POMO

Robert Redford sits down in his office at the beginning and, reminiscing about the espionage adventures he experienced with his partner Brad Pitt, doesn’t get up again for the rest of the film. With its sophisticated main characters and without a proper amount of action, Spy Game is a mosaic of flashbacks that thinks it’s enough to have an intelligently written screenplay to be appealing. And that’s a mistake. Drawing so much of the viewer’s attention to an overwrought 130-minute screenplay that doesn’t in any way really reward me… That’s a game I’m not willing to play.

The Luzhin Defence is a subtle, simple, intelligent and intimately low-key film with a nice subject, a decent screenplay and amazing performances by John Turturro and Emily Watson. The problem is that it looks too much like a bland television production with poor image quality to be memorable. If it had been made by, for example, the genre-appropriate duo of perfectionists Merchant/Ivory (The Remains of the Day), it could have been something more.

The Big Blue is a beautiful film in terms of its depth of thought and the poetics of its story. I’m willing to forgive it for its wild mixing of drama and comedy; after all, it’s French. What I can’t forgive, however, is the stark visual concept, which takes it off the movie screen and puts it on a television screen. I expect visual appeal from the creator of The Professional, La Femme Nikita and Atlantis.

The world of emotion that Steven Spielberg conjures up in E.T. could only have been created by a genius. How simply yet impressively he characterized the “bad guys” (ominous music + key ring), how he didn’t even need to look them in the eye and how he conceived everything from a child’s perspective...only a director who was born for this craft can do that. But...even though I have experienced E.T.’s story with all my heart and shed more than one tear while watching it, the film still lacks something more than just sincerely intended sentiment, something higher and something deeper.

Whereas Star Wars: Episode I “only” lacked the heart of the original trilogy, Episode II is just a dramaturgically lame comic-book popcorn flick. At the same time, however, it’s jam-packed with so many great characters, bombastic action, romance and plot twists that are important to the development of the Star Wars saga that it’s impossible to be bored for even a second. The visual effects are shoddy in some places, but the best of them are stunningly good. This is not the good old heartwarming Star Wars of before, but in the context of contemporary eye-candy popcorn entertainment, it’s great.

Imagine a classic action movie in which the bad guys and the heroes don’t chase each other in cars, but on jet skis and motorboats. Hard Rain is not a disaster movie, and if that’s what wanted to be, that would be to its detriment. Rather, Hard Rain is an action flick that places the motif of a hero fighting jewel thieves in the setting of a catastrophic flood. And it does it so skilfully that there is no room to relax or to be bored during its ninety-minute runtime. A solid Hollywood genre movie.

Seeing this film again after several years is an experience that can’t be forgotten. Rocky IV is the epitome of everything that we loved about the action movies of the 1980s. Good man of steel vs. bad man of steel, good America vs. bad Russia and, if you like, the power of the pure spirit of nature vs. the power of modern technology. There’s revenge for the friend who had been killed, intensive training and a final fight that is so packed with energy that you you want to get up and start throwing punches. Dozens of films at that time offered all of this, but few could serve it all up with such scope and showmanship, and in such a dynamic music-video-style package as Rocky IV.

Deep Blue Sea is bullshit. It’s better to not even think about it. Other than some excellent action scenes, it offers only one positive. The characters who “will definitely survive” are the ones who get eaten instead of the character that you really hope will die (e.g. the cook played by LL Cool J). This unpredictability of the screenplay gives the film both a bit of suspense and, after the absurd “untimely” death of one of the main characters, a likably ironic humor that justifies all of the illogic while screaming: “Yes, I am bullshit. Don’t worry about it and just let yourself be swept away by a raging hurricane of first-rate action entertainment!”

We all have at least one movie that no one likes except us. Mine is the flop Chain Reaction. Not that the actors’ performances are anything to write home about or that the film has an original subject, but its over-the-top thriller plot, adorned with brilliant action scenes, is intelligently written and briskly shot – its 106-minute runtime flies by. Keanu Reeves gets the job done as the long-haired, falsely accused scientist on the run, Rachel Weisz is naturally beautiful and likable, and Morgan Freeman is the ideal powerful man pulling strings in the background.

This time Lucio Fulci made the mistake of conceiving his film not as a dark horror movie but as a bloody detective flick. Imagine an old, mediocre detective series set in Manhattan, with a bland middle-aged actor in the lead role, leave out the sophisticated crime plot and spice up the result with murders that turn your stomach. There is no suspense or atmosphere, just the cheap visual concept of an average made-for-TV movie. And why does the killer make sounds like Donald Duck?? The New York Ripper is memorable only for the opening murder with a close-up of the precise slicing of a woman’s breast and nipple with a razor. Apparently Fulci’s tribute to Bunuel...