rikitiki

The enthralling story of three brothers and their group, which survived a series of ups and downs. Looking at them, it occurred to me how important the appearance of singers is nowadays. Do any not too good-looking female singers with fantastic voices exist, or do producers always pick them for just their looks and then fix their voice in the studio? It's plain unfair: there are plenty of not-so-attractive male singers today, but a different standard applies for women. The Gibb brothers were no beauties, but they sure could sing and write songs.

The drunken antics of the young Belmondo and the elderly Gabin are inherently sad. Especially when we discover that the reason for Belmondo's drinking is fear and a subconscious desire to avoid anything that duty and conscience might compel him to do. The two men keep getting drunk to deal with their anxiety and terror of reality, and everyone around them pays the price. I’ve seen that before somewhere. Fortunately, their alcoholic journey is not completely aimless and, although it zig-zags along the way, it does lead toward hope. IN A NUTSHELL: How to get to China by drinking while staying in small-town France. Sometimes being taken by the hand can provoke greater fear than a dragon breathing fire.

The story deserved more build-up. Maybe it should have concentrated less about the past and more about what happened to the central character's fate in the 1950s. Or maybe showed the absurdity of a man of German origin living in Bohemia and claiming to be Czech. A man who got in everybody's way while doing nothing wrong, just being who he was. The bizarreness of being involved in the filming of what he once personally experienced. So he knew how things were then, and how the communist propaganda presented everything differently than in reality. But then there is definitely enough build-up during the race itself. A deadly coldness and definite fatality ooze from it. IN A NUTSHELL: When frost gets under your fingernails even through the screen.

This overtly political movie tries to simplify a difficult subject for the viewer. We also see the civil war through the eyes of a little girl who has a problem of her own in the midst of the conflict: the search for her mother. Intimate family moments are interspersed with battle scenes, and it probably would have worked if the girl's parents hadn't kept making such clearly stupid and incomprehensible decisions. SPOILERS: Whether it's the way they told her she was adopted or the idiotic trip to a war zone where they walk around like they're on a seaside vacation at some resort. And they don’t let being captured by an armed group, gunshot wounds or rocket attacks bother them at all. IN A NUTSHELL: How to find a biological mother with no regard for the child's or your own safety.

I never had a poster of Pamela hanging on my wall. I always thought of her as a barbarian - artificially pretty and with a brain also made of silicon (she confirmed this in the documentary: "Thinking is overrated.") So I wasn't wrong. Except that Pamela won me over a bit with this performance because, besides her fake breasts and unprecedented naivety, she has other character traits. They certainly include indomitability and straightforwardness, and certainly honesty. And whatever it is, the story of her stolen sex video was horrifying and I hope it wouldn't happen today under similar circumstances and with the consequences it had then. Because, yes, she was exposing herself, but that was her own decision. No one has the right to expose her without her consent, and no one has the right to claim that the theft couldn’t have harmed her, if she voluntarily displayed herself on the pages of Playboy. No one should be allowed to laugh publicly at the victim of a crime, as many journalists and presenters did at the time. They made her the brunt of jokes, which made her upset and truly ashamed. This crazy experience and the following witch-hunt could have driven her to suicide, but Pamela - albeit with difficulty - endured it. It's actually very powerful. ___ The documentary itself is simple - a talking Pamela, (almost) without makeup, and a lot of archive footage.

A nice idea, with the excellent Auteuil and Ardant in a burnt-out marriage, where a spark or two can still be found. And the parallel story of the other couple, who are younger and have much more frequent rows because they lack years of experience is also fine. It's romantic in the French way, so infidelity is treated as par for the course. IN A NUTSHELL: How to resurrect old feelings using old tricks.

Considering I’m not into soccer, I quite enjoyed this movie. The character of the big-mouthed, rage-shaking coach was also given subtle shades of hidden insecurity in M. Sheen's performance (just facial expressions, but not embodied in words). I also liked the editing concept and especially the fleeting glimpses of matches (often just the score is shown). That was more than enough, and many times it was more effective than trying to recreate games long-since played. Because, even though it was mainly about soccer, the movie was mainly about the self-centeredness of one pretty unpleasant guy who clearly knew a lot about soccer. IN A NUTSHELL: Would they let him train in this authoritative and individualistic way today? I doubt it. Soccer is all about money now and I'd say it constrains the sport a lot, concentrating more on the money pipeline and less on entertainment and hard work.

It's one of those cute British pictures, like a porcelain dog with a pipe, sitting in a rocking chair. Lovely for the mantlepiece, makes for a good mood and a feeling of home for a while, but forgettable. They made the main character and his family too slick for my taste. A bunch of cute little creatures, local goofballs, friendly fools who are like children. Their purity sheds light on our distorted and hard world. It's clichéd, it's trite, and I don't think the protagonist's image of himself as a local hero would agree with such a portrayal. Or at least, I hope so. I hope he get a restraining order forbidding them to portray him as an impractical knucklehead who might be right about something, but otherwise we have every right to look down on him. IN A NUTSHELL: How to fight the system when no one even notices you're fighting.

I welcome any biopic that doesn't take the simplest route, and this one at least lived up to it by showing only part of the author's life, her childhood/youth, before she really started writing. In fact, if it hadn't been about a famous writer, it could easily have been a film depicting hard times in the Swedish countryside before the war. There's probably nothing more to write, except that Astrid messed up her life a lot right from the start, but she managed to cope with it very bravely, with the help of a fairly understanding family (for the time and circumstances) and the happiness of the people around her (caregiver Marie and her new boss). IN A NUTSHELL: Independence was the writer's big theme and, as you can see, she had to learn it very early on.

A movie that quite deliberately and repeatedly tries to break your heart with every flash sad beady eyes and every pant of wet snout. The story of a wandering dog soul recounts the stories of the people he meets along the way, but in the end he sticks to the first story, which had the most potential. They made a sickly-sweet tearjerker that will have dog lovers crying their hearts out. Granted, this is a high quality tearjerker, and such are sometimes needed, but... IN A NUTSHELL: ... sorry, I prefer cats!