Malarkey

The good thing is that Tom Cruise can boast about his good acting performances since his early childhood. He may be, as a graduate of law school, a quite a rookie, but in the end, you actually believe his nerve-wracking performance. It isn’t really the best thriller I’ve ever seen but if you are in the mood for something from the 1990s and at the same time know movies by Sydney Pollack, you won’t be offended. Just prepare for a really long running time, which may annoy you at times.

A pleasant and inoffensive movie, which made me realize why I never heard about it in the 1990s in video shops. There actually wasn’t a reason for it and the acting performances of Andy Garcia and Meg Ryan definitely didn’t salvage the movie and lift it up to be a more memorable viewing experience. But if you are emotional and appreciate nice people, you will surely enjoy the relationship between these two in this movie.

A series, during which my initial excitement transformed into a feeling of boring mediocrity. Stephen King probably got lost in his own world, because, in the end, the atmosphere is the only thing this series has to offer. The interesting premise didn’t progress anywhere from episode to episode. Nothing was happening. Interesting characters get lost in the unwanted originality and the series itself actually projects everything you loved about the series Lost, but also all that you hated about it. The producer J. J. Abrams’s touch can be seen plainly in this series. At the end of the first season, you get to thinking about the meaning of some of the episodes. Were they reality or fiction? Or could they be an alternate reality? I don’t know. It was filmed magnificently, and I was really enjoying the filmmaking ideas in some episodes, but as a whole? In the end, the series brought up way more questions than it managed to answer. And I actually don’t even know if I want to know the answers.

Everything good about this movie is actually thanks to Tom Hardy. This Marvel movie would have ended up in the abyss of history without Tom Hardy and nobody would have ever remembered it. In this way, however, it’s a decent introduction of a new character of the Marvel universe, but it pays brutally for the naïve screenplay. While I accepted the fact that Venom is actually a distant cousin of the Goa'ulds from Stargate SG-1, I really struggled with accepting the simplicity of the screenplay, according to which the tired and disappointed Tom Hardy meets with his buddy Venom. Riz Ahmed isn’t a completely dignified adversary for Venom either; he’s rather an easy ticket into our world, which he surprisingly grew to like. Being a crazy scientist is quite a popular topic which doesn’t get old easily. What could get old are the typical tropes Marvel is already full of. Thankfully, Venom is strong because of Tom Hardy and even Venom himself understood that. And at least because of that I have a reason to look forward to the next installment.

Fine, but nice shots of New Zealand and a Mini Cooper in action don’t make comedies better. However, it’s probably customary in New Zealand movies to make fun of the local police, as it happens in just about every single one of their comedies.

A Japanese film - that’s always an uncertain bet. Their different thinking and behavior are a great unknown for me and so they often salvage themselves either with a screenplay or simply by not acting like the Japanese during a movie but rather like Europeans. Or they simply aren’t as annoying. Unfortunately, Her Sketchbook is a typical Japanese movie where a Japanese guy at work straight up tells you that if he messed up, he would rather hang himself. On top of that, the main protagonist goes through the movie as a mute mannequin from the Red District shop window in Amsterdam. A strange and peculiar movie with no emotions. Not a thing I’d like to see again.

I sincerely take off my imaginary hat. I would never think that somebody in Germany will decide to film a prehistoric drama with everything it entails. And that’s including a local Germanic dialect. I thought that only Mel Gibson is to blame for these precisely made crazy trips in the movie industry. You can’t, therefore, understand almost a word in the movie, but the story is so simple that you are able to understand it without a problem. The story is about a simple revenge and in 90 minutes full of beautiful shots of the prehistoric era, you’ll tell yourself that you’ll probably never experience such amazing filmmaking again.

The fact that I like Til Schweiger doesn’t mean I like his movies as well. I saw a couple of them and not even one (including this one) convinced me to watch his work again. After all, he makes mostly comedies and some of them with sequels. I don’t understand why the Germans have a tendency to make so many comedies and they give most of them this strangely erratic character, which is supposed to be funny and at the same time also original. The movie is neither and the overall tone of it makes you cringe. In addition, Rabbit Without Ears has an absolutely typical story, and there is nothing noteworthy about it, let alone interesting.

A completely different type of drama (not really a comedy, as this website states) from what the Scandinavians usually film. First, I was pleased by Tuva Novotny who brightens almost every Scandinavian movie with her beauty. I still see her as the most beautiful Scandinavian actress and based on her surname I know why that is (it seems like she’s of Czech origin). However, the story has a slightly lighter spirit which is reinforced by the, for a drama of this sort, strangely conceived music which isn’t really milking your emotions but rather plays the tones of a Spanish guitar that I could imagine in a Spanish comedy rather than in a drama. But eventually, I had to admit that this pleasant change wasn’t completely out of place and in the end, the story caught my attention.

Nonsense. As expected. Nicolas is like the Little Boletus and he is plowing through family depression and sacrifice to revenge, which is pretty strangely depicted, though. Every now and then I like his movies, but I don’t really need to see this one in particular again.