gudaulin

Umberto Eco was part of the generation of European intellectuals who were shaped by their resistance to television as a medium, which they saw as the foundation for the cheap entertainment of the widest masses of consumers. Based on principle, they were convinced that any work had to be chewed up and spat out in order to satisfy a large enough target group. Therefore, Umberto would not be surprised or disappointed by the result of the work of the TV team that embarked on the adaptation of his cult novel. He probably would have enjoyed it instead and claimed that this was exactly what he expected. Personally, influenced by the novel, I once had a hard time fully accepting the film version because it seemed stripped of its philosophical and spiritual dimension. Meanwhile, Annaud's film stands out alongside this series as an excellent atmospheric affair with great casting. John Turturro ranks fourth on my list of favorite actors, and that says it all. However, I will forever remember him as the lawyer from The Night Of, not as the Franciscan from The Name of the Rose. He lacks the charisma under the veil of his beard, which radiates from Sean Connery's masculine character. The same is true for Christian Slater and Damian Hardung comparison. Annaud also discovered a distinctive face for cinema in Ron Perlman, and so on. His film was filled with atmosphere, which cannot be said at all about the series. It has nice set pieces, but they lack any real life. It is evident that the creators aimed to shift the plot toward an adventurous and romantic genre, which is the last thing Eco strived for. This is not about developing certain motifs, but about violating the literary source. I won't rate it with stars because I stopped watching after two episodes. But I'm sure that with each passing episode, I would suffer more and more.

The first episode of the artistic reconstruction of the Chernobyl disaster is characterized by an effort to adhere to commonly known facts and it does not look cheap or lazy. Johan Renck has a sense for creating a dark, hopeless atmosphere and for choosing actors. I am looking forward to seeing Jared Harris in future episodes as well. Despite all the efforts to create a perfect illusion of the fourth block of the Chernobyl power plant at the time of the explosion, I have conflicting feelings about what I saw. Reason and the experience gathered from 23 years of practice in operating a nuclear power plant resist believing in human behavior and the reactions of the block's personnel. It's not about observing incorrect manipulations and decisions of the block supervisors, I have known those for a long time. But when one sees the staff moving through the wreckage of the building without personal dosimeters or any protective equipment, touching contaminated fittings with bare hands, breathing air full of aerosols and dust particles without respirators, it tends to shake them. A nuclear engineer, who, knowing that the reactor was blown apart by an explosion, obediently goes up to the roof to look into the open reactor core just because their superior ordered them to. It's simply something so distant from the behavior and mentality of Central Europeans that I keep asking myself how much of what I see corresponds to reality. In relation to Chernobyl, I always had different questions: for example, how is it possible that the disaster actually caused an unbelievably small number of immediate and subsequent victims? At the time of the exposure, there were 400 employees at the power plant, many of whom received extremely high doses and, contrary to expectations, lived to an old age. And this was despite the supposedly terrifying Eastern European lifestyle and stress. Furthermore, the majority of those who died from radiation-related illnesses were firefighters from outside the power plant. I attributed this to the fact that they actually behaved rationally during the accident and tried to limit their exposure. However, the first episode does something different, perhaps for dramatic effect. We will see how the creators handle the subsequent episodes.

I will not review the series as a whole because I only watched it briefly, but my first encounter ended with great confusion, despite the luxurious cast. It is too forced, and childish, and I can't remember being bothered by canned laughter anywhere else like here. It is essentially the essence of the sitcom genre, which in such a pure form is, in my opinion, outdated. This is so sitcom-like that it could serve as a television backdrop within another series. It feels so exaggerated to me...

Nope, I can't do that to director Bogdanovich and this time I'm not handing out any stars. I would be too stingy and I consider Bogdanovich a director of excellent social dramas, like The Last Picture Show or Paper Moon. But this time, after just a few minutes, I felt that something was off. Making a conversational film with boring dialogue is the road to hell. The casting of Owen Wilson is basically a diagnosis in my eyes because I regularly miss out on his films where he gets a more significant role. I don't know if it's because he's unlucky with his roles or if his cuckoo mannerisms are just so annoying to me, but there simply isn't any chemistry between him and me. I watched half of the film without interest and realized that, with the highest probability, the second half wouldn't give me more than the first, so I gave up watching it with a clear conscience. I consider this comedy to be a typical case of a film that evokes a feeling of helplessness in all those involved in its production. As someone mentioned in a comment here, perhaps the most interesting thing is Jennifer Aniston's change of hairstyle, which I didn't even recognize at first. It's the first time since Friends that I felt she had detached herself from Rachel in terms of her appearance.

Bohdan Sláma is one of the few contemporary Czech directors who, in my opinion, has something to say to his audience. The problem is that he doesn't always choose adequate means and quite often comes up with rather lifeless constructs instead of real burning stories from life. In the case of Four Suns, after just a few minutes, I felt like Sláma was speaking a different language than the one I understood. I really didn't get this film. After 33 minutes of suffering, I gave up and, of course, in that case, I also gave up on rating it with stars. However, if I managed to endure until the end, the star allocation would truly be modest. Probably extremely modest. In one scene, Karel Roden asks the people present why they're here, and what they're doing, and I kept asking myself the whole time why I was watching it when there are thousands of more sensible ways to spend my free time...

In this case, I am not going to give it a star rating because I gave up on the film at a certain moment. I saw it on TV and approached it with high expectations. I simply wanted to see a new animal, but films of a similar category based on grand nature shots need to be seen on a big screen or at least on a television screen of the maximum size and image quality. This isn't that, and it significantly spoils the impression of the film. However, I also think that Animals in Love does not have the quality of famous films in its category, and the director could have squeezed more out of the subject. It needed more dynamism and bold editing. The way it is, the emotional impact is weakened.

I don't dare to give this a star rating because I gave up on the movie after a while. The whole Ocean's series didn't sit well with me, and I didn't rate the first one because it quickly evaporated from my mind. I gave the second one 2 stars, and if I found the determination to endure, the third one would probably receive the same rating. The Ocean's series looks up to legends like The Sting from a respectable distance. It may be because with Ocean's Thirteen, it's clear from the beginning who will win, and the movie doesn't have any significant twists or shocking revelations. Considering the multitude of stars, the budget, and the advertising, it's a very average movie for my taste.