense scene :-)
4- The road to hell
A truck full of cattle is stolen. The driver at first goes missing, then he’s found ok, and then he’s found again, this time dead. A cop has a grudge against a hustler and can’t let it go. He murdered the driver because he kept lying. The driver was in on it, with a girl and the owner’s son, but they were about to give back all the cattle. The cop dies after driving his truck against a road block, and they save the hustler he had kidnapped. 
Victoria “Vic” Moretti receives some flowers but they are not from her husband, and she goes crazy trying to find out who sent them. Finally the card turns up and it says it’s a gift ‘for their anniversary’, but we know it’s not from her husband and she doesn’t seem happy at all. At home, she tells her husband: “they found me” and he hugs her!
5- Party’s over
Gabrielle Carteris plays Barbara, the mother of dead-Tanya’s boyfriend.
Lizzy fakes an emergency to lure Walt in, trying to seduce him, but then he gets a call, a girl is dead.
Tanya’s sister Lorna is a fighter; Vic tries to fight her but loses :-p
A pharmacist told a gang of guys who was it who bought certain drugs so that they’d break in and steal the drugs and then sell them. Tanya tried to steal Barbara’s pills and she shot her, not knowing it was her, she says, then she left her in an alley. 
Cady is back in town. Branch goes to talk to her, he still cares. Walt goes to her too and they’re ok now, she’s no more angry at him, she probably thinks that he killed the murderer...
Henry is with a girl, Dina. 
6- Tell it slant
A psychic indian woman is dead. Her brother is a bit weird, Henry doesn’t like his ‘contrary act’. 
A couple was counting on Cassandra to find their daughter, they thought she was dead, but she told ‘em she was alive. The wife knew that Cassandra was a fraud but paid her anyway to give her husband hope. 
Finally the sheriff-debate, we see Walt in uniform. His wife Martha wanted to stop the casino from being built. People ask him why he hired Vic who’s not from here. Cady asks Branch what experience makes him think to be a better choice, but he can’t reply because a crazy man comes in, a drunken clown. 
Cassandra’s brother killed her because she wanted him hospitalized, and she was paying bars and liquor shops, paying his debts.. Vic found at Cassandra’s house a box with the name Longmire. His wife visited her, and now he shows Cady. 
7- Sound and fury
Cady is working for Henry :-D Henry overhears two men talking: one was refusing the job to kill a woman. Henry follows the other outside and offers to kill his wife, then warns Walt; he has little info so he has to say that Cady works there. She remembers only one guy at that table, ‘the hot one’. Walt: “so which one is the hot one, the husband or the hitman?” - Henry:”I’m not a good judge of hotness” :lol: They wait for the man’s call at the Red Pony, instead Dina calls: “what I want you to do to me is against the law..” :-p he looked embarrassed because Walt heard it too :-p
Instead of the wife it’s the husband who turns up dead. His lawyer says the wife might be behind it. A guy says he shot the guy and now threatens Henry’s life. At the end he shows up at the Red Pony and takes Henry hostage, to escape. When Walt catches up with them, he shoots the guy. Good scene, a pity that it was full night and very dark :-/
Vic meets a guy who says he used to be a cop and he had blamed Vic for a guy named Bobby’s suicide and he’s here to say sorry, to make amends... 
8- The great spirit
A horse is running wild with a corpse attached. Walt stops it with a lazzoo while Henry helps him by driving the car and pushing it the right way :-) 
Walt is pissed because Branch is so focused on his campaign he’s barely doing his job (does he think he can buy his way into becoming the new sheriff? seems so..)
Henry comes asking what did Walt say to the Denver detective because he’s in town and wants to meet Henry! We see more bits of what happened. Walt falling in Henry’s arms, badly injured. Henry took him to an old woman who patched him up. 
The man Branch gave money to doesn’t deposit it in the bank, so Walt sends Branch back there to lock his trailer. 
I just learned that Vic’s from Philadelphia. 
More or less: the dead man helped illegal Mexican immigrants that were held against their will, separated by their families, and a man killed him for money and to get his better-paid job. 
Walt frees the wild horse but it comes back to him (not sure what he will do with it...)
Henry goes to talk to the old woman who cured Walt and he tells us the story of the first warrior and the great spirit. Nice ending. I liked these last scenes. I love Henry & Walt’s friendship, hope nothing happens to it.
9- Tuscan red
Henry has Walt admit that he wants his job. Cady tells Branch she’s not up for a relationship so they’re over (didn’t she say that already? I guess he still had hopes..) but it’s obvious he doesn’t want it to be over. 
A man dies in a fire. There are protests, the Indians against an energy company.
Vic pretends to arrest her husband to get him safely out of there, and Walt arrests the victim’s brother who kept protesting. Walt: “who’s next?” Henry:”I am”, and he has to arrest him too.
The dead man’s face had been painted red and he had been forced to drink alcohol until his body shut down; painted red because he wasn’t ‘red enough’ and he was married to a black woman.
Branch takes a drunk Cady home and then she kisses him and more; next morning she tells him about here mom not dying of cancer - so only Henry knew the truth..?
Branch doesn’t say it to anybody else but he goes to Walt : “I know what happened in Denver” and he says that “maybe right now your daughter needs you more than the County does”. That’s not fair! I so don’t like Branch.
10- Election day
It’s Walt’s campaign party: Ferg dances with Cady :-) Henry praises Walt :-) That night Walt kises Lizzy, then starts going away but then he goes back to her to finish what they started :-p
Jason is spending a lot of money on Branch’s campaign. At a car accident site, Vic finds Cady :(
Vic, Henry, Walt and even Lizzy are at the hospital. Branch was so busy with the campaign he didn’t hear for a while. Ferg likes Cady and is crazy about finding the guy who did it. Walt feels guilty about not taking more care of his daughter, thinks he thought too much of himself  instead of her :(
Ferg tells Branch how pissed he is at him, that he likes her, and we figured that out already - at least earlier in this episode, there was really no sign in previous episodes.
Walt never leaves Cady’s bedside. The car that hit her: the owner sold it to a guy who said it was stolen; Vic goes to tell everything to Walt, sorry she got nowhere and he makes suggestions. Before leaving, she tells Walt that he won the election (by 17 votes), but he barely notices. Branch cries alone.
It turns out the guy lent his car to a friend, and Walt goes to pick him up.He’s drunken-Bob’s drunk son. Bob says he was driving, that he did it, but Walt knows he’s lying. He still says it’s “his fault”, which is only partially true, and Walt lets him take his son’s place and he releases the kid - dad’s fault, like he thinks of himself. That’s why Bob could convince him to do this stupid, wrong thing.
Walt asks Henry’s permission and help for an Indian ceremony - it sort of seems something you’d see on Hannibal, that last scene, that last shot of Walt...
11- Natural order
How long has Walt been standing there like that, suffering? Well, when the rope breaks, Cady wakes up and Henry goes to tell him and he runs to her. 
But then, a young man’s body is found. 
It was a nice scene when Walt calls Cady saying that Henry gave him his phone and after she hangs up we see that Henry’s there, eating an ice-cream cone like her and he sort of smiles/shakes his shoulders when she asks/tells him if he HAD to give him a phone :-p
Branch’s still working at Cady’s car. 
An animal was killed because his intestines or something are used to make velvetine, that that man at the hospital gave his son and that’s what made him sick. Thru him Walt finds Mr Chen, an engineer going by another name; he hired someone to kill the animals to bring him ingredients he needs. 
Branch goes to Henry: “I need your advice about something” - Henry:” you have got to be kidding me”
Branch asks if Walt holds grudge and Henry tells him a nice story of when they met in 6th grade (aww they go way back then :D they’ve been friends 38 years :D)
Henry’s Cheyenne; while looking for suspect Keith with Walt and Omar, he falls into an Apache trap hurting one leg, but they get Keith. 
Here is how the post-election thing goes: Branch shows up in his deputy uniform; Walt asks: “does this mean you still work here?”; Branch replies: “I guess it does”. Walt says: “ok then” and goes away smiling. 
Keith admits to killing the animals but not the man. The taxidermist did it, trying to get the medicine for his sick wife - she has cancer, she knew Walt’s wife too. He admits to killing the guy.
Branch goes to Jason; he asks if he had anything to do with Cady’s accident and with why did she have a black tyre. 
Walt tells Cady that he’s not angry about her and Branch, that ‘he’ll let it go’.
12- A good death is hard to find
It’s cowboy poetry night at the Red Pony. 
Walt receives a finger in the mail. Vic receives a postcard ‘Go Eagles’. She calls that Ed from last time. He says he moved back to Philadelphia but she traced the call, she knows he’s very near and kind of looks scared!
Walt and Branch are working together at the finger-case :) Good. The finger was sent by a convicted man now dead. 
Vic is scared to be home alone and she sleeps in a cell ! She finally talks to Walt. She had reported on a dirty cop and he committed suicide. His partner Ed blamed her. She turned blonde and moved here for her protection. Walt has her stay at his cabin. Lizzy comes and finds her there. He says: “nothing’s going on between me and Vic” and Lizzy says: “of course it is, you’re just too afraid to admit it” or something like that :-/
Ferg drops his gps watch in the truck of the man-without-the-finger, so they track him. The sheriff that arrested the dead con had a thing with his woman. This Connie had him killed. 
Vic goes to Henry to hire Hector to scare Ed away. She asked Henry if he could keep a secret, but then he calls Walt and tells him everything. Walt himself goes to scare Ed away.
13- Bad medicine
Ed got beaten up badly last night, he didn’t see his attacker but believes it was Walt. Ed and Vic were together for two months before she met her husband. 
Walt has to go pick up Branch, handcuffed by Matthias for sneaking around in the res.
Branch tells him he was looking for a man involved in causing Cady’s flat tyre. Walt turns around immediately. A video shows that that man shot himself. Branch also tells Walt that Jacob Nighthorse is involved, and that it was all for the election, to keep votes away from the polls. 
Ed to Vic: “I want you to feel what it’s like to have everything you care about taken away. I want you to hurt, Vic” so Vic arranges for him to blame the beating on her, and she tells Walt that she did it, with a baseball bat. Walt talks to Hector, to make him confess.
The Denver detective has search warrants for : Walt’s house (what’s in the teabox, mom’s ashes?), for the Red Pony and for the Sheriff’s office. A witness identifies Walt as the man busting in that man’s house, but the guy and his friends ‘kicked his ass’ - finally the truth. Henry says: “when I saw what happened to you in Denver last year I realized that there were only two ways the situation was going to end, with you dead or with you in jail. Neither seemed right to me..”
He called Hector, and he believed to this day that Hector had killed him, but now Hector’s here and he says that he’s not a killer. He beat the guy up badly, but didn’t kill him: “death is release, pain is forever”. 
Henry didn’t kill anybody! Good!! Still, who killed that man, and buried him?
During the search they found the dead guy’s teeth at Henry’s place and they arrest him!! 
Branch got shot while on a sacred res spot, collecting ashes for a DNA test on that man that shot himself. He calls Walt and he runs to pick him up.

Walt Longmire - Robert Taylor : very good for this role
Vic - Katee Sackhoff : very good actress, I’m not fond of the character but the actress is very good
Henry - Lou Diamond Phillips : my favourite of the whole show 
Cady - Cassidy Freeman
Ferg - Adam Bartley
Branch - Bailey Chase
Jacob - A Martinez : very good
Matthias - Zahn McClarnon : he’s good, but so far his character hasn’t had enough space

drunk Bob - John Bishop

Branch’s father - Gerald McRaney

The mummy - 2017

Well, it is entertaining, quite enough to stay seated till the end of the movie. 

But...

There are a few problems with this movie: 
1.it’s called the mummy but there are only like 20 minutes of scenes with mummies and the title-character actually looks like a sexy-walking half-naked girl more than a mummy... 
2. Annabelle Wallis, that I’ve never seen before and here plays Jenny, the hero’s sort-of-romantic-interest, is terrible, absolutely terrible, flat face and flat (and a bit annoying) voice. There’s only one decent scene at the end, when she looks at him without speaking a word, everything else is unbearable. 
3. Tom Cruise should really accept the fact that he was born in 1962 and not 1982, and leave this kind of roles to actors in their 30s. For good. Please. This role was embarrassing. And let’s just draw a veil over Crowe’s line “you are a younger man..”, which continued saying something like have respect, or beware, us older men... I mean seriously? It’s not like there are 30 years between them! I’m sorry to break this news to him, but Cruise doesn’t look like a kid anymore. He looks very handsome for his age, indeed he does, I’ll give him that, but there’s nothing he can do to avoid looking over-50 (let’s just hope he won’t go hard on plastic surgery, because that inevitably changes facial features and if he loses the Tom-Cruise-smile then it’d be the end). 
4. The Ahmanet character was not bad after all, but it was more than annoying the fact that the whole plot revolved around her wish to summon Seth into this world, and she needed a man’s body to do so; first thing first, two female characters in this movie and one is a plain save-me-please blonde and the other is supposed to be an all-powerful thousands-years-old tough-girl-badass, and yet she also revolves entirely around two male figures, the one she wants to bring to life and the one she needs to do it. Why did she need them so badly? Why did she need Set in the first place? She herself had killed her father and his new wife and son, so what did she need Set for? That was really annoying :-/   Ok, they say the pact with Seth was not complete, she had to finish it... for some reason. It is not really clear what the plan was, exactly. To bring Seth in a mortal's body and be at his side as his Queen, I guess... another case of 'he would have the power and she would be at his side, looking sexy and supportive'... not exactly seeking the power for herself...
5. If you have a character called Jekyll (yes, ‘that’ Jekyll) you obviously expect him to turn into Hyde at some point, and when he finally does... it’s such a disappointing scene, a little fight and the hero wins... and that’s it! They showed us big security measures, great fear and everything, and then we only got to see a simple fight between two men... Hyde was a bit stronger but alas also dumb. 
So yeah, this movie was a bit of a disappointment. Cruise’s performance wasn’t bad per se, but he played his usual hero-character, his usual scoundrel-good-inside, the usual decorated-soldier, it’s the same thing we’ve seen him do lots of times, so yeah, he kinda acts on autopilot. But he was still not a good choice for the role, which was essentially written like a 30-something man... At 55 the usual playboy-who-doesn’t-want-to-grow-up theme is simply embarrassing. 
I liked Russell Crowe and Sofia Boutella though, although their roles are marginal, it’s all about Cruise and the blonde who follows him around like a puppy.
The Nick Morton character (played by Cruise) is absurd from the start. He’s a soldier in Iraq but apparently goes wherever he wants doing whatever he wants, and basically forces his friend Vail to go with him (or stay behind in the desert without water, what a nice guy). He’s had a one-night stand with Jenny (Wallis) and left after stealing her map leading to a place marked something like danger or curse, and to him that means that there’s a treasure, so he wants to go and steal it. What a nice guy. 
They get into trouble but are helped by the arrival of Colonel Greenway (Courtney B. Vance, unfortunately his role is the shortest of all, he gets killed after a couple of scenes) and his men. Jenny also arrives angry about the theft, and they discover what appears to be a tomb but she rightly assumes that it’s in fact a prison. A spider bites Vail, which will lead later to him being controlled by Ahmanet - presumably, although she’s still a mummy inside a sarcophagus - but it’s not 100% clear why Nick frees the sarcophagus itself from its pool of mercury. He has a vision of Ahmanet.. does she have powers already, even though she’s still imprisoned? Because if she has, why didn’t she manage to control someone before? It may be a desert, but in thousands of years someone is bound to have been around the place at some point. 
They take the sarcophagus to London, and Vail kills Greenway and is himself killed by Nick. 
Birds attack the plane making it crash. Nick saves Jenny and then crashes with the plane, but he’s been chosen by Ahmanet for her ritual that will bring Set back to life into his body, so he doesn’t die, he comes back to life while in the morgue - and they simply give him back his clothes and let him go out free... just like that...
Nick talks to Vail’s ghost from time to time, and Vail explains to him that he’s been cursed. Ahmanet escapes from the sarcophagus and immediately kills some workers to suck their life energy and become all sexy again, then she sends her new zombie/mummies against Nick.. not too clear why since she doesn’t want him dead, she wants him with her so she can complete her ritual, but of course they escape.
Since that vision in the prison-tomb, Ahmanet is now into Nick’s mind, and he finds himself in a church where Ahmanet apparently wants to perform her ritual only to discover at the last moment that her dagger is missing the precious gem without which the ritual won’t work. A big red gem at the end of an otherwise all-black dagger, and she hadn’t noticed until the blade was almost touching his body... any person of any gender, any age, any nationality, would have noticed right away that the big precious gem essential for the ritual was missing...
They are rescued by some men, working for Prodigium, a secret agency working to study and contain supernatural evils. The leader is Dr Jekyll (Crowe), who right away tells us his story in a few words for no apparent reason : he got ill and this disease consisted in an “unquenchable thirst for chaos and the suffering of others” and found a cure for himself, but not a permanent one, he has to inject himself with it every time to prevent Hyde from coming out. 
Prodigium keeps Ahmanet prisoner, filling her body with mercury with the intent to study her afterwards - but of course she will free herself later. 
Ahmanet warns Jenny that Jekyll will kill Nick as other men before had killed her chosen one, and Jenny confronts Jekyll about this. Jekyll admits it, saying that there’s no way to stop the curse, and they must protect the rest of humanity. Nick is not pleased with this plan, and takes away his serum from him. Jekyll’s man takes Jenny out but Nick is too late and is trapped inside with Hyde. Jenny fights the guy in order to run to Nick’s rescue - basically doing nothing because he helps himself, when Hyde brings him close to the desk where the serum is and Nick uses it on him to bring Jekyll back. 
Jenny and Nick run away, planning on destroy the gem in order to stop the curse - easy:no gem no ritual no curse, really a no brainer, and yet it had been carefully preserved all those years...
Of course Ahmanet gets hold of both dagger and gem before them, and she summons some zombie/mummies to fight them. Jenny is drowned. Ahmanet tries to convince our hero to join her and accept the great power that the ritual will give him, but he steals again the dagger and tries to break the gem, but then she tells him that he’ll have power of life over death and he looks at Jenny’s lifeless body and doesn’t break the gem, instead he uses it to stab himself. He gets Set’s powers, sucks Ahmanet’s life energy away, reducing her to a powerless mummy, and then brings back Jenny. Then he hides from her, telling her that he doesn’t know what he is now, that he could be dangerous, and then he goes away alone. 
She discusses him with Jekyll, wondering if he’ll be their greatest ally or if he’ll succumb to his evil powers. 
The last scene shows us that Nick resurrected Vail - only to have him follow him around like at the beginning, so it’s not really a good-deed, he basically didn’t want to be alone and created a little slave for himself.
The two of them leave for a new adventure, whatever that might be.

Now, was Nick possessed by Ahmanet or not? During the movie there are various long-stares between them, and yet Nick always acted on his own - but for the two scenes when he freed her from the mercury in the tomb and when he found himself at the church where she wanted to perform her ritual - by the way, why a church??? She’s from before-Church-times, and anyway she didn’t need a sacred place back then (she tried to murder her lover on her bed) why should she need it now?
Why the long stares then? 
All those words about what kind of man he was, so boring: “somewhere in there I know you’re a good man”... yawn, yeah we figured that too, we didn’t see him being decorated, but we saw him saving her life, so what else could she think?  She says that she knows it because he gave her the only parachute, but he wonders because he says that he thought there was another one... was that suppose to make us doubt too? I mean, not only he’s the hero, but he gave her the parachute first, right away, he didn’t go: this is for me, now let’s look for one for you... I don’t know, but if the idea was really to make us wonder what side would he choose, it was a poor useless attempt, nobody would believe that he’d side with the mummy, not even for a second.
Anyway, seeing Jenny’s body Nick gains control over Set, so the ritual didn’t bring Set to life, basically it only gave Nick Seth’s powers...
I wonder, would it have been the same if Jenny had been safe elsewhere and he had seen instead the dead bodies of all the poor guys fighting for Good that got killed by Ahmanet’s army? Would that sight have been enough to raise some human empathy in him or he’d have thought ‘I can’t sleep with them so why should I care?’ - just wondering. 

Also, not even the slightest doubt of conscience over the fact that these characters went to Iraq, found and therefore took (stole?) what was there and they brought it home without knowing what it was, causing the death of many people? 

One day - 2011

A beautiful movie, enjoyable, annoying, frustrating, lovely movie about life and love and what path your life can take. I loved it, but I’ll never watch it again, because it hurt, and because the male lead, Dexter, I wanted to slap his face really really hard on more than one occasion, and of course because the ending is very sad.
It’s a kind of Harry meets Sally plus Before sunrise. 
The story is simple: Emma and Dexter graduate from the same college but he never really noticed her. She had a crush on him, and on July 15 they ‘almost’ sleep together. He was drunk and somehow it didn’t work out and they simply fell asleep together, deciding to be friends. He tells her something about the date, July the 15th, and we are shown one day in their life for each following year, to see how they’re doing. They kept seeing each other as friends, then he went abroad to find his way; they spent a week-end together but it was clear that she wanted a relationship while he only wanted to have fun, so they again went their separate ways. He had lots and lots of lovers, drank more and more , became a tv presenter for a kid-show. Meanwhile she worked as a waitress and eventually started dating wanna-be-comedian Ian that she didn’t really love. 
She becomes a teacher and enjoys it, but when they meet again he appears to be on drugs, and even insults her saying that she teaches because she couldn’t become a writer, ‘those who can, do, those who can’t, teach’ which is a jerk’s saying of course, and she leaves. She yells at him, then she tells him that they clearly want different things from life, and that although she loves him very much she simply doesn’t like him anymore, what he has become. 
Emma and Ian break up, but he encourages her to publish the book she wrote, telling her it’s really good. She doesn’t see Dexter for a while, and he meets Silvi and they get engaged, until they meet again at her old roommate’s wedding. They talk and he tells her about the wedding and the baby that’s coming. He tries to be a good dad but things with Silvi don’t go well and she starts an affair with his old friend Calum. Eventually they get a divorce. Meanwhile Emma has moved to Paris. He joins her there thinking that they might finally get together for good, since apparently they spent a night together after he got divorced, but she didn’t think that that meant much for him, and she has a new boyfriend now, a French jazz pianist. Dexter is upset and decides to leave, but she realizes that she wants him and runs after him and they kiss and get together. They get married in London and are happy together, hoping to have children of their own, but it doesn’t happen. 
We arrive at July 2006, the very first scene of the movie before it went back 18 years. She’s riding her bike, going to meet him, when she’s brutally hit by a truck and dies. 
He doesn’t know how to go on with his life because after all even when they were not ‘together’ he knew she was always there for him, but now she’s dead. The next four years he cries and slowly destroys himself. His daughter and ex-wife find him bloody on the floor and try to help him. His father tells him that he must try to live his life as if Emma was still alive, the same thing he has done for the last ten years since Dexter’s mother died of cancer. Even Ian, who now has his own family, visits him to tell him that she “lit up” when she was with him and that he made her happy (yeah, for what, two years? :-/ ). Dexter has again control over his life, and visits with his daughter the same place he visited with Emma on that first day in 1988. 
They finally show us what happened on that first day, after they woke up in the same bed, and decided to take a walk and they had a good time together and were now planning to finish what they hadn’t do the night before and they run to the apartment to have sex,  but then they meet his parents, arrived early to surprise him, so there was nothing to do really but to go their separate ways, they  simply left and he asked her her number.

It’s enjoyable because it’s well done and because the whole idea of showing one day in their life for each year is really good and interesting and never boring. 
It’s annoying because it’s the same old story: the guy’s idea of enjoying his life means sleeping with lots of girls that mean nothing to him at all, drinking himself stupid, being famous, basically sex-drugs-and-alcohol with lots of money to buy it all. Personally, it sounds so pathetically stupid and sad.
Of course the girl only has two guys in 18 years because a man sleeping around is a successful playboy enjoying life, a girl sleeping around would be called something completely different.
As soon as he is ready for her, she changes her life and whatever plan she might have had to run to him. :-/ 
It’s lovely because what they had was really special, and yet it’s frustrating because once again it shows that friendship doesn’t really exist and that a man and a woman only have one path together, no matter how long it takes them to get there. 
It’s down-to-Earth because it shows a growing relationship based on phone-calls and ordinary lives, and yet it’s totally unrealistic because they are all so good in this movie, but it’s frustrating to see how this guy wasted it all.
Obviously I'm also upset that she died, because this makes the film about him, not about them. He gets to go on with his life with his daughter, but there's nothing to remember her by other than his memories and her book for children. 

The actors were all good for the part, not just the protagonists but everyone else too, the parents, the friends, everyone. 

Emma-Anne Hathaway
Dexter-Jim Sturgess
Roommate-Jodie Whittaker
Ian-Rafe Spall
Dexter’s mother-Patricia Clarkson

Silvie-Romola Garai

One last thing: this is the only time in my life that I've wanted to see a movie because of its poster. I knew nothing about this film but I loved the poster so much, that picture of the two of them was simply beautiful. It's not just a picture of two people kissing, or almost kissing, I don't remember, it's the pose, the atmosphere, it's light and hopeful and beautiful. 

Agatha Christie's Poirot: Peril at End House

This was a nice episode, I liked it. 
Poirot and Hastings are on vacation when they meet Nick Buckley (Polly Walker, she was good), a girl who lives nearby in a big house but not enough money to maintain it. Talking to Poirot she mentions that she has survived a few accidents already, and when she forgets her hat Poirot notices that there’s a hole in it and a bullet near it, and he becomes convinced that someone is trying to kill her. They go together to pay her a visit, and her friend Freddy tells Hastings that Nick is a terrible liar..
Poirot explains to Nick his concerns, excusing the fact that she doesn’t know him because of her young age, and asks her if there’s anyone she can really trust. She can only think of her cousin Maggie, so she asks Maggie to join her there. Maggie comes, and she gets shot dead while wearing Nick’s coat. Obviously they all think the murderer made a mistake, intending to kill Nick. 
I didn’t fall for it because like Garak said once, coincidences happen all the time but I don’t trust coincidences, specially this kind of big coincidences...
Anyway, it appears like Nick’s life is still in danger. She goes to a hospital, in great shock. She says she doesn’t care anymore because she doesn’t want to live, and the reason is that her fiancèe Michael has died. Shortly after his rich uncle died, therefore leaving her a large fortune.
Poirot wants to protect her so she’s allowed no visits and can’t eat nothing that comes from outside, and yet she’s poisoned with chocolates. She ate them because she said that there was a card with Poirot’s name inside the box. It appears that there were two boxes of chocolates, and her friend Freddie had sent the other one. Freddie says that Nick asks her to get her some. 
Poirot informs them all that she didn’t recover : “I failed, I failed, she died”...
Her will turns up six months after it was supposed to have been posted, and her cousin who is also her lawyer reads it to them, all assembled. Everything has been left to an old woman who somehow helped her father... but it was a fake will, and Nick comes out alive and well, saying that it was all Poirot’s plan, only a trick, and can unmask the old woman and her husband’s attempt at getting their hands on her money with a fake will. She also accuses them of murdering Maggie, but the old man denies it. He admits about the will, but says that they killed nobody.
Poirot knows the truth, he understands it all and now reveals what really happened. 
He knows that Nick is not her real name, she told him that. She’s actually called Magdala or something, a family name. From a casual chat between Miss Lemon and Hastings, Poirot realizes that some names have a lot of different nicknames. 
Her cousin Maggie’s real name was also Magdala, they were both Magdala Buckley. Michael was in love with Maggie, not with Nick, but he didn’t know about the fact that they had the same name so he wrote in his will that he left everything to Magdala Buckley, and with Maggie out of the way Nick would inherit everything.  
Japp arrests Nick, and she takes a watch (I think it was Freddie’s watch, not sure) and Poirot knows that those wristwatches are what a guy uses to smuggle cocaine, Freddie uses it, and Nick will probably use it to kill herself, at least this is what is implied at the end of this episode. 
In perfect Christie-style, Poirot understands her intentions, but he thinks that it might be a better solution compared to being hanged. 
There’s only one little thing that is not too clear to me. Michael died more or less when Maggie died, not long before, so what about all the fake accidents, why was Nick making people believing that her life was in danger? Probably Michael had been missing for some time now and I missed that bit. He was a pilot. 

I loved to see Miss Lemon and Hastings together, they made for some very nice scenes.
I love the ending with Miss Lemon and Hastings coming with four ice-cream cones: one for Japp, one for her, nothing for Poirot because she read that ice-cream is bad for the little grey-cells :lol: and two for Hastings because he says that his grey-cells are already dead, this remark made because Poirot had previously said something on that line. Poirot jokes about leaving the two of them behind and they give him one :-p 

Such small ice-cream cones! I’ve never seen any so small! 

Agatha Christie's Poirot: The adventure of Johnnie Waverly

A pretty simple mystery, the solution was so obvious that it was of no interest at all, still I liked the episode enough because i like how this little series is made and I like the characters and the actors who are so right for them. Sure, it’s often annoying how silly chief inspector Japp is, but that’s how the character is, nothing can be done about it. I always like it when Miss Lemon is present, and Suchet is such a perfect Poirot that it’s always a pleasure to watch these nice episodes. 
The story is simple: Mr Waverly hires Poirot because he has been receiving letters saying that he has to pay a lot of money or his little son will be kidnapped, and since he hasn’t paid, the last letter promises the child’s abduction, even specifying the date and hour in which it will happen. Poirot, Hastings, Japp and his men are all there at his house to protect the child, and yet the abduction happens as promised. So many little things led to an inside job, plus there was the fact that Mr Waverly had an important name but was relatively penniless, the rich one was his wife, and also there was the fact that he was doing a rather poor job at ‘protecting’ the child, so it was really obvious that it was all a scheme to get his hands on his wife’s money. At the end Poirot tells him that he must bring back the boy or he’ll inform his wife, and gives him another chance because he is after all a good father, and the child had been taken care of by trustworthy people.

There is also the little joke of Poirot preferring the train to Hastings’ car because he drives too fast and the one time they do go together it runs out of petrol and he has to walk :p poor feet :lol:

Agatha Christie's Poirot: Four and twenty blackbirds

A not surprising but still interesting little thing, where there actually is no case officially, that is until Poirot solves it thus proving that it was, in fact, a case :-)
He’s out, dining with his dentist, when he hears from a waitress that an old painter suddenly changed his consolidated routine by ordering something very very unusual for him. Poirot finds it very interesting, and when he learns that the old man supposedly died falling down the stairs he starts investigating on his own, sure that he was murdered. 
Someone impersonated the old painter to make it look like he was still alive at dinner-time. His estranged twin brother had just died the week before, leaving no will, so with both brothers dead now the only relative to inherit it all would be their nephew George Lorrimer, a theatre guy. 

It wasn’t one of the best episodes, but Poirot is always Poirot, and Suchet’s Poirot is always worth it, just for him. 

I'm only sorry that I didn't understand the reference to the title, so I don't know what that means.

Agatha Christie's Poirot: The adventure of the Clapham cook

I loved it, at least two third of it, it was lots of fun seeing Poirot dismissing case after case because not enough important and then accepting the case of a missing cook :lol: a client snapped at him because he was so full of himself he thought he was too important to work on such a case, so he changed his mind and accepted. He was furious when her husband later sent him a letter dismissing him :lol: and he stayed on the case until the end. The cook, Eliza, had been approached by a man telling her about an inheritance, so she had obeyed him and left to take possession of her new house at once. Answering to Poirot’s ad in the paper, she writes him a letter and he goes to visit her right away, to find out her whole story. Poirot understands that a lodger in the house where she worked as a cook had killed a man and needed a way to get rid of the body, and wanted her used respectable trunk, so he found an excuse to keep her away. Poirot calls Japp and they stop the guy before he can embark for Venezuela. I kinda felt sorry for the poor woman, because she will soon find out that she doesn’t own anything after all, and that she has to go back to her old life... 

Agatha Christie's Poirot: Triangle at Rhodes

This is one of the shorter ones, really more like an episode than a movie. I liked it, the characters were ok, I liked Mr Gold's and Miss Lyle's actors, and I loved Poirot in here.

It was a nice episode. It wasn’t difficult to understand, but it was very nicely done and Poirot was his true sweet half/irascible half/conceited self :-D
He’s vacationing in Rhodes and he meets Miss Lyle (Frances Low) and together they witness two couples meeting and it’s easy to predict that trouble will follow. Miss Lyle believes that rich and beautiful Valentine Chantry (Annie Lambert) has charmed married man Douglas Gold (Peter Settelen) much to his wife’s distress (Marjorie Gold=Angela Down), so when Valentine dies after drinking from her husband’s glass, Gold is arrested, accused of wanting to kill him but ending killing the wife instead. Poirot was supposed to be away on a boat by then, but he had been detained by the Italian police who suspected him of being a spy, so Miss Lyle is able to reach him and ask his help. He had not been deceived and had seen clearly that Gold loved his wife and had advised her earlier on to leave the island at once, but she hadn’t. He understands that the only affair going on was the one between Marjorie and Chantry himself, so together they had bought a poison on the street and put it in his glass, that he had then passed on to his wife and then put the poison's little bottle in Gold’s pocket. They are about to escape but Poirot goes after them, helped by a major, some kind of spy, and the Italian police who shoots Chantry before he can throw dynamite at Poirot’s boat; I hadn't liked that Italian investigator before, when he had talked to Poirot trying to imitate Mussolini, but it was funny at the end when he called Poirot and the others “you crazy English” :lol:

I also liked this bit, when Miss Lyle tells Poirot that Valentine is dead and he says: "I feared such an outcome", and in hearing that she goes "then why didn’t you do something?", which is something people would always say in cases like this, as if it was easy to do something, and Poirot replies : "do what? what is there to do before the event? tell the police that someone has murder in their heart? no"

He was right of course, he had tried to get the Golds out of the island, but it hadn't worked. What else could he do? Follow them around trying to prevent it? They would have found another way.  

A taste for death by P.D. James

I liked it a lot. It’s very slow for a while, but that’s rather common for mystery stories, but the ending was very good. The murderer was clearly revealed 100pages ahead, so the rest was like a thriller. I thought it was very good. I was sorry for how it ended because I didn’t really want the old lady gone, but of course it was easier to take her out of the picture for future books. Still, it was very sad.
As always James introduces you to every character, letting you ‘know’ them and ‘feel’ what kind of characters they are inside. She also maintains in this book her love for describing places and houses and furniture.. which I find really boring because it’s all wasted on me, I can’t picture it in my mind however hard she tries. 
The story: a politician who recently resigned and a tramp are found dead in an isolated little church, their throats cut. Some people think it might be a murder/suicide, maybe Sir Paul Berowne wanted to kill himself but was surprised by the homeless Harry Mack and killed him before killing himself, but of course our Commander Adam Dalgliesh doesn’t believe that and treats it as a double homicide. Obviously all the investigation centers on Berowne, the famous and rich one, but with good reason easily explained. Not only a rich man and a politician at that has more enemies than a homeless guy, but there was also the fact that they were certain that Harry had not killed himself, he had been killed for sure, so they centered on Berowne, trying to find out everything they could about him, if it was possible that he had killed himself or killed someone else or if they had both been killed by an unknown murderer. 
There are a lot of sub-stories because there are a lot of characters: Since Paul had learned of his brother’s death years earlier, he had immediately thought that now he could get not only the title but also his brother’s beautiful girlfriend Barbara, and since she learned that in his face his own daughter Sarah became estranged to him and went away. He was married at that time, but he caused a car accident that killed his wife.. was that really an accident? We’ll never be sure, but very soon after that he married Barbara. She’s very vain and indifferent to anything but herself. Barbara has been having an affair for a long time with doctor Stephen Lampart who loves her in his own arrogant way, while she only loves herself. Paul’s affair was with a woman who truly loved him, the one who was most hurt by his death and the only one who got nothing, and I don’t mean just the money.
Sarah went away from home and joined a political group that opposed her father, guided by a man who became her lover, Ivor, and who was under surveillance by Special Branch. Paul’s old mother Lady Ursula seemed more concerned about scandals or privacy than she was with finding her son’s murderer, and she lied to the police more than once, and I was very annoyed that she didn’t pay for that; all that happened afterwards was all her fault, because the things she lied about because she said were irrelevant might have actually pointed the police in the right direction much much sooner and other people wouldn’t have been hurt. 
Dalgliesh’s new special division worked the case: he’s helped my John Massingham and a new one, Kate Miskin. Funny thing is, neither of them really won me over, which is unusual because I usually like more characters than plots, but in James books it’s different. It’s not about the investigators, it’s about the whole package, how she gets you to really know all the characters and feel the story. She’s very good at that, and also she isn’t over-sentimental in her stories, she is rather realistic, some people’s lives go on well others don’t, like real life is. Only stereotype she uses is that her Dalgliesh often has a hunch, a feeling that some things are important without no proof; in this book, he’s not only convinced from the start that both men had been murdered, but he also thought that investigating the deaths of two young women (cases closed as one accidental drowning and one suicide) was important to arrive at the truth. This always happens with fictional detectives, they always have the right hunch.. 
Kate has a boyfriend, Alan, which is great because I’d have hated for her and Dalgliesh to have any romantic relationship, and one with Massingham is out of the question because he doesn’t like women doing men’s jobs and she doesn’t like his attitude and status and basically him. 
Most important thing for Kate though is her job. Her only relative still alive is her grandmother and they haven’t seen each other in a long time because she likes her privacy and wants to focus on her work. Still, towards the end of the book the poor woman is mugged and Kate feels she has no choice but to take her in with her. I was so sad when the poor woman got killed :’(
So, Barbara’s brother Dominic was the murderer, we’re told that, as I said, rather early compared to other books, and maybe it was because a lot of people who like to find the solution to the mystery may find it not too difficult this time, because all the other characters had either a weak motive or a strong alibi. So our investigators clear that point and then it’s all a matter of how to prove it, and also a way to add some thrill in the story, because knowing for sure that it’s him we’re frightened every time he comes close to an innocent witness. 
The bodies had been discovered by Miss Wharton and her child friend Darren. They were both lonely because she had nobody and he only had an unsuitable mother, and they had taken to spend to spend a lot of time together, until they entered the church that day. The police discovered his family situation and he was taken away by social services, and she was worried for him and missed his company. Kate told her what school he attended so that she may meet him and talk to him, but while on her way she met Dominic. She didn’t suspect him, she thought him a charming young man that reminded her of her brother, and that’s a very dangerous thing since she’s not Miss Marple. Because of that small resemblance she trusted him enough to have a drink with him and tell him about Darren including her suspicions that he might have noticed something in that little church. I was worried for her at first, and then for the boy. He let her go because she didn’t really know anything, but he had planned to kill the boy, until they were face to face and the boy spoke to him so frankly and innocently, and then he fainted and Dominic realized the poor child was sick and nobody had noticed, and he decided to spare him. Learning from Darren about the only piece of evidence that could link him to the murders, he went looking for his lost button in the church and was surprised by Father Barnes. Dominic shot him. Knowing now that the police already has his button, he went to Kate’s house, thinking that the police will be looking for him and wanting her to take him to Lampart’s boat. He pretended to be Massingham so Kate’s grandma opened the door. Kate was out shopping, and came home to find a drunk Dominic pointing a gun at her grandma’s head. She tried to calm him down but there was no way. She managed to make a phone call to her boyfriend, hoping that he’d understand that something was wrong. It was the only thing she could try but wasn’t sure that he’d do it, but he did. He’s actually in love with her and he called Dalgliesh explaining the situation. Still, Dominic was very dangerous and kept his gun at the poor woman’s head, and Kate thought she’d better act quickly and at soon as she thought she had a chance she thrusted herself at his throat and they fought, but he was stronger, and managed to get at his gun again before her and before the police could burst in, and her grandma got shot. 

After Dominic’s words the boy had been checked out and it was discovered that he had leukemia. Miss Wharton went to visit him at the hospital, but he was now starting a new life with a foster family, and she realized that he didn’t need her anymore, he even looked kind of embarrassed that an old woman was visiting him, so she left and went back to her solitary life, trying to find some comfort in her old routine activities at the church.

Tale of tales - 2015

It’s difficult to say that one liked a movie so tragic, and yet it was indeed fascinating. I can hardly believe it was an Italian movie, but then it wasn't really, it only had an Italian director. The lights, the colours, the scenes, the make-up, the costumes, it was all so good. How beautiful it was the queen’s red and black dress she wears while running through the maze after her son! Even the princess covered in blood with a severed head in her lap looked like a fascinating painting. The story - or stories - are tough and bizarre. The special effects are indeed good although someone might say that the beasts didn’t look so real, but that’s because this is not a fantasy movie, it’s based on fairytales as they were before the Era of Disney. Just think of the little mermaid, the original fairytale was tragic, the girl died, just like the little match seller, and yet they were faitytales. 
This film combines three stories, but in the same world, as we understand when we first see the second and third king attending the first king’s funeral. There are names in the credits, but during the film I didn’t hear any. The characters will be seen together again in another scene at the end.
These stories are clearly linked by unhealthy obsessions that leads to wrong decisions and bad actions, and the unavoidable tragedy that follows. 
The first: A queen (Salma Hayek) is terribly unhappy because her greatest desire is to have a child and she can’t have any, until a man tells her of one way she could fulfill her wish. She must eat the heart of a sea dragon cooked by a virgin, and she’ll get pregnant instantly. He warns her that there will be a great price to pay, a life for a life, but she doesn’t care. The king slays the beast but he himself is killed by it. The queen doesn’t mourn, seeing him dead on the floor when she comes to collect the heart. She can only think of one thing. A virgin girl is called to cook the heart for her. The girl inhales the small of the heart cooking, and she too becomes pregnant (sure, this raises the question: why did the queen had to eat the whole thing and she simply needed to smell it? I don’t know, maybe because she was a virgin and also healthy, while the queen had tried the normal way to have a child but she couldn’t have any).
In a day they both give birth to a son. At the king’s funeral, we also meet the other kings of the movie: the one with a daughter (Toby Jones) and the one who seems to only care about sex (Vincent Cassel). 
The story moves forward sixteen years. The queen’s son Elias, with hair and eyelashes white as the sea dragon, spends his time playing with the girl’s son Jonah, who looks exactly like him. They are happy when they are together, but the queen can’t stand it. She orders the servant to keep her son away from the prince, and orders her son to stop seeing Jonah. The boys are close friends and feel like brothers, and keep seeing each other, until one night the queen sees Jonah and mistakes him for Elias, at least until she touches his hands and starts suspecting. She spies on them, and hears Elias’ plan to share his life with his friend. Elias says that they could take turns at being king, share everything and give Jonah’s mother a good life. The queen is terribly jealous and tries to kill Jonah, who hides and escapes. Jonah never tells Elias what his mother tried to do, and the next day he prepares to leave. Elias wants to stop him, but Jonah says he must go. He cuts a tree’s roots and tells him that he’ll be fine as long as that water will be clear. One day Elias sees that it is no more clear, and leaves in search of his friend, worried about him. The queen calls again the same man dressed in black, and he tells her again that her wish is a dangerous one and can only be obtained by violence. He also tells her that she brought it upon herself when she tried to separate the inseparable. 
Elias finds Jonah’s family and learns that he has been missing for three days, so he ventures in the woods to find him. Jonah in injured, when a bat-like creature attacks him. Elias comes in time to save him and kill the beast; later will see that it was in fact the queen. Elias brings his friend back to his family and returns home.
Second story:
This sex-addict king wants to have every young woman he sees. One day he hears a woman singing but doesn’t see her face, only which door she enters. He sends her a jewel as a gift and then knocks on her door. He doesn’t know that inside there is no young girl, only two elderly sisters. Dora has liked very much the jewel, and sees an opportunity to have more. The king insists, reminding her that he is after all her king and he could order her to go with him instead of asking. She accepts at the condition that all lights must be out. She goes to him and they spend the night together, but he’s horrified when he lights a candle and sees how she really looks like, and he calls his guards to throw her off the window. She doesn’t die, the bedsheets entangled in the trees branches. A woman, a witch I guess, helps her down and breastfeeds her. When she wakes up Dora is a young woman. The king happens to see her during a hunt and falls for her beauty and marries her. Dora sends an invitation, along with a rich dress and jewels, to her sister Imma. She tells her that now she can have everything she wants. Dora tells her that she’ll take care of her but also that she, Imma, must keep it a secret, nobody must know the truth about them. 
They’ve been together all their lives, alone in their little house, and now Imma can’t cope with being alone, even if not far away. She refuses to leave, she won’t go back home, she tells everyone that she’s the queen’s sister and of course everyone thinks she’s nuts. Dora repeatedly tells her to go home, that they can’t stay together anymore because she’s old. Imma asks her how did she become young again but Dora doesn’t know herself. Imma insists, wants to know how to become young herself that that they might live together again, and at last to get rid of her Dora says that she was flayed and grew a new skin. When the king arrives Dora hides her sister and goes to him and they start having sex. Imma seems fascinated by it and is discovered. The king is again horrified by the appearance of an old woman and calls his guards to throw her out yet again. Dora tries to stop him by telling him that she’s her old neighbour, but nothing can stop him. Once alone and outside, Imma starts searching for someone willing to flay her, and finds one when she offers to give him all her jewels. He takes her to the woods and flays her, and she comes back to Dora’s castle all bloody and skin-less. 
Third story:
This king has a daughter, Violet, who loves him very much. We see her playing a tune she wrote specially for him and yet he doesn’t even listen, fascinated by a flea that jumps from his one hand to the other. He hides the flea in his hand and hurries to his room. He puts it in a little glass box, feeding it with his blood, building little things like a small carriage for it to pull. In another scene he brings a big  steak for it to eat, it’s growing and we see it’s already as big as a dog. His daughter is getting bored and would like to go away and see a bit of the world, but he tells her that she’ll do that when she gets married. One night he calls for the doctor urgently, and the poor doc is shocked to see a giant flea in the king’s room. There’s nothing he can do for it of course, and the king’s devastated when it dies. Later he’ll tell his daughter that he’s found a way to get her a husband. She’s not too happy with his idea of a competition, of the whole idea of becoming the wife of whoever wins, but he’s enthusiastic at his idea. He challenges anyone to find out whose skin is that, sure that, being so big, nobody will ever guess it’s a flea. Suddenly a big scary ogre enters the room, but the king lets him try, as he stated before that anyone can try. The ogre sniffs it and guesses right; Violet runs out, intending to kill herself but the king stops her. Nevertheless he tells her that he gave his word and can’t take it back, so she has to go with the ogre. It’s a long and hard way to the ogre’s cave, and she finds it full with bones , nothing around but rock and bones. She’s scared of him and doesn’t want him but she is now his wife (well, there was no ceremony but she’s been given to him as his wife) and he has sex with her anyway. I call it rape, but they once called it conjugal duty. 
When he is out she sees a woman and calls her for help, but she’s like on a mountain and there’s a big void between them. The woman tells her that she’ll come back the next day with her sons to help her. Seeing her go away Violet thinks she’s lost but the next morning she still looks around in hope, and is happy to see that the woman really came back with her whole family. A young man carries her on his shoulder and walks on a rope to get to the other side. The ogre sees them but they manage to cut the rope before he gets to them. They think they are safe and go away, but the ogre is not dead and finds them and kills the whole family. She’s scared but she has nowhere to run so she tries to calm him down with slow gesture and a hug. He motions for her to get on his shoulders so she can bring her back ‘home’, and she pretends to agree but then she cuts his throat. She goes back home, where the king is ill but hurries out of bed to go see her. She’s all bloody, and has the head of the ogre with her, and shows it to him telling him “this is the husband you chose for me”. The king ashamed falls to his knees and cries. Everyone at this point kneels to her, the only one standing. She also cries, maybe for what she went through, maybe for the love she had for that man that caused it all. 
She will be crowned as the new queen, and at the coronation we see again Elias, obviously without his mother, and the sex-addict king with Dora, who notices that she’s turning again into an old woman and flees. We don’t know what it will become of her but we know that she’ll now be alone.
Their obsessions brought them all to destruction and loneliness and tragedy. 

ITA il racconto dei racconti

Kingsman: The secret service - 2014

Why the hell couldn’t they avoid the disgusting scene of the blonde imprisoned in a cell who can only think of having sex with him instead of caring to be freed? She had been a good character up to that point, the action was being acceptably entertaining, and then we have the princess looking at the kid about to save the world and all of a sudden she doesn’t care anymore about being a prisoner, all she can think of is ‘oooh you’re gonna save the world, wow, will you come back and have anal sex with me please?’ and when he does come back (of course he does) she lies there with her naked butt waiting for him. Disgusting, someone has seen too many porn movies apparently!
Am I the only one in the world who is sick and tired of this usual bullshit? Is it so impossible to have one movie where they don’t write in female characters only to have nude scenes or sex scenes or stupid and annoying jokes like this? Is it possible that people always want to see the same thing over and over again? Their brain can’t accept something new once in a while? In this movie there were only four female characters of importance: the princess whose naked butt has now been recorded in the Kingsmen’s files, the villain’s assistant ready to do anything and kill anyone for him, the girl who made agent only so that nobody could say that they are sexist but that has really little space in the movie, and the mother who gets beaten up by the local gangster. My compliments really :-/
Now I must try to put that aside, remove it from my head for a moment to talk about the rest of the movie. 
At first I wasn’t sure what direction it wanted to take: at moments it seemed a serious spy movie, at others it seemed more like a parody, and then the bad girl would come and cut her enemies into pieces that not even Goemon! 
Let’s analyze it further:
as a comedy: 
well, I never laughed honestly,  I would have liked some British humour but here I didn’t see any, and some moments only had the effect of making me think this was some kind of dumb, not very good parody. I don’t know if the princess-scene was supposed to be funny but her naked butt, although a beautiful one, didn’t make me smile at all. 
The scene when they all have to choose a puppy, and the kid chooses a Pug dog believing that he will grow into a bulldog might have been funny but for the fact that it was actually lame: so the kid didn’t choose that dog because he liked it or because he liked its qualities as a species, but only because he thought it would become big and scary :-/
Dark humour maybe? I don’t know if having lots and lots of heads explode in a colourful poof at the rhythm of a nice tune can be considered dark humour, I only know that I didn’t think it funny.
There was only one moment that can be consider good dark humour for me, when Valentine shoots Harry and then complains about how horrible it was, he didn’t like killing him at all, and when confronted with the fact that he just killed an entire church full of people he points out that he didn’t, they killed themselves! But of course I didn’t laugh because I was distressed that Harry had died. I knew it of course, there was no doubt about it, I was sure that Valentine or his girl would have killed him so the kid could take over, and yet I didn’t want it to happen. 
as a serious spy movie:
come on, seriously? There are only like a dozen Kingsmen, (using names like Artu and Lancelot and Merlin and Galahad, but still using a regular rectangular table because despite the names there must be no doubt that they are not all equal, but one of them is the leader). They wait until one of them dies to start looking for a replacement! This alone seems rather silly, but let’s move on. Each of them has to bring a kid, then there will be various tests and one of them will get the job. No training of any kind seems to be involved!! I mean, how did this kid become so good? He was young and athletic, but that’s it, he had no fighting skills before, and yet at the end he’s as good as his mentor who had a long career behind him. When did that happen? 
The girl who wants to be a spy is scared when she has to launch herself off the plane. Sure, she wins her fears every time, but doesn’t seem very normal or very right for agents like them to have such fears, an hesitation could cost highly sometimes. I didn’t like this.
The kingsmen’s leader is outwitted by the kid.. come on, seriously? How did he survive as a spy if he can fall for the oldest trick of switching the two glasses so that he’s the one who ends up drinking from the one with the poison? The kid switched the glasses when he made him look the other way. Pathetic. We were shown before that Galahad had seen the kid taking something behind his back, and yet their leader didn’t. :-/
The girl-spy doesn’t have one action scene. I was surprised that they hadn’t written in a relationship between her and the kid, but at the end I understood why :-/
The final test to choose between the kid and the girl was this: they were given a gun and told to shoot their dog (each of them had chosen a puppy, trained him and lived with him the entire time). That was disturbing, really, specially when we heard the shot and learned that she passed the test because she fired and he didn’t because he couldn’t. It doesn’t matter that later Harry says that there were only blanks in the weapons, that’s not the point at all. It’s not even that the blanks at such close range might seriously injure the dog anyway. No, the disturbing point was another: they are supposed to become professionals, fighting for the Greater Good, or simply mindless assassins? The kid didn’t know about the blanks, the test was to see if he’d kill the dog if given the order, and the idea that all the Kingsmen had done it in their time is disturbing. This is a movie, I want to think that the heroes fighting for Good are actually good, and shooting dead for no reason at all a living thing that has done nothing wrong is not “good” at all.
as an action movie:
now, here it gained some points. The action scenes were very entertaining, the bad girl who reminded of Kill Bill but using super-sharp blades as her prosthetic legs as weapons. The scenes with Colin Firth or whoever in his stead taking on multiple enemies were kinda awesome. Gruesome too, but still  awesome. The scene when he defeats a whole church full of people is very entertaining, a long action scene where he has to use every trick to get out of there alive. Morally, at first I thought What is he doing? They are normal people who are being controlled by the evil mastermind, they are not criminals! But after the scene we hear that he was being controlled too, they all were like possessed and driven to kill anyone they could, so that’s explained. 
Nothing to say against the action scenes, they were well done, well choreographed, very entertaining -  can’t compare to the first three Bourne movies action scenes, it doesn’t even come close, totally different style - although not very “real”. Rather gruesome as I said, and yet more like comic-book violence, not disturbing like war-movies violence, if you know what I mean. It was more like watching a videogame when you know they’re not real people, maybe because like in videogames they are hit and they fall and die, in one or in many pieces, but they never seem to suffer, they just fall.
I wasn’t disturbed by the scene when the mother tries to break the wall to get to her child to kill her: she didn’t want to, she was being controlled and of course she doesn’t touch her. We are only shown a lot of people around the world fighting each other, we are not shown anyone actually dying, although there’s no saying how many people will have died in all that time. We are only shown crowded places like the beach or the street, and never places where people had actual weapons at hand or were alone with their children or anything that might have been really disturbing.
The villain:
the villain was good, a crazy man so concerned with saving the world, meaning saving Earth and Nature, that he wants to lower the population to save it. Too many people on this planet, with the result that Nature’s being destroyed, so he has the brilliant idea to distribute free sim cards to everyone who wants one: these sim cards give people unlimited free calls, free internet, but people don’t know what the catch is, nor they ask any questions, but this is believable, it’s actually very realistic behaviour. Tell people that they can have something for free and they won’t ask many questions, they’ll just queue to get it. 
Through these sim cards our villain can manipulate their mind, sending the impulse to kill. 
Actors:
first of all the villain: Samuel L. Jackson, and this should say it all, but let’s say it anyway: I liked him. Valentine was as mad as a hatter but in a quiet, intellectual way, and captivating and scary at the same time. I think he did all he could with what he was given. 
Colin Firth plays Harry Hart aka Galahad, the hero of 2/3 of the movie, whose destiny is no real surprise, I knew his character would die from the start, and when he said “we’ll talk when I get back” it was obvious that he would never come back. Firth played it well but it’s not like it was such a difficult character, basically he played an English gentleman. 
Mark Strong played Merlin, and I liked him, and was glad that his character survived. 
Michael Caine played Arthur, and like Firth he basically played an English gentleman who talks serious stuff, he’s done that lots of times already.
Taron Egerton plays Eggsy, the kid protagonist of the movie. He was very plain, and honestly at the end he looked ridiculous dressed like Colin Firth. 
Sophie Cookson as Roxy, the spy girl, didn’t have much to do: she had to be confident in herself at first and then scared but courageous in a couple of scene when she had to parachute herself. She did ok.  
ITA Kingsman secret service

Left behind - 2014

Terrible, really awful, one of the most boring movies I’ve ever seen. Absolute waste of time, completely horrible movie. In a few words:
First part: a long and boring introduction of the main characters; 
The event: a minute, when you see a lot of people suddenly disappear, leaving all their stuff behind. Not gone away or taken away, but simply vanished out of their clothes. 
Second part: usual manifestations of mass hysteria and inevitable shitheads in action
The ending: ‘our heroes’ saving themselves and those they can in an absurd way.
Basically 109 minutes of nothing but boredom out of 110.
The characters were unbearable, absurd, stereotypes, boring. Worst of all the main characters, the girl and her dad, Chloe (Cassi Thomson) and her father Ray (Nicolas Cage). Apparently in the last year her mother had become more obsessed than ever with the bible, talking a lot about it trying to convey a message and make them understand, but they simply got fed up with her and tried to avoid her as much as possible. Chloe thinks she’s crazy and a fanatic, which she might very well be but what Chloe doesn’t admit is that she’s a crazy fanatic herself, only on the opposite side. She comes back from school and as soon as she meets her mom she starts talking about it in an offensive way, and then refuses to hear her talking about it. That’s what I call a fanatic, when you try to convince others of your ideas any way you can, instead of letting everybody free of making their own choices and belief. It doesn’t matter if the idea is ‘there is a God’ or ‘there is no God’, if you try to impose your idea over others you’re a fanatic. 
Ray is a pilot and has an affair with his flight attendant Hattie (Nicky Whelan) who doesn’t even know that he’s married. He’s all ‘oh how I love my daughter, I’d never hurt my wife’, and all that, and yet he planned in advance to leave for London with his mistress for his own birthday instead of spending it at home with wife and daughter - and also his son, who I think he never mentions once :-/
He leaves on a flight to London and Chloe is out with her younger brother when suddenly a lot of people simply disappear. Chaos ensues of course, and not only people trying to understand where the loved one have gone. There are a lot of people who take advantage of the situation to steal whatever they can, because the world is filled with shits like that. 
Everybody is either: being a shit, crying over those they lost, or losing their minds. Everybody but Ray and Buck (Chad Michael Murray), ‘our heroes’, who try to keep people calm on the plane... 
When Ray finds evidence that the missing co-pilot and the missing flight attendant Katie strongly believed in God and the bible, he realizes that his wife had been right all along, trying to prepare them for this, the moment when God would bring to him to Paradise those who believed in him, leaving everybody else behind. He’s left to pilot the plane alone, and the plane has been damaged and has lost fuel, and the airports are all off-limits so he can’t land there, but luckily Buck is able to contact Chloe just in time for her to take a motorbike and then a truck and free a road for them to land on, safe and sound. Rather conveniently she has just enough time, and she finds some fuel and a lighter to make a big fire so they can see where to go. They land safely and she runs to them, and jumps into Buck’s arms - and they had known each other no more than an hour before he boarded the plane, and then she runs to her father, and the three of them join hands and say that this is not the end of the world, this is just the beginning.
Boring, so so boring. The scenes of hysteria were so long and annoying. The hero-scenes were so long and boring. 
One more thing: the people who disappeared, they were people who really believed in God, like Katie who had regular Bible sessions or something, and ALL the children. Not just the babies, but all the children, and in fact we see all adults around. This is another stupid thing. First of all not everyone who really believes in God is also obsessed with the bible - although they put in a scene where we see that a priest has not disappeared because he said the words every Sunday but deep down didn’t ‘really’ believe anymore - and second: how it was decided who is a child and who isn’t? What’s the age limit? All the minors disappeared? As if all the minors were pure and innocent? All small children are born pure and innocent, but after a few years not everybody is anymore, because children tend to emulate their parents. How many bullies in schools? Did they go to Paradise too?
Oh one more thing, another stupid scene, Ray’s last communication: he tells the passengers to stay calm, to remain in their seats, and tells them everything else, that there is no fuel and no airport, and tells them to pray! As if after those words anybody could stay calm!
There’s really nothing going on for this movie, nothing. 

ITA left behind-la profezia

Les Misérables - 2012

Wow. Indeed very well done, every shot was like a painting, the lights were fantastic, every scene was perfectly constructed, I liked it all. Hugh Jackman was great, but he was not the only one. Anne Hathaway was extraordinary, Samantha Barks was amazing, and also Aaron Tveit was really good, and little Isabelle Allen was great too. I didn’t like Crowe’s singing, and the Thénardiers were turned into a comic duo, although still being disgusting people. 
The film is a musical, it’s like an opera where not a word is spoken, everything is sang. Although being a musical it is indeed so sad as to be painful. So much, I could barely get through it once, not sure I could endure it again, but that’s just me, nothing to do with the film.
It’s very tragic. It’s the story of Valjean who went to prison because he stole some bread because his sister’s son was starving; he tried to escape so his five years became nineteen. When he was finally granted parole, he couldn’t find work anywhere, being an ex-convict. A priest offered him food and a place to rest, and he stole some silver from the church and ran away. Caught again, he was freed when the priest confirmed his lie that he had himself given him the silver, and actually gives him some more, telling him to use it to make something of his life. He does. He changes his name and becomes a rather wealthy man, and he’s mayor when he meets Javert again. 
Fantine works for him. She has been seduced and abandoned with a child, and she left the little girl with the Thénardier couple, working to pay them for her care. When it’s found out that she has a child without having been married, she’s fired, and Valjean is so worried about Javert that he doesn’t even notice her. She has nothing, and she desperately needs money for her daughter - not knowing that the Thénardiers are lowlives who take advantage of her, asking for money but treating the girl like a slave - so she falls into a miserable life, selling her hair, her teeth, and her body. When she reacts to a rough ‘client’, Javert wants to arrest her, but Valjean recognizes her face and wants to take her to a hospital. Fantine is dying, and he promises her that he’ll look after her daughter Cosette, that she’ll be well, before she dies. 
Javert strongly believes in the law, in following “the path of the righteous”, and reports himself to him, the Mayor, because he says he wronged him, reporting him as an old convict before finding out that a man believed to be Valjean has been arrested, thus tempting him for a moment, but Valjean can’t let a  man go to prison to save his own life, so he confesses before running away. 
He goes to take Cosette away with him, paying the Thénardier to let her go with him, and is able to escape from Javert thanks to the help of a grateful man whose life was once saved by Valjean. 
He raises Cosette as his own, and we meet them again some years later (maybe nine or ten?), when she’s now a young woman who falls in love with someone met on the street: Marius. 
Marius and his student friends are fighting for their rights, their lives and for the People, but they’ll all be slaughtered by the police. 
Seeing Javert around (what a small world Valjean lives in) he worries that he might find him again and wants to flee with Cosette, but she’s in love now and doesn’t want to, and writes a letter to Marius. 
Éponine is the Thénardier’s daughter and yet she’s a better person than them, she loves Marius so much and would do anything for him, and she finds Cosette’s house for him and then prevents her parents from robbing it, and eventually takes the letter that she wrote. It is so very painful for her, she doesn’t give the letter right away, but she saves Marius life at the barricade they made out of furniture, and right before dying in his arms she gives him the letter. 
He sends a reply via a small boy, Gavroche, who leaves it with Valjean. He reads it and is heartbroken to realize that he’s about to lose her, he loves her very much, and he worries what kind of person he is and also that he might die in the fight, so he goes there himself, to find that Javert has been taken prisoner, who had infiltrated as a spy and being recognized by Gavroche. Valjean asks to be given the prisoner so to deal with him himself, and then he lets him go free without conditions, knowing very well that he’ll chase him again but not blaming him for doing his work.
When Marius is injured, he takes him away from the fight and escapes through the sewers carrying him on his shoulder. He meets Thénardier who steals Marius’ ring, then he sees Javert waiting for him, and asks him for the time to take Marius to a hospital or he’ll die. Javert says ‘another step and you die’ but then is unable to shoot him. He is conflicted between his duty and his obedience to the law and the fact that Valjean granted him his life instead of killing him saving his own. He thinks that he can’t do his job properly anymore and throws himself in the river to die. 
Marius marries Cosette, but then Valjean confesses to him that he’s wanted by Javert for stealing, and says that he must go away because if he’s caught she’ll be disgraced, and Marius agrees with him. 
When the Thénardier try to blackmail him, asking money or they’ll reveal that Valjean killed a man and threaten to say where he is, even producing the ring as proof of what he’s saying, Marius recognizes the ring and realizes that Valjean saved his life and that he misjudged him, and gets out of Thénardier the location of where he can now find him. 
Valjean is in a convent, about to die, and they arrive in time to say goodbye. He has a letter of confession prepared for them, and Marius tells a crying Cosette that her ‘father’ is a saint, that he saved his life. Valjean dies glad that he could see his precious Cosette one last time, and his soul goes away with Fantine. 
So tragic, what Valjean and Fantine went through all their lives, it’s so heartbreaking, and the ending is too. Maybe it’s supposed to be a positive ending, because Marius and Cosette are together and will live a better life, but I only felt the pain. All the students who died, Gavroche, Éponine.. it’s all so sad, and I admit I was unable to accept that through all this, all that those good people went through, the Thénardier still managed to keep on, free, no matter that the way they were played and written in this movie they were almost comical. It’s indeed very realistic but so hard to accept that Valjean was chased all his life while they kept on stealing every day and were never caught. 
The movie was done brilliantly though, every shot was like a painting, the lights made an amazing atmosphere, every picture was worth hanging on a wall, and Éponine’s song was great, so sad and so touching, and Gavroche’s death was powerful as well, this child facing alone the soldiers, and the song ‘do you hear the people sing’ without music was powerful as well, and every scene I thought was done very very well. Gavroche’s actor was very good, but he sang with such a strong accent :-p

Jean Valjean-Hugh Jackman
Javert-Russell Crowe
Fantine-Anne Hathaway
Cosette-Amanda Seyfried
Marius-Eddie Redmayne
Enjolras-Aaron Tveit
Éponine-Samantha Barks
Gavroche-Daniel Huttlestone
Young Cosette-Isabelle Allen
Thénardier-Sacha Baron Cohen
M.me Thénardier-Helena Bonham Carter