Goldbeater

Well, you won't get much blood in this PG-13 slasher, but you certainly can feel the overly pretentious script bleeding to death. I have a number of problems with this movie as a whole, and especially its final meaning, which I could write about, but I don't want to make waves. However, I consider this type of one-sided views à la "only I am right and I have to shove my truth down EVERYONE'S throats" as very ignorant, vulgar, and even dangerous. Especially in connection with the director's excuses, who claimed that the audience the movie was intended for wasn't men (so she alienated half the audience in advance) and that it is necessary for as many young girls as possible to see it. Fortunately, the movie is so bad and ridiculously laughable in every way that even people with the IQ of a pumpkin couldn't possibly take it seriously. What a total garbage.

This is a just-about-bearable remake that doesn't just try to milk the original, but at least wants to give an interesting backstory to the antagonist Billy, creating a pretty bizarre Christmas legend. The stumbling block, however, is that the screenplay just does not seem to be interested in anyone else, so we just have a group of generic characters lining up to be the next victim. However, there is a certain ingenuity in the gruesome presentation of each of the grisly murders in this movie, that cannot be denied.

This is a feel-good movie about a wannabe heavy metal band, a bunch of village misfits, trying to make it to the big time, without actually knowing how to do it. There is a gentle humour, a relaxed atmosphere, a positive vibe, and just some very good ideas going on in this movie (taking a promotional photo using police radar was genius!). I won't be using any real superlatives for this movie, but I did enjoy it and it was decently paced.

Just like Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, this is an equally haphazard and badly-written lazy movie, in which anything goes, even in totally bullshit ways, because you know very well where this movie is headed, it is so utterly predictable with a lack of any new ideas. The villain of the piece again "exists" only out of necessity, and does practically nothing, posing no real threat or danger to the main characters. The funniest part of this movie is the fact that Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart had the opportunity to impersonate and caricature the manners of Danny DeVito and Danny Glover, but is that really enough to fill out a two-hour movie?

I am pleased that finally, an adult comic-book movie has turned up, and is more financially successful with audiences than other comic-book movies (although Logan did prove this as a winning formula some years ago). And I kind of hope that this will change the tendencies of comic-book movies in the future, which are simply regurgitating the same old ideas and are mostly all the same today. In any case, it must be said that even Joker doesn't really come up with anything new but presents a somewhat shallow story in a pleasingly stylish way. I am annoyed by the attitude of the creators, who on the one hand say, "here's a comic-book movie for adults," but at the same time tend to lead the audience by the hand - like when a scene in which the Joker discovers he had imagined a number of his happy memories (which is clear from the first scene) but for some reason still had to be presented as an almost Shyamalan twist and explained away by retrospective scenes where the Joker talks to an imaginary character, and then it's later shown that he is actually alone all the time, so that even the dumbest audiences understand it to the letter. It's a very cheap thing that does somewhat insult the audience's intelligence for an otherwise serious movie, and which undermines the whole principle of feeling that the creators are playing fair. Otherwise, of course, Phoenix and De Niro are great in their roles, there's the stylish design, cool music and soundtrack, and so on. It's just not the flashing lightning bolt from heaven for me as it seems to be for others.

Live Wire is an explosive fun that's a totally striking B-movie, and while at the same time one of the first "bomb thrillers" featuring the explosives experts typical of the '90s (among others Blown Away, The Specialist, Speed to some extent etc.). On one hand, it's a fun thriller with the bizarre and very catchy idea of "live detonators", which results in a couple of very cool scenes with explosives, on the other hand, it's a movie imbued with so many clichés and garbage dialogue that it hurts. I really like Pierce Brosnan, but he has a pretty badly written role here (I had to laugh out loud at the tackiness of his flashback with his daughter). With narrowed eyes, it is better than average, like when Ben Cross from the movie Chariots of Fire plays the over-the-top villain to which I say, "yes please!"

The Bad News Bears is the absolute archetype of modern sports movies, in which a team of total outsiders joins forces in an impossible fight against an elite team. At the same time, it is still a fun positive movie that can be thoroughly enjoyed. The great Walter Matthau pulls off a first-class performance as usual making it a top-notch movie about a man who drowns the sorrows of lost successes in the beer bottle, until he finds a more noble way to redemption, and is full of his own heartfelt cynicism. You feel sympathy with him as he begins to train a group of a bunch of seemingly hopeless baseball players. Tatum O'Neal and Jackie Earle Haley are also great here.

Well, this is absolutely just a dressed-up Latin American soap opera. And the fact that the screenplay consciously lets the characters admit to it out loud during the movie does not justify it. For me, the third Bad Boys installment is a pretty random continuation of the previous two movies, in which Michael Bay is clearly missing during the action scenes, and it's quite hard to accept even though he puts in an entertaining cameo. The ending is just a total washout of a cliffhanger, maybe only just worthy of the trashy Fast and Furious movies, but I always considered Bad Boys a slightly more solid franchise.

In the late 1990s, Stephen King was able to start taking advantage of the fact that book and movie publishers were courting him, throwing so many offers at him he shamelessly unleashed his graphomaniac tendencies and abilities to write the screenplay for Sleepwalkers. The story centers around a pair of vampire-like creatures, who instead of drinking blood suck life force, and instead of fearing sunlight, fear cats who put them in mortal danger, and they indulge in incestual games and can make not only themselves but also their giant cars invisible (?!). The whole thing doesn't really make any sense and falls apart if analyzed. However, it does have a certain trashy charm. Let's say that Mick Garris managed to deal with the hobbled subject matter quite OK, and it's mainly watchable thanks to the casting of Mädchen Amick. My favorite scene is the cameo of King himself as meddlesome cemetery caretaker who is gradually pushed aside by both Tobe Hooper and Clive Barker. John Landis, Joe Dante and Mark Hamill also appear in cameo roles - Mick Garris was able to put together quite a respectable team.

Wow, another unbelievably low-energy action movie, which tries to juggle a bare-bones storyline, zero character development, undynamic “action" scenes, and frankly execrable ideas to balance with a colourful wannabe "cool, jerky style", and is riding on the modern “girl power” wave (it’s pushed to the limits here because all the male characters are scummy low-life criminals, dirty rotten scoundrels, despicable traitors). After a completely brainless Suicide Squad, I went into this with zero expectations. The fragmented plot jumps awkwardly around here and there, lacking any real atmosphere, and is a disparate nuisance. The characters at best represent typical clichés of what we've already seen a million times (the under-appreciated policewoman, the vengeful daughter of a mafia boss). In the worst case, a couple of characters are just simple props not really doing that much, occasionally used in a scene (the bar singer and the thief with a diamond in her gut). Most of all, I didn't understand the pair of antagonists, the theatrical effeminate male villain who is quite a bastard, and a childish drama-queen heroine who kills people and is quite a bitch, leading to the question of why we should cheer on Harley Quinn. Just because the movie demands it of us? Perhaps it's only because we have only been acquainted with Harley for two movies, compared to slack-jawed villain Black Mask, an uninteresting character Ewan McGregor endeavours in vain to make interesting or at least counterbalance with some crazy overacting. One might say that the screenplay gave McGregor little else left to work with. I would say that there was another option for him - just not to take part in this movie at all. And further, I would advise you not to watch this movie at all.