Gregorioshoplateia Reviews

Game of Thrones: The Last of the Starks (2019) Season 8, Episode 4

Dumbfounded

[7 May 2019]

Reading these insane reviews is amusing. The quality of the show went up after they ran out of books. The story before was all over the place. Finally we get focus instead of drama for the sake of drama. Wonderful, thoughtful episodes where you can clearly see all the hard work that went into them. Reading the spoilers for this particular episode I feared it would really be bad but then actually watching it everything made sense, especially character motivations. Dumbfounded.

Reactionary mindsets are the true problem facing society today. That and a total inability to observe things without expectations clouding the mind.

Here come the downvotes :) I don't hate you haters but I am really surprised by you all.

Boj na poziralniku (1982)

Lacking in both film logic and basic human logic

[20 December 2015]

So here is a movie made after a particularly nonsensical novel which may or may not be a critique of a stupid mentality of resentment - I cannot decide whether it is a satire trying to criticize the self destructive attitude represented by the characters or if one is supposed to feel sympathy for the characters. Either way the movie fails at both. Characters appear to be driven by nothing but their stubbornness which is lacking in situational awareness and which finds nothing but obstacles on its path while not searching for a way out. The characters rather hate everybody and even themselves as they turn to increasingly insane self-destructive escapades while blaming everyone for their situation. It is a cold world they live in but unfortunately I get the feeling that the viewer is supposed to symphatize with their plight. This would be OK if it was presented as a real plight towards freedom and towards the ability to sustain themselves. But it comes off as something completely different.

It does not help that the film is devoid of any visual logic and the sense of continuity is lost between the shots and the scenes. No grand narrative comes out of it except scenes which have no interior connection to each other. It is like watching random clips of people doing stupid actions - one after another - but without revealing the source which drives them. The only thing the film is left with is a sense of desperation and hate. But even so the actions and the shots are staged in such an absurd way that one can only laugh at the silliness of it.

So a word of advice - if you want to explore Slovenian cinema and see the high rating that this film has please do not trust it. It really is badly made on all levels and is rated as high because some teachers of Slovenian language ( who cannot separate a book from a film ) like the movie as the novel it is based on is in the official curriculum.

Deseti brat (1982)

A horrible movie

[26 November 2008]

This movie is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. The director does not know how to establish a sense of space, it's script is just not suited for film as it is obvious that people working on this came from literary circles without knowing the laws of cinema. In fact this movie even shows the superior complex of such circles where they look down on film as a lesser artform than literature and where they think that they can easily make great films. The film tries to be artistic but fails miserably. The acting is theatrical and the director does not realise that the actors should act for the camera. Instead you get a bunch of theatrical shots with static camera and bad framing, where persons walk in and out of the scenes without the director establishing the reason for this... Unreasonable placements of camera that show exactly the wrong things, shots being too full of everything, no focus at all... To think some people place the works of Duletič above such masterpieces of slovenian cinema such as Vesna or Kekec, simply because of their supposed artistic qualities ( that is the film was made after a book of a classic slovenian writer which in their mind makes it automatically artistic ) is a crime against film as an artform.