So much for Rotten Tomatoes and its "100 percent" approval rating.
Agnes Varda may be the greatest filmmaker out of Belgium since, since...(who?) but that still doesn't make her 2017 documentary of rural France any better. Zzzzzzzzz.....
Faces Places is a constant refrain of frame after frame after frame of Ms. Varda, 89, traveling around France in a big van with a "mysterious" photographer, "JR" (that's all), 33, who together take pictures, blow them up, and paste them to barns, trains, walls, whatever is handy. Cool!
Ta da! That's it! No plot, no drama, no upbeat to this tune except he wears dark sunglasses at night and all the time!
About a third of the way through, I thought about leaving. About half the way through, I thought more about leaving. At the end it was too late.
It's one of those movies you keep telling yourself it's going to pick up, pick up, pick up, but it never does, and lies flat like the train tracks. (The next time I tell myself that, I'll know it's the signal to VAMOOSE.)
Faces Places is 89 minutes long which matches Ms. Varda's age! Imagine! About 80 minutes too many.
Dullsville, lacklustre, you catch my drift. It would make a good drugless sleep aide since it works wonders in about 10 minutes.
Take my words for it and save your time and money and forget about Rotten Tomatoes! You know critics: They like films like that lifeless, depressing cat movie of 2014,
arty-farty films which earn zero return because they are public flops. But the producers don't make them for the money. Oh, no: They do it for the art! Yeah, right. And Donald Trump doesn't tweet.
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