Dilili in Paris & The Parts You Lose

Apple Cinemas Cambridge actually split the 18-seat screen #9 between three movies this week, with something called Semper Fi the third 90-minute movie getting two screenings a day, but I was kind of surprised to see that both of the two I saw were released by Samuel Goldwyn Pictures, which apparently also released them to the on-demand services at the same time. Like I said yesterday, I'm not sure how distribution works these days, but it seems weird for a studio to open two movies on the same day, but maybe it's a perfectly reasonable way to drop things to VOD. It also makes me wonder if Goldwyn is offering their VOD movies to places like this as a package deal. Not a double feature, but the studio recognizing that they can't ask for a whole screen under these circumstances, but maybe a half.

Sadly, neither is very good, although while writing the reviews, I did find one thing that amuses me: For all that I'm annoyed by the name-dropping Dilili in Paris does, it did not occur to me until a couple days later that at one point Dilili is saved through literal name-dropping. You kind of have to respect that.

Dilili à Paris (Dilili in Paris)

* * (out of four)
Seen 5 October 2019 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge/Fresh Pond #9 (first-run, DCP)

I'm not sure how completely an atrocious dub torpedoes Dilili in Paris in its American release, because it's got a lot of other problems, and it's entirely possible that the film's original soundtrack sounds just as flat and repetitive, only in French. Even if that's the case, this is the version that English-speaking kids will see, and while they've probably seen worse on YouTube, the way it's presented makes this film feels far more lazy than it likely is.

Dilili is a girl of about nine or ten who had a French father and a Kanak mother, and stowed away on a ship bound for Paris with a troupe of Kanak performers. Taken in by a Countess and taught the language by Louise Michel, she is disappointed that she is given as much trouble for her dark skin in Paris as she was her light skin in Africa, but on the last day of the troupe's performance, she meets a friendly delivery boy, Orel, who offers to help her see more of Paris from the seat of his tricycle. Orel seems to be a friend-of-a-friend of everybody in Paris, particularly opera singer Emma Calvé, and as such is a good friend to have in a dangerous time - a gang of "male-masters" has been kidnapping young girls throughout the city, and have their eyes on Dilili, who intends to solve the case herself.

Writer/director Michel Ocelot has made a number of films that have charmed audiences at kid-friendly film festivals, perhaps most notably Azur and Asmar, and for this one he recreates early-20th-Century Paris with mostly photographic backgrounds over which he places flatly-rendered characters that often have a certain charm but sometimes move in an odd manner, like the filmmakers are using a library of pre-programmed motions that neither quite mimic human activity nor take advantage of the room animation gives one to exaggerate. It looks like Colorforms, which is a nifty idea to have for this sort of movie, but isn't very expressive and sometimes has Ocelot caught in between, when he needs an original setting or complicate action.

Full review on EFilmCritic

The Parts You Lose

* * (out of four)
Seen 5 October 2019 in Apple Cinemas Cambridge/Fresh Pond #9 (first-run, DCP)

The Parts You Lose is a dreary movie about a boy finding a new father figure in a violent fugitive who seems like a minor improvement from his actual dad, with lots of nothing happening under the sort of grey sky that makes things feel more serious and as such does a much better job of making the film memorable just by being above Manitoba-subbing-for-North-Dakota in February than anything that actually happens. It's the sort of blandly generic movie whose very name starts to vanish even while one is watching it, becoming "The Pieces We Lost" or the like when a person tries to recall something about it.

The first person seen under that sky is Wesley (Danny Murphy), a ten-year-old with hearing impairment bad enough that he has to take special classes some distance away from his already-isolated home. His mother Gail (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) works hard to accommodate him; frequently-absent father Ronnie (Scoot McNairy) less so. The area is pretty quiet, but a fleeing gang of criminals got in a shootout at the local hotel, and one (Aaron Paul) turned up in the middle of the path Wesley takes to his bus, unconscious and bleeding. Unable to get his father's attention, Wesley hides him in an abandoned barn, sneaking food and otherwise helping him heal up.

Does Wesley have any idea how this man got shot? It's a potentially intriguing question; there are multiple scenes where Wesley is naturally less aware of the world around him unless someone goes out of their way to get his attention, and the filmmakers tend to drip information about the first major crimes in the area out in the background without doing much to indicate Wesley is seeing the television or that his hearing aid is picking up some muffled version of the news. Writer Darren Lemke and director Christopher Cantwell are building their movie around an isolated kid who finds one person to connect with, and this would be a good way to show just how alone he is.

Full review on EFilmCritic