POMO

Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a film that doesn’t need its first kiss boosted by anything more than a two-second quiet romantic tone to make it into the most romantic moment in the film. Forgetting Sarah Marshall has so much sincerity and tangible reality in it, such multidimensional and believable characters, and offers such versatile, fair, non-clichéd comic and dramatic situational clashes of characters that it’s a match for any highly acclaimed psychological drama in terms of having a unique creative touch and quality storytelling. I saw this in a multiplex right after the shallow, superficial, tacky, cheap and unoriginal Sex and the City – and it didn’t just improve my mood for a moment, it improved my whole weekend. Judd Apatow is no less intelligent than Steven Spielberg, and thanks to him, after twenty years of watching movies, I fell in love with a genre that I have always considered only mindless fun. And what about the missing fifth star? You don’t fall in love with a girl because she’s perfect...

This film is hard to describe; you must see it, believe in it, absorb it and then just let yourself be astonished by its infinite originality and philosophical message worthy of lengthy discussions. And all the while it’s just a crazy comedy flick.

It’s not often that you see such an excellent cast in such a bland film. Only one of the three stories is good (the one with Natalie Portman), but the languidness and shapelessness of the director’s narrative takes away her chance to shine.

Just no. This movie has Shyamalan’s typical signature in creating suspense (a spooky house with a spooky landlady), which tempts me to give it three stars, but unfortunately everything essential is amiss. The love motif doesn’t work, the relationship between the main characters is incomprehensible and there is no trace of interesting dialogue or a final point. The Happening is a bland, sometimes exciting and sometimes naïve farce, cooked in water salted with James Newton Howard’s music from Signs.

A hackneyed premise boosted with hits of LSD and a gay dwarf. The successful comeback of former comedy master Frank Oz has juice, is properly British, morbid and cynical, and maintains its quality even when one of the main characters gets feces on his face. Plus it has a not entirely mainstream cast, which is all the more interesting for that. I recommend serving this up after a weekend breakfast.

Constructed primarily on the premise of Eli Roth’s poorly made Hostel, Frontier(s) offers a tangle of plot twists slavishly copied from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre flicks. Add mutant children in the cellars and the treatment of a French historical complex from the rivalry with Germany. Brutal butchery with characters on our side whom we don’t care a fig about and characters on the other side that do not evoke horror, but embarrassment.

Untraceable is the maximum that the skilled genre craftsman Gregory Hoblit could get out of such a dime-a-dozen, unoriginal screenplay. Untraceable is a conventional, mainstream crime thriller, upgraded with the cruelty of the low-budget, fan-based morbid fun of the Saw series. Diane Lane is cool and the suspense works, especially in the climax. If you watch this movie with zero expectations, it will give you no reason to be disappointed.

This pleasant chill-out movie deservedly became a bigger American box office success than what it strived for. It is a lower-budget version of Ocean’s Eleven, bursting with youthful energy and music, and video-like editing combined with cool songs on the soundtrack. It also offers well-written and portrayed characters plus some kind of a wholesome message. In short, it is a little film worthy of a better three stars.

This film’s creators didn’t aim to please the masses with action or traditional thriller suspense, but conceived it as a minimalist, intimate drama about the feelings of two unexpectedly separated lovers. The Clearing is a nice film about a love that lasts a lifetime and forgiveness, relying on three excellent acting performances and a wise director who knows what he’s doing here.

A yellow-haired Franka Potente in a yellow floral-patterned dress runs through the tunnels of the London Underground, and instead of the date with George Clooney that she had planned, she’s on a date with a disgustingly deformed human mutant who enjoys raping women on a gynecological chair with a big, sharp machete. Christopher Smith fails to create even a hint of the oppressive atmosphere of the environment created by John Landis in only a few minutes of his An American Werewolf in London; and the first emotions come only with the onset of disgust and brutality. So it’s a similarly sad case as the more recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies, in which we at least didn’t have to wait through the first two-thirds of the film for these “rewarding” audience emotions.