POMO

What made Sean Penn switch from Oscar-worthy performances and directing Into the Wild to the character of an action hero in a coproduction with Joel Silver? A job another former character actor, Liam Neeson, didn’t dream of and now has three of them lined up every year? Gunman doesn’t want to be modernly stylish; it wants to be dirty and dark, with an ambiguously clean protagonist. I personally like this take and have no problem with Penn’s character. On the contrary, it’s the only thing that makes the movie interesting and different from its genre siblings, as it doesn’t excel in any other respect. The script seems to have been written twenty years ago, at the times of Harrison Ford’s Jack Ryan (to which it would have been a “dark alternative”). And mainly it dawdles with a romantic storyline no one really cares about.

Out of Nature twenty years later. This movie looks cheap, but is an example of functionally composed digital visuals of a home-made video: a man in his fifties wanders through French countryside and in the voice-over sincerely and openly thinks about himself and the emptiness and meaning of his life, considers suicide, etc. And surprisingly it’s neither annoying nor boring, thanks to the looks and minimalistic facial expressions of the protagonist and even more so to the wonderful and in places even poetic monologue that aptly summarizes familiar existential feelings and thoughts while additionally exhausting the poetry of the French language.

This would have been a failure even as a Czech project with local actress Aňa Geislerová. Now imagine it with a stellar cast, proudly introduced at a festival opening by its director, who says that he made it “mainly for the audience” (by which he wanted to say “not for the critics”?). Were it not for the actresses’ voluptuous curves, I’d die in an infinite ocean of BOREDOM. Not even the visuals are interesting, despite the film supposedly taking place in the gardens of Versailles and its surroundings. Remember the beautifully shot misty gardens in The King’s Speech? If only just the scenography had been on a higher level, the film could have been saved. As it stands, it’s a nightmare that will haunt the filmography of Kate Winslet, who probably only agreed to take part in this to help out a friend.

Such focused, unhurried thrillers where the psychological analysis of the main character is as important as the crime plot are no longer made by the American movie industry these (fast) days. Which is a pity. If I’m not wrong, there is not a single firearm in The Conversation. The role of an introverted freak seems to be written specifically for Gene Hackman, and Robert Duvall’s brief appearance is also great. The appropriateness and necessity of the final scene in the context of the preceding plot could be debated, but it doesn’t spoil the wonderful overall impression. Coppola was a true master of filmmaking back then.

Focus has one great advantage: it is entertaining and unpredictable in its heist plot twists. And it’s also visually beautiful. The costumes, set designs and everything else are glamorously polished to the finest detail. Will Smith and Margot Robbie are cool, the point of the American football scene is top notch. Only the climax loses credibility in its effort to conjure up the biggest and most surprising twist yet. Less would have been more. Despite that, I’m giving this film four stars because it was a pleasant surprise, a rare sight among Hollywood mainstream flicks with lower ambitions.

Chappie is a dramaturgically failed hybrid of Mad Max, Robocop and Short Circuit, with the worst casting disaster in many years (Hugh Jackman). All of the characters are totally unbelievable, regardless of who plays them. And that includes the motivation and actions of the robot Chappie. Neill Blomkamp had an top-tier budget, technology and actors, but his directing skills here are at the level of the guys from The Asylum.

You know how it goes when you attend a gala premiere in the middle of the week… your thoughts stay at work, so when watching a movie like Dodgeball, which is definitely not the most engaging film ever made (and in the first thirty minutes or so, you keep telling yourself “God, what did I get myself into again?”), you pay attention to barely every second scene. Naturally, I mean the scenes with the blond bombshells, both the young and more mature one. And as time goes by and you try and fail to understand who’s who with all the adult/teenage characters (the selection of the male cast is really strange), the music and the individual warmly human scenes make you grow strangely fond of the movie, in a guiltypleasure kind of way. Your intellect tries to stop you, but eventually you’ll succumb. And it ends up being a pleasant, undemanding movie for an evening in front of the TV. It feels like a little kitten you want to pet. Dumb but very cute.

A slapstick comedy composed of a series of humorous episodes with good music, the likeable Beatles, British humor and one really funny old man. Black-and-white and yet so alive!

I found the Emilio Estevez’s recent, similarly conceived The Way, in which a father embarks on a journey to find his dead son, more to my liking. It had more interesting interactions between the characters whom the protagonist encountered on his journey. Wild contains a few cool scenes, has a pleasant outdoor atmosphere and Reese Witherspoon holds the movie together. But the flashbacks depicting her relationships with the people from her past do not drive the film forward as much as they should. In comparison, Aron Ralston’s life in flashbacks in 127 Hours was much more powerful and, together with the situation the protagonist had to get out of, managed to completely captivate me. However, Wild still remains a good film worthy of three and a half stars.

The Snake Brothers is excellently performed and realistic in terms of the characters’ psychology. But I have a problem with the central motif of friendship, damaged by a single event, and with the last scene of the film, which defines its message. I can’t explain this problem without a SPOILER: since the film is based on one big idea about friendship… he shouldn’t have been mad at him for ending up alone “there”, and he shouldn’t even have mentioned him as a participant in the event.