DaViD´82

Is it a man? Is it a plane? No, it’s Citizen Toxie! The love of our life is back and the whole wide world loves him! A great comeback from the bald guy in red shoes who, using his barnacled charm, protects not just the inhabitants of Tromaville, but mainly his genes, against a cruel bad guy. For he stands before the greatest challenge in his life. To sire a descendent, an heir. And this mutant works hard at it. He is helped considerably in doing it, by feces, gallons of blood, a bare breast or two (thank you for those gifts) and even a dead special kid. Even the Masturbator himself puts his sperm to good work. At least Toxie is never evil or ridiculous fourth time around. He’s just taken enough dolphin sedative to put a regiment to sleep. And that reminds me. I cried at the death of the Dolphin man... with laughter. A toxic waste of huge dimensions that was rather longer than it should have been. This way it loses its punch and you get a little fed up with it. But only a little. And Dolphin man is unnecessarily slow. Which even Josh Levitsky would admit.

I could paraphrase my review on Country Teacher and write something like this: “Now try telling me that European cinema is dead." But I won’t waste time repeating that and so absolutely uncritically (and anything goes, according to Dostoyevsky) I write that, together with Tornatore’s The Unknown Woman, The Brothers Karamazov is the best movie to come out of the continent of Europe this millennium. As a result, this may well seem to many viewers just like a two-hour commercial for Dejvice Theatre (which is an accusation hard to argue with), but unlike the commercial for the Kalich Theatre (that’s right, Kvaska), this is a demonstration to the world of how skillful and talented Prague’s best theatre is right now. And it’s that simple. Believe if or not, or you can try not agreeing. Long live Dejvice! And many more movies from them!

Silence is Golden, or: How to say a hundred times more than Hollywood is used to via the stoic silence of two “pig-headed" actors. And it’s irrelevant whether they are fighting against each other, natural forces or a bottle of saké. Even the much discussed ending couldn’t be better, even though at first a lot of viewers will be taken back by its seeming cheapness. Simply an outstanding guy’s movie not just for guys, slightly too long and with an introverted soul. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

This turns out to be a little different from the other movies starring this punch-up pair. But it’s because it’s much more adventurous, a little less fisticuffs and served in a slightly more serious tone (but only slightly) that I like it more than many of their better known movies. Despite the screenplay which is seemingly non-existent and so all we just get to see random and out of the blue attempts by these two to make themselves a living.

There’s a glut of movies based on successful literature for younger viewers right recently. Most of it is disgusting calculative rubbish designed just to be wow. But that cannot be claimed of this movie. Here it is purely to impress. We see cute animals, the right values and other things to please, but if I take into account what segment of audience this is aimed at, it isn’t so bad after all. In terms of filmmaking, the creators themselves must have spent the last couple of decades on a forgotten island and have not the slightest idea about how to make movies for young people, although in fact I found their peculiar, old-fashioned way of filming rather pleasant. Not much goes on in this movie, and when it does, they include a lot of superfluous “chapters" (especially the Buccaneer), but all this is drowned out by the central acting trio. In similar types of movies the big names tend to be there just for effect. They give their standard performance and that’s it. Here you can see clearly that they are having fun. Especially Jodie Foster, who is as important for Nim’s Island as Michelle Pfeiffer is for Stardust. Because Jodie does such an excellent job with the role of the “troubled woman from Acapulco" that I don’t find the character irritating. It is Jodie who in the end ensures that this picture remains in the safe waters of a solid, regular movie for the whole family.

Bruce Banner would have be pleased with this approach. Occasionally he would have been so enthusiastic about it that he would purr like a little baby at his mother’s breast. And in some places he would be so pissed with it that his elastic pants would get too small even for his alter ego. The Incredible Hulk is an amazing joy ride along a sinusoid graph. Nah, I’m kidding. About the sinusoid graph. While at some points and in some scenes it works even better than Ang Lee’s version, as a whole it is a ride half-way to nowhere. Lee’s adaptation is more “Banneresque", while Leterrier’s version is unequivocally “Hulky". How significant. It’s up to you which you like best. I’m reminded of Marvel’s first movie attempt - Iron Man. In that movie, the juice like the style and the actors worked well, but the action element, the finale and even the villain was rather subdued. Here it’s almost precisely the other way round. The villain and the action are ok (but still no miracle), but the rest is just a bit wishy-washy. For instance sparks fly between Norton and Tyler as they would in a microwave oven during a power blackout. Paradoxically it works more at the moments when he appears in that miserable CGI guise. And the movie is rather lifeless in comparison with Iron Man. No jokes, no snappy comebacks (all hail a couple of exceptions). But I’m not saying it’s bad. In the end we have two good genre movies in place of one great one. But, as the ending hints, there’s a lot more in store (and we’ll probably see it soon). Oh, and one more criticism. I would probably rather have seen Liv’s bare chest rather than Norton’s. So fans of America’s substitute for their missing mythology will have a reason to be happy. The rest of us have another quality picture in front of us to join the rather thin ranks of colorfully saucy comic book movies. Somehow, right now I feel like watching a classic version of Jekyll and Hyde...

To tell you the truth, during the first twenty minutes, Mark Waters absolutely disarmed me and I’m not scared to admit that he even almost enthused me. Everything worked better than I had expected. Primarily the atmosphere and the aura of a kids’ journey to find adventure oozes from it. The kids here aren’t nearly so bad as they tend to be in similar types of movies, but they are nicely naughty and believable buggers who won’t leave some poor souls to read in peace. I just love these kids. And to add to the goodness, here the movie has rather a dark feeling about it. And after rather a mysterious opening they pull out their trump card: CGI dwarves. After this, the Chronicles stops all pretense and... the cruel truth emerges. No miracles happen, this is just another in that endless cycle of sprouting attractive family fantasies with no head or tail, designed for disposal. There is no story, just a substitute for a story in the form of a functionless pastiche with no end of clichés. And, what is worse, they are bad and terribly naive clichés at that. But not naive in a cute, fairytale way, but in precisely the opposite way. And, to make things worse, we get forced a handful of moralizing. Or rather a whole wagon load of moralizing. In terms of acting, this is like the woodpile before the winter. Wood stacked up, listlessly sitting there. Even Nick Nolte, in his only (very short) scene, manages to embarrass himself more than he has done in many a year. Not to speak of the usually otherwise outstanding Strathairn. As a whole it isn’t absolutely bad, and not even very boring; in technical terms it’s well-made, but he managed very easily to annoy me more than anything has for a long while. Which is a shame, because the beginning promised great things in terms of quality and Freddie Highmore does an unexpectedly good job with his double role. That kid’s got something in him. And that is the only information that the Chronicles gave me. But I knew that a long time ago, anyway, so in fact it was a completely needless watch.

For me, the second Futurama is described precisely by Leela when talking about a certain “thing" during the movie - “It’s boring. It’s got no oomph." Personally, I liked the last movie better; it may not have been so humorous, but at least it held together as a whole and the characters had some sort of development. But this is simply three regular episodes where only the “first" one is excellent (with its quality it’s on a level with the first season of the series) while the rest is only just passable. And even the jokes and gags, which are as frequent as love tentacles in the movie, play first fiddle, but they tend to be recycled from the series itself. But in no way a disappointment. It’s just, how to say it, an absolute waste of space.

You too can do what a toucan can. And when I see a panda, I jump with joy and start laughing, kinda. A panda with a gut like a hippo and the power of kung-fu. While I was expecting a regular DreamWorks ado. In other words, one pop-culture reference haphazardly after another, a worn-out edit sequence to the tune of a pop hit and loads of parodical joking around that we’ve seen (at least) a hundred times before. For all the Chinese saints, imagine this: somebody had the amazing idea of not doing a parody on kung-fu movies, but instead a completely classic, while lightweight and kid-friendly, kung-fu picture with everything that this brings. The good and the bad things. Although this Panda odyssey isn’t one of the peak of kung-fu genre, it is the best animated representative of the genre that I know (on the other hand, I don’t know too many of them). And who would have guessed that a family animated movie would treat me to the best and most ingenious action sequences this year. I just hope that Master Shifu and his followers don’t spoil it with a part two, which probably won’t take long to appear. I almost want to add the word “unfortunately".

Superbad is neither super, nor completely bad. Bill (Jonah Hill) and Ben (Michael Cera) are nice guys. So much so that you end up willing them to get laid at last. But what good is that when the duo at the typewriter gives them such paper-rustling dialogs. They try so hard to be “obscene and natural about something important" like when Kevin Smith writes them, but they end up being obscene and about nothing. Just a little spiced up with a pop culture reference in every other sentence. But just for the sake of it, not because it fits. Another down point is the length. Not even the ending of The Return of the King drags on this long. This way a few really good scenes and ideas are drowned under a ton of filler. And not the flavored filler like you get at McDonald’s, but ordinary, flavorless filler from McLovin. P.S.: Any similarity with my review for Knocked Up is fully intentional.