Malarkey

A movie that is trying to be more of an art-house film rather than a meaningful movie that would be logical and make a deeper sense. Nevertheless, the idea isn’t bad at all and if you can get over the weird story-telling, you will get quite an interesting punchline.

The name of the movie Amnesia does contain a nice double-meaning, but until I checked how old Marthe Keller and Bruno Ganz were I couldn’t believe them that they could have looked so young in the early 1990s. When I apologized to them in my mind, I got angry again because such music couldn’t have been played in Ibiza in the early 1990s. More like the turn of the century, but what can you do. I still stand by my opinion that I’ve never seen a movie where Nazis were forced into the plot more brutally than here.

Since the disillusionment with Chris Rock last year, who told off every white face on the planet, we have gotten to the new year only to see that the academics are skilled at brown-nosing. And in order to satisfy everybody, they stuffed 2016 with so many black faces that there simply had to be somebody who would turn tehir performance into an Oscar. And if this was the only thing that this year was about, the ceremony would be quite OK. But let’s take it step by step. Nominating Fences is exactly the kind of brown-nosing to Denzel that I am talking about. Nevertheless, I do admit that Viola was the only black actress to actually deserve an Oscar. What I don’t understand is the movie Moonlight, which won Best Movie and Best Supporting Actor. I personally think that it’s the worse movie the Oscars had to offer this year. And I don’t mean one of the worst, but actually the worst movie that received any nomination. And that’s pretty strange. On the other hand, the favorite La La Land also collected a number of nominations, where Best Music, Best Director and the nomination for Emma Stone literally hit the spot. Too bad for Ryan, who in my opinion deserved to win much more than Casey Affleck. However, I sneakily told myself that some of the members of the Academy could surprise everybody and give the award to someone else than the clear favorite. For instance, Jeff Bridges or Michael Shannon would definitely have deserved an award for their performances. But well, what can you do. These are the choices the Academy made this year and apart from the awards for La La Land, there wasn’t a single winner who would make me really happy, so Jimmy Kimmer had to come in to save the day at least in part, as he had a couple of really good ideas and he nailed it with the tour bus and with the balloons. These Oscars were pretty humorous, I must admit. The faux pas at the end put the cherry on top of the pie, but well, things like that simply happen. I must also say that the Czech commentary on the second channel of Czech TV was great this year. To the point and that’s how it should be. Thanks.

I don’t know if it is mainly because of the dubbing, but I must admit that it was thanks to the dubbing that I managed to watch this movie to the end. Those guys from a special needs school spoke in the voices of 20-year-old ruffians and that at times gave birth to some pretty good fun. The question is whether this was intended by the authors of the movie. I think the movie is supposed to be a standard French drama from the war and post-war period and there isn’t much to add to that. The French make all their movies pretty similar and if your attention is not caught by any particular scenes, then there is nothing left but to look for those qualities somewhere else.

A very strange movie. That was the first thing that I thought after I watched The Red Captain. Quite a good premise was destroyed by non-sensical and hard-to-follow story telling, which turns it into something more than what it really is. On the other hand, the actors definitely deserve your attention – they are simply terrific. The actors I personally appreciated the most were Oldřich Kaiser and Michal Suchánek, whose roles were the biggest surprises to me. But Maciej Stuhr was superb as well - he allegedly had to learn to speak Slovak because of this movie. Another thing is that only seldom do you get to see a Czech movie that is shot in Hollywood form. However, in action sequences, this form borders on the embarrassing because Oldřich Kaiser’s escape from the scene is probably the easiest escape I have ever seen. Kaiser jumps out of a window under which there is about eight meters of space and in a nanosecond he drives away from the scene. The film has several other moments like this and it loses a lot of its value. Still, the movie is a very nice surprise and I really enjoyed it despite its illogicality.

It’s no surprise that I know absolutely nothing about this film. In the opening credits, the premise makes it look like a weaker version of the movie Seven (which is actually a word of praise for the movie), but that’s only a very weak conjecture formed during the first couple of minutes. What follows is a mixture of all the bad things that the 1990s had to offer in film and what never brought the movies any success. A very forgettable movie.

According to the reviews here, this slightly morbid giallo film is quite OK. Well, I don’t really think so because other than the scene involving the naked Italian actress who was trying to seduce a 10-year-old boy, I only enjoyed one other scene that I had to wait for until the very end. An average course of investigation that looked like a combination of French crime movies and Italian naughty movies reached a conclusion that literally took my breath away. You see, the final fight was like an absolutely brutal Italian Fight Club. Brutal, illogical and in the end also bloody. I had to watch the scene twice because I haven’t seen something this funny in a movie for a long time. Thank you, Mr. Fulci, you kept low-key during the entire movie but you sure had a lot of fun with the ending.

This movie could have been the new A Beautiful Mind. But for that to have happened, the authors would have had to shoot it with a bit of emotion rather than self-centeredly focusing on themselves and thus offering nothing at all. Only boredom, empty characters and a plot that I didn’t care about for almost two hours.

The clever and imaginative stage play was turned into such a clever movie in 1972 that it manages to entertain me with its simplicity even after forty years of its existence. And I dare say that it’s also thanks to the supernatural beauty of Goldie Hawn, with whom you can clearly see that intellect and beauty can go hand in hand.

If I think about it, this movie has the most beautiful premise of all those movies nominated for an Oscar. You see, it shows that the existence of the Western world sometimes really does make sense. I feel sorry that the first half of the movie with the Indian lead role is much nicer and better than the other half. Dev Patel, even though he is a very good actor, put into the movie a whole number of questions and misunderstood moments, which is not say that I have to understand those, but he simply didn’t convince me to actually root for him. Sunny Pawar was probably the best child actor I have ever seen and scenes involving him were a pure balm for the soul. I must say that it’s been quite long sice I had two opinions about a single movie that are so strongly influenced by the acting performance in the lead role. But as a whole, I do agree that Lion is a huge movie and it’s beautiful to see that even stories like these can have a happy ending.