Isherwood

I already had a few problems with Golding's novel (it's hard to relate the faces of little boys to the characters) and the film only confirms it. It's dysfunctional as an adaptation and loses out completely as a standalone film. The brevity in the characters' actions and motives is noticeable every time a viewer familiar with the book makes a comma for the ten pages skipped. I didn't believe in the boys for even a second. If it were a quickie made a year after its release, I might even understand that someone could work on the script for almost a decade, but this is unforgivable.

I understand why I spent four years looking for it, and why I waited another year to watch it, thinking I had to be in the right mood. That didn’t work. In fact, it can't. What is depicted is not suggestiveness, but rather spews depression and hopelessness in a massive geyser. Reality can't be imagined any worse than this... and then comes reality itself.

Perhaps I’m too young, or just overly conservative, but is it really normal to pass off divorce, infidelity, "marital vacations" and any number of other variations of warped partner relationships as the norm? I did not finish watching this.

The joke where Boll admits in Postal that his films are financed by secret Nazi funds may have something to it. I doubt anyone in their right mind would give money for something like that. Without moral scruples and with his middle finger raised towards correctness, he lets innocent civilians die at the hands of an arrogant dandy who wants to save the world in the most primitive way. The cynical conclusion ("A mother knows when something is wrong with her child.") is to be applauded. Boll hasn't grown in terms of filmmaking, he’s just thrown off the shackles of Hollywood and straightforwardly (no psychological miniatures) served up what some (?) people sometimes only think about.

Jákl has seen a lot of films. This film looks "American" more than anything else, and Czech cinema finally has a real "bad-ass" character (Konstantin Lavronenko!), but making movies about people who the media will make saints out of is kind of immoral. We could have almost finally had a proper Czech genre film without a sour taste in our mouths. 3 ½.

It's like flipping through the Wall Street Journal and Woman's World. The former spouts a lot of financial terms, the latter a bland romance. I don't understand the former and I’m not enjoying the latter. And speed-up shots of Manhattan aren’t directorial finesse anymore, Oliver. I give it three shareholder points solely for the good actors.

Eleven years have passed, and with it Fincher's visual exhibitionism, and here is a film that assaults the senses in the same way that Fight Club once did. The generational thinking that it's no longer about breaking out of the system, but being part of it is "awfully cool." I’m not a nerd, nor do I understand IT, but Zuckerberg does. Like.

This is easy to predict and even easier to forget crap which at times is not even good enough for that one single use. Cohen is a purely action director, so it all comes down to overblown acrobatic escapades, which are ably followed by special effects, but their sterility knows no bounds. It lacks any ounce of perspective (and no, Liam Cunningham doesn't save it), and thus you're more likely to identify scenes stolen from elsewhere. I don't mind Maria Bello (I like her a lot as an actress), but as a replacement for Rachel Weisz, she was a total casting mistake. The family etudes are tired and the whole is desperately boring.

It's hard to find an objective explanation for why this particular romance is garnering such enthusiasm. From my humble point of view, it's mainly that it has a good idea, an escapade of elegant wit and quite a skillful zigzagging between the established genre aisles. Another way to look at it is that it's a pleasure to watch a film where you say to yourself, "and now this is going to happen"... and it happens in a completely different way than you thought. 4 ½.

Go ahead and get mad at me, but even in the traditional dimension, I enjoyed it as much as all the other films in the series. I have no love for the original Capcom franchise, but the movie series, spoiled by the hellish B-movie director Paul Anderson, always reliably puts me in a gaming mood, even if there’s really no plot, and if there’s meant to be one, it's the same thing over and over again. The fact is that it’s never boring, the slow-motion shots are not annoying, and the fetish of stolen action, which is mostly unleashed by girls, is damn emphatic. Subjectively, I have nothing to complain about. 3 ½ [I’m tempted to enjoy this romp using the effects of Cameron’s technology.]