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American Animals (2018)
American Crime and Punishment
While this movie mostly concerns itself with the hows instead of whys, I could not avoid drawing parallels between it and the famous work of Dostoevsky on the subject: the money, the old lady, the morality of violence, the boundaries of action, the toll for crossing them. Perhaps a Russian literature class would've done some good in Kentucky?
Anyway, the acting, the cinematography, the sound are all great. The plot is clear and straightforward, which I find refreshing as of late. This combined with the pacing and scenes with real participants of the events is an amazing setup for character study. Unfortunately, we don't get much of that. While this is the main reason, in my view, that this movie falls short of being a masterpiece, it is entirely possible that the portrayed depth of the characters and the reasoning about their actions is in fact correct. I mean, you wouldn't typically expect much depth in a teenage character, but the fact that their real "present day" counterparts failed at a more meaningful and convincing introspection is still disappointing.
All in all, pretty nice.
À l'intérieur (2007)
Victim of a grisly murder 101
First, the good things: I found intro sequence outstanding - immersive and graphic, emotional. Well, maybe just a little bit confusing when you think that high-speed impact should've put more distance between the cars. But heck, physics _can_ be weird. Then, I liked the way the film slowly changed the setting from a disturbing scene to a dark mourning atmosphere of loss and then naturally introducing a weird sinister woman wearing black in the middle of the night, appearing out of nowhere to make trouble for our heroine. Even the background of the story was set: Christmas, immigrant riots - which added feel and realism.
*Sigh*
The woman in black turned out to be a spec-ops hit-man gone lalala, obsessed with taking the main heroine's unborn baby as a toll for her own baby, killed in that car crash. Camouflage, impersonation, infiltration, emotion control, pain resistance and lethal hand-to-hand combat is but a short list of useful abilities demonstrated by our deranged P.S.Y.C.H.O. operative. At one point she even utilizes a portable teleportation doohickey. Her motives, however, are put to doubt at times when she starts making holes with a massive revolver in the bathroom door, where the main heroine was reflecting on her misery. Was it really the baby she wanted? After all, cutting it out with scissors wasn't the best plan for a healthy birth either.
Other folks pale in comparison to our raving banshee. It doesn't take much time to be slain when your favorite book is "Victim of a grisly murder 101": 1) If you're at your friend's in the middle of the night and you encounter a deceiving intruder - don't worry about it! In your next life you could be a flower! 2) Tending to a cut on your hand takes priority over defence against psychotic killers running around with melee weapons in the dark. 3) If you're knocked off your legs - crawl. 4) Have mercy on a cornered homicidal psychopath. 5) Firearms are for losers.
Psychosis, despair and stupidity are the colors on the canvas of this film, core moral implication being that one should drive responsibly... or something.
The Hunting Party (2007)
"Trust no one"?
It gets more and more disturbing as Hollywood masters the art of propaganda, calling onto seasoned actors and putting all the effort into making it work. As we all know there are at least two sides to every conflict and this movie's best is only a formal hint at that. Countless WW2 movies have finally shown us that a war movie should never portray the matter in black and white. To rip a piece out of the never-ending Balkan tragedy and to present it so blindly and preposterously cannot serve any other goal than political. Put against the recent "liberation" of Serbian Kosovo with joint Alban-NATO (as in: US-backed) efforts the movie looks even more frustrating, as we now have the motive: if you liked this movie then the next time you hear the word "Serbian" you _might_ get an eye twitch and the next time an American president (*doh* the UN, the UN of course) decides to slice up a foreign country called Serbia for the good of "democracy" or whatever you _might_ notice a righteous grin on your face. Peculiarly, in "The Hunting Party" the Serbska Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina is even misspoken as Serbia once.
Oh and by the way, Kosovo now hosts the largest US military base in Europe.
PS: War criminals aren't just those with the "kalashnikov" in their hand, shooting and raping women. Sometimes a signature is as bad as that.
Transporter 3 (2008)
90s revisited
Unlike some, I actually find the 3rd part fits in line with the previous "Transporter"s with one major "but".
Ridiculous? Fine. Unrealistic? That goes almost as a rule lately now, doesn't it? What haven't we, the poor movie goers, been fed by this time - be it a tad smelly or rotten down the middle.
Seriously, before I continue with the "but", let me ask you: have I been watching the wrong action movies or do 99% of them contain masked or open references to the controversial, worn and boringly propagandistic "war for freedom", "the fight for peace", "democracy at any cost" or some such? But wait - what's so special about "Transporter"? Nothing really, just that it also manages to fit into the remaining 1%, a little retro into the roaring post-Cold War 90s this time, with a Russian-speaking Ukrainian woman who appears nothing less than an imbecile and not even of the charming kind. I mean, coupled with the Hollywood's "remake tendency" this dead loop of ideas is starting to push my doubts about the imaginative ability of its crew or staff, or whoever they got there to a whole new level of fear - the one you get while still hoping for the best - for the industry's dire fate and those millions of mutilated minds who might never even know it, which makes the matter all the more grave.
Filmmakers, I don't know where you get your Russian characters, but please, if you want to laugh at something - make it smart (take Rocknrolla, for example), so we can understand you. Otherwise, having no other point to connect this to, it inevitably interprets as an insult to our culture and that is just low, besides I saw this stuff done too many times back when I could walk under a table. Kinda thought it was somewhat cool even - stupid Russians, funny! NOT. Not anymore, not for me. Maybe you should start putting age "caps" on your movies, maybe that's the issue here.
Anyway, closer to the point - all in all the action is OK (5/10), I expected as much, can't really complain. But the leading female character ruined it for me.
Grandma's House (2008)
Incredibly emotional and detailed piece of art.
This is the first indie that I watched on IMDb and right from the start I am amazed how the author put me in the Little Girl's shoes as she entered a new stage in her life in this incredibly emotional and detailed piece of art.
Great work, people :) I think I'm going to check back every now and then on the indie section...
P.S.: The weird thing is that even for these shorties a minimum of 10 lines is required in order to comment. Seriously, how can one expect any non-spoilers, if at all any comments here?
How Now Brown Cow. *Ahem*
Mr. Hell (2006)
The only excitement you'll experience is from the goofs.
Acting in this movie is amateur (makes one wonder what motivated the choice of genre), representing typical, nonetheless exasperating, mix of inadequate feelings (consequently, behavior) and involuntary pauses between lines being filled with either blank or bewildered facial expressions.
Arguably, the plot isn't much worse than that of the "exclusive horror" movie majority, meaning it's plain, predictable and thus, boring (when not silly).
Dialogues complete "Mr. Hell" as a cinematographic disaster, being fragmentary, extremely uninformative and unnatural. Moreover, sadly, the writers chose to uphold the flawed tradition of covering up the lack of scariness with would-be humor, would-be irony and would-be sarcasm, manifested in shabby, overly repetitive "cliché - change of context - touché" form.
The only thing that counts positive is solid B-class photography.
The Cave (2005)
A nice mix of myth, fact and fiction.
Surprisingly nice. A few days ago I'd say a man was nuts, if he told me I would be writing this :) It was perfectly clear to me that there was nothing to write about - I wouldn't even go to the movie, if they started showing anything better than "Harry Potter" :P (sorry if you're a fan) - because all I could see in the previews was darkness and flashlights (The Cave, huh) and IMDb rating suggested the movie sucked.
Fortunately, I chose it over the grim "Brothers Grimm" and was not disappointed. Of course, it is not much of a horror (are there any Hollywood horrors at all?), but it keeps you awake - interested in what will happen next and when you think you've anticipated the next turn of events, it just goes the other way :) A nice mix of myth, fact and fiction. It's obvious that people tried to make it a non-cliché movie and I'd say they were 95% successful. Nice monsters give it a shiny +, but it's still a movie of darkness, water and flashlights, so I give it a 8/10.
I hope that whoever of the three (Hunt/Steinberg/West) was responsible for making the movie what it is keeps up the good work outside "The Cave".
Il cartaio (2003)
boring and amateur
It is not a thriller, definitely not a horror movie, not even a drama. Just a bunch of actors, who obviously didn't know what kind of movie are they in themselves, running around like robots. Of course, what could you expect with such a cheap plot, that is only capable of cultivating long-obsolete techno-phobia? I'd expected at least as much as the movie this plot was ripped from ( providing this was the only preceding movie with identical plot ;), which is Ken Girotti's Hangman (2001). I had extreme difficulty in an attempt to find a worse movie than Il Cartaio. Don't watch it unless you want to see what shouldn't be filmed.