DaViD´82

A daring undoing of the black-and-white Soviet stereotype concerning Russian “heroes" and dastardly Germans. Except that it undermines this whole effort in the end, where everything reverts back to the “good old" way. A movie that's more interesting than being actually good. And in fact, it’s not even good, just shamefully mediocre. A few excellent passages can't redeem the fact that the middle section is as sluggish as well-frozen vodka. Just not as delicious. Although Trial on the Road is relatively strong in the details (especially those depicting the bleak winter landscape), overall impression it’s less powerful. Considerably less.

A tsunami of originality and an audiovisual feast. But there is so much originality that even Doggy and Kitty’s cake (in the short story by Josef Čapek, brother of Karel Čapek - inventor of the word "robot") has minimal ingredients by comparison. The imaginative visuals fill you up faster than chocolate-covered cherries, so even the most interesting partial ideas (or whole passages) cannot hold the viewer’s attention throughout this over-long movie. For a while, I wasn’t sure if the whole concept was meant to be taken seriously or not. I wasn't sure until after the main bad guy's monolog about hate. You can't possibly conceive of something so terrible, let alone bring it to realization. But here the filmmakers did it, and created perhaps the worst thing I've ever heard in a movie. All the worse because it's meant to be deadly serious. Moreover, Kiriya must absolutely love Čapek's work, because this is full of fragments from “The White Disease", “The Mother", “RUR", “War with The Newts", “Krakatit" and “The Absolute At Large". And nothing comes out of it. Just confusion upon confusion. Less is sometimes more. This is true of Casshern as many times as its style changes.

A short artsy demo of 12 Monkeys that managed to make its greatest limitation a virtue. Where else can you see such a static yet dynamic and emotionally charged form? The only negative side is its insufficient length. This deserved to be feature length back then. Rather than waiting thirty-three years for Gilliam's skill.

Anderson's unacknowledged adaptation of Carmageddon and the admitted remake of Death Race 2000. If Death Race were not so bitter and humorless, it could have easily competed with this season's B-movie king, Doomsday. Here, too, B-movie is synonymous not with a lack of craft, but with genuine entertainment. Albeit dumb entertainment (but not executed in a stupid manner), but at the same time stylish, energetic and constant, though somewhat repetitive.

The Somr/Novotný storyline is manna for the soul. It’s so convincing, perfectly written and outstandingly acted. It’s hard to believe, in fact, that these two aren’t really father and son. The storyline with Kostelný and Kroftová is a slap in the face to shake us out of our enthusiasm. It’s needless, over the top footage and, thanks to Kroftová being so tragically unconvincing, it’s almost irritating. But the paternal variation of Linklater works well, even so. Really well.

Stiller knows very well that making a parody doesn’t mean making one-to-one copies of one scene after another, but rather about well scattered nods and making sure that the movie works as a whole. You need to be skilled enough to shoot it at least as well as the original. This “anti" Hollywood Tropic Thunder was no disappointment in that respect. But, as hard as it tries, it just isn’t funny. It simply tries too hard and turns out unnatural. It’s like Stiller missed his fellow Frat Packers and their chemistry and interplay. Maybe it should have set out on the journey to absolute absurdity that we know from Zoolander or Dodgeball rather than this rather vulgar normality.

Isn’t it too dreamy? Who was this murder victim, Laura Palmer, anyway? Is there anybody at all in Twin Peaks who is innocent? And what do the Icelanders, the Douglas firs, the logs or the owls think? I could love Twin Peaks to death for how it constantly surprises, flinging me from one emotion to another, making tears of laughter roll down my cheeks at one moment, chilling me to the bone the next. I could adore it for the trio of genius creators comprising David Lynch, Mark Frost and Angelo Badalamenti. I could thank it for being one of the most atmospheric motion pictures to be seen (not only) on TV that I have the honor to have watched. However, I know one thing for sure. In real life, I wouldn’t visit that town for all the money in the world. Not even if I was accompanied by the most stylish FBI special agents ever to come out of Quantico, the awesome Dale Cooper and Albert, who raises non-assertive behavior to a completely different level. And even though the second half of the series suffers a drop in quality (with the exception of the last episodes), it is almost imperceptible. The drop I’m talking about is like this: a series of genius shifts almost imperceptibly into the class of “just" a darn good series that little can compare to. If anything.

If you have the honor of knowing the US cut of this pilot episode, then you have seen the best possible example of filmmaking and an emotionally captivating introduction to a town where nothing is as it seems. And of course a perfect introduction to the first season of this cult series of all cult series that is more delicious than a cherry pie eaten by Agent Dale Cooper. If you see the European cut of the pilot, where there is twenty minutes extra and investigations into the case of Laura Palmer’s murder reach a successful end, you also have an XXL portion of heavy-weight quality waiting for you. But now imagine this: you don’t realize that a different version that this exists and you automatically put on the next episode, hoping it will answer many questions and... and you’re shocked. What the? Why? Where? What a jerk, grrr - I’d like to kill that Lynch: he’s just taking the mickey, isn’t he? While watching the dream-sequence finale (where some fragments from the closed version) you suddenly realize that there’s something wrong, you take a look at the net and everything becomes clear. You calm down and become boundlessly enthusiastic again. Both versions deserve full marks, but I prefer the classic ninety-minute one because the solution of the case in the longer one is markedly rushed and they needlessly kill all loose ends from the preceding footage. It’s like having a chess board, but only using it to play draughts on. While the classic version launches a masterful game of chess that hasn’t been beaten by any other TV production to this day (at least to the middle of season two).

Postman Pat, Postman Pat, Postman Pat and his black and white cat... But Costner doesn’t have a cat. He has a horse that he rides for a full three hours all the way to where the sun doesn’t shine. And he’s headed that way from the very first shots. And, if his old nag hasn’t died in the meantime, he is still on his way to this day. My entire schooling went by more quickly than this embodiment of dragged-outness in its purest form. It seems to have been some allegory on the speed of the American postal service, because otherwise I have no idea what the filmmaker wanted to say. I hope that Kevin pulls himself together and films a sequel to this someday - it could easily be ten hours long. That would make better viewing than the daily footage of our House of Representatives.

It’s as if a war correspondent visited these regular Czechoslovak guys in Tobruk and reported a couple of really interesting fragments of their day-to-day “boredom in the desert" on the evening news, setting off again on his dusty way afterward. It certainly isn’t a war story with cliché upon cliché, where they read out love letters like at a poetry club meeting, where they also make July 4th style stirring speeches. In this movie, we get a lot of silence and gazing into the distance over the stony desert. But this logically results in the problem of fragmentation and total lack of story. On the other hand, it works excellently on a completely other level. On an intimate, internal level - call it what you want. But the main thing is that it works. And it could have ended up looking much cheaper, despite the passable visuals and fantastic sound. But that wouldn’t have changed anything on the quality of Tobruk. P.S.: It’s funny that one of the sponsors of this movie was the Czech forestry corporation, when this movie takes place in sand dune surroundings.