furex Reviews

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

Star Wars+Nolan/Top Gun fan-fiction defies intelligence

[4/10 · 20 June 2023]

The best thing about the original Top Gun is that it didn't care for a minute and that somehow saved it from its many flaws and limitations, even though it didn't really deserve it to, thus ending up being a surprisingly fun movie in spite of the odds (like it or not, it is a two hours long, give or take. Military-industrial complex advertorial no matter how you slice it)

Like the Mav likes to argue, if any (normal) guy stopped to think about that movie, it'd kill them dead. Of aneurysm. (Quentin's not normal, of course.)

TG: Maverick does all it can to ingratiate fans of the original ("see! We watched it and EVEN took notes on our iPhones.. how about dat ole HEN!" --seriously, it's got a character named Rooster and he's Goose's kid - I kid you not) while satisfying new moviegoers. Infamously you can't make everyone happy and trying to do so most likely pisses everyone off.

When the crazy warbird mayonnaise couldn't go crazier, it starts jumping sharks, maybe when a 60 yo writes checks his body should never be able to cash, and takes twenny somethings to school, while dropping the conscious act so as to not notice the ridiculous entirely.

After that it's just sharks jumping over sharks on top of shark-jumping sharks until the back row gets aneurysms, too. It never makes much sense beyond a very token, surface level --and you don't even have to stop to think, in the 130 minutes run there's enough down time to allow anybody to do that, sadly: one easy example is the overlong Mach 10 introduction whose task is to establish that Mav is no longer a self-absorbed dick, but in the process forgets to ever tell us why should anybody care about going Mach 10, past a token effort to paint Cpt. Mav as working man, AI fighting, hero. In fact, after the intro the thing is never mentioned or remembered again... and it just trusts that you'll side with the maverick and stick it to the - utterly charming as ever Ed Harris, BTW - man - just because we are all supposed to disregard authority somehow (a sentiment I can entirely subscribe to otherwise), unless the seat of that authority happens to be us (very Trump-like under a certain light) and it can't ever manage to misdirect attention long enough so that the viewer doesn't notice.

Oh BTW just like the original Top Gun I could not be affected less if you don't like this review, you fanbois can swallow a dusty GPZ900 sideways for all I care. The ghost of Obi-Wan, --sorry I mean Goose's, and also Admiral 'Ice' Kazansky's do hate when it does that, nevertheless they would still show you the bird.

PS: what the hell is a "multi-lateral NATO treaty" supposed to be, anyway ? Why would "GPS Jamming" mess up the F-35 ...but not ye ole F-18.. ? I could go on.

Moulin Rouge! (2001)

Overdone Mess

[5/10 · 5 February 2009]

If the songs in this movie were to be more rhythmic, you would have read tons of comments along the lines of 'MTV style editing' - I don't have a problem with fast editing, but in this one there are sequences composed of countless shots under a second in length, and they are long enough to make me dizzy.

Senses are purposely overloaded and silly plot devices are layered one above the other to form giant heaps which should be conveying a feeling of joyful mindlessness, yet if you take a step back and look at the big picture the plot has a nice symmetry intertwined all throughout.

The cast as a whole works, but Kidman came through as totally unbearable, she was like so totally over the top that if I was to compare her to a food, I'd say the cook has totally ruined the raw material by mistakenly pouring a ton of salt and spices. The underlying flavor of the character is totally blown away by the excesses of her interpretation (and FWIW the mindbending squealing) Despite involvement of famed producers like Craig Armstrong and Marius DeVries some songs are totally unlistenable (it doesn't help that the choice of Broadbent apparently couldn't sing even if it was a matter of life or death). I'm thinking of Show must go on, though on average the music wasn't so bad (the medley are a bit forced IMO), and couldn't avoid smiling when I recognized Gorecki.

All in all there are good things in this movie but its flaws completely overshadow anything else.

Il Divo (2008)

Sympathy for the Devil

[7/10 · 30 January 2009]

Andreotti was really recognized guilty of association with Mafia until 1980. This was probably the most important piece of information to be delivered to the audience, but it was instead concealed with legalese in a small blurb of rolling text among the end titles, where it's easy to understand just the opposite.

There's an unspoken agreement in the Italian medias, for this truth must not really be spoken or printed. We must all go on pretending Andreotti was acquitted of all charges because he was innocent. His lawyer, the one who lost the appeal, went on to lie and everybody in the press and TVs pretended to believe her. Now she's a politician herself. Go figure uh?

Paolo Sorrentino, despite trying to be oh-so-courageous, can't manage to state it in a simple and understandable way.

The screenplay is in itself a little messy. While in a sense it tries (and succeeds) in conveying the intricacies and complexities of politics through artistic devices, and to point out how blurred is the line which separates the underlying blunt truths from the soft words of the lies which the public must be lullabied into - the final outcome is that even I had some trouble to make all the facts and faces overlap with their real-life counterparts. And that believing I have a fair (though certainly far from complete) understanding of some of the basic facts that underpin the rise and fall of one of Italy's most controversial and powerful figure in all of my country's recent history.

I can only wonder what insights the unsuspecting audience may have gained from this viewing. And with the great deal of time the film spends to describe in detail all the quirks that make this otherwise alien figure all so human, eventually the effect may turn out to be sympathy for the devil.

The task was certainly not an easy one, but the outcome is a thorough disappointment.

Mamma Mia! (2008)

Gameplan: 1) Sing Abba 2) ??? 3) Profit

[1/10 · 4 December 2008]

If you want proof of how a movie could be drawn out of thin air just connecting the dots which are really songs in a band's catalog, do the right thing.

Choose Beatles and watch Julie Taymor's excellent Across the Universe. But if you wanna forget the nam war, and take a bite out of a fake flower power cold leftovers and feel the plasticky taste on your tongue, savour how far you can push a silly style without a bare trace of some substance, then definitely watch this.

In this badly casted, poorly sung and worse written movie, everything seems out of place. The first half hour goes about with everybody screaming on the top of their lungs and trying hard to convey a feeling of sunny joyfulness while brutally forcing their faces into meaningless atrocious expressions and squeezing their eyeballs out of their skulls, then again some more shrieking for good.

You would believe it couldn't go more downhill than that, but then a plot tries to unfold (and utterly fails), because of the sheer nothingness it is made of. Vocal performances that you could pull out under shower (and I'll just say Brosnan), leave you plenty of time to appreciate the gorgeous backdrop which is Greece, and also a bit more to ask yourself why this had to be done, really.

The vacuum-packed silliness of the story is completely revealed by the end (which ideally should have been the marriage), and then it will be full clear why it doesn't really end there.

It's just an excuse to sing some Abba. And make money. See the summary.

Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

Clever pretenses but shallow and insincere

[6/10 · 30 November 2008]

Synopsis: In 1944, against the backdrop of the rise of General Franco's fascist regime, a young girl on the verge of adolescence, tries to dodge the fears of growing and horrors of the historical moment through her magical fantasies.

While El Laberinto del Fauno definitely shows that the director has some skills (as it kept me involved for all of its duration), it's quite disappointing in itself. Why is that? The bulk of the film is about the horrors of reality, however those are depicted through extremely graphic gory sequences which do nothing to convey the plain, blunt, basic nature of true life horrors, because they all revolve around the figure of fascist Captain Vidal, who is basically manically depressed, a psychopath, and whose overstated displays of violence are really of no purpose in themselves, other than making it obvious for the most distracted viewer how sick the man is (and just look how much emphasis was put on the discovery of the connection between the doctor and the communists, it's like they're assuming you're not paying attention.) At some point the recurring, unnecessary outing of Vidal's sadistic personality started to feel trite, effectively neutralizing the power of the representation through desensitization.

In the end, the depiction of the fascist regime appears flat, simplistic and two-dimensional, too much like a kid's vision of history, bad vs good, black and white - almost Stephen King-ish in its oversimplification.

On the topic of the role of holocaust in movies (and anything else resembling that): every piece of film which deals, even remotely, with it, inevitably clads itself in self-importance, expecting the viewer to accept whatever is shown on the silver screen with a nod and utter respect for the sorrows the victims of those historical moments had to endure. So let me state this again: no matter the respect we owe to those victims, by no means your movie has a right to have this respect trasferred upon itself, unless it's _thoroughly_ _deserved_.

El laberinto is clever in sidestepping the overused holocaust focusing instead on a part of history which is connected to it but mostly unknown outside Europe. If El Laberinto had been any good in offering a believable representation of this close-to-forgotten memory, it would have restored it, thus gaining a right to be lauded, but as it is, it just used the historical backdrop to gain undeserved recognition, the filmic equivalent of an attention whore.

The fantasy parts, which revolve instead around the labyrinth and his ambiguous guardian, the faun, offer much more space for subtleties, which is quite likely an intended inversion of attributes, though lacking the flair Tim Burton has for this kind of device, and as a result this ambiguity feels only necessary to make the cardboard reality part more acceptable, but useless in itself. Subtleties for the subtlety's sake. The fantasy parts also come out as more genuinely disturbing than Vidal's outbursts.

A wealth of little details has been disseminated in the script, but not enough attention has been spent on interweaving them with the plot in a meaningful way. They just look a lot like the icing on the cake: 'look mommy how deep I am' rather than a functional part of story telling.

All of these elements persuaded me that El Laberinto is narcissistic exercise where all the movie maker has been thinking - You'll *have* to notice how good I am! - and for this very same reason ends up being shallow and fake, lacking a core of truthfulness.

PS: and for the 20+ minutes of standing ovation, either it was staged or a fantasy with no more substance to it than the ones of the main character.

Ocean's Twelve (2004)

Bloated script and pretentious directing

[4/10 · 10 June 2008]

While watching Ocean's Eleven I could not avoid to make a comparison with films like Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch.

Just replace the fresh, tight and engaging script with a wannabe-smart, well polished but ultimately soulless script that incidentally is also the based on some 40 year old original idea; the mostly unknown but captivating cast with a bunch of assorted Hollywood stars who, for the most part, have made better things; last but not least, replace a stylish, snazzy but functional work of Ritchie with Hollywood's idea of an 'alternative' director (the vacuous Soderbergh) In Ocean's Eleven all of this just works because the script is not exceedingly preposterous, and most importantly, it was directed with a steady pace which did not give too the viewer too much time to think about it.

Such a long introduction to explain why 12 is such a failure: the good things which made 11 a decent film are completely gone in 12. The attempt at tongue-in-cheek humor has gone so bad that the tongue sticks out of the cheek, there are even MORE stars, but the entertainment value has completely vanished: to be fair, the plot is built uphill, depicting the 100%-coolness heroes of the first film as clueless lads which have run out of both luck and money; it was really a sorry and miserable viewing, since the all-stars cast (and the cardboard-thick characters) does not make it easy to sympathize with the gang misfortunes. To add insult to injury, the final twist is so much stretched and overblown, that the rest of the film look almost believable in comparison.

Soderbergh's direction not only lacks tightness but occasionally even manages to become annoying, like one sequence when he does repeated close-ins on the faces of the main characters. A trick that works two or three times before it starts upsetting my stomach (a sensation previously felt only once, while watching the second Bourne).

Also deserving a mention is the metafilmic turn it takes towards the end when one of the characters pretends to be the actor it is interpreted by. However the idea had the potential to amuse, this trick is pulled off in such a campy and hollow manner that, short of being funny, it actually succeeds in representing how distorted the idea of self-irony may be in a bunch of overcelebrated mediocre blockbuster stars and writers.

Unless you are a hardcore fan of the first film or the cast, this is one to steer clear of.

Miracle Mile (1988)

The meaningless ramblings of a drunkard

[3/10 · 1 June 2008]

I was going to call this movie a romantic comedy with a pre-apocalyptic backdrop. Then I stopped and started pondering, maybe it was an apocalyptic movie with comedic overtones? Then the truth revealed itself to me in its sheer enlightening power- there's one precise word, in the English language, to define exactly what this film is. And this word is ...mess.

And it doesn't make any difference whether this film is really more of a comedy or more a drama, because in the end its flaws are so big to overshadow any intended or potential meaning it could have had.

Starting off as a romantic comedy, the plot then steers toward a pretty formulaic race against the clock script where the characters (and the actors who portray them) can't seem to remember they're no more in the comedy and they should stop making cheesy jokes and behaving like scatterbrains - to find this realistic and compelling your name has to be Truman and you spent your whole life in a silly TV series.

It is interesting to mention how this turn is goofily delivered upon the unsuspecting audience, just to explain how bad the script is. Amidst the night, a public phone is ringing, unheard by most, just to be picked up by the main character, who was there by pure chance of course. At the other end the frantic voice of a soldier who's trying to call his father's home to warn him of impending nuclear doom but... he got the number wrong!! (Believe that! and obviously he can't tell this stranger from his father) Of course both the character AND the audience keep thinking this is a joke, until the aforementioned soldier is hastily executed live on the phone, which is when I started to think "awww this can't be true" and realized it was going to be worse than the second-rate comedy I had to endure in the first dozen minutes.

The whole plot is then propelled forward by such magnificent(ly bad) narrative devices - you would be tempted to think they were spoiling it on purpose, but it wasn't funny, not even by mistake: if this indeed was the aim, the filmmakers should have made it clear with a "DON'T PANIC" caption appearing on screen every five minutes.

Miracle Mile is like one of those weird guys that talk strange like they have some great and deep insight, and watching it is like getting to know him better in the hope he will turn out to be a genius, only to find you had just wasted your time listening to the meaningless ramblings of a clueless drunkard.

House of Flying Daggers (2004)

A huge Rube Goldberg machine

[4/10 · 2 May 2008]

There's no doubt that Zhang Yimou, and his collaborators as well, really know how to put together something that looks both beautiful and stylish.

That said, the whole script is hardly worth all of this display of skill.

To sum it up bluntly, HoFD is just a weary old love triangle, but that is only revealed towards the end of the movie. To get there you need to go through an insane amount of unbelievable twists which can hit the nerves even more than the weary, unbelievable wire-fu fights that drag along like there's no tomorrow.

HoFD has nothing to say, and to conceal this fact, it engulfs itself so deeply in a shroud of hollow, stylized beauty that the scenes of passion which Zhang Yimou loves to indulge in, only make this lack of truthfulness feel more evident. As paradoxically as it may sound, it would have been better for me if the whole film did not make attempts to display passion. A more dry, essential tone in telling the story, would have been more in tune with the dull characters and the cardboard backdrop, which is only an overlong introduction setting up the triangle love story - so much that halfway the script completely loses track of it and after the ending we are left wondering whether the main characters' actions had had any consequences on the confrontation between HoFD and the corrupt government, not that it makes anything to make you care about that or the main characters, anyway.

It is indeed like a huge Rube Goldberg machine ticking, and clinking and throbbing and finally coming to a grating end only to reveal the clockwork nature of its futility. So carefully and thoroughly overblown that it made me cringe.

What a waste!

Battlefield Baseball (2003)

Army of Darkness meets Excel Saga

[7/10 · 1 May 2008]

Or is it the other way round? ^^ Anyway, with cheesy SFX, over-the-top acting, and absolutely nonsensical jokes, Battlefield Baseball comes out as one hilarious film that doesn't take itself seriously for nary a minute - mixing some neat AoD tricks with the kind of Japanese humor, which is pretty typical of manga and anime.

I haven't had the pleasure to read the original manga, but the closest comparison I can call, considering all the lampooning going on here, is the anime version of Excel Saga (which incidentally has an episode about baseball heroes - make sure you watch that if you haven't yet!) The movie is quite successful in what it was trying to do (and probably one the few that manages to pull it off): it's guaranteed to make you laugh - provided you like the styles of the source material. And Tak Sakaguchi is simply great as the archetypal anti-hero a.k.a. the bad 'student with long hair and a dirty uniform'.

Two thumbs up!

Gangs of New York (2002)

GoNY, nothing more than an embellished, average-looking girl

[5/10 · 17 April 2008]

Standard revenge story on the backdrop of a historic period which apparently didn't get much screen time.

OK, the backdrop is interesting, but the main storyline is drab and somehow the two things seemed to me too much disjointed. The characters are simplistic and generally they do not go through any kind of developmentwhich could get me to feel for them. In such conditions, the most interesting character is quite obviously the 'honorable villain' Cutting (Day-Lewis), while the 'dirty but good' ones are rather flat and maybe suffering from not-so-smart casting choices: I found Cameron Diaz as a red-haired Irish pickpocket hardly believable and Di Caprio as a riot leader is unconvincing to the least.

Gangs of New York tries hard to revive a piece of history in a way that is intended to show depth and broadness, with a sprinkle of realism. To show depth, it focuses on a plethora of secondary characters and small subplot which take entirely too much screen time. To show broadness, it encompasses events that only bear a vague connection to the main characters. To claim realism, it relies on graphic violence, and a casual shopper attitude in make use of historic events and names.

But what it lacks in its core, can't be compensated by just piling up a vast array of characters, big screen names and a whole lot of things that just happen one after the other.

And if you take apart the coating, it's nothing more than an embellished average looking girl - quite typical for big budget movies in recent years, to be fair.

Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

Scott's remake of A Knight's Tale isn't as funny as the original

[5/10 · 11 April 2008]

Under a whole boatload of cinematographic eyecandy, lies a formulaic script with a plot not really too far from that of Helgeland's A Knight's Tale.

A commoner becomes knight, wins the love of a beautiful lady and defeats the (stupid) villain.

All the rest is copious use of Fake Realism(tm) Made in Hollywood, with the pretentious script failing to even barely scratching the surface of the many subjects it touches and depicting a world which succeeds in being unbelievable even for a person who knows virtually nothing of the crusades, like I am.

Orlando Bloom delivers a wooden performance and in general the cast, which is choke-full of stars, feels like wasted.

Monahan has said: "If it isn't in, it doesn't mean we didn't know it... What you use, in drama, is what plays. Shakespeare did the same." well next time you have to call Shakespeare in, at least make sure your material is damn good.

The Machinist (2004)

Utter banality

[4/10 · 8 June 2007]

If one of your friends one day would come up and say to you: "Hey, I've got a script"; let's say you read out of curiosity.

You know that your friend really loved Memento and Insomnia, so you are not surprised to see how the plot unfolds. He also likes many other famous movies of the last decade, like Fight Club and many of Lynch's, so it comes as no news if there are lots of nods to those movies; he also loves classic cinema, Hitchcock is his favourite.

The script is utterly boring and you thank god because it's a short read. Later, you say to him "Yeah good stuff but it won't be easy to do something like this. You know, insomnia, MPD, they have already made some really good flicks with those." He seemed turned off at first...

But one month later he comes back to you; the script is pretty much the same, short for some literary references slapped in the face of the viewer and thrown in for good. You start to feel tired about this, so you say "I can see that now it really has that much more subtle touch, but I don't really think you'll find someone ready to fork out good money for something has already seen many many other times, and better done." -- "Go back to your daytime job and quit your senseless dreaming about becoming the next Fincher or Hitchcock or Lynch or whatever -- you are a machinist! that's what you do well." You don't hear back from your friend anymore, but one day, you hear of a movie that sounds pretty much familiar: and it's not only because it's souped down mashed up boring version of Yet-Another-Cult-Movie of the 90s.

The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

Dull story with overdone camera work

[4/10 · 15 May 2007]

The Bourne Supremacy is a pretty average story, one you have probably seen dozens of times already.

Matt Damon - once a spy - is now a man that remembers little about his past; he is forced to go back into action when a Russian hit-man murders his girlfriend while trying to take him out. He obviously wants to find out why someone wanted him dead, and he soon realizes he has CIA on his tail, too.

This pretty basic one-man-army against the whole world tale, one you would have called trite and under average, is spiced up by frantic editing and epileptic camera work, which require the viewer to keep his/her eyes glued to the screen just to follow the simplest of actions.

While hand-camera has been used to great effect in many other movies, this one is just plain overdone. A lot of work and effort (and money) has been put in the making of this film, but this does not save it from its own mediocrity. I would be almost tempted to say the director overdone it willingly, to try and conceal the low quality of his source material, confuse the viewers and eventually trick them into thinking it is actually 'cutting-edge'.

Children of Men (2006)

A carefully crafted pointless pretentious film

[5/10 · 21 March 2007]

Shantih! Shantih! Many hints but no development! UK beware of your arbeit macht frei tendencies which are artfully represented in a pointless, meaningless, waste of time.

Pay attention!!! you could all become terrible nazi! Thank you Cuaron and Sexton for n-th clichéd representation of an Italian, it's really really a powerful symbol. A powerful symbol of what happens to a film when you put together a full boatload of clichés and you try to pass them as an intelligent, elegant, effective metaphor.

I especially liked the name of the boat. Maybe you should have underlined it on the side of the boat, and put some neon-flashing arrows pointing at it, so that we - your mindless ignorant moviegoers - could better grasp the full potency of your enlightened message.

Shantih! Shantih!

Hostel (2005)

This. Is. Boring.

[3/10 · 3 March 2006]

Starts out as "Before sunset", this time the American boys are two instead of one, Josh still has to get past a sad high school story, while Paxton in the first only serve as a comedic narrative device for Josh to try unblock himself. Throw in another Icelandic overly expansive dude (he probably would have been black if the movie was set in USA) for good.

So you got this not-so-funny quest-for-eurosex-and-pot set up and running and guess what? It's boring. Does it get any better? Short answer: no. These guys end up in an ex-eastern block poor country, harboring all but the most illegal businesses, and all they got is killed (well not the narrative device, who after all should be left almost untouched to keep the movie going.) Is it scary? There's a "Blair Witch Project" lookalike sequence which is halfway through the movie: black screen, people screaming. Jeez, people, I'm totally scared by the absolute boredom this stems. Among the other sequences worth noting, there is one where Paxton cuts the optical never off a jap girl who he's saved from being tortured. Then they happily escape (she obviously feels no pain), and then you find the only meaning of this otherwise useless character is that her suicide later provides Paxton a way to get on a train unnoticed. Superbly written!

I'm really scared by the simple fact they want you to pay to see this shabby piece of script translated in an entirely uninteresting 90 minutes long film.

That's why I'm running away from the theater... I'm left with the feeling that the filmmakers see us (the moviegoers) as the bitches: dumb useless cash cows.

A History of Violence (2005)

The King is Naked

[1/10 · 29 December 2005]

When I headed for the cinema to go watch this movie, I was perfectly convinced that I was going to see a perfectly decent movie. I also checked the IMDb and found it has a 7.5, which usually means "good movie." Well, to put it simply: it's not the case. The script and dialogues are about at the level of a bad TV-movie: it's dull, boring, completely uninteresting. I am not going for an in-depth analysis, you can easily find good ones in the board.

There was a weird mood in the cinema: many people kept waiting for a twist that turned the movie into something actually worth watching, but that moment never came, and many sensed this quite early thus couldn't avoid bursting out laughing because of the sheer naivety and clumsiness of the script and dialogues.

I'm quite surprised to see so many gave enthusiastic reviews: it's so completely laughable... just take a look at the memorable quotes to see what I mean. The king is naked, but the faithful are trying hard to find subtleties in the holes of the plot.

Don't let them fool you, scream loud "the king is naked!"

Interstate 60 (2002)

Don't look closer

[6/10 · 17 September 2005]

The one thing that impressed me in this movie is how hard it tries to just to make you "look closer": it tries to teach you that in movies, like in life, the final goal you are heading towards may not be as important or predictable as the trip.

Funnily enough, there is no coherence between the script and "the message" because the movie does all the work for you, so there's really nothing left to get close to, nothing left to look, and the trip isn't memorable at all. It all boils down to something that is really like one of those teen comedies from the 80s: the terrible (to say it's really no good) acting performance by Marsden only adds to this impression.

If you want to look closer just watch "American Beauty" another time, if you care about the trip more than the ending, just watch a Quentin Tarantino film.

Pi (1998)

Suspension of disbelief is not an excuse for a poorly written script

[4/10 · 10 August 2005]

A cool looking/sounding movie that tries to tell the story of a sick, weird man who is obsessed with his own thoughts and his failure to grok the world outside.

Max Cohen, the main character, is a mathematical genius desperately trying to find an overlap between his own view of the world and the world itself. In fact Max thinks that the world can be described by means of one single mathematical model.

The inability to find such a model and thus reconcile himself with the world, drives Max towards madness, and eventually he chooses to call himself out of this search for the holy grail.

A simplistic script (look at the goofs page!) for a trite conclusion; there's a whole lot of icing, but the pie under it is so small that you are left with an appetite for more.

Before Sunrise (1995)

Adverse selection

[1/10 · 22 July 2005]

Pick a french girl, put her on a random travel, say a train from Budapest to Paris. But wait -- she's not your average french girl, after all, because she can speak PERFECTLY English. That's pretty uncommon for a country where the use of foreign languages is officially forbidden, but you don't want to be too picky, right? This is a movie after all! Now pick your average American boy, coming to Old Europe to meet his girlfriend -- but she is a really average girlfriend, one that comes to Old Europe for some kind of art study (we are allowed to think that this is not the real reason, or that art studies are useless - you choose); however, she is pretty average, so she ended up cheating on him and when he arrives, he soon realizes he's going to be dumped.

He buys an interrail ticket and he too ends up on a Budapest-Paris train, only to bump into that not-so-average french girl who's still a student at Sorbonne because she doesn't feel like she's ready for a real life (and she's only 23 yo) Could they avoid falling in love? The answer is no. This is all the plot. The rest is about 90' of them getting closer, with Wien as a cute backdrop for their story.

In this 'wannabe art' movie we can really see how nothingness can be stirred to fill up the standard Hollywood length of 100 minutes: two people chatting about nothing and trying hard to make it feel real.

But this IS Hollywood: because there's not even a little bit of something real in this movie. It's a movie that leverages the dream that you, as a foreigner in a foreign country, could start chatting with a beautiful stranger and then fall in love.

I could stand the cute 'what if' scenario, if only it managed to build up something for you to ponder - but there is no food for the mind here to be found.

I watched 'Before Sunrise' out of curiosity because I've read so much good about it, but now I understand that the only people who cared about it are the ones who like to view themselves as 'romantic'.

Look in the mirror: are you a so-called 'romantic' kind of person? then this movie is for you. Otherwise, keep away!

Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl (1998)

Wacky characters don't necessarily make a movie funny

[6/10 · 10 July 2005]

My main impression with this movie is that something, somehow, has got lost on the way.

It might be that the script has been adapted from a manga; some situations and some of the characters antics, dragged out from their context, look so wacky they end to be grotesque. Nonetheless, one of the strongest point of the movie are the characters themselves - Yamada in particular.

The plot is the weakest one, it doesn't really make sense and I ended up suspecting that some elements has been simply cut because they didn't fit in the run time.

However, I've seen this movie in Japanese with subtitles, so I really can't comment about the "witty dialogs" which are supposed to be another strong point.

This movie is occasionally entertaining, but fails to leave a mark: it reminded me somehow of "I Went Down" (1997), which is definitely more entertaining than this one, tough.

The Score (2001)

Archibald Tuttle: where are you? (SPOILER)

[3/10 · 15 May 2004]

Subtitle: Pointless boring movie, packed with stars, which ultimately has no soul. The plot is unsurprising, but heist movies are typically not very original, so this should be no problem - it looks like Oz isn't putting too much of his own into trying to catch the attention of the viewer. The characters are quite standard, and this is where the all-star casting should help - but De Niro looks quite dusty, makes you wonder why he accepted such a role, where he really had interpreted much more interesting ones in the past (even Heat was better than this). Angela Bassett and Marlon Brando play two minor roles which are supposed to lend some depth to De Niro's Nick, but they turn out to be useless. Edward Norton plays the usual two-faced villain you've come to expect from him, he's the most entertaining but his lone effort cannot help save The Score from being an entirely forgettable movie.