J*A*S*M

A good conversational thriller with an unravelling that you won’t see coming. Though, I think it has too many twists for my taste. And they come so fast one after the other that you don’t have time to figure out which of the many valid interpretations of the events make sense or not, let alone try to come up with your own.

Imagine this: you spot a new film with decent ratings in IMDB, you don’t know, nor you want to find out anything about it; you want a surprise… and what you get is a story about two abducted Mormon missionaries where basically nothing important happens (Chomsky would appreciate the Eastern European dissidents, lol!), plus a plethora of bollocks about Jesus. It’s irritating.

Well, fuck me. Forty minutes of nothing. A minute of a sock on a tree. Then twenty minutes (!) of a static (!!) scene in a tent that only in its last part (!!!) gets interesting a little (!!!!). That’s followed by ten minutes of going around in circles in the woods, something that hasn’t been cool since The Blair Witch Project in the nineties. Then the shrubs shake. Five minutes of the terrified faces of the protagonists hiding in another shrub at night. And all ends with a minute of the camera being dragged on the ground. The critics on Rotten Tomatoes (currently at 96%) had to be paid, otherwise I don’t understand.

Very well executed concept known from Groundhog Day, Source Code and probably every sci-fi series ever made. At the beginning, the hero is introduced without any heroic attributes and the pandemonium of war that follows during the landing in Normandy sets the bar very high. And it holds there damn long. Edge of Tomorrow only stumbles a little by the end, where the thus far relatively reaistic battles (to the extent than a battle between people in exoskeletons and giant tentacled aliens can be described as “realistic”) abandon the realism and now they are falling from huge heights without any injuries and the entire final fight goes too smoothly, especially considering how important it is and how it goes straight down to business. That said, it’s an excellent action sci-fi blockbuster of the kind that has been missing in cinemas for a long time. The action is spectacular, Cruise and Blunt have good chemistry and the script also has a couple of nice moments.

I admit that there are some shortcomings when it comes to the profiling of the characters and their interactions, where the reasons someone is doing what they are doing are not always convincingly explained. However, the film manages to be sufficiently entertaining, tense and riveting that I didn’t start thinking about those issues until I left the theatre. In the cinema it was excellent, uninterrupted fun. In short, a very pleasant time spent with old (and new) friends. I liked Evan Peters as Quicksilver, there could have been more of him, his scenes are interesting and fun. Overall, I had more fun than with the (IMHO) overrated First Class.

A group of eyeballs crawling on a road are run over by a car. That’s not the beginning of some absurd anecdote, but the first scene of this (well, absurd) Japanese horror movie, which makes clear to everyone that this won’t be a very normal experience. It’s a strange mix of extremely effective and extremely weird scenes (for instance, the one with the fake hand in the rubbish, I have absolutely no idea what that one was supposed to be about), but together they create a remarkably disturbing and astonishing whole that I didn’t quite understand, but I still had a lo of fun. It truly chilled me a couple of times and some of the sequences, like “blackout” after the 40th minute, scared the living shit out of me. Even though I’m not a big fan of this bizarre stuff from Asia, this one deserves thumbs up.

A revelation. In a time when most viewers rate the quality of a horror film on the basis of the number and the effectiveness of the jump-scares, this weirdly told, character-centred spooky story won’t have it easy, but I couldn’t be more satisfied. It’s a about a mirror hiding an evil that gets into the heads of its owners and drives them insane, but in two timelines that Flanagan tells simultaneously and that also overlap in different ways. If I had to choose one word that would best describe Oculus, it would be “oppressive”. The characters are likeable, you really wish them a happy ending, but the evil within in the mirror is the best part. The viewer simply cannot escape the anxiety and despair. Rather than Insidious, The Conjuring and other modern horror flicks, Oculus is closer to Kubrick’s The Shining in its slow but thorough build up of a bleak atmosphere. The performances are superb without exception and the technical aspect is perfect. If you prefer unsettling slow-burns over scary attractions, don’t hesitate it for a minute. Absentia wasn’t a fluke, I’m looking forward to what’s coming next. Oculus is a successfully realised opportunity to get into the horror major leagues.

It’s a pity they screwed up the third act. Up until Neeson’s speech to the nervous passengers, this is a solidly tense thriller and I would have forgiven it anything, but after that scene the decent fun falls apart in such way that it becomes annoying. By the end everything is bad.

So, a couple of days after a methodology exam and a couple of days before a philosophy one, I sit down to watch this film. It must be fate, it was perfectly timed. Frequencies is a hard film to classify with a genre, it could be called a sci-phi (science-philosophy) romance with some dark, mysterious elements. But don’t expect another Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, this one is a lot more philosophical, a lot more scientific and also a lot less romantic; sometimes I felt I was in a lecture – which, to avoid misunderstanding, I don’t mean as a complain. The story takes place in the near future, probably, when it’s possible to measure the frequencies of people. People with low frequencies are less synchronised with the world around (basically, they are unlucky), while at the same time they are gifted with empathy (emotional feeling). In contrast, people with high frequencies are embraced by nature (they are lucky), but at the same time, “they don't care” (they don’t have emotions). At one university for genius children, a boy with extremely low frequency meets a girl with extremely high frequency. If two people like these meet and remain close for longer than a moment, their divergent frequencies will likely cause some kind of catastrophe (the girl with the lucky charge repels the boy with the unlucky charge, “they aren’t compatible”). The boy falls in love with the girl and spends years thinking about how to balance his frequency and establish harmony, so the girl will have feelings and it will also be safe for them to say close to each other longer than a minute. But how is it possible that a boy with such low frequency has got so lucky that he’s able to defy fate? Isn’t there a catch in the form of a dangerous side effect?… And that’s just the beginning. The system, or rather, the mythology the creators have come up with is much deeper and more complicated. If you want to enjoy this film, you can’t turn off your brain. What’s great is how the world gets more complicated with each twist, but it still makes sense somehow. On top of that, the story taking place in that world isn’t told in an ordinary fashion, quite the opposite in fact. It was a big surprise, but there could have been more emotions. But, as the characters say: “Does it matter” – “Not to me.”

A film whose attributes and characteristics can be only described as “uninteresting”. That’s basically all it can be said about it. It’s not downright bad, just not good. It’s nothing but a run-of-the-mill thriller that’s adequate only to be sold by thirty crowns at the newsagent or to watch on TV, in the afternoon.