Malarkey

The fact that I like Til Schweiger doesn’t mean I like his movies as well. I saw a couple of them and not even one (including this one) convinced me to watch his work again. After all, he makes mostly comedies and some of them with sequels. I don’t understand why the Germans have a tendency to make so many comedies and they give most of them this strangely erratic character, which is supposed to be funny and at the same time also original. The movie is neither and the overall tone of it makes you cringe. In addition, Rabbit Without Ears has an absolutely typical story, and there is nothing noteworthy about it, let alone interesting.

A completely different type of drama (not really a comedy, as this website states) from what the Scandinavians usually film. First, I was pleased by Tuva Novotny who brightens almost every Scandinavian movie with her beauty. I still see her as the most beautiful Scandinavian actress and based on her surname I know why that is (it seems like she’s of Czech origin). However, the story has a slightly lighter spirit which is reinforced by the, for a drama of this sort, strangely conceived music which isn’t really milking your emotions but rather plays the tones of a Spanish guitar that I could imagine in a Spanish comedy rather than in a drama. But eventually, I had to admit that this pleasant change wasn’t completely out of place and in the end, the story caught my attention.

Nonsense. As expected. Nicolas is like the Little Boletus and he is plowing through family depression and sacrifice to revenge, which is pretty strangely depicted, though. Every now and then I like his movies, but I don’t really need to see this one in particular again.

A great premise that initially made me feel as if I was watching something by the director Frank Oz. It is appropriately off-the-wall, crazy, and features a number of great actors. I didn’t actually laugh, but it was oozing with great ideas, which could be expected from a movie like this. With time the story started to evolve (especially in Norway) into a pretty strange something, which is trying to give its point global importance and educate us about the topic of the current population of the Earth. Over time I started to question what the creators actually wanted to convey, and I ended up questioning what they were actually trying to achieve. It stopped making sense to me. And if it wasn’t for the final “earthquake” I wouldn’t even laugh. In the end, I was glad that I ended up at three stars. It could have been worse, even though I didn’t think so in the beginning.

A type of comedy very similar to Heartbreaker. Everything is actually fine and alright. You laugh here and there, other times you don’t, but overall, you tell yourself that when compared with where French comedy used to be, it could have been a shade better. Maybe it’s because of the relatively unknown actors or the not entirely clear story. I definitely don’t want to be as critical as I am probably coming across. In terms of comedies, this movie sometimes makes you chuckle a bit, and it was constantly swapping a pleasant atmosphere with a neutral one. That may be the reason for my final three star rating.

After a very long time, I finally lived to see a story from the Second World War which managed to knock me out completely. WWI and WWII can actually still tell stories that will make you stop dead in your tracks. During the war, anything was actually possible, which is one of the reasons this movie could be created. Honestly, I am surprised anybody from Russia actually acknowledged this film. If I were Russian, I would be embarrassed until my dying breath for what my nation did. But I understand it’s a problem of an individual. But when it comes to the Russians it doesn’t really matter. I don’t really want to spoil the movie here, but the first half of it sets a clear atmosphere that stagnated a bit in the expectation of the end of the war. The second part of the story came just in time and it really made me turn on all my senses at 1 AM, because everything happening there has crossed the lines of humanity and logic. This film might just be the weirdest one in the world cinematography because of the most absurd story ever made on the backdrop of the Second World War.

I was expecting a gloomy Italian gangster movie and I got a boring family drama based in the human-wise pretty disgusting Calabria, which is however being elevated by the camera. If it wasn’t for the ending which at least created an impression that something was happening in the movie at all, I would probably go for an even worse rating.

Michael Peña and Dax Shepard are brutally overacting here. They are playing at the classic buddy cop action comedy which hasn’t really been here for a long time. But the problem is that even though the technical aspect of the action scenes is spot on, the relationship of the two idiots really didn’t work here. Michael portrays an idiot; Dax portrays an idiot. Michael is at least a tiny bit funny but when they are together it simply doesn’t work.

The folly of the powerful in a British form from the pen of Jane Austen couldn’t have been better. Her world is very far from what I imagine as an ideal bedtime story. Reading her books would be make me totally desperate. The movie is a different case, however. Joe Wright honors the source material and so there is a number of higher-class conceited characters that you would like to shoot with a cannon from a Soviet T-100 tank. But the film is lucky because the dialogues are brilliantly written so there is always somebody to shut them up with a polite, cynical word. That and the very pretty shots prove that it would be a shame to overlook this film.

A European drama as gloomy as the poster itself. I was looking forward to another Scandinavian film made with the assistance of the Baltic States and the result was that I was actually struggling to finish the movie without falling asleep. The television director Hannu Salonen is in this case an experienced routineer. It almost looks like he cannot make nothing more than a television film which got the label “feature film” rather by accident. The relationship between the Chechnian and the youngling is interesting at first, but you quickly realize it’s quite nonsensical. The amateurism actually started with the explosion itself, which was quite essential for the story. And then the movie just breezes along.