Office Space

Office Space; satire, USA, 1999; D: Mike Judge, S: Ron Livingston, David Herman, Ajay Naidu, Jennifer Aniston, Gary Cole, Stephen Root, John C. McGinley

Peter has a terribly monotone and stressful job in a software company, and is increasingly anxious for having to work in cubicles. However, one day, a psychiatrist manages to hypnotize him and end his tension. Completely relaxed, Peter does not show up for work for days, and when he openly tells two downsizing consultants that he does not have any motivation for his work, instead of getting fired, he is promoted and his boss punished for not motivating employees. He even takes courage to take a waitress, Joanna, out for a date. Together with two employees who will get fired, Michael and Samir, he coins a software that will extract penny decimals of company's transactions to their account. Luckily, the company ends up in flames and thus they are not caught.

After his thin debut film "Beavis and Butt-Head Do America", Mike Judge surprised with his 2nd film that reversed his cheap humor, the intelligent "Office Space", which is a grand satire on corporatism and the toll of stressful jobs on employees. From the opening - where the hero Peter is waiting in his car in an endless traffic jam, then switches to the right track because the cars are moving there, only to find out that his "new" track has now stopped, while his "old" track started moving as soon as he left it - is a brilliant introduction of the "cursed" little worker who finds endless plight surrounding even the path to his humiliating job, while the movie works and grows thanks to clever observations and quietly hilarious humor originating from the work environment in which people are treated as cattle - the highlight is probably the funniest joke, where consultant Bob informs the boss that one meek employee, Milton, "was fired five years ago, but no one ever told him about it; but through some kind of glitch in the payroll department, he still gets a paycheck". There is something true to this storyline, and one can sense it. One great way of escapism is provided after Peter finally manages to relax after years of stress, and completely turns his behavior upside down in one subplot. The last third of the film is the weakest, since it abandoned the theme of work and went on to an obscure software heist scheme that leads nowhere, thus diminishing the overall effect. Nonethless, despite various omissions, this forerunner to "The Office" is a therapeutic essay on work many can identify with, and a tribute to anyone who ever had a job he/she did not like.

Grade;+++

Ikarie XB-1

Ikarie XB-1; science-fiction, Czechia, 1963; D: Jindrich Polak, S: Zdenek Štepanek, Radovan Lukavsky, František Smolik, Otto Lackovič, Jozef Adamovič

In the future, a crew of about 40 astronauts is travelling in the spaceship Ikarie XB-1 to Sun's nearest solar system, Alpha Centauri, to explore if there is life there. Due to their high speed, it will take two and half years until they get there, but 15 years will have passed on Earth. They encounter a space ship, but it turns out to be from Earth, sent there in the 20th century, while all inhabitants are dead. That ship explodes and kills two crew members. One crew member goes crazy from isolation in space and threatens to sabotage Ikarie XB-1, while one woman is pregnant and gives birth. They are also followed by a strange, unknown dark star. They finally reach Alpha Centauri's planet, and find a city on its surface,

"The Magellanic Cloud" is not among Stanislaw Lem's better SF books, but it is still superior - and far more conclusive - than the movie that was based on it, "Ikarie XB-1", which nonetheless gained cult status for being one of the handful of Czech SF films of the 20th century, thereby showing remarkable audacity. Unfortunately, remarkable audacity aside, the film itself is sadly dated: filmmed in black and white, with noticeably 60s set designs of the spaceship and uniforms, as well as disappointingly bland and one-dimensional characters in which nobody stands out, which makes the whole storyline faceless. Unlike the book, the film does not have a beginning nor an ending - it starts with the crew already travelling inside the spaceship, without showing the "why" and "how" that lead to it, and it ends with one of the worst cop-out, anticlimactic endings that abruptly terminate the story just when it became good - which makes it seems as if half of the narrative is missing, as well as some sort of an conclusion. In one sequence, for instance, after entering the Alpha Centauri system, the spaceship finds a derelict spaceship from Earth (!), with dead people inside it, sent from the 20th century, but there is no explanation as to why or how it got there. Such and other inconsistencies bother, yet one can enjoy bits and parts of it that are good, since such films were rare outside the English speaking cinema world.

Grade;+

Agony

Agoniya; drama, Russia, 1975, D: Elem Klimov, S: Alexei Petrenko, Anatoly Romashin, Velta Line, Alisa Friendlich

Imperialist Russia, 1916. The emperor, Tsar Nicholas II of the Romanov dynasty, is increasingly influenced by charlatan and mystic Grigori Rasputin, which further exacerbates the already disastrous mismanagement of the country, where the poverty and the neverending war in World War I front already alienated the people from the court. Claiming to be a healer and a prophet, Rasputin just uses the Romanovs to stage decadent parties. He even starts influencing Nicholas II in decisions at the front. Finally, he is exiled and killed, which signals the end of the empire.

Elem Klimov's 4th film, "Agony" is a disappointing achievement that has very little of the dazzling style of director's other films, and is arguably his weakest film. It is an overlong, boring and ponderous historical account, a one in which the event portrayed - the bizarre influence of the mystic, healer and all-around fraud Rasputin on the naive people around him, which went all the way to the highest circles, thereby mirroring the theme of how religion can be misused to deceive the masses - is very interesting, but it is shown in a very uninteresting manner. Full of chaotic scenes of decadent parties and carnival at the court, stiff characters and inconsistent narrative, this is an overall a mess of a film, with a few very questionable scenes (one example of animal cruelty, where the actor playing Rasputin throws a living pig and sends it smashing on to a table full of beverage). The only scarce examples of Klimov's more imaginative style are black and white scenes of archive footage combined with the played events, and the use of subtitles to introduce and identify several historical characters. If anything, at least Klimov refused to succumb to Bolshevik propaganda since they are not shown in this - for them - important time before the October revolution. Other than that, even though it was banned and tempered with, this is a mediocre film.

Grade;+

Beavis and Butt-Head Do America

Beavis and Butt-head Do America; animated comedy, USA, 1996; D: Mike Judge, S: Mike Judge, Robert Stack, Demi Moore, Bruce Willis, Cloris Leachman, Richard Linklater

When two small time crooks steal their TV set, Beavis and Butthead crash into a motel apartment because a TV was on, but the man inside, Muddy, mistakes them for two contract killers he hired and sends them in a plane to Las Vegas in order to kill his wife Dallas. However, Beavis and Butthead are so dumb they mistake his contract for a hired sex with her, and once they meet Dallas, she sends them to Washington because she smuggled a dangerous virus in a unit she hid in Beavis' pants. This causes a wild goose chase since FBI agents are looking for the virus. In the end, the agents get the virus and arrest the wrong man, while the two teenagers are decorated as heroes.

This movie adaptation of the cult comedy TV show "Beavis and Butt-head" somehow brings back memories of a legendary quote by Alan Moore who said that "it is not the job of an artist to give the audience what they want, but what they need". Namely, there are some 3-4 good jokes here, but the rest is one long, overstretched story about nothing, about two teenagers who see sexual innuendo in every sentence someone says and who are so dumb that at one point it becomes almost damaging and detrimental by itself. However, just as with "Dumb and Dumber" and many others comedies about dumb protagonists, there is something subconsciously attractive for the masses that made them all hits, probably because by living in civilization and culture somehow makes it interesting to see something really primitive for a change. Still, Mike Judge managed to squeeze a few funny jokes, nonetheless - the most hilarious being the one with the Federal agent who says to another one: "Never end a sentence with a preposition" - whereas there is only one example where Beavis and Butt-head's stupidity was used for an intelligent joke, but it was great: when the two teenagers announce on the Congress speakerphone that they are ready to "score", there is an awkward pause, but then all politicians inside start giggling 'Beavis and Butthead'-style. The only point of interest is spotting a small cameo by Daria Morgendorffer some 50 minutes into the film, whose authors did exactly the opposite and made the far superior spin-off "Daria" about intelligence and humanity, thereby quickly leaving their origins far behind.

Grade;+

God Forgives... I Don't!

Dio perdona... io no!; western, Italy, 1967; D: Giuseppe Colizzi, S: Terence Hill, Bud Spencer, Frank Wolff

The Wild West. After a trunk of gold has been robbed from a train, insurance agent Hutch suspects it might be outlaw Bill St. Antonio. The only problem is, Bill was supposed to be killed in a duel by Cat years ago. After investigating a little bit, they find out Bill is alive since he gave Cat a gun with blank bullets in order to conveniently disappear from many enemies who are now not after him anymore. Butch and Cat find the hideout of Bill's gang and steal their stolen gold, burying it. However, the gang finds and captures them, and Bill tortures them to find out where they hid his gold. Butch and Cat manage to escape, though, and in a renewed duel, Cat manages to kill Bill.

"God Forgives... I Don't!" stayed remembered for establishing the very first teaming up of legendary Italian comic duo—Bud Spencer and Terence Hill—except that it was in a serious story, which caused a negative backlash from their fans who had to wait all until their 4th collaboration, "They Call Me Trinity", to get their run for the money and see them interact in a comedy. However, leaving expectations of the masses aside, "God Forgives" is a surprisingly good film on its own terms, and if watched with an open mind, it actually shows Hill and Spencer in a quality, serious, but genuine and natural performances. The opening sequence, with a train full of dead passengers stopping by crashing onto the station, is effective and expressionistic, whereas the situation where Cat (Hill) and the bad guy Bill are preparing for a pistol duel while the cabin around them is slowly burning, causes double suspense since there is huge pressure on them to draw as soon as possible before the fire collapses on them. Unfortunately, those two sequences outshine anything else in the film, which is good, but rarely matches them later on. Still, director Giuseppe Colizzi has a fine sixth sense for mood and stylistic images, which makes this one of the better post-Leone Italian westerns, with bits and pieces of brutality and violence with a measure, whereas his two actors, Hill and Spencer, would appear in his unofficial 'western trilogy' which continued with "Ace High" and "Boot Hill".

Grade;++

The Cabin in the Woods

The Cabin in the Woods; horror/ satire/ grotesque, USA, 2012; D: Drew Goddard, S: Kristen Connolly, Franz Kranz, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Bradley Whitford, Richard Jenkins, Sigourney Weaver

Five students - Dana, Holden, Marty, Curt and Jules - drive off to spend a relaxing weekend in a cabin in the woods. During night, they find a basement underneath it and enter it, where they find a diary of a woman who was abused by her family a century ago. By reading out her Latin lines, they summon a bunch of zombies who attack the cabin. Marty, Curt and Jules are seemingly killed, while the rest find they cannot escape because a force field barrier is blocking their way out. When Holden is killed, Dana and the surviving Marty find a shaft that leads them to a TV studio beneath, which recorded and orchestrated all the killings. They meet the two main technicians there, Gary and Steve, and find out the ritual murders are performed to appease the sleeping demon gods beneath. Marty and Dana survive, but they thus trigger the demon gods to awake and attack humanity.

"The Truman Show" meets "Evil Dead" - Drew Goddard's feature length debut film, "The Cabin in the Woods" caused quite a stir and managed to reach cult status since some consider it among the better horror films of the 21st century. The first part of the story plays with the horror cliches in an inventive way, twisting them to add something new to their worn out repertoire or giving them an altogether ironic touch - for instance, while alone in the cabin at night, Dana chooses "dare" while playing the "truth or dare?" game. But just then, the door of the basement opens all by itself, leading to a dark place underneath. The five students want to send someone down there to explore it, and one of them decides to send precisely Dana because she chose "dare". The framing story of a TV reality show that is being used to control the events in the cabin and record them, is interesting and causes the viewers to guess the whole time what is going on, and gives the story a puzzle like structure, whereas the two main technicians in the studio, Gary and Steve (Whitford and Jenkins), are brilliant characters who cannot resist but to give a few cynical remarks at the whole situation, especially in the hilarious scene where one actor gives a religiously fundamnetalist rant over the phone, without knowing he is on speakerphone. The events manage to constitute a quality storyline, all until the disappointing finale - when such a clever concept was set up, such a lackluster resolution, where ideas and demons are crammed without any criteria or measure, almost as pure trash, is counterproductive and seems as if it was pulled out from someone's you know what. This would not have been so crucial had the story not placed all the emphasis on the finale that explains everything what was going on until it.

Grade;++

White Nights

Le Notti Bianche; drama, Italy, 1957; D: Luchino Visconti, S: Marcello Mastroianni, Maria Schell, Jean Marais, Marcella Rovena

Mario is a young man who has a poorly paid job and wonders through city's streets at night to forget his loneliness. One night, he meets a girl at a bridge, Natalia, and falls in love with her. When they meet the second night, she avoids him, though, and then explains that she is awaiting for a man whom she fell in love with a year ago: the man rented a room at her place but disappeared without an explanation, except that he said he will wait for her exactly a year later at the bridge. The third night, Mario takes Natalia out for a dance and she agrees to marry him, thinking her man left her. However, just as Mario was overwhelmed with joy, Natalia leaves him when her man shows up at the bridge.

Luchino Visconti's "White Nights" is a well made film, yet its overstretched impression reveals that it is based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's eponymous short story and that it would have been better as a short film: while the transition to Natalia's home a year ago is effective, as a flashback it drags on for too long, whereas while the long dance sequence is deliciously comical, even it is overlong. The virtues of the film are various contemplations about loneliness and one scene near the end, in particular, is the essence that carries and justifies the whole film: when Natalia agrees to marry him, it starts to snow and Mario has his Annus mirabilis summed up in five minutes - for the first time in the entire film, he is overwhelmed with joy and it is clear the only thing missing in his life was just love when he shouts: "I thought this city was bleak and depressive. But all this time it was me! Now it seems bright and full of sparkle." This retroactively gives the events weight and emotional power, which comes to full expression in the end. The black and white cinematography is also remarkably crisp and crystal clear, giving dark streets at night a fine mood. While the storyline is kind of contrived and melodramatic at times - it is never clear why Natalia fell for the mystery man in the first place, nor why she would be waiting for him for a whole year when he did not provide any reason for his absence - the two main actors manage to minimize the flaws and strengthen the framework: Marcello Mastroianni is great and charismatic, though a little bit too attractive to convey a lonely man, whereas Maria Schell allegedly memorized all her lines phonetically since she did not speak Italian. Her performance is great, though he character is slightly indecisive.

Grade;++

Adventures of a Dentist

Pokhozhdyeniya zubnovo vracha; satire, Russia, 1965; D: Elem Klimov, S: Andrey Myagkov, Vera Vasilyeva, Alisa Freindlich

A young dentist, Chesnokov, moves to a small town and finds out he has a special talent: he can extract bad teeth from patients without pain, in only two seconds. He quickly rises to prominence, but other dentists see his talent as a threat to their own careers and thus arrange a commission to inspect him. During that visit, Chesnokov refuses to pull out a bad tooth from Masha because it is complicated, thus sending her to a specialized clinic. However, because of that delay, Masha misses her wedding by a day, and thus her engagement is ruined. Plagued by rumors spread by jealous dentists, Chesnokov loses his talent and thus quits the clinic in order to become a lecturer at a dentist university. When the students have to pull out a tooth in practise, his talent returns, and a girl student discovers she has the same talent as well.

Elem Klimov's 2nd feature length film, "Adventures of a Dentist" is a bitter satire about how a special talent in certain field can become a burden to an individual who is surrounded by crushing jealousy in a vain society: the synechdoche storyline about a dentist who has a talent of extracting teeth without pain mirrors not only the director's own trauma for having great talent in film making than other directors, or the Totalitarian Soviet society, but the global behavior as a whole. Faced with a town where each of his mistakes is exacerbated while all of his positive achievements are belittled, the hero thus quits his clinic and loses his talent. Klimov has a few moments where his stylistic side is once again demonstrated, mostly while breaking the 4th wall (a man, the narrator, sits at the dentist's chair and looks into the camera, saying: "I was Chesnokov's second patient!"; while Chesnokov and a girl are walking on the street, subtitles show up in the background that say how he accidentally ruined Masha's marriage when he sent her to a clinic on her wedding day; while walking in the middle of the road, Chesnokov and a girl embrace each other, while all the passerbys on the sidewalk, left and right, stop to look at them. And when he two stop hugging and continue walking, the passerbys continue walking as well), yet the movie somehow seems too schematic, stiff and its narrative underdeveloped, since it is not always clear why a certain character reacts the way he does, whereas the ending seems abrupt and not elaborated enough, which somewhat undermines the premise from coming to full expression.

Grade;++

We Bought a Zoo

We Bought a Zoo; comedy, USA, 2011; D: Cameron Crowe, S: Matt Damon, Colin Ford, Maggie Elizabeth Jones, Scarlett Johansson, Elle Fanning, Thomas Haden Church

After his wife died, Benjamin Mee decides to quit his job and resettle with his two kids, the 14-year old Dylan and 7-year old Rosie. They browse for numerous houses, until they find the right one - the only catch is, it comes with a Zoo. Benjamin thus accepts the challenge and moves in with his kids: he decides to use the remaining Zoo keepers, including Kelly and Peter, to restructure the enclosures and prepare the animals for the July opening, which would repay the high costs of the Zoo. In the end, Benjamin manages to open the Zoo in time and pass the inspection, while the visitors make the thing profitable.

In the 90s, Cameron Crowe established himself as the modern B. Wilder - except that his protagonists were young adults - when he made films that were both comically and emotionally satisfying. "We Bought a Zoo" is a good film, but, alas, just as it was the case with "Elizabethtown", it is not quite clear why such a thin story warranted the attention of such a high profile author in the first place. The first 30 minutes are excellent and gather momentum, because the interaction between Benjamin and his kids manages to generate emotional engagement and wit (Benjamin reacting to Dylan's repeated use of the word 'whatever' with: "You know what? 'Whatever' is the laziest word of the 20th century! I've had it with whatever! I don't wanna hear it again in this century, ever again. 'Whatever' is over!"), whereas at least one dialogue by Duncan ("Human interaction is a good thing. take it from a guy who spent six months on a commercial fishing boat in Bali trying to find himself... You know what I found? I miss people.") is a perfect Cameron Crowe line. However, when the main plot sets in, some 30 minutes into the film, instead of taking off, the movie starts moving a gear slower until the end. The adventures of protagonists taking care of animals are all right, yet never have that full swing: it seems as if Crowe wanted to take more care about his human characters, but lost them along the way in the flora and fauna of the Zoo. Overall, it is a good film, yet one simply wonders how Scarlett Johansson and Matt Damon would have interacted had they received the true Crowe treatment as Dorothy and Jerry in "Jerry Maguire" or as Janet and Cliff in "Singles".

Grade;++

Alien 3

Alien 3; science-fiction horror, USA, 1992; D: David Fincher, S: Sigourney Weaver, Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance, Brian Glover, Ralph Brown, Lance Henriksen

Just when Ripley and her crew managed to escape from the aliens, one of those creatures causes a malfunction on board and crashes their spaceship on a planet penal colony. Only Ripley survives, and finds out the planet is inhabited only by men, mostly criminals serving their sentence. However, one alien managed to survive still, and starts killing the inmates one by one in the dark base. With the help of Clemens, they manage to kill the alien by luring him in the steel mill of some sorts. When Ripley finds out she has one alien embryo inside her and that the military wants to use it as a biological weapon, she commits suicide by jumping into the steel mill as well.

Out of all the films in the original "Alien" quadrilogy, "Alien 3" offers the least: it is a clear testimony that perfect cinematography, editing, set design and high production values cannot brink a movie when its essence - the story - is simply no good. Many critics correctly pointed out that the concept of having every character shave their head was pointless and counterproductive, since we have here dozens upon dozens of bald characters who are all hard to distinguish; the setting on some sort of a gulag-planet was stupid and without any point whereas Sigourney Weaver's character Ripley turned out disappointingly pale compared to the previous film, Cameron's "Aliens", where she had a strong feminist charisma. Not only that, but it is unclear why the screenwriters simply took Cameron's previous story and then had to trash it by killing off all the surviving characters from the 2nd film, including the 12-year old girl Newt, who could have been used in the storyline. Finally, not much is going on in the story, anyway, and the endless monotone dialogues contribute to nothing, at least until the finale. David Fincher hereby delivers his feature length debut film, but rarely rises to the occasion or offers sophisticated build up of suspense from his future films, with the couple of exceptions - for instance, the scene where the doctor gives Ripley a needle while the alien shows up behind the curtain, is effective, whereas the finale, where the inmates are trying to lure the alien through the long corridors, has moments of delicious chills since it shows alien's POV through a fish eye lens while he is running at high speed on the ceiling, chasing them. Fincher would go on to direct the excellent thriller "Seven" three years later, while the "Alien" franchise was given one last shot of freshness in "Alien Resurrection" when the talented Jeunet-Caro team twisted it further still by giving it the unexpected - humor.

Grade;+