It was a not-so-great day at the movies :
Ballerina / Leap! (Eric Summer & Eric Warin, 2016)
French animation can suck too ! This is not an offensively bad movie, it's just... the script feels like it could have been written by a computer having been fed animated movie plots from the last twenty years, and the voice acting doesn't particularly elevate the material. There just isn't any reason for this film to exist, it has a potentially interesting setting (1880's Paris, it's about an orphan girl from Britanny who becomes a ballet dancer) but doesn't do anything with it other than "hey look, it's the Tour Eiffel and the Statue of Liberty under construction... neat, huh ?". Its inclusions of Sia songs feels like a particularly desperate attempt to be hip and cool, because ballet is boring right ? It almost never goes over the top either, and thus stays painfully bland throughout.
3/10
The Great Wall (Zhang Yimou, 2016)
About what you'd expect : dumb, occasionally fun, but mostly dumb. The real disappointment here comes in the acting department : Matt Damon and Willem Dafoe, two actors I generally like a lot, are actively bad in this, Andrew Lau gets nothing to do, and Jing Tian is... fine. Pedro Pascal is the "highlight", because he's the only one who gets to relax a little and crack some jokes, some of which are pretty forced but that's still better than whatever Damon is doing. He's a mercenary with a dark past trying to become a hero... we're told, because there's just nothing going on in his performance. There is some decent action in there, especially in the first 20 minutes, the costumes are colourful and cool... but that's about it.
4/10
Kollektivet / The Commune (Thomas Vinterberg, 2016)
I don't exactly know where to begin with this. It has a great ensemble, and some strong performances across the board, especially from the central couple (Ulrich Thomsen and Trine Dyrholm)... but this isn't as much of an ensemble film as you might think. It is about what living in a commune does to this couple more than it about the commune in general, and it has some interesting things to say about private life and boundaries.
The problem though, is that this film is filled with character making very obviously poor decisions and putting themselves in intenable situations... and those situations predictably blowing up in their faces. But it also seems to want us to believe that what they're doing is good ? I get the feeling that Vinterberg likes the idea of living in a commune, but everything he shows us in this film seems to prove that is a terrible, terrible idea, at least for these characters... for reasons that are completely obvious from the start, even before affairs start happening and make everything even more awkward. Yet, it ends on a note that feels like it'd belong in a bad Sundance movie, and that stark thematic dissonance left me with a very sour taste in my mouth.
4/10