3DD!3

Knock! Knock! Knock! A cute crime movie, cut precisely to suit today’s fashion. It’s just that hypnosis isn’t so central as PR tried to imply and the painting isn’t absolutely what this is about. Sanity, lies, anger, love and hate. Boyle mixed this cocktail following his own traditional recipe and his signature is apparent in almost every shot (the beaker thrown at the camera), maybe the trailers gave away too much. Cassel excellent, Rosario Dawson super smooth and McAvoy masterfully swaps roles and is the inconspicuous puppet master of the entire Trance. Delightful and not completely stupid. Rick Smith supervised the creation of the first-rate music.

Pilot: To tell the truth, I didn’t enjoy this much; it looks like it’s turning into a classic series about relationships, and I can’t see anything that would make it unusual. The premise isn’t particularly imaginative. I’ll probably still give it a chance thanks to its solid depiction of the L.A. environment. We’ll see.

Ingenious, madcap hodgepodge. We’ve all seen stoned nut-jobs before, but they were never this nice or this funny. Rogen and Franco have no trouble entertaining us and the twists were obviously written by stoners. A myriad of unbelievable characters, an awesome chase with a foot in a window and a really bloody finale that looks like Vietnam with all that grass. Just more consistent dosage is lacking, otherwise great.

A completely believable, tense to chilling sci-fi that is of credit to the genre and again instills a thirst for space science. Cordero uses the concept of camera recordings cleverly and through sensitive dramaturgy he exploits the viewer’s questions for the good of the story. As a Clarke lover, I was thrilled by the mission to Europe (the setting for more than one Space Odyssey) where life may exist in the oceans beneath the ice. The casting is faultless, even though the most memorable were the trickster Sharlto Copley and the unerring Michael Nyqvist. No shortage of charged scenes and you might not realize it yet, but one of the experiences of the year is waiting for you. - I forgot my toothbrush. - Then we’ll just have to go back to Earth.

At first, a perfect romantic drama. Wrecks of people, chewed up by life, gaze at each other on the balcony until they like what they see and arrange a date. Then it begins to get a bit sticky and the heroes reveal their secrets. Add a couple of murders, a great atmosphere and it should work. And it works, but the cast and the director held more promise. And mainly the ending like out of a Segal movie cuts this movie’s throat. Don’t get me wrong, I like slaughterhouse finales, but it just wasn’t right for Dead Man Down.

A passable summer blockbuster that could have done better, but trying to please the viewer’s greed it ended up as a visual one-bite snack with an unclear message. Forster presents the pandemic as Mother Nature’s way of making human trash pay for their sins, forcing them to eat themselves. The title sequence and the dulcet tones of The 2nd Law: Isolated System by Muse, a summing up by an deranged virologist (our greatest hope), this all indicates deeper thought. Then there’s a turn about when in War of the Worlds style we escape from the city (even Rachel is here) to get to a boat and then we travel the world with Brad - when I say the world, I mean basements in Korea, Jerusalem (substituted by Malta) and Britain. The whole thing holds together weirdly and it seemed to me that the storytelling structure had maybe been different (better) in a first version of the screenplay and the initial attack on Pitt’s family was meant to appear in some flashback. You can see that it’s a broken vase broke stuck back together again and it holds, but some of the pieces were newly made to fit some gaping holes. The ending in the lab is the only scene with the genre cliché of terrifying, shuffling zombies, while they are quite successful in changing them in the rest of the movie. These stiffs remind me more of Smith’s colleagues in I Am Legend. On the other hand, some individual scenes are filmed exceptionally well, they are engaging (the 3D really bothers me in dark interiors), and work excellently standing alone. The ideas that the creators pull out of the bag are sometimes very novel and refreshing. The toothless David Morse, the burned general’s tapping finger, the airplane and the laboratory chase. The mainstay of the movie is the conquest of Jerusalem, which takes your breath away. In fact, I liked it, despite all of my objections, but I can’t get rid of the feeling that this could have made a much better movie. It had the material for it... If I had to compare it to the book, I would just sadly agree that this wasn’t good.

In a regular revamp for the new millennium, Kal-el has set off in the right direction (destruction!) balanced between a realistic approach and a sumptuous fantasy watch. The hero is an unbalanced foreigner in a country that has no understanding for him (Cavill is wonderfully alien, occasionally a little conceited, occasionally naive) and the flashbacks pile up the layers of a torn character who daddy Kent (the excellent Kevin Costner) tries to channel into one - it’s a shame that there aren’t more moments like that and the narrative structure isn’t chronological, but is presented jumbled up throughout the picture. However, Snyder balances the doses of emotional forming of the hero with the action and at the end he lets loose an all-encompassing inferno and Metropolis (and maybe even a few acres of India) is reduced to ashes. Powerful dialogs (with a compulsory dose of pathos) which are more than just the dumb joking around that we know from earlier recreations of this flying cape-wearer, but meditation over the direction taken by nations, their conceit and, at the ending, also stupidity that leads to the end of civilization. The introductory twenty minutes on Krypton is like out of Avatar and the lightly illustrated government disputes are far more interesting than any of Clark searching for his origins. Zod with Michael Shannon’s ugly mug has depth to him and isn’t utterly evil, but he’s just doing what he has to and Superman understands this. And that makes the finale even more crushing. The two fellow countrymen are fighting for a chance for an inferior race (us) and the only thing that stands between them is a difference of approach to the problem. The verbal disagreements between Zod and Jor-el are nicely gradated and fateful, like everything in the movie, in fact (yes, this is at the expense of humor and irony, but that doesn’t matter at all). One thing that matters sometimes is the unnecessarily “realistic" camera which focuses, jumps and shakes. I really like this approach sometimes, but I would also like to stop and enjoy the shot of the ship as it falls without having to search for the ship on the screen, because it is shot from so far away. The fights with collapsing buildings and general destruction don’t disappoint and there is some invention in the beating (like in the Matrix, we don’t start flying till the very end). Hanz’s music is the diametric opposite to Williams’s and it suits the spirit of the movie perfectly. It’s not so bombastic as they promised us in the trailers, but still, it’s a marvelous new approach that makes sense for this type of character and I’m really looking forward to the next part.

Lots of style and ideas; I understand the message, but I think it needs more of an explanation of how this world works, and I’m intrigued to see what my stalker would look like. You might think I’ve gone crazy, but since I watched this I have more respect for blocks of concrete. :)

The screenwriters couldn’t resist. Honestly, it was just too enticing, but hats off to Abrams for saving fans from themselves (clever differences in the trailers) because he knows the value of a good secret. The story of Into Darkness is a solid political sci-fi thriller, working perfectly with the main characters and visually provokes nothing less that amazement. Both Kirk and Spock are given equal space. The divergence from the primary story line, caused by Nero’s intervention completely turns around some events and changes the context of certain events to a chilling extent. I’m afraid the creators just can’t afford to do this next time. The so acclaimed bad guy with a mug like Benedict Cumberbatch lives up to his reputation both mentally and physically (his hands are like skull-crackers). And Peter Weller is cool! - If Spock were here, and I were there, what would he do? - He’d let you die.

A danish trip to the bloody world of drugs and Thai (homo)boxing. Now it depends how much you can take as a viewer. Nicolas Winding Refn doesn’t need to tell us anything. The story is simple. The message unclear. The dream sequences like out of Valhalla Rising or Fear X gain even more ecstatic dimensions thanks to the Bangkok location. The symbolism of severing limbs, good born from evil and twisted good that achieves justice only by perverse means. The foul-mouthed and permanently grouchy Kristin Scott Thomas is a perfect contrast to Gosling’s passivity and to the Terminator-like precision of Vithayi Pansringarm. Only God Forgives also contains one of the most appalling torture scenes of recent times. Something to watch for the most demanding of viewers, with a dark after-taste that stays with you long after the final song is over.