J*A*S*M

One rule I follow to grant a five star rating to a film is getting goosebumps while watching it. In Away We Go I felt them in basically every scene with a song, so very often. The story is not very original, but Mendes’s subtle and sensitive approach to the narration turns an ordinary “roaringly independent” comedy-drama into something more than a movie that you will forget overnight. Where Czech comedies full of ordinary Czech people try to look real, Mendes’s latest film looks exactly like that, even though you (almost) don’t see the kind of ordinary people that would be familiar to us. Away We Go captivated me in several ways: the stroller scene was comedy gold, the playful shot of the plane taking off, the scene at the bar, the romantic climax  on a trampoline, and the new home. And it’s not by chance that these moments are smartly placed apart from the course of the film, this is what it looks like when a film is made by someone who knows exactly what they are doing. I wanted to give it four stars, because at first I felt that the last two episodes had lost some of the pace and the humour, but then I realised that they had their place in the story and the ending wouldn’t have worked out well without them. 9/10% PS: What’s most interesting is that you can’t choose the best film from Mendes’s family drama trilogy (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road and Away We Go), because each of them is very different and can’t be compared to the others.

This film had a lot of potential, but never manages to exploit it. What’s funny is that it’s intentionally silly in a 1950s way, but without any real humour. I really didn’t have fun :-(

There’s one thing I’m 100% sure of: Ryan Nicholson must be a disgusting and filthy person whom I would never like to meet, because nobody normal and sane could make films like Live Feed, Gutterballs or now Hanger. This one in particular offended me and made me promise myself to ignore this kind of stuff from now on. The rating is an emphatic Boo! because a film that made me feel almost physical pain doesn’t deserve anything else.

After the excellent Storm Warning, I expected only the best from Jamie Blanks. Unfortunately, I’m not very satisfied with the result. Long Weekend is not about a revenge from Mother Nature (nature itself doesn’t cause the protagonists anything that in real life wouldn’t be called “quite unlucky but no big deal”), it’s just a 80-minute long boring plot vacuum, and the only thing that held my attention were the expectations that something would finally happen, as well as the amazement at the little things the protagonists go crazy about. The protagonists, by the way, are a chapter on their own, it’d be hard to find a more unlikeable couple (they reminded me of the recent not-quite-horror film Vinyan: Lost Souls…) The only thing that managed to surprise me was the ending, but quite unpleasantly it should be said, which exacerbated my disappointment. Technically, of course, it’s very good eye candy, but I’m not giving it another star for that; I think that’s par for the course for Blanks, and since he didn’t bring in anything else, I’m not going further than 2*.

The vampire genre has been getting one slap after another in recent years. First the degrading Twilight, then Seagal’s awful Against the Dark, and now this digital borefest that doesn’t even look like a movie in its key moments. Anyone who hates scenes where the hero falls down a 100 metre ravine with a truck, then shakes off the dust and carries on should avoid this. Schoolgirl Saya kicks more ass than Chuck Norris, but Nahon’s asexual direction turns what in theory should be a fun splatterfest into a boring farce that after 30 minutes makes you feel you’ve been watching for two hours. One of those films that I can’t trash with a Boo! but that I still regret watching.

A beautiful and chilling example from Spain proving that in a subgenre as stale as ghost stories, you can still come up with something original, and it’s so nice to see. Except for a couple of distractions, The Appeared is a wonderfully atmospheric film with several very memorable scenes (e.g. the one in the poster). I was quite anxious about whether the creators would come out with some shocking twist, or whether they would close the film with what was clear from the beginning. Basically, they did both and hats off for that. Great horror.

The only thing I remember about The Messengers is one jump-scare and the very pretty female lead and I fear I will remember even less about Messengers 2: The Scarecrow after some time. It doesn’t have any jump-scares, or at least none that would be effective in any way, and the heroine now plays only a secondary role and it’s not nearly as pretty. I can’t say the climax with the pissed off scarecrow wasn’t fun, but I can’t forgive the film for the hour that preceded it.

Maybe a solid action ride with a villain more likeable than the hero, but certainly not horror. It’s OK to watch once, but no more.

I’m not afraid to call Pontypool the most talkative horror film I’ve ever seen and given the premise, that’s quite deserved. In any case, after my own unfortunate experience, I’d recommend those who don’t know English perfectly to wait until some poor soul makes the subtitles (there is too much noise to make sense), and I will have to watch it again when that happens. But even though I got lost with some of the conversations of the characters, I have to say that I liked Pontypool. Basically, it’s a zombie flick where you barely see the zombies themselves, it’s set in a relatively safe, closed space, and that surprisingly works and manages to generate tension for most of the runtime. That’s mainly thanks to the original premise and the unusual way the script is put together. After REC, this is the freshest breath of originality in zombie horror in a long time – it actually turns the concept of REC upside down.

Unfortunately, Full Metal Jacket reaches its peak at around the 40th minute, after which it looses much of its pace, gets boring and the ending completely fizzles out. But I expected to be disappointed, I don’t like war movies at all.