Malarkey

You can basically expect anything from movies like 100 Bloody Acres. I was especially curious to see if I get some amusing non-PC fun; alas, it didn’t happen so I was watching a classic horror full of intentionally idiotic people who keep murdering each other in equally idiotic situations. So, a classic. I watched this for the Challenge Tour 2015.

Another of those pleasant German comedies from recent years, which are funny just enough to receive average rating. They neither offend you nor take your breath away; you have fun but don’t need to see them again. This particular one, however, has a bonus in the form of an unorthodox view of the consumerist society, which made me add one star to my rating.

This movie has such a precise filmmaking that it’s almost a shame that it’s ruined by individual moments that I simply can’t look past. After Earth is a great movie with an interesting premise and a directing that Shyamalan really nailed. But the really decent overall quality is ruined by, for example, the relationship between the father and the son, thus between Will and Jaden. I thought that it was all too serious and over-the-top. Actually, I didn’t manage to form any kind of relationship with them throughout the entire movie. It felt as if two human robots were on screen. A father with a broken leg talking all sorts of nonsense due to a delirium and a son with a mission that not even the best SAS unit could take on. I was also bothered by some of the individual scenes, like the one in which Jaden jumps off a mountain. I was getting over that for quite some time. But hats off! Shyamalan can still shoot the movies he himself believes in, even with a compromised career. And then the entire movie ends up looking really great, but after about twenty minutes of a “wow” atmosphere comes some sort of a nonsense that makes me sick to my stomach.

I was really looking forward a B-list action movie and that’s what I got, with everything that involves. Including a boring action hero, who I don’t want to say goodbye to yet based only on this movie. But he was pretty tragic in this one, but there used to be more of these wrestling heroes and where are they now.

On one end, there are endless discussions with patiens, activists and professors on the topic of AIDS. On the other end, pointless gay scenes that took a lot of effort for me to handle. Don’t expect anything subtle here…

While watching this movie, I remembered a plethora of stories of young, promising French guys, who, with joy, spraypaint on our historic buildings in Prague, and then the police have to scrape them off the roads in the middle of the St. Wenceslas square or they intentionally shove them so they would fall from the statue of St. Wenceslas.

A bunch of girls in an unintersting French town are bored. They have been bored for a long time, so one ‘intelligent’ 16-year-old girl gets the idea that it might be quite fun if she got pregnant. The girls’ lack of zest for living was pretty obvious and I can easily imagine that this very thing is the problem with today’s young people, who do not know how to entertain themselves, so they look for entertainment in nonsense. The film’s premise will attract your attention, but at the same time you cannot expect this to be a five-star gem of a movie. There are too many scenes portraying the endless moments of boredom of the current French generation, who do not know how to value life.

The Italians once again came with a brilliant subject matter. In my opinion, they have a talent for it. I watch a dozen of mediocre Italian movies (often with a lot shouting on top of it), and then they hit me with something I can’t get out of my head even if I hit a wall with it. And there’s nothing wrong with the fact that they’re exploiting time travel here. This is a film about family tradition, about some sort of family spirituality, which is what I liked so much about it. Plus I immediately noticed the Slavia Prague soccer scarf in the living room, belonging to the father with Buffon’s hairstyle, which made me feel even more enthusiastic about the film. Plus, the casting of actresses is also very fortunate – Vittoria Puccini’s acting performance was brilliant and Benedetta Porcaroli was also not bad given her youth. 18 Presents is a sensitive family film that won’t make you cry, but in the end it you will feel so incredibly strange that you will not want to forget it.

That CGI shark was really awesome. Basically, this takes the premise of the D-grade Mega Shark or the E-grade Sharknado, but it’s shot by a talented director and so it doesn’t even feel as stupid or boring.

Jackie Chan wanted to film it honestly and as convincingly as possible, as it’s about a rather crucial moment in the history of China. But the result is so bland and boring that it won’t convince even the world’s worst dictator of how China should write its history. It looks nice, but the action is slow, and the dialogs won’t mean much to the Czech audience. I wanted a film made in an interesting way that would not be boring and that’s exactly what I didn’t get. Seen based on the Challenge Tour 2015.