SinginDetective Reviews

Hugo (2011)

Filmmaking by an automaton

[4/10 · 29 August 2012]

I love Scorcese, I love film, I love the history of film. Bla bla. As whenever a review starts like this I guess you know what comes next: I didn't love "Hugo". It is too accomplished, too polished and ultimately too life- and soulless, like Scorcese himself has become a robot who pretends to have human emotions but just goes through the notions. First off I thought I had put in "The Polar Express" by mistake. This cg-world is supposed to be from the man who made "Raging Bull"? I cringed for Cohen and all the Amelie-like side-stories. And I always heard a loud voice in my head, bellowing: "Come on! Isn't that quirky and charming? IT IS! ISN'T IT?" But there is a very telling moment in the movie that made me think. When Melies bows down to that kid in his studio and asks him: "Did you ever wonder where your dreams come from? THIS is where they are made." It wasn't touching, it was scary, a bit like "1984". Movies have become the ultimate dream-control-devices, because nothing is left for the imagination of the viewer, nothing at all, saccharine music in every scene, plot-points you can set a stop-watch to, even the colors get tweaked to resemble a certain emotion you are supposed to feel. With Melies it was all theatrics, woodwork, floorboards and you filled up the rest in your head. With Melies movies where a starting point for dreaming. With a film like Hugo it's the mournful waking up.

Sucker Punch (2011)

A cliché in a cliché in a cliché

[13 September 2011]

So: Hack Snyder finally made the movie he always wanted to make. Good for him. I was very much looking forward to it, expecting a stylish CGI-rip-off of Tarantino's ass-kicking in a limitless dream-like fantasy-world inside a dream ... inside a dream. And that's exactly what I got and I was very pleased but then I found out I had watched Inception instead. Then I got around to Mr. Snyder's effort and I really have to say: I feel quite sorry for him and all the geeks and nerds he tried so desperately to please with a script and a movie that borders on criminal negligence for everything original or new. So Snyder wanted to make Brazil but Gilliam beat him to it, he wanted to do Moulin Rouge but an Australian guy was faster and he always dreamed of doing "Kill Bill" but even that one had been made a couple of years earlier. Bad luck. But no reason at all to turn those films into a horrible stew and garnish it with gruesome actors or sad has-beens (ok, granted: Scott Glen looks a little bit like David Carradine in Kill Bill and Snyder couldn't get Carradine as Carradine was dead, lucky him) It was like I could predict every line before it was spoken. "What if we get killed?" one scantily clad girl asks. "We are already dead" I sighed in my head. "We are already dead" said another scantily clad girl on the screen. They fall from a great hight and I go: "Please, god of movies, don't let them land in that crappy anime-style stance, one leg spread out straight, one arm raised high, looking cool to the ground, but, alas, of course they do. They must. Because this movie survives on unoriginality. Why a girl that get's institutionalized for NOT being insane has constant insane fantasies and swaps her mental asylum with a whorehouse from the twenties I will never know. Does that horrible fantasy make the horrible reality more bearable? And that crappy music. The whole film was like one of those bad mix-tapes by guys who don't know anything about music but think they do. Brrr. All the "cool" bands but only their worst songs, or those overused in other movies, in horrible updated versions. (Oh yes, Snyder obviously always wanted to make Fight-Club too) I promised to kill myself if I ever had to listen to White Rabbit again, used in a dream-sequence. Luckily I didn't really mean it serious or I would be turf now. And the twist at the end? He nicked that from Gilliam who in turn had nicked it from Ambrose Bierce. And everybody saw that coming, even my wife. At the latest when Glen said ominously "The fifth thing you must find out for yourself. Only you will know!" The fifth secret ingredient that Snyder misses (as a script-writer at last) is talent, sadly...

Popeye (1980)

The worst masterpiece ever made

[7/10 · 7 April 2010]

Wow, again "the worst movie ever made". At least when you go by those self proclaimed internet-movie-critics on IMDb who never bother to bestow upon the heavily bored public their highly imaginative musings like "Two hours of my life I will never get back", without even having one (a life that is) in the first place. Fact is: Every movie in this database is "the worst ever made" ... for someone ... then scroll up or down a bit and suddenly the same movie will become a "never fully appreciated masterpiece". What does this teach us? The truth, like always, lies somewhere in between and is highly subjective. Go and see it for yourself. Don't be interested in what I have to say. Well, if you still are: I quite liked it.

Katyn (2007)

Important movie, unfortunately not a very good one

[5/10 · 14 January 2010]

I watched the movie last night and, being an ardent admirer of Wajda, was quite disappointed in his treatment of the Katyn-massacre. I am German of Polish decent and found this film to be a monosyllabic statement of the obvious, namely the fact that Bolshevik soldiers are responsible for the killing of tenth of thousands polish officers and intellectuals. The movie let's the Germans off the hook too lightly in my opinion and seems only motivated by an (albeit understandable) personal desire for revenge. This massacre would not have been possible though if it wasn't for the Hitler-Stalin pact or Germany invading Poland, or Germany's consent to the communist treatment of the polish officers after they became POWs. Nowhere is a comment to be found about what an irony it is that German soldiers discovered the mass-graves in Katyn, almost to the point of being relieved to find out that they are not the only people being capable of mass-murder or falling prey to the temptation to be radically dehumanized by delusional claims of power. This one-sided and quite patriotic treatment of polish history would have been OK though if it weren't for fundamental weaknesses in script, structure and storytelling. Like many fellow viewers stated before, "Katyn" delivers a mangled storyline with too many characters showing up and vanishing quickly without a trace so that they remain strangely one-dimensional. Meetings by chance, falling in love, being killed the next second, it really owns more to the soap-opera than cinema, even if it's maybe more true to life than the old formulas of the silver-screen. The end of the film has quite an impact but it is an impact easy to achieve by scenes of this nature and I was kind of hoping Wajda would avoid the easy road.

Saving Private Ryan (1998)

I'm still weepy like a lunatic because it didn't win best picture

[10/10 · 22 October 2007]

Just leave it up to the genius of a master like Steven Spielberg to depict WW II in all it's gruesomeness, chaos and inhumanity. This is about the only war-movie that I have ever seen where you just simply become stunned, overwhelmed and shocked by a pandemonium of apocalyptic pictures, sounds and dialogs who ring nothing but true. This film doesn't shy away from stating a simple message, the message that war dehumanizes the human mind and bares open a bestiality that ponders on the verge of uneducated seaweed in terms of emotions. I congratulate you, Steven Spielberg, for being brave and courageous in your way of showing us that war is hell, that it is tedious, brutal, sometimes even boring but most important of all: definitely no laughing matter. This honest and depressing examination of the human condition should definitely have won the Best-Picture-Oscar in 1980. Oh wait, I just realized that this isn't the comment-board for "1941"... sorry, my mistake!

The Passion of the Christ (2004)

A movie dangerously misunderstood!

[21 April 2007]

Passion of the Christ, yes. I think what Mel Gibson was trying to achieve here is what film-historians would call "splatter-comedy" like early Peter Jackson. A bit like "Life of Brian" meets "Hostel". Did you notice the three guys dangling from crosses at the end of the movie? An almost identical scene is in that Monty-Python-movie. A coincidence? I hardly think so. Wow, and all those lowly Romans were so delightfully over the top, only picking at the guy who looked like Jesus, although there where other criminals around who could do with a bit of torturing as well. It almost seemed as if they wanted to turn that thorn-crowned-guy into a martyr. Alas, a lot of the jokes went by me as my DVD-player flunked the sub-titles. And in the end I guess I would have laughed more if the whole film wouldn't have been an attempt to "justify" the genocide of the Jewish people (especially in the German holocaust), as Mel himself admitted freely after having one beer to many.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)

The restored Biberkopf

[8/10 · 28 March 2007]

I think it's a perfect crime that this epic of human behavior has been neglected by German audiences. Even here on IMDb the people commenting on it are from various parts all over the wold but not from Germany. This is mostly due to the fact that "Berlin Alexanderplatz" was aired only once in 1980, under not very becoming conditions (it was a very bad copy of the original 16mm print that was much too dark for once), and then quickly thrown on the garbage heap of television-history. In the US for instance, Berlin Alexanderplatz was shown in cinemas and the association of American film critics at the end of the 80ies placed Günther Lamprecht under the top three actors of it's time, just behind Robert de Niro and Ben Kingsley. Figure that. Still the Germans go on saying that the Americans are mere barbarians when it comes to art. Thanks to "Süddeutsche Zeitung" and the people responsible for the quite expensive restoration-process of the series we now have a DVD and can watch the somnambulic masterpiece in all of it's original glory. It's the spiraling downfall of one man in a big Leviathan of a city, hard to swallow for most who rely on the silver or small screen for escapist entertainment. I just wish that today for every "Lost", "24" or "Profiler/CSI"-series there would at least be one "Berlin Alexanderplatz".

Equilibrium (2002)

"Equilibrium" is a sense-offender!

[21 July 2004]

Yesterday I had the misfortune to watch one of gods freak-accidents in the field of entertainment cinema. Beware of spoilers cause this movie is one. Director Kurt Wimmer cooked up a science-fiction-stew that got a bit of everything, except one original idea. But then again: who needs one of those when you can 'borrow' from all the classics of utopian literature? There is the basis of a functional neo-fascist post-wold-war-III-society: the drug 'Soma' from 'Brave new world' but this time around it is called 'Equilibrium'. There is the omni-present 'Big Brother' from 1984 who delivers his neo-fascist philosophies down from large screens and this time around is called 'Father'. There is the neo-fascist arm of the law who later becomes an underground-fighter, the book-burning 'fireman' from 'Fahrenheit 451' but this time around he is called 'cleric' and he still burns books but in addition to that he kicks arse matrix-style, yee-haw! Needless to say that Christian Bale even has to look like Keanu Reeves. Everybody involved into the making of this movie should have been forced to watch 'Brazil' at least a 100 times. Terry Gilliam knows how to steal together a movie too but he does it with style, dark humour and a great sense of elaboration and what is most important: He defended the bleak ending of his film to the last "Variety"-double-page. The mainly-British 'Equilibrium' thus turns into a bad American film whereas American Gilliams 'Brazil' is a truly great British one.

SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!

Damn you Kurt Wimmer... don't you know that a negatively utopian movie has to have everything but a happy-ending? Even fireman Montag from Fahrenheit 451 was merely a survivor, not a hero who brought down the regime in one single sweep. Utopian books and movies are stories to warn us what might happen if we keep on developing the way we do, not bleeding fairy tales. There has to be a horrible end or otherwise the effect of the movie will be destroyed in a couple of ridiculously choreographed shoot-out and sword-fight minutes. And when it was so easy for the cleric to kill almost all soldiers, henchmen and leaders in one easy go then why the feck didn't he do so straight away and thus saved us the pain of having to watch his boring 'Oh god! I seem to develop some feelings'-story for over an hour? I must say: The firearm-fights are quite entertaining because they are so godawful stupid it's almost funny. Up to 20 people firing everything they have at one single guy who just stands there, crossing arms over his head or shooting through his legs, thus killing everybody and staying absolutely scratch-free? Respect, that is suspension of disbelief that even the craptastic Matrix-trilogy didn't dare to envision. 'Equilibrium' is not a movie about a world without feeling. It's just a movie without feeling.

The Wicker Man (1973)

May Day! May Day!

[10/10 · 28 July 2003]

Stop trying to classify this film. Stop labelling it with a genre. It's one of the very few works of cinema-history that transforms into anything you want it to be: may it be horror, may it be thriller, may it be satire. For me it's a black-comedy-folk-musical and as black comedy goes it's up there with the best. It's is as dark and horrific as Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" and "The Wicker Man"'s final scene even rivals the famous bomb-ride of Slim Pickens in Kubrick's masterpiece. The horror doesn't rely on pointed teeth or spilled guts but some very basic revelations about human nature. Religion is forced onto you by birth, place and upbringing. Here the christian stands alone against a community of pagans and everything he represents suddenly seems to be just as (or even more) bizarre, elaborated and downright silly than the heathen rituals he encounters. As for the musical part it's just done with a natural grace. Actually this is one of the very few musicals where the scenes of singing and dancing are motivated (by the villager's lifestyle) and thus becoming organic. When the townpeople get into their nicely choreographed sequence about the lovely inn-keeper's daughter you will be reminded of Dennis Potter's musical fantasies. And in terms of comedy think Monty Pythons (the animal heads that quickly duck behind the pier when Sergeant Howie can't start his plane) or contemporary british comedy troupe "The League of Gentleman" ("This is a local shop for local people!") who borrowed heavily from this films style and setting. Be open minded about this flick and it will blow you away. Watch it today because tomorrow it could be too late.