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Cool World (1992)
By all metrics I should have liked this, but it falls short
By all metrics I should have liked this.
The premise sounds good, the actors are A-list and do a generally good job in other movies, the characters and general art style is gritty and appealing.
But putting it all together it doesn't really work and click together as a whole. The story is nonsensical, the pacing feels off and the acting is awkward.
Brad Pitt does an alright job in the outside world, but looks like he's standing in an empty room or looking into the distance/empty void while he's talking to Toon characters. This could have been helped if the characters were played by actual people and just drawn over like in a few scenes later in the movie where actors are rotoscoped.
The doodles superimposed over the frame appearing every other minute filling and running across the screen with axes and other paraphernalia also feel very superfluous/lazy and subtract from the overall mood.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)
Boring and Nonsensical
Similar to other late Marvel movies, full of tired jokes that are played out by now.
Script writing and plot that seems to lack any coherence or consistency.
They start off by wanting to "save Rocket", in the process they invade several high-security facilities, put thousands of lives at risk including their friends and their own, watch as a planet with presumably billions of sentient creatures gets blown up without trying to do anything to save it (or them). Then once again put an entire settlement with thousands of people's lives at risk and have it invaded (Knowhere) to save a few of their friends lives that decided to board the big bad's ship in a "funny" scene and then decide that they have to save a few hundred children or animals because as opposed to the creatures on the planet these ones really matter.
In the process they sometimes decide to horribly injure or murder random people like guards or a scientist while sparing the life of the big bad that just blew up a planet, because... reasons. Maybe his ugly face triggered a bout of sympathy or they are suddenly "the Guardians" or something.
It all doesn't really make any sense anymore. Spaceships go Woosh, Guns go Bang or Pew, Planet and Space Station go Boom.
"Did that look cool?" No, no it didn't.
Blonde (2022)
What could have been an interesting Biopic sadly marred by being saddled with the wrong movie director
What could have been an interesting Biopic sadly marred by being saddled with the wrong movie director, that for some reason thought every second scene should have been "psychedelic" or "experimental" and that drags on for at least an hour too long. Also with what feels like a too liberal interpretation of real events, which is obvious even for someone that doesn't know too much about the subject matter. I don't think Ana de Armas was necessarily miscast, but she didn't have much to work with between director and script writer (which are seemingly the same person).
Maybe good as an anti-abortion or anti-drug PSA Awareness movie. Not so much as a biography about Marilyn Monroe.
Von Caligari zu Hitler: Das deutsche Kino im Zeitalter der Massen (2014)
Great pictures from the Weimar Republic and its most famous movies marred by Postmodernist rhetoric
You'll get to see amazing pictures of 1920s and 30s Berlin and Germany and get to know a few influential movies of the Weimar Republic period of German cinema along with some less known examples in the latter half. Unfortunately the basis for the documentary and narration is based on Siegfried Kracauer's book "From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film" published in 1947, which is filled with Postmodernist gibberish and sociologist analysis and interpretation through a decidedly Frankfurt School lens describing the time period, directors, other people involved and the movies, often even self-contradictorily so. A few of the interviewees picked also don't seem to hold any deeper insights into the time period and it's questionable what they add to the documentary or for what reason they were chosen.
Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
Overrated
It wasn't a bad movie really in my opinion but it seems way overrated... Watched it, and after all the awards and praise I was hoping for something to blow my mind or at least be extremely entertaining, instead I got a solid 7.
Compared with City of God (which is similar in many aspects) this can't really hold its ground. For one because the first was actually based on a true story and thus also written and filmed believable from the start up to the end and it was a movie depicting things as they really are (albeit maybe a little flashy) and focusing on the life story of one individual in the middle of it all, as opposed to Slumdog, which mainly focuses on the "Who is Gonna Be A Millionaire"-show (seemingly to be more appealing to the western civilization and TV viewers) all around... No surprise with shows like "American Idol" and "Dancing With the Stars" leading the ratings in the US and in some cases International TV, while shows with brains get the axe by the minute.
If you want to view it as a "mirror" into Indian culture etc. I guess it was okay, but again it focused too much on the show and the respective answers. There are movies with a more... subtle approach that I liked more and imo succeeded better in doing that, e.g. Darjeeling Limited for example...
Also there were some cringe worthy moments like the flashbacks near the end, how he couldn't answer some of the more simple general questions, but somehow "circumstances" allowed him to answer questions in the show, and how winning just by coincidence saves ones entire life and is something to be admired, a few of those ruined it even more for me...
An okay movie, but 8 Oscars and so much international acclaim? (While City of God didn't get one) I smell something fishy xD
Wonder Woman (2009)
Great animated movie
...But this movie was the best of the new Animated DC and even Marvel movies coming out yet (maybe with an exception of the Justice League: The New Frontier Movie), which might've been a bit better...
Everything just fit from the Storytelling, Jokes to the Action and even the Voice cast... usually they tend to overdo it (especially on the Action part) but it was just about right in this feature.
More of them in this quality please, I'd even like a TV show if it stays like this :P
I gave it an 8/10 with a tendency upwards.
MOAR!
Inkheart (2008)
Nice special effects, nice general ideas...
...even most of the characters were depicted/played pretty good, but the script and/or story writer failed HORRIBLY.
The characters called "Silvertongues" basically have the power to induce the Apocalypse at any given time by reading Fantasy/Sci-Fi Books aloud and yet they mostly just dick around, risking their own lives and the lives of their loved ones by trying to go solo against an army of bad guys.
The villain is about as scary as a paper-cut and seems to be one of those sorts of comic-book villains that can never really get things done even though he has almost infinite resources (to not say anything about him not being able to keep some civilians under lock)...
Also the writing something down and reading it aloud was a major plot point that bugged me throughout the whole movie... they could've basically done anything from writing his wife back to summoning a death-star to kill the bad guy when they first found out about him. Yet again they fail to do so throughout till the very end (and when they do it is for something completely stupid, like wishing by a storm that could kill them and actually RUNNING through it while there's cars being torn into the air and falling down besides them instead of say a magical shield so they cannot be harmed or an Archangel or whatever to help them out a bit), in which they don't seem to be very keen of getting it over with quick but indulge in poetical rhymes, similes and alliterations while they're just about to get SLAUGHTERED. There's a plot-point that they can't influence events of one book if it isn't written in the same style (albeit somewhat stupid but okay) it doesn't exclude elements out of other books in the real world to counter them... After all Toto & all those mythical creatures attacked the bad guys near the end... yeah Toto seems to have been the ultimate killing machine they could've thought of throughout xD
It could've also been a lot nicer if the whole thing didn't focus on a barely selling bad fantasy novel called Inkheart, just dripping with cheesy and seemingly slightly retarded characters to start with, but I guess that's another thing. (I'm talking about the book "Inkheart" as depicted in the movie, which they're constantly searching for to read stuff out of it not the "real" one the movie is based on.)
Somewhere between a 4-5/10 for me.
Eden Log (2007)
Man wakes up in a cave, sets on a journey to the surface discovering all sorts of wondrous and weird things and is finally presented with a decision.
Didn't expect much when I started it and thought it might be some kind of horror like "The Descent" to pass some time...
At first, especially during the first 5 minutes I was kind of confused and might've even turned it off, the constantly flashing light and the grunts of the main character put me off quite a bit, until the story started to unfold and I got to watch one of the better Sci-Fi's I've seen in the last few years.
I guess the movie is either underrated because people turned it off in the very first few minutes or because they expected a horror-movie/didn't pay enough attention to understand the plot.
It was great to see the hero start with a completely clean slate, while discovering what is going on all around him and uncovering the plot and the setting of the movie-world to finally even find out about his true identity and still do what he deemed right with all of his newfound experiences and pieces of information in the back of his mind.
For me it's somewhere between a 7 and a 8, I gave it a 8.
Donkey Xote (2007)
Who the hell wrote this?
While the animation and style of the movie aren't half bad, in fact (besides of background stuff and vegetation not exactly moving much and the characters seeming lifeless every now and then) it seems better than a lot other animated movies (except anything by Pixar or Dreamworks of course).
That said the writing is horrible, mainly because the story doesn't seem to make any sense WHATSOEVER. From what I gathered it seems to play a few years after Don Quixote's fight against the windmills and all of his adventures and the movie is to about 50% about Sancho's Donkey (thus called Donkey Xote). The actions and traits of the characters deviate from one scene to another and the story even gets into the bizarre at times.
For example we got a "bad guy", that isn't really evil... more conflicted or confused cause he wants to get famous. And he seems to be the kind of guy that believes the best way to make you leave a city would be to make everyone else disappear so you feel unwelcome, then block all the rivers and burn all the food so you'll have to leave after a while instead of say throwing you out directly... and while that might have some sort of style it's illogical and this movie is riddled with similar stuff. Also there's some of his minions that want to kill some of the protagonists at one point and after the heroes managed to save themselves, there doesn't seem to be any grudge and both parties just walk away.
With a decent script this could've been a nice animated movie similar to say Shrek but as it stands right now it's somewhere between a 3-4 for me.
The Love Guru (2008)
Just painful to watch...
The jokes shoot and miss throughout the entire movie. It didn't make me laugh or grin even once and for the 2nd half I was occupied thinking "When is it finally going to be over?".
Without the booty here and there and Jessica Alba as eye candy I probably would've even stopped watching it after a while (It's got a lot in common with Uwe Boll's latest disaster "Postal", also is it just me or can you tell which comedy is going to suck by checking if they have "midgets" on the cast just for cheap laughs?).
It's too bad really, because with a decent script and a good director it could've been great, maybe not another "Austin Powers" but something similar to "The Guru of Sex" from 2002, which wasn't really all that bad and had some great moments.
The New World (2005)
Quite slow and even partially boring.
It's probably my fault that I watched this movie immediately after I've seen Apocalypto and had an immediate picture in my mind of how (good) this movie could have been.
Compared to it, not even the costumes seemed realistic and rather actually rather "dull". The second mistake, was probably to expect a similar movie that is more focused onto the colonists and the colonization process itself. The movie even starts in that way and keeps the impression up for quite a while, but it ends up in being a slow love-story which centers only on Pocahontas for almost the entire second half of the movie.
You really got to love long camera-shots focusing on her just walking around the set or staring at someone for minutes on end to actually begin liking the second half of the movie, not to talk about various long nature shots dubbed with the overly illustrious theme music of the movie for over 2 minutes.
It had some good things about it though, especially the beginning made me wonder what it would have been like to have lived at a time like that, while having completely different things to worry about compared to today and with large parts of the world still unexplored and "mystical" (Here be Dragons), in which you didn't have a Google Earth at the tip of your fingers to zoom in and see any island or part of the world you want from above or being able to fly there in a matter of hours.
5/10 even though it's more likely only high 4 for me personally.
Innocence (2004)
The first part was a lot better
To start with, the beginning of the movie and especially the technology and animations it is done with are a lot more advanced, which could be expected about 10 years after the first part was made. But the plot (in my opinion) can't hold up with it's predecessor and especially the last 2/3rds of this movie gets to be full of pseudo-philosophical BS where the two protagonists decide to quote "great men of history" about every 3rd spoken sentence (which surprisingly didn't happen in Part 1 a lot), which also kind of adds a lot of absurdity to it. Besides of that I also liked the character development in the first part a lot more.
All in all a pretty decent Anime, but not more than a 5/10 from me.
300 (2006)
An epic tale of heroism from the oldern times, retold with the technological possibilities of today.
As the title says, the best way to describe this movie and everything it resembles is by saying it is a epic tale summarized and retold with todays technological possibilities.
It is full of exaggeration, hyperbole and yes even close-mindedness... But it is told out of the viewpoint of the Spartans, it doesn't even try to be historical or politically correct and is also idealizing a lot of things, but it accomplishes every single one of those feats greatly. For me it transcended the feeling you get from reading old sagas (like Hercules or Odysseus), full of heroic people fighting and defeating monsters and demigods, the slow-motion and all those other effects all seem to serve as a means to making the movie seem more epic and it certainly succeeds at that.
9 / 10
The Fountain (2006)
Great Cinematographic value but hard to watch.
When I decided to watch this movie all I had seen about it was a short glimpse at the genre and the rating on IMDb. I thought I would be tuning in to another fantasy movie but boy was I wrong.
The movie itself and the story were wonderfully weaved, but it depressed me over a certain degree a usually enjoyable movie should do in my opinion... I have a problem with just "accepting" mortality as a given but that seemed to have been the movie's main point and throughout it I was torn between liking it as a piece of art, full of symbolism or hating it because of the overly dramatic value and forced ideas I do not really agree with and which also make me feel somewhat uncomfortable.
In the end I ended up giving it a 8/10, because of the first but as a warning to anyone expecting to watch this movie as a pure piece of entertainment and without inciting any heavy thinking, just don't... It really is not that kind of a movie.
Eragon (2006)
Worst fantasy movie ever?
I expected something of at least the quality of Dragonheart before watching it, maybe not an excellent but a good enough movie but oh boy was I wrong.
I nearly started crying at the end with the words "Why is this so bad?" tacked to the back of my mind splurging into my brain every few seconds I couldn't even concentrate on watching it anymore... Mostly because of the many plot holes, the weak actors and the unbelievably cheesy story writing. No character development whatsoever, the boy rises from the status of a stupid farm-boy to a national hero killing "the mightiest sorcerer" and at that winning a war almost singlehandedly in what seems to be 3 days...
Imagine Frodo defeating the Balrog in Book1 of The Lord of the Rings after he makes it to Bree. I also couldn't help but ask myself who the hell are the Waden (Warden?) and why can't anyone find them if they seem to have near mind-reading abilities or why can't they capture/pay off one of the several thousands of people living there? Why does the hero seem to be ready to go and save the princess from his arch nemesis 2 days after he held a pitchfork in his hands and why did about every character have only about one introductory sentence before they joined up with the group?
Oh well... maybe it was just me but I don't think so. This is the only movie that I've actually rated a 1/10 in over 500 titles, for that it can be proud of itself.