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Angels & Demons (2009)
indiana langdon
WARNING IT CONTAINS SPOILERS!
WARNING: contains SPOILERS and inflammatory content against 1) the Vatican and the catholic church and the pope 2) Rome (the city of) 3) the movie itself 4) the carabinieri
if you hold a grudge, as I do, amongst the other, against the 4 entities above, you might be mislead to believe that this movie is for you. yes it's true that you might enjoy, if you're inclined so, a mysterious killer (what is he? the devil? or A devil?) the death of some high ranking priests and a couple of carabinieri. and the threat to wipe out the whole of Rome (so that we can finally build a massive shopping center and underground park in lieu of).
alas the good writers, producers and the good Ron Howard have delivered the usual happy ending blockbuster. and if you are a fan of the previous installment and of professor langdon as a detective of signs and historian, forget about it, because here the decision has been made to make good old tom, still full of stamina and in perfect physical form, into a sort of indiana jones "de Roma". yes, in fact, to set the tone, the good professor makes his first appearance in the movie not giving a talk on symbols, but swimming rather effectively on a university swimming pool.
obviously nothing prepares the audience for the chopper scene (*), followed by the chute scene, followed by the supernova scene; at that point while Ron might think that he is going to surprise us further, he doesn't realize that it's enough to think of what would be the next most obvious and stupid thing to guess what's going to happen.
if you're wise, take my advise: save the money and do something else..
(*) not entirely true; in fact the Irish priest had mentioned earlier, en passant, that he had been in the air forces (which ones? the Italian ones? is he supposed to be Italian? with that accent?) as a pilot (never thought there could be a pope who had been in the air force).
No Country for Old Men (2007)
I didn't like it (again)
"was this a Q. Tarantino movie?" I asked my girlfriend roughly halfway into the movie. I had seen enough blood and technical details about a rather new and clean way to kill people (also good to open doors actually), that I couldn't anymore place this as a Coen brother movie. in fact the Cohen brothers' last movies had been so bad that I was expecting something just plain bad, but this movie was a bad movie with a lot of blood, so i thought maybe it's Tarantino.
no it is the Coen brothers, scratching the bottom of an exhausted creative barrel. Fargo gone Texas, but with a pinch of Tarantino. a crazy killer, an old sheriff, the usual gallery of immortal heroes or antiheroes.
there is in American movies , this idea about people , or at least some of them, that basically you can shoot them, you can beat them, you can crash them, and they still stand. last man standing, bleeding, with bones sticking from their bodies, it doesn't matter: they still stand up, say something tough and off they go.
they don't cry , they don't shout, no! they are real men! they stand up and go. like on Lost, the TV series, concussion after concussion, punch after punch, bullet after bullet.
i wonder, don't they ever get tired of this life? and movie people, don't they ever get tired?
clearly there is never enough violence, shootings and killing and bleeding; because this movie has plenty. Yes, it's beautifully shot, yes the landscapes borrowed from mother nature are beautiful, and grand, but these are the Coen brothers, they are pretty good at what they do, technically. what is missing is that sense of uniqueness , of unseen, of unprecedented, of originality that we tasted so many times in the earlier movies that made us love the brothers.
Read my reviews on http://benmovies.blogspot.com
4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile (2007)
great movie, great cinematography, great camera work (could be a spoiler).
Romania seems to be producing some rare pearls of beautiful cinema. this is the second Romanian movie i have seen in the past months and both are excellent movies. they have a quality that lacks from many other movies: they weren't produced in wealthy bored rich countries with an established cinema industry and market; they still have that feeling of "wanting" something, reaching for something that only a nation in the doing can express. small budgets nurture ideas, increase quality, boost stories and plots and allow freedom of choice. this is what you see in these movies, stories, ideas, great cinematography. This movie is perhaps about abortion, I don't know what the director's position is on this issue. But, I won't remember this movie because of abortion; i won't remember it because it portrays aspects of life under the Causescu regime. I will remember this movie because of the terrific cinematography: the hand held camera that opens the movie, the still life of the table, the fish tank, the things spread on the table, the notes; the close up profile of Otilia in the hotel room beautiful, intense, unforgettable. The struggle in the hotel room, told almost entirely with a shot from the side of Bebe and Otilia while Gabit is not seen. Otilia in search of a place to finish the business, at night, in the dark night of a poor country with no lights; no buses, no taxis; it remembered me of a Romanian art video seen some time ago at the Tate modern, where they go out at night and just film a city, probably Bucharest, dark, scary, with the lights of the car cutting slices of darkness to show a different world, rubbish on the side of the road, ditches, dodgy characters. The movie revolves around 3 or 4 interior shots, the dorm, the hotel room, Adi's flat and Adi's mom birthday party and friends, the hotel restaurant, plus the short wondering in the dark night, a sort of short passage in hell. The camera doesn't move much, although seems to be hand held most of the time. In the dorm, with the fantastic still life opening; at Adi's mom birthday party, the camera fixed on Otilia, Adi and Adi's parents, excluding everyone else but for the hands, picking up food, the whiskey bottle; or the "moralist", the "good ol' time" bloke, who comes and goes in the picture; this image is interesting, because it seems to defy the portrait of a miserable communist "dictatorship" country, showing that middle classes, professionals, are not doing so bad. Even the social racism toward Otilia and her parents doesn't seem to stick, it comes and goes, but the cinematography of the party is very powerful and stays with the viewer. This is a great movie, absolutely positively go and watch it, possibly in original sound.
Chop Shop (2007)
welcome to the slums of NYC
my girlfriend, as we walk in the cold London evening in leicester square, after the movie, says: if they didn't speak English and they didn't show the stadium, you could have thought this was the slums of a South American city or some other slum anywhere in the world,not Queens in NYC.
Ramin Bahrani is , right now, my official hero, because he seems to have devoted his work to show not the OTHER face of American, but the REAL face of America.
Ramin Bahrani's movies are like Ladri di biciclette, or Germania anno zero, or Roma citta' aperta. Chop shop is reality turned into a movie, is more realistic than a documentary, in fact I think Ramin Bahrani's movies are more realistic than documentaries. This is a great movies, but don't expect any car chase or shooting. This movie is about tragic lives on the margin of the wealthiest , richest country in the world.
El camino de los ingleses (2006)
a lot of good music
i was thinking that maybe Antonio Banderas has spent a career in commercial movies to be able later on to develop his own projects. who knows maybe it's like this. yes, this movie was not made by an fine director, the pace is uneven, there are a lot of scene that could have been removed improving, not hurting , the movie. but the movie is not entirely pointless, it seems to have a sincere desire to say something to the viewer, especially with a very well mixed balance of music and images, those seem to be the most powerful moments of the movies. the plot , the story is to a certain degree irrelevant , this is a movie of powerful images, of details, of obsessions. The love scenes are a very small part of the movie, yet they are incredible details, nearly as in a soft porn movie, but this is not a limitation of this movie, but one of features. the bodies of the characters are explained in details, a flat stomach, a leg, a hand, a scar , eyes, aging hands. the movie is poetry and as poetry it refuses to be confined in the structures of novel, this is a movie of images and music, it's like the work of an Impressionist painter, maybe there are autobiographical elements, let's not forget that AB was born in Malaga in 1960, so he more or less would have been the age of the characters at the same time. All in all it's a good movie and it was worth watching it, I hope who reads this has enjoyed it already or will in the future.
The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
I thought it was a new movie!
I thought this was a new movie, but I must have misunderstood. It looks like the previous 2! and the 3 "Bourne saga" movies all together all look like the 3 days of the condor! I think that if there is one thing that we know about USA thanks to Hollywood blockbusters is that at CIA work some very dangerous people! What? Oh no, they are sending an "asset" to terminate me! IMDb requires at least 10 lines to allow me to publish my comment, but it's hard to find 10 lines of stuff to say about this movie. Maybe one could wonder about the planet hopping of Mr. Bourne, his infinite supply of passports, and of that thing, called money, that we all struggle (on a daily base) to procure. I know I know, a movie is a movie, it doesn't need to obey the rule of physics! I so wish I wasn't the obese 42 years old "it consultant" I am, and instead I was a highly trained CIA cover-op assassin, someone that could survive everything and anything. I think it's 10 now. No really, I didn't like this movie so much. :-)