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Reviews
Offset (2006)
Playing with stereotype
Technically, the movie is done very professionally, good lighting and camera. Sound is OK, does not really adapt to the various scenes. Acting is good, but the characters are simple and react always the same way (e.g. it is not understandable why Stefan does not drop her earlier).
The story begins interesting: a young German engineer comes to Romania. He meets Brindusa and they fall in love. They have to overcome the cultural differences.
The ex-lover of Brindusa and still her (married) boss tries everything from foul mouthing, sabotaging, threatening, bribing, to violence to get them apart. The French investors finally withdraw their offer to invest in his production line.
The German stereotype family arrives to meet the stereotype father of Brindusa.
At the wedding the boss arrives with a gun, shoots himself in the chest and Brindusa returns to him in the hospital instead of going to Germany. Why the hell one may ask? Maybe she is attracted by his macho behavior.
What really made me hate this movie is exactly this. Stereotypes which in the end make life together impossible. Romania is portrayed as a filthy place with violent, uncultivated people everywhere, Germans as overly moral and intrusive.
It left me with the feeling of "I never want to deal with Romanians".
The usage of 4 languages in the film seems stupid to me. Should it show, that everybody manages to speak 3 of the 4 to communicate and has a secret language with others?
A River Runs Through It (1992)
The movie reminded me of how lucky I am...
... to not live in Montana and especially not to live there at the end of the 19th century.
"A river runs through it" certainly is a well made movie from a cineastic stand-point. Great landscapes, Redford acting well.
Unfortunately, the story is bad (if there is a story at all).
I felt sorry for the narrator / author, who is as dry, narrow-minded a character as his father, a preacher. Being driven, not driving his own life, he is left to watch his brother, who is also caged in the small town environment, losing his life. The author never even comes close to undestand his brother's motivations, but at least realizes, that he is lacking the slightest amount of homour / fun. All there is, is fly-fishing, where he follows even as an old man the style of his father.
The end is not surprising, it is forseeable from the very beginning.
Definitely NOT a must-see (3 / 10)
The Shipping News (2001)
Spacey acts in a flawed story
"The Shipping News" could have been a great story. An average man faced with his family's brutal past in the remote wilderness of a small village. The novel/screen-play -- to me -- is intrinsicly flawed. It seemed that the author was bored of his story and tried to mix in elements of violent side-tracks.
Maybe I did not get the point, but why one needs that wife who beheads her husband, because his Hitler-Yacht crashed some boats? And why revitalizing a fisherman on his deathbed who runs a news-paper? The main story would have been interesting enough.
Spacey's acting is excellent, showing another face of his talent. The surrounding actresses are rather disappointing and colorless. It's Spacey who carries through the movie.
5/10 (for the acting and the great images of the landscape)