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Reviews
American Sniper (2014)
War as pictured by an 8-year-old
I'm German and I keep being baffled by American movies so disconnected from reality that they are basically a 2 hours long joke.
People call this film propaganda, but I think the "child vision" factor is much more disturbing:
The enemies are bad savages, the US guy is kind of an Übermensch - a modest hero who helps anyone he can, with the relationship to his wife being one pile of overemotional schmalz (grease), to use another word from my language.
It's a parody of a war movie, and I can't understand how people can even seriously discuss it, let alone be moved by it. Heck, even 80s action flicks with Arnold & Stallone had more artistic value, and you knew from the beginning you were watching nonsense.
I'm giving this movie 4 points for a few nice action scenes.
The Matrix Resurrections (2021)
Not bad, better than parts 2 and 3
I saw the original trilogy in the theater. I thought parts 2 and especially 3 were just boring. A friend who accompanied me for part 3 actually fell asleep during the movie. I can hardly remember what the plot was about.
This fourth part, while certainly not perfect, is well made with some sophisticated action scenes with a kind of suspended motion effect I have not seen in this quality before. Not great, but entertaining and fun. It seems to be targeted at an older audience that has seen the older movies when they came out. Refreshing to have heroes for once who are not 20 years younger than me.
Extraterrestrial (2014)
Fun film, though purposely formulaic
Saw it yesterday at the Fantasy Film Fest here in Hamburg. Technical quality and cinematography were respectable, this seems much easier to get right with today's digital filming technology than a decade ago. There is a bit of a B movie atmosphere later on, but at least it wasn't like I was watching a video game - something that happens all too often with major productions these days. The acting is quite alright, I've seen worse in top productions. It was a bit of a pity that the ETs are shown rather early (although it's fairly clear from the beginning that they will appear), suspense could have been higher without this. Also, the movie tells its story in a very classical way and cites many well-known sources, so if you want innovation or surprises, you'll have to look elsewhere. Nor can you expect another Alien or ID4. Still fun to watch, with a macabre ending.
Dead Survivors (2010)
Pretty abysmal
Even for an indie movie, this flick is rather atrocious. A bunch of school kids (one of them still has braces!) stroll through so-called "Raccoon City", which looks suspiciously like an East German town, call each other by English names and ranks they can't even pronounce correctly ("Cornel" Templar?), shoot other kids with bad makeup using what's obviously blank guns, and mumble silly dialogs that could've been written by a fifth grader, with no acting skills whatsoever. I'm referring to the original German audio, the English dub is even worse. Some errors are funny and likely deliberate, e.g. fumbling with an ammo box with the logo of a well-known fireworks brand and a "9mm blank" designation in plain view. But there are not enough of these ironic moments to save this trash-fest. Avoid, unless you dig the worst of the worst in movie making.
Vanishing Point (1971)
Maybe I just don't get it..
Maybe I just don't get it, but from my point of view this sorry effort managed to match the stupidity of today's Hollywood CGI fests, which is quite rare for an early 70s film.
Nothing of it made much sense. You see some slightly strange looking guy driving around, meeting characters seemingly taken straight from a bad comic book with totally artificial and unbelievable dialog, plus whacked out sequences apparently written while being high on heaven knows what. Worst of all was the black DJ - incredibly annoying.
And the car chases weren't that impressive either, especially compared to other movies of that era. Most of the time the cars were going pretty slow with the impression of speed achieved through various tricks. This is common today but it wasn't back then. I would've expected at least a few short scenes with the Dodge going 100-150 mph, speeds I regularly drive on the Autobahn. Cuts and special camera angles are not a substitute if you know the real thing.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
I'm a fan of art-house movies, but this was just dull
Most American/Hollywood material is far too shallow for my taste and I love many slow "artsy" movies from the likes of Wenders or Fassbinder. But I have to say, even after watching 2001 with an open mind now and the suspicion in the back of my head that I might have been too young to understand it when I first saw it about one and a half decades ago, this movie just does not deliver. Main problems:
1. What creativity, symbolism or beauty is supposed to lie in painfully slow sequences of someone using technical appliances?
2. The kaleidoscope effects, inverse images etc. towards the end were playing for far too long. Overusing such effects comes across as rather primitive.
3. Most of the acting was plain bad. I did like the voice acting for HAL though.
4. I don't want to sound like a Trekkie, but a computer with full control over the whole ship with no easily accessible manual override is an unbelievable concept. Plus the supposed infallibility even though the machine was created and programmed by fallible human beings. I could accept it if I could see an artistic reason for this, but I don't. It appears like some standard sci-fi component of the time thrown into the mix.
My rating: 4 of 10 for some good cinematography and a (mostly unsuccessful) hint of artistic endeavor.
Deep Impact (1998)
When I saw this "movie", I knew I've had it with the US film industry
To describe Deep Impact is simple: 1 or 2 minutes of special effects (comet hitting the earth, the flood dispersing) and a tedious excuse for a movie knitted around them.
That's really all it is. Of course, all the trailers consisted mainly of material from the above mentioned few minutes to lure people into the theaters. Unfortunately, it worked for me. Never before and never after have I been so bored in a theater. The SFX were alright, but when I got out of the hall I had to wonder about the sheer bizarreness of the situation after I had to wait over 100 minutes for them to show up during which I had the impression I was watching something slightly above the quality of a Spanish Telenovela.
Braveheart (1995)
nice popcorn movie with a bad influence
The cinematography and action is indeed impressive, but that's about it. None of the commentators here seems to have noticed the most obvious and ridiculous aberration from the historical facts: Since years before the movie was made, it was discovered that the right of "prima nocte" (first night), in the form the movie depicts it, was a myth. It was completely inappropriate for feudal lords to engage sexually with the 'lesser' people, also, such a right would have caused massive uprisings everywhere. It is said that the parallel to reality is probably that a lord could demand a monetary compensation for someone leaving his reach through a marriage, immediately on the first night after the wedding.
Many of these myths, often dealing with things like torture and oppression, have been established in the 19th century when the people wanted to delimit their time from the "dark ages" by depicting the latter in the most gruesome way possible, thus elevating their achievements and the hope for a better future. I think a movie, fiction or not, should not support these myths. Too many will believe it. The 'prima nocte' scenes from Braveheart have already been referenced to by writers dealing with sexual violence etc., so its influence has indeed spread to serious works.