Isherwood

I wanted to believe in it after the good trailers and mostly positive feedback. But Joe Johnston and I once again don’t see eye to eye. I don't mind the poetics of Captain America as such, I understand the time period and why the comic was created, and how it got moving according to Hollywood rules is appropriate to all of that. Yet the whole thing is so perfectly staged, it has a lot of visual frills, and it overflows with insight that is delivered by precisely cast actors, until in the last third I stopped enjoying it just because of how perfectly it copies the classic template. It's not the failure that Green Lantern was, and the king of the naive comic book films this year was Thor (and the film made do with half the bombast!).

Fresnadillo is talented, no question about it. Yet I didn't understand that until I saw his next film. I don't see how 28 Weeks Later can be brimming with utterly brilliant momentum when this first feature is based on a great idea that's buried by an incredibly dead pace and a complete lack of empathy for all the characters. The day after watching it, all I remember is the famous sprint through the forest, which is too little for 105 minutes.

Compared to the trailers, it's quite a decent bit of entertainment, which is surprisingly brought down by not being as dumb as it originally looked. However, the grafting of a tangled plot, with political intrigue in the background, onto a through-and-through B-movie concept, brings down the impressions quite dramatically, although in each position separately the film is quite decent. Statham's physical abilities have once again found proper use for once, and De Niro is finally in a role that suits him after a hell of a long time. In the end, we are left with a decent silly film that doesn't completely offend but also leaves us with a slightly awkward impression from the two-hour runtime.

This amounts to unnecessary suffering that is only functional when the last two Bond films are made fun of. Otherwise, the film offers a crystalline distillate of essential awkwardness in which Atkinson's "poker face" is completely off, you can read the villain from the opening credits, and the only pleasant surprise left is that Gillian Anderson is an utterly luxurious "MILF." :)

One might have expected the film to go against traditional audience expectations, yet Soderbergh manages to surprise us mainly through the optics he applies to the sloppy plot. He makes do with a documentary-like tone instead of spectacular crowd scenes and quite sovereignly lets the famous Hollywood names have minimal parts, for which they reward him with great performances. This is minimalism that digs deep under the skin. PS: This is the second film this year that was largely "made" by Cliff Martinez.

A whirlwind of over-the-top insults that has the same wobbly level of wit as last year's David Hasselhoff roast. But at the end, Charlie himself steps in and delivers a speech that captures his essence perfectly. "After Platoon, Wall Street, and Major League, I went on to have the biggest salary on television. Sounds great, right? It was! Then I did the one thing that everyone in America really wishes they could do. I told my boss to fuck off."

It's rude and unethical to laugh like that over the corpse of an old showbiz star! No, David is alive, and more than ever, he knows how to make fun of himself and this is a shallow, filthy, and superficial show. But it’s also outrageously funny! ;-) [PS: Seth is a great host].

The nonsensically edited first half, which doesn't let a single scene resonate, battles with the beautifully sprawling second half that pushes the limits of the widescreen camera to the limit. This takes points off Weir's film in the final rating despite the fact that he manages to introduce his characters using only a few words and make you like them without dramatizing the scene in any drastic way; he makes do with great actors, a few frostbite marks, and swollen lips from dryness.

At first glance, everything is as it should be. Ryan is a likable guy, Blake is every straight man's wet dream who isn't blind, the special effects team has been paid generously for their overtime, and proven hitmaker Martin Campbell manages it all. Yet only half of it works. No, more like a third because that's about how much the "civilian" world takes off the whole. The section in which the lanterns glow green tries to cloak the boundless naivety in a cheap pomposity that probably comes from the comic books, but it struck me as a cheap carnival ride that (hand on heart) looks pretty stupid. It's not boring and it keeps on flashing, and someone is always jabbering (quite often humorously), but it lacks that drop of soulfulness. This was the worst comic book film six months before Thor.

At first, I was concerned with thoughts of "academic boredom," but from the moment McAvoy starts to doubt, political glossateur Redford takes you by the hand and guides you through the upturned face of the sacred American Constitution in a way never seen before. I was expecting glorified heroes in a clash with essential evil, but Redford puts into the mouths of his characters formulas that many statesmen still use today, and that's why his film manages to tease with its topicality even though the actors are wearing historical costumes. And it is the actors whose sovereignty even in minimal spaces (Kevin Kline!) allows you to forget that it's all presented in a somewhat... "cinematic" way.