Malarkey

A group of idiots wants to outwit a store because it’s working their fingers to the bone. Everyone who’s worked in a supermarket before knows what it’s like and so I’m not surprised that France thought of filming this kind of a comedy. It’s a shame that it isn’t really funny; it sometimes is, but mostly not.

The very first episode showed us just what kind of low-lives there are in Bad Tölz and that it’s Benno against the entire town. Apparently, Lower Bavaria is way more corrupted than the neighboring towns right behind the Czech border and so it’s apparent that there’s going to be far more murders than we’d expect in a town with a population of 12,000 people. What’s more, the creators introduce us to Benno’s colleague from Berlin and also his mom, whose inn isn’t exactly run by the book; so now we know that Benno isn’t a real stickler for the rules. The investigation drags on despite its rush of a start, but then the ending is so abrupt that I must admit that I haven’t seen a confession this fast in any crime investigation before. And I doubt that I ever will.

This is what it looks like when they open up the borders and the directors can do whatever they want. Suddenly, it’s okay to write in some anti-communism humor and then throw in a pro-communism joke at the end. And it’s still just as fun as the prequels. I don’t know why people think it’s so bad. I didn’t see any big difference, apart from more wieners in this instalment. It wouldn’t even surprise me if it was just for the sake of criticizing popular movies that won’t ever get old, not even when we do.

Edgar Wright is a pro. Never mind what he’s filmed before; now, with his quick-fire editing and love of music, he’s actually managed to film one of the best gangster movies in a while. When I was watching it, I truly didn’t even care how illogical it was at times. I was enjoying an action comedy so perfect that I doubt I’ll get a similar experience within the next five years until Edgar comes up with something new. And you realize that once you hear high-quality music in the background of a machine gun firing off. You also realize it as the music gets intense when Ansel Elgort’s having his life-changing moment. He might be just a twenty-three-year-old pipsqueak, but after half an hour, I finally got used to him; because beneath the rough layer of toughness and arrogance, there’s a boy who’s lived through a lot. And that’s getting me started about the story, which isn’t exactly any good, but I didn’t even expect it to be. This movie was filmed to be visually effective and to be a conscious homage to all the (not only) Guy Ritchie gangster movies. If Simon Pegg and Nick Frost were starring in this, I think it could even be another addition to the Cornetto saga. But this way, it’s “just” a simple, but highly functional movie. That’s exactly what I expected from Edgar Wright and it’s what I got in the end. Thank you for an amazing experience. At times, I was thinking that I’m not gonna get a similar experience nowadays. The editing combined with the music – absolutely awesome.

An amazing small-scale sci-fi movie that’s situated in the future, but it’s a classic battle royal, so that’s pretty much set. Another thing that’s set it Vanessa Kirby who fits the movie like a glove, who’s making this brutal small-scale movie even more beautiful and who tries to survive in an atmospheric forest that looks just like the one where I like to take walks in the fall.

It’s a little crazy as far as the story goes. At times, it’s a comedy, then a drama, but it feels right in neither case. On the other hand, it was nice to watch, and Nicolas Cage and his team together with Shirley MacLaine put on quite the show. Therefore, I think that three stars are very adequate.

I guess I have a fetish; every now and then, I search for Nicolas Cage movies and then tell people that they’re not that bad. But he has a bit of a problem these days. He’s been shooting awful B movies. But these B movies are aware that they’re B movies and so they’re not so bad for a B movie in general. Just like this one. What can you expect from a movie with such a stupid name that it specifically has to tell you that it’s both a love story and a vengeance… Nicolas, however, is completely okay and since he begins to take revenge, the movie gets into some pretty solid levels of vengeance, therefore delivering what the title has promised. And since I noticed that Nicolas has produced this movie as well, I almost feel as if he specifically aimed to shoot similar movies. I don’t know about him, but in my opinion, this was one of the better movies of his unsinkable five-movies-a-year ship.

Let it be heard that this is a great small-scale movie from the Swedes who can be pleasantly surprising from time to time with horrors like these. Alena is a timid girl and the entire time, it’s obvious that she’s (and this might be a spoiler to some people) a bit schizophrenic. But despite the confessions of everyone involved, the movie maintains its suspense and an atmosphere you could cut with a knife, and the knife wouldn’t manage to cut through anyway. You need to forget all the regular movie nonsense or the intentional movie scenes and brace yourself for the fact that Alena is an unorthodox girl who might be getting bullied, but it doesn’t even phase her. On the contrary.

You don’t get to offend Icelandic cinematography in front of me, which is something that other reviewers here should know already and spare me their scathing remarks about how Icelanders need to learn filmmaking. They know how to make films. For their overall population of some 300,000, they make quite a lot of movies, and a good percentage of those are high-quality. Only in this case, Cruelty was a bit punishing as far as the police’s naivety goes. It is no wonder when there’s a murder in Iceland once in a blue moon. The cops are degenerates and they don’t know how to investigate. And so, they accused every single local lunatic. They called them up one by one and forced them to admit to something they haven’t done. I had the feeling that this movie wasn’t really about investigating, which is nonexistent, but about people and their feelings, which it was so much better at. The issue is, however, that it’s seemingly a crime investigation, but it just doesn’t work as such. The ending was really good, but it didn’t explain the murders at all. It was a good drama, but a bad crime investigation movie.

When I watch old American movies, I often encounter a certain form of levity that the movie represents itself with. That’s why I am all the more happy to experience a pleasant film surprise, in this case from the 1950s, which is guaranteed to have outraged the entire American continent at the time by the premise alone. It really took a lot of courage to put a white man and a black man who are chained together in the leading roles. And if the lady with her kid didn’t appear in half of the movie, I would have given it five stars. But she reminded me of why I’m so careful with old American cinematography. Her behavior made her so punchable, and since it was such an incorrect movie at the time, I’m surprised that Tony Curtis didn’t actually do it. Only a real cow can fall in love with a criminal and then plan a wedding, a family and a house in Detroit within a single hour. Oh, Tony and Sidney were great, too.