Filmmaniak

I definitely appreciate about half a dozen of the film’s truly funny and imaginative gags and scenes, but otherwise it's quite weak, especially compared to the excellent, first Borat. Confrontations with "unsuspecting" Americans (who are surprisingly resigned this time around and put up with everything) are unfortunately dull, sometimes giving the impression of artificial staging and especially the desperate need to involve them in a poorly directed, convulsive and unfortunately broken plot about the relationship between a father and his daughter. As long as Cohen is provoking people while wearing bizarre costumes, the film works, but as soon as the scripted actions take place, or if anyone else is on the screen, the film immediately falls off the rails. The film only has sporadic quality satire and is otherwise mostly a relatively standard comedy with borderline humor and plenty of dead spots.

A dilapidated Al Capone, afflicted with worsening dementia and struggling with the effects of heart attacks and venereal disease, is living the last year of his life, dependent on the care of relatives, while in numerous hallucinations he is confronted with his ancient sins and brutal past. Despite the unattractive sounding theme, it could have been at least an interesting and remarkably conceived contemplative biographical drama, but its implementation is very unfortunate. Repetitive motifs and Capone's delusional visions have virtually no point, and the whole film is somehow about nothing and it disintegrates just like the main character's mind. Thanks to the actors, at least the film is not embarrassing and unintentionally ridiculous. The film could be summed up as an unsatisfactory wait for Capone to finally remember where he hid his stashed millions, but a far greater mystery is how he managed to persuade Tom Hardy to accept a role in which, as the most famous gangster in history, he just shits in diapers, mumbles Italian swears, sucks a carrot and looks repulsive.

This is a fragile and completely unique documentary about an unexpected friendship between a curious cephalopod and a burnt-out filmmaker who spent most of his life with him while daily diving. The film is an original, emotional and sometimes thrilling connection between the world of people and the world of animals, finding unifying parallels in the lives of both protagonists and casually encouraging understanding of nature from a completely different point of view.

At first glance Daria seems like a stylish mysterious conspiracy thriller, but in reality it is just a bizarre and chaotic feature film amounting to earning a reward for nonsense, seemingly as if it were written by a random plot and dialogue generator. The film’s plot consists of a completely meaningless series of happy coincidences and is strongly marked by the fact that its creators can film an effective shot here and there, psychedelically cut an occasional flashback and underscore a scene with a sharp song, but the level of their narrative, screenwriting and dramaturgical skills ranges in negative values. As a result, the film is incredibly bad and stupid, sometimes so much that it's actually quite fun to watch (steampunk ranch!, sex with demons!!, Jiří Schmitzer in the role of a mad scientist!!!). The film includes a few goofy ideas and the pretty heroine occasionally gets nude, but unfortunately that’s where the positives end.

David Attenborough talks about his life and provides, against the background of the changes that have taken place on Earth in recent decades, a clear and plainly understandable appeal about environmental topics. The film thus serves not only as a perfect recapitulation of the career of this famous documentary filmmaker, but also as an important message about the state of the environment. However, instead of looking for culprits, the film provides constructive proposals and visions.

Mank attracts viewers primarily through its unraveling of the tangle of influences that led the title character, an alcoholic screenwriter, to write the celebrated Citizen Kane. However, the actual writing of that screenplay plays second or rather third fiddle in Mank, as there is no depiction of the classic’s shooting, the great Tom Burke as Orson Welles appears on screen for a total of maybe three minutes, and Mank isn’t very faithful to the historical facts; for example, it presents Welles’s involvement in the drafting of the screenplay in accordance with myths that have long since been debunked. In fact, Mank is rather generally focused on the workings of Hollywood in the 1930s and during the Great Depression, and to roughly the same extent it deals with the political mood of the time and the affair involving the 1934 California gubernatorial race, which is understandably not much of a draw for viewers. But that’s not the problem. Rather, the problem is that none of this is rendered in a very engaging way. Though I fully understand Fincher’s desire to make a film based on his father’s long-shelved screenplay, that screenplay is unfortunately about uninterestingly written and poorly defined characters who frequently deliver witty and precisely aimed lines, but what good is that when there is no one to build any kind of relationship with on the screen? Furthermore, the second half of the film fundamentally loses traction and, with the exception of a drunken scene at a fancy-dress dinner party, it doesn’t contain much that’s remarkable. Tim Burton's Ed Wood, for example, was made with a similar intention and turned out much better. Mank is also related to Citizen Kane in its attempt at an audio-visual retro-form, which, though impressive, is not in any way consistent (after all, it was shot in widescreen digital), with a complicated narrative structure full of flashbacks (which are rather oddly skipped between in places) and a lot of different allusions (visual quotes, references to sleds and rosebuds, for example). Therefore, it is definitely necessary to see Citizen Kane before watching Mank. And though it’s fortunately not entirely necessary, it helps to know something about the key figures of Hollywood society at the time.

At first glance, the film seems like a comedic romantic life drama with a lot of emotion and humour, but that would mean that someone other than its creators would have to have made it, because their idea of things like "emotions", "humour" or "life" come off as something obscure from another universe. This poorly filmed and poorly written inconsistent genre mix begins on a light comedic note about relationship lifestyles (but essentially none of it is funny at all), and then gradually mutates into a raw psychodrama with zero trace of comedy. However, the film does not become realistic at all and instead turns into only a superficial and disintegrated torso built on a dubious psychological basis. The film’s goal was probably to satisfy both fans of burdensome dramas relationship comedies, but the battle was lost beforehand. The result is terrible, the film is empty of content, whilst also managing to randomly alternate mutually incompatible moods and follow a lazy template in which men behave like sociopaths and women are destined to love them, constantly forgive them and let them do whatever they want to them. This is particularly inappropriate in a film about women that happens to be written and directed by women. The fact that the main female roles are played by Czech women and male roles by Yugoslavs very poorly dubbed into Czech is just the icing on the cake. That the film was going to be a disaster could be guessed from the bizarre opening credits, in which a book version of the film first passes around a digital Earth in space, followed by a cartoon radio pulling an astronaut in a red convertible, which is of course entirely unrelated to the rest of the film.

Birds of Prey (and Harley Quinn herself) is like a drunk prostitute strewn with glitter with a thick layer of make-up, at first evoking attraction, but upon closer inspection ending up repulsive and sticky. The film masks its banal flat plot with a complicated narrative style, whilst the mostly insufficiently detailed characters act annoying, and the action scenes are seldom able to break free from their chain. At least the pompously flashy visual stylization matches how the film’s crazy and ostentatiously corrupt anti-heroine is presented. Through the combination of its impressive façade, immediacy and all-enforced playfulness with the aesthetics of dirty streets and crumbling, gross locations, it's about as much fun as going to a disco, drinking one shot after another and then furiously vomiting into your purse (which also happens in the film). Some people like this type of entertainment, no doubt about it.

This film is a somewhat unbalanced, but nevertheless interesting horror movie about old age and neurodegenerative diseases, but it also pretends to be something that it’s not. To its detriment, from the beginning it comes off as a standard ghost story about a haunted house, meaning the use of the usual genre motifs to build atmosphere (mysterious shadows in the corridors, something hidden under the bed...). These have no point in terms of the story and are extra aspects of the film,which is also true for all of the supporting characters. The theme of the film is anchored in a harsh reality (and giving it the form of a horror about a family curse makes perfect sense), but its resolution is based on a single visual metaphor that sweeps everything else off the table in the finale. The joy from the characters, who are not non-trivially conceived, and successful work with the interiors is muddled by the fact that the film unnecessarily clings to a few insufficiently intertwined and, above all, misleading hints of the presence of ghosts that have nothing to do with the film's central theme.

Sonic the Hedgehog is better directed, more imaginative and has slightly more action than, for example, the live-action Garfield, Yogi Bear and Stuart Little, but otherwise I don’t see any significant difference. It’s definitely okay for fans of the video game and kids under the age of ten, but otherwise Sonic the Hedgehog is just a very mediocre family spectacle that in places goes a little too far in underestimating the viewer’s intelligence. The hyper-stylized Jim Carrey is fine just as long as he doesn’t slip over the edge into awkwardness. It’s remarkable how often the filmmakers use Sonic’s ability to run fast when it suits them for setting up a gag, but almost never when it would be appropriate in terms of practical solutions to the problematic situations in which the protagonists find themselves. It’s even more fortunate that the outcry from fans on the internet resulted in a new design of Sonic, because if they had stuck with the original one, we would have wound up with a new Howard the Duck. So maybe those fans at least went to see it at the cinema.