Reviews
Laitakaupungin valot (2006)
one of the worst Kaurismakis
When you get experienced enough as a filmmaker and you learned most of the tricks of the trade, you realise that the best thing to do for an art-house director is to stick mindlessly to whatever made you successful with the festival-going crowd and the film critics earlier. Never mind that you have no new ideas and that the most your film does is deliver the 'good old feeling' everyone expects.
That's a fate Kaurismaki seems not to have been able to avoid with his Lights in the Dusk. Totally devoid of ANY new or creative ideas with respect to what we have seen from him before, Kaurismaki's feature recycles his lately trademark - and otherwise very appealing - darkish, yet basically cheerful coloured backgrounds and surroundings behind and around the actors. But the story is the most feeble ever... No real suspense, only mindless clichés about a totally hapless main character (no, this is not irony on the film's part, guys, this is just the 'good-old-Kaurismaki-feeling' we yearn for and it only seems to work because his other films were enjoyable on their own). Plus some sentimental music tossed in (who would have expected that from Kaurismaki? ;), without the real possibility for the viewer to relate to the characters (you feel no sorry, no empathy, only anger at most about how incapable they are).
And finally, even at about 75 minutes, this movie is waaaay longer than it should be: another sign of running out of fresh ideas. Hey Aki, you'd better take a rest and come back with something that's more up to your standards. And my advice for the potential viewer: watch the other parts of the trilogy (The Man Without a Past, 2002; Drifting Clouds, 1996), and skip this one.
Um Tiro no Escuro (2005)
don't be misled... it's not that good
If you like to watch (in the end) overtly sentimental dramas with average acting (pace other reviews) and with a storyline that doesn't exactly require a genius to compound, you will have a great time watching this movie. The plot is somewhat dull and way too familiar from other crime/heist flicks, except for one sole twist in it, while the music is totally conventional (by American standards), at points reminding of second-class thrillers without any real chance of creating suspense (and in fact this is more a drama-cum-crime flick than anything else). At the end sequence it really felt like watching a watered-down Brazilian soap-opera episode (i.e. it really wasn't as sentimental as it could have been). On the positive side, Um Tiro... has real smooth, Hollywood-style camera-work, but, even here, you will not find nothing out of the ordinary. And routine visuals cannot make up for what the film lacks in depth and imagination.
Terra Estrangeira (1995)
nice visuals, not much more
the film's got very stylish, if not utterly original, camera-work throughout (that's what makes it a better-than-average movie) - and you don't mind the images' being grainy at all. the finest scene, to my mind, in this respect, was when the main characters are shot through the windshield covered by patches of rain pouring down on it. but, sadly, the characters are rather shallow, consequently hard to sympathize with, and the story isn't very convincing either - it's only mildly complicated and it does not offer more than a run-of-the-mill crime drama. it is also too redundant at some places - things it already communicated subtly and implicitly get said out in a rather direct way by some of the characters or through some superfluous scene. watch it once, though, it's not bad at all.
Szép napok (2002)
no idea why this got an award
For some reason, so-called `honest' films are quite popular with young Hungarians these days. However, this movie mistakenly suggests that drifting young people have no choice but to drift in life and always choose the wrong way, so no honesty here. This is the type of movie that would be financed by the Hungarian state these days, because you can sell it partly as artsy, partly as `a movie that explores the boundaries of human life and concerns deep social and moral issues'. Well, if the director's intention was to shock (`let us all face reality' and all), he definitely failed, unless he thinks that in the era of hardcore porn and Hollywood B-movies nudity and superfluous violence are shocking. Sorry, I simply do not feel sympathy, sorrow or pain for stupid characters (involved in a stupid narrative), especially if they are sketchy, shallow, or more like empty. The dialogues are crap - believe me, nobody talks like that, ever. This language was invented specifically for this film (not a new phenomenon in Hungary), so it cannot be honest in this sense either. With a little malice, I might add that the amateur acting was so artificial that it drove me crazy after twenty minutes. There was nothing in this film that grasped my attention image-, story-, character- or otherwise. This movie has nothing to it, nothing at all. As I come to think of it, if this is Mundruczó's profound reality, he should probably have made a film about nature and animals.
Exotica (1994)
not the best Egoyan
One learns about a tormented man here, without getting a satisfactory explanation of the cause of his torment, or a resolution, or anything that is deeper than the tormented surface - something that could have made it into a good art movie. On the other hand, the man's motivation is too clearly, too directly given, and there is a relatively heavy-handed use of music to signal the characters' emotions - too reminiscent of traditional Hollywoodian films. And the way all the threads are (forced to be) connected together makes the film fail from both points of view.
Egoyan has made much better movies than this (e.g. Calendar).
La vie est un roman (1983)
probably the nadir of Resnais's career
Watching the first few moments, you realize it's going to be a parody - and certainly it *is* a parody, but I'm not sure of what (a fairy tale? an opera? a Hollywoodian C-movie? - if there was something like that), and I can assure you it's not worth watching. It's simply a pointless film (cf. a good parody is everything but pointless), with pretentious, shallow speeches of extremely sketchy characters. It's like a commedia dell'arte. Or better, it's like a botched commedia dell'arte. And the score... sung in an intentionally incompetent way (something Greenaway will use much more efficiently), it *is* painful to listen to (unless one wears some sate-of-the-art earplugs, haha). Go for quality movies (e.g. A. Mitta's How Czar Peter the Great Married Off His Moor, 1976) and steer clear of this mistake.