Wknd Box Office: Incendies, The Double Hour, Everything Must Go, Hesher

Here is an interesting article from http://www.debbieschlussel.com/  reviewing some of the movies that came out over the past weekend. This follows this post some of the movies from last week and  THIS POST about some movies that have been released over the past few years that you might have missed!  This all  follows this post about guidelines to chosing good movies to watch yourself!

Wknd Box Office: Incendies, The Double Hour, Everything Must Go, Hesher


By Debbie Schlussel


There are four other movies I didn’t get to, one of which I liked a lot, and two I hated intensely.











* “Incendies“: Rarely have I been so angry walking out of a movie because it is such a lie. This movie is a complete fraud, written by a pan-Muslim Lebanese Arab PLO-ass-kisser (Wajdi Mouawad) and designed to propagandize the West with a fiction about what really happened in Lebanon in the last several decades. In this movie, there are no Islamic terrorists in Lebanon, only Christian ones; no Islamic homicide bombers, just Christians who do that; no Muslim honor killers, just Christian ones. The Muslims in this movie are universally and without exception innocent, kind, downtrodden, the underdogs, and they give you tea and help you find your long lost relatives. The Christians are the Islamic terrorists who wear masks and shoot up buses full of people. There is no Hezbollah or Amal, even though predecessors to both of these Shi’ite terrorist groups, if not the groups themselves, existed at the time this movie takes place. It’s simply absurd and would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so effective at propagandizing the mindless American movie critics (who are raving about this fraud of a movie) and artsy fartsy crowd, who are woefully ignorant about real contemporary Lebanese history. In this film, there is no P.L.O., which, in real life, invaded Lebanon and raped, tortured, and killed both Christans and Muslims, as I’ve documented on this site many times. Google the Damour Massacre. Yup, you gotta learn the real history on your own because the movies lie.



The story: a twin 20-something boy and girl are read the will of their single mother, an Arab woman in Montreal, who has just died. The will instructs them to go back to Lebanon to meet their brother and their father, both of whom they never knew they had. The girl goes back and is treated horribly by Christians all over Lebanon, but the Muslims are so kind. Her brother, who wants nothing to do with the search, eventually goes to Lebanon to get his sister to return to Canada, and he, too, gets sucked into the quest.



We learn that their mother was a Christian woman pregnant with her Palestinian Muslim boyfriend’s baby. Of course, they never tell us he’s Palestinian, but he lives in the refugee camps, which–memo to the many ignorant Americans watching this movie–means that’s what he is. The Muslim is shot in an honor killing by the woman’s brothers, and they are about to shoot her, but her aunt or mother or grandmother or something (I forget which and don’t care) rescues her, delivers the baby, and after putting an identifying tattoo on its heel, makes the woman give the baby up for adoption. Thereafter, the woman becomes a revolutionary in college, siding with Islamic terrorists against her fellow Christians. Of course, we aren’t told they are Muslim or terrorists. The only religion specifically identified, and constantly portrayed as terrorists are “right wing Christians.”



After this, the woman tries to find her baby and finds herself on a bus full of Muslims who are shot up by “right wing Christian terrorists.” The Christian “terrorists” are wearing green masks and Arabic headbands, which in real life are worn by Islamic terrorists, like HAMAS and Hezbollah, not Christian ones. Even more ridiculous, the “Christian terrorists” wear t-shirts depicting their leader, who is supposed to resemble the real-life Christian leader Bashir Gemayel, assassinated by Muslims at the behest of Syria. What terrorists wear t-shirts of their leader? It’s absurd.



The woman is spared murder on the bus because she is Christian and is horrified by what she sees, so she approaches the Muslims (who, again, are never identified as Muslim, but they wear keffiyehs and they are fighting the Christians based on religion, so we know who they are supposed to be). The woman joins the Muslims and helps them in their terrorist attacks, including assassinating the Christian leader, the Gemayel-esque man. She is sent to a prison in South Lebanon, where she is repeatedly raped and tortured by–you guessed it!–the Christians. Muslims would never ever do such a thing, right? From the rape at the hands of the interrogator, Abu Tarek, she becomes pregnant and gives birth to twins, the twins who are now looking for their long-lost half-brother and their father.



The ending is messed up, but something I predicted about half-way through. And, frankly, it’s just more fictional propaganda designed to make you feel for the nice, oppressed Muslims in Lebanon versus the “evil” Christians. How sad that there aren’t any movies telling it the other way around. But, then, truth just isn’t something that Hollywood–our version or the imitations around the world–are interested in when the villains are actually the Muslims and their innocent victims are Christian.



In French with English subtitles, but would have been just easily translated using deceptive Koranic verses and Muslim Hadith.



FOUR ARAFATS PLUS A NASRALLAH PLUS A BIN LADEN




* “The Double Hour [La Doppia Ora]“: This was a fantastic thriller with so many twists. I figured out one of them, but not the rest. It’s that good. And it moves pretty quickly along. If you like a great psychological thriller, this is it, although the white subtitles were sometimes hard to read on light backgrounds (the movie is in Italian with English subtitles).



Sonia (Ksenia Rappoport), a Slovenian immigrant and maid at a fancy hotel in Turin, Italy, meets a security guard/former cop, Guido (Filippo Timi) at a speed dating event. Soon, they are dating, and he takes her to the giant mansion he guards. The owner is out of town, and he turns off the security system, so they can go into the woods for a walk. But they are blindsided by a group of robbers who tie them up. They shoot the security guard boyfriend, killing him, and a bullet just grazes her. She survives.



I can’t tell you anymore because it would give away the movie, but as in all great psychological thrillers, NOTHING is as it seems. I loved this, except for the ending, which was not justice served. It was riveting, and kept you thinking, guessing, and enjoying. It’s a light, fun, enjoyable movie that is definitely escapist stuff.



FOUR REAGANS





* “Hesher“: I absolutely hated this. If an intellectually-challenged frat boy on crack was challenged to make a movie, this is the crap he’d produce. Absolute garbage. Filthy, vulgar, violent, stupid, slow, and boring beyond belief.



Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a homeless hippie hoodlum in the ’70s or early ’80s who terrorizes an eleven-year-old kid and soon moves into the home of the kid’s father and grandmother. The father (Rainn Wilson) is a loser who grows a beard and lives on the couch after his wife, the kid’s mother, died just a few months earlier. The kid also has a crush on the supermarket clerk (Natalie Portman), who saves him from the son of a used car dealer, who is also terrorizing him. The kid keeps trying to get his mother’s crashed up car back from the used car dealership.



The movie was pointless, absolute dreck-beyond-belief, and a complete waste of time. Four-letter words populate most of the dialogue, and it’s just simply disgusting–jokes about an old grandmother being raped, a kid being forced to eat a urinal cake, and a nose being cut off. This is entertainment? Only if you need to be locked up, which should be the consequence for everyone who made and/or starred in this utter piece of dung. Did the soldiers–the fallen heroes–we honor tomorrow really make the ultimate sacrifice so movies like this could be made? Oy.



FOUR MARXES PLUS A BIN LADEN


* “Everything Must Go“: Will Ferrell takes a serious role as a vice president of sales who loses his job because of his alcoholism and the accusations of sexual harrassment of an underling. When he gets home, his front lawn is filled with his stuff, and his wife has locked him out of the house. For the rest of the movie, Ferrell is living on his front lawn struggling to survive and hold a yard sale, while he drinks beer. Oh, and his wife has frozen his bank account and canceled his credit cards, so he has no money and no way to get around or survive. In the meantime, he meets a boy whose mother is a nurse for a dying resident of the neighborhood. He befriends the boy and teaches him how to sell things and become a sales genius. Ferrell is also contemplating what to do with the rest of his life and befriends the pregnant young new neighbor across the street.



This movie was somewhat slow and depressing, but not all that bad. I wouldn’t pay $10 or even $5 to see it, though. But it had its moments, even if it seemed somewhat anti-corporate and anti-police at times.



ZERO REAGANS OR MARXES – A WASH