Gutza

A brilliant exploration of the many, many types of love we humans feel towards one another, towards our spouses, parents, children, and siblings, erotic love, forbidden love, toxic love, love of God, love of our tormentors, love of life and love of living, delusional love, love of money, love of power, love for hire, lust and cheating, forgiveness and empathy out of love. And all of this in just eight self-contained, wonderfully executed one hour episodes. The music is perfect, almost every shot is a painting, the story is well told, the characters are consistent and yet evolve, the costumes and the.locations are gorgeous, and while the whole thing is about love there is not one cheesy, melodramatic scene. An absolute gem, I have literally no idea why it has such a low rating here.

I get DVDs and give the ones worth seeing to my father. That's exactly what I wrote on the Post-It attached to this one: "Excellent! (for an action movie)". This is what action movies should be all about. This is what James Bond movies used to be all about. Well, to be perfectly honest, I'd rather have a really good James Bond over a really good Mission Impossible, but since they don't even do reasonably good James Bond movies any more, I'm happy to embrace the MI franchise instead.

The movie is packed with action. But it's reasonably believable. It's packed with suspense. But not in an obviously artificial, silly way as recent action movies tend to. Technical terms are relatively frequent. But the explanations are either reasonable or not needed, as opposed to the confusing mumbo-jumbo we had to get used to lately.

But the most prominent feature which actually makes this James Bond-like is the touristic quality of the movie. James Bond movies were arguably the first mainstream, widely recognizable movies which featured several exotic locations per movie for the single purpose of enhancing the movie viewers' experience. Of course, the "real" James Bond movies added an extra touch of refinement which the MI series doesn't even attempt to touch. But the reality is that the "real" James Bond movies are really, really tacky by today's standards, in an Austin Powers sort of way. Really.

So, unless the James Bond franchise owners make a serious effort to update Bond's character while also keeping his British charm (which they obviously haven't over the last decade), we'll have to settle with the MI series as "the thing". And, to be honest, that would only be marginally disappointing in the greater scheme of things, if they keep their standards at the level of MI:3.

9/10 only because I still hope for James Bond to be resurrected--10/10 otherwise.

(I rate movies per genre; one can't compare this to The Godfather, or The Lord of the Rings, or The Matrix, or Schindler's List in any reasonable fashion, in my opinion.)

... quintessential pre-pop outrageous pop art rock opera freak show comedic hall of weirdos with a pumped-up 70s fragrance and sexual innuendo slide-show of parodic impossible-to-predict sci-fi implausible kind of impossibly over the top horror-meets-fantasy in a grotesquely but quite voluntary way of ridiculous and out-of-worldly piece of contemporary art-hinting quasy-minimalist semi-theatrical interpretation of an intentionally petty pulp-like quite erotic and kaleidoscopic, surprisingly accurate in trend prediction movie.

Quite remarkable.

{Note to editors (this should be removed from the posted comment): I'm aware I'm risking my free account with this post, and I could've easily refrained from posting it at all; I do however feel the "review" above is appropriately styled for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And yes, I also typically hate such "original" adjective lists. But this is no typical movie. Please just dump my review if you don't think it's a good idea after all. Regardless of your decision, thank you for reading this!}