"Going Places"
Reviewed by Andrew Johnson
DVD Review

My . . . how young they all were in this 1974 French comedy romp, “GOING PLACES.” It’s touted as the first starring screen role that made a star of a very slim Gerard Depardieu, and among the first roles for Miou-Miou and Isabelle Huppert. Patrick Dewaere, who died at a very early age, was a usual staple in the French films of that time as he pairs with Depardieu in one escapade after the other. Jeanne Moreau, in a brief appearance, plays an ex-con trysting with the boys at one point. A now considered all-star cast in this new DVD release from Kino Classics.
One could consider this tale to be a crude one concerning overgrown twenty-something juvenile delinquents, two good-for-nothings who womanize and commit petty crimes at first, then escalate to serious offenses in their “anything goes” existence. As the film opens, we find the boys purse snatching, stealing a car, and one of them getting shot in the thigh. They’re outrageous at what they do. Housebreaking and committing most heinous acts are all in their realm of being. It’s this aimlessness of the young and seemingly not caring for others that was depicted in a number of films of the time, foremost in my mind the Italian film I consider one of the first classics of director Federico Fellini, “I VITALLONI.”
Terrorizing seems the staple for the brutish pair as they even share their women: chauvinists world class! The frigid beautician (Miou-Miou), the sex-starved ex-con (Jeanne Moreau), and a teenager desperate to escape bourgeois life (Isabelle Huppert) cross the twosome’s path as life seems to be taken one day at a time, strictly for their pleasure which is warped at times, with no planning for the future whatsoever.
Bertrand Blier, who co-wrote the script, directed this film that is oft times quite earthy in its humorous manner, a film that seems to draw you in as you empathize with the lot of the two and kind of pull for them to overcome the obstacles that cross their paths every now and again. Film critic Pauline Kael, at the time the film was first released in this country, called the film “an explosively funny erotic farce – both a celebration and a satire of men’s daydreams.”
On Blu-ray (and regular) DVD from the people at Kino, “GOING PLACES” is definitely a film to be seen as it depicts the aimless, carefree existence of many of the young who embraced such a lifestyle at the time.

The Players: Gerard Depardieu, Miou-Miou, Patrick Dewaere, Jeanne Moreau, and
Isabelle Huppert

The Filmmakers:
Directed by Bertrand Blier
Written by Bertrand Blier and Philippe Dumarcay
Music by Stephanie Grappelli
French dialogue with English subtitles
Released on DVD by Kino Classics
Original French title for the film: “LES VALSEUSES” (“THE TESTICLES”)

  Compared to his or her console gaming counterparts, the dedicated gamer on PCs has always been a tinkerer,looking for the CPU, graphics card, audio card, memory and peripherals that will produce a better overallgaming experience. The same trend has been true for mass storage of games, which has evolved from floppydiscs and CD-ROMs to DVDs and hard drives.

As awareness builds of the advantages of solid state drives (SSDs) over their rotating media predecessors, asthe proliferation of flash memory into mobile devices fosters expectations of instant-on consumer technologyproducts, and as the ultrabook category expands beyond Apple’s MacBook Air line of laptops, we expect more
gamers to seek out SSDs as part or all of their internal storage solution.
For this white paper, Hit Detection downloaded from Valve’s Steam retail store 25 PC games released withinthe past five years. Based on our comparison of PC games running off of the Samsung 830 SSD solid state driveand a traditional rotating media drive, we found:

• A 21 percent average improvement in load times when starting up a game, with a peak improvementof 55 percent.

• A 35 percent average improvement in load times when loading a game’s save file, with a peakimprovement of 63 percent.

• First-person perspective titles demonstrated the most consistent benefit with respect to game loadtimes, with three of four titles showing improvements of more than 30 percent.

• A 77 percent improvement in Windows 7 boot times

• Anecdotal improvements, including faster restarts from sleep mode, and less hitching at autosave checkpoints

Hit Detection also spoke with the vice presidents of technology at two prominent U.S. game publishers to get their take on the potential of this technology. They said:“We could have much more immersive worlds than we have right now, and larger worlds too.”

There is sufficient benefit from SSDs in terms of boot times and load times alone that from the perspective of performance, dedicated PC gamers should strongly consider SSDs as a viable option, whether they are upgrading an existing machine or purchasing a new one.

However, the main challenge that SSDs face from the consumer’s point of view is that the rate at which consumers are acquiring and generating new content—from music and Hollywood movies to multi-megapixel photos and high definition home videos—their desire for high-performance storage may be outstripped by their need for increasingly high-capacity storage. This in turn favors traditional rotating media drives because of their lower cost per gigabyte. Assuming that this situation will exist for the foreseeable future, we suggest that solid state drive
manufacturers like Samsung and PC manufacturers like Alienware encourage dedicated gamers to consider

RAID setups where an SSD is paired with a traditional rotating media drive for the dual benefits of increased performance (SSD) and largest possible capacity (rotating media).
They must also reach out to game developers, many of who have become active in social media, to help increase awareness of the advantages of SSDs among both the developer and gamer communities. Because while the basic benefits of SSDs—faster load times—do not require any optimization, it is the possibilities that come when developers build their games around the presence of flash-based storage that are truly exciting. More complex artificial intelligence (AI). More detailed animations. More realistic physics. More simulations running simultaneously. But for this to happen, console, PC and component manufacturers will have to come
to terms on a model that allows SSDs and flash storage to proliferate in these devices to the point where they are effectively a standard rather than an option.
As part of our research for this white paper, we interviewed the vice presidents of technology at two
prominent console and PC game publishers, both of whom agreed to speak with us on a not-for-attribution
basis.
Both men told us that that there would be several considerable benefits if consoles and or PCs were
standardized around solid state drives or flash memory. First, accessing data would be faster, both in terms of
streaming and accessing multiple files. As the VP of Company #1 told us, “It’s not just speed of data
streaming off the disc, it’s how quickly we can recover multiple files. And seeking around on the disc to find
the files is a lot faster too.”
Second, their respective companies’ games would not have to use RAM to cache textures and geometry.
Instead, they could free up that RAM for other game-related uses, because they could count on a flash drive
to quickly stream those textures and geometry as needed. As a result, the RAM they would free up could then
be devoted to the following purposes:
• More complex AI
• More detailed animations
• More realistic physics
• Additional simulations
In other words, SSDs and flash memory could clear the way for developers to bring their game worlds to life
more vividly than they can today. The VP of Company #2 distilled it this way: “We could have much more
immersive worlds than we have right now, and larger worlds too.”