Malarkey

Before I saw this film, I thought that Claire Danes and Kate Beckinsale are pretty good-looking chicks. But they are hotter now that when they were twenty. Other than that, they got entangled in quite an interesting conflict with a classical 1990’s atmosphere and a solid blow-up at the end. The ending makes the movie worth watching. You won’t believe it until you see it. In my opinion, this is the greatest self-sacrifice in the history of film.

The weakest predators in the history of film were playing cat and mouse with the worst soldiers on the face of the Earth. Adrien Brody put on about 15 kilograms of muscle for this role, yet he still looks like a stick. Goggins, on the other hand, generally plays fags in most movies and here he is supposed to put in an absolute performance worthy of the SAS. Neither of them managed to clear that hurdle. It looks embarrassing, and what’s even worse is the Chinese guy, who swordfights one of the predators. I don’t know if the predators were just sick of what a bunch of amateurs those morons were, of they were the weakest predators ever. However, both those things made sure that even otherwise good ideas were buried with everything else in this film.

The expectations were sky-high and the result was definitely worth it. Having said that, I definitely recommend watching this movie – if possible – with dubbing. This might be the only movie for which I would recommend that, but at the same time I believe that it’s still better than listening to that “Czech” English spoken by English actors, which, according to the director, was his intention to be able to differentiate Czechs from Germans. And I don’t hold it against him. I got over it quite quickly, but I understand that it might be grating for some people. What was worse was the camera, which in some crucial action scenes was flying around like a rag on the broom wielded by a Ukrainian cleaning lady. But what the hell, I got over that as well and I have to admit that despite some uncertainty during the assassination scene, I was literally excited about the final scene in the church. And that was despite the camera flying about, which added the right amount of confusion to the scene and thus created undoubtedly the best war scene of the past few years. But it’s not only about these individual things. Anthropoid deserves praise mainly as a whole. I don’t think I’ve seen such cooperation between Czech and English filmmakers. That cooperation alone makes the movie unique in my mind. If somebody is giving this a two-star review, I guess they watched the same movie but didn’t perceive what I did. This was the first time that somebody wanted to take a story from Czech, or rather Czechoslovak history and present it to the whole world. And Adam Ellis was a great choice in my opinion. This incredibly sad story deserves global attention. And I believe that Anthropoid did its best!

A beautiful Irish road movie that will give you exactly what you are expecting of it. Naturally, what you get is a journey through a beautiful landscape inhabited by melancholic and thoughtful people who tend to think a lot about life. On top of that, this was the first bigrole for Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter and that also influenced me in my review. Obviously for the better.

Now I know why it took me years to finally see this movie. It’s actually pretty worthless. The story was penned by Halina Pawlovská and the main role was portrayed by Ivana Chýlková. That alone is nothing to write home about. I decided to bear with the movie because of a single actor, who was completely unknown to me – Franciszek Pieczka. I don’t know him at all, I didn’t understand a single thing he said, but his acting performance paralyzed me. Other than that, I can safely say that today we have much better movies available on a similar topic.

Naked erect dicks form the basis of this movie. It’d been a long time since I saw an uncompromising comedy, so I finally got to see one. And this one actually knocked me off my feet pretty well. It’s a pity, however, that brutal motifs were alternating with several boring moments. Well a comedy of this variety cannot keep it up for the entire length of the movie. So the second, more dramatic half was a bit worse, which also goes for the beginning of the movie, which was rather slow-ish. But other than that, I got to see scenes that I will never forget and that convinced me that film as a genre in general still has a lot to offer.

Tom Hardy felt like a dual role and a dual role he got. And truth be told, he did a more-or-less good job portraying the two brothers, who are both criminals and who are each a little different. It’s a pity that the movie only starts getting really interesting once their entire empire begins to crumble apart. At that point, Legend capitalized on the entire story, which was otherwise not that interesting, and the movie prepared a rather tragic unravelling of the plot. And that was good. Mainly because the story was written by life itself. I actually felt really sad at the end of the movie about the human tragedy.

I must say the Finns surprised me a lot with this movie. Not only because it presents an uncompromising description of the nationalism problem in their country, but also since they managed to incorporate this story in a plot completely different from what a standard European-born viewer might imagine. And naturally, it answers these complicated questions in just as uncompromising and successful manner, which befits a proper Scandinavian movie. But it’s actually strange that a movie on this topic was made of all countries in the one that probably has the smallest problem with immigration in Europe. I think they even have more Gypsies than migrants and they take royal care of them. Nevertheless, I was surprised that when I read a Finnish newspaper once, the only article involving crime was about two Ethiopian soccer players who burgled the football club that had vouched for them.

War of the Buttons is like the Czech TV series Bylo nás pět (“We Were a Handful”). I’d love to know who copied from whom, but my guess is it was the French copying from the Czechs. That’s pretty clear. Other than that, the movie is nice, but as I say, Bajza from the Czech series is better and a lot easier for me to identify with.

Another reason to cut down on driving your car. And I have to admit that I am really glad that this movie was made. Without embellishment, it shows absolutely precisely what interests BP had on the oil rig and how the company was willing to literally walk over dead bodies to achieve its interests. The film as such then quite intensely and relatively exactly depicts the disaster as if it had been filmed by Greengrass himself. Not only was the film expensive, but you can really see it was. And that’s despite the fact that sometimes it feels like the camera was attached to a merry-go-round or a rollercoaster. But that actually serves a point as well. It amplified the atmosphere in order to make the viewer think as if they were really on the rig with the rest of the actors. And there’s no doubt the authors managed to achieve that effect. I was as confused as a forest bee and the only thing that could put me to a similar level of confusion that Mark Wahlberg experienced on the screen was the series of explosions, which I could survive through a certain coincidence. The only reason I didn’t give the movie a five-star review was that there is not a single character the viewer could really identify with or root for and that’s despite the fact that Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell and John Malkovich all put in absolutely excellent performances. Mark actually puts in a standard patriotic performance, whereas Kurt and John are trying to compete for the worst American accent and the best acting performance. And they both succeed. At the end, you get a smaller load of traditional American patriotism, which on the one hand is terribly obvious, but on the other hand, I actually don’t hold it against them. The afterword is pointless, but it’s necessary for American viewers. Other than that, it was great… or rather terribly sad. The more money we have, the more liberties we are ready to take with our mother Earth. The question is how much longer this can go on…