Malarkey

A TV movie involving a whole lot of mediocrity: the actors, the screenplay and pretty much everything that is happening in the movie, or rather not happening. And that’s despite the fact that the story is pretty much made to be turned into a film and it really reminds me of last year’s Oscar-winning piece The Room. I didn’t really find that one amazing either. It might be because the entire movie is really impersonal and cruel. Raymond Cruz does everything in his power to ensure that a hundred people out of hundred hate his guts.

(Overheard in a discussion between two American soldiers on Sunday night patrol at the northern barricade in Damascus) You, brother remember how we used to only have to fight the fucking IS on this goddamn continent? -Yeah, those were the days. Now there’s these fucking monsters and the world is really turning into shit. At least if those pieces of shit wouldn’t look like they were from “Half-Life”, you know what I mean, right? -Sure, you’re right! Here’s me lying in my tent, scared out of my mind that one of those swine will jump on my head and start controlling me. -Exactly! And now imagine we have to fight them while that amateur filmmaker is following us, running here and there when things heat up thinking he will somehow turn that shaky material into film. And now get this, right. I think it’s supposed to be called Monsters – Dark Continent. -Dude. What else would you expect, this place sucks… -You’re right about that too.

It’s this strange ode to farmer families that live somewhere in the middle of the USA and take care of so many fields that they can undoubtedly feed not only their own state, but the entire country as well. The excellent cinematography showed me an interesting piece of America, which on the one hand is represented by beautiful nature, but on the other, it means thousands and thousands of acres of corn fields, which essentially means that you will be stuck here until you die living off nothing else than corn meal. So naturally, Zac Efron needs to become the model of the rebellious youth who is sick of farming and who wants to go make his big dreams come true. But sometimes we are not in this world to make our dreams come true. And every now and then it might happen that the rebelliousness will cause something nobody wanted to happen. The ending was pretty much a roller-coaster of emotions, which elevated the movie from a three-star to a four-star review. It’s a movie from a world that we will never be able to understand. That might be why the film got such bad reviews here. But if you work your way through the piles of farming bullshit, you will find out that this movie tells the story of a pretty big family tragedy. By the way, both Zac and Dennis are excellent.

I had a pretty strange feeling while watching this movie that the authors were trying to elevate the entire premise a notch through the mysterious atmosphere based on scenes from the Bible and on the fact that they were so orthodox. The beginning gets interesting pretty quickly, when decent cinematography is supported with excerpts from the Bible and I almost felt that I might have been watching a promotional video by the Mormon Church. What you get then is a psychological massacre rather than a pure thriller, which actually through pushing too hard as regards the family creates the impression of a chamber movie, but also of boredom. Well and at the end, it takes things up a notch again. In other words, whatever happens at the rednecks’, remains at the rednecks’.

Under different circumstance, I quite like these buddy action movies. With this one, however, I couldn’t understand why they turned the otherwise interesting car chase into a game video from “Grand Theft Auto 3”. Including the graphics. And that wasn’t even the only stupid scene in this movie. An incredibly chatty Kevin Hart along with the wacky Ken Jeong won’t save the movie either. So, what else can I say? I will happily avoid this piece next time.

My relationship to Pedro Almodóvar’s movies is like a seesaw. But I feel that with this film, he completely forgot that he wasn’t making movies only for himself but for his viewers as well. Already the first scene featuring Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas couldn’t have been more artificial. And that’s really hard for me to say this because otherwise I really like Penélope and Antonio. It’s a pity.

It took me a while to get used to the manner in which the story is told, which unnoticeably skipped forward in time sometimes by years so that it could tell the complex story all the way to the end. While watching the movie, I once again confirmed my idea that France is at this moment the most active country when it comes to gearing up against the Muslims. It might actually be the last thing they can do about the situation in their country. And in this one, they definitely didn’t fuck around, you gotta give them that. Nevertheless, I tip my hat off to the director for not being afraid to squeeze about 20 years of plot into the almost two hours the movie takes and for managing to tell the story not only in France, but also in the Near East and include in it a significant American actor, who enters the movie in an interesting manner only to step away from it inconspicuously. If it weren’t for some lengthy scenes, I would have given a five-star review. But I only realized that at the end because the ending totally killed me. Finally, another French movie that did its job the way it was supposed to.

In this one, animals speak in the voices of these two guys who I think must have had a long toke of some Malaysian Dragon kind of weed that knocked them into the state of ultimate unconsciousness with the ability to nothing more but dub characters in a cartoon. I personally kept watching this until the third episode involving cats, where I was expecting pretty much anything. Situational humor done by animals who have to deal with all the things you would never want to deal with… or shouldn’t. Sometimes it is interesting, every now and then it’s funny. It’s got character and mainly it is incredibly weird.

Isn’t it a bit obsolete to make a horror movie like this in this day and age?

Somebody drew inspiration from Tarantino, Ritchie and tried to turn all that excitement into some kind of home video. It looks very cheap and very bad.