thomas4cinema

The German FAZ Newspaper discusses the future of US Late Night tv. And who is the only hope in all this streamlined sadness? My year-long favourite Craig Ferguson! TutsiFrutsi! Zukunft von Amerikas Late-Night: Wer macht die Nacht zum Tage? – Fernsehen – Feuilleton – FAZ.NET.

Why, you wonder? Because the friends at Filmspotting are in the middle of their Billy-Wilder marathon, and I really had not seen those films in a long time (some actually never before). “The Apartment” I have seen, but literally decades ago, and what a treat this is. Roger Ebert correctly asserts that the quality of this film has nothing to do with context of the time. It is just outstandingly written, directed and played. It is also a bit sad to see what a great actress Shirley McLane was before she went bonkers. Jack Lemmon… what can be said that has not been said about his performance. Not many actors get such a chance for a lifetime performance, and the apocryphal story a bout the directors needing to stop him acting in order to get the best out of him may only be too true, because he balances on the thin line between charging and understatement, and he does never fall off (my favourite: when he keeps dealing the cards while the girl lies in bed, she wants to talk but clearly is too weak, he does not want to get involved now, not now… so he keeps dealing and counting). And the nice neighbour Dreyfus and the sad barfly at Christmas night, and all those great lines of dialogue about the broken mirror and “shut up and deal”… what a masterful way of cornering poor CC Baxter and then letting him out in the last minute.

Ebert Review

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053604/

While [rec] created a very nice original idea (or let’s say: original within the clear-cut confines of the zombie- or crazie-genre), the second part varies this theme with traditional elements, or shall we call it: superimposes the topics of “Exorcist” and “Omen”, some say “Da Vinci Code” (actually, the blood testing is more or less inspired by “John Carpenter’s The Thing”, but maybe all blood-testing-for-vicious-things is. And “species” and and and… Some clever ideas prevent the film from going stale after a few segments: the perspective changes with the cameras available, and through tricks like defects and empty batteries, the film gets occasional changes of perspective without necessarily being guilty of neglecting an available perspective (with one exception, and that is the original camera from the first part, which we will meet again at a stage a bit too late to help anybody). The film is outright creepy: the subjective camera does that, the ferociously attacking infected tenants (and guests) of the house, and the fact that we already know that there is something wildly more dangerous and terrifying than just rabid zombie-thingies lurking in the penthouse. And through a nice twist of narration, we are forced to live through this nightmare in a mostly ill-lit setting (because sometimes, there’s more to be seen in the dark …). It would actually be much better to watch this in a movie theatre with the big screen and the lights out and a nice hand to grab your shoulder in terror… but even the home cinema watching was creepy enough. Interesting that through some complete coincidence, I watched that briefly after Haneke’s Hidden / Cache, not realising until now that both have the same theme: the importance of perspective and point-of-view, and differ in the important question of who’s in charge, the watcher or the watched.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1245112/

Most stunning questions is how they got all those actors: Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes? Sam Worthington is still in a category of acting where B movies of this sort do not do much damage, but he may want to be alert of Vin Diesel’s career and stay alert for his next choices.

While some of the effects are quite nice (the flight chases with Hades’ winged creatures was excellent kinetics, watch how some of the monsters get thrown off balance when over-pacing… nice!) and some of the ideas cute (riding the scorpions, or those  jinns, that reminded me of the desert creatures from Return of the Jedi, I think…), at the end of the day, the questions remains: why, oh why??? The original story-telling was better, the character motivation more convincing (why change the role of Calibos when you do not have a need to? Now I have no idea what his role is, why he does what he does. ). The only crappy special effect in the old movie was Poseidon opening the gate of the Kraken’s lair – is that reason enough to remove Poseidon altogether and make the Kraken a creature of Hades? No really: Pegasus was more noble, the witches more creepy, Calibos more human and hence more wicked in the original movie – and in particular: Medusa was not a pretty-girl with a cute tail, she was a monster, and now look at her…   a very strange case of remaking a film because of the new technology available, and then falling behind the old film in almost all aspects …

Oh yes, and there were no titans involved in the clash.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0800320/

Looks a bit like a home video, grainy and a bit shaky camera. But makes it feel very natural in its atmosphere, and all the more terrifying when things go wrong.
The story (as many “based on real events” stories) suffers a bit from predictability, but then again, once they are all in the water, the feeling of paralysis and helplessness comes across nicely. Why do they not just swim towards the coast? I don’t know, they may have their reasosn, I would have done something, I guess. Don’t blame the sharks!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0374102/