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He ovat paenneet (2014)
Some promise and a load of utter bull
This movie is pretty promising at the start. For a Finnish movie, it uses a rather original cinematography and storytelling. Two teenagers get to know each other and decide to run away from the system that wants to oppress them both. OK, nothing very original, but a fair start. You even get hints of subtle symbolism.
...and then it hits you. The symbolism is anything but subtle. It's the only purpose of the movie. Who cares about telling a story, who cares about character development, who cares about anything at all but symbols after symbols after symbols, non stop for the entire length of the movie?
Don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with full blown symbolism if you know how to do it, if you know how to actually tickle the viewer's brain with something he or she can at some level understand, but then again, not quite. David Lynch is the master of this school, his movies make you think what actually happened, and even if you come to a conclusion, it's never THE conclusion.
Well, not here. There is nothing to interpret in the symbolism. It's so painfully obvious what the director wants to say that you feel like yelling at the screen for him to just tell a straight story without all this shallow symbolism. Want an example? Masked gunmen lock the protagonists in cages, urinate on them and perform all sorts of other oppressive and violent acts on their helpless victims. Gee, I wonder what that means. Maybe something with faceless society using violence to entrap the free spirits and force them to its will or something?
And therein lies the problem. This movie is a marathon of symbols you don't need to even try to interpret, because they're basically self explanatory, making them in effect not symbols, but Artsy Bullshit. And that does not make a good movie. 3/10 for decent effort though.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)
Peter Jackson is a genius...
...at milking money out of gullible fans of J.R.R. Tolkien's work, myself included. And that's about it. This final part of The Hobbit "trilogy" shows no sign of him having any storytelling talent left. What little redeeming qualities this movie has, I'll go through in the end. Now, a long list of faults and failures:
- Smaug. He was the main villain in the book. Now we get five minutes of him in the beginning. Unforgivable.
- The way Bard kills Smaug. Being an archer myself, this scene made me cringe in physical pain. What in the world were you thinking, Jackson? Why didn't you just give him a ballista or at least a very large crossbow? If you know anything about archery at all, you know that you would never be able to shoot an arrow like that with a broken bow at all, let alone that distance at that speed and so accurately.
- Alfrid. OK, we get it, he's a selfish, greedy, egocentric, cowardly vermin. You don't need to rub it in at every turn. It's obvious that Alfrid was supposed to be some sort of Gríma Wormtongue part two, but whereas Gríma had a motivation to be "evil", Alfrid just is all out evil and no good with no humane features whatsoever. Unforgivable.
- Dwarf - Elf love story. Against the lore, no depth, no plausible reason for the characters to be in love, no chemistry between the two actors, no purpose in the greater story. Why?
- Bilbo's role in the movie. At times I forgot he even existed, and he is supposed to be the main character.
- The giant worms. So, you have these massive worms that can eat their way straight through a mountain and you use them to...drill a few tunnels for the orcs to walk? Why not have them surface directly below the enemy formation to send them into disarray? Why not send them to weaken the enemy fortifications and bring them down?
- Dáin riding a pig. Yes, a mighty dwarven king is riding a pig in this movie.
- The battle of the five armies begins with the dwarfs forming a solid shield wall across the valley floor. The orcs have no missile troops to mention, whereas the elves, now protected by the dwarven shield wall, have rank upon rank of deadly archers, and what do the elves do? Whittle the enemy down with their arrows, as any sensible commander would have them do in such a situation? No. They ninja jump over the dwarfs into close combat with the orcs, throwing the major tactical advantage of the shield wall straight out of the window. It's as if Jackson paid the medieval warfare experts that he used in LOTR trilogy to not take part in the making of this "trilogy".
- Where in Tolkien's lore does it state that dwarfs ride goats? I know that it happens in World of Warcraft, but Middle Earth? And where did the goats suddenly come from?
- Wait. Azog's supposed plan was to lure Thorin, Fili, Kili and Dwalin into a trap, which they would have been unable to walk into without the goats, so maybe Azog sent them to the dwarfs. Yeah, it suddenly makes sense. Or not.
- Bard riding a wagon into a troll, Trolls used as battering rams, Legolas riding a bat, Legolas using his sword as a joystick to crash a troll into a tower, the ensuing duel on top of that crumbling tower, Azog's choice of weapon (a huge slab of stone on a long chain) for a duel on a frozen lake, go ahead and have your pick for the silliest moment of the movie from these.
- The Eagles. Yeah, I know the Eagles were originally used in The Hobbit. Yeah, I know they were supposed to be present in the battle. Then why for the love of all the gods of all possible pantheons do they have the smallest role of any six Tolkien movies that Jackson made in this particular one? We get about 15 seconds of them. And Beorn? Five seconds. I'm not kidding you. Five seconds.
- Thranduil tells Legolas to go and search for Aragorn. What? Why? They don't know each other when they first meet in LOTR trilogy, and at the time of Battle of the Five Armies Aragorn is in fact a 10 year old boy being raised and guarded in Rivendell, not a ranger known as Strider, so what the hell Jackson?
- No closure whatsoever. Seriously. We're not told that Dáin became the King under the Mountain, we're not told that the lake people will begin to rebuild Dale, we're not told what happens to the gold, we're not told what happens to the remaining dwarfs, we're not shown the funeral of Thorin, Fili and Kili, NOTHING. The movie just ends without answering the usual questions raised by a trilogy of movies.
The only good thing about this movie was the cast. Richard Armitage and Martin Freeman were both brilliant and others did a fine job as well, but with material and directing so weak, they simply can't do much to prevent the movie being a piece of turd. 3/10, and all the points go to the actors and their work.
Täällä Pohjantähden alla (2009)
Passable
"Under the North Star" by Väinö Linna is one of the shining classics of Finnish literature. Up until 2009, the only cinematic interpretation of the masterpiece was the dismal attempt of Edvin Laine, which just leaves the viewer wondering what might be happening on the screen and why, if they have not read the book.
You must admit however, that movie makers are facing a near impossible task translating this book onto the big screen. There's 1000 pages of words that knit together the life, death, strife and joy of an entire Finnish rural parish from a time span of 60 years, with great emphasis on the social issues that slowly tore the Finnish society in two hostile factions, the brief but brutal civil war those factions fought immediately after independence was secured and the painfully slow recovery from it. Just how do you squeeze that into any comfortable number of hours without compromising the story? Well, you don't, as we see in this movie. Director Timo Koivusalo really does the best he can, but with so much golden source material, he's really in trouble because he tries to fit it all in. He does a decent job telling the story of the Koskela family of tenant farmers, the very central characters of the story. However, many of the minor characters that are almost equally as important, and so masterfully described in the book are mere caricatures here. The tensions that eventually erupt violently in the parish and the entire country after slowly building up for decades are quite simply present from the beginning.
With more than a three hours runtime, the movie still feels like it's sprinting through the plot points to get them all covered. It's more illustration than interpretation. Regardless, it's still the best cinematic version we have of the book that was written 50 years ago and still counts among the best that were ever written in Finnish. To do justice to this film, you might say that it's not painful to watch, but not very good either. If you only have three hours to spare, watch it. If you have more and want some magic, read the book.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)
Feels thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.
The Hobbit is a simple and straightforward children's book about finding a dragon, killing it and going back home. How can you possibly mess that up when you start making a film adaptation with abundant resources? Well, let me tell you how they managed.
Poor J.R.R. Tolkien, he's probably spinning wildly in his grave right now. The man that you could with justification call an absolute perfectionist when it comes to the presentation of his work would have never approved of this silly bore fest. Honestly, during some of the fight scenes I was expecting Graham Chapman as Colonel to come on to the screen and tell us exactly how silly it was that we just saw. "An Unexpected Journey" was promising enough to assume that the trilogy would probably not be a complete flop after all, but "Desolation of Smaug" is where everything goes wrong. There's little left to redeem in the end.
OK, the bottom of the barrel first, fight scenes. In Lord of the Rings trilogy fight scenes passed two critical tests: they were (at least if you exclude Legolas) somewhat realistic, and they served a purpose from the viewpoint of the story. Here, we have none of that. Legolas is back with sillier stunts than ever but that's not all. This time, EVERYONE is doing silly stunts, except the orcs of course, who are there solely to get hit, usually in the groin by an axe that has just passed through several pairs of hands of dwarfs that are going down rapids in bouncing, shaky barrels that somehow refuse to sink despite taking in water all the time. Another thing: whenever a central character is threatened in any way, you'll soon learn to ask yourself two questions: which part of the baddies' body is the arrow going to pierce, and who will shoot it?
Need I even talk about the absurd love story between one of the dwarfs and the elven warrior played by Evangeline Lily? It's probably enough if I say it's one of the most forced and implausible love stories ever put on screen. Besides from this romance that kick starts immediately without a viable reason, everything in this movie is so drawn out and slow that Bilbo's quote from Lord of the Rings fits perfectly. You wait and wait for something meaningful to happen, and when it finally does. It. Goes. On. For. Ages. There are good things as well, most notably Martin Freeman does good job as Bilbo and Benedict Cumberbatch is phenomenal as the voice of Smaug. Unfortunately, with a script like this even talented actors can only do so much.
The script. Oh god, the script. I refuse to talk about it. If watching the movie was this painful, how awful must it have been to actually write something so boring? All in all, this movie is bad. Really, really bad. It's not because the crew and cast don't know what they're doing, it's because they're doing too much of everything just to squeeze out as much money as possible from source material that would've been enough for one feature film and no more. Also, the spirit of the source material is forgotten. This is no kids' movie, this is a movie that tries its earnest to be Lord of the Rings without ever having a chance to achieve that goal.
A friendly word of advice to you Peter Jackson: since you clearly wanted to make a movie trilogy that was like LotR, start filming Silmarillion next. There's enough gritty source material for ten movies for you there, and it's all action if you so wish. Drop the silliness you have brought in in The Hobbit though.
Silmäterä (2013)
Not bad enough to be so bad it's actually good.
I would really like to give this movie a good score, since it is about an important subject and it does have its strong moments. Problem is, those strong moments are drowned in a flood of horrible loose ends.
If the movie is about a mother who is trying to conceal the identity of her daughter's father from both the daughter and the father, the viewer should really not be left wondering first and foremost why we saw so very little of the father and were really not told about his motives. Instead, we are told and shown that the uncle of the child runs a pizzeria that has its window broken by someone for some reason, and there's also an attempted lesbian seduction in the movie that comes out of nowhere. The movie is full of irritating stuff like this. Something happens and the viewer has no idea why. None of it has anything to do with the main storyline, leads to nothing and is never explained. Dismal storytelling.
The other thing that really irked me was that the acting was beyond bad. I suppose that the mother was supposed to be going crazy. Too bad then that the leading actress failed to deliver any notion of anything like that happening. Sure, she does things that indicate to her being out of her mind, but it doesn't look or feel like she really is, and since we don't see much of the other characters than the mother, this really makes a bad movie even worse.
All in all, this movie was by far the worst movie I've ever paid to see. That really sums it all up.
The Interpreter (2005)
Potential goes crashing through the plot holes
This might have been a very good movie. The setting and the idea are good, there is a pair of quality actors in leading roles, and the director is an established artist as well. Still in the end all you're left with is a sour taste in your mouth for all the lost potential.
Both Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn do a great job here, very solid performances. Sydney Pollack does a good job keeping the strings attached, and up until the last 30 minutes of the movie everything looks very good save a few minor complaints. Then comes one of the largest plot holes I've seen in a movie of such quality up until then.
Are you honestly telling me that if you're supposed to protect the life of a foreign head of state in the UN headquarters, and a person goes missing who both has a history of armed resistance against said head of state and bears a very strong personal grudge against him, AND possesses a key card with substantial clearance within the HQ, you aren't going to do as much as deactivate the key card on the double? Also, even if you don't deactivate the key card, you don't check if it's been used or not either when you do a security check of the building? And after this goofing around you manage to make yet another mistake, and leave the head of state alone and unguarded in a "safe room" that is apparently easily accessed by any interpreter and hasn't been double checked either for whether it's actually empty or not.
Sorry, but I just won't take this. Such a string of amateurish mistakes might occur on a local police level maybe, if the worst goof-balls of the station happened to be on shift at the same time, but a secret service officer trained and dedicated for protecting high profile targets simply would not make them. The plot hole is big enough for several movies to slip through at the same time, and it completely ruins the entire film. That is a shame, because the makings for something much better were there.
Der Untergang (2004)
A stunning study of megalomania
Having seen this movie a few times, it still sends shivers down my spine every time I merely think about it. It was criticized heavily for portraying Hitler as "too humane" before and after it was released, but people who say things like this are missing the point. Bruno Ganz's masterful interpretation of the most demonized human being ever is exactly the greatest strength of this movie.
Hitler may have been a megalomaniac, despicable dictator whose hands are stained by the blood of millions, but he wasn't a demon. He was a human being, and thanks to Ganz we now have the possibility to see that human being for ourselves and be touched in a way that no amount of text and numbers on the pages of a history book can ever touch us. You can easily believe that you're looking at the man who was the driving force behind mankind's most destructive conflict ever. No other cinematic portrayal of Adolf Hitler is anywhere near to Ganz's in terms of realism and quality. Truly, this is one of the best performances ever put on film.
And that is just the beginning. Everything is exactly where it should be in this movie. The desperate atmosphere of the "throne room" of a crumbling empire is astoundingly presented to the viewer, whose only option is to devour it with one's eyes and ears and be sucked in to the thick of it.
You feel the artillery shells exploding as the Red Army closes in. You feel the devotion of a maddened mother who murders her children because she thinks life without Führer is not worth living for anyone. You feel the desperation of an SS doctor who still has a shred of humanity in him despite all the horrors of the war he has witnessed, as the Nazis blame the innocent civilians of Berlin of their own failures and take their revenge on them. You feel the growing insanity of everyone as their entire world rapidly spirals towards its inevitable and complete doom. And yes, you even end up feeling pity and sympathy towards the devastated and trembling shell of a man, Hitler, even though you know he only has himself to blame for his downfall and that of millions of others.
There is nothing to be taken out from this movie, and nothing to be added. It's as close to cinematic perfection as mere men and women can get, and will hold you in its grips for a very long time.
The Wicker Man (2006)
Quite possibly the worst remake ever
It was my intention to review this title as an independent film and avoid mentioning the original. It's impossible, because much of the mental and physical pain this movie causes somehow traces back to the fact that it's supposed to be a "remake".
Remakes are usually not a very good idea in general. You really need to have a new perspective on the story to justify a remake. If you bring something new to the table while holding true to the original version, then you've succeeded, whether or not the quality of your work compares to the original.
The world and story of the original Wicker Man were so well thought of that virtually no logical inconsistencies remain in the movie. The world view and the way of thinking of a heathen culture and their collision with the Christian values is plausibly depicted from the beginning to the end, and in the end no questions remain. All the characters and their motives are treated with equal consideration and respect. The end result is as much a study on religion in general as it is a movie. There are several perspectives to choose from, and whichever you choose, you can still relate to the movie and agree that it's a fine piece of work.
To bring something new to that is a gigantic task and should only be attempted after a very critical evaluation of the idea you have for the remake. But here, there is no perspective whatsoever. There's just a horrible mishmash of poorly executed direct loans from the original, and erratic changes for whatever god awful reason. Honestly, I don't have a clue what they were thinking. It's like they threw away the consideration, consistency and plausibility of the original, made an 8-year old rewrite the script and brought in Nicholas Cage to punch (and kick) women in the face.
Now, I wholeheartedly agree that violence towards women can be an element in a film, but just like any other form of violence, it needs to make sense from the viewpoint of the story. The character doing it needs to have a reason for behaving violently, and we the viewers need to know what that reason is. Nicholas Cage delivers the punches, but he doesn't deliver the reasons for them, or any other sort of emotion for that matter. When his character finds out that he is in fact a father and his daughter is in grave danger, he reacts as if someone just told him that the price of a beer just went up by 5 cents in the bar around the corner. Tommy Wiseau's performance in "The Room" is more vivid and plausible. I'm 100% serious about this.
Everything that's remotely good about this sorry excuse of a "remake" comes straight from the original, and even that means individual lines of dialogue and not much more. Every single change that has been made is disastrous or worse. The soul and spirit of the original movie has been brutalized, and they still dare call this a remake.
If I had never ever even heard that the original existed, I might, just might have given this 2/10, because then I would've been fooled into thinking that they had a pretty original idea that they just miserably failed to execute. The acting is horrible, the directing is horrible, the production is horrible, everything about this movie is horrible and appalling and will haunt me to my grave and beyond. Avoid like the plague.