Lima

Poster tagline: She drained men of their loves and lives!!! This should be featured at the the Shockproof Film Festival. A piece of work from the pen and director's chair of some chauvinist pigs. It addresses the theme of eternal youth, but ultimately demeans women. The basic premise alone – an endocrinologist wants to divorce his wife because she has wrinkles around her eyes (huh, what a horror!). She, therefore, understandably desires to rejuvenate herself to avoid the divorce, and the clue may be an old woman, a 142-year-old retiree, one of the doctor's patients (and in fact the chieftain of a black tribe in Africa) who, with the help of the secrets of the Nando tribe and its medicine Nipe (for God's sake), is able to bring youth and beauty back to the woman. There is one catch, though, a man must be killed in the rejuvenation ritual. So yes, it sounds like colossal shit, and it is shit. And it doesn't end with the ritual. You honestly laugh at the scene where, on a getaway from Africa, a guy has sex with the woman in question, and when Nipe stops performing the next morning and she has wrinkles again, the guy runs from her in terror and screams at her not to touch him. Yeah. And the beauty ride of stupidity continues even after we return to New York, where women are being murdered. P.S. The only good thing was the small role of the hugely charismatic Grant Williams (The Incredible Shrinking Man), who definitely deserved a better film career, but alas, no luck.

Okay, let's check it off. Willem Dafoe has nothing to work with - check, Mickey Rourke, chewing like a herbivore, has nothing to work with - check, and Elizabeth Mastrantonio is as far from a sexy femme fatale as a politician is from a truthful person. It starts off nicely enough, though, but after ten minutes you know that the whole thing is a beautiful example of the director's, or rather the screenwriter's, inability to tell a story in any meaningful way, to somehow engage and draw you into the plot. The plot is something you don’t give a fuck about, and towards the end, after the "cruel" revelation and the nonsensical twist, logic gave itself half a pack of rohypnol. And you might take some molly to get the "experience" going.

At times I thought it was a bit naive, an "old man's" (which John Hughes was definitely not) view of teenage life, but on the other hand I would carve some of the statements and ideas in stone. Certainly the mental processes of teenagers stemming from the traumatic "despotic father vs. son" relationship was hit perfectly by Hughes, the unusual comedic exaggeration was surprisingly fine considering the seriousness of the topic, the light hinting of sexual themes was amusing, the five completely different characters complemented each other perfectly and it just flowed very nicely. A very nice film and a well-deserved major overseas cult following.

A perfect detective story, of the classic cut, with nothing lacking or redundant. There's a paranoid atmosphere, there's a chase of the killer in the dark alleys of Paris and it culminates in the interrogation "grilling" of the perpetrator, wich, by the way, is excellently filmed and edited. Jean Gabin was and always will be the best Maigret, combining passion and vivacity with stoic calm and charisma, and you can only watch in amazement to see which of his character layers he uses when interrogating suspects. Such a multi-layered police figure is not so common in the crime genre, and Gabin grasps it phenomenally. Perhaps the film lacks a major surprise moment, as the killer was clearly offering himself up from the halfway point, but I still enjoyed it to the max.

A delightful and VERY brisk comedy, which was supposed to cement Katharine Hepburn's position as a budding film superstar. She's imminent here, but I was more entertained by the irresistible goofball James Stewart, his cute diction and body language, as if he's always wanting to apologize for what he's actually doing, and when he's hitting on Hepburn, you want to pat him on the head like a big brother :) The only problem I had (and not only here) was with Cary Grant and his single acting stance. I never considered him much of an actor, but he always worked reliably as a magnet for women, so his limited register must not have bothered him.

I would like to use the words of the contemporary intellectual Karlos Vemola "I didn't get it, but it was great", but alas. David Lynch got lost in himself this time, he didn't advance the series or his filmmaking anywhere, he was just kind of showing off in a rather clumsy way, just like his role as the agent here when he yells at David Bowie. So to use Libor Matuška's words "I didn't get it and it left me completely cold". PS: I wonder how many filmmakers would normally get away with this if their name was not Lynch.

"I want an Oscar! .... I want my fucking Oscar!" Yes, the cinematography is great, the music is magical (but that's not Bradley Cooper's doing), the aging make-up effects are fantastic. But what good is that when at times I felt like I was at a show where the lead actor is trying so hard he doesn't even realize that the one that was supposed to be second best is overwhelmingly outplaying him. Yes, Carey Mulligan gave Bradley's big boxer of an actor a K.O. after a few minutes, because she, unlike him, came across as authentic, natural and didn't need any great prosthetics to do it. And I tried in vain the whole time to determine what it was actually supposed to be about. For it to be about a genius in the arms of the muses who was also a bit of a dick, it's too vague and indistinct, with characters just shuffling around, coming and going and nothing coming of it. And if it was supposed to be about the magical power of music, then maybe only in the cathedral scene, otherwise the reassurance of why Bernstein was such a great composer didn't really rub off on me the whole time. But maybe that's how Cooper intended it, according to the opening credits, that "a work of art doesn't answer questions: it provokes them", and I'm just wronging him on that. But sorry Bradley, sometimes I'm entitled to a bit of superficial viewer expectation...

All my life I've passed noir films as a slightly inert viewer, but that's just me. But I've always admired Billy Wilder's ability to layer dialogue on top of dialogue, and here I've had a blast again. Too bad about two things, though. Firstly, I would have liked some refreshing visual ideas, in this respect Orson Welles, for example, was unmatched, but here where there's nothing. And then the laboriously invented idea of the murder seemed quite banal and in some places very naive. Barbara Stanwyck, however, was perfectly chosen for the role of the femme fatale. She is seductive, but at the same time, there's something off about her from the first look .... you just see her dark side before she turns out to be a cynical bitch :o)

The 4 stars really aren't out of mercy. Anyone who's even a little bit interested in the filmmaking process knows what a pain in the ass it is, especially in our neck of the woods, where you have to beg for every cent. I won’t even mention that the whole film could have been made into a 5-minute trailer with all the visual effects shots, because I'm glad at least for that. Also for the fact that finally there was a domestic film in the cinemas without Langmajer, young Polívka, Prachař etc., and that it is not one of the usual provincial semi-romantic movies Czech cinemas are full of and that nobody remembers two months later. Here, in the case of Robert Hloz, you can feel a worthy ambition to come up with something that stands out from the current Czech film production that is contentedly rotting away on Voyo and similar channels. And in this case, I have to turn a blind eye to the fact that, if you ignore the basic premise of "resetting", which is the only one that meets the standards of sci-fi, the whole plot and the paths it winds its way through is rather on the level of a mediocre TV crime show. But otherwise, the cinematography is very nice, the compositions are great at times, and in general the individual elements (the piano, the teeth with projection) are interesting and imaginative. Thanks for that, really. And by the way, the last such good Czech sci-fi film was a long 61 years ago!

You can't teach new tricks to an old dog. Richard Fleischer was a film giant, a representative of old classic Hollywood, who wanted to catch up with the fresh wave of New Hollywood. He chose a topical theme that resonated in society and about which he had no idea, and it didn't work. It's such a succession of episodes, without any unifying storyline, George C. Scott, the main attraction, is on the sidelines, the motivation for his fatal move is very poor. The whole thing has a terribly soporific pace, even though it shows everyday police work, deals with crime, drugs and violence against women. And when it comes to the intimate scenes, Stacy Keach can't sell them as an actor, with some shallow elevator music playing in the background. It's historically interesting from perhaps the only two perspectives that would absolutely not pass today as they are racist and socially objectionable: blacks are here as the despicable dregs of society who only make trouble, as are gays when a cop tells his wife that he and his colleagues were hunting fags in the park.