POMO

The musical is the only film genre that I can’t stand (with the exception of Moulin Rouge! until today), so my review is rather biased. I always suffer through the singing parts, as they are the necessary evil between dialogue scenes. In this film, however, the singing constitutes about 99% of the overall 160-minute running time and it’s not always done by actors who can sing (Russell Crowe). This was a very painful experience that I survived thanks only to the perfect set designs and camerawork, which makes the film more three-dimensional than most 3D movies.

The Golden Door is a slow-moving film about Italian emigrants on their way to America: the decision to leave their homeland and their departure from Sicily, the journey, admission procedures on New York’s Ellis Island (only indoor, without a look at New York, due to budgetary reasons, I suspect). It is a film made up of scenes that would have been left out of another movie in order to get to the point faster. Here, however, the journey is the point. The film’s goal is not to impress, but only to show what is usually neglected, in a distinctive way without milking the audience’s emotions, but sometimes with a subtle humor. I’m giving the fourth star for originality and visual aesthetics.

Whereas LOTR was filmed out of love and with little money, The Hobbit was filmed for money. The first viewing made me happy because of the return to Middle-earth, enveloped in Howard Shore’s music. But after the second viewing, I dropped my rating to three stars. It is unforgivable that the scenes with Gollum, who was a highlight of the phenomenal trilogy a decade ago, are so protracted that they cannot keep my attention with every word. In fact, the entire first Hobbit is incredibly protracted. While in LOTR you felt that it could’ve been longer, which it was with the extended editions, the first Hobbit looks as if it’s stuffed with cotton wool. If it portrayed some more intense relationships between the characters, such as Frodo’s friendship with Sam, it would’ve been more engaging. But there aren’t any such relationships. And the key problem compared to LOTR is the most expected: Peter Jackson cannot rely here on the ultimate evil and the menacing darkness, whose portrayal has always been his most powerful directorial asset. He does not have Sauron, Saruman, Mordor or the Uruk-hai, whom the main heroes have no chance against. LOTR’s strongest motif was the courage of the small, peaceful hobbits to confront the invincible, colossally powerful enemy. The Hobbit doesn’t have that. The main bad guy with his bunch of orcs is the most exciting feature of the film, but he’s not playing a bigger role in the story than, say, any of the bad guys from Narnia, The Golden Compass or similar superficial digital affairs. Martin Freeman is excellent, however, and the most beautiful scene of the film for me is the flight of the eagle.

Frankenweenie is visually fantastic. The visages of the figures perfectly reflect their nature. But, as has been the case with Tim Burton lately, the film doesn’t have heart. Although the film deals with subject matter from the director’s childhood and early days as a filmmaker, it does not reach the quality of Ed Wood or the charm of Edward Scissorhands.

Killing Me Softly starts out as s a provocatively engaging erotic adventure. When it later tries to look like a serious thriller, however, it’s just ridiculous.

Haywire wants to be a stylish thriller with a cool heroine, physical action and a clever plot. Instead, it’s just stylish inanity that takes itself too seriously, is too unnecessarily complicated to be a proper chill-out movie and the main character is a violent cold-blooded lesbian about whose fate you don’t really care. A strange pulp hybrid.

Taking such care of the woman I’ve spent my life with is a matter of course. And such an attitude towards her departure from the world is not shocking. So why make an academically cold movie about it, deliberately avoiding emotions or deepening the story with flashbacks or supporting characters? If it weren’t for the visual minimalism, I wouldn't know this was from Michael Haneke. This time, however, his minimalism is an end in itself, not part of a clever creative intent. Amour is dull, empty pseudo-art.

A few successfully rendered psychologically tense scenes and an impressive post-apocalyptic voyage in the last third, versus idiotic behavior of the characters that destroyed all the potential of the interesting subject matter. The film so much doesn’t want to make a “Hollywood heroine” out of the main character that it makes an idiot out of the viewer instead. I am talking of the events in the quarantine that didn’t have to happen at all under the circumstances. Even the concept of quarantine at the beginning of the epidemic was unrealistic and hard to believe. The government isolating a group of people who have lost their sight for unexplained reasons in such a brutal manner as if they were dangerous zombies and firing at them with machine guns when they step slightly out of a crowd while walking across the corridor surrounded by five-meter-tall concrete walls? And the bizarre, in places absolutely inappropriate soundtrack (dementedly comical music in scenes that are supposed to be chilling) certainly does not help. I’m more of an emotional viewer rather than a nitpicker obsessed with logical inconsistencies, but this was too much.

Unlike Woody Allen’s best films, Manhattan won’t make you laugh or engage you in a relationship drama. It will, however, warm the cockles of your heart with its relaxed, natural flow, black-and-white aesthetics and fantastic atmosphere of the time and place. And the final dialogue serves as an intelligent conclusion. A jazz-like film.

The ace up William Friedkin’s sleeve is not the plot but the eccentricity of its characters and what it can lead to. That is, what they’re capable of and how they deal with situations gone wrong in their redneck shortsightedness. An excellent “chicken blowjob” scene. I didn’t hope for anything like this from Matthew McConaughey in the age of A Time to Kill and Amistad. This actor is rising to the stars! And it’s not just him, the entire cast is excellent here. A brutal movie with big balls and a not exactly sound mind.