Category: Movies

I watched “The Life of David Gale” on DVD today. It is by far the best movie of the recent pile. It is a drama about capital punishment with Kevin Spacey playing the main character. Lots of good acting by everyone, excellent directing, good soundtrack and overall very close to a perfect movie. :)

This movie got the thing I enjoy the most right – all the characters are complete. You picture clearly every person that is shown in the movie. Futher more, most of the characters are more complex then heroes from the comix animations. They do indeed look like a real people that have real lives and real problems. Few excellent tricks were used to accomplish these fullfillness. For example, pieces of paper with written feelings in a fast rotation… You have to see it to appreciate it.

I voted for a (strong) 9 out of 10 on IMDB.

Olga and I just came back from the movies where we saw “Spider-Man 2“. If you missed the hype and still planning to see it – don’t. There is nothing to it. All action from the movie you can get from the trailer. The story too. The rest of two hours was a bad soap opera. Not Mexican or Brasilian – those guys know how to make good soap operas. This one was bad.

Half of the film shows problematic life of Spider-Man where the guy has to live two lives – of Spider-Man and Peter Parker. No surprise his performance is poor in both of them. Then everything goes nuts for him – lost job, lost girlfriend, blah blah blah… Then he decides not to be a Spider-Man, but just Peter Parker. That doesn’t work out too well too. So he turns back into Spider-Man and everything is OK now. That’s it. On the background, so that everyone does wake up once in a while, there is a good guy, a professor, who was turned bad by the evil mechanical hands on his back with artificial intelligence. He is trying to build something the whole film, but fails and kills himself in the end. Boring.

In the end, you are given a clear idea that there will be a third part to this film. Another sequel. There is nothing left to show, but it will come anyway. Too bad. I think I’ll pass.

IMDB rating is going absolutely crazy about this film. I’ll go vote for 3 out 10. And I have a feeling I’m giving too much. Yuck.

Olga and I watch “The Grey Zone” on DVD. It is a slow and boring movie about the World War II. It is not even so much about the movie, but about a concentration camp and how people were burning other people in crematoriums.

I’ve seen a whole lot of movies about World War II and this is not the among the best of them. It has the point, but it’s not deep on covering it. Of course, noone knows what they are capable of doing in order to survive, unless they have been on the edge. But that is so old and simple…C’mon!

Even Steve Buscemi and Harvey Keitel – two excellent actors – don’t have anything to do in this film. There is nothing they can exercise their talent upon. Pity.

5 out of 10. Find yourself another movie to enjoy.

Watched “Wag the Dog” on DVD. It is an excellent movie that merges so peacefully to the recent memory of “Fahrenheit 9/11“. Both films have a lot of common ideas, one of which is that mass media plays an enourmous role in what we think and beleive in. This is more true of America I guess, which is a country will very developed mass media (networks and staff like that).

There is a whole bunch of excellent acting in this film. Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro are brilliant. Woody Harrelson had a short and silent role, but he was great too. Few other people added to the quality of the film.

The difficult thing to say about this film is what genre it is. IMDB rates it as comedy, but it is not exactly a comedy. It has a little bit of everything. I would put it into what IMDB usually classifies as an independent movie.

See it if you have a chance. 8 out of 10.

After fixing all the problems with the sound, I’ve decided to test the new TV and watch a movie. “One Hour Photo” was the next one on the list. It is a kind of movie I wanted to see, but after I’ve missed it in the cinema, I didn’t care too much to rent it. Accidentaly I’ve got my hands on the DVD a few days ago. ;)

It is a good film. It is different from a whole bunch of other in the way that it is about the maniac, but there are no dead bodies in the film. Not even blood. It kind of shows everything from the perspective of the poor guy with the wicked mind. Robin Williams is awfully like himself. I like the way he acts, but I guess I’ve seen too much of his movies. He is getting boring.

There were plenty of nice photographs in the film, which I especially appreciated, being an amateur photograph myself. Actually, all the camera work in the film was pretty good.

If you’d ask me to rate it, I would give it a 6 out of 10. Watch it if you want something slow, with no blood, few “F”-words in it, and few nice family pictures. Not particularly entertaining for my tastes.