Monsieur Lazhar
Cast:
Mohamed Fellag, Sophie Nélisse, Émilien Néron, Danielle Proulx, Brigitte
Poupart
Written and Directed by Philippe Falardeau
Written and Directed by Philippe Falardeau
Running time: 94 minutes
So many
cinema critics and enthusiasts spend far too much time carping on about
inferior films, that it takes a bit of an adjustment when something comes along
that is simply so beautiful and observant. Monsieur Lazhar is one such film: a
cinematic story that is so effective, it seems almost effortless. To reveal the
inner workings of why Philippe Falardeau's production succeeds would be like
unwrapping someone else's present. Instead, I'll try to entice you by
describing a scene near the beginning.
In a busy Montreal school, a young boy ends the recess early to help distribute cartons of milk. When he reaches the door of his classroom, he views a dreadful sight through the glass panel of the door. We watch the boy run off down the school corridor, presumably to alert his teachers. As the camera remains trained on the empty area, we wait and hear the sound of children coming back into the school. The clamour intensifies until, at the last moment, a teacher rushes in and ushers them away from the classroom door. Stripping the scene down to its bare essentials, Falardeau increases the tension while at the same time never showing us what the teachers are trying to spare the children from seeing: the body of their teacher, who has hanged herself in the classroom.
Monsieur Lazhar is a film about grief, guilt and mourning. The pupils and their late teacher are linked. Stepping into the scene, with the smell of fresh paint still in the air, is Monsieur Lazhar: a substitute teacher from Algeria who carries his own personal baggage. Playing the title role is Mohamed Fellag, an Algerian comedian and humourist, who takes a serious turn in Monsieur Lazhar.
This is a quiet film, filled with gentle moments. That's not to say this is a piece without weight, but this drama does have a way of sneaking up on you. The natural performances Falardeau draws out of his actors could be part of its power.
Working with children can be tricky, but Monsieur Lahzar manages to capture the key period when young people are struggling to define themselves and take responsibility for their actions. With their absent parents and busy schedules, it sometimes seems the youngsters are left on their own. It's up to them and this strange and stuffy substitute teacher to carve a path through the bureaucrats and make peace with the past.
Luckily for the class, and for the audience, we have Fellag as Lazhar. He's an odd fit in this bustling city school - a teacher who wears his single, threadbare sports jacket as a suit of armour. Fellag gives us a man who is thoughtful and persistent. Like the children, his Monsieur Lazhar is in transition. In the surprising but moving ending, with empathy and affection, they help each other.
In a busy Montreal school, a young boy ends the recess early to help distribute cartons of milk. When he reaches the door of his classroom, he views a dreadful sight through the glass panel of the door. We watch the boy run off down the school corridor, presumably to alert his teachers. As the camera remains trained on the empty area, we wait and hear the sound of children coming back into the school. The clamour intensifies until, at the last moment, a teacher rushes in and ushers them away from the classroom door. Stripping the scene down to its bare essentials, Falardeau increases the tension while at the same time never showing us what the teachers are trying to spare the children from seeing: the body of their teacher, who has hanged herself in the classroom.
Monsieur Lazhar is a film about grief, guilt and mourning. The pupils and their late teacher are linked. Stepping into the scene, with the smell of fresh paint still in the air, is Monsieur Lazhar: a substitute teacher from Algeria who carries his own personal baggage. Playing the title role is Mohamed Fellag, an Algerian comedian and humourist, who takes a serious turn in Monsieur Lazhar.
This is a quiet film, filled with gentle moments. That's not to say this is a piece without weight, but this drama does have a way of sneaking up on you. The natural performances Falardeau draws out of his actors could be part of its power.
Working with children can be tricky, but Monsieur Lahzar manages to capture the key period when young people are struggling to define themselves and take responsibility for their actions. With their absent parents and busy schedules, it sometimes seems the youngsters are left on their own. It's up to them and this strange and stuffy substitute teacher to carve a path through the bureaucrats and make peace with the past.
Luckily for the class, and for the audience, we have Fellag as Lazhar. He's an odd fit in this bustling city school - a teacher who wears his single, threadbare sports jacket as a suit of armour. Fellag gives us a man who is thoughtful and persistent. Like the children, his Monsieur Lazhar is in transition. In the surprising but moving ending, with empathy and affection, they help each other.
What To Expect When You're Expecting
Cast: Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez,
Elizabeth Banks, Chace Crawford, Brooklyn Decker, Ben Falcone, Anna Kendrick,
Dennis Quaid, Chris Rock
Director: Kirk Jones
Director: Kirk Jones
What to expect when you’re expecting a
decent film - nothing much, if this is the best this collective ‘talent’ on
screen can muster for the public. The cinematic equivalent of eating a large
bowl of pink sugar with a teaspoon.
This is yet another example of a troubling modern cinematic trend - an attempt to construct an ensemble comedy from a best-selling advice book. In this case “What To Expect When You’re Expecting,” takes its title, at least, from Heidi Murkoff's 1984 self-help manual. What screenwriters Shauna Cross and Heather Hatch, director Kirk Jones and an apparently starry cast have managed to bash together is an episodic, extended puerile sitcom that offers an avalanche of tediously weak and bad jokes unrelieved by the occasional burst of mawkish sentiment. It is an unmitigated stinker. A surfeit of characters are caught up in this muddle.
First, of course, are the expectant couples. Jules (Cameron Diaz), host of a TV fitness show, is pregnant by Evan (Matthew Morrison), who also happens to her partner on a dancing reality series. (They win, but she vomits into the trophy live on air—the first of many such ultra-sophisticated moments.) Wendy (Elizabeth Banks), who’s apparently some sort of activist for breast-feeding, is happily with child after years of trying with fat husband Gary (Ben Falcone). Never to be outdone by his son, Gary’s ex-racing driver father (who in their right mind cast this nonsense? Quaid could pass for Falcone’s own offspring!) Ramsey (Dennis Quaid) announces that he and buxom trophy wife Skyler (Brooklyn Decker, are also expecting—with the further one/twoupmanship being that they’re going to have twins. Then there’s perky Rosie (Anna Kendrick), a fast food van worker who becomes pregnant following a one-night stand with Marco (Chace Crawford), an old schoolmate who’s now her counterpart on a rival van.
On a separate track is Holly (the relentlessly tiresome and grossly over-rated) Jennifer Lopez – trees can act better than this fraud), a photographer who can’t have children and, along with her bloke Alex (Rodrigo Santoro) is looking to adopt.
It will come as no surprise that most of the couples, after a variety of slapstick episodes, wind up in the hospital at exactly the same time, just as Holly and Alex make their way to Ethiopia for an adoption ceremony. One doesn’t: the pregnancy comes to an unfortunate end. (This is the sort of shameless tosh that turns a miscarriage into a maudlin musical montage.) But even this isn’t enough for the filmmakers. They add a chorus of bland American dads who gather to walk their kids in the park and babble on about the joys and burdens of parenthood like a bunch of moronic stand-up comics, with the talent-free pain that is Chris Rock (who the hell pronounced this loser to be a top comedian??) loudly leading the pack (which also includes Matthew Morrison, Thomas Lennon and Amir Talai).
And of course the whole thing winds up in an orgy of ultra-cute bits with babies played through the final credits. Help!
“What to Expect” runs slightly under two hours, but it feels like the full nine months. There’s not a genuinely innovative second in it: every dialogue scene is forced like your worst constipation nightmare, with synthetic speeches and one-liners cascading out of characters’ mouths and the situations coming across as totally artificial, the serious and cloying moments even more than the broad, comic ones. Most of the lead cast appear so fleetingly that they can’t do much more than recite the lines (Falcone is drab even doing that), but some—Diaz, Banks and Decker among the women and Quaid among the men—overplay so hugely that they turn into caricatures. A special category is reserved for Rebel Wilson as Wendy’s bulbous, dim assistant Janice. With her slightly stoned demeanour she would appear to have been cast as weird comedy relief but she’s as grim as the rest of this bunch of has-beens and never-wheres.
Granted, “What to Expect” is technically proficient, with Xavier Grobet’s cinematography clean and bright, and you have to feel for the crew who give the material more professionalism than it deserves.
However, it all makes you wonder why cinema was ever intended as entertainment. This is dire stuff - atrocious and offensively hideous. Please take my word for it and don’t buy tickets for this or indeed waste your hard-earned on a disc as it will only encourage them to make a sequel. Agh ... the mere thought of that … please, no!!!!!
This is yet another example of a troubling modern cinematic trend - an attempt to construct an ensemble comedy from a best-selling advice book. In this case “What To Expect When You’re Expecting,” takes its title, at least, from Heidi Murkoff's 1984 self-help manual. What screenwriters Shauna Cross and Heather Hatch, director Kirk Jones and an apparently starry cast have managed to bash together is an episodic, extended puerile sitcom that offers an avalanche of tediously weak and bad jokes unrelieved by the occasional burst of mawkish sentiment. It is an unmitigated stinker. A surfeit of characters are caught up in this muddle.
First, of course, are the expectant couples. Jules (Cameron Diaz), host of a TV fitness show, is pregnant by Evan (Matthew Morrison), who also happens to her partner on a dancing reality series. (They win, but she vomits into the trophy live on air—the first of many such ultra-sophisticated moments.) Wendy (Elizabeth Banks), who’s apparently some sort of activist for breast-feeding, is happily with child after years of trying with fat husband Gary (Ben Falcone). Never to be outdone by his son, Gary’s ex-racing driver father (who in their right mind cast this nonsense? Quaid could pass for Falcone’s own offspring!) Ramsey (Dennis Quaid) announces that he and buxom trophy wife Skyler (Brooklyn Decker, are also expecting—with the further one/twoupmanship being that they’re going to have twins. Then there’s perky Rosie (Anna Kendrick), a fast food van worker who becomes pregnant following a one-night stand with Marco (Chace Crawford), an old schoolmate who’s now her counterpart on a rival van.
On a separate track is Holly (the relentlessly tiresome and grossly over-rated) Jennifer Lopez – trees can act better than this fraud), a photographer who can’t have children and, along with her bloke Alex (Rodrigo Santoro) is looking to adopt.
It will come as no surprise that most of the couples, after a variety of slapstick episodes, wind up in the hospital at exactly the same time, just as Holly and Alex make their way to Ethiopia for an adoption ceremony. One doesn’t: the pregnancy comes to an unfortunate end. (This is the sort of shameless tosh that turns a miscarriage into a maudlin musical montage.) But even this isn’t enough for the filmmakers. They add a chorus of bland American dads who gather to walk their kids in the park and babble on about the joys and burdens of parenthood like a bunch of moronic stand-up comics, with the talent-free pain that is Chris Rock (who the hell pronounced this loser to be a top comedian??) loudly leading the pack (which also includes Matthew Morrison, Thomas Lennon and Amir Talai).
And of course the whole thing winds up in an orgy of ultra-cute bits with babies played through the final credits. Help!
“What to Expect” runs slightly under two hours, but it feels like the full nine months. There’s not a genuinely innovative second in it: every dialogue scene is forced like your worst constipation nightmare, with synthetic speeches and one-liners cascading out of characters’ mouths and the situations coming across as totally artificial, the serious and cloying moments even more than the broad, comic ones. Most of the lead cast appear so fleetingly that they can’t do much more than recite the lines (Falcone is drab even doing that), but some—Diaz, Banks and Decker among the women and Quaid among the men—overplay so hugely that they turn into caricatures. A special category is reserved for Rebel Wilson as Wendy’s bulbous, dim assistant Janice. With her slightly stoned demeanour she would appear to have been cast as weird comedy relief but she’s as grim as the rest of this bunch of has-beens and never-wheres.
Granted, “What to Expect” is technically proficient, with Xavier Grobet’s cinematography clean and bright, and you have to feel for the crew who give the material more professionalism than it deserves.
However, it all makes you wonder why cinema was ever intended as entertainment. This is dire stuff - atrocious and offensively hideous. Please take my word for it and don’t buy tickets for this or indeed waste your hard-earned on a disc as it will only encourage them to make a sequel. Agh ... the mere thought of that … please, no!!!!!
