Malarkey

I wouldn’t completely condemn Pepa for living quite an unorthodox life. Well, some people are like that. And that it’s coincidentally Pepa and that the movie talks about him? The movie has to show some sort of extreme. If it showed what’s average, everybody would forget about it and they might even never think about it again. The first half of the movie was, after all, quite good. The period of communism reminded me of comedies from the turn of the millennium, which kept taunting the communists and taunt them until this day. As soon as the story swung into the present day, which shows where the melancholic Papa ended up, the story somehow stops working. Michal Suchánek is good, that’s all. The case is worse when it comes to some of Pepa’s opinions, which turned Pepa into his current self. Some people were, based on the reviews here, offended by this; I wasn’t. Unfortunately, even people like this live among us.

Once in a while, the TV shows some real human experience, which deserves to be labeled as the best that movie dramas can offer. And it’s clear that the main focus here will be on the story. In this case, the story again involves the Second World War. Not that it takes place in it. Rather, it ends one unfinished chapter. The camera will thus very quickly transport you from Germany to tumultuous Ukraine, which is kind of living its own separate life and kickstarts the story of the character which is so brilliantly portrayed by Jürgen Prochnow. It shows us human nature, both its good and bad aspects. It compares nationalities, lives before and after the war. It compares what was then and what is now, it observes the absurdity of borders and it tries to answer a number of unanswered family questions. All of that in the span of 107 minutes, which this film has at its disposal. A movie full of good people and people who simply are the way they are. Neither bad nor good, simply unique. Subject to the time, a given state, a given life in a given time. Simply a story of a former Wehrmacht officer who, coincidentally, became a member of the Ukrainian Kozaks. You will find out what happened next in this beautiful and unique life story.

A great idea which sweetened the horror waters of the year 2018. A movie where there is little talking, because it’s set in a dystopian world with an extraterrestrial civilization that destroys everything that speaks aloud. There is a whole array of logical errors, but the simplicity and originality overshadow the contents. The suspense is literally spouting from the movie and the married couple Emily Blunt and John Karsinski are truly enjoying this family horror drama. Just like the viewer, after all. Only from a slightly different perspective.

The good thing is that Tom Cruise can boast about his good acting performances since his early childhood. He may be, as a graduate of law school, a quite a rookie, but in the end, you actually believe his nerve-wracking performance. It isn’t really the best thriller I’ve ever seen but if you are in the mood for something from the 1990s and at the same time know movies by Sydney Pollack, you won’t be offended. Just prepare for a really long running time, which may annoy you at times.

A pleasant and inoffensive movie, which made me realize why I never heard about it in the 1990s in video shops. There actually wasn’t a reason for it and the acting performances of Andy Garcia and Meg Ryan definitely didn’t salvage the movie and lift it up to be a more memorable viewing experience. But if you are emotional and appreciate nice people, you will surely enjoy the relationship between these two in this movie.

A series, during which my initial excitement transformed into a feeling of boring mediocrity. Stephen King probably got lost in his own world, because, in the end, the atmosphere is the only thing this series has to offer. The interesting premise didn’t progress anywhere from episode to episode. Nothing was happening. Interesting characters get lost in the unwanted originality and the series itself actually projects everything you loved about the series Lost, but also all that you hated about it. The producer J. J. Abrams’s touch can be seen plainly in this series. At the end of the first season, you get to thinking about the meaning of some of the episodes. Were they reality or fiction? Or could they be an alternate reality? I don’t know. It was filmed magnificently, and I was really enjoying the filmmaking ideas in some episodes, but as a whole? In the end, the series brought up way more questions than it managed to answer. And I actually don’t even know if I want to know the answers.

Everything good about this movie is actually thanks to Tom Hardy. This Marvel movie would have ended up in the abyss of history without Tom Hardy and nobody would have ever remembered it. In this way, however, it’s a decent introduction of a new character of the Marvel universe, but it pays brutally for the naïve screenplay. While I accepted the fact that Venom is actually a distant cousin of the Goa'ulds from Stargate SG-1, I really struggled with accepting the simplicity of the screenplay, according to which the tired and disappointed Tom Hardy meets with his buddy Venom. Riz Ahmed isn’t a completely dignified adversary for Venom either; he’s rather an easy ticket into our world, which he surprisingly grew to like. Being a crazy scientist is quite a popular topic which doesn’t get old easily. What could get old are the typical tropes Marvel is already full of. Thankfully, Venom is strong because of Tom Hardy and even Venom himself understood that. And at least because of that I have a reason to look forward to the next installment.

Fine, but nice shots of New Zealand and a Mini Cooper in action don’t make comedies better. However, it’s probably customary in New Zealand movies to make fun of the local police, as it happens in just about every single one of their comedies.

A Japanese film - that’s always an uncertain bet. Their different thinking and behavior are a great unknown for me and so they often salvage themselves either with a screenplay or simply by not acting like the Japanese during a movie but rather like Europeans. Or they simply aren’t as annoying. Unfortunately, Her Sketchbook is a typical Japanese movie where a Japanese guy at work straight up tells you that if he messed up, he would rather hang himself. On top of that, the main protagonist goes through the movie as a mute mannequin from the Red District shop window in Amsterdam. A strange and peculiar movie with no emotions. Not a thing I’d like to see again.

I sincerely take off my imaginary hat. I would never think that somebody in Germany will decide to film a prehistoric drama with everything it entails. And that’s including a local Germanic dialect. I thought that only Mel Gibson is to blame for these precisely made crazy trips in the movie industry. You can’t, therefore, understand almost a word in the movie, but the story is so simple that you are able to understand it without a problem. The story is about a simple revenge and in 90 minutes full of beautiful shots of the prehistoric era, you’ll tell yourself that you’ll probably never experience such amazing filmmaking again.