Malarkey

Mark Ruffalo sure is the man. He portrays a complicated human story with such lightness that I have to laugh with him, but at the same time I have to follow him to the very bottom of depression. Things can’t be any other way with a person who is suffering from bipolar disorder after all. However, how nice he is will get under your skin so much that you won’t be able to get rid of that after a week, or maybe even for the rest of your life.

The reviews of this movie here clearly hint at the qualities of this film. Well, you can be the judge of that. Who would like to watch a guy who ends up owning a shoe factory and who gets help saving the factory from a black transvestite, who by the way is portrayed excellently by Chiwetel Ejiofor. The English sometimes have the gift for absurdity in stories and you get a story like that here. If you do devide to give this movie a chance, I think you will end up like Nick Frost, who was the reason I watched this movie in the first place. If you want to see how, do watch this film. I don’t think it will be a waste of your time and on top of that you will experience a story that is definitely based on fact.

The first big surprise took place in the Lucerna cinema, where I met a lot more Bulgarians than Czechs. The other surprise came with the course of the film, which at first sight looks like the Bulgarian version of Holiday Makers, but in reality it is a more compact Torrente, the Stupid Arm of the Law from the sunny beaches of Bulgaria. Holiday Makers are simply the bomb and I had a lot of great laughs while watching it. My colleague Enšpígl did not assume at first sight that this comedy would be politically incorrect, but he had to admit the Bulgarians were right. Holiday Makers sure came out really well. They managed to offend half of Europe including the Germans and the Russians and they even poked fun at the committee that monitors and selects tangible and intangible monuments for the UNESCO Heritage List. Yes, I am talking about the old ladies, whom I couldn’t understand the entire movie until I finally got the point. In other words, you enjoyed April Fools’ Day in April, May, June, July and August. This one really came out well for the Bulgarians and if I get the opportunity to see this movie again, I will gladly do that!

A movie that is trying to be more of an art-house film rather than a meaningful movie that would be logical and make a deeper sense. Nevertheless, the idea isn’t bad at all and if you can get over the weird story-telling, you will get quite an interesting punchline.

The name of the movie Amnesia does contain a nice double-meaning, but until I checked how old Marthe Keller and Bruno Ganz were I couldn’t believe them that they could have looked so young in the early 1990s. When I apologized to them in my mind, I got angry again because such music couldn’t have been played in Ibiza in the early 1990s. More like the turn of the century, but what can you do. I still stand by my opinion that I’ve never seen a movie where Nazis were forced into the plot more brutally than here.

Since the disillusionment with Chris Rock last year, who told off every white face on the planet, we have gotten to the new year only to see that the academics are skilled at brown-nosing. And in order to satisfy everybody, they stuffed 2016 with so many black faces that there simply had to be somebody who would turn tehir performance into an Oscar. And if this was the only thing that this year was about, the ceremony would be quite OK. But let’s take it step by step. Nominating Fences is exactly the kind of brown-nosing to Denzel that I am talking about. Nevertheless, I do admit that Viola was the only black actress to actually deserve an Oscar. What I don’t understand is the movie Moonlight, which won Best Movie and Best Supporting Actor. I personally think that it’s the worse movie the Oscars had to offer this year. And I don’t mean one of the worst, but actually the worst movie that received any nomination. And that’s pretty strange. On the other hand, the favorite La La Land also collected a number of nominations, where Best Music, Best Director and the nomination for Emma Stone literally hit the spot. Too bad for Ryan, who in my opinion deserved to win much more than Casey Affleck. However, I sneakily told myself that some of the members of the Academy could surprise everybody and give the award to someone else than the clear favorite. For instance, Jeff Bridges or Michael Shannon would definitely have deserved an award for their performances. But well, what can you do. These are the choices the Academy made this year and apart from the awards for La La Land, there wasn’t a single winner who would make me really happy, so Jimmy Kimmer had to come in to save the day at least in part, as he had a couple of really good ideas and he nailed it with the tour bus and with the balloons. These Oscars were pretty humorous, I must admit. The faux pas at the end put the cherry on top of the pie, but well, things like that simply happen. I must also say that the Czech commentary on the second channel of Czech TV was great this year. To the point and that’s how it should be. Thanks.

I don’t know if it is mainly because of the dubbing, but I must admit that it was thanks to the dubbing that I managed to watch this movie to the end. Those guys from a special needs school spoke in the voices of 20-year-old ruffians and that at times gave birth to some pretty good fun. The question is whether this was intended by the authors of the movie. I think the movie is supposed to be a standard French drama from the war and post-war period and there isn’t much to add to that. The French make all their movies pretty similar and if your attention is not caught by any particular scenes, then there is nothing left but to look for those qualities somewhere else.

A very strange movie. That was the first thing that I thought after I watched The Red Captain. Quite a good premise was destroyed by non-sensical and hard-to-follow story telling, which turns it into something more than what it really is. On the other hand, the actors definitely deserve your attention – they are simply terrific. The actors I personally appreciated the most were Oldřich Kaiser and Michal Suchánek, whose roles were the biggest surprises to me. But Maciej Stuhr was superb as well - he allegedly had to learn to speak Slovak because of this movie. Another thing is that only seldom do you get to see a Czech movie that is shot in Hollywood form. However, in action sequences, this form borders on the embarrassing because Oldřich Kaiser’s escape from the scene is probably the easiest escape I have ever seen. Kaiser jumps out of a window under which there is about eight meters of space and in a nanosecond he drives away from the scene. The film has several other moments like this and it loses a lot of its value. Still, the movie is a very nice surprise and I really enjoyed it despite its illogicality.

It’s no surprise that I know absolutely nothing about this film. In the opening credits, the premise makes it look like a weaker version of the movie Seven (which is actually a word of praise for the movie), but that’s only a very weak conjecture formed during the first couple of minutes. What follows is a mixture of all the bad things that the 1990s had to offer in film and what never brought the movies any success. A very forgettable movie.

According to the reviews here, this slightly morbid giallo film is quite OK. Well, I don’t really think so because other than the scene involving the naked Italian actress who was trying to seduce a 10-year-old boy, I only enjoyed one other scene that I had to wait for until the very end. An average course of investigation that looked like a combination of French crime movies and Italian naughty movies reached a conclusion that literally took my breath away. You see, the final fight was like an absolutely brutal Italian Fight Club. Brutal, illogical and in the end also bloody. I had to watch the scene twice because I haven’t seen something this funny in a movie for a long time. Thank you, Mr. Fulci, you kept low-key during the entire movie but you sure had a lot of fun with the ending.