D.Moore

The good old Cold War spy theme, which I have a real soft spot for. The MacKintosh Man may not be as realistic a piece of work as The Ipcress File, nor is it as brilliantly and engagingly written as Funeral in Berlin, nor is it as gripping as, say The Quiller Memorandum, but despite all that it would be a shame to write it off for good. I'd say it's a decent contribution to the genre, but one that probably won't appeal to people other than its fans. Paul Newman is as good, funny and likeable as ever, John Huston does a standard job (the escape from the house and the escape from the dog, the car chase between the old ugly truck and the Mercedes), Maurice Jarre's music is reminiscent (in the best sense) of John Barry's atmospheric works... It was good.

There's something about Ben Stiller, because if it weren't for him, I wouldn't be nearly as amused by There's Something About Mary. It is Stiller's undeniable talent for comedy that makes the film's best scenes (the first attempt to gift Warren with a baseball, the hitchhiking, arrest and interrogation passage, and the battle with the dog) the best. Yes, I know he didn't (probably) write them, but I can't imagine them working that way with anyone else. And although I might have given maybe one less star otherwise, because I didn't like a lot of the stuff that others seemed to find super funny (anything with Magda, then of course the hair gel, the stupid songwriters, Tucker collecting keys), thanks to Stiller I not only give it a third star, but I'll even watch the film again for sure because of his scenes.

A very good film. Very funny, sometimes suspenseful, with good monologues and dialogues... If only it wasn't so "overbuilt". Although perhaps everyone who appears in Ritchie's film has a role written in such a way that they should be easy to remember, it's not quite a piece of cake. The last half hour requires a lot of concentration to remember how it was at the beginning, who was calling who and who was hired for what... I’m lucky that I'm in the mood to watch Snatch again, because the second time around I'll hopefully figure it all out.

Walk the Line, a film about my favorite singer, has been in my house for a long time, and I've been putting it off as long as I've been looking forward to it. I was afraid that maybe I wouldn't like it, that it wouldn't live up to my expectations, that it would be lousy and I would be angry and wonder why someone made it if they couldn't even do it properly. But I watched the DVD yesterday and what can I tell you? All I had to do was watch the introduction from Folsom Prison and all my fears were gone. For two whole hours I was amazed by the performances of Joaquin Phoenix (he flawlessly studied almost every move of Cash and especially during the shots from a distance he is indistinguishable from the real Man in Black on the stage) and Reese Witherspoon, who would have made "Johnny and June" happy (they chose both actors), I sang along, smiled and stomped my feet, watched all the greats from Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis to Waylon Jennings to Carl Perkins and the Carter family shuffle through the story, and thought to myself: that turned out great! What I knew mainly from photographs simply came to life. And it came to life in a great way. I won't criticize the script, because in this case it was simply capturing an important part of a great man's life, and we can be glad that it didn't turn out to be tearful lingering boredom, but rather a film that felt so good. I give four stars for the film and five stars out of respect for the master. I have only two complaints. One smaller and one bigger. The smaller: The Folsom concert should have been longer, at least one song longer. The bigger: How could the writers completely leave out Bob Dylan?

As I have read somewhere, Daniel Pearl was not really a saint and as a journalist he allegedly poked at everything that seemed even a little bit thorny to him, and he was overly ambitious and sometimes arrogantly opinionated. I don't know what the truth is in this, but I think that as shown in A Mighty Heart, he could not possibly be such a naive kid who, despite all his experience as a journalist, allows himself to be lured into a trap. If so, I feel a little more sorry for his wife in retrospect, because she married not a prudent man, but a fool who actually took his own life. But back to the film. It's not very good, and unfortunately it's also quite one-sided - what I missed most was the reaction to how stubbornly the US refused to meet the hijackers' demands (or even think about meeting them) and how the American public reacted to that. The script is very strangely written, to the point where it seemed to me that there was a complete lack of emotion, but Angelina Jolie does her best and especially at the end, when she learns of her husband's death, she overacts so much that she is believable. Apart from the script, the direction and music are not worth much. I would only praise the sympathetic actress Archie Panjabi. Two and a half stars.

A good comedy in the style of the unsurpassed Shaun of the Dead. Those who didn't find the aforementioned film to their liking probably won't be satisfied in this case either, but I had fun and was glad to see that finally a parody of the horror genre was made again that isn't Tarantino-Rodriguez grind-house, full of grossness, unnecessarily exposed female and male body parts, and stupid characters. Lesbian Vampire Killers is often hilariously funny (the first disposal with an axe, the vicar and his scenes with Fletch), but it never slips into fecal or any other kind of disgusting humor, thanks to its pleasant length it never get boring, the main characters are likeable, one girl is prettier than the next... And the direction is imaginative and knows that timing is not a dirty word. Four pure stars (and a little bit of a fifth for the last shot).__P.S. Debbie Wiseman's music is better than anything Danny Elfman has written since Sleepy Hollow (never mind that she rips it off a bit).

One great (Day-Lewis) and other good (DiCaprio, Reilly, Gleeson) performances are met with a lousy script, Scorsese's tired direction and outrageously long runtime. After about an hour, the fight of gangs against gangs turns into the viewer’s fight against boredom... And boredom will win out in the end. You could count the impressive scenes on one hand, and the film is quite strange in that it wants to feel like an intimate drama and a sweeping epic at times, but it doesn't quite manage either. I was also struck by the music. I don't mean the Howard Shore music, but the modern music that plays in the opening battle - I seem to have misunderstood something about its use. Not to mention the final slow tune by U2.__P.S. Liam Neeson was here for maybe only five minutes, but he still impressed me the most after Daniel Day-Lewis.

I almost always find movies or books set in submarines scary, and there doesn’t even need to be anything scary in them. But I was curious to see what would happen when the claustrophobic environment of a metal coffin lying on the bottom of the sea would be combined with supernatural phenomena. It didn't turn out badly at all. This is a classic ghost story, whose main plot and point is guessed within the first twenty minutes (could it be that Darren Aronofsky contributed to the script with this very work?), but the post-war scenery gives it a nice touch of originality. The depth is evidenced by the not-so-familiar but well-acting cast, Twohy's skillful direction complemented by Revell's dynamic score, and a script filled with a number of memorable moments - the record-player (Benny Goodman's “Sing, Sing, Sing" in a horror film? Why not!), the depth charge rolling around the submarine (a very suspenseful scene), the hooks, the divers and the stingrays and the ship repair, the hot door and what comes next... The only detriment is the overlong runtime, which makes these (and other good) scenes a bit boring now and then.

I don't know. It wasn't very funny for a comedy, it was suspiciously too similar to the others for a romantic movie that was supposed to be different from the others... And I really had to do my best to hold on to the end with my eyes open. Of course it was nice film, and everyone will probably find something they like at least once in the plot, but I don't think that it was "different". Even the jumping around in the plot, which seems imaginative at first, seemed to me to be somehow unnecessary - what actually enriched Tom and Summer's story? Weren't they just regular flashbacks, just numbered by day? I'm probably digging too deep, I know. Anyway, not to blab - the central couple was really likable (I even got used to Joseph Gordon Levitt, who got on my nerves at the beginning with his perpetual smile), I liked the Amélie de Montmartre scenes (a funny introduction to the protagonists, too bad it only happened at the beginning), a pleasantly listenable soundtrack, one dance scene (Han Solo!?) and the character of the "little" wise sister. But that's about it.

If Cate Blanchett, Giovanni "In-every-role-different-and-always-great" Ribisi and Keanu Reeves had not been in The Gift, it would have been a complete waste of time. Seriously, what everyone sees in this film remains a mystery to me. Sam Raimi is a genius? And what exactly has he done here that is brilliant? Yes, he builds the atmosphere of the town solidly, until one wonders why he has never made anything based on Stephen King, but that's about all I can praise him for. Apart from that, there are a few cheesy jump scares, dreams/visions that are also quite simple and not very impressive, the story is particularly bland and it's no problem at all to figure out who the killer is... And what about the final surprise? I felt like I was watching a special episode of the (pretty terrible) series Beyond Belief.