POMO

Pasolini’s soulless, sexist exhibitionism, which instead of a feature film rather reminded me of a long amateur music video with no rhyme or reason.

One thing that keeps me up at night is the fact that this film was made in the same year as Fulci’s Zombie 2 and Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust. After all, it’s a clone of both of those films’ screenplays, complete with the added theme of a mad scientist creating humanoid zombie-creatures on a mysterious island (a lá The Island of Dr. Moreau). Add to that a sexy blonde who constantly takes her clothes off everywhere, a hero in the mold of Harrison Ford/Belmondo, and lots of very detailed gore. It’s also nice to see cannibals and zombies together in one movie! As Italian trash, Zombie Holocaust is irresistible. It’s brutal and unintentionally funny, with an essential helping of sex. If you devour this genre and judge the appeal of similar films by the frequency of stupid dialogue, the extent to which the music is terrible and the number of litres of blood, zombies and cannibals, you’re in the right place.

Two Weeks Notice is a comedy that focuses less on what it’s actually about than on the charm of the lead actors. The film contains a lot of improvisation, mainly from Sandry Bullock, while Hugh Grant remains in her shadow. This sincere, immediate and endearing film is delightful as a pleasant way to pass the time.

The first third of The Recruit is great. The plot slows down in the second third and in the final third, it reaches a spasmodic and ineffective climax. It’s a thriller in which nothing is as it seems. And a thriller that doesn’t work the way it was intended. The fine cast can’t salvage it.

Not much space is given to identify with the main characters and thus only a weak argument can be made against the film’s questionable moral aesthetic: never mind that you’re a murderer – as long as you are capable of love, you’re going to heaven. Tom Tykwer doesn’t deny it. Some of the scenes – e.g. the dialogue in the church, the camera circling the tree and the ending – are amazing. But in order for the film as a whole to be amazing, it would have to be longer, more detailed and better developed in the first half. A missed opportunity to make an exceptional film based on an exceptional subject.

In terms of filmmaking, The Pianist is a skilfully told story that takes too long to crystallize and is too depersonalized for what it ultimately crystallizes (or rather doesn’t crystallize) into.

A Guy Thing is an extraordinarily unfunny and forced comedy with an extraordinarily stupid climax. The screenwriter must have written it while sitting on the toilet with some very serious intestinal problems.

Guts of a Virgin would have been passable as a kinky softcore-porn comedy –  Japanese sexual deviancy has its charms. It’s endearing, and I’ll give the film one star for that. But the horror storyline in the second half is ridiculous and embarrassing. The forest monster looks like the last Mohican caked in clay and the gore effects and editing of the murder scenes are disastrous. Cheap amateurish, bullshit.

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS is famously shocking, but it’s not nearly as shocking as it claims to be. There’s plenty of explicit sex in it, but the violence and blood, of which there is also an abundance, don’t have much of an effect. The reason for that is that the film itself is terribly naïve, amateurish and boring. Poor acting and inept directing make it impossible to identify with any of the main or supporting characters on the other side of the barricade, and as far as atmosphere is concerned, there is emptiness on the camp’s parade ground. The film is passable in terms of its screenplay – the modest runtime and the amount of violence and sex would have been enough for a decent portion of perverse entertainment. But it would have to have been filmed by someone with more skill.

In my opinion, this is the funniest comedy ever. Even on the eighth viewing, I busted a gut and cried with laughter through the whole 100 minutes. Jean Reno and Christian Clavier as armor-clad bumpkins in our hectic times and all of the characters they meet are divine. Their antics, conceived in the typically French way, with a fast, frantic pace and crazy camera angles, get me every time. While most French comedies are similarly conceived, I find Les Visiteurs exceptional and perfect, which is also thanks to the amazing music, the lovely fantasy feel and the idea of the film, which is surprisingly strong for the given genre.