POMO

At the time this flop’s release, it was the worst film that I had ever seen on the big screen. I’m giving it one star only for the make-up and costumes and for the fact that the scene with the mutant’s birth gave me chills. Otherwise, it’s a bad joke in every way, as if everyone involved actually wanted to make the worst movie possible. The presence of Marlon Brando is bewildering!

A boring, lifeless, would-be comical recipe for killing time as “efficiently” as possible by doing nothing all day. Unless you’re an unemployed gangsta American with a Cadillac lowrider and you live in the suburbs of a big city in California.

Subway is by no means a masterpiece, but after watching it, you want to blow off the whole system and just wander around in the Paris Metro, play with Jean Reno and his eccentric band, and fall in love with Isabelle Adjani. Though this goofy Besson variation on a Jarmusch ode to independence is not stunning, it definitely leaves you in a pleasant, contented mood and a desire to weather even the biggest storms.

Robert Redford sits down in his office at the beginning and, reminiscing about the espionage adventures he experienced with his partner Brad Pitt, doesn’t get up again for the rest of the film. With its sophisticated main characters and without a proper amount of action, Spy Game is a mosaic of flashbacks that thinks it’s enough to have an intelligently written screenplay to be appealing. And that’s a mistake. Drawing so much of the viewer’s attention to an overwrought 130-minute screenplay that doesn’t in any way really reward me… That’s a game I’m not willing to play.

The Luzhin Defence is a subtle, simple, intelligent and intimately low-key film with a nice subject, a decent screenplay and amazing performances by John Turturro and Emily Watson. The problem is that it looks too much like a bland television production with poor image quality to be memorable. If it had been made by, for example, the genre-appropriate duo of perfectionists Merchant/Ivory (The Remains of the Day), it could have been something more.

The Big Blue is a beautiful film in terms of its depth of thought and the poetics of its story. I’m willing to forgive it for its wild mixing of drama and comedy; after all, it’s French. What I can’t forgive, however, is the stark visual concept, which takes it off the movie screen and puts it on a television screen. I expect visual appeal from the creator of The Professional, La Femme Nikita and Atlantis.

The world of emotion that Steven Spielberg conjures up in E.T. could only have been created by a genius. How simply yet impressively he characterized the “bad guys” (ominous music + key ring), how he didn’t even need to look them in the eye and how he conceived everything from a child’s perspective...only a director who was born for this craft can do that. But...even though I have experienced E.T.’s story with all my heart and shed more than one tear while watching it, the film still lacks something more than just sincerely intended sentiment, something higher and something deeper.

Whereas Star Wars: Episode I “only” lacked the heart of the original trilogy, Episode II is just a dramaturgically lame comic-book popcorn flick. At the same time, however, it’s jam-packed with so many great characters, bombastic action, romance and plot twists that are important to the development of the Star Wars saga that it’s impossible to be bored for even a second. The visual effects are shoddy in some places, but the best of them are stunningly good. This is not the good old heartwarming Star Wars of before, but in the context of contemporary eye-candy popcorn entertainment, it’s great.

Imagine a classic action movie in which the bad guys and the heroes don’t chase each other in cars, but on jet skis and motorboats. Hard Rain is not a disaster movie, and if that’s what wanted to be, that would be to its detriment. Rather, Hard Rain is an action flick that places the motif of a hero fighting jewel thieves in the setting of a catastrophic flood. And it does it so skilfully that there is no room to relax or to be bored during its ninety-minute runtime. A solid Hollywood genre movie.

Seeing this film again after several years is an experience that can’t be forgotten. Rocky IV is the epitome of everything that we loved about the action movies of the 1980s. Good man of steel vs. bad man of steel, good America vs. bad Russia and, if you like, the power of the pure spirit of nature vs. the power of modern technology. There’s revenge for the friend who had been killed, intensive training and a final fight that is so packed with energy that you you want to get up and start throwing punches. Dozens of films at that time offered all of this, but few could serve it all up with such scope and showmanship, and in such a dynamic music-video-style package as Rocky IV.