Reviews

As an Indy fan I was a bit worried, since Spielberg kindly declined directing and the bad reviews were really honest and could intelligently and very convincingly describe in detail the many ailments of this film. And the good reviews were riddled with excuse like "who's complaining, it's Indy". So I decided to "role play" along (albeit not dressed up as Indy), just join the masses in rejoicing the return of Harrison Ford as Indy. Trying just to be happy despite the outcome and subject myself to the movie with an open mind.

The general theme centers around Archemedes' dial, an ancient clock predicting ruptures in time, ideal for nazi's to travel back in time to reset WWII. You can sort of fill in the whole film from there. Obtaining the artifact in 1944 requires for Ford to be de-aged using CGI, and basically statically place the 80-year-old in front greenscreen to produce a lot of CGI action around him while he stands still. The whole sequence looks like you're watching someone playing a soulless Indy game on the new Playstation 5. It looks weird with way too smooth movements, "dead eyes". It totally distracts from what is actually going on. The feared CGI overkill Spielberg always used to be able to steer away from.

Cut to 1969, and the movie gives a glimpse of what it could have been: A more serious coming-of-age drama/adventure. But soon it's plunged into the realm of pure silliness when a bunch of goofy Disney cartoon characters enter the movie. With the exception of one: The formidable Boyd Holbrook, who is the only convincingly dangerous and unpredictable villain.

Poor Harrison Ford's age is carefully camouflaged by his young companion Waller-Bridge who drags him from greenscreen to greenscreen, even hoists him into a scuba suit at one point (with Atonio Banderas playing Popeye) and trying to give us all what we are watching this terrible kids film for: A glimpse of the old Indy as we remembered him with hat and whip. The whole film basically could have been shot by a second unit as backgrounds for Ford's greenscreen posing. It's just not an actual Indy movie anymore. And Spielberg must have foreseen that.

Finally the movie reminded me of Dora the Explorer, a silly kids adventure movie. From beginning to end predictable, lifeless and no pace at all. If not for tge blood, I could have brought my 4 year old son along, but I'd rather see him watch Raiders as his first Indy film when the time is right. If Dial of Destiny is good for one thing, it's showing what an amazing director Steven Spielberg actually is. Including his effords on Chrystal Skull, which is actually still a real Indy movie and can be categirized as such. But hey, this movie is hyped, will be a success, Ford will have his 25 million, Disney a billion and that's obviously the goal of this childhood destroyer.

I never knew what binge-watching meant until I appearantly did it myself yesterday 😄 Of course this docu is not for everyone, I mean, you need to love watching 6 hrs of special effects geeks, but I've been waiting for something like this for a long time. The whole thing is a funny, in-depth piece of Heroin For Geeks. What a time it must have been for all these friendly geniuses to work on Star Wars from their little hippie commune. I just couldn't switch this time machine off. Loved it. The definitive, ultimate doc on movie special effects. Edlund, Dykstra, Lucas and all you pioneering heroes: I salute you!

The producer of this documentary must have felt pretty bad that the quick, juice, poignant doc The Tindler Swindler beat them by just a few weeks when it came out and just stole their potential thunder. Bad Vegan is almost an exact copy of Tinder Swindler, except it's spread out over 4 predictable episodes, where the Tinder Swindler managed to bottle it's effectiveness in just over an hour.

The Dropout is a pretty straightforward drama, nothing special really, but Amanda Seyfried is just magnificent and lifts it to the next level with an intricate portrait of a very driven woman with a light psychotic and aggressive ingredient in her personality.

It's very difficult to rate this film, since it's not really a film at all, it's more like a being of some sort. It's a journey into the mind of every single individual watching it. Like the journey into the unknown "zone" undertaken by the story's 3 protagonists. The director gives the audience plenty of time to generate their own vision and idea about what's exactly going on in the movie, without telling what's going on. Only the bare minimum of a story is provided. Tarkovski allegedly wanted to make a movie about nothing, with just the style to keep the whole thing up. Result is an infinately breathtaking visual opus. You just have to allow yourself to step over the line, into Tarkovski's zone to be taken on that ride. For everyone this film plays out differently, so there's no use giving you my explanation.

However ruminated and unoriginal certain plotlines might be, they get repackaged very well and provide a sturdy, low-key crime drama with Matt Damon showing his incredible versatility playing an introvert ruffneck. Not original, but well worth the watch!

'Wait till the end' someone wrote about this "movie", which means there's a plot in there somewhere, but the whole movie is basically one long wait for it. Unfortunately 50 minutes of oxygen was all I could muster for this story. "Movie" is also a term I wouldn't use for it, since literally nothing moves really: No character development, minimal plotline and very restricted body movement from the main character. It felt like one of those long jokes you have to sit through simply to see if the punchline is worth the wait. That just annoys me, but that's personal of course. During "oxygene" came this breaking point for me where, regardless the brilliance of the plot, it wouldn't justify me having to go through another minute of boredom basically. I just didn't care. The challenge for the producers obviously was to deliberately minimize space and character and still get the audience hooked, but they failed for me. Is it fair to write a review of a movie I didn't finish? I don't really care either.

It's great to watch a film that finally breaks the mold of the conventional, and frankly very boring standard horror movies we've been subjected to the past decade(s). They all seem to follow the same path: A house (or a doll, or whetever object) - an evil spirit - a family with kids - a few squeaking doors opening by themselves at night - a struggle - an open-ended victory.

Saint Maud however, solely focusses on the psyche of one person and makes you wonder if what you see is real, or just the figment of the protagonist's madness. At times it's very disturbing, confusing and rather uncomfortable viewing. It's definately not a date movie like "Annabelle": It takes the viewer over the edge a few times, but when you can find the least bit of guts to go through with it, you simply have to admid Saint Maud is totally original and might be the best horror movie you've seen in the past 15 years: It's hair-raisingly creepy, it's lead actress is totally brilliant and the punchline totally haunts you!

It's unfair to rate a movie after checking out half way through, but venting a bit of frustration might work: I was really looking forward to Tenet, but was gravely disappointed. Like Inception, Nolan devised a complicated and simply ludacrous concept to build his action movie around. I was so busy keeping up with the complicated plot and it's pseudo-scientific premise, I failed to ask myself 'do I really care?'. The answer was 'no'. Not enough to sit through a 2,5hr movie about time-travelling Russian gangsters. Tenet was actually just a rerun of Dark Knight's and Inception's action scenes, repackaged in a time-traveller movie. Nothing new or unexpected from Nolan. Frankly it felt like an over-serious Back to the Future: Feather-light entertainment made over-complicated. I was relieved reversely pressing the PLAY button on this one.

What do you get when you take the theme of some fun Schwarzenegger sci-fi flic from the 80's and turn it into an arthouse movie with lots of slow camera movements, minimalistic design and hallucinogenic caleidoscopic shots? You don't get much further than a 6,5 on IMDB appearantly. When watching Total Recall you at least know in advance you don't have to expect more than it's shallow premise.

Unfortunately I'm not entirely objective when reviewing "10". For me it's a trip down memory lane: I still remember seeing those first pics of Bo Derek with her beads in the magazines back in the day, causing a total sensation. Just like Farrah Fawcett in her bathing suit. It's become such an iconic 70's image.

So years later I watched the movie for the first time and finding it a bit tame. However....Watching it as a man approaching his 50's I really learned to appreciate this movie with every repeated viewing. It's a combination of melancholy and reaching the proper age to appreciate the movie's subject I guess.

Dudley Moore is just astonishing in this. A total master of comedy and slapstick timing. You just don'ty see that kind of artistry anymore. He simply IS the character and despite Bo Derek's outerworldly physique, you only have eyes for Dudley. He not only saves the so-so script, he lifts it to a higher level for me and turns it into a tribute to my childhood.

However Bradley Cooper's masterful performance and Gaga's equally surprising acting, this movie seems to have been created by Gaga's concert promotor Live Nation to boost ticket sales. A sort of "Bodyguard" if you will.

However, where the Bodyguard delivered JUST the right amound of tongue-in-cheek lightness that matched Whitney's poppy songs perfectly, Bradley Cooper created a sort of arthouse drama that would have shot into the stratosphere with a soundtrack that would have done the movie right.

Of course we buy into Cooper's character, who performs rather flat country mockup songs to make him look legit, which works. But the fact that Gaga, despite her amazing singing abilitie,s fails to deliver that one "I Will Always Love You" which made The Bodyguard, is a letdown: Whitney clearly picked her cover song to reach number 1 before the movie came out, making everyone curious to see it. But Gaga came up with a rather bland soundtrack which doesn't do the quality of the movie any justice. Ask anyone who's seen the movie to recite the first line of a featured song and they'll fail. A missed oppertunity for an otherwise briljant movie.

The original was an undisputed masterpiece, and to top the artistry with which it was hand-created by true artists is a potentially doomed challenge. But when this live-action version got a great review in Empire magazine we gave it a chance.

About 10 minutes into the movie we felt like watching a Christmas parade at Eurodisney with surprise celebrity appearances. Or an episode of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. By then we knew the movie was doomed: The colors, the over-polished and over-use of CGI (makeup would have created a much more humane beast instead of this emotionless CGI one), the mediocrity of the extra added songs, the pompous styling and the obvious auto-tune on the voices by some director who's clearly a compulsive cleaner, allergic to even the smallest of human imperfections. Take a song like Be Our Guest: In the original movie the graphics transformed this great Menken/Ashman song into a next level highlight. In the new version the song gets unnecessary extensions and looks like Liberace just vomited all over it.

The fact Disney expects us to applaud the fact they put their first gay character in a movie in a time homosexuality is widely accepted is just ridiculous: It's long overdue, but to Disney also a clever marketing tool to generate press.

Bottom line: I guess even Disney isn't perfect but after giving us next level treats like Zootopia, Inside Out and Toy Story 3 I can forgive them...