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Genres:
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Action /
Comedy /
Romance /
Thriller
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Release:
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Director:
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George Gallo
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Actors:
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Meg Ryan,
Marco St. John,
Aki Avni,
Tom Adams,
Tarri Markell,
Mark Meade,
Jeff Fried,
Antonio Banderas,
Colin Hanks,
Selma Blair,
Trevor Morgan,
John Valdetero,
Eli Danker,
Keith David,
Enrico Colantoni
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Duration:
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97 min.
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Rating:
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(5.2/10)130
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Plot Summary:
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Heartbeat Detector is an immersive corporate thriller in which Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, Quantum Of Solace) plays Simon Kessler, an in-house corporate psychologist, who is asked to study the erratic comportment of the party CEO (Michael Lonsdale). His investigations take him under the skin of his train, and its neutral corporate language, to dark, Hiding-place-style transgressions.
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Tags:
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Heartbeat detector
This slow movie's main theme is the correspondence between today's corporate attitude towards employees and the Nazi's towards Jews. Both considered these people as 'things', to be eliminated, or manipulated, as such. Similarly both use euphemisms to gloss over atrocious acts.Despite some excellent acting and character creation the film verges on the unwatchable through the vastly longdrawn out nature of three episodes, which produce boredom and irrititation to a degree that actual walking out of the cinema is almost invited
(some did when I saw it). None of the professional critics that I read mentioned this evidence of a badly made film and most gave it a rave four stars. I agree completely with our viewers average rating of two and a half stars.
Pretentious
A deeply flawed exercise is style over content - or rather, style over competent story telling.
The central premise, that the Nazi's methods of processing human beings and the language they employed in doing so is comparable to contemporary corporations attitudes to their workforce, is potentially insulting both to the descendents of the Nazi's victims and to modern industry. Perhaps this explosive subject was handled more delicately in the book on which the film is based - and it is a film that seems very obviously based on a book.
Mathieu Amalric, so good elsewhere, is here miscast as Simon; essentially a passive / observer character about whom we learn very little, but through whose eyes we must experience the entire narrative. Such a role requires an actor who can...
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