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Jason, I agree with you on Swimming Pool and with most of your comments on Lilja except the ending completely works for me. I think it's really the only way it could have ended and I found the final image beautiful, spritiual, and sublime. It's one of my top 3 of the year so far.
Dirty Pretty Things was ok, I liked the way it showed the plight and shadow life of refugee's/illegal immigrants in a big city like London, and the characters were compelling enough to keep me interested, but the thriller/crime aspects of the story were pretty standard stuff. Audrey Tautou isn't very convincing as a Turkish woman but there's a long history of stars adopting phony accents so I don't know that she should be singled out for criticism. The actor playing the male lead gives a good performance and grounds the film. It was better than average, I didn't feel like I'd wasted my time/money, but it's not a movie I'll be thinking about in the coming
weeks. B-
Can't say the same for Northfork a spiritual Lynchian story of the last days of a town about to be put underwater by a new dam and the folks trying to rescue the last remaining souls. Packed with symbolism and offbeat humor (there's a one liner that is fall out of your chair funny, of course the 3 people in front of me never laughed once the entire film) I am going to have to see this again and read some reviews to figure out where certain things are coming from. I'm unsure of the ultimate loyalties of some of the characters, and I think this is an important aspect of the film that I need to "click" .
Also after years of seeing Anthony Edwards on E.R., it's very weird to see him with multi-lensed glasses and wooden hands costumed like somebody out of City Of Lost Children. Extremely interesting and often quite funny, I'd recommend this. I didn't think a whole lot of the Polish Bros. 1st movie, Twin Falls Idaho, and skipped their 2nd, but with Northfork, I'm interested to see what they do in the future. B+ but open to improvement once I understand a few things a bit more.
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