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Reviews
I Give It a Year (2013)
Romantic Comedy That Works
This is the very rare chance to see a modern romantic comedy without the Hallmark schmaltz soundtrack, predictable 3 acts, suburban venue, formulaic tugging of emotional heartstrings, nauseating scene juxtapositioning, Beatle-brown-haired tall solid chisel-featured loveable "hunk" with a 1-day beard, and the corresponding obligatory bleached-blond female protagonist in pursuit of him, and the creepy guy in her life is a natural blond.
Instead of such instant ennui, this story portrays the intertwining love lives of London 30-somethings, but without Hugh Grant. Their personalities are not snide or witty, but the writing of their bantering dialog and wisecracks are quite funny and first-rate -- for instance, a silly discussion whether all Brazilians are superheros for the super power to speak Spanish, not knowing, as Bill Clinton, they actually speak Portuguese.
Thus, this film proves it still is within the realm of possibility to find a palatable Romantic Comedy.
Za granyu realnosti (2018)
Apple + Orange = Lemon
It was impossible to recover from the shock that a film proclaims itself to be the story of a "confidence artist," but does not know the meaning of the term. It would be like trying to watch "The Terminator" with the plot itself dubbing him an "insurance fraudster." The mind cannot wrap around it. It is too absurd to "willingly suspend disbelief."
There is no grifting in the film by gaining the "confidence" of "marks." It actually is about casino cheaters at cards and dice. This very strange malapropism, used frequently, corrupts all meaning in the plot, and destroys it from within.
In Time (2011)
Cracker-Jack Box Morality Vehicle
Good movie idea, but becomes pathetic with a diatribe after about 32 minutes, spewing the weary old Marxist saw, that "capitalism" describes the free exchange of goods and services between humans, and always results in the dread "greed."
Why these hyper-moralistic pinheads of pictures are so preoccupied with the 3rd Deadly Sin ("Greed") and not the 1st ("Lust") or 6th ("Envy"), I'll never know. The motion picture morality moguls dictate a blue law that states that "Greed" must be avoided at all costs, and "Wall Street" = "Greed is good."
In movies' beloved communism, the government sets the prices, which is instrumental in causing all the privation, suffering and murder in real communism, so it is irony that government sets the prices in this film, too, but the murderous system is blamed on capitalism. Such ignorance takes all the fun out of a movie, and I was out of there like the lights in a communist country.
The Mystery Beneath (2015)
Bait and Switch
The title of this documentary should be,
"We forgot to read the strux (of the GPS)!"
It is a bait and switch scam, that hopes you do not notice. They bait you with a ragged-pixel abstract image of the iconic Millennium Falcon, and claim they found it on the floor of the Baltic. But...oops! Aw, shucks, they lost it. From this they spin a boring documentary of blunders and misadventures as they try to find it again, showcasing their ineptitude that lost it in the first place. File it under "comedy."
A Most Wanted Man (2014)
A Most Mediocre Man
I envy those of you who understood A Most Wanted Man, because I did not.
A story about a man who superlatively is "wanted" naturally would be expected to tell the viewer why he is ultra-"wanted." I never could figure out who wanted Issa Karpov, nor why, and I envy viewers who can.
The opening of the movie implies the story dovetails with another superlatively-wanted man — Mohammed Atta — but we saw only love and kisses regarding the title role of this story. The comedy "Springtime for Hitler" comes to mind, but not to the minds of viewers who figured out why "the authorities" had reason to see a downside to the Polyanna-like Russo- Chechnyan.
Who did want Issa, anyway? The Russians and the Turks let him out of prison, so they had stopped "wanting" him. If the Chechnyans wanted him, why did he leave Chechnya? If the Germans "wanted" him as a citizen, they would have given him legal status from the beginning. If he were wanted by the Germans as an outlaw, why didn't they arrest him when they had him in mid story. If Annabel Richter "wanted" him in a carnal way, she would have responded to his kiss.
Instead, these people merely used him as bait for another guy, Abdullah, who logically should be the title character, since he seems to be the only one "wanted," and by the nature of superlatives, there can't be two of the #1 most wanted man, though a split-personality plot with two Mr. Hydes and no Dr. Jekylls might be interesting.
If the title were, the Most Mediocre Man, then Issa gets the title role.
Then again, there is the "Story of a Boy" twist, which sounds like it's about a real boy, but the boy actually is the infantile Hugh Grant character. This angle would have to convincingly shift the title role to Phillip Seymour Hoffman — but no one wanted him, either, unless to bum a cigarette.
Speaking of which, have other viewers noticed nowadays that smokers in movies do not look like they smoke for themselves, but for the camera? It was sad how the camera told Hoffman not to act, but to "Smoke like you mean it!"
Speaking of Hoffman, a good actor would be an American who could do a good German accent when speaking German, or a German who could do a good American accent when speaking English — not, as Hoffman, an American auditioning for a guard role on Hogan's Heroes.
In the climax at the end of the film, I was not able to tell who was doing what to whom, nor why — neither the authorities nor the terrorists — or even if there were any terrorists at all in the movie.
I know I must be the only viewer who could not understand it. Imagine if Popeye Doyle only had a hunch there were a "French Connection," but was not sure, and we had to wait till the end to find out, then there was a very busy climax, and we never found out, because the Fernando Rey character did something we could not see, — even if we could understand it — but alles war klar to Popeye Doyle, then — darn! — the camera missed it.
There used to be a very sexist technique used by storytellers of old: If you want the plot to turn in an unexpected way, and there is no logical reason for it to do so, then have a woman do something illogical and erratic, because the audience would believe a woman could do such a nonsensical thing, to save a failing plot of for a story.
In this movie, the woman is "The Americans." They did something weird and unintelligible, so we are left with the idea that it either was a stroke of brilliance by the storyteller, or nonsense. I choose the latter.
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014)
Movies Cannot Recover from Lying Moralistic Recruitment
I like the Bourne movies, James Bond movies, and most action-thrillers. Regarding this film, I was expecting a satisfactory action thriller, assuming an A-list production, given the star alone, whom I've seen in other movies and have liked.
I have a vague recollection that perhaps this character, Jack Ryan, is based on a modern Ian Fleming-type bestseller writer of government spook novels, and I was expecting a realistic gritty modern tough-guy scenario. I still do not know, or care, if there are such novels.
I was riveted by the London School of Economics on 9-11 at the beginning, and the backstory that built up to his recruitment by Kevin Costner to be a super-spook for the government.
Then the movie blew the whole mystique of my expectations -- Jack Ryan is such a twerpy little wussy that he has a sissy meltdown over 'water-boarding,' about which we, the audience, are not to condone under any circumstance, because it is torture and does not work anyway (both factually wrong), and nice guys don't do it.
This is so ignorant, so far from reality, that it told me everything I needed to know about the movie, and left it immediately. Usually the writers of the stories know more about the world of their plot than the viewers. This proved total writer ignorance of the basics of the genre's real-world rules of engagement -- believing instead some gossipy lies from morality-mad mainstream media from which I was trying to escape -- by watching a movie!
This meant there was nothing left at all for me, and I knew enough at the beginning of the movie to stop wasting my time. People like me stay away in droves from lying spooks with a hyperventilating moralistic message of any kind, but especially a lie.
3 Backyards (2010)
Human, Not Suburban
If 3 Backyards were a graffito, it would read:
"The Bourgeoisie are kaput." -Marx
"Marx is kaput." -The Bourgeoisie
Do not look for the trite old suburban stereotype in 3 Backyards, as told in typically quaint 20th Century tales, when American suburbanites were portrayed as people condemned to purgatory for having sold their souls to a capitalist devil, suffering in angst in their pointless "consumer-based society" in "little boxes all the same" as they vainly seek a desolate "American Dream."
Do not look for this two-dimensional vision in the desperate young job-seeking African woman in the film who bravely is trying to carve out for herself a fourth backyard there.
The people in the three tales from three backyards are three dimensional, and très sympathiques. They are human and frail as they work their way through their own personal demons on a typical day in a typical suburb, where the living looks pretty good.
The tale of the little girl who navigates herself through a day-long snafu is nothing less than a good episode of Leave It to Beaver, from an era before it was cool to bash suburbs.
If the life of the suburban housewife "artiste" in a second tale were so tragic and bleak because of the suburbs, why was the exotic movie star the one who started the cry-fest?
Though a marital crisis in a third tale could turn out tragic, the love and poignancy among the family bode otherwise.
In the facing panels of this triptych tale the scale of human tragedy is "bittersweet," at worst. Life can be this way, regardless of locale.
Disclaimer: The writer of this review is a suburb-o-phobe, with nothing but bad memories of infrequenting car-centric living areas -- but there is no call to get political about the people who like them.