Day: May 12, 2024

Sirocco and the Kingdom of Winds was watched as part of the Seattle International Film Festival 2024! It had its showing on Sunday, May 12th as part of the festival, and it was the Seattle premiere of this film!

Long winded titles about wind are long winded. What is this, some modern fantasy book series?

Well, yes, in the movie it is.

You see, Juliette and Carmen are sisters, and they are at a babysitters house, and bored! Well, Juliette is bored. And their babysitter is taking a quick nap, even if it is Juliette’s birthday. Also, this person has wrote the fantasy series Sirocco and the Kingdom of Winds. Eventually, some toy creation pops out, and makes a magical portal, that of course Juliette decides to jump into, forcing her older sister to follow.

And hey look, they are now weird cat people! And they are in the world of the books. Thankfully it isn’t scary, it is cool.

Until these goblin creatures find them, capture them, and break the toy so they cannot portal home. Oh, and then they also get separated. The older sister to be married off to the head goblin’s son, and the younger kid to be a maid to a visiting singer, Selma. The good news is, Selma is awesome, and powerful, and wants to help the girls. But the real person to help with the toy is going to have to Sirocco, and he is scary and controls big giant storms.

These goblin people look like they like to party though…

I was excited to show my kids their first FRENCH cartoon, and they still did get to see it. But unfortunately, it was dubbed. Oh no! Still a French cartoon, but the people who did the English voices aren’t noted anywhere, so I couldn’t tag them.

As for the movie, it is basically a Studio Ghibli’esque film. A giant focus on the child characters, and their feelings and facial expressions. Some danger, but nothing we think will actually win over at any point. A world of whimsy and strange shapes and structures. It hits all the marks, just is less anime and more whatever this style of French is called. I think if you like Ghibli films a lot, you would love this one.

Both of my kids enjoyed it a lot, including my youngest who made it very clear that she didn’t think she would like when I showed her the trailer, but she dug it a lot.

For the adults? Well, the story is relatively basic. And it is fine. But it is not something groundbreaking in any level. A tiny, cute story, that is relatively short. A nice break from the hardcore films of death and destruction out there.

2 out of 4.

Bonjour Switzerland was watched as part of the Seattle International Film Festival 2024! It had its showing on Saturday, May 11th as part of the festival, and it was the Seattle premiere of this film!

Hello, Switzerland! Yes, I know a little French, be impressed.

To set the stage for this film, you need to know about Switzerland. And you know what? I am going to quote Wikipedia here. “Switzerland has four national languages: mainly German (spoken natively by 62.8% of the population in 2016); French (22.9%) spoken natively in the west; and Italian (8.2%) spoken natively in the south. The fourth national language, Romansh (0.5%), is a Romance language spoken locally in the southeastern trilingual canton of Grisons.”

Four languages is a lot, but not really for Europe. A big German population, by a lot. Well, in this film, there is a referendum being brought up to change Switzerland from FOUR languages, to just ONE language. And it has gained some steam, but most people think it is absolutely silly. They like how unique everything is. And the way the law is on the ballot, they have to pick if they want it to take effect or not, and if they want it to pass, which language should be the one remaining?

Well, shockingly it passes. And due to apathy and other reasons, it looks like FRENCH is the winning language. This pisses off most people. As now many folks have to learn French, more than expected. And our main character, a cop (Beat Schlatter), is struggling to learn, and he will need to, to do his job.

He actually gets a big job, to go down to Ticino, an area of Switzerland that is mostly Italian speaking, because they are rising up and talking of separating from their country. Forming their own tiny nation, and will fight and attack to get it going. Oh boy. Politics, amirite?

Also starring Vincent Kucholl, Catherine Pagani, Silvia Jost, and Leonardo Nigro.

I don’t know if this is a Switzerland specific joke or not. But, tiny car and many people is still funny. Okay, first off, let me tell you about what I learned about the title as it is in Switzerland. It is called “Bon Schuur Ticino”. So, first off, Ticino is that one area with the Italians. They can be specific to them in the title, since they would know that, while us filthy Americans do not. But Bon Schuur? That is nonsense technically. It is how a German speaking Swiss would likely pronounce Bonjour. So a German speaking Swiss, speaking French, poorly. That is pretty clever, and something I never would have gotten on my own (thank you Swiss friend who saw this and laughed about it).

Now, onto the story. It is quite a very silly one. We have terrorism, and deceit. We have bombs going off and people getting kidnapped. We have old people potentially getting arrested or fined for just wanting to do their own thing. That’s right, we have a satire.

And like any satire, you have to know everything they are satire-ing, to get the full picture. That can be hard to get with a foreign flick whose own politics and social norms are so unlike your own. I am assuming there is a LOT of this movie that I just didn’t get and would have found it to be a lot more funny if I did. But alas, that is the problem with culture sometimes. As I am not a Swiss Scholar, I couldn’t even get the joke in its title.

Overall I can say it is an interesting and amusing movie. There are parts that still made me laugh, but a lot of parts that just fell flat, and I can only think to blame it on the fact mentioned above.

2 out of 4.