Malarkey

I was originally going to give this film a four-star review, but when I read the reviews below I realized that three would be just about enough. The movie had such a satisfying premise that it could have incited very different emotions from those it did… and that the entire thing was rescued by the camera taking shots of the extremely beautiful countryside? That sure as hell isn’t enough. The Russian movie The Return is a whole level better.

The film focuses on the central couple, who at the same time work as a sort of romantic center-point and who are trying to have their relationship / non-relationship somewhere in the Ukrainian Donbas region. What’s definitely worth noting is the setting in which the movie takes place. It’s also no less interesting to watch the characters in the film. I believe that they will likely be based on some real models. But the lives of the people suffering in the frozen setting of a war are as cold as the countryside itself. For the entire almost two hours, I felt as cold as a witch’s teat. The only moment that broke me was the ending. It proved that it was worth the two-hour wait.

One of those dystopian sci-fi flicks with many aspects that deserve criticism. But thanks to the premise and to how well it is made, you will quickly forgive all its shortcomings and you will enjoy the overcrowded world that a female dictator is trying to regulate. Noomi Rapace’s acting performance is out of this world. Probably similar to James McAvoy’s work in Split last year. I would never have thought that a single actress could create a different set of emotions for each of the seven characters that she plays in this film. It’s pretty clear she is in charge of this sci-fi movie. And since she is a pleasure to behold, it is a pleasure to watch the entire movie as well.

This film’s problem is that – whether I like it or not – I have to compare it to The Big Bang Theory. And that’s slightly better and, what’s more important, funnier. But I am quite fond of Icelandic cinematography in general and I am even fonder of the then Miss Iceland – Hildur. But the problem is that the very slow start of the film is then replaced with a series of funny scenes, which in an original manner, but one that doesn’t really fit into the movie much, are supplemented with scenes from the RPG world. Dorks & Damsels is definitely an original and interesting film. Some parts of it are funny, but it doesn’t keep that fun up for the entire length of the film. You can clearly see that not only the characters in the sketch were nerds, but that the authors of the film are nerds themselves. Still, as a small-scale flick for similar nerd enthusiasts, Dorks & Damsels is pretty alright and it definitely deserves its place in the sun.

There’s nothing special about this film. Maybe the cast is pretty cool. But what good is that if for instance Jan Budař is behaving as if he’d just had a lobotomy? I mean it can be fun in some films, but once it starts seeming as if he was doing a parody of himself, you know something isn’t right. And that’s what the movie is actually about. The coolest (meaning positive aspect of the film) were the two naughty little girls who were screaming whenever they could… and the screamed a lot. You gotta hand it to them. All in all, not great, more like worse average.

In this film, Whoopi plays a character that is as annoying as the draft coming from under your door and on top of that, she hates Christmas. And even though the actual Santa Claus, portrayed by an actor who is very well known for his role of the permanent secretary at a ministry, Sir Humprey Appleby in Yes, Minister!,manages to change her mind about Christmas, it still doesn’t save the overall impression of the movie. At least the Yanks put his residence to Norway. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Since pre-Christmas clean-up was underway at our house, I simply turned on the TV and the only film that I didn’t know was this piece of shit. A movie as stupid as a clogged toilet. I don’t get that Casper Van Dien was in Starship Troopers. But then again… his face fit pretty well in that B-list movie.

Smugglers of Death is a perfect example of a precisely made movie that at the same time perfectly captures what things looked like in the Šumava Mountains back then. And that’s both in the good perspective of how people lived at that time, and from the bad angle that shows us what kind of propaganda people were being fed at that time. They simply wanted to show everybody how bad and rotten the West was. An incredibly schizophrenic movie.

I have to mention that in the past few years, the Germans have done some solid work in the field of comedies. But what I have a problem with is that a good premise and at times really good humor are combined with some out-of-place and absolutely pointless scenes. For instance, in this film, I got to see one absolutely pointless sex scene, and towards the end of the movie, there is bit of a pointless drug craze which – if I was the author – I would have left out altogether. To my liking, the ending of the movie is a bit too much happy-go-lucky, same as the entire movie for that matter and it paints the Germans in different colors that they actually are. All in all, I am OK with that. If I turn a blind eye to all of this, My Blind Date with Life was a very pleasant comedy that was missing only a very few pieces for me to grow to really like it.

Canadians have always been a bit crazy for sci-fi. Sometimes even for very stupid sci-fi.