Bells of Innocence, Antoine et Colette, & Les Mistons

Bells of Innocence apparently cost $2.75 million. I am pretty sure it all went into the coke the writers were taking when they thought this was a good idea. Wow, it was outstandingly bad. Every single person in the film was a terrible, terrible actor. Even Mr. Chuck Norris. And the names... Jux Jonas, Oren Ames, Conrad Champlain, Joshua Ravel, and Lyric? Seriously? I swear some 12 year old's D&D character is named Jux Jonas. Or, I guess, since WOW is so popular, some Horde warlock is named that. Are warlocks even an option there? I don't know, and I don't need to, really. It's bad enough I know that the two factions are the Horde and the Alliance. The more I know, the more likely I am to get involved in that crackrock. The movie is amateurish in every possible way. The ADR (or Additional Dialogue Recording, for those of you who didn't spend too much time with film nerds in college) was atrociously obvious. And I was rooting for a nuclear holocaust to wipe out the film crew on set. Too bad that I knew that wasn't going to happen. I kept hoping though. The set itself, the town of Ceres (nice overuse of Greek and Roman mythology and names to just point out how sacrilegious those people were), looked like it was only one street, and they just kept changing camera angles. Good for them for that though, because otherwise I never would have noticed that the same fence kept going behind them when they were walking down the street. Oh, the movie is so terrible it's somewhat enjoyable, but man, that 97 minute running time felt like I was in hell forever. Soooooo long.

I also saw two Truffaut shorts, Antoine et Colette and Les Mistons. The second one is a story of five pubescent boys who torture an attractive older girl because they don't know how to express their real feelings for her. And the first is a sort of sequel to The 400 Blows, but instead of it being about a juvenile delinquent, Antoine Doinel has grown up to be a young man who is very impressive with parents but not as impressive with the woman he's in love with. No, I have absolutely no connection to either of these protagonists. They were both around 20 minutes long, and Antoine et Colette was actually from a collection of films, Love at Twenty, that included four other foreign films. Apparently, it's unavailable anywhere. So maybe the other films were nowhere near as good, or something. Because this was great. I'm looking forward to finishing off the Antoine Doinel collection in the upcoming weeks.