Moofies - Paris 36

EXPECTATIONS: I honestly don't think I'll enjoy this film all that much, but we are going to Paris soon and I want to get a few French films in before we leave. I'm excited about going, and I think seeing beautiful depictions of the place is going to fuel that excitement.

REALITY: This film is a mess. There are so many plots and tones going on that I was left feeling empty and 'meh' about the whole thing.

The storyline begins with a Bob Hoskins lookalike sulking to a police officer. He has been charged with murder, so rather than getting straight to the point, he begins to tell this long, drawn out story about a music hall/theater that he used to run; the Faubourg (the original title for the film is Fauborg 36; the English title for the film doesn't actually make all that much sense really). It gets shut down in 1936 due to a lack of funding, so roundfacedman and his crew get together, occupy the building, and try and get it started again. This is when the one redeeming feature of this film enters: Douce, played by the beautiful Nora Anezeder. She's pretty easy to look at, but she also has pretty much the only character in the film that I cared about it any way and she can sing. Everyone else was either a ridiculous stereotype or just a mess of motives and actions that made no logical sense.

The film tries to tell the dramatic story of fattyroundface and his kid, as they are seperated and he has to work to get his son back. It also tells the story of some kind of Nazi party called S.O.C. running out of France. I know very little about this, and I think a story based solely on it could have been interesting, but rather than actually investigating the S.O.C. we are just given a few scenes in their meetings, amongst scenes with the songwriter character, amongst scenes with a stupid "immitator", amongst scenes that belong in a musical, amongst whatever other bloody scenes were thrown in. It was just a ridiculous mess of genres and styles and it all came up flat and empty.

Anezder's costumes and singing were pretty great, so the stars this film gets are for that. The rest of this film was pretty awful.

*1/2