Malarkey

First, Woody Allen clumsily picked the mistress in the form of a 17-year-old masculine woman, who looks more like a boy from a cornfield than like an underage girl from Manhattan, and then he decided to bombard me with a few unrelated texts, which were actually supposed to make sense in the context of his way of life. The result is such that I actually found out that in Manhattan at the end of the 1970s they had tap water as rusty as the freshest beer from a local tavern and that girls sought out boys who could talk about art for 20 minutes straight in an ostentatiously dull manner. An interesting movie, but I cannot say that it impressed me all that much.

Three stars. And not a bit more. It was a good idea, but Victoria is so timid that it was hard to just watch her for 95 minutes. And her life story is ideal for a French drama. But where there aren’t emotions not even a leaf will move and what kind of France would it be without emotions?

I wouldn’t say that, from a philosophical standpoint, the movie Youth is worse than The Great Beauty. But its great advantages are the locations in the Swiss Alps, where there is a hotel in one valley for retired Western world stars from any industry. In the movie, you meet the standard professions. A fat soccer player, a miserable actor who starred in a role that is constantly being talked about by the public, a director who has his head full of thoughts about how to make his masterpiece, Miss Universe, who is of course very beautiful, or a composer who is tired by the fact that he composed something unique. All of them are here willingly, like on a vacation, to get some rest. They are all talking here, thinking, philosophizing, and they can, but don’t have to, be joined by their loved ones. And the nicest thing about it is that this movie was done by probably the most interesting European director of the modern era – Paolo Sorrentino, who appears to have learned those spectacular scenes from Stanley Kubrick himself. I am not giving it a full score only because there were so many ideas that I wasn’t able to get it all in those two hours. Nevertheless, it is still an unbelievable, not only movie experience with a finale that is exactly the sort of thing that makes movies so unique.

Who would have thought, that an Estonian-Georgian friendship would emerge in the field of cinematography and would be based on a story from the not so distant past when Abkhazia was swept by an ugly lady called war. Tangerines are one of the stories from this setting, and for its exotic location, it brings a very catchy, human story, to which there is nothing more to be added. It most closely resembles the Croatian movie No Man’s Land. Just as sad, and as absurd. Just like war itself.

I was afraid that Nightcrawler would disappoint me just like the movie Southpaw (it came out in the same year), where Jake Gyllenhaal was also starring. In the end, I was completely misled, because I got a very solid thriller. Nevertheless, I have to confess that I couldn’t imagine any possible course of the story and in the end, I was even surprised by the interesting development of the character itself. Jake is portraying such a psycho that even a certified psychiatrist wouldn’t know what to do with him. You can see the madness in his eyes, which scared me throughout the whole movie and I still have to think about it even now. Nightcrawler is definitely one of those movies that draw from an interesting idea and a brilliant acting performance. Well, and you don’t actually need anything else for a quality movie experience.

A great episode with Benno, who is investigating a murder whose only witness was blind drunk. The course of the investigation is pretty weak and it is mostly salvaged by Benno’s mom – Rösi, who is being paid off by the main witness – the official from Munich, because apart from being wasted, he also knocked down her fence and who knows what else. But all is well in the end and even Benno loosens up for once and lets himself be paid off with quality sex. No Bavarian can reject quality sex, as is mentioned at the end of the episode.

A typical TV movie that is betting on the quality of its locations. But the locations are so high quality that they pretty accurately characterize some typical characters of that time. I was the most annoyed by the priest, who was preaching God’s word so vehemently that I could compare him to the modern orthodox minority. When the elephant then saved a few people in the mines and they apologized to him because they were saved by an animal and not God, he was really making me sick.

The third episode, which is also the sixth one to be shot, makes its epic qualities really more than obvious. I feel that George Lucas told everyone that the first trilogy couldn’t be done in the 1970s, but he also did it on purpose so that the epicness of it could be built on the existing fame. Which actually, in the end, happened. I remember, that when I, back then, started with the newer trilogy, I was very uncertain after the second episode what would come in the third one. And the third one also started pretty slow. But the second half of the movie is, thankfully, a never-ending wipe-out that not only brings you the transformation of Anakin into Darth Vader, but there is also a solid amount of scenes some fans have been waiting for for 2 decades and which aren’t going to be forgotten easily. And that’s despite the fact that everybody even then knew very well what was going to happen and they still couldn’t help but feel the suspense that the third episode hides. For me a complete climax during which you need to wait out the first half-hour of political babbling so that you can enjoy the acting reincarnation of Hayden Christensen into one of the most powerful Sith Lord of that time.

During this movie, the hypnotist got quite a beating. And you wouldn’t really guess at the beginning of the movie that his ego could even admit it. During the first 10 minutes nothing major happens, but then a solid wipe-out starts, and it is reinforced by very decent effects and atmosphere, which could be cut with a knife. It’s nice that the whole mesmerizing story is being introduced by the Chinese creators in a way that it cannot be not understood. They explain the final, shocking punchline in a way that leaves you with no questions concerning your understanding. A pleasant small-scale movie I wasn’t expecting from the Chinese and I was, at the same time, pleasantly surprised.

Jonny Vang isn’t a completely ordinary boy in the middle of nowhere. He has a plan, and that is to breed earthworms and make cash off of it. But in the setting of the beautiful Norwegian nature, where the weather changes with every new shot, his job is made easier neither by his relationship with his friend and his friend’s wife nor by the debt he is surrounded by. But Jonny is, fortunately, very likable and so, from the beginning until the end, he has a bit of luck, which is being hinted at by the movie. Well, and since Jonny is also a bit of a weirdo, you can count on laughing a lot at times. And I am not even counting the endless dance creations, which the actor Aksel Hennie was presenting. Overall, in this debut, Aksel showed that he is a great actor whom you aren’t going to forget easily. The locations, characters, Western-like music. All of that makes this movie into 80 minutes of more than solid fun.