Tag: Denis Ménochet

In Guy Maddin’s Rumours, What’s Amazing is That There’s No Secret Societies At Work Here

There’s lots of absurdist moments in this polticial satire set during the apocalypse in Rumours. What’s offered is more than just a movie review here, but also an analysis about what it all means!

Guy Maddin's Rumours Movie PosterNow playing at select theatres
Spoiler Alert

When Guy Maddin’s Rumours gets heavy with absurdist humour and presents a group of world leaders as inept, this movie may well be his most bizarre to date. That’s because of the setup: these folks have gathered to deal with some unknown global crisis. And as for whether the mud people they discover is part of it or not, that’s a mystery they’ll have to figure out, if they don’t kill each other first! I suspect these subplots had the help of co-directors Evan and Galen Johnson during filming, and reminded me of the classic soap opera, Dark Shadows.

By the time everyone agrees on how to enact a plan against some strange mauraders, it’s too late. Here, we meet German premier Hilda Orlmann (Cate Blanchett) trying to keep it together, but I suspect she’s ready to crack. And the people who are there to represent other extremes include Antonio Lamorle (Rolando Ravello) from Italy; Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis) from Canada; Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet) from France; Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira) from Japan; Cardosa Dewind (Nikki Amuka-Bird) from the UK, and US President Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance). While most of them are caricatures of certain leaders we know in our world, the folks who don’t get lost in the shadows.

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Only the Brotherhood Wants to See Assassin’s Creed

484-film-page-largeBy Ed Sum (The Vintage Tempest)

Video game buffs will be curious about Assassin’s Creed. When this movie is competing in a heavy holiday week which includes Rogue One and Sing, a single film will stand out and the winner is sadly obvious. This product succeeds at a reasonably enjoyable techno-fantasy romp that blends ideas from the Tomb Raider 2 (ala Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull route) with DaVinci Code.

However, this film is an introductory one, and it needs more substance (lore) to make it more filling. I do not know the games very well, so I was going into this movie slightly blind. The archaeology hints at a master race (the Nephilim?) who predated the creation of the Garden of Eden (from whence the apple came from) in order to create the Tree of Good and Evil to which Adam and Eve plucked from which gave them free will. I’m being deliberately misleading so not to spoil the real mythos.

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