POMO

Grown Ups is another comedy with a “script”. Let’s line up today’s most popular comedians and let them improvise and have fun. Something will surely come out of it, something that will make more than a hundred million dollars in U.S. cinemas alone and we’ll all be happy. The movie has a poor plot and makes poor use of the individual actors’ uniqueness, and the most valuable character actor of the entire film, Steve Buscemi, plays the biggest idiot here. Thanks, but no thanks.

Dumb from head to toe, and yet at the end it pretends to have a "big idea".

The creator of Enterprisse made black-and-white photographs move and called the result a “film”. It has some kind of a kinetic drive, but should that be reason enough to praise this?

Doug Liman created some decent conversations and the chemistry between Naomi Watts and Sean Penn hasn’t lost any cinematic drive since 21 Grams. But where is the entertainment potential in addressing a marriage crisis against the background of complicated political happenings in the White House when even American audiences have already forgotten all about those events? Fair Game is an example of a viewer-unfriendly, bland and boring film.

A family drama (in the sense of a “drama about a family” rather than a “drama for the whole family”) that is pulled out of mediocrity only by the excellent Christian Bale (in a role similar to the one he played in Harsh Times). Fighter is a psychologically believable and, in terms of acting, focused film that doesn’t bring anything new to the genre of intimate relationship movies and doesn’t offer any moments of a more dramatic nature. Mark Wahlberg’s role suits him due to his real-life background, but the film rather needed a real actor in the mold of Bale for that role.

A surprisingly bland and uninteresting thriller. Martin Campbell is “only” a professional action-movie craftsman, and the subject matter of Edge of Darkness needed a more distinctive take on the sad, depressing and urgent warning against the circles of powerful people. Moreover, the film barely contains any action and doesn’t offer any kind of breathtaking climax of the detective plot, which is more chaotic than interesting. Danny Huston and Ray Winstone are well cast in their roles, but Winstone’s character is horribly botched up (while it is evident that it was supposed to be the second most important character in the story). Mel Gibson is good but his performance is nowhere near what he did in Payback. The same could be said about the whole movie.

God of Love is a nice idea, with black-and-white visuals being a perfect fit for the streets of New York and Luke Matheny’s good self-casting and performance. And it has a nice message that, however, could have been delivered in half of the running time.

It would not be dignified to compare this movie to the Jason Bourne series. Let’s overlook the fact that Green Zone does not have Bourne’s entertaining drive, has no compelling music, and takes place from beginning to end in a location that looks like a single dark construction site and tells us nothing about its characters. It is easier to compare it with Ridley Scott’s thematically related Body of Lies, which I rated with three stars and which entertained me more. Green Zone is just a black-and-white militaristic exercise with a directing style that has been applied more successfully and with more vivid colors in other movies.

I saw the first four Harry Potter films and stopped there, as I’m not a fan of the series. I went to see Deathly Hollows: Part I only because of its attractive billboards. And I was bored to death. The beginning of the series introduced us to the characters and the story’s lovely environment and, in the case of Alfonso Cuarón’s contribution to the series, brought us a unique, wonderfully dark film adventure that showed a lot of inventiveness on the director’s part. The films had their own stories and always took the audience somewhere. In comparison to them, Deathly Hollows: Part I is only a protracted masturbatory porridge, slavishly and without any creative input following the original book, the qualities of which I don’t know, but if they’re anything like this film, I’ll gladly pass.

The ability of the creators of romantic comedies to prepare such a great cocktail of tasteful humor and romance that is not annoying is sometimes more admirable than that of creators of quality drama. Very pleasant. And those Monaco exteriors ... a fairy tale. In some things, the French are unbeatable.