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Also Known As: - |
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| Year of first release: 2004 | |
| Director: Steven Spielberg (E.T., Jaws, Jurassic Park) | |
| Actors: Tom Hanks (Could Atlas), Catherine Zeta-Jones (Traffic), Stanley Tucci (Transformers 4), Zoe Saldana (Avatar) | |
| Country: USA | |
| Genre: Drama | |
| Conditions of visioning: 08.04.2015, SD VOD, Home cinema | |
| Synopsis: Viktor Navorski (Hanks) lands at JFK airport while his country is undergoing a revolution. He is thus not allowed to enter the USA nor to return home. | |
| Review: I was surprised to learn that this movie is loosely inspired from the story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri who lived for almost 18 years (!) in the Paris airport, and that this kind of adventure has happened to others as well (see this Wikipedia page). I had a hard time getting into the movie, first because of the choice of the very American Tom Hanks to play a citizen from the fictional country of Krakozhia, then because of the way this man is handled by the airport authorities. The man clearly doesn't speak a word of English and the airport manager keeps on explaining him (actually he does that to the audience) his situation, before dropping him in the international zone for an undetermined duration. I don't think that someone in that situation would be handled like that without the chance for him to understand the situation thanks to a translator. And if yes, then some Americans just can't understand that some people in the world don't speak their language, and that's very sad. Once this feeling passed, I could better appreciate the story and the not-so-bad acting by Tom Hanks. But then I found the chain of events too exaggerated: him learning English, falling in love with a flight attendant, the side story with Zoe Saldana (by the way it is funny to see her young as a Star Trek fan)... and not believable. Definitely not the best of Spielberg. |
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Rating: 4 /10
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More than entertainment, an Art.
Thursday, April 9, 2015
The Terminal (2004)
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it worth also maybe to watch the French movie "Tombés du ciel" (Lost in Transit, 1994, distributed by Dreamwork of whom Steven Spielberg is one of the founders), a comedy directed by Philippe Lioret, and which tell the incredible story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri. I've read that it won several prizes, in Japanese film festival and San Sebastian film festival for instance.
ReplyDeleteMaybe a bit closer from reality, I've learnt that a documentary (Waiting for Godot at De Gaulle) and a mockumentary (Here to Where) have been made about Mehran's life and the Kafkaesque situation he ends up.