Cebalord Very best movie i ever watch

Matrixiole Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

rgcustomer It continues to amaze how gullible the viewers are with this film. When something is as bleak, tedious, pointless, and indecipherable as this, that does not signify that it is good. Rather, it signifies that it is bad. This is a basic point that I think many in the artistic community fail to perceive, intentionally, so to protect their own careers, which are often based on telling the public that there is more to film than meets the eye. Sorry, but there isn't, and that's the point.I didn't fall asleep during this one, but it was so boring that I found myself not even looking at the screen for minutes at a time, which is saying something since there isn't much else to look at. It didn't matter. Most of the time, the characters were speaking in a foreign language, with no subtitles. Their speech was unimportant. They never did anything particularly interesting, and the cinematography was horrible, so it wasn't even worth looking at. As a curiosity in an "anti-film" designed to antagonize the viewer, I suppose this succeeded, but as a film it is a failure. It has its good points (which is how it earned a 5 from me) but they aren't worth detailing since there are many here happy to sing the praises of this work.I've seen summaries of the film that indicate that women invited to eat at the photographer's place were in fact escorts. I saw or heard no evidence of that in the film. Maybe they revealed that in a language I do not speak. I have no intention of sitting through this again to find out what I missed.

Justafilmwatcher After watching Egoyan's film several times, and being of a resident of Toronto, a city which trumpets its multi-cultural populace, I picked up on some references in Calendar which maybe others would not have.At one point, the Driver (Adamian), says his two Armenian-descent Canadian passengers (Egoyan and Khanjian) could not properly raise children anywhere but in Armenia. It's an instant dismissal of the fact that the passengers come from a different country; in the Driver's mind, since their ancestry is Armenian, they are Armenian.Later, the Photographer gives uncomfortable answers to his Translator wife as to why he's not moved by his subject matter--the old churches of Armenia. He states that he finds the churches interesting to the eye, but also that he feels little reverence for them culturally or historically. She seemingly cannot fathom why he would feels so; but also doesn't she seem to understand that her husband is Canadian, not Armenian.The most telling references come the end of the film where the Photographer and his final Guest talk about living in a new country. He tells of his difficulties when he, as a child, moved to Canada from Armenia and had difficulty in learning English. The Guest sympathizes with Egoyan, implying that she went through a similar experience, saying she "considers herself Egyptian"--yet BORN and RAISED in Canada! (It's also interesting to note that Khanjian, the Translator, speaks Engish with an accent. The Photographer speaks urbane, Toronto English.) Calendar revolves around the issue that the couple's trip to Armenia provokes a strong response in Khanjian's character, so much so that she discards her country and her husband.Consider the final scene with the Driver: he jokingly acts like a KGB official, and takes the couple's passports.

Stu-24 Atom Egoyan's work is almost always about a distance from the immmediate events occurring. This film is no exception to this rule, but is heartbreakingly more accute in its treatment of the theme. Unlike the more popular films, there is no sympathy for the supposed main character, played by Atom himself. He is a dispicable, soul-less chap, without hope or redemption, lost in a fate of repetition that is of his own creation. Moreso than Egoyan's other films, this repetition is a fantasy, moreso than compulsion. Here guilt is as much at play as destiny.This film hurts me.

God! Awful I don't usually give movies a rating of 1. Normally I have the good sense not to sit through movies that I'm going to hate. However, in this case the filmmaker was Atom Egoyan so I decided to bear it out.Calendar is one of those films which hangs in time. The events on the screen are initially incomprehensible to us, but as the plot drags on, the same basic scenes are repeated again and again, each time casting new light on the relationship between the protagonist and his wife.Egoyan seems to have a love affair with European languages. A large portion of the film is spent listening to women of various nationalities jabbering on the phone (without being able to understand what they are saying).Then there are the scenes where Egoyan films his wife's trip to Armenia. The whole episode is deliberately constructed to play like a home movie. The subtle nuances in these scenes are overshadowed by the fact that the scenes themselves are boring.A large part of the home video is spent having Egoyan's wife translate one character's narratives from Armenian to English. The last film I saw with that plot device was Godard's "Contempt" and I hated it then as well.Egoyan even ridicules this plot device in a subsequent scene when his photographer character spends several minutes (onscreen) videotaping a man talking without having any conception of what he is talking about.There is a section in the middle of the film where the plot seems to accelerate. We see the distance forming in the relationship between Egoyan and his wife; meanwhile, Egoyan opens up to his date about the Armenian foster child he supports.At this point, I had mentally upgraded my evaluation of the film to at least a 2. But shortly thereafter, the film reverted to its previous boring tone.