DaViD´82

A reality show that combines footage of the entire month of the hardest induction training “in the world" with documentary form, made up of recollections of former Legionnaires and an interesting, although concise history of the French Foreign Legion. The camera doesn’t just follow these talking heads and the group of volunteers during this training hell, but also loses itself in atmospheric desert panoramas. And the group is well-chosen and fits together, with the nice guy Bear “survive anywhere, eat anything" Grylls. The only negative side is the leap. The first two episodes cover the first three days in detail and then, all of a sudden, without warning or continuity it jumps two weeks, with the last two episodes being about the end of training. It would have been better if it had been two episodes longer and covered the whole period evenly.

The most catastrophic commercial for Coca-Cola. McCarthy’s The Road stands on atmosphere, and so it was extremely important that no one scene should stick out, like in the book, so that a month later you have no memory of anything specific that happened, only of the atmosphere of cruel despair, ruin; a world where trusting your nearest and dearest is a synonym for criminal naivety. A memory of the atmosphere that gets under your skin, an atmosphere that will stay with you long after you leave the movie theatre. All it takes is somebody coughing on the bus, the sight of a discarded beer can and there you are again - up to your ears in depression. I don’t want to pretend that this is flawless. It isn’t. I could find quite a lot of things to criticize here, but everything fades in the shade of THAT atmosphere and the very end, where you find out straight away who has what perspective of the world (you know: is the glass half-full or half empty?). That dulls the edges of any of its negative aspects. Mainly that it’s fragmentary and everything else that the book suffers from. Yes, you heard me right, although I really like The Road, I don’t rate it among McCarthy’s top works. It isn’t even his most atmospheric works. P.S.: But this is one of those pointless adaptations. It’s an illustration, one to one scale, nothing more. I really had expected the director to cut deeper and defy the “canon" of the book, while still remaining faithful to it. Here, everything is down to the book, and nothing comes “out of Hillcoat". That’s why I give it four.

No idyll with romantically whistling train, merrily chuffing though the glorious French landscape, but a reality of deafening iron monsters spouting steam and oil at the end of occupation. Basically the very best and most suspenseful way of paying respect to the memory of the French railroad Resistance. Apart from one detail. The character played by Paul Scofield. Such a crudely negative character stands out like a blot on the landscape in this movie. You would expect him to torture his prisoners and laugh crazy Huron laughter while doing so. But in fact, all the characters are really “gray", and only he is clearly black-and-white, although the motivation side is convincing. He would have fitted in well in a naively delivered movie, but here he just spoils the aura of convincingness.

As an audio-visually powerful, toned-down, existential drama about seeking forgiveness and God in a God-forsaken place, this movie is excellent, but half way through it’s like out of nowhere Fincher remembers (or more likely the producers forced him to remember) that he is filming the new Alien and not a sci-fi adaptation of something by Dostoyevsky. So, all of a sudden he forgets about everything that came before and then launches into an absolutely regular, uninventive kill-fest that loses all of the atmosphere built up in the first half. And this goes for both the regular version and the director’s cut, which is the better of the two, but just a better version of the same and not “something completely different" as many reviewers suggest.

Far from being the most kosher Coen movie, but, despite all of that “viewer-unfriendliness", it’s a good movie, although it isn’t even a bit funny. Even though it is clear not just from the ending that this movie was nothing other than one big joke from this brotherly duo. And, you have to give to them, it came off brilliantly (even though I started to have my suspicions after the Goy’s teeth episode).

The same old story. Reitman makes one movie after another, but he just can’t achieve the quality of his shorts. And here it is even worse because the entire time I couldn’t shake off the feeling that this is an Americanized variation (and I don’t mean that pejoratively, just it’s been adapted to the American way of life, the mood in society etc.) on last year’s Japanese Oscar winner. Unfortunately I get the feeling from this that it isn’t nearly as sincere as intentional, criminally dry and almost too “serious".

In part one, Arnie promised that he’d be back. And he kept his word like a real gentleman. But the stumbling block here is the sticky epilog which I have never come to terms with (and have no plans of doing so in the future) and this also applies to the special effects which are unusually frequent for Cameron. P.S.: This is one of the few movies that HD is detrimental to. The picture is so crystal clear that in most stunt scenes you can easily recognize Arnold’s stand-in, who really doesn’t look much like him.

A perfect cast, but it doesn’t help much. Strong spends too much time in the background, Law can’t keep up with Downey in any of their scenes (while in this movie they are meant to be on level pegging!), Rachel McAdams is uninspiring, the movie lacks any real case, deduction is not employed, but abused like deus ex machina and so Hans Zimmer steals all the attention. And it’s not that Richie is bored; he is having fun, and it works well in some places, but he fell a long way short of managing to reproduce the type of goofy shenanigans like we saw in Pirates of the Caribbean. But it’s clear that’s what he was aiming for. If you want to make an untraditional Holmes movie, you need either a good idea or you need a good Sherlock to base one’s performance on, which Downey does in any case. ♫ OST score: 4/5

In the first half, this movie is almost distasteful, thanks to the “I suppose I’d better be try and be funny" trainer. Then the second half has more tears and pathos than anything else of the kind. Plus the forcibly inserted clash with the US team... It’s almost a shame to waste words on this shower. So why the high score in the end? Well, I have a soft spot for ski jumping and I must admit that they are presented so wonderfully and spectacularly here that this is crying out to be projected in an IMAX theater.

If there’s nothing happening, not even a death can change things (screenplay) and less often means more (special effects). The images we see are often beautiful, but also absolutely empty of emotion. It would never have occurred to me that Peter Jackson would end up suffering from the syndrome that accompanies the works of Tarsem Singh. But in the first half-hour it has everything it needs, including emotions, which are so important for movies like this. But this just makes the rest of the movie that much more painful, because this outstanding “prolog" just proves that the movie could have been different. For instance, more in terms of hints instead of spectacular CGI landscapes.