DaViD´82

Is it a man? Is it a plane? It’s... Big, it’s big, it’ big. It’s hopeless, it’s hopeless, it’s hopeless. Massively effective, but at other times unfortunately just effective. Self-centered, pretentious pathos, interspersed with incredibly opulent action following the maxim “any one second of action when a skyscraper doesn’t collapse or nobody throws a locomotive at anybody else and where there aren’t at least seven cuts and fifteen reflections is a god-forsaken, wasted second of action". Tons of pathos, but no levity or tongue-in-cheek. Just the falling skyscrapers, deathly serious faces, falling skyscrapers, character “psychology" reduced to moralizing two-word sentences, only sounding right from the mouth of charisma-oozing Crowe, falling skyscrapers, falling fighter planes, falling people, flying extraterrestrials and a couple of falling skyscrapers for good measure. If, same as the skyscrapers, you can’t take all of this (and that could easily be the case), this turns into a good movie to laugh at in ridicule, more than anything else. I could take it, but for me to like it, the ratio of the almost non existent down-to-earth storyline to the cold, action (and, purely subjectively, endless and therefore numbing) part would have to be more than 1:5(00); and it really wouldn’t hurt if the creators could lighten up a little.

The unbearable lightness of ruling in the unadmitted third season of Yes, Minister/Prime Minister in the pre(sequel) of The Queen. While in that movie the Peter Morgan/Helen Mirren duo followed her... ahem, Her Majesty in a serious tone over the course of one week, here they follow her... ahem, Her Majesty over the course of more than sixty years through “therapeutic" interviews with an array of so dissimilar, but also so similar prime ministers, including the Iron Lady.

Wannabe Stardust. A wacky fantasy fairytale with no lightness or humor, not to speak of the chemistry between the central duo. And although it’s pretty hard for the above reasons, in the end it’s more or less watchable. The crowning stupidity of this is, however, that although the movie ends after running for an hour and a half, instead of the final credits a forcibly grafted on half-hour of fight mayhem takes off and it’s... massively unbearable (and I found Jack similarly unbearable too).

Along with Game of Thrones, the best fantasy series currently airing. An adaptation of the most famous collection of badly presented, unfunny Jewish anecdotes where we wait long and interminably for Godot and primarily an adaptation with which it would be senseless to reflect one’s own beliefs or opinions on faith in the final score. The creators took on a thankless task in the shape of retelling the fundamental parts of the Bible in the space of just ten episodes and so they decided on extreme truncation and a whistle-stop tour of god’s world with a hint of theatricality. But if you refuse to play their game, it has some magic about it. A shame about the necessary evil in the shape of an annoying, literal narrator and even greater shame about his affected, pompous delivery which, along with occasional excesses (for instance the Asian angel tough guy from episode one who slaughters the whole of Sodom), are rather detrimental. The end product is a reverential, dignified and uncontroversial illustration of this time-tested bestseller which was, is and will be an essential component of the basic education of Western civilization, nothing more, nothing less. P.S.: Will there be a season two about the Koran?

Like the anti-Gondryan The Class inside out and on board a New York City public bus. A teenage-generation testimony that works so well that after just ten minutes I was already praying for the bus to crash, with all the youth inside dying a painful death... In itself, the movie isn’t bad at all; in fact, in the limited space of one bus, where he follows “documentary fashion" everything from bullying through the caste system to love, Gondry handled this movie with flying colors. And I couldn’t say that it was uninteresting. I just that spending over an hour and a half in the company of people who I would rather give a good clip round the ear to just rubs me the wrong way.

Stay true to your geek enthusiast soul, making Trekkies happy with allusions and references, or pander to the demands of the blockbuster market? That is the question to which this time Abrams didn’t find a satisfying answer to. And so sways between these two approaches, a while this way, a while the other. The instability here rears its head in all aspects. On the one hand a seriously conceived (and criminally underused) villain with incredible motivation played by a charismatic actor and opposite him a comically fresh-faced crew full of puppets to make up the numbers. Although it’s Spock-style emotionally cold, more tears are shed here than at Kim Jong-il’s funeral. It pretends to be a popcorn movie where you don’t have to switch your brain off, but they start coming out with over-combined plans that would seem idiotic even in much dumber pastiches. We get tongue-in-cheek Indian Jones-style escapades and attempts at dark, fateful monumentality topped off with a convolutedly grafted on compulsory deus ex machina-style cameo, incessantly recycled music, unwanted, ridiculous metavariations (the worst being that awful scene “behind the glass) and the rather sudden ending which, rather than being a climax involving the inevitability of fate, looks more like the budget ran out and so the movie didn’t end as it was originally meant to... Simply a messy (and confusing due to the frenetic work in the cutting room) result where the biggest surprise is that Abrams had no problem with exactly the same things in part one.

An empty hypnoneon nothing that paradoxically has it all; redruM, a shitload of material for Gosling’s breakfast, Oedipus complex², Jodorowsky, a return to mother’s womb, Martinez, Thai folk song karaoke, some explicit violence etc.

Everyday politics and the role of women and of the media in it. It is commendable that the creators chose neither the easy path via mafia-style, corruption-rife politics nor the naive path of chintzy politics full of good souls with the good of the people/planet at heart. In this movie, politics is a result of behind-the-scenes negotiation/plotting by various differing groups, where some are involved in politics for the limelight, others for the power, others as a public service and others are just incompetent good for nothings. And they all try to make sure that they keep their places on their perch after the next elections. A regular episode (the opening, election episode is an exception) involves a dozen characters in interiors endlessly trying to find a compromise to enable them to push through “their own project" via tons of dialogs that are frequently about what goes unsaid rather than what they say. For Czechs I would say it is interesting that in this series they have to deal with similar internal political problems as exist in the Czech parliamentary canteen. When you also take into account that Lindholm pretty faithfully reflects not only the current situation in politics, but is sometimes even ahead of time (several times, immediately after a problem/event occurred in the series, it happened in reality), I have no choice but to recommend the end result to everybody who likes a realistic glimpse behind the scenes of something that, ,despite affecting our everyday life, we on the outside don’t often get the chance to see. P.S.: One of our female parliamentarians, Miroslava Němcová, must be an avid fan of this series, judging by how she has recently been trying so hard (and failing) to create an image of herself as a Czech copy of Nyborg.

Chauvel's “War Reporter” meets Thompson's “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” in a somewhat very biased film. Had it been apolitical and impartial, it could have been better. But then it wouldn’t have been Stone.

The daily routine of a barristers’ chambers in London in a series that prides itself on being a realistic (according to experts, the only fundamental hiccup is the low age of the candidate for “silk") depiction of the world of law, full of behind-the-scenes intrigues, legal procedures and loop-holes, briefs so thick they could make it into the Guinness Book of Records delivered to be read overnight before the trial and even some cases before the court. But what stops it from being completely convincing are the characters. Not that the chambers staff are uninteresting, but (the first season of) the series is blindly focused only on Martha who, despite being pleasant (and Maxine’s performance) is a little annoying due to her desperate goodness. If she were given the same space as the rest of the unremarkable characters (apart from Billy’s Machiavelli-ism), she would function as an excellent foil. However, this way, alone in the center of events, she is more a dead weight dragging the series down, while not sinking it totally. However, season two changes this radically; the unremarkable characters have been fired, leaving behind the “more mature", non-black and white characters and cases which now tend to be on a fuzzy knife-edge where the perspective and interpretation of the law is completely different to the higher, moral principle; and so nobody wins and everybody loses. In many respects, season three is the best in terms of the development of cases and characters, but due to “holding up a mirror" through socially topical cases, this rather loses the excellent down-to-earthness of the previous seasons. P.S.: The creators take it for granted that you are well versed in the procedures, hierarchy, powers, jargon and division of work of the British legal system; but if you aren’t, I recommend you spend a short while with Wikipedia, otherwise you will easily get lost in all of the ins and outs. | S1: 4/5 | S2: 4/5 | S3: 4/5 |