Marigold

To bring cities back to the people, to make them a space of common existence again... even though the five chapters are a bit unbalanced (especially the Bangladesh chapter is a somewhat confused collection of cute chatter), the film does have a number of useful thoughts, examples and ideas. The fifth chapter is magnificent, and I can’t even remember the last time I was this moved by a documentary. The human dimension provides room for an optimistic dream of a better world, without necessarily talking about a political revolution and a perverted system. It simply promotes the perspective of the pedestrian. It also looks very aesthetically pleasing. This is not surprising coming from the Danes.

Like his hero, Tornatore is a bit of a museum exhibit, to whom the information age must seem like a deceitfully wounding enemy and film as an intimate room of certainty. Emotionally, the film stopped affecting me (intentionally) in the excessive second third, and whilst the twist is well thought out and well prepared, the conclusion is unnecessarily long and literal. Excellent actors (the duets of Rush - Sturgess / Rush - Sutherland are decorative), visually, it’s a great splendor (the reference to Sorrentino is not accidental - he and Tornatore still believe in the power of unnecessary gestures), and the musical background is perhaps too sentimental. A pleasant museum of nostalgia, folly and defensive detachment from reality. I liked the motifs of the thirteenth room, the automaton, and the truthful dwarf the most in this somewhat mechanical metaphor of uncertainty, creativity, and destructiveness of emotion.

I will set aside "what it is about" for a moment and instead focus on "how". Normalization is a documentary metaphysical detective story that lacks a solid argumentative / descriptive structure and tends to prefer flimsy monologues, dialogues dominated by the investigators' reluctance to motivate events, the defendants' emotions or poor witness memory. The documentary filmmaker himself admits to bias, sometimes arranging the situations too scornfully (when he brings their opponent amongst the godly pathologists, who chatter like they are out having coffee, who then takes them out of the autopsy room in a moment). The camera, the work with lyrical shots and the rather morbid sound design, which adds a touch of modern tragedy, are very solid. Great moments seemingly too unrelated to the testimony complete the raw impression - most notably a storm accompanying the "killers" to Hríb in a session or the dark deserted corridor of the court, where the creator comes to look for answers. And now to the testimony itself: Kirchhoff is on the side of the convicted. He does not hide it, and the other party refuses the word or answers incompetently and unconvincingly. I don't blame Normalization at all for its commitment, because it's fine. Moreover, it does not idealize its heroes in any way - their manner is natural (although sometimes pathetic). In fact, I have only one reservation, in addition to the purely technical reservations - when Normalization defends its version of the case, it should at least indicate the answer as to why the investigators at the time arranged such a breakneck conspiracy. If one does not like when the investigator at the time is unable to answer "what was the motive of the convicted persons", he should measure in the same way this extremely sympathetic and suggestive documentary with a really disturbing overlap. If you've ever wondered why we should cling to "beyond a reasonable doubt," Normalization presents a rather chilling answer. Even that which the other party brought out of the secret file as a counter-argument does not dispel the doubts. Perhaps the repression of the two regimes destroyed the lives of seven people. We can only speculate about the reasons.

Something between teenage fantasy, horror, a help line, a lively guide for young suicides and a moralist hip-hop track a la Majk Spirit. At the same time, the film is clearly activist and aims at a sensitive youth that is losing perspective in Spain and walking through ghost towns without a vision of hope. Somehow I feel that it will appeal to an unbiased observer who appreciates (unfulfilled) ambitions rather than teenagers, for whom it will be more like indigestible compulsory reading (but of course I understand their fart mentality, so...). Classic Spanish pathos, maneuvering on the edge of the genre and a few quite good moments. I have no reason to condemn it, although I wouldn't call it a good film, either.

This film is like Dogma with incredibly stupid descriptive monologues and one-liners like "we hid inside of each other". The only uncertainty in the film is when one of the characters goes from book recitations to wooden talk. Psychology? Ridiculous. Trier's final heist beyond the edge of everything. A fake game of an aestheticized tragedy, under which there is a black hole of persistent efforts to get inside the pathology of human relationships. It's not just that Jarchovsky's scenarios are excessive, unnatural and disintegrating (although they can theoretically reconstruct logical thematic units, contexts and intentions to shake the viewer), it's that Hřebejk chooses a senselessly pompous style instead of civility, which exacerbates the debility as a result. His films do not lack ambition and potentially a world look, but they do desperately lack the ability to get into characters in ways other than through visual and verbal explicitness. Sorry, but this fake offends me deeply. [30%]

A socialist blockbuster? Why not. It's too bad that at the core the only deviation from classic Hollywood is that everything is the other way around. Those who protect the status quo are disgusting, those who creep in the dirt and humiliation are nice and dedicated people. Damon does not excel from the periphery as Jesus, but no one also expected him to. The guy eaten by radiation and riddled with knife cuts feels forgettable, anti-heroic, and most of the time he does his own thing, even though at the end he understands what a meerkat hippo is for. The fairytale concludes nicely to my satisfaction. It is once again a pity that the difference between Bay and Blomkamp lies mainly in the fact that guys here act like they are from Brazilian social dramas, and some of the bad guys have an obvious political officer (Jodie Foster really forced Maggie in there). At its core, Elysium is actually quite dull, but (for me) sympathetically "do-gooder". The problem for me is where many see excellent directing. I see a magnificent art / sound design and a number of partial nice shots, but which have an unusual stylish scattering. With a bit of exaggeration, it's like a mix of the City of God, Elite Squad and what I'd call "Paul Greengrass imitates Paul W. S. Anderson". Some of the elements are inconsistently used (the video game shot "over the shoulder" including the accompanying blur effect) and, unlike District 9, the constant jumps between different styles are choppy. Kinetic games and section cuts sometimes result in clutter. It occurs to me that what Blomkamp had to do as efficiently and simply as possible in his first film, here was able to "fluff" it unnecessarily. Unfortunately, Elysium then loses its energy and its tightened atmosphere. Paradoxically, the closer to the end, the more fun it is, because I was able to absorb the inconsistency. Similarly to In Time: sympathetic but terribly unfinished. P.S. Copley is two levels higher in this film than everyone else... the sociopath of the century. [70%]

Spoiler. Without anger and bitterness. The start is solid - it honestly exploits the drive of the first film - but the entire film dies with Colonel Stars and Stripes (Jim Carrey). There is too much serious bullshit, the inconsistency of tone and the resulting self-purpose, and there are a few awkward serious scenes for a few punk scenes. The film has problems with things that the first film did with ease. About halfway through, the wheels totally fall off and the film only gets it’s groove back for a moment. Wadlow manages the details, but does not make the whole thing work. I will always love the first film for its audacity and civil pathos, but I have nothing to love or hate the second film for. He's not an evil badass mothafucka, he's just a forgettable hard-working transvestite. [50%]

A colossal waste of time and of an interesting idea. This smurf mainly needs to be purged, and maybe he would then manage to stuff at least one twist into the film that I wouldn't guess even with an ax parked on a footpath. The acting death match between Hawk and Wakefield ended in a beautiful draw, and I wanted to shove a billiard ball in both of their noses. Fifteen minutes at the beginning plus the final captions are pretty good. The rest sucks.

How do you combine irony, distance, fun and shock? Don't ask Michael, he doesn’t know. The problem of Pain and Gain can be summed up in one sentence: for this type of film to work, it needs to be smarter than its characters. And it's not. The director has no distance, the escalating dementia of everything and everyone excuses the genre of black comedy and the complete imbalance of tone of the popular alibi that reality is "stranger than fiction". But it is not in this form. Everything that is strange and unsettling about this story was melted by Bay in a sweaty muscular goulash, all the dynamics of which lie in the constant movement of the camera and grotesque performances that do not have a shred of integrity in them (just like the entire script). How does one make it so that all the pain brings some gain, other than superficial tabloid entertainment? This equation is beyond Bay's capabilities.

A protest that helps itself by downplaying the things it fights against and moving them to the level of easily attackable caricatures. It may, of course, feel revolutionary and radical, but in reality Folman's revolt against mechanization, schematization, and the subjugation of reality is even more mechanical and "generic" than most of the criticized phenomena. The Congress inevitably feels like a hopelessly leaky metaphor stuck somewhere in the dystopian visions of the 1990s, like a weeping confession of an extinct star, the bitter murmur of an independent filmmaker about something he didn't bother to understand, and above all a terribly aggressive testimony which, unlike Valčík and Bašír, the animation does not serve as a means of liberation and distance from trauma, but rather a tool of subjugation and enslavement of the viewer's perception (pure ideology, the entire visual, complete trivialization, synchronization of the pictorial information, as we intellectuals with a clip-on beard like to say). I have not seen a more ill-conceived film for a long time, one that is able to anger me so much with its simple bile. Basically, I see two positives: Max Richter's excellent soundtrack will definitely serve as a good background for the trailers, and the first thing that came to my mind after The Congress was: I want to see Michael Bay's new movie. His simple stupidity will purify me more than this bony and sinewy parable, whose "intellectualism" is as ostentatiously engineered as a caricature of Tom Cruise. P.S. Maybe Folman should think about the fact that his vision was processed by a damn visual psychotropic factory several times infinitely more intelligently and sophisticatedly. But I know that this doesn't fit into his indignant reality.