DaViD´82

...all those reality shows and documentaries can go take a walk. Who would have said that the gray daily routines on both sides of the barricades could be depicted so convincingly. So much so that you absolutely understand the actions of both sides, while not identifying with either, although it is quite clear that that’s just the way it is. And not just in Baltimore, but also in circles not involved with crime or the police. You find no clichés here, either genre or series-related. But in spite of everything it works the same as what it is illustrating. Like an addiction that you can’t quit. And so I am becoming more and more addicted to the drizzly Baltimore weather that little fish, big bosses, regular cops and their superiors wake up to every morning, just to go out there and take shit again... It may put some viewers off that the separate seasons don’t work so much as individual episodes, but as a whole; like one long movie with lots of parts, so it’s understandable that if you watch this series in classic “one episode a week" style, you won’t have the stamina to last out to the very end.

Impassiveness through pulsating tempo. Irony through silence and furtive gestures. A study of a man whose internal motives we know almost nothing about. If you know your way around the political scene in Italy at the beginning of the nineties, you will probably enjoy this more than I did. I don’t intend to hide the fact that I was expecting something completely different - concentrating on Andreotti’s career as such with a particular focus on the events of spring 1978 and spring 1979. This is more of a “made by an Italian for Italians" affair.

The vendetta-obsessed white/Indian teenager is played by wrinkle-covered Arian McQueen who must have been getting on for forty. No joke - the filmmakers were completely serious. The movie is so full of unintentionally bizarre moments when Steve is visually the same age as (or even older than) his colleagues on-set, but they behave toward him like a little brat with milk still dribbling down his chin. It would have been excellent as a five-minute sketch by Monty Python, but it just doesn’t work as an unnecessarily long regular western about revenge which, apart from what I wrote here, has nothing of interest about it.

I hereby notify all upstanding citizens that Foxx is about as endearing here as any regular politician and Butler didn’t even attempt to endow his character with the charisma needed to command due respect. And if that weren’t enough, while writing this weak broth made from the first part of Saw, they looked up the term “shocking twist" but mixed up the definition with that for “load of hogwash".

An absorbing and wrenching film that brings to mind The Lives of Others. Only this secret police mid-life crisis is more believable, more intense and much better (not only) because of it.

Gilliam's The Last Temptation of Christ, while losing points in the superfluous passages behind the mirror (except in the of the very final one), it gets a lot of points in the London "real" part of the storyline, which fortunately prevails.

A reality show that combines footage of the entire month of the hardest induction training “in the world" with documentary form, made up of recollections of former Legionnaires and an interesting, although concise history of the French Foreign Legion. The camera doesn’t just follow these talking heads and the group of volunteers during this training hell, but also loses itself in atmospheric desert panoramas. And the group is well-chosen and fits together, with the nice guy Bear “survive anywhere, eat anything" Grylls. The only negative side is the leap. The first two episodes cover the first three days in detail and then, all of a sudden, without warning or continuity it jumps two weeks, with the last two episodes being about the end of training. It would have been better if it had been two episodes longer and covered the whole period evenly.

The most catastrophic commercial for Coca-Cola. McCarthy’s The Road stands on atmosphere, and so it was extremely important that no one scene should stick out, like in the book, so that a month later you have no memory of anything specific that happened, only of the atmosphere of cruel despair, ruin; a world where trusting your nearest and dearest is a synonym for criminal naivety. A memory of the atmosphere that gets under your skin, an atmosphere that will stay with you long after you leave the movie theatre. All it takes is somebody coughing on the bus, the sight of a discarded beer can and there you are again - up to your ears in depression. I don’t want to pretend that this is flawless. It isn’t. I could find quite a lot of things to criticize here, but everything fades in the shade of THAT atmosphere and the very end, where you find out straight away who has what perspective of the world (you know: is the glass half-full or half empty?). That dulls the edges of any of its negative aspects. Mainly that it’s fragmentary and everything else that the book suffers from. Yes, you heard me right, although I really like The Road, I don’t rate it among McCarthy’s top works. It isn’t even his most atmospheric works. P.S.: But this is one of those pointless adaptations. It’s an illustration, one to one scale, nothing more. I really had expected the director to cut deeper and defy the “canon" of the book, while still remaining faithful to it. Here, everything is down to the book, and nothing comes “out of Hillcoat". That’s why I give it four.

No idyll with romantically whistling train, merrily chuffing though the glorious French landscape, but a reality of deafening iron monsters spouting steam and oil at the end of occupation. Basically the very best and most suspenseful way of paying respect to the memory of the French railroad Resistance. Apart from one detail. The character played by Paul Scofield. Such a crudely negative character stands out like a blot on the landscape in this movie. You would expect him to torture his prisoners and laugh crazy Huron laughter while doing so. But in fact, all the characters are really “gray", and only he is clearly black-and-white, although the motivation side is convincing. He would have fitted in well in a naively delivered movie, but here he just spoils the aura of convincingness.

As an audio-visually powerful, toned-down, existential drama about seeking forgiveness and God in a God-forsaken place, this movie is excellent, but half way through it’s like out of nowhere Fincher remembers (or more likely the producers forced him to remember) that he is filming the new Alien and not a sci-fi adaptation of something by Dostoyevsky. So, all of a sudden he forgets about everything that came before and then launches into an absolutely regular, uninventive kill-fest that loses all of the atmosphere built up in the first half. And this goes for both the regular version and the director’s cut, which is the better of the two, but just a better version of the same and not “something completely different" as many reviewers suggest.