POMO

Surprisingly, I actually liked G.I. Jane. The role of a tough soldier suits Demi Moore. It’s obvious here how skilfully Ridley Scott knows how to work with military action. I have no doubt that producer Jerry Bruckheimer offered him the director’s chair for Black Hawk Down on the basis of his work on this film.

An excellent thriller by David Fincher with a proper amount of paranoia. But the conclusion, which is the key to the whole story, is a bit contradictory. On the one hand, it shocked me but, on the other hand, I found it slightly disappointing.

The first half-hour is brilliant! The stifling karma surrounding Tarantino’s psychopathic killer could be cut with a knife and the dusty desert setting adds to the film’s bleak atmosphere. You can feel bad things coming. But from the moment the vampires take the stage, Robert Rodriguez fails where Peter Jackson (Braindead) is the intrepid king. From Dusk Till Dawn is a prime example of the fact that it takes a special talent to tastefully combine bloody brutality with humor.

The atmosphere of old London is captivating thanks to the great production design and Johnny Depp is great as always, but the modern music-video visuals used by the directing Hughes brothers don’t suit the nostalgic atmosphere of the film at all.

If you don’t know anything about Frequency, it doesn’t have anything to capture your interest. There are no superstar actors or great action, nor is the subject matter particularly unique. But then there’s its execution. When you watch this movie, you’ll find that you can’t catch your breath. This is due to the intelligent screenply, the very respectable performances by Jim Caviezel and Dennis Quaid, and the high-quality directing by Gregory Hoblit. If it weren’t for the more open-ended and pessimistic ending, Frequency would have been an exemplary thriller.

In terms of its visuals, sound and music, The Spirits Within is wonderful, but in terms of its content, it’s a below-average sci-fi flick. That is doubtlessly the fault of the first-time director, who had previously had experience only with making computer games. The cinema screen requires something more than just a visual feast for the eyes.

Finding Forrester is a skilfully made drama with nice humanistic ideas. However, we have seen its plot motifs a hundred time before in other films.

Robert De Niro initially rejected this project, but Tony Scott spent a lot of time talking him into it. And that turned out to be a mistake on De Niro’s part. The Fan is a terrible thriller and the actor has an even more terrible role in it. If the screenplay is no good, then not even fancy camera filters can help.

Though Hitchcock’s final opus lacks the master filmmaker’s style (it seems rather more run-of-the-mill), it is still more entertaining than most genre-related films of the 1970s. Primarily, the fresh and intelligent screenplay and relaxed atmosphere make it perfect entertainment for a Sunday spent relaxing in front of the television. I went into Family Plot with a bit of scepticism and ended up being pleasantly surprised. Don’t think of it as a Hitch film and you’ll be nicely entertained.

Until I saw Face/Off, I had the feeling that I couldn’t appreciate action movies. Die Hard, Speed, The Rock...all of those widely acclaimed action blockbusters were too simple for me in terms of content. They were spectacularly filmed and offered a pleasant way to relax, but they weren’t an engaging experience. And then along came Face/Off and my concerns about my inability to judge action movies fell by the wayside. John Woo convinced me that even a spectacular action flick can have strong dramaturgy with sophisticated psychology of its characters and that even with an action movie, even if it doesn’t hit the mark, I can take an interest in the story and be moved by it. ___ Face/Off has the fantastic subject of face-swapping, elegantly set in the present without coming across as ridiculously unrealistic. It has an unpredictable story with surprising twists and unique performances in the context of the genre. And all of this interspersed with Woo’s brilliant action scenes that soothe the soul of every lover of spectacularly stylized action. Having seen only Woo’s early Hollywood movies Hard Target and Broken Arrow before Face/Off, this masterpiece of his is to me what Hard Boiled and The Killer are to someone else. Face/Off is the best Hollywood action movie ever.