Marigold

In some ways, Lincoln uncomfortably reminded me of last year's sensational The Help. Probably due to the film’s ostentatious clinging to the fact that black and white, truth and falsehood have no shades. Spielberg made a film that reminded me of Eliad's concept of an absolute epic time. It is not a historical drama. It's a myth. A myth in which politicians disintegrate into enlightened progressivists, hysterical obscurantists and spineless "hesitators". A myth in which we do not ask what motivates the main character to such a determined attitude, what drives him forward, because the main character himself is the absolute truth (although it suggests a certain internal ruggedness in the film, the film never lets it prevail and disrupt the state aura). Lincoln could not have wished for a better form than Daniel Day Lewis imprinted on him - slow, deliberate, genial, infinitely kind, yet convinced and convincing to the bone. Spielberg treats the character with striking iconicity - the way he places him in the shots, the way he uses the meaning-creating light, only confirms to us that Lincoln the mortal is not in front of us, but rather Lincoln the icon. When the president dies, Steven draws a baroque shot in which life is darkness and death is light ("He has gone to Eternity"). The Hagiography of the Saint, including the structure of the narrative - an exposition revealing the world in imbalance / enlightenment through dream / rectification / martyrdom (something that has worked well since the Middle Ages, through messianism, to this day). I'm not making fun of it, I’m not questioning it. I've seen other deified lumens with a far greater degree of dilettantism, and it does not bother me in Lincoln. But it also doesn't affect me in any way. This is a film-ritual for believers, whether "Lincoln" or "Spielberg" lovers, who will compete in praising how narratively and formally brilliant it is (and it indeed is). I do not deny the film the visual captivation of classical art, nor the narrative prowess with which Spielberg brings humor to the leather framework of parliamentary debates and skillfully alternates spatial-temporal plans. But the film is cold, simplistic in some respects, avoiding real problems... I have to smile a little: when Lincoln bribes the Democrats to help him out, we can agree that he's doing the right thing (because he represents the truth, "it's a long time ago", and moreover it's filmed as a comedy). But when the protagonist of The Ides of March does the same thing, it's disgusting pragmatism, dirt, disgusting politics, and American critics are writing about a film that today's America doesn't need. Today's America certainly needs Lincoln and a solid granite myth. As a spectator, I don't need to see anything like this, even if it has a more self-virtuoso form. It is, in my view, self-affirming ideological boredom that defends any doubts by eradicating them with the schemes seen a hundred times, to which the elite actors' faces and the proven structure of the narrative give the impression of uniqueness. But such a film is not able to offer me anything important for life, just a yawning abyss of distance from the perfectly coherent and closed world of myth. With all due respect, Mr. Spielberg.

Black dynamite. A provocative kick in the balls, which Tarantino inflicts with xenophobia and racism in the field of the "white man" genre, such as the western (but at the same time, in a way, he does not spare the "niggaz"). If I am to blame Django Unchained for anything, it would be that, in addition to the fact that some parts really look like they were edited by a high negro using autogen, then perhaps just its very digital look. I know that Tarantino simply wanted to give the western locations a modern patina, and I know he didn't want to unnecessarily tie himself down with spaghetti western conventions, but in some places Django Unchained looks stylistically quite weak (rather, it lacks style - I think it is important to see Django Unchained in the movie theatre mainly so that one can enjoy the choruses of laughter). But I would end the criticism there. Perfect punch lines (they don't hit you - they tear your balls out and stuff them down your throat), great acting attached to great characters, absurd black humor, irresistible volatility between sublime epics, blaxploitation and grind-house blood, dramatic timing that Tarantino won me over with despite my years of resistance in Inglourious Basterds. What I enjoy most about his new films is how he turns his light, bloody and disrespectful hand against great history and "sociocultural" concepts. This black version of the Nibelungs, where the white pride of the KKK can't see through the bags on the road and a German drinking beer is fighting against the colonels in white... well, it just grabbed me by the balls.

1st series: For lovers of "over-twisted" and socially conscious Nordic detective stories, this is something like a luxury chocolate shop. Although the series follows the model of an American thriller on thematic crime, it of course translates it into the Nordic value system and perceives it in the context of social phenomena - the mysterious criminal acts like Nolan's Joker for some time, i.e., a director of phenomena that reveal the fondness of a peaceful society for excess. Some of his "trials" are brilliant, and their borderline moral-ethical nature goes beyond ordinary political correctness. The fact that The Bridge is moving towards a "more conciliatory" motivation of the perpetrator is something like an expected tax, which does not spoil the pleasure of the chaos that "TT" is committing. What's more, the tax accounts for dizzying profits - a beautifully asymmetrical central duo with the jovial Kim Bodnia and the alien Sofia Helin (her Saga finally shed light on what is so sexy about Cumberbatch's Sherlock for some women), metrosexual light design and framing of shots that is chillingly beautiful and protects The Bridge from decaying into sentiment and genre clichés. Pure pleasure from the visual that is thought out to the last irrelevant shot (even the filler scene in which the detective gets out of the car and goes home is lit so that one sees how someone thought of it as an integral part of the whole), cold and withdrawn atmosphere, an interesting probe into the Scandinavian conscience and, despite its predictability, also a strongly emotional finale... If you even remotely like names such as Mankell, Nesbo or Larsson and sometimes tear-up at the BBC version of Wallander, then this has to be perfect for you. 2nd series: There are a few more awkward transitions and strange discrepancies, again repeating some of the purposeful work with side storylines (the characters and their destinies appear only as purposeful "complications" of the plot), but on the other hand, the creators learned this time and constantly maintain the tension and "global" perspective of the case. If the first series fell off a bit around the 7th episode, the tempo is constant here and the gradation paradoxically comes by moving to the intimate level of the characters. The ending is one of the best in the genre, there is a monstrous cliffhanger of the main plot, but the greatest strength brought to the narration is the repetition of the motif of revenge from the end of the first series. Jens, as the "legacy" of the first series, works great all the time, and while the dialogues and social "faux pas" of Saga and Martin no longer have the same intensity, the emaciated specter of "truth terrorists" pushes their relationship further to the bitter finale. I'm really looking forward to the next series, because the creators have shown the ability to maintain quality, not change the concept and at the same time move it forward. In addition, unlike Sherlock, Saga is not subject to the position of "antisocial superstar" and the more she opens up, the more human, imperfect and the less cool she is. In fact, she is quite annoying with her obsessiveness and in some respects she begins to evoke her colleague Lund.

A documentary as a tool for articulating civil despair and disillusionment? Why not. Unfortunately, a similar thing can be done with much greater elegance and formal bravura than that offered by the author's ugly voice and microphone sticking into the camera. The film gives the impression of a high school exercise, the result of which is not so much authenticity as sometimes being annoyingly unkempt. Even so, I rate The Grasp of the State quite high. The fact that many people blame the author for stupidity, one-sidedness, etc., cannot be taken completely seriously. Piussi examines self-promo, performance, the campaign, or the effort of the "power" to communicate with citizens, and vice versa - citizens trying to communicate in an organized manner with "state power". She does a very good job of it also because she does not take committed positions and depicts supposed "non-power" individuals intoxicated by power (the passages from anti-gorilla meetings are extremely stimulating for analyzing the impossibility of an authentic egalitarian movement). The resulting impression is not a cheaply directed "Moore" indignation, but rather a farce from which the crisis of communication and the emptiness of words and deeds that engulfed the local parliamentary democracy really stick out. It is a mistake to ask a documentary filmmaker for objectivity and in-depth analysis - rather, it shows how much we want someone to think and formulate for us. Piussi filmed ugly material that offers plenty of food for thought. If, in turn, it ends only with angry condemnations of "limited subjective documentary filmmaker", or enthusiastic proclamations of the "event of the year", it only indicates that the author's despair is justified at its core.

Frk and Bohdalka got to me - similar morbidity is noticeably missing here. Fear is alternated by a television routine with shots that sympathetically seek the big screen. Sometimes it's a pleasant spectacle with poetics. Trojan succeeded in the Uncle Pepin and Jack Sparrow mix, an ethereal loving couple with a traditional head shaker. Oh, the Czech Hanas. The role of Štěstěny monotonously outside of good and evil (and the whole film). Otherwise, after a while, it’s a painless TV show, where everything is just right and it can be watched without the assistance of a psychiatrist and pathologist.

Cruise as the adopted son of Steven Seagal and James Bond? No, more of a tired guy next door who had seen and experienced too much, and coincidentally, most of it consisted of ingenious deductions and fights with green brains. McQuarrie likes traditional genres, in The Way of the Gun he borrowed from a western, while here he worships an old-fashioned slow thriller with slowly dosed information and anachronically slow tracking-shots and disturbing hints. It's not bad at all, at least if one accepts this vague relationship between camp and deadly seriousness. I really enjoyed the exposition (which everyone curses), but I found myself fading a lot during the scenes where Cruise a) moralizes (does he really feel that someone is going to believe the anti-system rebel?), b) interrupts the speeches of other characters almost like a mythical superhero, although there is no reason to do anything like that. As a detective story, it works (there are not that many of them, so you will appreciate it if some deductive twist is successful), as a thriller it has a beard-mustache-leather charm, as camp there are plenty of attractions (Herzog and Duvall are perfect, the bathroom battle potentially iconic). As the thriller start of the "Reacher" series? Well, I didn't understand at all what McQuarrie wanted to pull out against the competition, apart from the confused rambling between humor and seriousness, successful self-defeating jokes and a world where they pretend to have ultra-realism, and for a while the string that the original A-Team strummed. If he avoided the heroic bombast and kept his feet on the ground, it could have been a dignified, prudent crime film. But that wouldn't be enough for Jack Reacher, would it? Four stars for having had a lot of fun for most of the two hours, sometimes perhaps against the dignified intentions of the creators and little Tom's persistent efforts to be as hard as granite in his fifties and as seductive as Cupid. P.S. Someone should explain to Chris that blondes with big eyes are nice, but their unreasonable staring into the camera doesn't seem witty at all.

And what the fuck was that? McQuarrie has a special talent for shooting scenes in which the mischievous nickel-and-dime license cannot be distinguished from the deadly narrative seriousness. Largely because Joe Kraemer writes pathetic musical undertones for bizarre-looking scenes. So when an old pregnant lady limps through the hospital to the sound of gunfire, it's a funny scene, but the film wants to seem like it's being over-dramatic. It's not. For about half of the runtime, I wondered what The Way of the Gun was supposed to be about. Is it supposed to be a cool gangster film (it has escalations but no perspective)? Is it supposed to be a drama (then where are the convincing characters and motivations)? The result is extreme confusion, where lousy scenes (the heroine stares at the camera for a good minute for no apparent reason, the desperately dragged death knell of one of the characters in the car) alternate with good scenes. When The Way of the Gun seems to be content with being an extraordinarily transparent gangster film (is there a spectator at all who doesn't understand the relationships long minutes before they are revealed?), they pull out a kind of moral saber for guilt and forgiveness. The Babylonian confusion of words and motivations, however, sometimes has something like magnetism in places, which keeps your attention at least because the characters die both during the plague epidemic, and the final western shoot-out reveals that the director likes old genre classics. Del Toro and Kaan are also very good. Which is something that can't be said about the entire film...

To wake up and be sodomized by a rickety Bruce Springsteen, who will then write a beautiful hit about you? Some users would benefit from it, first in the ear and then in the eye. The disgusting, suffocating, schizoid debut of a man who can easily have as bright of a future as PTA, which I thought about a few times while watching this female existential horror. What Durkin does with the pre-camera space (we pseudo-intellectual nobodies call this mise-en-scène - a scene for misanthropes) I consider an unprecedented shot below the belt with the aim of dumping the viewer in the underexposed mud of agony, uncertainty and schizophrenia. I give it five stars because I like it when the movie ends and I feel like taking a brain shower. Because the world is just like that. More when I die. One of the movies of the year.

"Set time" in Middle-earth - I can't think about this film in any other way. A prequel for something that doesn't need a prequel, a film that has a hard time finding its pace, a film that can't shake off the specter of the overly strenuous imitation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a film whose characters, despite almost three hours, act like Bilbo, Gandalf, Thorin and a chubby bunch of blabbering beards (moreover, I'm not quite sure if the step of giving Thorin the position of Aragorn was successful). Since The Return of the King, Jackson seems to me to be lost in a pastel-filled imagination - after the third sunset / sunrise, I have no doubt that what was "beautiful and epic" in the original trilogy is more self-serving and kitschy here (this also applies to the depressing flights, which are supposed to confirm to us "that it's here again and it's as big as an orc double chin"). Still, I'm not overly disappointed. Partly because I didn't expect anything else. Particularly because Tolkien's book was not particularly hurt by the powerful thickening of the "additional" storylines, although the best moments for me are equally identical to those of the books (puzzles in the dark, the Song of Durin's People). In some cases it is a mirror reflection of The Fellowship of the Ring (for example composition: the historical "battle" introduction // the exposition in Middle Earth // the diplomatic interlude in Rivendell // the action mess in the depths, but there are more such connections), while in some case it is its opposite (while The Fellowship of the Ring cut and dynamized, the Hobbit rather stretches and retards with retrospectives and explanations). I can't shake the impression that the original trilogy looked "more cinematic" thanks to a smaller share of digital accessories, and thanks to that it also functioned as "good epic theater". The Hobbit did not give me this feeling even during the eloquent speeches in Rivendell. No, I'm definitely not annoyed, but if I was anxiously waiting to see if the division of the film into three parts made much sense, I have no greater reason to say YES after today. The rating applies to the 3D version with dubbing and hovers a "bit" over three stars. But just a little bit. Edit: not even the original version convinced me. For me, the film between the poetic introduction and the action finale contains an awful lot of dramatically staged rubbish, which did not draw me into its depths for even a moment like any (cut out) scene in The Fellowship of the Ring. It is wide, so I'm wondering if all those dialogic retardations and hinted storylines will be beneficial later.

A small film that allowed Peter to develop his filmmaking skills and extraordinary flexibility of moods and different accents like no other endeavor afterwards... in a sense, it is to me the pinnacle of the New Zealand Hobbit. The wonderful transition from the pink girl's diary to the bloody edition of adolescent psychopathology is magnificent, as are the eccentric but perfectly smooth jumps between worlds. And Kate is an enchanting psychotic single poem.