NinadeL

Is the new Suicide Squad that much better than the first one? Ordinary audiences despair about what the movie theaters have to offer, but an educated audience familiar with films from the palette of the seasoned viewer will be satisfied. Everyone else can safely consider it a slightly different comedy from the comic book blockbuster family. It's a lot of great fun for well-read comic book people, but for people with other media backgrounds, there's something extra in it. For example, the great Harley Quinn escape scene backed by the classic hit "Just a Gigolo." She didn't have the courage to do something like this before. It's fun to watch that development.

Season 1 began in December 2019, and Season 2 continues through August 2021. I've never experienced a longer wait for a series cliffhanger. But it's a happy reunion again, and except for one line, I'm thrilled with all the ideas. Hopefully, maybe even Shane will offer something interesting soon. Lots of joy, humor and love are the essential ingredients of TLW: GenQ.

The series director Pachl (and a fan of Hynek Čermák) remade the book of the same name by Marie Poledňáková in his own way. The result is a little bit of this and a little bit of something else, a combination of a Czech gangster film, a family comedy, Randall and Hopkirk... in the style of Life is Life. Also, the whole mixture is framed by the Christmas atmosphere. An acceptable affair for an undemanding audience.

A great multi-genre experience on the theme of "The Beggar's Opera", Brecht, the end of the Weimar Republic... Theater in theater, film in film, Brechtian alienation effects. All of this with the help of excellent actors, especially dazzling performances by Lars Eidinger (Brecht), Tobias Moretti (Macheath) and Hannah Herzsprung (Carola Neher / Polly).

In a healthy competitive environment, Bride Wars is an ordinary romantic comedy, but for Czech filmmakers, it is unattainable.

The years 1938 and 1939 are again very demanding. The oldest generation has passed away, and the farewell to Jean Marsh is bittersweet, but the political changes bring with them some interesting new characters. The topics of the individual storylines are once again very varied. We have it all here: racism, alcoholism, a lesbian affair, infidelity, Nazism, espionage, but also the saving of children in the style of Sir Nicholas Winton, and that's not all. For only 6 episodes, it's a pretty good load. Of the real-life personalities, John F. Kennedy makes an appearance, and the best scenes are with an American textile magnate. You go to the movies to see Irene Dunne in Love Affair. Claire Foy, whose protagonist has a similar fate to Unity Mitford, once again shows strong acting. And of course Alex Kingston, the classic representative of the most energetic women in the world.

Karel Janák has always profiled himself as an author who likes foreign models. Recently, he has also started to look to Slovakia, which has brought some more interesting ideas. In the end, it turned out that Janák was trying to make a thriller with artificial intelligence. And it worked for him, at least partially. The exteriors are really nice, one moment we are in Prague's Karlín, the next moment somewhere in Slovakia in a beautiful landscape. The cast is also interestingly mixed - there are three strong Czechs, and the rest are Slovaks. I see Marcinková and Porubjakova as interesting discoveries, and Hajdu and Luknár are among the faces I would like to see again. The theme itself is so unusual that one can forgive a lot of things within the whole, the details do occasionally fracture, but I would like to see many more genre films made in Czech meadows and groves with similar energy.

Tomáš Svoboda has so far managed to establish himself as a director of useless Czech films, but thanks to his collaboration with Marcel Bystroň he has managed to sink even lower. That's almost an art form in and of itself. How is it possible to have a bunch of decent actors, singers, and skilled technicians and still make it all look like a total mistake? There's a complete lack of basic editing and supervision of the script... Unfortunately, what is missing here is the humility of the theatergoer who thinks that film is essentially the same thing. It's not. Svoboda’s films are simply lazy.

Universal explicitly benefited from the 1938 Box Office Poison case. The stars then labeled as box office poison were forced to change their style, take a break and rethink their comebacks. Some were more successful, others less so. Dietrich was successful with the western Destry Rides Again (1939); her Paramount colleague Mae West made her western with Universal a year later. My Little Chickadee is a film of two stars, West and W.C. Fields, and while both were and still are Broadway legends and artists coming out of the best vaudeville tradition, here they had to keep it quite low-key. Seeing the two of them together is a decent source of entertainment, but the entertainment is safe, cautious, and nostalgic, and all the eroticism that used to be West's hallmark is here only in a light version.

After a roaring success, and after the first problems with the film code of the infamous Hays Bureau of Bullshit, Mae West had a wonderful idea. She was going to make a film reflecting on her achievements. Lawrence Riley's play "Personal Appearance" served as the basis for the script, which she wrote herself. She's focused on the glorious film glitz, political corruption and a naive audience, not just in the countryside. Logically, then, she plays a movie star with her own history and fictional films, some scenes of which we even see (such as the exotic bar scene in Drifting Lady), while others are just talked about. It's a good film, a medium transcending itself. The only real problem is the silly country boy character who is a caricature of illiterate blacks. Whereas before Hays' influence on the film was cemented, West herself, for example, had three black maids in I'm No Angel who were interestingly written, funny, and acted as the main character's sidekicks. Unfortunately, this too changed in mid-1934.