POMO

In the first half of The Painted Veil, the director unfortunately doesn’t let us get closer to the characters and succumb to the emotions of the story, which makes him as immature as the heroine. This handicap, however, disappears over time and when Naomi Watts’ character grows more mature, the picture turns into a powerful intimate drama about two very different people growing close at the end of the world. It’s a pity that the ending is cut short, once again not allowing for deeper emotions on the audience’s part. However, it’s a nice film postcard from faraway lands, and though it is kind of forgettable and doesn’t attain the epic qualities of the biggest Hollywood period films, it has a kind heart and a unique creative touch. Similar uniqueness can be found in the recent film by the Australian Phillip Noyce dealing with his homeland (Rabbit-Proof Fence). Naomi turns in a fine performance, but the driving force behind the film is (once again) Edward Norton, even though he gets much less screen time than his female counterpart. P.S. Another beautiful score by Hollywood newcomer Alexandre Desplat.

Stranger than Fiction is a fresh, inspiring and on-point comedy for an intelligent audience. It offers a deluge of great ideas and cute moments we know from real life but have never seen in a movie. Will Ferrell’s serious acting is a bit too minimalist, but he has great help in the form of the eccentric performances by Maggie Gyllenhaal and Dustin Hoffman. I recommend taking a cookie with delicious chocolate icing to the cinema with you.

This bland piece of commercial crap oscillates between a dumb slasher and an adult thriller, with a very weak, almost TV-like formulaic script. There’s almost no connection with the original material; this flick just feeds off the name Hannibal. Sad.

A very... very... VERY beautiful, fragile and poetic story about love and about how good triumphs over evil. An emotional and spiritual cleanse, a film from another world.

Sunshine is too low-budget and chatty, and with too many interior shots for a grandiose mainstream sci-fi movie, and it’s too unoriginal and clichéd for an intelligent intimate drama. We know practically nothing about the characters, we have already seen almost every twist in the story elsewhere, and the film is visually austere, at least one level worse than Event Horizon. I don’t like to say it, but even the silly The Core was more fun than this. Danny, stop with this bullshit and shoot Porno (note for those not in the know: the announced sequel to Trainspotting).

Oops. This is no mega epic. 300 is a modest experiment based on a ten-page screenplay and with nice blue-screen backgrounds. The dialogue pretends to be so serious and cool that it’s laughable. The story recycles what we’ve already been told by Braveheart and Gladiator, only shortened and focusing exclusively on the visual aspect. It’s nice to look at and the battle scenes are well done, but everything else is bland. If not for the slow-motion shots, 300 would barely run 60 minutes. It’s fine for what it is, but I hope it doesn’t herald the start of a new film subgenre.

Clint Eastwood’s overly sensitive Flags of Our Fathers fails exactly where one would expect – in the softness and naïveté of the combat scenes, which – in order to be a strong counterweight to the monologue with the line “Some of the things I saw done, things I did, they weren’t things to be proud of” – were meant to inspire dread and horror, but they don’t. And then there is the film’s second storyline involving the exposition of a trio of soldiers evolving into the roles of questionable heroes. This storyline – though in pathetic disgrace – would be viable, but its connection to the war storyline doesn’t work – the slow and simplified explanation of an idea that is clear after the first half-hour becomes increasingly unbearable and the ultra-sentimental last twenty minutes are merely a test of just how much you can take. There is a no more accurate synonym for Flags of Our Fathers than *shit*. It’s not a weak film, but rather a dysfunctional and poorly made film.

Letters from Iwo Jima is a nice film. The Japanese view of the incident is darker, more accomplished and more meditative than the American view depicted in Flags of Our Fathers. And, mainly, it works internally. The spectacular action scenes are all the more impressive due to the fact that there is a minimum of them and we see them only from a distance, thanks to which the film maintains a powerfully intimate nature. The sentiment and simplicity are tastefully balanced with a beautiful visual aspect and the minimalism of Clint Eastwood’s music, whose dominant feature is a fragile piano motif. Another pleasing aspect is the filmmakers’ affection for the Japanese and, in contrast to that, their contempt for the American soldiers in some scenes. It’s a shame that Flags is such an unworthy sibling to Letters and drags this ambitious diptych of films down to the level of a quickly thrown-together Oscar frontrunner. If more work had been put into Flags, these two films could have gone down in history together.

This is what happens when a Korean sci-fi fan gets a mega-budget to make his childish dream come true.

This is not just an action movie, but a brilliantly shot and edited action movie with wonderful sound. It is the most powerful audio experience to be had at the cinema, even better than Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.