NinadeL

Another Iñárritu version of Amores perros, but this time with Hollywood actors. I still don't feel any particular connection or empathy for the characters that one might expect given the structure of the story and the escalating situations they go through. In short, 21 Grams is another example of manipulation of feelings. You need to subject the heroes to absolute suffering, then entangle and connect the stories, and then increase the suffering. That's what it's all about - about suffering, about denying yourself, about finding a way out. There’s too much violence in proportion to one meter of film.

I haven't seen Run Lola Run in a long time, but I'm finding myself having more and more enthusiastic reactions to Tykwer. And if he's working with Franka, then it's practically a sure thing. The wonderful inner world of The Princess and the Warrior is a magical modern fairy tale in a realistic setting, and even a real Disney-type storyteller would be ashamed of its positive charge. Lovely.

While waiting for Antonioni (they were supposed to make Beyond the Clouds together), Wenders went to Lisbon to shoot one of the many symphonies of cities. It's a theme that we find in the 1920s in the USSR, Germany, and the Czech Republic, but I really don't feel that it suits the 1990s any better.

I don't have the slightest interest in seeing the original German version, and that's kind of uncharacteristic for someone of my background. In the end, this disinterest in comparison indicates a slight contempt. I don't see anything attractive, interesting, or alarming about Funny Games. I was made to watch an entire Kubrick film in the past, and if he dealt with the unaddressed violence in A Clockwork Orange, he at least gave himself a job to do with the other motifs that are missing here, replaced only by an uninteresting loop from which there is seemingly no escape. Of course, Michael Pitt is not a bad actor, but I've seen his brash youthful style that shies away from nothing capitalized on much better. Finally, Naomi Watts is also a name that resonates in certain circles, as she is often sought after by popular directors, but as it happens, if you want to surprise with a strong female character, it's a classic joke to wrap that strength in the non-conflicted package of a petite blonde.

While The Illumination made me depressed, The Structure of Crystal is a pleasant non-conflict dialectic. The author asked himself questions about the meaning of life, and in the film, he has written these questions into two characters of old classmates, one of whom continues his academic career after school and the other lives a happy life in the countryside with his teacher. The traditional decision of every college student about how to proceed with life is the subject herein. Nostalgic in form, while still topical in content.

The Wild Emir on a quest for... what? Love? His native land? To come to terms with the past? Anyway, it is once again beautiful, and incredible, and all the emotions are accompanied by total destruction. It is probably not possible to have sex in the whole of the former Yugoslavia without several pieces of furniture, possibly a fence, or even some domestic animals getting in the way. And the shenanigans about the Montenegro Forest!

7 Days in Havana served only to amuse me with a parallel to the Czech normalization. Otherwise, it is probably only worthy of attention as an extreme Easter egg story with Kusturica playing himself. Or perhaps Medem's romance with Daniel Brühl. The biggest mindfuck is, of course, Noé, but there are no surprises when it comes him and just move on to the next day without a longer stop.

Antonioni's famous tetralogy of emotions with Monica Vitti is one big inflated bubble about wandering from nothing to nothing. It is about staging situations that are seemingly universal and yet banal. Here, for example, we have Milan and the story of a few hours in which we meet a married couple defined perhaps only by their penchant for better clothes and, especially for Jeanne Moreau, the need to dress up whenever the mood changes. If this is enough to make you happy, then go for it. Marcello, more than ever, is just a sort of silhouette of a man in a tuxedo, while Bernhard Wicki has too little room to achieve anything deeper. And Monica? She is only there to approve the fact that the couple actually dismantled her in one night. Aestheticized to the point of pretentious boredom elevated to art.

Of course, the post-war effort in individual national movie theaters to come to terms with the reality of war, which often did not end overnight for individuals or entire families, is unquestionable. Films with a strong humanitarian message can be found all over the world in the first post-war years. Hollywood couldn't be absent from this wave of coming to terms with the past. I'm simply afraid that I react very badly to leaving the entire weight of this unpleasant statement on the shoulders of a child hero. Rossellini's film, unfortunately, offers no partner for Edmund Köhler (Moeschke), making the message of Year Zero somewhat more intimate, turning the tragedy of a nation into the tragedy of an individual. I would consider that at least a topic for discussion, right?

It's okay, Emir just lives outside my universe. I find Goran Bregović's contribution unacceptable, as well as the imaginary fish and Depp's performance, who staggered then, just as now, between art films and commercial hits, and one could wallpaper one's room with him or let him go his own way.