DaViD´82

12 Monkeys in the pub after a few rounds. In the end much less humorous and much smarter than it seemed to be at the beginning (up until the moment with the jukebox, everything thereafter is the reason why I almost went down a star). A beer and a hoodie are as essential kit as a towel when reading “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy".

All of you Rosemund Pilchers and Danielle Steels out there had better start getting worried, Almodóvar has broken into the romance fiction market. Boring romance fiction that you’ve seen a hundred times in telenovelas, feebly masked by calling it art. If it weren’t for Penelope, in a couple of years time, we’d be more likely to see this on morning housewives’ TV than on the CT2 Film Club.

Paradoxically, the only blot on the entire movie is that cult Mini chase through Turin at rush hour. The excellent tempo and textbook hyperbole that the movie had up until then slips into a series of forgettable scenes like out of a regular commercial. No people, just cars. This kills one of the movie’s main attributes, Caine’s charisma. That wouldn’t be so bad if the chase didn’t lack any hint of tension. And the bizarre idea of not having background music for the chase was largely responsible for that. But the stylish ending tipped the balance in favor of the movie in terms of the number of stars I decided to give it.

Gran Torino meets Indy in escapades à la Pixar. Some parts are great, but altogether it seems so inconsistent that it’s bothering. However, Carl is a really nice guy and his only blemish is that he’s not dubbed by Clint. The real “hero" and the dog do their CGI best to make this movie work. And they had to try hard, because this movie was moving alarmingly near to the shameful average (quite normal for Pixar).

If it weren’t for the initial Leone-style chapter, I would have no objections. But that chapter is there. And its matchless genius sheds a big shadow over the rest of the movie that it doesn’t manage to escape (with the exception of the exquisite tension build-up in the bar). But even so... To satisfy everybody’s great expectations with a few guys in uniforms blabbing away about bullshit for two and a half hours in about seven different interiors deserves applause alone. Simply wunderbar! P.S.: And I want Tarantino to make a regular spaghetti western at last. He’s been heading toward that all his career, so why avoid the unavoidable? P.P.S.: Having watched the Basterds for a third time in just a couple of weeks, really enjoying myself each time, I realized that full stars is more suitable, and so I changed it. ♫ OST score: 5/5

It’s got plenty of action, but also a few too many minutes. At least a small whiff of reality would have moved it up a league, but it's still the best episode of the series, which is quite sad in its way.

If the first half hadn't felt like a five-hour TV series edited down to half the running time for cinema release, it could have competed with even the best resistance films. This way it "only" ably seconded them.

When you see the picture, you don’t see outside the frame. The dark side of the “nice guys". Hard to say which is more amazing Morris’ choice of topic or its delivery, which in no way suffers from talking heads. It’s fascinating how he manages to make people tell him even what they don’t want to reveal, I sit there gobsmacked at how he’s not afraid let the camera do the work and to record details of those questioned, which often gives away more about them than a thousand words. And I just love his cooperation with top composers. This applied to his previous work and it applies here too. Simply the exact opposite of flashy, technicolor bullshit with nothing to say that have the cheek to call themselves documentaries.

A contraceptive justification of vegetarianism. Jordon Ladd acts his heart out, the screenplay certainly doesn’t avoid controversial topics, but I got the impression that Paul Solet doesn’t know how to handle the tense atmosphere and so it sometimes becomes boring, so it would have been better if considerably shorter. If you expect an intimate, psychological good mood drain, you might not be disappointed.

I was expecting a regular sports movie “How the outsider and the looser eventually won" in soccer colors. But no. Most of the movie is a coach’s “War of the Roses", perfect period music, pleasant hyperbole and Michael Sheen, who shines again. This time as an ambitious, capable, guy who can’t see further than the end of his nose. Simply a picture that loves soccer and isn’t afraid of showing it, even though you won’t see any soccer as such in it. And the ways in which the individual matches are (not) imparted to us are very inventive.