Lima

Wittily and engagingly written, fantastically edited and I just love Liman's fierce visual style. And also Tom Cruise, who at 56 looks like someone who could pick up a young girl on the spot :o) He's such a stud.

This is what happens when a self-centered artist succumbs to ideas of their own exceptionalism.

The first episode, by Fincher, is ironically the weakest. He slowly lays the cards on the table and it's not terribly interesting in the overload of dialogue, but from the second episode, from the meeting with Ed Kamper, things start to pick up and you just watch in fascination the main character's transformation from a nobody to an arrogant genius investigator. I consider the interrogation of the dude in the last episode to be the best thing I've seen in series production in years. I want the second season now!!!

Rogue One thrilled me because it took a bold detour, ditched the Force and showed war as something that hurts like hell. The Last Jedi, on the other hand, brings Star Wars back to its roots, to the legacy of the fifth episode. Whether it's the locations (the white planet), the Force is palpable here (unlike the Abrams film), the layout of the Force of Good and the Force of Evil overlap (the main characters doubt themselves and the meaning of the Force) and in general it's an massive improvement over the seventh episode. Whether it's the treatment of the characters (Kylo Ren is finally a charismatic badass and not a teenage brat from Hogwarts who looked like he just had his magic wand stolen as in Abrams’s film), the script, which is convoluted and interesting enough to make you look forward to every scene (I consider Rey's training and her search for herself on the desert island with Luke to be the best thing this franchise has ever offered), and finally, the humor that so graced the old trilogy. That’s how it should be! So to conclude: for me, after The Empire Strikes Back, this is clearly the best entry into the Star Wars universe.

I didn’t mind at all that it wasn’t about Michael Myers, I liked the departure from the Halloween universe. The premise was in keeping with what was being made in the 1950s and 60s, i.e. appropriately wacky, but in a nice, interesting way. But the cinematic execution of it is absolutely, utterly awful. This is what happens when a film is made by someone with vision but no talent. Zero production value, lack of tension, scenes that unintentionally parody themselves, and the whole thing is clumsily edited on top of that. 97 minutes of suffering, but at least the final few seconds were nice.

There's probably no bigger fan of the original Blade Runner than me, so, first of all, I don't think a movie like this needed a sequel at all. In terms of the story, it's like The Matrix. There, the mythology was developed in the other two episodes, here, the story is developed in a way that makes sense, but does not enrich the original film. In terms of pure craftsmanship, it's a solid piece of filmmaking, but I didn’t feel the atmosphere of Scott's gem, that "Babylonian" mix of cultures and peoples with a predominantly Asian element where you could easily become an anonymous figurehead. Deakins does magic, yes, but the atmosphere is missing, and anyone who says otherwise has failed to feel the subtle nuances of the first Blade Runner. I missed an interesting character like J.F. Sebastian and his electronic toys in the prequel, I missed a fateful character like Pris, I missed a strong villain like Roy Batty whom you both hated and pitied. There's none of that in Villeneuve's film, just a terminator in a skirt and a bland Leto. Thanks at least for the holographic Joi, probably the only interesting character in the film. I just can’t avoid feeling slightly disappointed.

The cult status that this poliziotteschi enjoys in Italy is somewhat undeserved. Franco Nero, on whom the whole film stands and falls, is a great actor, with a wide range of expression, but here Castellari pushes him into a position that is not his own. It reminds me more of Azurito the rabbit on speed – he talks fast, or rather shouts, gesticulates a lot and excessively, just ridiculously overacting and it's not nice to look at. The plot is more sophisticated than in other poliziotteschi films, but it takes quite a long time before anything really interesting happens. There is little action, and instead of no-brain entertainment I got a lot of banter with the perpetually angry Nero.

The Italians in the 1970s didn’t mess around and didn’t care about political correctness either. So, what is the final balance? One six-year-old child executed, a pregnant woman shot in the stomach, about 25 dead and several cars destroyed by grenades. This cult film in Italy, together with High Crime, started the poliziotteschi film trend that abounded in violence, criminals, cops and corrupt politicians. The motivation of the protagonist, a suspended policeman, is questionable, because despite the laws he’s driven only by revenge (the Italians in the 70s felt it, when their country had more than 2000 criminal or terrorist attacks every year), the plot is simple but very brisk, action follows action, and Merenda does not lack charisma in the main role, although he can't act much. There’s also an anti-corruption appeal and in general it’s a pleasantly uncompromising view of Italian society in the early 70s.

The production design and the effects are great, as only Bruckheimer's bottomless wallet can do, but the fifth encounter with Jack Sparrow is like meeting a drunk who tells you funny stories and you don't want to listen to him anymore because he's annoying. He just drunkenly drones on and on and on and you get tired of it :o)

Excellent documentary, beautifully structured thanks to the engagingly presented graphics, which we don't often see in documentaries. At the beginning, you will learn that between the 1950s and 70s the Italians became (in)famously known worldwide as the ones who copy film genres that are currently trending in America and the Western market. So, Hollywood westerns were replaced by spaghetti westerns (ask Sergio Leone o the countless clones of Django that later became an inspiration for Tarantino), the sword-and-sandal films of the 1950s were copied in a genre called peplum (all those Hercules, etc.), which were followed by giallo, and in the early 70s, as a response to Coppola’s The Godfather and The French Connection, the Italians came up with a fashionable genre called Eurocrime, also known a s poliziotteschi. All the major films are mentioned, such as Execution Squad and High Crime with Franco Nero, whose huge success kick-started the genre's production machine (poliziotteschi films can be counted in the hundreds). It explains the social background of that success, when in Italy in the 70s there were about 13,000 cinemas and 400-500 films a year, which were in demand, because Italian TV was closed to the world (there were no satellites and VHS yet), it had only two national channels that broadcast only two premieres a week. Going to the cinema thus became a social phenomenon, with the average Italian going four or five times a week. It introduces the biggest stars of the genre of the time (Franco Nero, Henry Silva, Richard Harrison, Tomas Milian, Lee Van Cleef and also Maurizio Merli, the biggest star after Nero, who resembled him in his appearance and in the way he imitated him in everything), the important directors (Ferdinando Di Leo, Enzo Castellari, Sergio Martino) are also mentioned, of whom Umberto Lenzi, the most successful poliziotteschi director of the time, gets the most space. The distinctive aspects of the genre are clearly explained, i.e. social criticism (Italy in the 70s was a pretty wild place, in 1977 alone there were 2080 terrorist attacks, whether by fascist militia or the Red Brigades), the long fingers of the mafia, and all of this under the sign of Violence (unlike Hollywood, the Italians were not afraid of anything, e.g. dead children, mutilated genitals and torture and rape of women was nothing exceptional). Italy in the 70s was a macho society, so the women in the films were mere victims, raped, beaten and only rarely took the law into their own hands. There are also mentions of Italian stuntmen, who surpassed those from America in terms of skill, and it’s interesting that the main stars did not let themselves be replaced, following the example of Belmondo, popular throughout Europe. The account concludes with the fact that with the advent of VHS and better TV antenna technology (and thus a wider range of offerings) cinema-going ceased to be a social phenomenon in the late 1970s, more than 10,000 cinemas closed in Italy and the poliziotteschi genre slowly died out.