The Horde (Yannick Dahan & Benjamin Rocher, 2009)

Made it considerably less far into this, my second foray into French as the only movies I'm watching. Begins as a cop revenge movie, only to have the police hit squad out for revenge bungle so badly that half of them die in the opening sequence. I presume, once the zombies show up sufficiently, that cops and crooks will have to work together in an attempt to survive. Unfortunately, I only made it twenty minutes into the proceedings. The film showed no flair for tension nor any decent idea of how to shoot a frightening action scene. The first zombie that shows up enters with a flurry of quick cutting and semi-hilariously sped-up footage. Benny Hill meets George Romero. Throw in a little extraneous close-ups of gnawing flesh and you have a film that feels mostly like incompetent pandering. The only halfway interesting character in the film is one of the first to die, and the rest seem to have no personality. This wouldn't be a huge deal, as Assault on Precinct 13, which the film is obviously modeled after, has characters who are closer to archtypes than people. But that movie had John Carpenter. This is probably the most superficial thing I've written for this blog, but there honestly isn't much to say. If one expects a cops vs robbers vs zombies movie to have a lot to say about real human life, one is probably going to be disappointed. I wasn't even expecting that and I still managed to be too quickly bored to contine.

36th Precinct (Olivier Marchal, 2004)

The first in my experiment to watch almost exclusively French movies for the rest of the year (exceptions will be: movies seen in the theatre and when I feel like it). Though, to be fair, I haven't actually even finished it and am not sure that I will. I watched half of it before going out to a late dinner last night and have not yet had the will to resume it. It begins somewhat interestingly -- a kind of mood piece in which the viewer is thrown into a series of scenes that don't quite add up to a story. Police parties, heists, violence, political intrigue. Each scene almost seems to exist for itself, for the emotion it generates and for the piece of law enforcement that it represents. Later on, however, it's difficult to tell if this ambiguity is intentional or simply the result of poor plotting. It seems difficult to believe that the same person who would have intentionally crafted these sequences would have agreed to a scene in which an officer who has just filed for transfer and has X days until he leaves would be shot in slow motion while the main character yells NOOOOOOOOOOOO (or, since it is a French movie, NOOOOOOOOOOONNN).

36th Precinct's about-face is easy enough to pinpoint -- it begins with a disturbing and gratuitous sex scene. Well, disturbing to me anyway. However much I complain about chinless nerds as the new male hetero cinema icons, they still can't beat the French for their fascination with plain old seriously ugly old dudes. Both Gerard Depardieu and Daniel Auteuil have wives who seem far too attractive and sexually voracious to be married to such unappealingly glum and work-obsessed men. After this we get a series of home scenes which fill in unnecessary back story elements of each officer's characters and the rest of the movie from there is content to pack on the cliches and sentiment. With over an hour left to go, I am unsure what they could introduce to bring it back from such an edge. Thus I will also be starting to indulge in another experiment: that of quitting while the quitting is good. Too often lately I have made myself suffer through a movie long after I know it won't offer anything to me.