Isherwood

Howard has the craft down pat like few others. In a way, I admire him for how he managed to turn such a simple script (I preferred to skip the book) into a stylish chase after various symbols, statues, paintings, and crazy conspiracy theories which, despite the constant chatter, isn’t boring whatsoever. Compared to The Da Vinci Code, here we don’t get all that babbling that arouses resentment of the Vatican, which means that while the marketing controversy has been reduced, at least the film has avoided outright stupidity. That doesn’t mean that it’s particularly amazing - Brown is still too cheap a storyteller for that - but as a thriller whose aim is to entertain rather than dumbly lecture, it works surprisingly well. The actors in particular are a treat, and the charisma of Hanks, Skarsgård, and Mueller-Stahl and Zimmer's fantastic choruses alone make me want to watch it again sometime. PS: If I were a woman, I would get wet at the sight of Ewan McGregor in the movie theater. He’s never been this sexy on screen. ;-) 3 ½.

Clint's Farewell, or Empties by the American badass. The film has a tendency to slide into cliché and calculation, but the character of a grumpy old man who finds redemption (?) in his old age has the kind of gradation that will make you swallow the two hours of mentoring and lamenting the good old days to the max. Objectively, there are many things that could be criticized about it, but subjectively, it affected me so much that I don't want to have any reservations regarding it.

I still can't decide if Gilroy took a step back or missed the mark. The script is decent, the weaving of conspiracy threads is fun and so is the layered ending, but why did it have to be so drawn out? The line between a slow and drawn-out tempo is too thin, which you realize when you think of the amazing Michael Clayton, compared to which this film noticeably lacks symbolism and greater vigor. I do get that it wants to be a bit lighter (the awesome opening credits), but there’s a total vacuum between Julia and Clive, which is made up for (albeit desperately slowly) by the famously slightly choleric Wilkinson and Giamatti duo. And Howard's rip-off of Powell's "Bourne" music isn't much fun either. Despite all the aforementioned, the "Gilroy" brand is still a strong enough trademark in my eyes.

"Is there a doctor here? I need urgent help for a die-hard Star Trek fan!" said a guy two rows above me after the film was over. I understood what he meant. I wasn't expecting anything soulful from Orci and Kurtzman, but if Abrams wasn’t this good at his craft, the rest of the people in the movie theater would certainly not have enjoyed it as much. He traded the naivety of this space saga for an unbelievable barrage of catchphrases, action, and visual orgies, which he endowed with so much warp that I literally suffered on the way home in a speeding carriage. The perfect casting and the amazing work by the ILM guys are just the icing on the cake. This was two hours of pleasure.

Neveldine and Taylor may give a different dimension to the concept of "over the top," but they still don't really provide much originality. The aesthetics, tuned to the form of video-game-comic hyperbole, only work occasionally and are mostly drowned in a numbing ballast of copied scenes (from each other), which gets boring after a while - which is paradoxical when taking the frantic pace into consideration. It is better not to think about the fact that what happens in the film is mostly total decadence. Jason is an incredible tough guy and Amy is sexy, while the rest of it amounts to my jaw getting tired from yawning.

Mourning for Singer went out of fashion long ago after Ratner's collapse, so why not enjoy mutants in the brisk action guise dictated by the increasingly popular 1980s model? Hood grasped the point of the subject matter on offer and presents us with a very decent piece of work that relies on the fact that if something moves, shoots, and explodes on the screen (preferably ten times in a span of a few seconds), it is impossible to be mad at it. However, Skip Woods is still writing like he’s had a lobotomy, so the dialogue is solidly rough, and the twists and turns were surely foreseen by the group of twelve-year-old snots sitting a few seats away. My fondness for Reynolds, the fact that Schreiber is a crackerjack and Jackman a major crackerjack, who simply is Wolverine, saved a lot of this film for me. I’ll probably forget it in a few days, but the fact that I wasn't bored for two hours, and the over-the-top finale on the cooling tower gives it just enough bonus points. Edit: Even after the second viewing it still has some energy, but the stupidity is also quite visible. I give it a better three stars.

A non-negotiable reconstruction that keeps the right distance the whole time, while dragging the viewer through a whirlwind of perfect action (the question remains whether it is possible to consider a film like this in such a way) and a glimpse into the souls of the people who founded a new form of modern warfare. The Germans are healing their historical pain through films and it's working out exceedingly well. They can be envied far and wide.

At first, I appreciated how even a Czech filmmaker can get behind the camera so that he doesn't shoot the same characters at a static angle at face level. These are the people that keep on worrying about small Czech problems over and over again, but once your eyes have seen enough - especially when Ševčík alternates "cool" shots with the cheapest ones - you start to think he is, in fact, showing us nothing. If Milan Kňažko is not in the frame, the monster is only talked about, and that is simply not enough. An unhappy childhood is just words in a void and a legal dilemma is just a sweaty forehead and a shirt without a tie. Not to mention love and other deeper things. When Ševčík finds a screenwriter who can thicken the plot, his solid images will get a solid idea and an original Czech filmmaker. This film left my mind on the way home. 2 ½.

This is the essence of screenwriting idiocy that refuses to make the characters anything more than pieces on a chessboard of slaughter. These are one of the best things I love about the current French exploitation wave, but when you spend the first half desperately looking at what jerks the main characters are and the second half looking at what jerks those around them are, you kind of start looking forward to the end. But then comes the final point, and I just helplessly wonder how much Western critics must have seen that made them yelp so much. It left me completely cold, desperately bored, and kind of... pissed off. Laugier is a very decent craftsman, no question about it, but as a screenwriter he sucks!

Untouched by the comics, but with thoughts of both Gilliam and Greengrass, I end up being thankful for Zack Snyder, who has grown as a filmmaker in his third film. While he was enabled by an obviously strong premise or rather its script treatment, the way Snyder presents the vast world of rejected superheroes is breathtaking. It’s a powerful reflection on America with an almost meditative thought about humans in general. It is based on excellent dialogue by a group of fresh-faced actors who are occasionally sent into excellent action sequences by the director. Rorschach's rendezvous with the cops took me far beyond mere viewer ecstasy. I left the movie theater very pensive, but a day later I was cheering and I know I have to see it at least one more time. Edit I: It was worth it. It's been a long time since I've experienced a second screening of a film that I've enjoyed so intensely. Edit II The D.C. version is "only" a gourmet cherry on top.