Blind Chance

Przypadek, art-film / drama, Poland, 1981 / 1987, D: Krzysztof Kieślowski, S: Bogusłav Linda, Tadeusz Łomnicki, Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, Marzena Trybała, Bogusława Pawelec

Łódź. Witek is pressured by his father to study medicine, but one day receives his father's phone call: "You don't have to do it". Later, his father dies in the hospital. At the train terminal, Witek runs to catch a train... 1st story: Witek boards the train and meets Werner, a Communist who sends him to Adam, a high ranking official. Witek becomes part of the Communist Youth and is sent to end a standoff at a drug addict clinic, where the drug addicts locked three doctors in a cage. Witek frees the doctors and is promoted. He meets his first love again, Czuszka, but she is arrested by Adam for distributing banned books about Polish independence... 2nd story: Witek misses the train, bumps into a the railway guard, is arrested and sent one month of community service, where he meets anti-Communist Marek who acquaints him with a priest. Witek starts a relationship with Werka and becomes religious. But the Communists raid Marek's printing office, and he blames Witek... 3rd story: Witek misses the train, but meets Olga. They get married and have a child. He becomes a doctor. Witek boards a plane to a medical conference in Libya, but his plane explodes.

It is peculiar that Krzysztof Kieslowski released a film about a protagonist going through three different variations / possible outcomes in life, yet was surpassed by later films which improved said concept: Dormael's "Mr. Nobody", Tykwer's "Run Lola Run" and Howitt's "Sliding Doors". The reason for that is that this triple hypothetical outcome is fascinating as a concept, but Kieslowski directed it here in a too sterile, grey, underwhelming and all-around routine way, with overlong running time and monotone dialogue. "Blind Chance" thus works only on the level of the concept, but not on the level of execution, yet still poses some thought-provoking, philosophical questions—would all of our lives have unraveled completely differently if one defining moment had played out differently? Do people have control of their life, or are they pawns in the grand game of determinism, fatalism and chance? Determinism is the obvious in the outcome of all three different variations—even though the protagonist Witek goes into three vastly different directions (in the 1st story, he becomes a Communist; in the 2nd story he becomes religious; in the 3rd, he is apolitical, non-religious, refusing any ideology), all three end up in a tragedy. Even more unsettlingly, just one random encounter with someone who played an influence on him, determined if Witek would become either this or that or neutral, implying that the whole history of each country could have gone differently, depending on who had more influence on the populace. The three different variations of Witek running through the terminal to try to catch the train are directed each in their own way, with different details (Witek passes a lady who drops a coin, a random man picks it up and orders himself a beer, but Witek then either spills his beer or stops to go around him, depending on each story), but overall, the film simply lacks more imagination and creativity.

Grade:++

Green Card

Green Card; romantic comedy, USA / Australia / France, 1990; D: Peter Weir, S: Andie MacDowell, Gérard Depardieu, Bebe Neuwirth, Gregg Edelman, Robert Prosky

New York City. Quid pro quo: American Brontë accepts to marry Frenchman Georges for a short fake marriage. He will receive the American Green Card, while she will receive her dream apartment with a big garden which is only leased to couples. However, during a routine interview of two Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officers, Georges mistakenly calls Brontë "Betty", and thus a new, more elaborate interview is scheduled. Georges and Brontë do not like each other that much, but now have to spend some time actually living together in the apartment and learn more about each other to pass the test. During the second, separate interview, Georges goofs again by forgetting the name of Brontë's face cream, and thus confesses everything. He is about to be deported, but Brontë has fallen in love with him.

Australian director Peter Weir's 4th American film is seemingly his own contemplation about the problems of US immigrants trying to get a chance to start a new chapter in life there, presented in the form of a romantic comedy about an arranged marriage which was supposed to be fake, but where the couple falls in love with each other in the end. "Green Card" is not among Weir's best films: the screenplay is thin and with a rather hard-to-believe motivation of the heroine Brontë (would a woman truly set-up an arranged marriage with a stranger just to get an apartment with a garden? Couldn't she just have asked a friend to pretend, for instance her lover Phil?); Gerard Depardieu (before he went crazy) is good in dramatic moments, but simply has no comic timing; the ending is unsatisfactory; whereas Weir has no more creative lift-offs in directing. Nonetheless, Andie MacDowell is excellent in the leading role as Brontë, sweet and charming, whereas the movie is refreshingly set-up as an intimate, quiet story about two people learning about each other, allowing for subtle emotionality. "Green Card" is simple and humane, staying true to Weir's vision, and offers a good meditation on communication between two different cultures, advocating that good people can be found in every society, despite their differences: a cure for xenophobia and anti-immigration perspectives.

Grade:++

Threads

Threads; disaster film, UK, 1984; D: Mick Jackson, S: Karen Meagher, Reece Dinsdale, David Brierley, Rita May, Jane Hazlegrove, Paul Vaughan (voice)

Sheffield. Ruth and Jimmy get intimate in a car. A few months later, she is pregnant, so they decide to get married and rent an apartment. However, a more pressing problem appears in the news: the US staged a coup d'état in Iran, after which the Soviet Army entered into said country. The American and Soviet soldiers exchange fire, resulting in a nuclear attack. This leads to a domino effect, and Sheffield prepares for the worst, advising people to buy food and prepare shelters, while a crisis commission is established. A nuclear war erupts, and the Soviets target a NATO base near Sheffield with an atomic bomb, causing mass destruction. 17 million people die in Britain, the nuclear fallout causes dark clouds during summer. Jimmy is never found, while Ruth and her family manage to survive and emerge from the shelter. People fight for food in the sparse food centers. Ruth gives birth. 13 years later, as the country is being rebuilt, Ruth dies from radiation, while her daughter lives on. 

"Threads" is one of those depressing movies you never want to see, but once you start watching it, you have to see it to the end. Produced by the BBC, this film depicting the effects of a nuclear war in Sheffield was apparently so effective that many viewers were traumatized after its TV broadcast in Britain. As the title already hints at, the modern world is interconnected through invisible threads, and even though one event may happen in one part of the world, its consequences may affect the other part—this is illustrated via a close-up of a spider weaving a web, as the narrator explains: "Our lives are woven together in a fabric. But the connections that make society strong, also make it vulnerable." The story has no main character (the top-billed Karen Meagher, who plays Ruth, has barely 10 minutes of screen time), as it instead focuses on a sort of collective view on society during the apocalypse, consisting out of numerous episodes, but all of them paint a bigger picture that perfectly encapsulates the dread of the Cold War. The budget is limited, and thus its scale is kind of held in boundaries, but the suggestive close ups and still frames manage to conjure up a solid bluff.

The director Mick Jackson (who would later directed such American comedies as "L.A. Story" and "Clean Slate") depicts the story in a clinical, concise, cold manner, almost as a documentary, building uncomfortable suspense through little details (people panic buying in a store; Jimmy's friend trying to persuade him to flirt with a girl in a pub before his wedding, saying: "If we're out on a carpet, might as well go out with a bang!"; a TV announcer advising people to wrap a corpse in "polythene, paper, sheets or blankets" and "label the body with name and address"). After the nuclear attack some 48 minutes into the film, seen as a mushroom cloud above the rooftops of the city, "Threads" becomes even more dark and depressing, with several shocking, disturbing images (black, vaporized corpses lying around a ruined building; people throwing up from radiation poisoning; the pregnant Ruth lamenting how her fetus has no future...). The rest of the film depicts the effects of survivors who continue living in this post-apocalyptic landscape in the rural area, suffering from famine, deprivation, up to reconstruction efforts. "Threads" is a bitter warning of how precious civilization is, and how humanity is always only one big disaster away from losing all of its progress and falling back into barbarism and existential hardship. It could go in a double-bill with Murakami's similar film "When the Wind Blows" and Masaki's "Barefoot Gen" depicting the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Grade:+++

The Wrong Box

The Wrong Box; comedy, UK, 1966; D: Bryan Forbes, S: Michael Caine, Peter Cook, Ralph Richardson, Dudley Moore, Nanette Newman, John Mills, Tony Hancock, Peter Sellers

London, 19th century. Families of 20 boys invested a 1,000£ each into a collective tontine, i.e. a lottery, but only the last survivor will receive the wealth. 60 years later, 18 of them are dead, except for elderly brothers Masterman and Joseph Finsbury. Upon hearing the news from Masterman's grandson Michael that Masterman is on his deathbed, Joseph's relatives Morris and John decide to travel with Joseph there, hoping to finally cash in on the tontine which is now worth 111,000£. After a train crash, Morris and John spot a corpse wearing Joseph's coat and mistakenly assume he died, so they devise a plan to feign Joseph is still alive, until Masterman dies so they inherit a fortune. They ship the corpse in a box, but it mistakenly gets delivered to Masterman's home, where Michael assumes he killed Joseph, so he hides the corpse. After a lot of misadventures, it turns out Joseph is alive, and that the corpse is from a serial killer, so a police inspector offers Michael a reward for eliminating the criminal.

The film adaptation of the eponymous novel by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, "The Wrong Box" is a funny black comedy about a battle for inheritance, with a lot of wacky, sometimes almost burlesque jokes and slapstick, augmented by the talent of co-writer Larry Galbert. However, some parts work better than the others: the supporting characters of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore as the clumsy relatives Morris and John are wonderfully funny; Peter Sellers, who appears in two scenes as the alcoholic, cat-infested slob Dr. Pratt is hilarious ("Well, it'll cost you five shillings". - "Price is no object". - "Right. Ten shillings, then!"; he even puts a "seal" on a document using a back of a kitten pressed onto the paper); but the leading actor Michael Caine either has no sense for comic timing or his jokes were underwritten, and is thus only mildly amusing by contrast. Several jokes among the supporting crew are highly comical—for instance, after two trains collided, Morris exits the wagon with his pants torn, revealing his underwear, so a conductor with an eyepatch addresses him: "Sir, I didn’t lose my right eye in the Indian mutiny to have my left eye offended by the youths of England standing around with their arses hanging out!" The way 18 of the men fighting for the inheritance fortune are killed in the opening act is sometimes highly comical (in one episode, a woman throws a bottle of champaign to "baptize" a new ship, but misses, and the rope swings the bottle back, as it flies and hits the face of one of the beneficiaries), and some sight gags are creative (after failing to kill his brother in the bedroom, Masterman throws a vase with flowers at Joseph descending down the stairway, but the vase misses him and only the flowers fall on his head, which Joseph thinks is meant as an apology from Masterman). It is a pity the last third is a bit overstretched and too chaotic, exhausting itself with just situations of misunderstandings, instead of also adding other kind of jokes, which would have improved the film's impression.

Grade:++

What Dreams May Come

What Dreams May Come; fantasy drama, USA, 1998; D: Vincent Ward, S: Robin Williams, Cuba Gooding Jr., Annabella Sciorra, Max von Sydow, Jessica Brooks Grant, Josh Paddock

Pediatrician Chris Nielsen and his wife, painter Annie, are shocked when their two kids, Ian and Marie, die in a car crash. Some time later, Chris also dies in a car crash in a tunnel. However, his soul is transferred to heaven, in the form of Annie's paintings, and guided by Albert. He meets a woman dressed as a flight attendant, and it turns out she is Marie. However, Chris finds out Annie committed suicide and is now in a form of mental hell, so he goes with Albert and The Tracker to this dark underground to save her. It turns out Albert is actually Ian. Chris encounters Annie in a freaked version of their house, but she cannot recognize him and acts psychotic. His love manages to wake her up and they get to heaven. After that, they are reincarnated as children back on Earth.

"What Dreams May Come" is one of the those films that are almost impossible to grade because they are so weird and unable to be pinned down, defying any category. Based on Richard Matheson's eponymous fiction book, it is one of several experimental films where comedian Robin Williams occasionally risked to star in, outside of mainstream. Its story dwells on human (semi-religious) subconscious wishful thinking that good people who died tragically will somehow be compensated, revived in afterlife, and reunited with their loved ones in a better place. Here, it is shown as a heaven without God. The director Vincent Ward excels in stunning crystal-clear cinematography, wonderful colors and visual style, but stumbles drastically in banal melodrama, stiff dialogue and underwritten storyline. The opening 5 minutes of the film, for instance, where Chris and Annie first meet, should have been either elaborated more to make these characters more alive or simply cut, since in this edition they are stuck in an awkward middle. The first 20-minutes and last 45 minutes of the film are wasted—the two car crashes, funeral and grief scenes in the opening act are too melodramatic, without a sense for being more subtle; whereas the whole third act, where protagonist Chris travels to hell to save his wife, is depressive-grey nonsense, a patchwork hard to digest. The only truly good part is the middle 30-minute segment where Ward shows a lot of imagination in creating Chris in a colorful world of heaven: the scene where Chris jumps from a cliff and then runs manically fast across a field of red flowers, roadrunner-style, is almost therapeutic. The idea that Chris meets his deceased dog again there is touching, whereas the reveal of true identities of two characters there is a genuine surprise and delight. "What Dreams May Come" is an uneven patchwork, unable to find a balance, but its "free" structure is almost its own unique trait, whereas Williams has one genius humorous scene: in the clinic, Chris puts photos of Annie's paintings on the medical whiteboard next to an MRI scan.  

Grade:++

Day of the Wacko

Dzień świra; black comedy, Poland, 2002; D: Marek Koterski, S: Marek Kondrat, Janina Traczykówna, Andrzej Grabowski, Michał Koterski, Joanna Sienkiewicz, Monika Donner-Trelińska

"Every morning I'm afraid to open my eyes. I have absolutely no idea what to do with the oncoming day." Adas Miaucznyski is sick and tired of his life. He lives alone in his apartment and wants to write poetry, but is constantly interrupted by the noise outside, either from construction workers or his neighbor playing Chopin too loud. He works as a poetry teacher in a high school, but his lecture is interrupted by someone making a farting sound. His salary is too low, his mother does not listen to him and only talks about her soup, his teenage son is confused, his ex-wife hates him. Adas boards a train to the beach and lies there to rest. A dog, seagulls and punks disrupt him, so he dreams of his first love, Ela. In the evening, he returns to his apartment and goes back to bed.  

Voted in a 2 0 2 5 local national poll as one of the 13 best films of Polish cinema up to that point, the 6th film featuring the director Marek Koterski's fictional character of Adaś Miauczyński, "Day of the Wacko" is also considered the cinematic highlight of this grumpy persona on the screen, a black comedy that seems like a blend of Melvin Udall from "As Good as It Gets", Travis Bickle from "Taxi Driver" and James Joyce's novel "Ulysses", featuring 24 hours in the life of the magnificently misanthropic, obsessive-compulsive disordered, cynical and all-around miserable anti-hero. Despite a simple story that only features Adas complaining 90% of the time, "Day of the Wacko" is able to be engaging, interesting and quirky throughout, thanks to little details, creative ideas, the director's interventions, and especially the sharp dialogues which offer mercilessly honest observations about life. Adas is both a hilarious and a tragic figure—he represents people living on the margins, ignored or shunned by others, and the only thing he can do is rebel verbally. Several scenes illustrate his state: he tries to teach teenagers poetry in high school, but only one girl truly looks at him and listens—until, in a twist, it is revealed she was just wondering why he is wearing a medical bandage on his forehead. He looks at his mail and thinks: "Is there anyone lower than me on this God-forsaken planet?"  

In one scene, he is arguing from his window with a woman and her dog outside: "The dog is shitting right beneath my window!" - "It's only a dog." - "So what? Does a dog shit less shitty shit than a person?!" Since the woman does not pay attention to his complaints, he later goes to her residential building and defecates in the bushes right next to her window: "The freedom of one cannot infringe the freedom of other!" Adas has strange OCD behaviors: he fills his coffee cup full, carries it on a plate to his couch, and then pours the spilt coffee from said plate back into the cup. He also has a weird move where he "adjusts" his lower pants to sit comfortably. When he goes to a train compartment, numerous strange people go to sit next to him, as he wonders: "Maybe I attract the crazies". The height of satire is reached in two fictional scenes: one near the beginning of the film (a nationalist holding a speech on TV with a flag of Poland drawn on his forehead), the other near the end (the cult moment of a real "Polish prayer" where dozens of people pray on the balconies of a building: "Father, Son, and Holy Mary! Let me see my neighbor buried! He is not a friend of mine... May his roof come caving in! ..."). But behind all these cruel comments, Adas hides a vulnerable side, best expressed in his long monologue some 63 minutes into the film: "Life didn't work out for me. I wasted it... And the thought that my son will end up as unhappy as I am breaks my heart!" "Day of the Wacko" is a bitter protest against injustice in life in general, against any institutionalized "pointless existence". Is there a way out? Is there a possible world where everyone is happy? Can there be an ideal life impossible to waste? That the film poses such universal questions about indifferent modern society which creates such "dead end" cases is already impressive enough.

Grade:+++

Throw Momma from the Train

Throw Momma from the Train; black comedy, USA, 1987; D: Danny DeVito, S: Billy Crystal, Danny DeVito, Kim Greist, Anne Ramsey, Kate Mulgrew, Branford Marsalis, Rob Reiner, Oprah Winfrey

Los Angeles. Novelist Larry Donner hates his ex-wife Margaret who stole his manuscript, published it and got a bestseller. Larry is a lecturer at a writing course, and his student Owen misunderstands their conversation when Larry advises him to go watch Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train", and assumes that is a signal that Owen should kill Larry's ex-wife, and that he will in return kill Owen's unbearable mother. Margaret indeed disappears from a cruise voyage in Hawaii, and Owen now asks Larry to keep his end of the "deal". Larry refuses to kill Owen's mom, and even saves her from falling off a train. Margaret reappears since she only slipped from the ship into the sea, but survived. A year later, Larry writes a crime novel based on his misadventures with Owen.

Danny DeVito's feature length debut film as a director, "Throw Momma from the Train" is arguably the best film he directed, and is underrated. Filled with several delicious little jokes, black humor, inspired ideas and vitality, this is a strong comedy film from the 80s, though it unfortunately falls apart in the chaotic, aimless last third. Billy Crystal is excellent as the novelist Larry, as is Anne Ramsey in one of her last roles as the irritating, unbearable mom (but the problem is that her character is underwritten, without any more elaborate "acting scenes" to find out more about her personality than just shouting and being a maniac), whereas DeVito shows a lot of directing finesse in crafting careful scene transitions: for instance, Larry is watching his ex-wife on TV in the Oprah Winfrey show, as there is a cut to another TV with said show, watched by mom who turns around and shouts, as the camera drives back across the room to go to Owen in the next room. In another scene, Owen interrupts Larry's date in an amusement park and asks if he liked his crime story, but Larry replies with: "No!" Cut to the next scene of Larry in bed, his phone ringing, he picks it up, as Owen's voice is heard: "Why not?" Cut to another time jump, as we see Owen and Larry sitting on a bench outside a store, as Larry explains why his story doesn't work due to a lack of motive.

After a wild ride, a car slams into a tree and stops, the camera pans to the right, and the white picket fences "dissolve" into white bars of a jail in the next scene. There is aesthetic in these scene transitions. Some situations are misguided—Owen imagining stabbing mom with scissors in the ear is bad; Owen hiding behind a couch as Margaret has sex with her gardener could have worked if DeVito simply ditched the stupid idea of said gardener "barking" like a dog to arouse her, for some reason. The dialogue also isn't as witty as it could have been, since Larry and Owen are novelists, and is instead rather improvised and obvious. Still, the first 2/3 of the film are a lot of fun, without any 'empty walk', full of playful allusions to Hitchcock's style. Unfortunately, the final third really does not know what to do with this story—it wants to pretend that Larry will kill Owen's mom, but is ultimately too scared to go this dark route, and thus just runs around in circles, backing out, not sure what it should do. The whole last third is a giant 'copout' in slow-motion, bringing the concept to a dead end. Despite this anticlimactic finale, "Throw Momma from the Train" has so many merits in the first half, that it deserves to be seen. One little episode of an agent, played by Rob Reiner, is wonderfully cynical: "I handle writers, Larry, not artists. You go be an artist. Let the rest of the world make a living!"

Grade:++

Clean Slate

Clean Slate; crime comedy, USA, 1994, D: Mick Jackson, S: Dana Carvey, Valeria Golino, Michael Gambon, Kevin Pollak, Jayne Brook, Olivia d'Abo, James Earl Jones, Michael Murphy, Angela Paton, Michael Monks, Bryan Cranston

Every time he falls asleep, private detective Maurice Pogue forgets everything what happened yesterday and thus has to re-learn as much info as he can from his tape recorder. He is an ex-LAPD cop who has to testify against criminal Cornell on Thursday, who killed Pogue's girlfriend Sarah in a car explosion. However, a woman introduces herself as Sarah and gains Pogue's trust. Little by little, Pogue investigates and interviews LAPD colleagues Rosenheim and District Attorney Dolby. It turns out Cornell is after an ancient coin he stole from a museum, and which Pogue hid, but gives it to Sarah. Pogue however realizes that Sarah is actually Beth, secretly working for Dr. Doover, who exploits Pogue's amnesia to get the coin. Beth has a change of heart and decides to help Pogue. After testifying on court against Cornell and retrieving the coin, Pogue gets his memory back and re-starts his relationship with Beth.

Why does Nolan's "Memento" work, while the crime comedy "Clean Slate" doesn't? Maybe because a drama has the benefit of the doubt of not needing a point after each scene, since it can "bluff" with contemplation, while a comedy has the burden of requiring a set-up and a punchline continuously. Both films feature protagonists with amnesia after a traumatic accident, who search for clues of their enemy, but develop in different styles and moods. "Clean Slate" has some moments of cinematic literacy thanks to director Mick Jackson, but its script is hopelessly stale, lukewarm, bland, overstretched, without any sense how to conjure up a good joke. Dana Carvey is sympathetic as the private detective with amnesia, Pogue, and one wishes he was given something with better inspiration and ingenuity to reach his full potentials. There is not a single brilliant gag that stands out, everything is just okey. The actors all give it their best, including James Earl Jones and Michael Gambon as villain Cornell, who is missing his right thumb (after the trial, a reporter tells him his appearance got a "thumbs down"), yet there needs to be a reason and a goal to them, which are absent.

The director Jackson has more success with certain cinematic techniques than with jokes. For instance, in one scene, Pogue takes a magnifying glass and spots a sign behind a half-torn photo of him, saying "Police Aca...", which is followed by a match cut to said sign in full, "Police Academy", which Pogue visits. In another scene, a wall painting of a faceless Mona Lisa "dissolves" to the same outline of Sarah's (Valeria Golino) face as she sleeps in bed. And after a betrayal, the camera zooms out of Pogue's face to a wider shot, revealing the poster of a film: "A Man Betrayed". These are nice touches. But the storyline required a better sense for shaping humor, since huge 85mm close-ups of the actors' faces can only go so far. The best joke is probably the scene where Pogue is running away from his enemies on a street, and in order to hide the ancient coin from the museum, he simply inserts it into a parking meter and runs away, to retrieve it later. Other jokes fare less. The fact that Pogue forgets everything each day gets annoying at times, especially in the forced, cringe court testimony where he stalls in the most cliche ways. It is perplexing that "Clean Slate" only becomes a good movie 68 minutes into its running time, during the betrayal 'plot twist'. Why did it take so long? It is strange for a comedy that its serious film noir elements would have worked much better on its own than in tandem with its comedy elements.

Grade:+

Mission: Impossible – Fallout

Mission: Impossible – Fallout; action thriller, USA, 2018; D: Christopher McQuarrie, S: Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Sean Harris, Angela Bassett, Vanessa Kirby, Michelle Monaghan, Alec Baldwin

Impossible Mission Force (IMF) agent Ethan Hunt, and his associates Luther and Benji, receive a new assignment: the mad ex-British agent Solomon Lane is in jail, but his terrorist forces, the Syndicate, restructured into the Apostles, a shady organization with a new manifesto that wants to destroy the old world order through three nuclear explosions using smuggled plutonium. Ethan is assigned a new partner, CIA agent Walker. Traveling to Paris, Ethan contacts the White Widow, who will give him the plutonium ores if he releases Lane. Ethan complies, but refuses to hand over Lane, and then tricks Walker into admitting he actually colluded with the Apostles and Lane. At a finale in Kashmir, where the Apostles want to detonate two nuclear bombs to poison the water for a billion people, Ethan defeats and kills Walker, while Luther and Benji de-activate the bombs. A wounded Ethan is visited by his ex-wife Julia.

When an action film turns into a franchise spanning several sequels, the suspense inevitably deflates—after all, a hero can plausibly survive an impossibly dangerous situation only so many times before it becomes routine. As was the case with the James Bond film series, the 6th "Mission: Impossible" film is also stuck in this dilemma: it became a formulaic mold, a set of mandated, predictable outcomes dictated by the committee. Its action scenes are excellent, and are the only area where the authors were given a free rein to be wildly creative; however, its writing, directing and characters never go beyond the safe territory. "Fallout" gained fame because it received an incredible 98% score on Rotten Tomatoes, making it the highest rated "Mission: Impossible" film on that website, but overall, one really wonders what is there to decipher beyond good. The subplot involving Ethan Hunt's encounter with his ex-wife Julia, who has to have a secret identity as to not be in danger from enemies trying to attack her, is good, but it never becomes sweepingly emotional as it could have been. 

The motivation of the villains, the Apostles, is again vague and unclear, as it is never quite clear what exactly would incite them to become so loyal to their cause, nor what they would gain from it—since it is always safe to simply use some terrorists than to actually engage with evil in the real world, where war criminals rule entire countries. The 3-minute scene of Ethan and Walker jumping from a plane in decompression suits, Walker falling unconscious, Ethan saving him and ejecting their parachutes to land on the rooftop of a building in Paris, filmed in one take, is amazing, practically virtuoso directed. The fight in the public restroom is also extremely energetic and superfast. The chase sequence of Ethan on a motorcycle across Paris is a thrill ride. But after a while, this all becomes somehow mechanical, almost on autopilot, as there is no deeper substance. Just one example: a captured villain wakes up, handcuffed to a hospital bed, and watches with glee the TV news of how his henchmen detonated nuclear explosions on three religious holy sites (Mecca, Jerusalem, Vatican), reveals some secret information to Ethan, until, in a plot twist, it is revealed that the hospital room was just a fake observation room to trick him, as the TV news were false and there were no nuclear explosions. The safely played "Mission: Impossible" would, of course, not want to go there to explore such a complicated scenario. But could you imagine how much braver (and better) the story would have been if it actually did?

Grade:++

The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner; drama, USA, 2007; D: Marc Forster, S: Khalid Abdalla, Homayoun Ershadi, Shaun Toub, Atossa Leoni, Saïd Taghmaoui, Zekiria Ebrahimi, Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada

Kabul, 1 9 7 8. Amir (10) is friends with Hassan (8), whose father is Ali, servant of Amir's father, Agha Sahib, a wealthy man. They fly kites. Amir feels his father never forgave him that Amir's mother died at childbirth. A bully, Assef, and his two associates threatens them, but Hassan stands up to them. As a punishment, Assef rapes Hassan in an alley, while Amir observes everything but is too much of a coward to intervene. Plagued by guilt, Amir wants his father to fire Ali and Hassan from their household. After the Saur Revolution, communist takeover, and the Soviet invasion, Agha and Amir flee the country to a Pakistani town, and later to California. Amir wants to become a writer and marries Soraya, daughter of former Afghan general Taheri. Agha dies. Amir travels to Peshawar, where he finds out Hassan was executed by the Taliban, and that he was his brother, since his father Agha had an affair with Ali's wife. Amir is childless, but he travels to Kabul, finds Sohrab, Hassan's son, adopts him and brings him to California.

Excellent adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's eponymous novel, "Kite Runner" is a bitter depiction and chronicle of Afghanistan's dark ages, from the communist to Taliban takeover, seen through the eyes of a refugee from that place who settled in the US. The director Marc Forster shows all these painful, sometimes unpleasant themes in a very sensitive, emotional and humanistic way, though, thereby imbibing it with sophistication and intelligence. The first half, playing out in Kabul of the 70s, is a rare reconstruction of Afghan life before the madness, showing several details (women without veil, people owning music records, cinemas playing "The Magnificent Seven"...), and friendship between the two boys, Amir and Hassan. One little dialogue between them is already a philosophical contemplation on the futility of cruelty, when Hassan asks Amir about the story he wrote: "Why did he have to kill his wife?" - "Because he will cry, and each of his tears will turn into a pearl." - "Yes, but why couldn't he have simply smelled an onion?" Problems already arise along the ethnic lines, as Amir is Pashtun, while Hassan is Hazara, which will lead to betrayal. 

The potentially gruesome scene where bully Assef, with the help of his two associates, rapes Hassan in an alley is done with maximum measure and subtlety possible, never showing anything explicitly and lasting only 10 seconds. But it becomes a turning point, since Amir observed this the whole time, but was too much of a coward to intervene. His guilt will follow him and shape his life for the rest of the film, until he undergoes an attempted redemption. The standout performance here is by the brilliant actor Homayoun Ershadi who plays Armin's father Agha, who has integrity, honor and ethics. For instance, he is staunchly against religious fundamentalism of the mullahs, who claim drinking alcohol is a sin: "You'll never learn anything of value from those bearded idiots... They do nothing but thumb their prayer beads and recite a book written in a tongue they don't even understand... All this talk about sinning is making me thirsty!", as he triumphantly drinks his brandy to finish the conversation. When an Afghan truck filled with refugees is stopped at a border, and a Soviet Russian soldier asks for "half an hour alone" with some man's wife in exchange for letting them pass, Agha again stands up and protests against this lack of morals, showing his sense for justice even during crisis situations. The second half, playing out in the US, shows a grown-up Amir maturing to understand his behavior he could not comprehend as a child, showing remorse. Forster directs the whole storyline with remarkable elegance and fluency, with several sharp observations (gender apartheid in the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan; bully Assef growing up into a paedophile, but having complete immunity because he aligned himself with the Taliban, showing their moral hypocrisy; the clash between civility in civilization and barbaric primitivism in extremism...), all leading up to an impressive achievement that finds its ideal balance even during scenes that could have been controversial, but ultimately weren't.

Grade:+++