+ Most Overrated Movie of the Year
 |
| A dismal poster for Denis Villeneuve's Incendies |
The old woman Nawal dies and leaves a mysterious will for her adult children, which tells them that they have another brother and a father who still lives. One of the children, the daughter, investigates and learns horrific things of her late mother's life.
Incendies [Fr. 'fires'] is devastatingly boring, arranged in chapters and dependent on an abnormal interest in the characters, which the film never established in my case. There is a religious aspect to the story, which is not handled at all: Are the family Christian, although they seem very Muslim? Instead politics mix with awfully depressing scenes of their awful lives in a nondescript Middle Eastern country.
Incendies is written by co-writer-director Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners (2013)) with Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne (Endorphine (2015)), based on Wajdi Mouawad's same-titled 2003 play. It's a film totally deprived of humor and anything uplifting, a huge bore and wildly overrated. (Although its generally unbelievably high estimation does make me wonder if I maybe should give it a second shot sometime...)
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Watch a trailer for the film with Spanish subtitles here
Cost: 6.8 mil. $
Box office: Probably somewhere between 7-12.1 mil. $
= Big flop
[Incendies premiered September 4 (Telluride) and runs 130 minutes. The story is based on events during the Lebanese civil war, but it is made intentionally unclear throughout where we are, and what groups are interacting. Filming took place in Amman and Montreal. The film opened #46 in 3 theaters to a 50k $ first weekend in North America, where it peaked in 90 theaters and grossed 2 mil. $. The B.O. numbers out are conflicting, but adding the foreign totals on Box Office Mojo gives a foreign gross of 5 mil. $. On its IMDb page, the film boasts a 15.6 mil. CAN$ world total (approximately 12.1 mil. $), which isn't in line with this at all. So the film's performance is up in the air. Its 2nd and 3rd biggest markets seem to be Australia with 1.1 mil. $ and Italy with 688k $. It has made very little business in the Middle East. Incendies was Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Film, which it lost to the Danish In a Better World/Hævnen. It won 8 Genie awards (Canada's Oscar) including Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay. It also, amazingly, inhabits #150 on IMDb's user-generated top 250. Incendies is certified fresh at 92 % with a 7.9 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Incendies?
If you are a fan, tell me what I am not seeing, please
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