The We and the I

With this film, Michele Gondry presented the problems of today’s youth. The whole film takes place on a bus which is crowded with blacks, browns, whites, Arabs, Indians or Hispanics. Kind of a world in a nutshell as a bus. And there’s nothing going on on that bus other than that they are enjoying the last day of school and getting ready for the summer holidays. They deal with silly things, none of these kids amuse me and I admit that somewhere halfway through I felt like rating it Boo! without finishing it. I like conversation movies, but this one was simply a failure. I would slap everyone so much that they would think about it for the next year and a half. It starts to be interesting only towards the ending. The assholes leave and only the biggest one, who commands everybody, stays. However, he then finds out that he is not as good as he thinks he is. And that’s a win for me, because there is finally time for a little bit more intelligent talk than what the herd was showing before. But the end is nearing and suddenly no one is left sitting on the bus, because the holidays begin. (08/05/2014)

Like the anti-Gondryan The Class inside out and on board a New York City public bus. A teenage-generation testimony that works so well that after just ten minutes I was already praying for the bus to crash, with all the youth inside dying a painful death... In itself, the movie isn’t bad at all; in fact, in the limited space of one bus, where he follows “documentary fashion" everything from bullying through the caste system to love, Gondry handled this movie with flying colors. And I couldn’t say that it was uninteresting. I just that spending over an hour and a half in the company of people who I would rather give a good clip round the ear to just rubs me the wrong way. (09/06/2013)