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:+++

Point Break

Point Break; action, USA, 1991; D: Kathryn Bigelow, S: Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, Gary Busey, Lori Petty, John C. McGinley, James LeGros, John Philbin

Los Angeles. Four men, disguised in masks of ex-US Presidents, keep robbing banks, and then escaping in a car. FBI agent Johnny Utah is sent on the case, and his more experienced colleague Angelo Pappas has a theory that the four robbers might be surfers. Johnny thus decides to take on surfing lessons from Tyler, falls in love with her, and gets befriended with many surfers, including the unusual Bodhi. When it turns out Bodhi is indeed the boss of the gang, he kidnaps Tyler, and thus blackmails Johnny into robbing a bank with them — but without a mask. When the gang wants to break into the safe, a security guard and police officer shoot some of them. Bodhi escapes, Johnny follows him, they both enter a plane, but Bodhi escapes by jumping from the plane in a parachute. Years later, Johnny finds Bodhi somewhere along the Australian coast. Bodhi goes to surf on a wave during a huge storm, and disappears in the ocean.

"Point Break" is the darnedest thing: its aesthetics and style is a 10/10, but its story and characters are a 4/10. It is thus difficult to rate this film as a whole, since the viewers more inclined towards the former will like it more, while the viewers more inclined towards the latter will like it less. The most unusual ingredient in the rather standard action story is its villain, Bodhi (Patrick Swayze), who does not rob banks for selfishness—rather, the perplexing thing is that he robs to be able to live out his spiritual lifestyle, surfing, without having to be part of the capitalist lifestyle. This makes him different from other villains, but, alas, the movie really needed better character development and more philosophy. And some plot holes bother (for example, why does Bodhi take his mask off during the bank robbery at 93 minutes into the film? It makes no sense, since the cameras are recording the entire room). Nonetheless, the director Kathryn Bigelow and cinematographer Donald Peterman take a step towards advancing the new cinematic aesthetics established since the 80s, which have not been improved in the decades after "Point Break", meaning they have reached the optimum of cinematographic looks. Four moments are outstanding, two of which are "impossible" scenes, yet they filmed them anyway—these are the intense 5-minute long chase sequence across the streets, gardens and houses of Santa Monica, as Johnny is running after the robber wearing a mask of Ronald Reagan; and the scene where a character goes to surf into a giant wave during a storm. But the two "impossible" scenes are unforgettable: both involve the protagonists jumping from a plane, "gliding" during skydive, while the camera follows them and observes the coastline below. One of these "impossible" scenes is even more "impossible", as Johnny is left alone in the airplane after Bodhi escaped, but he still takes a gun and jumps out, without a parachute (!), falling until he reaches and grabs Bodhi skydiving, in a scene that is of such perfection, such passion and untrammeled imagination that it sends shivers down your spine, something modern Hollywood rarely reached, and thus this unbelievable highlight overshadows any flaws, sweeping all omissions away with its majestic momentum.

Grade:+++

Night Train

Pociąg; drama, Poland, 1959; D: Jerzy Kawalerowicz, S: Lucyna Winnicka, Leon Niemczyk, Zbigniew Cybulski, Teresa Szmigielówna, Roland Głowacki 

Numerous passengers board a train heading towards the north, the Hel peninsula on the Baltic Sea. Among the passengers are surgeon Jerzy, whose patient died during surgery and who forgot his ticket, and Marta, who bought a ticket from a stranger at the train station; they have to share the same compartment, even though it is reserved for men. They talk and exchange ideas, while Marta admits she is followed by her ex-boyfriend, the crazy Staszek. Other people include a lawyer and his wife, as well as a train conductor. The train stops unexpectedly and several police officers enter, arresting Jerzy under the suspicion of being an escaped murdered, because he is in the compartment that the suspect booked. However, Marta shows them the stranger who sold her the ticket, the real murderer, who runs through the train, presses the emergency breaks, and flees in the countryside. Dozens of passengers chase and capture the murderer, beating him up, after which the police takes him away. The train resumes its trip. The passengers exit at the last stop, including Marta who abandons Staszek.

Voted in a local poll as one of the 13 best films of the first hundred years of Polish cinema, Jerzy Kawalerowicz's "Night Train" is still a step below all this hype, a slightly overrated, but still good achievement. assembled in the form of a road movie set inside a train, where the passengers travel during the night, it is a cozy, competent, fluent film, but a one that is simply not that engaging nor interesting to the fullest. The main ingredient—the conversations between Jerzy and Marta, who have to share the compartment—is only sporadically inspired. One really good dialogue has Jerzy asking Marta, a meteorologist, what her job is, and she ironically replies with: "My job is predicting the future". The other is when Marta is looking in the camera in a close-up, pondering: "Nobody wants to love. Everybody wants to be loved". The drama segment is rather underwhelming (except for Zbigniew Cybulski playing the wild Staszek, Marta's ex lover), and thus the crime subplot revolving around a murderer hiding among the passengers, emerging in the last third of the film, is much more interesting, reminiscent of a variation of "Murder on the Orient Express", except without the detective part. The scene where the murderer pulls the emergency breaks, stops the train, runs into the meadow, while a dozen passengers run after him, one even throwing mud chunks at him, is the highlight of the film, entering a more intense, more focused territory. An assembly of several characters, "Night Train" attempts a kaleidoscope of Polish mentality, but its enjoyment value is today rather limited.

Grade:++

The Experiment

Das Experiment; psychological thriller-drama, Germany, 2001; D: Oliver Hirschbiegel, S: Moritz Bleibtreu, Justus von Dohnányi, Christian Berkel, Oliver Stokowski, Andrea Sawatzki

Taxi driver Tarek applies for a strange add in which 20 people are supposed to play prisoners and guards in a fake prison for two weeks, for the sake of a social experiment led by University Professor Thon and his assistant Jutta. The reward is 4,000 DEM each. Tarek takes on glasses with a secret camera on them for a journalistic report. Once inside, the relaxed mood quickly disappears and is replaced with more and more tension from the people playing the guards, mostly by Berus and Eckert who resort to cruelty to impose their discipline. Tarek befriends fellow prisoner Steinhoff, an Air Force pilot who secretly monitors the experiment for the German military. Exploiting Thon's absence one night, Berus and Eckert order the guards to beat up an inmate, Schütte, who dies from bleeding; place Tarek in a solitary confinement, and kidnap and imprison Jutta. When Tarek and Steinhoff escape and release the prisoners, they end up in a bitter fight with Berus and Eckert, after which the latter dies. The experiment is aborted and the police arrest the guards.

"The Experiment" is a dark and bitter contemplation on how social laws prevent the worst aggressive impulses from emerging among even ordinary people—and how sometimes the border between playing a role and reality can disappear. It is inspired by the famous Stanford prison experiment led by Philip Zimbardo, but the movie unfortunately takes it very loosely—so loosely, in fact, that it seems more like a Hollywood action film exaggerating everything for pure sensationalism and unearned thrills than an intelligent European film. A little bit more of the latter would have been better. The first half is the best since it still has a sense for measure: the introduction of the characters is effective, and it is ironic watching how the guards of this fake prison are actually seemingly benign characters (Eckert is a professional Elvis impersonator; Berus works as an executive for an airline), but the role of guards gives them that illusion of power, authority and dominance over others, a sort of fake sense of significance. Soon they will start abusing the "volunteer prisoners", already revealing their dark side (an inmate says he cannot drink milk because he is lactose intolerant, but Eckert insists that all of them must eat their meal to the end, until their plates are empty, without exception, so Tarek defuses the situation by simply drinking the man's milk himself). The prison guards are not allowed to use violence, so Berus decides to spray them with a fire extinguisher, take the beds from their cells, strip them naked and leave them like that for the night, since, in his own words, "humiliation is control". There are some thought provoking issues touched upon here, such as situational context, the hidden urge for absolute power among some people (hinted at as an allegory of the Nazi dictatorship), empathy, and the limits of following orders even when it is not "worth it", but the second half becomes just a cheap action and fight collection, with highly unconvincing cliches (the Professor is at first absent, and then when the whole situation goes out of hand, he storms in alone, without any assistants to help him end this), which reduces the film's quality.  

Grade:++

Mob Psycho 100 (season 1)

Mob Psycho 100; animated fantasy action comedy series, Japan, 2016; D: Yuzuru Tachikawa, Takefumi Anzai, Katsuya Shigehara, Tomoaki Ota, S: Setsuo Ito, Takahiro Sakurai, Miyu Irino, Yoshitsugu Matsuoka, Akio Otsuka

Shigeo "Mob" Kageyama is a secluded teenager with telekinetic powers, which can be upgraded to explosive levels if his anger levels reach 100% capacity. Mob works for Arataka Reigen, a swindler running a psychic agency which exorcises evil spirits from tunnels and schools. When one such evil spirit is defeated, Dimple, he assumes a form of a green ball and becomes Mob's sidekick. When Mob's brother Ritsu also obtains telekinetic powers, he is abducted by the evil Claw organization, which kidnaps people with special powers with a plan to use them to rule the world. Mob, Teruki (a bully he defeated) and Reigen infiltrate the Claw headquarters, destroy it, and release all the prisoners, including Ritsu. 

Warning: do not give up after watching only the first episode of this anime, because it improves later on. The character designs are too bland, but "Mob Psycho 100" excels in a wacky blend of humor, post-modern style, coming-of-age teenage story, discovering your potentials, and egalitarianism (in the finale of the first season, an evil organization wants to establish a world supremacy based on people with telekinetic powers, but the protagonist, himself having these special powers, rejects it and believes everyone should be treated equal). Several bits are simply creative and bursting with ingenuity. For example, in ep. 2, Reigen is arguing with a high school girl on the phone over whether Mob should join her club, and a stylized split screen shows the two of them shouting, with Reigen’s part of the screen moving towards the right side of the screen and taking more “space” when he is arguing more, and then retreating, whereas the girl’s screen is pushing to the left when she is more energetic in arguing. Ep. 3 has a hilarious plot of Mob being solicited by a random masked woman to join an underground sect led by a man called LOL, who can all make them laugh and thus happy. When Mob decides to leave because he is not interested, the cult leader warns him: “You are missing out on life!”, as Mob simply laconically turns his head and counters: “My dad said that people who’ve never smoked before are missing out on half of their lives. It made me realize that everyone has a different idea of “missing out”. 

The leader then challenges Mob to a bet that he should stay in the cult if one of the members make him laugh—specifically, Mob and a member are instructed to both take a full sip of milk, hold it in their mouths, and then try to tickle a chuckle out of each other: the one who laughs and spills milk from his mouth first, loses. This leads to some highly comical bits when one man makes grimaces by pulling his nose up, but then just instinctively laughs himself—and spits milk on Mob's face. After several such outcomes, Mob is tired of always "winning" and ending up with people spitting out milk on his face. Other ideas and sight gags are also amusing, such as when Mob takes a dumbbell with his telekinetic powers, but when he hands it to his own hand, he drops it to the ground since he is physically too weak of holding it; or when he cannot eat curry because spoons keep "bending" Uri Geller-style, while he holds them. The problem and a big flaw is when the story simply gives up on comedy and suddenly switches to an action and martial arts genre in episodes 7-10, as people with telekinetic powers are fighting, which undergoes a sort of undue "Dragonballization" of sorts, since these fights all start looking the same. Luckily, the final two episodes get the story back on the right track, resuming its comedy tone, mostly thanks to the return of Mob's boss Reigen, who is such a swindler that this leads to some unexpected big laughs. The way Reigen simply dismantles the narcissism of two out of three leaders of the Claw organization by demotivating them in episode 12, is deliciously refreshing; even the dialogue of the third leader with Reigen is a riot ("We are special! We are superior lifeforms to the rest of humanity!" - "I'm sure you have to believe that to even go on. But sadly, society has no interest in you"). "Mob Psycho 100" is an acquired taste—but once you get a hang of it, you get addicted, and wonder why that flavor is so rare to find.

Grade:+++