"G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra" [fr="G.I. Joe - Le réveil du Cobra"] ~ 1/10

After the "Transformers", it is now Hasbro's other best-selling toy, G.I. Joe, which is brought to the big screen. It seems that, here again, they actually gave some little plastic soldier toys to a bunch of 10 year-old children (I'm being kind here, 10 is perhaps the sum of their brain ages) who then "wrote" a screenplay involving actual man size soldiers (but with no more brain than the toy ones).
America is still showing a complex of inferiority towards France, trying to castrate the latter's big penis (or so the US see it) called "Tour Eiffel". Since their last war against the Iraqi people, it looks like, if French people in Hollywood movies aren't the bad guys, they will have to face the destruction of their capital city anyway. And I do not give a shit about the fictitious destruction of Paris here, but in a movie showing the killing of many soldiers, it does not seem right to show the profanation of the Soldat Inconnu (Unknown Soldier)'s tomb under the Arc de Triomphe...
I will not comment the totally improbable geography of Paris this picture tries to display (again, I am not as paranoid as the American who wrote this crap...), as it happens in so many movies, even french. But I cannot bear the regular Japanese character (played by Chinese and Korean actors, of course) who learned martial arts with a (Hong Kong cinema) kung fu master dressed with garments he borrowed both from a Shaolin warrior monk and from a Shintô monk, all that in a contemporary Tôkyô where an american beggar kid steals in martial arts temples to live (which is absolutely impossible in every way). There has to be a Japanese bad guy here, maybe because Hasbro wanted to punish them Japanese for having drawn such a bad "G.I. Joe" animated series in 1985 ?

Why did they also had to steal a Darth Vader gestapo costume for the sickest bad guy in the movie, the mad doctor who becomes Cobra ? Of course it is always a mad doctor in those kind of movies, because he is American and hence did not have the chance to be taught philosophy in high school ; furthermore, he almost talks like a Nazi - his pronunciation of "Kill all the Joes" is so close to "Kill all the Jews"...
The film ends up with a false American President replaced by a badass moron. It seems, contrarily to the story told in this movie, that the moron actually was already whistling in the White House before the 9/11 attacks.

"Silk" [fr="Soie"] ~ 6/10

Per una volta la critica la faccio in italiano. Dopotutto, questo film in inglese è l'adattazione di un romanzo breve italiano ("Seta", un'opera assolutamente sublime di Alessandro Baricco), la cui storia si svolge in Francia e in Giappone. Mentre il libro era un bel piccolo capolavoro, diventando un film ha perduto un po l'emozione della scoperta di un paese lontano e misterioso, forse per colpa della musica di Ryûichi Sakamoto che ci allontana troppo dai sentimenti veri dei personaggi.
Ma la storia rimane bellissima. E sopratutto, non è internazionale, ma proprio universale : l'amante che uno ha, l'amante che uno fantasma, l'amante che uno cerca, e finalmente l'amante che uno trova. La storia di Baricco, per quanto è sviluppata nel libro o nel film, è forse una specie di domanda : chi sta capace di riunire tutte queste amanti in una sola donna, e come lo fa ?
La risposta che ottiene il protagonista Hervé Joncour (incarnato da Michael Pitt) non è quella che aspettava ; è meglia.
Un punto positivo del film, paragonato al libro, anche se non è molto, è di avere cambiato il nome del personaggio interpretato da Yakusho Kôji : Hara Kei (perché fu anche il soprannome di un Primo Ministro giapponese).

> For once, I will write the critic in italian. After all, this english speaking movie is the adaptation of an italian short story ("Seta", a sublime work by Alessandro Baricco), the story of which is set in France and Japan. The book was a pretty little masterpiece, but it somehow lost the emotion of the discovery of a mysterious and far country, maybe because of Ryûichi Sakamoto's music which keeps us away from the characters' feelings.
But the story remains beautiful. And above all, it is not international, but quite universal : the lover one has, the lover one fantasizes, the lover one seeks, and finally the lover one finds. Baricco's story, as developed in the book as in the film, might be a sort of question : who is capable of unifying all those lovers in one single woman, and how ?
The answer that Hervé Joncour (impersonated by Michael Pitt) obtains is not what he expected ; it is better.
A good point about the movie, in comparison with the book, even if it is not much, is that they changed the name of the character impersonated by Yakusho Kôji : Hara Kei (as it also was the nickname of a japanese Prime Minister).