Movie Monday: Chinese Puzzle.

This week I went to another Kino Bambino film screening at the Showroom with my offspring. We went to see Chinese Puzzle which I guess is the French version of Chinese Whispers.

The film is about the complex life of writer Xavier, his family and friends. It starts off in New York then skips back in time to Paris and the end of Xavier's relationship with the mother of his children as he explains the situation he is in to his book editor.

While the film deals with the serious issue of Xavier's fight for access to his children it also has light hearted moments like when he is at a clinic donating sperm for his lesbian best friend.  This is one of the reasons I liked this film as you feel for the central character wanting to be able to see his children and have a say in their lives but it is not too heart warming and sentimental because of some of the more farcial elements of the films.  This is a film with a multitude of languages spoken so if you can't handle subtitles then this isn't for you but you'll be missing out. (I enjoyed it even if I spent half of the film watching from the cinema floor as I kept an eye on my crawling son...)

After watching this I found out that Chinese Puzzle is the last film in a trilogy by this director so I think I will be hunting these down to see if the previous films were as good or better as well.

Movie Monday: Dark Shadows.

We got this film just after we decided to cancel our Lovefilm subscription as we're finding it a tad harder to watch films these days... funny that! We popped this on the list as we quite like Tim Burton films and thought we'd give this ago.

This film is about Barnabas Collins a seventeenth century man who is cursed after rejecting the love of a witch and the ramifications of this curse. Obviously bad things happen to his family, then worse things and before he knows what's hit him he ends up as a vampire confined in a coffin. Fast forward a few centuries later he's released, feeds and tracks down his descendants who are also down on their luck. So he decides that he needs to help turn their run of luck around.

Dark Shadows is what happens when Tim Burton decides to venture into the cash rich vampire film genre and set the main part of the film in the seventies. There are a few laughs in this film mainly from Barnabas's archaic language but I did find the plot a bit forced and a few supernatural elements added in there with little foreshadowing. Maybe I missed some things as I was chasing my baby around the living room trying to stop him unplugging the tv aerial or turning off the dvd player.... I just didn't find it as enjoyable as Sleepy Hollow or Edward Scissor Hands.