Reviews

I love this movie not because it is cinematically brilliant or for its plot line. The humor is excellent, there are so manyinside jokes that only a french sephardic jew would udnerstand, so it may seem uninteresting and cheesy to an american viewer. Whenever I am sad I watch this(and i've watched this at elast 10times) because the jokes are classic aswell as the characters. The movie shows how french and arabic culture intermingles with judaism to these jews whose parents have come from norh africa. It i a part of me (y mother is an algerian jew, a "pied noir" and it connects me to a side I cannot explain to my american friend. It is a culture that will soon be lost, because there are very few jews in northern africa after the french elft and the extremists control the countries. Overall: awesome and funny film

La Haine is a movie that is hard to forget. I am not going to give you a whole summary, that is what the IMDB description above is for. The last commentator who wrote about this movie called it superficial. La Haine is an exact portrayal of some poor suburbs outside of Paris. This movie speaks of real problems. As a Franco-American who has spent a good chunk of my 18yr old life in Paris- I was very impressed how accurate the characters were.

There are many cultural nuances, I think this is why I appreciate this film so much. One of the characters is Jewish (Mathieu Kassovitz) and the other Arabic, whose family is from North Africa.

My family is a Jewish Sephardic family from Algeria who moved to Paris after the war. The expressions and stereotypes were right on target. I loved how the director chose to mainly focus on the three peoples friendship, stressing each of their backgrounds. It adds so much genuinity to the film. TWhat striked me was the joke's tagline "Up till now, everythings fine" -which is the characters' method and mentality to deal with poverty, and above all France's stinging racism, which is in a distinct league of its own. Mathieu Kassovitz is brilliant. This film is dolorously raw, real, yet hilarious. Another excellent and very differnet movie with kassovitz is Amen.

Being Franco-American, after 20minutes I knew the type of movie it would be all too well. In Paris, I went to see it because a) Audrey Tatou was in it(a mistake since she limits herself by usually playing similar roles)and b) because it was a franco-spanish production and my aunt's company France 2 was involved so I thought it couldn't be that bad. After all it's a European film. Big Mistake, eurotrash does exist.

It had many elements of an American teen movie. I thought that the plot was pretty weak and at some points I thought that I was watching S-Club 7, a cheese ball show. I liked the idea of a french guy going to study for a year in Spain and meeting people from all over the world-fun, but the movie was corny and done in an unoriginal way. I think that it had potential but the script screwed it up and also because of the audience it was intended to. My french friends liked it, why, because they like anything American, that happy ending, attractive teenager appeal.