Reviews

Dragon Ball is one of the most popular anime titles of our time, when ever you look up at message boards where someone starts a topic about which anime should be broadcast on TV again, this title is bound to be mentioned. I myself have no clue why. Watching Dragon Ball is like watching a Steven Segal or a Chuck Norris action flick: an endless array of fights, the main hero always wins. There are no surprises here, everything is predictable, everything is the same... And worst of all, it goes on and on. This show has no common sense to end the story at least in a fair amount of time, to qualify for a guilty pleasure. No. Instead it sets itself to become one of the longest soap operas ever, an epic garbage. Imagine a Sergio Leone epic without Leone's sense for style, measure and weight, and you have Dragon Ball. The first, original season had 153 episodes, the second one, Dragon Ball Z, had 291 (!), and if that weren't enough we have another 64 episodes of Dragon Ball GT, and - I kid you not - another 98 episodes of Dragon Ball Kai. But do not be fooled, folks. This is no Tolstoy, not by a long shot. Sheer quantity over quality can easily become an overkill.

Here on IMDb, Dragon Ball has a rating of 8.6 out of 10, but Segal's movie Out for a Kill has only 3.1 out of 10. Why the discrepancy when both are of equal merit? I have to ask the voters who gave Dragon Ball a 10 (or even a 7) the same question as one of the protagonists posed to writer David in Ingmar Bergman's tragedy Through a Glass Darkly (1961): "What life truths have you done in your work?" The questions seems almost ridiculous for this show: it has no truths about life, not a single one. When you encounter a problem, what are you gonna do, perform a kame-hame-ha? When you have to train, are you seriously gonna copy Son Goku's moves? The experience you take away from this show is nonexistent, it is just some guys fantasy about beating up stronger people around him stemming from his frustration. I enjoy a few humorous moments involving Bulma and Kuririn, and that's why I give it two stars. Other than that, I do not want to waste my time on such a long and bad show that is just one huge wrestlemania (and not a good one, at that, either. Compare this to One Piece, which has much more style, imagination and capability of crafting great fights and showdowns). I know I am gonna get hate mail after this, but I don't care, it is irelevant. I enjoy trash and cheese when I want to relax, but I am never gonna say that trash is something great. If you want to spend over 100 hours of fights to get nowhere, enjoy Dragon Ball. If you really want to grow up and realize there is so much more to life, do yourself a favor and watch some epics that nobody heard of, but are classics of wisdom and intelligence, like Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Evangelion or Steins Gate.

Just like users at the IMDb board here, I too am at wonder why Hitchcock had the urge to remake this film. Agreed, Leslie Banks is no James Stewart, but Bernard Miles is no Peter Lorre, either, who gave a truly creepy performance as the main villain - with a face of a villain. One can argue that the 1956 film is technically superior than the 1934 original, but even that is relative, since the 1956 Panavsion has been surpassed by modern cameras. It does not matter, I have to hand it to Hitchcock - if there is one reason for a remake, than it is for the director to remake his own original film himself! Here, Hitchcock directed "twins" that are equally good, giving that pure suspense story he knows how to build, here (and in the remake) revolving around parents trying to find a kidnapped child and accidentally finding themselves into a spy conspiracy ring. The dentist sequence is very inventive for its time and might have inspired The Marathon Man (1976), while I enjoy that black and white cinematography that gets me back into those good old times of passionate filmmaking and mood. The flaws? For my taste, the ending seems to drag, and the finale is nowhere nearly as good as it could have been. Honestly, though, it does not matter, both films are classics. Which ever version you chose, you cannot lose.

Yes, I know that Modern Times were not Chaplin's first attempt at drama (the first one was A Woman of Paris, that did not go well with the critics or the audience, and the poor Chaplin even had to apologize for trying out something honest!), but it is his first successful and winning formula of smuggling a drama in the disguise as a comedy. While even City Lights showed Chaplin in a dramatic role, Modern Times seems to me, even today, as primary a dramatic, tragic film about the Great Depression, and only secondary as a comedy. Bear with me, I am aware that there are a lot of laughs in this one, yet watching the movie as a whole, as a context, they seem to be there to at least keep a little will for life in the otherwise bitter, sad and depressing story. Heck, even the ending is revealing.

Chaplin here plays his iconic Tramp, except that this time practically half of all the characters in the movie can be labeled as such - bums, poverty, unemployment, poor living conditions, the story is even more relevant today after the 2008 financial crisis. Heck, you could screen this at the shelters, the people would identify with this for sure. Chaplin was rich, but he came from a very poor family and never forgot how it is to work hard for a living. He was aware of the changes in the society and how millions of people were struggling to survive, so he channeled their frustration into this movie, a warning to the people in charge to do something. Things eventually improved, only to just recently get back to a state Chaplin was warning all along. Modern Times are a classic of unobtrusive social commentary, an ironic tragedy where technology - instead of making jobs easier for the people - just made them work even more, and the wages were so low you could not afford to live. Inside Job (2010) or Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) cannot even hold a candle to this. The sequence where Chaplin is frantically trying to keep up with a production line, tightening bolts, may not be as iconic or recognizable as his 'shoe dance' in The Gold Rush, but it is way more identifiable and easier to connect with the daily life, at least for me.

David Wark Griffith was a pioneer of cinema because he dared to explore in a time when people were playing it safe, when a film was a conservative medium (in the US, at least), try out something new, he was curious and adventurous, which in the end resulted in a few failures, but when he did it right, he paved the way that even modern day epics still walk today. Ben-Hur, The Gladiator, Gone With the Wind...Numerous Hollywood epics owe a lot to Intolerance, a classic that already in 1916 showed that a film can be long, all-encompassing and "larger than life", even when the silent era was not quite the best level for such an opulent scale.

With almost three and a half hours of running time, Intolerance is no easy piece of entertainment, but I view it still as a fascinating document of its time, almost as an archaeological discovery of a film. The four stories form a simple, humble and wise message of man's hate towards man, offering love as the only way we can survive. Some may call it naive, but the message still stands, and people of today even thought of different titles - like patriotism or law and order - to make love more appealing to the masses, all just to make the society go on and not allow people to destroy themselves. The first story, set in Babylon, is easily my favorite, and you can feel the colors and opulent set-designs of the crew behind the black and white cinematography. The second story, revolving around Jesus Christ, is also fine, as is the third one, revolving around Huguenots who were persecuted by Catholics in France in 1572. Still, I must deduct one star from my review because the fourth and final story, set in modern times, simply did not do it for me. After so many expenses and great pains, the "modern" story seems almost nonchalant and too simplistic. Ignoring this and moving on, there is still so much to enjoy in this. Intolerance established the spectacle - which is sometimes a good thing, sometimes a bad thing, depending on each film - and that should be respected.

Yes, folks, this is it. Look no further if you are a science-fiction fan. There is no bigger space opera than this. The whole galaxy is the stage. Though, to be frank, that can sometimes be a drawback, too: the too big ensemble of characters is sometimes an overkill, and the storyline is so long you must spend some 25 episodes (10 hours) just to start appreciating it. However, the setting is thought out down to a T. There are many characters, but I can still name a dozen at the top of my head - Yang Wenli, Reinhard, Hildegard, Julian, Merkatz, Poplan, Schenkopp, Muller, Oberstein, Rubinsky, Siegfried...All of them are just cogs in the big machine called history, but since there are so many possible variations and destinies, it is impossible to predict what will happen next. The outcome can be anything.

This is the main trump card of writer Yoshiki Tanaka: pure, raw inspiration. He did not have a big budget at his disposal at that time, which is why the animation in the first third of the show is dated, the camera work is slightly flawed and the marketing was so scarce that many of you probably never heard of it. You probably heard of The Fast and the Furious, but your intellectual potentials are lost on that one. I for one, though, prefer a technically modest, flawed and unknown presentation of a story - as long as the story itself is worthy to be told. And my God, is this a story to be told. You will never view democracy or autocracy with the same eyes again. You can watch perfectly filmed big budget blockbusters, with perfect editing, lighting and sound, but you know deep in your heart that it lacks soul. I am still at wonder that something like this was ever made, at all. Babylon 5 does not even hold a candle to this. My favorite part has to be the middle, around episode 50, where Kaiser Reinhard and Wenli start an epic space battle at Vermilion - believe me, you will not stay indifferent when Wenli gets Reinherd in the crossfire. If there is one thing I have to object to strongly, though, then it is the sometimes fascist tone in this. Maybe I am just imagining things, but the total authority Reinhard wants over the whole galaxy does tend to turn unbalanced at times - except without the killing of anyone different, but tolerating them. However, you have to see this and make your own mind. Your science-fiction knowledge will not be complete before watching this.

When I look at the modern day West, and the 2008 financial crisis, I often see parallels with images from RoboCop: protests, mind-numbing commercials, crime as the result of huge poverty, profit as the main goal of life, no matter at what (or whose) expense. There is not one OCP today, but dozens of OCPs, huge modern mega-corporations that influence every aspect of the society and drain it of its wealth. Just like in RoboCop, the middle class is almost gone and we only have the poor and the rich.

RoboCop started out as a pure B-movie, but unlike Cyborg (1989) or The Six Million Dolar Man (1974), it kept its relevance, satire and sharpness precisely because it is so close to today that it hurts. Even as a kid, I somehow got that one of the messages of the film was how the power was slowly shifting from the government to the OCP. Let's be fair, though, Verhoeven sometimes directs a scene in a heavy, clumsy manner, and some cheap ideas slightly reduce my enjoyment whenever I re-watch this. Overall, this is still a strong film, and I stand behind what I say. Kurtwood Smith is one of the most fiendish villains of the 80s, and one of the most unorthodox ones, too, with those glasses, but we must also mention Peter Weller who is often overlooked under that armor, yet his stoic presence tells us everything we need to know. His Murphy is a character designed by the corporations, a being that is a product, not a being anymore. The way he finds his humanity, nonetheless, is still powerful. He defies the system, he defies the cold exploitation - and he becomes worthy to become recognized. And the ED-something-something robot is still cool as ever, too.