Marigold

No no no. Oddly enough, it sticks together nicely, and the action scenes work exactly the way they're supposed to. Steven Seagal has finally been given a fitting role, and before he can break his first criminal hand (and thus take part the traditional action dementia of his last period), he is taken out of the picture and other players take over the game. At first glance, this is about a dorky (but otherwise heroic, of course) agent in the standard version played by Kurt Russell, sexy stewardess Halle Berry (she is a good actress), Hercule Poirot with a shaved mustache, a non-Belgian accent and a tendency to use triggers instead of gray brain cells. Stuart Baird sticking clippings of other people's films side by side doesn't matter, because his collage holds together decently and leads the viewer to a well-thought-out but still entertaining finale in which Kurt Rusell conquers the honor and heart of a beautiful stewardess. That's the way it's supposed to be. At least on Friday around 1:00 am, anyway.

In Team America: World Police we find everything that made South Park a cult hit, but unfortunately, it’s too watered down. We get funny singing performances, really breathtaking caricatures (Matt Damon), parody references to popular films (Star Wars and The Matrix paraphrases, a wonderful love song about Bay's Pearl Harbor sucking), and in it we find the paradoxical combination of the artificiality of the artistic aspect and the nature of the other components... But it’s diluted. For quite a long time, Team America only rides the wave of parodying the action film genre, which unfortunately quickly gets old. It lacks the lightness and exuberance of South Park, as if a clearly chosen genre would bind the creators' hands after all. Better characterized main characters are also lacking, we do not get to see the evildoings of iconic types such as Kenny, Cartman and so on. Nevertheless, the finale and the resulting idea of the film turn things around, and I thus find Team America to be a very intelligent and apt satire on today's world, which may lack more mature poetics, but it does not lack perspective. And I appreciate that.

Luis Buñuel's famous work has, of course, lost its edges in many ways. Yes, contemporary cinema can certainly be more shocking, but, with all due respect to it, contemporary cinema can hardly go straight to the essence and, without unnecessary exaggeration, reveal the misery of mercy and austerity to the bone. Buñuel is a great aesthete, and I hunt in vain in my memory for a film with such a magnificent and organically integrated composition of the image... The aforementioned scene of the beggar feast is one of the highlights not only of the film, but of cinema as a whole. The perfect pointing-out of the idea through the paradoxical combination of image, music and their overall composition (the paraphrase of L. Da Vinci is eerily cynical heresy!) creates an incredibly impressive whole, from which the character of Viridiana, a beautiful woman committed to God and the service of the "suffering", must necessarily come out foolish and doomed to defeat. No wonder that the Church was irritated by it... Viridiana attacks with sensitive and supremely artistic means, not to insult and shout angrily, but only to reflect on the absurdity and true face of human nature. The absurdity of human action. If you save one suffering dog, you'll miss out on saving another one in no time. If you help a beggar out of the mud, he'll try to smear you. I watched Viridiana with a strange tremble and tension that only the films of the great masters arouse in me. It did not come from a surface that was seemingly peaceful and sedated, but rather it was based on the heart of a film in which the tragedy of a woman who dedicated her life to a great idea and was endowed with one great emptiness and disillusionment is born. With some criticism, I only look at Buñuel's all-embracing skepticism, but it is every artist's right to be subjective... Actually, that's what he's expected to do, right? The thorn crown burning scene seems to me like a really strong ace for the time period...

If The Aviator is anything to go by, it's a perfect example of top Hollywood, the Hollywood that Hughes helped build in the 1920s with his bold visions. It's a precisely-fulfilled genre scheme that offers both a breathtaking spectacle and great dramatic filmmaking. You can't help but praise the famous camera, the well-incorporated tricks, and the perfect period music that gives everything style and atmosphere. The story of Howard Hughes is not only a personal drama, but also a spectacular and epic spectacle in which some scenes bolt you to your seat in a "Hollywood" manner and don't let you breathe (the superbly shot aerial sequences are really worth it). More importantly, each part serves a monumental whole, and the monumentality of the whole does not overshadow the personal and not-very-idealized personal plane. Hughes' personality is the centerpiece around which everything spectacularly turns, not the other way around. That's what I appreciate about Martin Scorsese. He didn't succumb to a big topic and tried to go under the surface. He did not idealize, but he tried to tell the story of one of the fascinating carriers of human imagination and the desire to fly (figuratively and literally) in all shades. From where I was sitting, it clearly seemed that he had succeeded. The Aviator is a truly wonderful specimen of a biographical major film in all its dazzling sheen. There's no room for misery this time... The few extra minutes the film has can be considered a hereditary disease. And Scorsese was able to richly balance Logan's weaker script with his precise direction.

Gibson overstepped the mark here... True, the basis of the film is the same as that of his mega hit Braveheart, but unlike the campaign of the charismatic Scottish warrior William Wallace, the struggle for national independence of a certain Benjamin Martin does not have the right "scale". Scale in fulfilling the templates of a historical film, scale in the piling of clichés. Because The Patriot is uncomfortably predictable, and the emotional charge is generated is a way that is so toiling and obvious that nothing happens during the moment it's supposed to spark. The handsome poses of the statuesque hero Gibson do not help. Roland Emmerich, I think that's one big historical mistake, and I thank him for confirming it again with his sterile and inept direction. The script is one big mess, which mattes and kneads a potentially interesting topic in the most chewy and exuded way. The characters are so embarrassingly standardized that my memories of a Czech building film of the 1950s come back to me. Pathos, pathos, and pathos again. In the middle of it, you just have to appreciate something as mediocre as Gibson's acting. At least it elevates the film to slightly below-average, but its schematics and traditional Emmerichism ("being more Emmerichan than American") represent something I don't want to see again.

It's a shame to have to write words on this topic. National Treasure is a film so phenomenally mediocre and cold that I can scarce believe it was a commercial success. Yes, the American monuments are fine, the action scenes are civil, the Masons and Templars are an interesting subject... but in Turteltaub's style, it all feels too soulless. In addition, all the acting stars are out like a fire in the fireplace around 4:00 a.m. Considering the possibilities this creator had, there is no choice but to rate the result with a below-average grade and discourage all those who like the quality sound of Indy's whip from watching this film.

This isn't a film about war, it's a braving foray into the hell of the human soul into the backdrop of Vietnam. Like Conrad's Marlowe in Heart of Darkness, Coppola's Willard travels down the river in purgatory to find hell at the end of it. The apocalypse is conceived as a sequence of diverse stories that illuminate horror from different angles. Horror is the key word in the film. It doesn't matter if it's horror from the point of view of reed warblers or the French... it's the same horror Kurtz embodied in his apocalyptic and pagan-brutal encampment. It's the same horror that's been eating Willard since the beginning... Emptiness. The removal of humanity. Coppola's film is shot in an almost cynical tone. Absurdity often evokes Heller's Catch-22 with its power... Despite the runtime the gradation is amazing... I didn't find a weak spot. Every shot, every speech, every sound creates a riveting picture of horror on the bloody canvas of the Vietnamese jungle – suffering, loss of humanity, loss of self. I'm reluctant to write that Apocalypse Now is a metaphor. No, it's eerily literal and explicit. It is a direct image that impacts through all the means used. A masterful film in every way. In terms of suggestiveness, I don't know of any stronger war films. The actors have an incredibly naturalistic feel – crazy Brando, crazy Sheen... as if hell had consumed them. Apocalypse Now is masterful in the sense that while it says much about the nature of the Vietnam conflict, its impact is universal. It reveals something from the darkness of the human soul... And as for the oft-mentioned unfinished plot... can anything be said that still lasts? Coppola's Apocalypse Now doesn't end with headlines... in the film world, maybe.

A naïve thriller about the pernicious power of computers and computer terrorists... The theme is interesting, but technically not thought through... Even the plot is not much better, which, true, is quite exciting at times, but basically quite readable and unbalanced. Technical design – average to below average. Sandra Bullock earned the film a third star... and she is simply cute. That's what I call an argument, friends...

A classic Kitano film. At first, it has the pace of a snake charmer, but it all hangs on the viewer's willingness to accept Kitano's traditional game of breaking genre schemes. If you expect the story to be told to America by the fleeing Yakuza killer at a dynamic pace, you will soon be disappointed. Rather than a story, Kitano notices the characters, relishing situations that would be secondary in the action film genre (background, relationships) and seemingly key epic scenes are edited in surreal abbreviations. His lyricizing manuscript illogically recalls the rough-tender Kikujiro's Summer. A clear demonstration of how much this distinctive creator cares about NARRATED, gourmet (and perhaps a little ruthlessly) enjoyable subjective portrayal. The fact that the characters are different than one would expect by convention will only surprise those unfamiliar with Kitano. The same goes for the fact that the ruthless killer Brother (Kitano himself) hides another being under the mask, too. But it still works. Unlike Quentin Tarantino, Kitano doesn't make ubiquitous brutality a self-purpose poetic, but portrays it as the cold reality of gangster life... A cold reality that will eventually knock everyone's head off. A Japanese Godfather or a frantic gangster fugue, you'd like to write. But Kitano defies generalization. Brother will delight the audience with at least Joe Hisaishie’s excellent soundtrack... Those who like Kitano will enjoy almost everything about the film.

A little bit of an overdone film. Tom Hanks is excellent, and his Robinsonade is pretty well sketched, but the script slid across the surface, and the highlight of his skid is a terrible and over-complicated ending that clearly shows how much Zemeckis didn't know what to do with Chuck Noland's character. His whole story eventually drowns in horrible phrases and stretched melodramatic schemes, which is really unfortunate. Especially since Hanks is persuasive and apt... The little that the script allows him to show from Noland's insides is demonstrated with passion and great suggestion. But he can't pull off an entire film that's so down-to-earth and literal that it got on my nerves towards the end. It’s too bad, because the theme and some partial technical categories (camera, design) are promising... But the result is unnecessarily sweeping, pathetic and overdone. Yet, thanks to Hanks, quite convincing.