POMO

Escape from Alcatraz is well crafted, both as a film and as an escape through film. This isn’t about deep ideas, but about tension that you could cut with a knife, which is strongly supported by Jerry Fielding’s dark music. Eastwood is perfectly suited to the role of a charismatic, highly intelligent criminal, and he even looks like the real Frank Morris.

In its time, this co-production between Paramount and Disney, with the maestro Altman in the director’s chair, was a major Hollywood flop. Its creators admirably succeeded in recreating the look, speech and mannerisms of the animated characters with live actors, but it didn’t make them likeable or wonderfully playful. In fact, they are rather unlikable both visually and in terms of their behavior. As are the musical numbers. Perhaps it needed a more “family-friendly” director like Spielberg, a filmmaker with a feel for fairy-tale magic and a child’s perception of the world. Then again, maybe even he couldn’t have made it better.

The Patriot is to Braveheart what Troy is to Gladiator, i.e. not as good. It is a well-crafted Hollywood movie, but not made so much “from the heart” and with the risk (that comes with such a huge budget) of not being accepted by the masses. The Patriot had to be accepted by the masses because it contains absolutely every cliché of war, heroic and romantic epics that you can think of from the history of cinema. And it blends them together in a rich screenplay and with a high-quality cast. Except that Emmerich is an over-the-top kitsch master – many of the compositions are unrealistically rearranged and recolored (even in blue just because of Gibson’s eyes!) – and he serves up pathos to such an extent that it detracts from the film’s seriousness, which it needs as a historical fresco about actual events. That said, it works as a “Disney movie” for a rainy Sunday afternoon.

A high-calibre film. Psychologically precise, superbly balanced. A simple plot premise, slowly and cleverly building up from safe unease, through a tightening noose, to strict absolution.

A Darren Aronofsky production? For God’s sake, why? Because it’s a drama in which everyone suffers? But it’s a rather dull drama. And Arnold’s presence in it is unquestionably the WTF moment of 2017. It's like he’s taking Sean Penn’s place in 21 Grams. Show me a single person who is at least a bit interested in movies (either as a viewer or as a filmmaker) who doesn’t find this unreal. Otherwise, the depiction of the responsibilities of the workers in the airport control center is original and powerful, and Scoot McNairy turns in a respectable performance, which was necessary. In terms of the screenwriting, the story could have turned out differently and thus more interestingly. As it stands, the film is forgotten before the closing credits come to an end.

Buster’s Mal Heart is nonsensical blend of all kinds of things that don’t really go well together. The individual fragments of the narrative and the characters’ feelings and motivations are understandable, but the screenwriter/director/editor tries to weave them together into a sophisticated, deliberately confusing jigsaw puzzle straddling the line between reality and fantasy, which is supposed to make sense in the end and come to an almost philosophical conclusion. But in the course of the storytelling, the viewer’s interest and trust transform rather into wonderment and increasing distance. The characters’ behavior is exaggerated, turning them into cartoonish idiots, and in the (otherwise viewer-satisfying) social motifs of the story, the film fatally loses its way, as if it has forgotten what it originally wanted to say.

With the atmosphere of its Australian outback in a realistic (i.e. non-fantasy) post-apocalyptic form with a lot of bleak social goings-on, The Rover is a superbly engaging thriller. Furthermore, I really like these reticent opuses in which we get to know the characters just a bit at a time. But the more sophisticated The Rover gets, the more futile it seems in some of its would-be philosophical dialogue, and the more unsatisfying its ending becomes. It’s as if it admitted that it was shit (and considered that to be its creative strength).

The motivation for the transformation from a committed skinhead into a good guy who starts to understand the evil that he has perpetrated is not sufficiently shown in the film. And the need to protect a single mother, with whom he becomes involved, arises too quickly. The screenplay could have used some stronger events leading up to this. Or it could have emphasized his doubts right from the beginning instead of having him do hateful fascist evil immediately in the opening scene. You spend the first half-hour wondering why you’re watching a film with such characters in it. Otherwise, however, the actors are good, the gang of Nazis and their behavior give rise to real goosebumps, and the film benefits from the fact that it’s based on actual events.

Angel Warriors is a dull drama about a biker gang of bad guys versus three good-guy bikers versus a group of hippies, among whom tensions arise in a remote ghost town. Murder, false accusations, bullying... It's not exploitation – one bare breast is not enough for that – and it works only on a primitive level as a drama about injustice and satisfaction through revenge and subsequent redemption. In terms of picture quality, the film is borderline unwatchable (apparently no remaster even exists), as you can’t make out the characters’ faces in the night scenes, at least one of which is crucial and takes place in extreme darkness.

Produced by Roger Corman, this lesser-known B-movie variation on Bonnie and Clyde is crazy and wildly amoral. Angie Dickinson is a top MILF, and it’s no wonder that Tom Skerritt seduces her first and then both of her daughters (at the same time). I’d join them in the car too (and elsewhere). As a comedy, Big Bad Mama is quite infantile and as a crime flick, it’s laughable. The relationships are utterly silly and not very realistic. But that Angie is a knockout!