DaViD´82

What good are excellent actors for Kim Ki-duk, when a picture relying on poetry in the end contains only a minimum of poetry? That’s right, no good. Already the story about lovelorn wives from unbroken, but non-functional families and about a mute criminal sentenced to death who wants to commit suicide doesn’t promise much, but potentially could have made a good movie. However, this time Ki-duk cut it down a real lot and sometimes the result is unbearable.

A powerful topic, excellent actors, but the result is “merely" a good movie. Although the opening and the conclusion reach the highest heights of quality, round about in the middle the movie starts treading water, with no clear direction. Too bad; if they had reduced the running time by twenty or thirty minutes, it could have been an excellent movie. This way it’s just wasted potential.

The minimalist opening credits prepare you for the form of this picture. Just a few locations, a couple of actors, no music (with one small exception at the end) and lots of long emotionally tense scenes, without even one single cut or camera movement. Seriously a very low-key French work about a broken family and their trials and tribulations living together on a large country estate. The rising tension between the wonderfully written and acted characters is the central focus of Private Property. And unimposing, and therefore all the better, “little big" movie.

Joel Schumacher will convince you that it's not good to be within reach of Michael Douglas's baseball bat when he's wishing for a consumerist lifestyle. An incredibly effective and apt pitch-black humorous satire about a "kinda" different mid-life crisis.

If you agree to play the creators’ game here, then, as a harmless family TV movie with an obligatory message, it’s quite all right. However, it lacks the humor to make it a comedy, the matches or races to make it a sports movie and the relationships to make it a teenage “relationships" movie. The would-be sports sequences are edited and directed appallingly, but there luckily there are so few of them that they don’t get a chance to get on your nerves. The girls are likeable, although Keira is still a kid really, but they are tripped up by the shaky beginning and the unbearable length. The filmmakers deserve to get a red card for that. But it has no problem keeping up with the substitutes on the mundane movies bench, that we see dozens of every year. If you don’t mind the downsides, I see no reason for not setting off down the path toward a big dream, encountering prejudice from the family and the outside world.

Before the Revolution, The Professionals stood out like a sore thumb. They demonstrated incredible quality, a pleasant central trio, interesting cases and skillfully alternated episodes more centered on action with episodes with more detective work. But it seems that not all that shines is gold. Back then, we got just a small selection of a few episodes that were basically the best this British series had to offer. When the whole series came on TV after the Revolution, it turned out that not all episodes achieved the same qualities. But even so, despite a large portion of mediocre episodes, this is still a quality crime series.

This isn’t downright bad. After all, the beginning throws out a hook and it carries on pretty well, but ab hour later, instead of heading for an action ending, absolutely unexplainably and needlessly it starts dragging things out and out and out... In some places there’s a good moment, while occasionally there’s horrendous one (the flashback with the helicopter is pure, undiluted hell), but most of the time it keeps within the boring, stagnant, completely uninteresting waters of a mundane B-movie that is pretending to be more than is. Simply another standard offering from the routineer that Fuqua is, was and always will be.

Graham Linehan definitely has a talent for original and really funny things. The topic of the IT Crowd is almost genius - making a sitcom about “regular IT guys" that you too must be familiar with in your everyday life is simply a priceless idea. But although the result certainly has its qualities, they aren’t that huge in the end. The world of ones and zeros was left heavily underused. In the end, most of the humorous situations emerge from regular sitcom roots (despotic macho boss) and the “difficulty of communication between IT staff and the surrounding world" is forgotten. Each episode contains only a couple (literally) of good gags. It’s not bad, it’s funny, however the subject matter promises much more than what we end up with in the end. The high point is paradoxically episode 2X01 where the authors don’t even try to make any IT jokes.

Brian Singer proves that even a movie based on a comic book can contain some psychological undertones. If you add precise directing, well-chosen cast, lots of ideas and an ingenious action sequence. In addition, they have the advantage that the movie worked even without any of the above, unlike most other popcorn movies recently. At last a picture that proves the rule that a sequel can be considerably better than its forerunner.

The original version is a few quality levels higher. But Sena’s isn’t a complete waste of time either. It’s solidly done average filmmaking that finds no support in the screenplay and so has to rely solely on the dumb things the actors do. Due to its length, Gone in 60 Seconds doesn’t have its foot full on the gas, but the two hours spend in its company goes by fairly quickly in the end.