Malarkey

You can basically expect anything from movies like 100 Bloody Acres. I was especially curious to see if I get some amusing non-PC fun; alas, it didn’t happen so I was watching a classic horror full of intentionally idiotic people who keep murdering each other in equally idiotic situations. So, a classic. I watched this for the Challenge Tour 2015.

Another of those pleasant German comedies from recent years, which are funny just enough to receive average rating. They neither offend you nor take your breath away; you have fun but don’t need to see them again. This particular one, however, has a bonus in the form of an unorthodox view of the consumerist society, which made me add one star to my rating.

I’m sort of thinking about the US history. It wasn’t very joyous. And then I think about ours. But I’ll return to the US history and I can only say that people were real bastards in the past. I’m not saying that they’re not bastards nowadays, but what happened on the US territory during its colonization is just unparalleled. The land bought by the blood of Native Americans and then subsequently African Americans that the white men have brought in… that’s not exactly something you can brag about nowadays. And a very interesting British director Steve McQueen introduced one such chapter into a story that made me sick throughout the entirety of the movie. I almost didn’t make it till the ending. And I believe I can take a whole deal when it comes to movies now. But I guess I can’t, I haven’t seen a movie this heavy in a long time. Some of the scenes reeked of absolute despair, loss and sadness from each day spent on a cotton field. But the director filmed it really well. I won’t ever get some of the scenes from my mind. And not only because there were insane things happening, but also because the director has purposely filmed them to be lengthy, sometimes even silent. The ending itself is all-telling. And those actors? I don’t need to take a long time to talk about them. They all left such an impression on me. Not only the main African American ones, but also those portraying secondary characters, who had a whole array of famous names.

I was really looking forward a B-list action movie and that’s what I got, with everything that involves. Including a boring action hero, who I don’t want to say goodbye to yet based only on this movie. But he was pretty tragic in this one, but there used to be more of these wrestling heroes and where are they now.

On one end, there are endless discussions with patiens, activists and professors on the topic of AIDS. On the other end, pointless gay scenes that took a lot of effort for me to handle. Don’t expect anything subtle here…

The Canadians have never been too good with art. The music isn’t any good, except for a few exceptions. The movies aren’t any good, except for a few exceptions. And this movie certainly isn’t that exception. It was a drama that copied whatever it could and did it poorly.

While watching this movie, I remembered a plethora of stories of young, promising French guys, who, with joy, spraypaint on our historic buildings in Prague, and then the police have to scrape them off the roads in the middle of the St. Wenceslas square or they intentionally shove them so they would fall from the statue of St. Wenceslas.

A bunch of girls in an unintersting French town are bored. They have been bored for a long time, so one ‘intelligent’ 16-year-old girl gets the idea that it might be quite fun if she got pregnant. The girls’ lack of zest for living was pretty obvious and I can easily imagine that this very thing is the problem with today’s young people, who do not know how to entertain themselves, so they look for entertainment in nonsense. The film’s premise will attract your attention, but at the same time you cannot expect this to be a five-star gem of a movie. There are too many scenes portraying the endless moments of boredom of the current French generation, who do not know how to value life.

The Italians once again came with a brilliant subject matter. In my opinion, they have a talent for it. I watch a dozen of mediocre Italian movies (often with a lot shouting on top of it), and then they hit me with something I can’t get out of my head even if I hit a wall with it. And there’s nothing wrong with the fact that they’re exploiting time travel here. This is a film about family tradition, about some sort of family spirituality, which is what I liked so much about it. Plus I immediately noticed the Slavia Prague soccer scarf in the living room, belonging to the father with Buffon’s hairstyle, which made me feel even more enthusiastic about the film. Plus, the casting of actresses is also very fortunate – Vittoria Puccini’s acting performance was brilliant and Benedetta Porcaroli was also not bad given her youth. 18 Presents is a sensitive family film that won’t make you cry, but in the end it you will feel so incredibly strange that you will not want to forget it.

I think that Sam Mendes was aiming for the Oscar here, I don’t know why there aren’t more films about the First World War, but it’s probably because most of the time the soldiers were battling boredom in the trenches rather thanfighting for territory on the ground. Sam Mendes, however, went a bit too far here, replacing filmmaking with an attempt at absolute realism. The illusion that everything is a single long shot makes the scenes look remarkably surreal. It all starts with the crash of a German plane into a dilapidated barn, continues with ruins of the town illuminated by flares and ends directly in the trenches, a few seconds before running into the turmoil ofbattle. I was bating my breath, fascinated by the fabricated scenes, and enjoyed one of the best war films made in the last few years. The trio of good old British actors (Firth, Cumberbatch, Strong) is the icing on the cake, which will draw you into the depicted events of the war and remind you that it is “only” a film.