DaViD´82

I am sincerely sorry for the staff of that dive of a Prague beer bar Pivnice U Milosrdných; I can just see how tourists look in there curiously and then wonder “where has that sumptuous, stylish interior from that great but really depressing movie gotten to?" And I hope that Polanski sees it (the movie, not the beer) to learn in just half an hour what an adaptation of Club Dumas should look like.

Cowboys and Indians for the twenty-first century pulling out all the stops; the bad ones and the good ones. And the dozens (dozens!) of neat, not immediately obvious allusions (the cicadas and the birds in the bush, the umbrella in the desert etc.), paradoxically more than in Rango, prove better than anything else that the creating team didn’t treat this as just another product. And, yes, this is unarguably “just" the Pirates of the Caribbean in Western garb. However, it should be said that, along with the first Pirates, this is the best to come out of that “series".

However you might imagine a documentary about a not so poor, legless fishing boat captain would be, almost certainly you would not expect it to be such a not so melancholic, zen-lyrical poem that rocks you to the brink of slumber. And if you succumb to the rocking of the boat and fall asleep, you’ll miss nothing; it’s intended to be like that (straight from the creators’ mouths). Whether this is a (dis)advantage, is a completely different matter. I liked it, but I warn you that I unashamedly adore that so special rocking peace of the boat on the waves with the sounds of the sea outside. And this isn’t about anything more than that and there’s nothing else to see. And thanks to the rocking, it’s an ideal movie for a 4DX movie theatre!

... or: How ego, ambition, an unknown actress in the leading female role and Slovak folk music bankrupted United Artists. It seems that over-populated is the only impression that remains with me. During the first thirty minutes so many (absolutely unnecessary) extras promenading around that even Bondarchuk would balk at it. I was afraid that even the intimate scenes would have a couple of hundred actors rolling around in the bed. For all that, the end result isn’t wrecked so much by Cimino’s flamboyant megalomania as by the pure fact that it hid a good genre-subverting hundred-minute movie into a filler-packed, almost four-hour lump of celluloid where he forgot to develop the main trio of characters.

A pedantically down-to-earth Prometheus with convincing behavior from all in this minimalist and incredibly orthodox sci-fi offering for genre connoisseurs. And one of the rare exceptions where the concept of found footage isn’t just a cheap trick hiding a low budget, but an integral component and one of the main building blocks of its effectiveness, which it also owes to the simple fact that it succeeds in creating the convincing illusion (I repeat, illusion, not real-life action) that “one day, when it happens, these people will behave exactly like this".

Indy dons his fedora again and... And sets out in the name of a Methodist God to redeem a game. Combining a sport movie and a humanist-aware, integrating, warming drama in a naive, fairytale wrapper is already a combination so fundamentally dangerous that the resulting pretty solid tearjerker is a genuine success this time.

A mixture of many incongruous interpretations and approaches to the zombie apocalypse theme. No surprise then that it couldn’t make a single coherent unit if it tried. But surprisingly, each one of these approaches is handled well in itself and so as the sum of many separate subsets it actually works; outstandingly so in the second half Jerusalem→ airplane→ Wales. Too bad about rating worries and so the lack of a darker tone and more gore in the final part. In the scenes where Pitt sinks his crowbar into a zombie’s head, not even Angelina would want to see a close-up of Brad’s face; whenever a drop of blood “threatens", the camera quickly pans up to Pitt’s tortured face. And considering how many times this happens, it’s almost ridiculous. Anyhow, I’m intrigued to see the potential director’s cut, because if I understand correctly, Forster had a vision, Pitt from his position of producer had a completely different one and, in the end, in the spirit of “the strongest dog gets to fuck", the studio slipped in its own version?

A darn long shift for a provincial narcotics unit. For To, a surprisingly toned-down, raw, realistic, dark and the first movie I’ve seen by him where “style and form above all else" applies; unusually he chose a Mannesque style and approach, so it centers on atmosphere and what goes unsaid between the characters on opposite sides of the barricades. Simply a very well-made variation on Heat with all the trimmings. The problem is the final twenty minutes which would so love to be something like a shootout in the street like in Heat, but instead turns into classic To-ism. Hitherto intelligent characters suddenly begin behaving like dumb asses. Don’t get me wrong, the shootout is entertaining, uncompromising and stylish. It’s just that it comes from a completely different movie.

Thanks to the central duo (over)sweet and nicely uningratiating, but in view of the theme “mind what you wish for, it might come true" in indie romantic style, it’s almost surprising just how predictable and unplayful it is in the end. And, once upon a time, Richard Matteson proved that the same can be made playful and ingenious in a Twilight Zone episode A World of his Own.

Is it a man? Is it a plane? It’s... Big, it’s big, it’ big. It’s hopeless, it’s hopeless, it’s hopeless. Massively effective, but at other times unfortunately just effective. Self-centered, pretentious pathos, interspersed with incredibly opulent action following the maxim “any one second of action when a skyscraper doesn’t collapse or nobody throws a locomotive at anybody else and where there aren’t at least seven cuts and fifteen reflections is a god-forsaken, wasted second of action". Tons of pathos, but no levity or tongue-in-cheek. Just the falling skyscrapers, deathly serious faces, falling skyscrapers, character “psychology" reduced to moralizing two-word sentences, only sounding right from the mouth of charisma-oozing Crowe, falling skyscrapers, falling fighter planes, falling people, flying extraterrestrials and a couple of falling skyscrapers for good measure. If, same as the skyscrapers, you can’t take all of this (and that could easily be the case), this turns into a good movie to laugh at in ridicule, more than anything else. I could take it, but for me to like it, the ratio of the almost non existent down-to-earth storyline to the cold, action (and, purely subjectively, endless and therefore numbing) part would have to be more than 1:5(00); and it really wouldn’t hurt if the creators could lighten up a little.