Showing posts with label Reality Television. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reality Television. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Chez les beaux parents

The tender affection delicately shared between the loving members of a heartfelt couple, routinely generating awestruck accolades through the nimble art of jocose spontaneity. 

Living together in New York Sophie cooks and Gordon teaches, their sturdy union a fluid cascade bearing versatile witness to collective enchantments. 

She's an exceptional chef and one day her ex appears out of the ethereal blue, to offer her a coveted position managing food services at the Château Frontenac.

She has to compete for the job but since her family lives close by, she'll be able to re-establish contact and spend cherished hours ensconced à la ferme.

Gordon is up for the challenge and generally supportive of his partner's endeavours, although when he discovers that Sophie and her potential new boss were once lovers, he responds with critical animation.

The challenge goes well it crucially seems like the brilliant chef may land the position.

The family farm still in financial jeopardy. 

Gordon increasingly unable to stay cool.

I never spent much time reading great romantic works of fiction, or even paperback melodramas effectively disseminating romantic visions.

Romance does immaterially blossom in many classic science-fiction films however, technologically endowed on interplanetary scales intergalactically inclined to diplomatically blossom.

Chez les beaux parents presents an alternative style of Québecois filmmaking, an international collaboration no less with prominent filmmakers from the United States.

It's not Babysitter or Mommy or Tom à la ferme or Quand l'amour se creuse un trou, it's something much more tame more zoological more glad-handing more mainstream.

It's not that it doesn't mean well or that it doesn't try to incorporate more rugged scenarios.

Which probably worked for many people who saw the film.

Who most likely loved it.

Don't listen to me.

The filmmakers still love Québec and that's plainly evident throughout the film.

And I can't critique such ingenious preferences. 

Especially on an international scale. 

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Gamer

Brian Taylor and Mark Neveldine's Gamer synthesizes reality television and online gaming in a sadistic salute to mendicant masochism. Computer genius Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall [Six Feet under]) has created two billion dollar programs: Society and Slayers. Prime time participants have had nanites inserted into their brains in order to enable a third party to control their actions with hypersensitive virtual controllers. In Society, such participants live out the carnal fantasies of their masters for the benefit of their adoring public. In Slayers, death row inmates are given the chance to avoid the electric chair/ if they can survive 30 rounds of a bellicose bloodbath orchestrated within a simulated war zone. Running man Kable's (Gerard Butler) almost free, his controller Simon (Logan Lerman) a world renowned celebrity. But has Kable been framed by Castle for a crime he didn't commit and will an underground band of hackers be able to reunite him with his wife (and Society star) Angie (Amber Valletta), just in time for them to rescue their daughter?

It's all just a matter of time, depending on the ratings.

Gamer's a bit cheesily melodramatic and predictable but it's also entertaining and well executed (including a cameo from Star Trek's John De Lancie). It competently examines the age-old appetites versus intellect dynamic by creating a world where people ravenously devour realistic fantasies at the expense of the impoverished individuals forced to willingly yield their pride, while simultaneously championing methods of destabilizing this dominant discourse. There's also a scene which is so revolting that it ruined waffles for me (a sign of great directing). Taylor and Neveldine painstakingly point out that there are things that remain popular even though they're humiliating and that working class dignity is something for which people must fight. Their portrayal of the future resonates in the present and stands as a prominent warning against fascist social slayers.