DaViD´82

Everything Baz Luhrmann's Australia wanted to be twenty-three years later, and everything it ultimately wasn't for a moment. A Hollywood epic in the best possible sense of the word.

To survive an unsuccessful landing in the Pacific during the War, at last, after endless suffering in the beating sun with no water to drink to reach a desert island in the middle of nowhere and to meet a beautiful nun there who has the sexiest voice ever (I have to find some more movies with Deborah!), openly seducing you with every glance, every gesture, who doesn’t succumb to your advances; now that really is bad luck, Mr. Allison. But otherwise, in view of Huston’s talent, the interesting topic of the conflict between loving God/a person is addressed rather naively, but because the chemistry between the central two protagonists works so darn well, this shortcoming may easily be forgiven.

In Charly's "first phase" Robertson pushes the envelope too hard, and in general it's shifted from the source material to that warmly human level so typical of films about the simpler intellects among us. But it's still a good film, just from a slightly different genre than Keyes's original work.

A Czech animation classic. Pojar managed almost incredibly beautifully to combine the catchy and original visual aspect with amazing playfulness and unforced lessons, while maintaining the quality at such a high level that this is entertaining for kids and adults alike. The separate episodes that were made gradually over the years all maintain an almost incredible balance that easily survived the later change of narrator.

“Maskerade" isn’t one of Pratchett’s best works. Even so, it’s good that the Theatre in Dlouhá Street chose to perform it. Unlike a theatre play Wyrd Sisters, this is more about production design - it’s more lavish and audience friendly. The problem is occasional uncalled for slipping into cabaret and cheap jokes that just don’t suit an adaptation of a book overflowing with dry British humor. I don’t want to give the impression that this is all just cheap. There are just a couple of moments where it gets like that, but they are not based on anything that appears in the book. And again it turns out that despite the unarguable talents of the Dlouhá Theatre ensemble, Vondráček and Táborský are on a different planet in terms of acting. What actually makes me happy, on the other hand, is the marvelous parodic background music by Jan Vondráček and the second half of the performance, which is considerably better. Because then the overly episodic storytelling and frequent change of locations eventually blend into a powerful unit (this is even more noticeable in the theatre - a lot of it was cut for the TV recording).

From a purely filmmaking point of view, this must have been hell to film in such cramped spaces. And when a chink of space appears, it immediately fills with water. But purely from a viewer’s point of view, it’s good that Cameron decided to go accept the challenge of making it. This has a fundamentally positive impact on the atmosphere. But this makes the ending all the more annoying, because Cameron is no good at presenting (selling) a message like this. The movie simply lacks even a drop of Kubrick inside it and not even the longest of director’s cuts can help.

Bonnie and Clyde - a priceless story. Romeo and Juliet “gangsta"-style. But we don’t find anything like that in Penn’s offering. Instead of character psychology and motivation, we see just illogical leaps in behavior (We’re gonna rob a bank, want to come along? Sure thing!). And instead of fateful love and mutual, sparking chemistry, it’s a one woman show with Faye Dunaway, who overshadows Warren Beatty so much that it is painfully clear that the movie could have done without him. Plus, in my opinion, the omnipresent “redneck" tone buried a lot of the scenes. It doesn’t matter in principle. It’s just a shame that they didn’t approach it more sensitively. The worst part is the scene with the shootout between the Barrow gang with Blanche running about like a headless chicken with the ax. This is the epitome of movie awkwardness for me. Luckily the works nicely, it has style and mainly Faye who holds everything together, in spite of Beatty.

In terms of film-craft this is the most precise work that can be achieved under current conditions, but above-average film-craft defining new standards alone doesn’t necessarily make a good movie. Luckily, Avatar is good, but unfortunately no more than just good. It’s like despite all the attention that Cameron devotes to polishing everything down to the last, tiny detail, he forgot about the movie as a whole. Who cares that it suffers from all imaginable maladies of “blockbusters", if only Cameron had managed to enthrall us, draw us in, simply forget that this is still just a movie (it only happened to me in one scene). And the saddest thing about this is that, despite the message, in the end it will be Cameron who causes mass deforestation on out planet due to the mountains of wood needed to produce the paper on which the millions of movie theater tickets sold around the whole world will be printed, and this thought chills me more than any of the best scenes in Avatar. And all of the above applies to the extended version which didn’t concentrate primarily on emotions and characters, but again on technical brilliance. P.S.: This review was written after seeing the regular version; my subsequent visit to see the IMAX version neither improved or impaired my impression of the movie (and why should it, it’s the same movie, isn’t it?), but it did enhance the brilliant effects. ♫ OST score: 3/5

Palin’s travelogues were always mainly about the book form, where the forced (and understandable) conciseness goes unnoticed because Palin has an incredible nose for situations, people and moments... Simply for details that attract his attention and he subsequently presents the atmosphere of the place in question using “dry humor rife blog style". The TV version then serves as an accessory which offers the beauties of the world visually and where everything is focused on Palin’s personality and his situation humor. This unusual mutual combination worked almost twenty years. Until New Europe. Not that it has nothing to offer, but the briefness often remains uncompensated by anything extra, plus Palin is scared of getting into conflict and diving under the surface of sweet nothings and so it gradually changes into an exhibition of his comedy antics which reliably entertain, but don’t enrich. And, in terms of Palin’s regular standard, this is too little.

Brüno, just face it: Derek Zoolander is simply a prettier, but really a prettier class of guy. Your bad luck lies in the fact that you have always been so obviously the “third wheel" even in the days when Sacha Baron Cohen was still really funny and original (i.e. in the days of short sketches with Borat and Ali G). But what now, when he’s just regurgitating himself and has trouble coming to terms with feature length productions. As a result he spends more time puckering his butt to the camera than criticizing public attitudes. In other words, I think that Cohen no longer has anything to say through the mouth of Ali/Borat/Brüno and should begin to consider a different alter ego.