Malarkey

I haven’t seen a more unnecessarily forced and artificial series than the first season of American Horror Story. But, I was getting a mass of recommendations from left and right for, allegedly, the best – second – season, so I simply had to start watching it. Well, and the first half was in a similar vein to the first one. The creators jammed everything they could into the asylum. At times I thought that the only thing that was missing was to connect it with some concentration camp… and what do you know. During the very next episode, I was met with an Auschwitz-Birkenau flashback. The second half of the season was a lot more interesting and I actually finished it thanks to that. Unnecessary scary scenes were exchanged for gradual refinement of the characters, to whom I was gradually getting used to. The finale went to the very core. In the end, hats off. Finally, a series that doesn’t have a problem with raising questions and answering all of them.

Film brain lobotomy minus the basic life functions. The most boring Sherlock Holmes adaptation I’ve ever seen.

The first instalment was not really sure if it wants to be serious, or seriously funny. However, the second one is much different. It is hilarious from the beginning till the end and everything that happens there is a total hyperbole. And it all looks so innocent at the beginning. The tipping point is when they sew a zombie’s hand onto the main character. Then such crazy things happen that everyone the main character meets will stay stuck in your head. My favorite was the metrosexual gay poseur with inconspicuously Finnish surname. These inconspicuous Scandinavian allusions can really lift up your mood. Actually, the whole instalment can do that. I have to admit, I did not expect that I would laugh that much and that I would want more explosions in the middle of the Norwegian nature.

A childhood adventure in possibly the most beautiful European scenery, where you could happily look for dragons, harpies or centaurs, is in this case overshadowed by the filmmaking failure.

The Poles have taken up a really rough topic, which I think is for them similarly important as Lidice for the Czechs. And the first half an hour looked really amazing. The characters were believable, the atmosphere was completely war-like and the action had class. This film did not lack almost anything. But then there was a romantic kiss in a slow-motion bullet-time scene, which looked as if it was cut out of a Max Payne game, which invented this slow-motion effect. Add the music, which does not belong to a story like this at all and the whole promising atmosphere was immediately lost in the void. Then the classic approach continued, and it again seemed pretty decent, but another slow-motion appeared just at the right time and now it was, for a change, accompanied by dubstep music. That was too much for me and I had troubles watching it till the end. The Second World War is not an action movie. The Second World War was a time where many people died and that is why movies from that era should be shot with respect to the people who have fallen in the war. But someone here did not understand that. And I have to say I feel really sorry for that. Under different circumstances, City 44 would aspire to become an important movie from the Second World War that would deserve far more than just two hours on the screen.

Usually I get really annoyed by spoiled children. However, this boy was possibly the first kid with whom I did not mind it at all. Not only he had a strong argument for everything, but he was also not stupid at all. And when I saw the girl, I thought these two would make a great duo. A completely natural story from the lives of two completely different characters, united by accident. I love similar films because a story like that can only be written by life itself.

It is nice to see how Jiří Bartoška recovered from his illness. I even think that it made him truly enjoy this role. Of course, it would not be the same without the (more than one) cigarette. I have to thank him as I have not laughed this whole-heartedly for a pretty long time. And what’s more, this movie really got me thinking about the domestication of men. Finding the right level is really a form of art. What Taťána Vilhelmová and Eliška Balzerová did in this film will haunt my dreams for a long time. But it is visible that they utterly enjoyed it, and they were not alone in this. Even the rebellious Jiří Havelka or Jakub Kohák were excellent. I would not expect to see Jakub in the best, and at the same time the roughest, scene of the whole film. I’m bowing down before him. While Theory of Tiger does not deserve the perfect five star rating, at least it is worth the proper four star comedy rating, and I plan on watching it a few more times in my life.

I got a recommendation for this Bollywood movie that it may not disappoint me, so I was hoping there won’t be any Indian happy dances and… They were. However, I have to admit that as a comedy it was not so bad. It just made me realize that even the best comedies should not last for more than two hours. And even the two hours are often beyond the line. But if you skip the endless dreaming connected with dances and survive the great Indian absurdity and beautiful locations without a single piece of trash or the high number of happy people smiling like Ashtar Sheran on the poster of the Universe People cult, you will get a fairly traditional comedy, which is at times even entertaining. But I never want to see another three hours long Bollywood movie ever again.

If the director was not narrating this properly gloomy crime film in such a clumsy way, I would have been utterly excited. But still, Charlize Theron again shows a good performance of a woman with a destiny similar to a snail on the road and I have to admit she was the reason why I watched the whole film till the end. The gradual uncovering of the plot then caused a real excitement about the finale, which amazingly broke some sort of resolution into the darkness-soaked story.

I understand now why I was unaware of this movie my entire life. At first glance, the combination of Charlie Sheen and Chris Tucker appears incredibly funny, but once you watch it, the happiness disappears not only from your lips, but also from the movie itself, which is inconspicuously inflating the thought bubble in your head with the label “a good comedy”, until it bursts and you shut down the TV out of exhaustion from the motion pictures, as you realize you are not able to finish watching such a boring film.