Malarkey

A great premise that initially made me feel as if I was watching something by the director Frank Oz. It is appropriately off-the-wall, crazy, and features a number of great actors. I didn’t actually laugh, but it was oozing with great ideas, which could be expected from a movie like this. With time the story started to evolve (especially in Norway) into a pretty strange something, which is trying to give its point global importance and educate us about the topic of the current population of the Earth. Over time I started to question what the creators actually wanted to convey, and I ended up questioning what they were actually trying to achieve. It stopped making sense to me. And if it wasn’t for the final “earthquake” I wouldn’t even laugh. In the end, I was glad that I ended up at three stars. It could have been worse, even though I didn’t think so in the beginning.

A type of comedy very similar to Heartbreaker. Everything is actually fine and alright. You laugh here and there, other times you don’t, but overall, you tell yourself that when compared with where French comedy used to be, it could have been a shade better. Maybe it’s because of the relatively unknown actors or the not entirely clear story. I definitely don’t want to be as critical as I am probably coming across. In terms of comedies, this movie sometimes makes you chuckle a bit, and it was constantly swapping a pleasant atmosphere with a neutral one. That may be the reason for my final three star rating.

After a very long time, I finally lived to see a story from the Second World War which managed to knock me out completely. WWI and WWII can actually still tell stories that will make you stop dead in your tracks. During the war, anything was actually possible, which is one of the reasons this movie could be created. Honestly, I am surprised anybody from Russia actually acknowledged this film. If I were Russian, I would be embarrassed until my dying breath for what my nation did. But I understand it’s a problem of an individual. But when it comes to the Russians it doesn’t really matter. I don’t really want to spoil the movie here, but the first half of it sets a clear atmosphere that stagnated a bit in the expectation of the end of the war. The second part of the story came just in time and it really made me turn on all my senses at 1 AM, because everything happening there has crossed the lines of humanity and logic. This film might just be the weirdest one in the world cinematography because of the most absurd story ever made on the backdrop of the Second World War.

I was expecting a gloomy Italian gangster movie and I got a boring family drama based in the human-wise pretty disgusting Calabria, which is however being elevated by the camera. If it wasn’t for the ending which at least created an impression that something was happening in the movie at all, I would probably go for an even worse rating.

Michael Peña and Dax Shepard are brutally overacting here. They are playing at the classic buddy cop action comedy which hasn’t really been here for a long time. But the problem is that even though the technical aspect of the action scenes is spot on, the relationship of the two idiots really didn’t work here. Michael portrays an idiot; Dax portrays an idiot. Michael is at least a tiny bit funny but when they are together it simply doesn’t work.

The folly of the powerful in a British form from the pen of Jane Austen couldn’t have been better. Her world is very far from what I imagine as an ideal bedtime story. Reading her books would be make me totally desperate. The movie is a different case, however. Joe Wright honors the source material and so there is a number of higher-class conceited characters that you would like to shoot with a cannon from a Soviet T-100 tank. But the film is lucky because the dialogues are brilliantly written so there is always somebody to shut them up with a polite, cynical word. That and the very pretty shots prove that it would be a shame to overlook this film.

A European drama as gloomy as the poster itself. I was looking forward to another Scandinavian film made with the assistance of the Baltic States and the result was that I was actually struggling to finish the movie without falling asleep. The television director Hannu Salonen is in this case an experienced routineer. It almost looks like he cannot make nothing more than a television film which got the label “feature film” rather by accident. The relationship between the Chechnian and the youngling is interesting at first, but you quickly realize it’s quite nonsensical. The amateurism actually started with the explosion itself, which was quite essential for the story. And then the movie just breezes along.

There actually isn’t anything truly bad about the movie. The actors are pretty okay, the locations are also quite solid, here and there the action has nice ideas, which, when it comes to Hollywood, is quite a miracle. I just don’t know if I am getting old and prefer older movies that are more authentic, entertaining and the actors are a few notches better. Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, and Kevin Hart are pulling the comedic aspect of the movie as hard as they can. They also nicely twisted the premise for the new version of Jumanji so you don’t get the same movie in a different shade of blue. I just cannot shake the impression that in the past similar movies were better. And no, I don’t want to complain that the grass was greener then, but I don’t know if I am onto something and if I am not aging together with the movies.

Now I know exactly what it looks like when a classic ghost movie gets shot like a classic horror movie. Awful, cheap and lacking in atmosphere. The premise is clear – that hasn’t really changed since the first one, but the main focus here are these 15-year-old brothers who have absolutely no logic to them. It makes you wonder whether this movie tries to ride the recent wave of 1980s horrors look-alikes like It or Stranger Things, but apart from these two boys, nothing else is there. So you just have to accept the fact that this movie is a load of bullcrap... A completely useless cheap sequel that is simply benefiting off a brand. To be fair, the tapes had a pretty decent atmosphere. But that was it.

I am completely willing to admit that this show hasn’t piqued my interest at all. The producer Ivan Reitman promised us a solid dramedy worth talking about, but the result is simply an unorthodox family. We get a brother and a sister, where the sister’s relationship is falling apart while the brother started an online dating service where he picks up girls and doesn’t really take anything seriously, showing no signs of responsibility. I gave it a shot, but after the first season, I already can tell that this won’t be my afternoon chill.