J*A*S*M

After the mixed reviews (very well received by American critics and IMBD users, but considerably worse on Filmbooster; the action trailers are apparently misleading), I forgot my expectations of a tense action survival movie and went to the cinema with an open mind, ready for anything and willing to let Carnahan to please me as he saw fit. Unfortunately, mate, you didn’t make me very happy. Technically speaking, The Grey is gorgeous, but the script grinds and can’t decide what the prevailing theme will be: horror atmosphere, brutal attacks by wolves, blokeish adventure survival, a study of relationships between castaways, a philosophical analysis of the desire to fight and live… In the end it’s about everything and nothing. As a parable, it does work somehow, but otherwise, I have mixed feelings about it. In order to overcome all those little things that bothered me, that “effective” parable would have to be much sharper. Disappointment and 6/10. PS: This film has grown on me after some time, I might give it another chance.

Martin and Jakub went to Toronto. They did some sightseeing. They made photos. They made videos. They blogged (by the way, I recommend it, it’s a fun read). Then they came back home and, instead of the classic home video of their holidays that every summer aunt Vilma and uncle Rudolf make you suffer with, they used the footage to make a documentary that has the potential to entertain even people who have never met the authors in person. There is the Toronto Tower, the Tomáš Baťa museum, Masaryktown, the Niagara Falls and the world’s biggest underground shopping mall. And lots of quotes, so there you have it… :) Available on YouTube.

Christ on a cross! This is some very lightweight horror for very undemanding viewers… It’s pretty decently made, but everything is so derivative that, already a few minutes after watching, I hardly remember anything. And no, there isn’t any German hiding things at my place. But on top of it, it pissed me off passively, rather than actively.

Very good début. A war between two families set in the American backwaters, with slow pace, decent performances, summer atmosphere, nice shots of the landscape and the suspicion that the central petty conflict can end very badly. Vengeance isn’t always sweet, or even cool, more often than not, it will get you in deep shit. 7/10

I liked The Enemy overall. Gloomy atmosphere, greyish visuals, the setting of postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (I have a soft spot for it)… and an enigmatic guy walled up in the basement of an abandoned factory. A group of soldiers set him free – they shouldn’t have done it. I loved the first half. The demon that makes people mad at each other nicely reflects the hostility among the Yugoslav nations. The film was aiming at something like “horror with a message”, but in the second half everything that I liked sort of fades away and all I could do was wait until the end. Good, but it had more potential.

The trailer and the beginning of the film (the first twenty minutes or so) suggest that we will have the honour of watching your typical semi-amateur found-footage horror that will be boring for most of its run, will show the monster a couple of times in the last five minutes, and The End; i.e. something that anyone could make with sufficient determination. Fortunately, that’s not the case here. In the second half, Evidence makes an utterly crazy turn, it runs from one location to the next, the monsters jump from almost everywhere and the whole thing is very atmospheric, scary and shocking. Where, for instance, Atrocious (I was expecting something boring and uninteresting like this) ends, Evidence carries on for another half an hour or so, and at a very fast pace. There are many things I could reproach (the character behaviour, the not very believable performances, and the fact that the last half hour is basically a chaotic run through an incredible number of locations that you wouldn’t expect to find in the “wilderness”), but I’ll be honest, Evidence caught me really unprepared (how many genre surprises out of nowhere have we had in the last year? Not even one…) and, horror-wise, it fully satisfied me. A very pleasant surprise, indeed.

A simple horror story in the beautiful settings of an English seaside village. I didn’t mind the lack of originality and the simplicity of the plot (Hammer has never made intellectual and sophisticated films), what I did mind, though, is that in such beautiful setting, all the film can do to generate fear is to use cheap jump-scares that follow the template of “show anything” + “raise the volume”. Visually, I enjoyed it very much, both the haunted house and the village, but the fear hardly shows up at all. One look at the woman in black in the more than 20 year-old TV adaptation made me tremble in terror a lot more than all those jump-scares put together. Daniel Radcliffe delivers a decent performance. The climax was disappointing, just like a couple of very unconvincing scenes (the lady with the dogs, the bird in the boarding house). I’m giving it 7/10. I liked The Woman in Black, but unfortunately, with all the aforementioned reservations. I expected something great, but it doesn’t come close to that.

PEOPLE, Y U NO LEAVE?!

A standard underground slasher/exploitation flick. Not original at all, nicely made, with nothing really bad like characters behaving illogically, etc. The villain looks a little too glaringly psychopathic, almost like some sort of caricature of a horror villain at times. Urban exploring is a very interesting and attractive activity (and that’s why I looked forward so much to this film), so it’s a bit of a shame that the creators failed to use the settings of abandoned urban architecture to create a thick atmosphere, and instead, they stuck to pretty and attractive visuals to produce consumer horror that will not offend the viewers, but would rather appeal to ignorant teenagers. It works fine under the circumstances, but it’s not something to write an ode to. And a quibble to close: most of the film takes place in an inaccessible underground space, but when the torches are off there’s still light everywhere, as if things were taking place in a dim room with light coming from the surface. It’s silly, I know, but I did notice it and it bothered me a little.

After a long time, a film where Leonardo’s performance was pretty unconvincing. His J. Edgar Hoover is an unlikeable, arrogant, single-minded prick and closeted homosexual, but all those characteristics felt like a package with the real, lovely DiCaprio hiding inside it the whole time. In The Iron Lady, Meryl Streep really transforms into Margaret Thatcher, but Leo isn’t able to do that under Eastwood’s direction. Otherwise, it’s way too long, told in a not very interesting way (yeah, in the end, the old Hoover proves to be a not very reliable narrator, which illustrates his personality, but until then it’s just boring) and with emotions that never work out. For most of it, instead of paying attention to the film itself, I pondered the question of whether the older (with make up) versions of the protagonists looked like a bloated person who stuck their head in a beehive or more like a horrifying mutant product of crossing human and alien DNA. I was unable to find a straightforward answer.