Isherwood

A Balkan field trip, a road movie in a bus, an occupation behind the door, and the perfect characters on board. A great antagonism to de Bont's Speed. ;-)

This is desperately monotonous and unbelievably drawn-out story about people wandering in the desert. I forgive it for the lack of a stronger plot, but on the other hand I reject the dysfunctional characters, gibberish dialogue, and moments that lack a single bit of common sense. The actors suffered through the filming and, unfortunately, so did I when watching it.

An even bigger mistake than expecting Gangster Squad to be the new L.A. Confidential is to watch L.A. Confidential two days beforehand. I don't mind the lemonade game of gangsters, which mainly treads on a 'sunny' note because the actors fit the period suits exactly, cigarettes are smoked countless times, and there are plenty of excuses to get the Thompsons to bark. I can accept all that until Fleischer says he'd like to be the new DePalma and switches from funny conversational humor to serious mode, where he fails utterly. In fact, all the action scenes seem to have been shoehorned into the film as an afterthought, only one of the two female characters is anchored in the plot, and the police unit is carried by Brolin's charisma and Gosling's smile. To top it all off, it features a collection of annoying Hollywood clichés. A well-deserved fail.

I understand that getting Osama was mostly due to lengthy bureaucracy combined with refreshing waterboarding, but the first hour of this film is the pure essence of boredom. It only begins to pick up after the attack on the base in Afghanistan, only to culminate in the final bit of action, which is something so precisely and coldly filmed that the director's craft is bewildering; anyway, we won't know for a few years whether this film came too soon or too late. 3 ½.

Without a solid plot skeleton, but with skillful direction and tight dramaturgical grip, David Ayer serves up a few snippets from the lives of ordinary cops who don't take drugs or bribes, but enforce the law to the best of their knowledge and conscience. It’s a good change that Ayer could have managed without the POV, but thanks to well-written and even better-acted characters (Gyllenhaal and Peña are one of the most coordinated cop duos ever), it works in every moment; including the fact that the last scene is absolutely the most emotional. 4 ½.

Returning to Middle-earth after so many years is fine. The three hours are still mesmerizing in the perfect WETA world, both in the moments of infantile goofiness (the book itself is a fairy tale) and the ultimate in self-indulgence (the battle of the thundering men of the rocks), yet it all feels somehow... hollow. This is mainly because there is no imaginative moment from a distinctive filmmaker and the only vital moment of the whole film is the puzzle game with Gollum. In the end, I'm actually sorry in retrospect that Guillermo del Toro didn't direct it because Peter Jackson loves this world maybe a little too much. I liked it, and yet I have no reason to ever see it again.

This was great! It’s a fantastic genre film, which sprinkles one cliché after another in such a cadence that I snorted with joy for two hours. The film works in every conceivable way, from the (un)predictable story, the fitting music, and the hero’s catchphrases, to a few scenes that want to be quoted time after time (the opening, the bathroom, the chase, and even the rainy ending). This isn’t going to be the only movie theater screening.

Lazenby is not charismatic but rather arrogant, the Bond girl is an unsympathetic bitch, and the bland script lets 007 sail through a story where absolutely nothing happens for the first hour. Then, documents are stolen in Switzerland, there’s a bit of skiing, and finally, the Blofeld mansion is attacked. Two and a half hours of cruel boredom. PS: The fact that Blofeld doesn't recognize Bond in their first scene together (given that the film sort of picks up from the previous film) amazes me more than the sloppy wedding.

While last time Anderson was intoxicated by a new technological toy called "the third dimension," here he gets rid of it and tortures us with a tiresome, unexciting, and absolutely sterile sequence of shootings without ideas, tension, or adrenaline. Instead, he leaves Alice to perform her parental duties and the other characters to awkwardly explain everything around them, come back from the dead, or be jerks on a whim (Leon S. Kennedy!). Sorry Paul, I've always defended you, both to haters on the internet and in person over a beer, but this is shit that I suffered through outrageously and for the first time I'm not looking forward to the next film.

Derrickson's got it handled, no doubt about it. He just follows the routine template that doesn't offer a single surprise, and ultimately sells even the extended cut's point as expected from the first screening. That’s perhaps a bit of a shame, as Hawke's excellent performance, solid direction and Young's impressive soundtrack pull it high into the red otherwise. [Inside joke: Norwegian black metal and Pishin on the left did their thing in the movie theater. :)]