Kung Fu Panda (Osborn/Stevenson 2008)

Po, the son of a great noodle chef (which must have been a true amour fou - but we are not told what the mother looks like) daydreams about his future career as sword-fighting, iron-willed Kung Fu warrior, fighting his fiercest enemies with the speed of light and without so much as a flinch in the face of danger. More than surprising, when real life danger comes about and the Kung Fu Grandmaster needs to activate the hero of heroes, the Dragon Warrior, his choice on who that master should be falls on fat and slow Po. Who stands up to the challenges and beats the evil snowcat, of course.
A magnificient melange of role models: in the opening fight dream sequence, it becomes very much undestinguishable whether the Japanese Samurai traditon, the modern Takeshi Kitano interpretations, Ang Lee's Americanisms or the Tarantino rip-off stand model - all is one, and well done it is, quoting everybody and doing it with ferocious vigour.
Interesting, by the way, that this opening sequence also has a different director and is much closer linked to the Asian martial arts tradition as the rest of the film.
That main part is definitely cute despite the fact that a Panda is not a particularly interesting animal. But all the others are, from LaoShi, the (surprise!) teacher, over the Magnificent 5?, Ferocious 5? Marvellous 5? Furious 5! those fighting beasts anyway, to the ancient turtle grandmaster. As always most care has been given to the design of the bad guy, the snow leopard whose name I forgot. That evil one is being sketched very evil and dark, indeed, and I kept wondering how the Mordor-like prison where he is being rather inhumanely kept prisoner, immobilised for life, actually, will go down with the kids watching this. But definitely my favourite sequence.
On a lighter note, the expected training and practice squences are well done, with some stunning movements being triggered by the one motivation Po knows about: food! I could not help, however, but think of the much more brilliant "Montage" sequences in both the South Park skiing episode and the "Team America: World Police" feature. How can you do a training montage these days without singing "If you want show the progress but only have a little time, you need a MONTAGE!"??
If a film is made for IMAX, see it in IMAX! Brilliant picture, sound, everything. Definitely worth the extra money and an experience to which you cannot even get near when watching it on youku.com or any of those other sites.
One downside I mentioned: the Panda… but there is another, which is the voice cast. I would only recommend to all those animation producers to abandon the nonsense habit of casting famous actors. Get good voice actors, forget about the Jacky Chans or Lucy Liu's who cannot act for the life of them, not to speak when limited to their voices. Jack Black is also an odd choice, and can only be explained because the casting agent looked at the body volume of the actor and the panda and realised increasing similarity? The unknown Tai Lung voice (now I remember the name: that's the evil cat - and check out the record of Ian MacShane at IMDB - that guy even played in Dallas!) is by far the best, only Dustin Hoffman can stand up to that a little bit.
Still very enjoyable, with furious fighting sequences (may be a bit violent for the little ones, but I am not that little…) and I seem to remember even an impressive soundtrack.

Hancock (Berg 2008)

Will Smith is Hancock, a superhero with superpowers, ability to fly and shave with his fingernails. Unfortunately he is a smelly bum, permanently drunk, disappointed by his own life, wondering why everybody calls him an asshole despite the fact that he keeps destroying half the city of Los Angeles and everybody's front yard and Mercedes just to stop a car chase. When he saves the life of a PR consultant, he is in for a free image campaign to get a better life, to become a more lived hero again.

All the way through Hancock I kept thinking "There must have been a meeting. There must have been a meeting" - a meeting, I mean, where somebody stood up and said (then shouted) "Excuse me - if you want to make fun of us, try again. Films about ill-begotten superheroes must look like the one about the fat panda. You must start by telling the audience why the central character should be a hero, but currently can't. Then you have to introduce a villain, and a good one. And finally you have to show the hero a way to overcome his deficits.
There are 4000 examples in movie history for this. Go home, watch them, come back. Surprise us by making it end with everybody dying. Surprise us by making the character swear at bystanders or watch porn movies to kill time.
BUT DON'T MAKE THE FILM LOOK AS IF HALF A GOOD SCRIPT HAD BEEN WRITTEN ON THE SIDES OF A RUBIK'S CUBE, THEN AN IDIOT WAS ALLOWED TO PLAY WITH THE CUBE FOR HALF AN HOUR, AND THEN ONLY ONE SIDE OF THE CUBE WAS USED!!!"

This is by far the most all-over-the-place film of the year, the decade, ever? It does not know AT ALL where to come from and where to go. Fallen hero? Nice, but is played for maybe 15 minutes. And there is the idealistic PR consultant who helps him out of his misery. And is this a comedy, as indicated by the funny bum hero, by all the funny things he breaks in his funny landings? By the slapstick "head up his ass" scenes? Or is this serious terror, the woman dying? Hands being cut off? Mortal compact to the end, with very dark visuals? What the hell do you want to be, ill-begotten creature? What, in any case, if the plot? Where is the conflict, the villain? That little bloke with the hooked hand? Excuse me??"

The most amazing thing is that the film shows how incredibly bankable Will Smith is - it truly takes a superhero to get such a film started - and even end up number 1 at the box office. He is hot, and he cannot even do anything against it himself!

NYT Overview
The Filthy Critic writes: "Shitty ideas are like potato chips in Hollywood: one is never enough."

And Spout.com: Hancock hits a point where you can practically feel the filmmaker say, “Oh shit, this is going nowhere, so we better surprise them.”

The Bank Job (Donaldson 2008)

In order to take posession of some incriminating pictures of a royal family member, an institution that has probably a fancy acronym, but that I call "Royal Family Reputation Maintenance Task Force" initiates a bank robbery through which those pictures can be withdrawn from the control of a politically inconvenient character. While being used for higher purposes, the group of bank robbers does the best it can to mess it up, but succeed in several ways that is most annoying to the well-dressed Royal entourage.
When checking where the hell I have heard the name of the director Roger Donaldson before, I realised that I watched a lot of his films (Dante's Nonsense Peak, Naked Species, Cadillac Man is getting on my nerves… and I do not even mention Cocktail, even though I do...), but half-liked only one: Thirteen Days. All these films looks so much different from the Bank Job. Those slick Hollywood productions with their machine-generated production design and their arbitraily exchangeable character actors (Brosnan, Cruise, Costner, pfff). But here? Brilliant cast almost throughout, with particular honours to the smart, handsome and immediately approachable Jonathan Statham and Richard Lintern (as Tim), who dresses, looks and orders drinks as if the James Bond role was up for grabs again. How you can play such a slimy tuxedo-Tim and still be sympathetic is beyond me, but I liked him and did not blame him for getting the hot chick Martine occasionally (played by Saffron Burrows, who looks much better in film than on IMDB).
A sympathetic English 1970s film-alike, with cute characters, not enough tension to keep you awake at night, but thoroughly enjoyable.

Mang Jing - Blind Shaft (Li Yang 2001)

Two coal miners float from one occupation to the next, trying to find a victim who pretends to be a relative in order also to get a job. The they kill him in an "accident" and cash in the compensation from the mine. The scheme works fine for them until they meet a young boy who they start liking just a bit too much.
While the film has the neorealistic touch to it that is typical of 6th generation, critical social filmmaking in China, I found it stunningly well composed and directed. It does not show the technical flaws of, say, the early Jia Zhang-Ke pictures, but a very mature approach to introducing the characters, revealing their dimensions slowly and controlledly, and of rolling out the drama and building suspense, mixed with comic relief. You could actually say this is played by the book of narrative, but is feels very natural and relaxed. Great actors an all accounts, brilliant settings that show the desolate reality of large parts of rural China, and the equally desolate lifes a large workforce has to lead. Very good film!
A stunning number of external reviews at IMDB worth checking out.

Nim's Island (Mark and Levin 2008)

A young girl and her father live on a beautiful island, him studying nature, her hanging out with cute animals and reading adventure books. When the father goes missing with his boat after a storm, Nim - the girl - calls for help from the hero of her favourite books. Turns out this Alex hero is only a whimpish Jodie Foster author in real life, almost too scare to leave her Manhattan apartment. But she does, and they find each other, and all is well.
Spectacularly harmless, the joining of Jodie Foster and 300-star Gerard Butler (who is actually quite enjoyable here as Foster's alter ego) is aimed at somebody considerably younger than me. For those, there may be joy in flying chamaeleons and fat English tourists with sunburns, but then again, even the most little ones may realise that the script is a bit all over the place, with the whole drama suddenly evaporating when the father just returns without much ado.

10.000 B.C. (Emmerich 2008)

The plot is … er … some stone age or something people hunt mammoths, and then … er … some of them get kidnapped and one of them follows them and then there or Kenian warriors and more mammoths, only now they are working on an Egyptianal pyramid. In the end, they kill the Egyptian Prime Minister with a white spear.
The most horrible dialogues, and a narration that sheds light in the fact that at some point in your carreer, you start doing just about anything for money, because at Omar Sharif's age, there is nothing to lose. The most un-thrilling action sequences involving mammoths and dinosaurs (??? WTF???) and whatever.
When I heard of the film for the forst time a couple of years back, I was wondering why the hell anybody would want to make such a film, and how they would manage to create a decent story in such a setting. Well, yeah…

The Flock (Andrew Lau 2007)

Andrew Lau is representative of the very strange breed of Hongkong filmmakers who got a certain fame for being rather ruthlessly stylish and brutal in their films, and by influencing European and American directors with their overtly visual style. To me, these guys are notorious for hiding their lack of stringent story-telling behind recurring episodes with leg-cringing brutality, and usually produce rather forgettable merchanidse, not attributable to a specific director, but rather to the genre of "modern HongKong style".
And "The Flock"? Has an impressive set of well-known actors that you are kind of surprised to see here - but clearly being the result of this HongKong reputation leading to some producers and agents expecting another John Woo phenomenon to be around the corner (the John Woo of Face Off fame, that is, not of the other nonsense he has done in the US). That's a good bonus to get started, working with an eerily slim and exhausted Richard Gere and a very fragile and slightly dispaced-looking Clare Danes. When you get down to the story, it is confusingly thin, so that you keep wondering what twist is around the corner to make it worth all the fuzz. Nothing, however, is around the corner, apart from more and more "quotes" from high-concept genre films: Seven, Silence of the Lambs in particular, but also - as some IMDB reviewers have pointed out - a general X-Files setting about all of it. The final is really embarassing in it even trying to replicate Brad Pitt's every movement from the final scene in Seven, but without the high-tension builidup to the scene it just falls flat on the face.
The most interesting question is whether Andrew Lau will get another chance after this first US effort that did, I understand, not just go out without a bang at the box office, but that even very few reviewers cared to pay attention at.

South Park - Bigger, Longer & Uncut (Parker 1999)

After the kids of South Park get exposed to the barbaric humour of the latest Terence & Phillip movie, all hell breaks loose in South Park and they sing some brilliant songs. Kyle's mother (the "Big old bitch" of the song of the same name, probably the best musical song in 60 years - in good company with 14 others in the film, including the ear worm "what would Brian Boytano do?") seeks to ban all TP products and perferably Canada, while Saddam Hussein gets involved in an amour fou with Satan. The kids form and sing a Resistance movement and free Terence & Philip before their execution. In vain, however, because their blood is still spilled and Satan may rule the Earth, if Saddam lets him, but Eric shoots some light flashes at Saddam and the White side (or rather: Satan's red butt) wins.
Some of the most hilarious musical songs, a record in profanity, dead Kelly, gay Satan - this film is indeed the centre of everything the South Park universe stands for. I don't particularly care for the Satan character or his annoying boyfriend (or for T&P, for that matter), but in the words of immortal Eric Cartman: "Aaawesome!"
Review by an admirer at NYT
Roger Ebert quote of the week: "I laughed. I did not always feel proud of myself while I was laughing, however." Exactly!
And if you want to know what I have been doing for the last two months: go see all (!) SP episodes online at http://www.southparkstudios.com/

Se, Jie / Lust, Caution (Ang Lee 2007)

The life of Wang Chia Chi, who shifts her life in Shanghai from being an normal student to cecoming an assassinating actress, trying to help the resistance movement to eliminate the collaborator Yee.
Ang Lee films are always a bit strange for me: the little Americal bourgeois drama of Ice Storm qualities, the melancholy of Brokeback Mountain, the standard Hollywood ware of the Hulk … there are not too many drawers into which he could fit, maybe the only drawer is the one where "sadness" is written on. I always find his films to be filled with sad nostalgia, memories of a better world or life. And of the difficult decisions that had to be made, the characters reflecting on the what if's of their decisions. In this case by both the assassin and the emperor, so to say. The seduction game leads to the possibility to kill, but for both sides, and maybe the way to this point where every decision is possible has somehow reversed the ability of the persons to act: she cannot kill him anymore, but now he can. Maybe they now are better suited to face their lives, because pretending to be a killer (she) or pretending not to be one (he) was too strenuous? In the words of the ever-brilliant Roger Ebert: "There is not a frame of the film that is not beautiful, but there may be too many frames."
Salon.com Review, Variety Review

Donnie Darko (Kelly, 2001)

Donnie Darko learns in a dream or vision that the world will end in 28 days, unless he and the giant rabbit who told him … emmm … do something I do not remember.
There's the president of the Colonies as his mother and the gay cowboy from Brokeback Mountain as Donnie, and the chubby girl from Charly's Angels, and the ...
There is a book on time travel written by an old woman with white hair and an innovative school teacher who gets sacked, and ...
And there is a kiddie lover who gets exposed when Donnie burns down his house, and there is a lot of sewage water in the school headmaster's office and ...
The nice girl gets killed and Donnie takes revenge by shhoting someone in the eye and travels back in time and ...

It is really worth to look at the full synopsis again IMDB offers, I could really honestly not figure out anymore what had happened. Now my poor memory is partly responsible, but I also think that the film's problem may be a script problem: too much stuff happening at the same time, and often just stuff, not too coherent, too many exotic developments creating an early expectation of the unavoidable ending - or at least a possibility of how that ending was created with the help of time travel?
I feel slightly confused, but I believe that the film with its cute starring actor and the nice level of absurdity about it will remain with us for a while, as it seem to touch a nerve of confused teenagers who adhore it as a cult film.

Iron Man (Favreau 2008)

Weapons producer Tony Stark gets hijacked in Afghanistan, and develops scuples about his trade as well as an armed and armoured suit while in captivity. This does is not taken up friendly by hus business companion, who also wants a flying suit (and not such a "conservative one") and Stark out of the way. Stark discovers he wants to be a hero, and now he can.
As predicted, the girls are in love with Robert Downey Jr., and who wouldn't? It is exactly the cool badass bastard that gets all the upscale journalist chicks with Brown degrees and who cannot be mean enough to them and still makes them addicted. Perfect choice for a superhero who is not super, but just very smart, tech-savy and in command of next to unlimited riches. In the company of The Dude and the girl from Shakespeare in Love and Hook, this superhero film fortunately has very little superhero about it and does not need it really. The characters are strong, the locations awesome, the suit very kinetically real-feeling and the damage done during the fights loud and painful to man and material. And Downey does not even mumble as much as usual. Well done!

Diary of the Dead (George Romero 2007)

During the shooting of a mummy horror C movie, a crew of film students is being confronted with the world falling apart around them: dead bodies stand up again, the world turns into a zombie madhouse, and they have to find some refuge with their trailer. They do, at last, take cover in one of the crew members' huge mansion, where they take their last stand.

George Romero is some kind of routine zombie provider, and you have to gove him that the quality of this provision never drops below a certain standard. As zombies in a zombie movie are not the key point anymore, he takes the chance of showing how societies evolve when being struck by apocaplypse's horsemen. How military abuses the vulnerability of the non-armed, how the previously underpriviledged use the ruthlessness they were forced to develop in order to get in charge of supplies and hence civilisation. How people deal with the fact that their beloved ones are "slow mutants" - eager to eat flesh.

None of this is new, but . . . no "but", unfortunately, this time it is actually a problem that pre-existing patterns are being recycled without really adding anything substantial. The shaky camera, or the obsession of the guy who holds the camera to the last moment, is very much last year, and what does it add, anyway? Media criticism? Voyeur-Bashing? More authenticity? The threats or benefits of ubiquitous computing? No, not anymore, if ever. There is one funny aspect, at least, which is that the Mummy turns into a Zombie, kind of mind-boggling, when you are geekish enough to analyse the implications while being sufficiently drunk.
Diary of the Dead is the Diary of a film-maker who cannot escape his clichee at the moment, but who will need to re-invent himself in order to remain interesting for audiences.

Nice opportunity to come back to an old favourite - when did you last visit the Fangoria website to read a review? Do now!
Salon.com Review
Jim Emerson's review

Cloverfield (Matt Reeves 2008)

These days, it is relatively easy to hype a film to the Internet geeks, make it the talk of the days on the Blogs. Snakes on a Plane, Hulk, Cloverfield - all Internet phenomena that will usually not reflect the internet hype in a real life setting. Cloverfield is, actually, a nice little crappy B movie, with uninspired actors, a lot of helicopters, even more military personnel to shoot the crap out of Godzilla (or not: not the crap out of, and not Godzilla, but some wormy thing), and a monster of appropriate size and desctructive quality with little critters falling off it so it can also reach out to those heroes hidden away within skyscrapers or subway tunnels (always weak points of Godzilla films - even though Roland Emmerich cheated his way into the subway tunnels by alternating monster sizes at his will and really pissing me off with that nonsense).
It is not a real film, of course, no input for the brain, and would be much better had they not chosen the PG strategy - the film could do with some ripped-off heads, chests and clothes. Still entertaining, though, and pleasantly short. But the South Park Episode with Barbara Streisand as Godzilla where she gets thrown into Outer Space by the singer of The Cure is much better, of course.

Das Papst-Attentat (somebody 2008)

4:52 min into the film, the scriptwriters had the nerve to actually write the infamous German line "das wird ein Nachspiel haben" (this will not be the end of it!" or something tacky like that). At this moment, I lost all hope that a film with one of the most virile German actors Heiner Lauterbach may be interesting despite the fact that it was produced as a tv movie for RTL. German private tv drama, it needs to be said, is of the poorest quality, and that is particlularly sad because the money is there, the training is there, but acting and storytelling is missing completely! Oh so completely. A train crash of a tv movie.

El Espinazo del diablo - Devil's Backbone (del Toro 2001)

So the earlier film by Guillermo del Toro I see after I watched Laberinto del Fauno for the second time, which may be important to mention, because had I seen Devil's Backbone first, I am pretty sure my assessment might have been considerably different. Devil's Backbone (of 2001) also takes war into the lives of children, this time the children in some kind of orphanage. The mansion they inhabit houses not just the typical social relationships a newcomer initially has to endure when joining such a group, but also a proper ghost, the ghost of Santi, a previous inhabitant of the orphanage who is believed to be missing since a couple of years. The new kid (Carlos) decides that interest is better than fear and seeks to investigate the mystery around the ghost. He succeeds, and this leads him and his buddies into darker territory, where it's not the ghosts they need to fear, but those who created them.
The film is a "ghost story" in a very traditional sense, in one line with the recent "Orphanage" (for which del Toro serves as producer, I believe), "Los Otros" or the whole tradition of gothic Haunted Hill House-style literature. This appears to be one of the darker traditions of the Spanish people in Europe and America (just read Marquez and Allende and Llosa…), and it is very nice to see it in such a pure fashion, not spoiled by the (perceived) need to add gore and gruel to the ghost because the narration is insufficient. Here it is done very well, and - just as in Laberinto del Fauno later - real world and fantasy world continue to convergence, and find each other in the end.

Roger Ebert Review
And plenty of praise from Guardian / Observer
And Scott Weinberg actually wording "masterful"

Entourage (Season 1-4)

Sometimes it is worth listening to the elderly, and in this case it was the surprisingly Malcom McDowell of Clockwork Orange fame who mentioned in a radio interview that he enjoyed playing in this US tv show of the title "Entourage". Simon Mayo confirmed it was good fun, so I checked it out and enjoyed four seasons of perfect-length HBO cable format (24 minutes) that gets you addicted or annoyed after a very short while. Addicted, in my case. The entourage around new movie superstart Johnny-Depp-clone Vinny Chase, his older brother of past fame (Viking Quest), Turtle the chubby driver and self-declared rap producer, and E - Eric the Little One, who tries to manage Vince's carreer while keeping the buddy boygroup together in their efforts to chase women and spend Vince's money. The star of the show undoubtedly is Ari Gold, agent, maniac, evil charmer, roller and shaker, who is the way anybody wants to be in that shark pool - especially as you cannot but love him. The only guy getting on my nerves is the arhouse director who manages to mess up several things over the course of several seasons: E's ego and Vince's carreer, for example.
Sugar coating being provided through nice cameos by people like Dennis Hopper, James Woods, Paul Haggis or James Cameron (and most likely dozens of others of whom I have never heard before). Season 5 in preparation, I hear!

La Mome / La vie en rose (Olivier Dahan 2007)

Must be a pretty fascinating life when the whole set of media forms on offer, including stage plays and musicals, take care of your life after it ended. So happended to Edith Piaf, the French Chansonnier who partly grew up in a brothel, had a life long history of sickness, became the symbol of her art form, and broke down under the fame and glory to go down in drugs. Not knowing how authentic it is, seeing the late Piaf I still was reminded of Clint Eastwood's Charly Parker film, "Bird", where the coroner guesses the dead Jazz musician's age at 60, while he was actually around 35. Same with Piaf, she is fading away, and she dies a real wreck, destroyed by medication and drug abuse, way before her time.
While that life surely was exciting and dramatic (or melodramatic, if you wish), the film only scans it. All the stages of her life need to be covered, like on a checklist the scriptwriters had, and hence none is given the time it would probably deserve in order to unfold its emotions and drama. Only towards the end of the film, when the death of her boxer boyfriend shatters her life, the film develops some artistic element that lifts it above comparable musicians' biopics. At the end of the day, I find those films not too necessary, they hardly ever contribute anything exciting to what you knew already (on the information level) or what you go to the movies for (on an emotion and aestheticism level). The music was nice, however, even though also on this, only a tiny little fragment was touched upon. And with a musician, I still believe the music is more relevant than anything an adoring biography can provide.

The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner 1987)

I can imagine why so many people refer to this film as an absolutely enchanting fairy tale, of a magic that can hardly be found in the cinema. With supervillain kings and superhero pirates, with giants of gigantic heart and witches and warlocks to bring you back from the dead if necessary. In order to imagine the fascination emenating from this tale all you need to do is to imagine that you've never read the book! But if you cannot forget the fabulously twisted plot stumbling over pages and pages of suitcase packing or the cultural specifics of wedding day preparations of Proincess Buttercup, giving Grandpa a hard time because the rotten kid rightly complains about the boring level of household detail surprisingly to be found in this piece of adventure and mortal peril, and if you only watch the bit that was reduced to the plot in this movie (at least adapted to the screen by William Goldman's own hand), then the film is perfectly fine and entertaining. I cannot find too much of the book's magic in it, however, it reminds me of the executive summary films that were based on the Harry Potter franchise and that apprently were mostly made fro those who do not like to read. The film did not really bore me, but was on the verge of it and made me want my nice two-colour-ink hardback edition which, I realised with pain, is boxed a couple of thousand kilometers away.

The Mist (Darabont 2008)

Funny that last week I watched two Stephen King-based films ("Dreamcatcherrubbish" and "The Mist") and two William Goldman-written films ("Dreamcatchermoronicnonsense" and "The Princess Bride"). The overlap is the worst, but the other two ones are actually rather decent. "The Mist" is engraved in my memory as a brilliant audio experience, as it was recorded in some 3-dimensional Kunstkopf-Stereo when it was released some 20 years ago. I must have the tape somewhere - but no tape player, dammit! I always liked the story, because it combines some well-established and reliable motives (say "The Mist", "The Birds" and "Dawn of the Dead"), and combined it with King's ability to depict the relationships between real human characters pushed to the edge, and a bit over.
This "Mist" now, with the production qualities of Frank Darabont - the old Stephen King hand of Shawshank Redemption and Green Mile reputation - is equally reliable, and surely provides from some nice thrill and gore in a cinema. On DVD, it is not as effective, as the blindness one is exposed to when the Mist hits the screen is just too small on the TV screen and does not engulf you the way it is supposed to.
A pretty good, yet rather unknown cast around Thomas Jane as the artist faced with madness from another world and more madness from his own. The fuss around Marcia Gray Harden as religious loonie is a bit exaggerated, I find, but still she contributes the required and gets what she deserves in the end.
The deviation from the story's original ending is acceptable if you are not too religious about an author's intentions - I very much like the new ending, I admit, but would have liked it more had it not been a bit predictable (which may be the reason why King had chosen another path in his story).
Anyway: the film deservedly enters the top-15 Stephen King film adaptations. It is a long shot away from The Shining, Carrie, or Stand By Me, but on the other end, it is gratefully out of sight of Children of the Corn…
Mr Ebert does not like it too much, I see, and check out Variety's Review.

Dreamcatcher (Lawrence Kasdan 2003)

Lawrence Kasdan? Laurence Kasdan, whom Star Wars tie-in readers may remember… ! William "Marathon Man" Goldman's script! Morgan Freeman, Tom Sizemore, Timothy Oliphant!! It is absolutely incredible what a big pile of talent and money can be thrown into one Golden Pot and after some months or years of boiling and stirring out comes the most dramatic cinematic failure outside the Spiderman and Pirates franchises I have encountered in a decade or more.
The film is a sensational mess. Based on one of Stephen King's weaker books, which tries to merge a childhood reminiscence involving "special" boy Duddits (which is the book's good part) with a horror development introducing into their hunting weekend (which is a bit gross., but fun reading) and with a queer alien invvasion story (which is rubbish) - the film now stresses the nonsense bit of the book and adds another ridiculous element, namely Morgan "I play anything for a Million Dollars" Freeman as the manic leader of some special alien hunters army squad who goes on a rampage. The interaction between the guys in the hut, the flashbacks to their youth when they met Duddits, and that Duddits himself, the boy who changes the people he encounters, who has this special air about him - all missing or so reduced that if you have not read the book, the bits about the memory storage and the Dreamweaver and the mind-reading abilities remain next to incomprehensible. I need to check the book's ending again, maybe it's the novel's fault, but there are two alternative endings on the DVD and you cannot really decide which one is more rubbish.
And Roger Ebert correctly asks how those stupid teeth-monsters could ever steer a spacecraft - or build one, for that matter.

Night Watch: Nochnoi Dozor (Bekmambetov 2004)

Interesting to see that the Russian cinema has changed strategy a bit (if that can be judged from watching one film… at least it's actually two, with Day Watch already waiting on the desk): from reflective parables (sometimes political, such as Askoldov, or philosophical, such as Tarkowski's oeuvre), now there appears to be something more of blunt elbow-like style: Matrix meets Vampires meets Lord of the Rings and what else. The fight good versus evil, and the world's fate is at stake, and there is the chosen one, but he can pick sides and hence decide the eternal battle.
After I had heard quite a bit about it, and remember a spectacular trailer I watched some years ago, I expected the visuals of the film to be way more spectacular. The "vortex" looked nice and dark, but that was because it was an ugly apartment house circled by a couple of thousand animated crows, and at night, for that matter, so no wonder. The director or editor also liked it, so much, actually, that it was given more screen time than most of the actors. Apart from some nice graphical gimmics, the rest is just Moscow at night, which may be a nice setting in principle, but I guess the transfer from big screen to DVD revealed that even the visual concept of the movie is not up to snuff - not to speak of the nonsense script that even I understood and that just does not provide any mystery, drama or thrill. It is easy to get distracted during the film, so better provide food and drinks to the sofa, otherwise you will take on eny opportunity to jumo up and change rooms in-between.

Film: We Feed the World (Wagenhofer 2005)

Erwin Wagenhofer's documentary world tour shows some of the absurdities of food production, from hybrid Aubergines over hald of Almeria covered with greenhouses, to the absurde pictures industrial chicken production provides. He spares us some of the more grisly images you could expect, as most of the film is not devoted to, for instance, the inhumanity of animal breeding and slaughtering, but rather to the absurdity with which the allocation of food is being managed by global production and distribution companies. Nothing one would not have seen before if you are interested in tv documentaries and the frequent food scandals that pop up in investigative tv reporting magazines. But well filmed, with interesting expamples showing the wide range of the global food production and destruction madness. What I found odd was the fact that most production bosses or enterprise CEOs interviewed are so boring you can hardly believe it - must be the sector they work in?
Variety Review

El Laberinto del Fauno (del Tor 2006)

http://www.panslabyrinth.com/

Update after second viewing:
Still thank God I don't need to decide on anything here, but if I had to, I would shed more sympathy on the film than I did after first watching it. I still think the script is tumbling over its own feet when alternating a very classical (and hence hery simple) "Three Tasks" structure with a "Evil Stepfather" narration, not making very clear why not concentrate on the one or the other. And I still think that each element (each task, each character, each dramatic turn) does not get the time it would deserve, and that the film should have been much much longer or much much more concise. But I was more enchanted than the first time around, by the desperate girl more than by the fairies and the monsters. So while there is still no Citizen Kane anywhere near - it is one of those films where the desire of watching again (and again) may be really rewarding.

Initial article (May 07)
Thank God I do not need to decide on the best films of the year, the best foreign language films, the best arthouse films, or what an arthouse film is and what is not, for that matter. There have been a couple of interesting films in the foreign language sections, and argument is out whether those were not partially better than what contended in the main sections of the main awards. Pan's Labyrinth is clearly a very well made and original film. It is among those films that allow themselves the clash between reality and fantasy, hence enabling stronger contrasts through the switch between the two domains than would have been possible if the film was exclusively set in one of them.

Both worlds are powerful: the vicious brutality of civil war military leaves no room for sympathy with the Franco troops, they fight a brutal war against their own people and do not hestitate to torture, humiliate, kill and abuse. The creatures our little heroine encounters on the other side of reality, however, are at times equally blindfoldedly murderous (as the guy with the eyes in the hands - whatever his name was) or at least of intransparent and ambiguous moral standing (as the Faun, who - I have to say - disappointed a bit in terms of animation, which was sad given he has so much screen time). The plot is easy and drives the story finely along through the tasks that are being given to the "chosen one". Yet not all of these have a satisfying resolution, sometimes the scenes end as if the director was glad enough to have gotten her out of this new trouble alive and in one piece, disregarding issues of dramatic build-up and scene resolution.

As a fairy tale, however, the film has the right to all these liberties, of course. Not all of them are intentional, however, and I really do believe that the film suffers from incoherence in script quality. In total, I loved to watch it, but with expectations having been as high as they were ("the Citizen Kane of fancy cinema" - "easily the best film in the last couple of years"), a bit of a stale feeling lingered…

John Rambo (Stallone 2008)

8 minutes into the film I fell in love with it, precisely when the nerve-wrecking church-bloke finished his speech about bringing bibles and whatever into the war zone "in order to change people's lifes", Rambo only replying "Are you bringing weapons?", and after an "Of course not" he turned around with a dismissive "Then you are not going to change anything." (flavoured with a hearty "Fuck the world.") The film is not a "good" film, do not get me wrong on this, but it is a nice kick-ass piece of entertainment if harsh, non-compromising violence without any artificial additives entertains you in movies (also using some of the neo-realistic instruments that made "Private Ryan"'s stunning images, so it's actually a spectacular watch). I think "viciously brutal" is the expression that fits it best.
Of course the performance by all those actors who want to show they are actors are embarrassing ("the woman" in particular - the "guy with the big gun", however, is pretty good - and don't bother to remember names, there is only one name of relevance: "Boatman"). I find myself, however, to be very comfortable with what Stallone does in his late roles as fleshy mountain of a man, just beyond "use best before" date, but not convinced that the writing on the package was correct.
Direction is a bit clumsy at times, as is editing, but there is compensation for all this at the end, when Rambo shows how strongly he influenced a certain generation of movie-goers: Am I wrong or does everybody (everybody!) who ever saw First Blood know exactly which road he is walking down at the end of the film? I did not check against the old film, but I don't think I need to. It is one of those images burnt into memory.
Now let them rest in peace, those Balboas and Rambos, and do not make it a habit of only doing requiem movies for the rest of your life, but well done on those two, I think there could not have been other ways of finishing off those characters (maybe more politically balanced ones, ok…).
Surprisingly good ratings at IMDB (and I thought only I had a bad taste...), but the critics (see IMDB list and RT) were not too pleased (check out the insults at Kermode's).

4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days (Cristian Mungiu, 2007)

I think the reason why this film stirred so much excitement, in particular around the fact of it not getting nominated for best foreign-language film at the Oscars, lies only in the fact that Americans are not very used to intense chamber-like drama anymore. The film is very good, no doubt, but I would guess that at any given moment, there are 20 films in European cinemas that are of siimilar quality. It features a terrific horrific villain who can easily match Javier Bardem's latest man-eating character, has a painful scene of suspense when the "heroine" is caught in a horrible family birthday party, while her friend and sister in suffering is lying in a hotel bed, waiting for her bodily tortures to commence. There is a powerful reconstruction of the dull atmosphere that was most characteristic of all those pseudo-communist dictatorships in Europe's East, and there is an excellent juxtaposition of the inept and clueless central character, who would completely collapese without the sidekick taking care of things. Screentime actually reflects this, und reverses roles accordingly. I found this to be maybe the most interesting feature, that the support cast is being established as the actual lead not just in terms of content and plot drive, but actually in terms of presence.
Excellent drama, with creative, yet no-frills, camera work. Another astonishing example of current Romanian cinematic resurgence!
Roger Ebert
NY Times
Salon.com

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Stree (Tim Burton 2007)

In brief, this is another Tim Burton movie. This says it all, positively as well as negatively, for me. It has a fascinating and fantastic setting, beautiful production design, excellent hair, nice acting. It has Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter's bust on display. That's all quite nice to watch, pleasant to look at. But: never will he manage to surprise the audience by managing to get more out of the material than you would expect. Once you have explained that the film is about a barber who goes on a rampage and slits throats by the dozen just to get revenge on a city rather than an individual enemy, you have basically the whole film in your own imagination. No need to watch it, really, because the way Burton executes the principle ideas does not transcend the story beyond what can be told. Fascinating, in a way, and with unexpected ideas for resolution: maybe he should not direct his films, but rather develop them and then give them away? I don't know. What he's doing he is doing with great reliability, if it would only be a bit more original... The music is not very interesting, by the way.
A.O. Scott of the NYT praises the film's savagery (by which I think he means the unrelentless efforts to cut throats, that were a bit tiring after the fifth or sixth one, I have to say). Roger Ebert also was quite charmed.

Ms Zacharek of Salon.com is more on my side: "the display [of violence and blood] is joyless without being particularly horrifying, either -- there's something perfunctory and inconsequential about it".

Sunshine (Danny Boyle 2007)

Without doubt, "Sunshine" has the most beautiful sun I have ever seen in a movie. Extremely regrettable that I did not see it on a big screen, I am sure it would have been amazing, especially together with the subtle soundtrack that gave me an eerie feel about the whole film. I initially wondered why someone like Doyle would want to make a film with such a slow and reflective premise: a couple of people traveling to the sun, which takes a while, trying to save the world on some very abstract level. Not too many aspects of the plot appeared to offer the kind of kinetic energy that I link to Danny Boyle's name. But then again, who am I to judge, having only seen (or at least only remembering having seen) Trainspotting and 28 Days Later (I suppose I must have see "Shallow Grave" and "A Life Less Ordinary", but cannot for the life of me remember anything about them). Those two were pretty good, but I always found it strange how well-received Boyle's films, or those two in particular, are among audiences and critics alike, while I enjoyed both (a lot), I would not put them on the shelf with Those That Will Last.
So I was watching this Science Fiction movie but that slightly over-rated director, and oddly, the parts where I did not follow him was when it got more energetic and kinetic, meaning the last act, where all boredom and self-reflection is being substituted for some form of Alien-like stand-off, only without Alien. Fair enough to introduce a dramatci highlight , but when it follows more than an hour of showing that drama can evolve without diablo ex machina (sorry...), why not leave it that way and go with what you have and what is organically part of the film. A slight letdown at the end, a slide into more conventional territory than was necessary.
Roger Ebert
New York Times Review

No Country for Old Men (Coen and Coen 2007)

For almost a year now one of the most anticipated movies, the clear favourite for most directorial and best film awards, the clear favourite in best male supporting actor for a viciously vicious Javier Bardem (who looks as if cut out of an Addams Family cartoon), with beautiful photography illustrating the glorious emptiness of the American Southwest.
It is all very well, no doubt that the Coen family has risen their level above the dullness of Intolerable Cruelty and the impossibly non-funny sacrilegue of Ladykillers. But.
But on top of all the beauty and beautiful emptiness and beautiful silence (loved the soundtrack score…), there is this feeling of something missing, and it may be that the missing thing is the film's heart. I suppose the eerie feeling of boredom that is not really boredem but rather a permanent adoration of the picture's beauty or the actors' brilliance comes with the slow pace of storytelling the film choses. This would probably be less prevalent when watching it in a cinema, the pictures taking you away to a better place where pale killers cannot reach you and Tommy Lee Jones' southern brawl fills your head and forces you to concentrate in order to understand what the hell is going on. Boredom can be beautiful, if the film convinces you that it is necessary to mirror the characters inner self, think Solaris. But boredom in a film about a killer chasing a thief having stolen from drug dealers having even killed the dog (or "dawg", as they would pronounce it)? A little bit of tougher editing would have done well, and when you see that they chose to do this themselves, it may lead to the evertrue notion of letting specialists do specialists' work.
I really liked the film, no doubt, but it could have been quite a lot better if (1) expectations had not been risen so high over those many months and (2) it just had been put together a bit more dynamically, also allowing to merge the various stories better. Tommy Lee Jones is brilliantly tired, but they leave him a bit alone in all this mess they created.
Roger Ebert Review
A O Scott for the New York Times