Whether in store, in video clubs or in the media, DVD/Blu-ray rays are much more than a physical catalogue. Choosing a movie in a bin is also a moment of exchange and sharing. You just have to come across a look, come out a few words, and a very long and passionate discussion can immediately result. Wishing to reproduce this kind of encounter, the association The Next Meeting offers you a show, Mag.7, with the aim of highlighting certain titles, as cults as forgotten, and leaving the word to those for whom cinema is an important part of their lives.
It was the next session!
Mag.7 is a podcast, produced and distributed by the association blésoise The Next Meeting. The principle is simple: in collaboration with libraries of Agglopolys In the town of Blois, the host Étienne invites people to walk through the music-cinema service and video games of the places and to choose DVDs there. More specifically, seven films, series, documentaries or concerts – seven corresponding to the borrowing capacity proposed by the library – then evoke their selection to the microphone. A monthly program based on the sharing and passion of the 7th art, and seeking to highlight the quality and quantity of films available in public libraries, all accessible for modest amounts, if not totally free in some communities.
A little more Bad Tours?
Étienne seems eager to return to Bad Tours Festival, the new edition of which will be held from 15 to 18 October to celebrate Cinemas of the Imaginary. Not holding in place, he invites to the microphone of the Mag.7 Yohan Inza, referent of the young jury. In their company, let yourself be carried by a selection that covers American cinema, from the 1970s until the decade 2010.
We take advantage of this article to thank the group Ultramodern for lending us their title Lacrimosa Bernard for the ending credits of this episode.
Gremlins (1984)
Nationality : United States – Gender : Fantastic, Horror, Comedy – Director : Joe Dante – Distribution : Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, Hoyt Axton, Frances Lee McCain, Dick Miller...
DVD Edition France | Warner Bros. | 6 February 2008 - Blu-ray Edition France | Warner Bros. | 21 October 2009 - 4K Ultra HD Edition France | Warner Bros. | 2 November 2023 - Dissemination platforms : VIVA, Pahé Home, PremiereMax, Rakuten TV, Orange, Canal VOD and SOONER
The pitch Rand Peltzer offers his son Billy a strange animal: a Mogwai. His former owner warned him well: you should not expose him to light, avoid contact with water, and above all, never feed him after midnight... Otherwise...
Opinion of The Next Meeting (Mia): A misunderstood inventor is looking for a Christmas present for his son. It is in the shop of an old Chinese antique that he finds his happiness and goes back with a box, which contains a strange creature subject to three strict rules: no bright light, no water and especially no food after midnight. Failure to comply with these rules could turn the perfect gift into a perfect nightmare...
Gremlins is a beautiful mix of genres, between Christmas film, comedy, fantastic, horror and drama. We laugh throughout the film about the ravages of the small town of Kingston Falls, but the Gremlins are not mere little farfadets who come to ruin our happiness. They come to break down the classic tradition of Christmas movies and blow up the order of this small American city with great snowshoeing. The Gremlins are a mess in the highly coded world of Kingston Falls, but also in the cinema. The camera seems to be the only one able to contain these creatures in its frame, insulating them in close-up and connecting the chaos they cause. And again: in the sequel made in 1990, the film is literally attacked by the Gremlins, who tangle the film, tear the screen and demand the projection of Snow White. They thus invade the spectator's space. This tour de force is one of the few positive points of Gremlin 2, which has some findings but remains generally catastrophic.
But what are these little terrors really? Their representation, their activities and the final replicas of the old Chinese merchant put us on a track: the Gremlins would represent the turbulent youth of the 1970s–80s. A discourse on adolescence that compares a rational child, Gizmo, whose only vice is to love television, and others in excess, the Gremlins, who experience all the traverses and express themselves only by violence, led by « wick », characterized by a punk cut. But is it really this violent youth that the film criticizes, or on the contrary the traditional society against which it reacts and which it reform in its own way? The problem of the Gremlins is not only their destructive temperament: it is above all their education, because as the old antiquarian says at the end, one must be prepared to take this responsibility. It is the gaps in education and the violence in society that have made this youth violent, and it is therefore through violence that youth will try to find solutions.
Terminator 2: The Last Judgement (1991)
Title V : Terminator 2: Judgment Day – Nationality : United States – Gender : Action, Thriller, Science fiction – Director : James Cameron – Distribution : Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong, Robert Patrick, Joe Morton...
DVD Edition France | Studiochannel | 17 October 2001 - Blu-ray Edition France | Studiochannel | 23 September 2008 - 4K Ultra HD Edition France | Studiochannel | 05 December 2017 - Dissemination platforms : PremiereMax, VIVA, Pathé Home, Orange, Canal VOD, SOONER and Rakuten TV
The pitch : In 1997, the survivors of nuclear apocalypse continued a merciless war against the robots and machines they themselves created. To end John Connor who leads the resistance of men, two « cyborgs » are sent in the past. Their mission is to kill Connor as a child. The first model of the series « Terminator » failed in 1984. The second, a more efficient model in metamorphosable liquid, began to pursue the child and her mother, Sarah, in the 1990s. For their part, the men of the future have sent in the past a Terminator to protect young Connor. The robot duel will then take on a titanic look. And while the child will teach this Terminator basics of humanity, his mother will try by all means to prevent the creation of the first intelligent machines...
Opinion of MaG (the celest wolf) : After the classic of the cinema of action and anticipation of the 80's which will the Terminator (a mythical figure of the 7th art) in the collective imagination, here is the monument of science fiction that revolutionized the technique of SFX (the digital age) by pushing the limits of the possible. At the edge of the temporal paradox, this true « monster » From cinema to very great show is still an absolute model of the genre. Now I know why you're crying...
Opinion of The Next Meeting (Aurélie): If Terminator lays the foundations of the war against machines and the possibility of a journey through time, it is no less an action film than a pure science fiction film. It's unquestionably with Terminator 2: Final Judgement that we are actually entering a SF film, with its pre-apocalyptic vision of the destruction of most of humanity.
The film retains its identity as an action film: chase races and fights are regularly present and haunting. Especially since this time the enemy has new resources. Our favourite cyborg, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, responds to the call, but in the role of John Connor's protector. By his side, he will learn the notions of good and evil, and bring a spirit of hope in Sarah Connor's vision of the future. John is then just a child, but we quickly understand how his values make him one of the greatest fighters against machines and humanity's main hope. Last Judgment anchor in science fiction with the appearance of T‐1000, android made of liquid metal. This material allows him to adapt his appearance by taking that of another person, or to modify only part of his body to make it a formidable weapon.
Terminator 2 allows for an observation of the rapid evolution of special effects. Where the first film was innovative in 1984 with the presence of humanoid robots, in less than seven years James Cameron and his teams made technical prowess, for which the film will receive several awards, in the implementation of convincing special effects. Like creating the T‐1000 and its multiple metamorphoses through morphing, or using the synthetic image. What his director has always pushed further to realize his dreams... Or her nightmares! (Laughter?)
Boulevard de la mort (2007)
Title V : Death Proof – Nationality : United States – Gender : Action, Thriller – Director : Quentin Tarantino – Distribution : Kurt Russel, Rosario Dawson, Zoë Bell, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Vanessa Ferlito...
DVD Edition France | TF1 studio | 6 December 2007 - Blu-ray Edition France | TF1 studio | 3 December 2009 - Dissemination platforms : Canal VOD, Orange, Pathé Home, PremiereMax and VIVA
The pitch : It was at the dawn of the day that Jungle Julia, Austin's sexiest DJ, could finally relax with her best friends, Shanna and Arlene. This infernal trio, which lives at night, attracts attention to all the bars and dances in Texas. But the attention of these three young women is not necessarily innocent...
Opinion of The Next Meeting (Aurélie) : I liked it Boulevard of Death, but especially its first part. I immediately hung on to his old movie style, with the damaged film, which gives a lot of charm and a real atmosphere. We follow a group of girls in a bar, then the arrival of this worrying man raises the tension to a final scene worthy of a good horror movie. This entry into the field is, for me, the best part of the film. The one where we proclaim loud and clear: « But what is this?***d? I'll love it! ».
The film finds its weakness in the redundancy of its theme. The scenes look more like a road trip than a horror movie, and I was frustrated to lose the charm of its first part, whether in terms of ambiance, visual, interest of the characters, but also in the predictability of events. However, the film catch up in its last part: it surprises and reverses the situation by becoming a film that keeps us in breath, giving it a real horror film look. While addressing topical topics, a title that could be included in the #MeToo era.
Revelation Now (1979)
Nationality : United States – Gender : Drama, War – Director : Francis Fort Coppola – Distribution : Martin Sheen, Frédéric Forrest, Robert Duvall, Albert Hall, Dennis Hopper, Harrison Ford, Marlon Brando...
DVD Edition France | Paramount Pictures France | 9 November 2000 - Blu-ray Edition France | Pathé | 27 April 2011 - 4K Ultra HD Edition France | Pathé | 25 September 2019 – Dissemination platforms : SOONER, Arte Boutique, Orange, Canal VOD, Viva, Pathé Home and PremiereMax
The pitch : At the heart of the Vietnamese conflict, Revelation Now Following the epic of Captain Willard charged by his superiors to find Colonel Kurtz, a former green beret reigning over an army of fanatics somewhere beyond the Cambodian border.
Opinion of MaG (Celeste wolf): This war film (Palma d'or in Cannes in 1979) all but Orthodox inspired freely from the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, is a masterful and disturbing work sublimated by a fabulous and dotted with pop fulgurances (the opening where the blade noise of the helicopter is mixed with the cultism The End and other pieces of anthological bravery (the attack of the Vietnamese village by the 7th airborne cavalry to the sound of the The Walkyrie Horse of Wagner), which resembles the psychedelic journey of a man (an Officer) in search of himself, in a time when the ideologies of America appear as lies. A masterpiece!
Opinion of The Next Meeting (Mia): Adaptation At the heart of darkness by Joseph Conrad, mounted on the back of the Vietnam War, Revelation Now follows Captain Willard's odyssey to find and kill Colonel Kurtz, a prodigious soldier who has gone mad.
Just like The End the accompanying Doors, Revelation Now is a peaty film, a descent into hell that bewitches us, a feverish nightmare of an absurd war where madness reigns. The madness of the traumatized soldier who can no longer live without the battlefield, the madness of the « Costumes » who direct war as a game, the folly of too young recruits and too old commanders, the madness of an impossible mission, the madness of guru Kurtz and his disciples, the madness of an invisible enemy, the madness of acid and Hendrix. The madness of a meaningless war whose fools are both pawns and kings. Coppola's camera adopts these madnesses, fears, tension.
As soon as the film opens, the frame is set and the director shows his mastery of editing, image and sound. The cithar The End sound like a wave of shock, and its melody, mixing itself with the sound of the blades that split the air, leads us into this peaty atmosphere of madness. Sound in all its dimensions (noise, voice, music but above all silence) is an essential part of the film. For Revelation NowCoppola creates the first five-point sound system (which will lead to the Dolby sound that we know today) in order to play on the spatiality of sound and enrich the audience's immersion. And, when one observes, one realizes that all the sequences that became cult are based on sound: a cult replica of the smell of napalm in the early morning, explosion and blades of helicopters, B.O magistrale passing from Doors to Wagner...
The atmosphere of the film and the madness of the characters are perfectly carried by the actors, who excellent in their roles: Martin Sheen, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Robert Duvall, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne (who lied about his age to get the role), Dennis Hopper and finally Marlon Brando. Marlon Brando, great movie star... But we hardly see it! The strength of the guru is the myth: Colonel Kurtz remains invisible to his followers and to the spectator. A magisterial control of light, with sharp light dark, drowns Kurtz in the darkness. Coppola uses the aura that releases Marlon Brando: we don't see it, we guess it. We don't hear it, we get his diktats. Kurtz belongs more to the tyrannical divinity than to human madness. And can we kill a god? The notes of The End Resound again, madness is at its peak.
« This is the end. Beautiful friend. This is the end... »
Bad Lieutenant (1992)
Nationality : United States – Gender : Polar, Drama – Director : Abel Ferrara – Distribution : Harvey Keitel, Frankie Thorn, Victor Argo, Paul Calderon, Leonard L. Thomas...
DVD Edition France | Wild Side Video | 21 September 2004 - Blu-ray Edition France | Wild Side Video | 1 September 2014 - Dissemination platforms : Arte boutique, PremiereMax and VIVA
The pitch A rotten and drugged cop accumulates debts. When a nun is raped by two men in a church, it places a reward on the heads of both criminals. The Lieutenant wants to pay debts that endanger his own life, decides to look for criminals, like a bounty hunter. His descent to hell will see no end...
Opinion of The Next Meeting (Aurélie): Bad Lieutenant, according to the habits of Abel Ferrara, is a hard and disturbing film that follows a police lieutenant who has lost all moral landmarks. Instead of enforcing the law, he abuses his authority to steal, drug, play money and manipulate others, ready to do anything to escape the consequences of his actions.
Through this character, who should nevertheless embody the integrity, but also the individuals he is close to, Ferrara paints the portrait of a humanity imbued with corruption and decay. In this dark universe, no soul seems to be able to be saved, and even religious beliefs seem vain. Yet, it may be there that the full strength of the film lies: by giving us the impression that everything is lost, the director ends up suggesting that a glimmer of hope can survive, even in the most desperate situations.
Despite this openness, Bad Lieutenant remains a deeply uncomfortable work. Violence, sexuality and morally reprehensible acts of falling characters make viewing difficult. Ferrara thus delivers a dark, sometimes shocking film that forces the spectator to face the darkest part of the human being.
Hostiles (2017)
Nationality : United States – Gender : Drama, Western, Adventure – Director : Scott Cooper – Distribution : Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike, Wes Studi, Adam Beach, Ben Foster...
DVD Edition France | Metropolitan Film & Video | 18 July 2018 - Dissemination platforms : Cinemasalademande, Canal VOD, SOONER, VIVA, Orange and PremiereMax
The pitch : In 1892 cavalry captain Joseph Blocker, a former war hero who had become a prison guard, was forced to escort the dying Cheyenne warlord Yellow Hawk to his former tribal lands. Shortly after taking the road, they meet Rosalee Quaid. Only after the massacre of her family by the Comanches, the traumatized young woman joins them in their journey. Shaped by suffering, violence and death, they have in them infinite reserves of anger and distrust towards others. On the perilous path that will lead them from New Mexico to Montana, the former enemies will have to show solidarity to survive the environment and the comanche tribes they meet.
Opinion of MaG (the celete wolf): Far from the slightest manicheism, this melancholic-crepuscular western with a solemn tone, careful reconstitution, inhabited casting, meditative staging, slow (but not boring) journey and dry violence, is a great humanist film that reconnects with the codes of the genre to better speak of the weight of remorse (the characters are prisoners of their own guilt). Moving and deeply reflexive.
Opinion of The Next Meeting (Sebastian): In the history of 7th art, there are at least two key periods for Hollywood westerns. Of course, we have the golden age in the 50s-60s, which has marked many movie stars with its celebrities (John Wayne in the lead) and its own cinematic codes. But it is important to consider the 1980s as well. The latter, in fact, helped revive the western, but by deconstructing it. If only by the achievements of Clint Eastwood, a mythical figure of the genre, who had fun breaking the image of the lonely hero (Pale Rider, Unforgiving). I am also thinking of filmmakers such as Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man) or Kevin Costner (Dance with wolves), who wanted to break the Manichean image that cinema made of American Natives: « Wicked » against « nice white men ». Some titles such as Little Big Man can even be considered as precursors on the subject.
But since these great times, the western has unfortunately fallen into disuse. Some projects have certainly continued to emerge, but few have been able to re-create the craze for... unless you call yourself Quentin Tarantino and chain Django Unchained and The Eight Salopards. Between remakes (3h10 for Yuma, True Grit, The 7 Mercenaries), trade failures (Disappeared, The Homesman, Horizon: An American Saga) and direct-to-video (Seraphim Falls, Bone Tomahawk), the genre has been somewhat caught in recent decades. Although some titles, such as that of the Coen brothers, have a certain degree of critical and commercial awareness, we are still far from the relevant references. As a result, films go unnoticed in the eyes of the public, such as Hostile Scott Cooper.
Armed with a budget of $39 million, the film did not succeed in making the latter profitable, with its global revenues of less than $36 million. Like so many others, Hostile falls into oblivion when the title deserves our full attention. With its five star casting, the ensemble presents itself as a twilight western whose interest is not to respect the codes or to have fun with a lot of shootings. The ambition of the film is clearly elsewhere. The latter even resumes with the deconstruction of the « Bad Native », but digging it even deeper. On the journey of soldiers to accompany a dying Cheyenne warlord, Hostile made to confront two worlds at first sight different, but which turned out to be the social reflection of one another. Indeed, the title breaks this barrier between good and bad, and saventures in an area of absolute gray.
Whites are no longer the good guys and Natives the bad guys... or vice versa. Each clan has both its share of goodness and its dangerous individuals. By this assumption, Hostile tends to break the prejudices that would like a person to be defined by his ethnic or cultural roots. A strong message from which the film draws all its power, and which still resonates today, even if only to criticize the amalgam that many can still do between Muslims and Islamists (to take an example among so many others). It is through this theme that Hostile presents itself as a captivating and human work. I might even say: an important western of our time, worthy representative of a genre that still has one in the barrel.
Massacre with chainsaw (1974)
Title V : The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – Nationality : United States – Gender : Horror – Director : Tobe Hooper – Distribution : Gunnar Hansen, Marilyn Burns, Allen Danziger, Paul A. Partain, William Vail...
DVD Edition France | StudioCanal| 4 July 2001 - Blu-ray Edition France | TF1 Studio | 3 December 2014 - 4K Ultra HD Edition France | Carlotta Films | 19 September 2023 - Dissemination platforms : ARTE boutique, Canal VOD, Orange, VIVA and PremiereMax
The pitch : At the end of Texas, people are making a macabre discovery: their cemetery has just been desecrated and corpses exposed as trophies. Meanwhile, five friends cross the area on a minibus. They cross the road of a hitchhiker and decide to take it on board. But when young people see that the individual has a disturbing and threatening behavior, they end up getting rid of it. Soon running out of gas, the group decided to visit an old abandoned house, belonging to the grandparents of two of them. Each their turn, the five friends will be attracted to the next house. The encounter with its strange inhabitants will be fatal...
Opinion of MaG (the celete wolf): A true matrix of the slasher, this founding work of modern horror cinema that takes a ruthless look at Texas, the ungrateful cradle of America, is a terribly unhealthy awakened nightmare that goes through decades without losing anything of its traumatic power.
Box Nicolas Roeg
Title V: Donate Look Now / The Man Who Fell to Earth / Bad Timing, A sensual Obsession Nationality : Great Britain – Gender : Thriller, Drama – Director : Nicolas Roeg
DVD Edition France | Potemkin Films | 6 October 2015 Dissemination platforms : Don't turn around: VIVA, La Cinetek, Orange, PremiereMax and Canal VOD – Man who came from elsewhere: Canal VOD and SOONER
The pitch : This box contains 3 films:
- Don't turn around. Laura and John Baxter face the death of their daughter. On a trip to Venice, disturbing events refer them to this traumatic loss. A film at the edge of the paranormal, a great moment of terror in a Venice filmed as never before...
- The man who came from elsewhere : Coming from another planet to search for water on Earth, Newton builds an industrial empire thanks to his mastery of futuristic technologies. A philosophic tale performed by David Bowie...
- Survey of a passion : In Vienna, a psychoanalyst experiences a malady passion for a mysterious young woman... A magisterial and disturbing incursion into the dark world of sexual obsession...
Opinion of The Next Meeting (Sébastien): Nicolas Roeg, he is a director I knew without really knowing. Before I started this series of viewings, I had only his adaptation of Holy Witches (with Anjelica Huston) to my credit, without being for a moment concerned with his name. By borrowing this DVD set, I was able to discover the work of a real filmmaker. Like any artist, Roeg has a rather specific leg that he has had fun exploiting under different genres: the fantastic, therefore, but also the thriller (Don't turn around.), science fiction (The man who came from elsewhere) and romance alongside the police movie (Survey of a passion). With this pretty proposal, the publisher Potemkin offers us the opportunity to enter the universe of a man of pronounced taste for experimental, having delivered films far from any convention.
No matter what film you'll see, getting into the viewing of a work by Nicolas Roeg, it's waiting to be pushed, to be debunked. In addition to the use of raw sex sequences (they have often been controversial when each feature film is released), the filmmaker has fun bursting the intrigues he deals with, using an abrupt and non-chronological editing. Each title presents itself as a kaleidoscope of images, a film object with unbridled freedom. This can lose the spectator at first, it must be recognized. But this process is clearly not in vain, since it actually makes all the strength of its feature films. He even managed to transform them into more complex narratives than at first, at the sometimes so special atmosphere. Don't turn around. then becomes a psychological drama trying on mourning, oscillating between malaise and horrific. The man who came from elsewhere marries the strangeness of his character and his interpreter (David Bowie) to appear to us as a dreamlike work on consumerism from another world. And Survey of a passion presents itself as a beautiful love story that gradually drifts towards the passionate tragedy, approaching the toxic relationship in a very frontal way.
These works are clearly not simple to address, The man who came from elsewhere being undoubtedly the most kitsch and hermetic of the three. But as you dive into their viewing, you will see films that deserve to be analyzed in the smallest detail to appreciate all the mastery, all the substance. And for that, I can only thank publishers such as Potemkin, which invite us to (re)discover the filmography of such strong artists. It's simply exciting and rewarding!
The different podcasts of The Next Meeting are accessible at this address.
Subscribe
Connection
0 Remarks
oldest
