Malarkey

Susan Sarandon was literally born to play this role. You see, I personally thought I was watching my mother, which sometimes was for the better and sometimes not. So, all in all, a nicely average movie.

So first of all, you put together a couple of actors. Take a couple of unfamiliar new faces, add a couple of tenacious old geezers and you put all that into a very unorthodox family that is everything but normal. And even though the film seems very average, you do get a couple of good catchphrases every now and then.

Manchester-by-the-Sea isn’t really a village that I would like to visit, even though I normally like similar areas and I actively seek them out. But what can you do with people who look as if they had been taking Xanax for two years, surviving in their strange vacuum of nothingness. Well, and Casey Affleck is rooted in this world, and probably wants to get an Oscar nomination because he is the weirdest of the weirdest and in some scenes he literally jumps between emotions like a flea from one hair to another. It’s a pity, as under diferrent circumstances this film wouldn’t be bad. But its endless length and the strange behavior of the characters doesn’t simply make for a good movie and the few interesting scenes unfortunately can’t save the movie.

If there’s one thing you have to grant to this film, it is the fact that Barry Jenkins is a very skilled director, who took on board with him James Laxton, who is s an equally skilled director of photography. And even though all this skill goes hand in hand with the actors, whose performances aren’t bad at all, my biggest issue is with the topic, which is not uninteresting, but I was more into it from the perspective of the Oscar nominations. You see, it’s really hard to me to follow the life fate of young Chiron, who lives in a society that is totally beyond me. There’s nobody in this movie I can understand and I simply watch young Chiron, who has trouble expressing himself and who’s simply observing everything as if from a distance. He probably can’t even see that the things that are going on around him are not ideal, but he can do nothing about it himself, so he’s simply trying to adjust, but despite that he wants to form an opinion of his own. A strange film, well made, but to me it was very inaccessible. It was really hard for me to find any emotion that I could at least catch on to.

I’m not going to try to conceal the fact that I was looking forward to this one, but what I got was an average, or rather below-average disappointment. Problemski Hotel does offer an interesting topic to tell a story about and according to the synopsis, the movie looks very attractive. But the problem appears at the very start. The movie is very impersonal. The characters, even though they are interesting, are in reality really easy to see through. The viewer has no reason to root for them and actually won’t be surprised that they got stuck where they did. The protagonist Bipul is definitely the most striking character, who doesn’t really seem to fit into this situation, but who eventually ends up the same as anybody else. For the 110 minutes, I was bored rather than trying to empathize with the characters, who are trying to live, but in reality are merely surviving.

The problem of this film does not lie in the fact that it contains a lot of invention and that it’s trying hard to be different from the original, which many people know by heart from their childhood. I personally thought that Steve Coogan portrayed Phileas Fogg as a half-wit and I couldn’t really get over that. Fogg has always been an intelligent gentleman and all of a sudden he’s this boob who has shit in his head rather than genius. Nevertheless, scenes involving Arnold Schwarzenegger are great and the series of scenes in China was pretty awesome too. Jackie Chan definitely put in quite a performance. Actually, the entire movie is quite nice, but doesn’t deserve more than the decent three stars.

Even though I really like Miloš Forman, with this one you simply cannot deny that Valmont came too late so it had to yield to Dangerous Liaisons, which are much more attractive for the average viewer than a story from the 18th century full of intrigues and falseness. But if you do give the movie a chance for a while, you will notice its beautiful and unique cinematography. Well and if you are familiar with Dangerous Liaisons, you will also enjoy a series of minor, but pleasant surprises, so in the end, you will not be disappointed. And if nothing else, you will at least appreciate that the movie was made by Miloš Forman, which is something every Czech should appreciate!

If there is one thing the British love wallowing in, it is absurd stories. And a story like that is told in this movie about the divine Florence is exactly like that and I must admit that it’s a pleasure to watch. They are really enjoying the absurdity in this one and they get the most of it, which is good. At times, I did ask myself whether Meryl Streep didn’t ruin her voice because of this character because they way she sang was really terrible. Which I think was the purpose and by appreaciating it like this, I actually appreciate the film itself.

Elderly citizens feel like taking justice into their own hands. On top of that, the movie tries to employ standard British humor, sometimes they succeed, sometimes they failed, but the proper atmosphere of a small town fortunately saves the day somehow.

In 1989, the authors of any comic book movie could literally come up with whatever they wanted. And since in this case, the project involved Tim Burton, it was clear that you surely wouldn’t be disappointed. Even after almost thirty years I can say at least that, as opposed to today’s comic book movies, this one absolutely has the spirit of the playful visionary that is Burton. In this one, Batman is as dark as midnight, Joker is as deranged as a train gone wild and the music in this case is so genial that in connection with Tim Burton, who put a layer of gloss and visual aesthetics on all that wackiness, disappointment was simply not an option. It’s nice to see how it was all about entertainment with movies like this one back in the day. Today it’s all about colors, digital effects, pseudo-realism and forced catchphrases in the mouths of characters who don’t even deserve them. Here, you can simply focus on the scene and you are good. For instance, the scene where Joker storms into the museum and while listening to a divine song by Prince, he and his thugs spray and draw over one Renaissance painting after another. I mean that’s so genius that it can’t be beaten even by the entire arsenal of the Marvel of today.