Malarkey

I liked the scenes where Patti Cake$ with her chums was creating music. It came across really well. Her, Nigger Antichrist (who shouldn’t be called a Nigger, but Antichrist is okay) and a crazy Indian guy, who added a bit of Bollywood into the heavy rap, initially came across as the biggest amateurs. In time, however, they turned into pretty solid professionals, which is also a nice thing about the movie. What’s worse, though, is that I don’t really appreciate this kind of music. It didn’t make the impression as if they wanted to impress the serial murderers on Life Sentence Radio, nor as if did they wanted their music to be played by typical pop radios. It was a sort of small-scale film, which has a few good ideas about writing music. A person who knows what that’s about can at least appreciate the movie for that. Otherwise, if they don’t like the music, they’ll condemn it anyway.

I watched this movie because of my interest in European cinema. Tired, expecting to relax and rest in the following 2 hours. All of that without reading the summary. If I had known to put on sweats so that I’d be on the same wavelength with at least some of the characters, it would have been more digestible. This way it was worth turning off at some moments. And it’s not the fault of exclusively the plot, but also the boring way in which it was filmed. The only plus I can see is the camera work, which at times managed to conjure up interesting and nice tricks, which made the film exciting at least for a moment. Otherwise, not that great.

Oh God, what a drivel. Pretty boy Liam Hemsworth, the youngest of the Hemsworth trio, is trying to look cool in a techno-thriller rougher than the coarsest sandpaper. He walks around for maybe half a movie without his T-shirt, just to show his pecks, sixpack, and shoulders. While doing that, he’s acting cool and pretends to be an IT specialist, who is trying to hack a company the size of Microsoft. But the hacking is done in a confusing way; I walk over here, tap my phone 2 times to show that I am actually doing something on it and just like that the doors I need to go through open. After that he sits behind a computer, where only a few swift double-clicks on the monitor cause many applications to open and close just so it would seem truly effective. It’s a shame that he didn’t show his pecs and sixpack during that moment, too, ‘cause at that point, it would be a Boo!

I was excited. But I was initially dumbfounded by the fact that the movie wasn’t funny at all. I told myself that it’s probably going to be more of a drama, which is usually the case with European movies in a similar vein. But over time I realized that even the most dramatic part of the movie was really bad and so after finishing watching it I went to bed pretty sad, unsatisfied with the average, or even mediocre Scandinavian film.

A well-known story of an air crash with action sequences that are a throwback to the 1990s. But the rest is a bit boring and dull and isn’t salvaged by the few callous shots which, like it or not, had to appear due to the topic of the story.

The Romanians know what they’re doing with their movies. Especially when their movies are set in the time of Ceaușescu. That time oozes irony and sadness. I don’t know why, the movie reminded me of Cosy Dens. The only difference is you won’t get much fun here. Quite the opposite. The story points out what and who communists managed to destroy in the Eastern Bloc during more than 40 years of their rule. Taking up topics like this can never hurt.

The depiction of youngsters living in the capital of Chile, who are constantly ogling, oftentimes intentional, fatal accidents on the internet, until they become a part of one such situation. The movie is completely emotionless; it cuts through human nature like a blade made of cold Japanese steel. Easily and precisely. The movie can’t get more than three stars from me, but it still keeps you in suspense. The finale is then a real human ordeal, which proves that the film was worth watching.

It’s the kind of movie where you cry from start to finish, but at the same time, you’re laughing. It milks your emotions but it doesn’t seem forced at all. And I spent a lot of time thinking about it and I think this artlessness is mainly thanks to the parental duo, where Julia Roberts is completely cool as a mom of the wonder boy and you simply have to laugh at Owen Wilson, who drops a joke every time he appears on the screen; there is no other way. 113 minutes go by at a completely natural pace; the author doesn’t explain to you why that particular boy is so extraordinary, but he attempts to show you his fight with the world. And since it’s a child who wants to fit into a children’s world, the world is just a shade worse than that of adults.

I didn’t actually find much comedic elements in this movie. Rather, I found moments that compared the 1970s with the present and came across as very absurd. Which is more or less obvious. The comparison of the then landline phone with modern mobiles will always be absurd. Nevertheless, the movie is built on situations like these, and it’s actually its essence. It presents life stories of different women of that time and even though the movie is boring at times, the finale makes up for it very nicely. An inconspicuous, stylish movie, which contains plenty of good ideas and a solidly executed ending.

A movie that’s hard to review already due to its topic. It’s actually really hard to review a movie about a special unit Wega operating only in Vienna, which can’t really be compared to anything local and so it can sometimes come across as funny to the viewer because of the unit’s competences. It’s all the more interesting when I realize it’s actually an Austrian movie. Which country should be close to us, if not our neighbors, right? But cinematography-wise the film isn’t bad. Despite some hard-to-understand moments and one really strange twist with American boots, it’s actually not an entirely bad movie. And since I saw the movie at DasFilmFest, I had a chance to enjoy it with an interesting discussion with the likable director.