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Reviews
Final Justice (1984)
Even crime seems to be bigger in Texas
After perusing a few other reviews here, I'm steadfast in my declaration that I never ever need to watch the original version just to see more of a John Wayne fantasy on how some people straight-faced think this is actually how you do justice.
Our "hero" right off the bat violates international law by becoming an illegal immigrant in Mexico, commit first degree murder, and performs kidnapping by forcing a then-yet alleged criminal from a place he has zero jurisdiction in and has no legality to one where he does. For some weird reason the State Dept doesn't get involved to put him under review, no, they reward him with the impossible task of escorting the prisoner to Italy. Which, in reality, is federal jurisdiction, so the movie should have ended there the second time (the first him being tried and jailed in Mexico for murder).
From then on it's only downhill with illegal firearm's possession, multiple assaults, reckless endangerment of civilians, multiple violations of international treaties, insubordination toward higher federal authority, intentional disregard of local laws, ignoring his mere observer status.
I think the final insult was the last minute subplot about the diplomat being dirty, because him being dirty explains how the homicidal sheriff was never in the wrong, his villainous acts are justified in the end.
Spiral: From the Book of Saw (2021)
Still not getting the point
Despite the gratuitous torture porn thought up in-universe by sadistic characters, the Saw franchise in the original 7 movies had a gritty realism to it, exploring the reason why Kramer was never captured alive: police corruption in the local force, and interdepartmental spat with the feds later on.
That is the part this movie got right... to a point. Because here where it has failed, and miserably so: in real life, cops aren't just protected by qualified immunity, in some districts so-called gypsy cops have sealed records of their previous activities, in others the same department that has armored vehicles and tactical gear, accidentally doesn't have a fully functioning database keeping track. Over the years a few judges and district attorneys have gone to prison for covering up crime committed by cops, so while the move has a moment of realism in acknowledging young cops and detectives can't just willy-nilly, choose where they are assigned, it lost me when he just had unfettered access to what really happened and who else was involved. We know from real life court cases that when a cop is being accused of killing an unarmed person on whom they plant a weapon to look as credible in self-defense, after they report it in, per custom their next call is to the union rep to lawyer up and right there, there's already coordination on what will ever become public knowledge. The movie hinted at this by making Rock's character a second Serpico, going down just like the original real life person. Thus, the killer would have never gotten past the two cops he saw as a kid. Similarly, Policy 8... police departments are very well aware that local councilors, state representatives/senators and above can and do inquiries into their activities, so it would have been written in legalese to defer guilt from anyone and still be very legal.
Last but not least, boy oh boy... I get the killers motivations by himself, except the writers should have remembered that Hoffman's guilt was evident by the last movie and he was on the run. They wasted a huge opportunity by forgetting about Cary Elwes's character who is the genuine successor. This is the second movie where a Hoffman like sadist killer gets away, despite Hoffman getting his comeuppance as per John's last wishes.
The movie failed in showing us how this young man had the facilities to become a mechanical engineer, or to explore the bag of psychological tricks John had used to lure victims exactly where he wanted them to be. So many things could have gone wrong by working alone, not to mention he lacked the good doctor's help that John had to determine how much tranquilizer a person needs.
Jigsaw (2017)
The ills of franchise fatigue
I think I have waited to review this one before I watch Spiral and desperately hope it will be a better entry that understand who John was a person.
First up, will obviously not hand wave away his crimes of kidnapping, forced imprisonment, physical and mental torture in a depraved worldview where he was losing a battle for his life and lost his future with his wife.
Even after Saw III and the change of cooks in the kitchen, at least the creators understood that John's vision was that people through self-sacrifice realize the consequences they caused in their own lives and especially in the lives of others by their negligence and selfishness.
Heck, his own life could have been saved if the insurance company did not shirk him on experimental treatment and the medical staff had realized his condition earlier. He viewed his own car crash survival after the suicide attempt as his own test.
That is why Jigsaw was a huge offense to me, and probably to a lot of others. This movie tried to create a myth, where a Zep-like male nurse failed to discover his tumor and then just allowed him to be like Hoffman and devise inescapable traps they set up together. The same John who swallowed a tape warning Hoffman that his comeuppance is inevitable, yeah, sure.
This movie went up against everything the original character stood for even if Tobin Bell gave a good performance. Giving a paycheck performance to the disgrace of the original is not unheard of.
Honigfrauen (2017)
A stroll down memory lane
I was vacationing on Lake Balaton, roughly the same time as these events takes place, but just so that people understand, the surveillance of East German citizens was a well guarded secret. I mean, sure, we could recognize by the sandal wear of Germans, who was from the GDR, and who was from the FRG, but even so, establishing contact was risqué. Beyond the fact that not many Germans tried Russian, a common obligatory language and therefore stayed among other Germans, it wasn't likely to camp near them.
I've to admit with a bit of envy, that the set designers deserve the highest available German award for their work. They didn't lean into nostalgia like Stranger Things that occasionally goofs on available items, they've recreated 1980s Hungary, not as I remember it, but as it actually was.
My rating of 8 relies on a bit of a nitpicking. In Under the Same Sky and Deutschland'83 they make it a crucial point, that West Germans say Orange, not Apfelsinnen, so it's a tad anachronistic that they would have said Orange marmalade. The second thing is, that we, Hungarians, while having a more eased travel, couldn't travel to the capitalist abroad once a year in 1986, unless she meant that Tamás in connection to his hotel work already own a blue passport with such exception. For the rest of us, it was once every 3 years after 1986, which never came to pass, as it was lowered to once a year in '88, and then communism ended. The third thing is that Tamás claims to be from Debrecen, and people from there are nigh immediately recognized in Hungary by their strong emphasis on the letter t.
The Hunt (2020)
The screenwriters did not disappoint
Well,
I wasn't let down by this movie, because the writers behind it studied up on the subject material. First, there's a bias that's true for any large country that mainly speaks one language, the set of ideas brought forth by its citizens will rarely get challenged on the inside by those who didn't grow up there. It's nice to call America a melting pot, but it's not exempt from processes that happened here in Europe, namely the innate need to create one language. Lincoln's logs aren't controversial, even though the style was imported by Finnish settlers, who descendants today carry Anglicized names and wouldn't understand a lick of Finnish.
That's where Europe comes in. The downside to having one large country with one majority language is that both the majority and many people of color tend to imagine all white people like the way WASPs do, but we don't. Way before the Cold War necessitated a long physical barrier between the Western and Eastern half of Europe, while Western powers fought over colonies in the world wars, the later Eastern Bloc just fought to eradicate each other, not unlike the later Yugoslavian Civil War. I'm guessing choosing Slovenia which was largely spared of fighting, but FLOTUS is from there, would have been too much on the nose, Croatia is a better fit. Frankly, Gary's ruse to infiltrate himself among refugees would totally not work in real life. For one, Arabic dialects are different and some slang is region specific. Imagine it like using an Alaskan fishing slang in Louisiana, both are English speakers, but so far away that they'd likely be not familiar with it. Linguistics aside, being a refugee on the Western Balkans route is no cake walk, and the levels of xenophobia is high. For the record, xenophobia means anyone not from the region, so the depiction of being somewhat hostile to Americans is accurate, y'all the face of globalism.
I think Crystal caught on the "diplomat" being fake, because having served in Afghanistan, she probably was assigned to humanitarian missions, therefore knew that it's the UNHCR's job to get people out of refugee camps if they have no papers. In fact, they were lucky, in real life they'd probably detained in a normal jail, and fingerprinted until their identity can be confirmed. I'm glad they dispelled the myth of "I'm an American, I'm entitled to my phone call". It's also rare that a member of the diplomatic corps travels without a chauffeur or at bare minimum a translator.
From a writing standpoint I loved how they presented a Texas Hold'em style of plot presentation where they could expect us being familiar with the visceral gut reactions online, and not need to elaborate further what connected the targets and hunters. However, there is one thing I didn't see in other reviews, and that's the mention, how not everyone who supports a great cause does so out of the goodness of their heart. The hunters were just sorry they got caught in a possibly Sony-level intrusion, deep down they had no connection to the people they allegedly felt offended for. To put it differently, this is the typical "I'm willing to make a donation so your kids don't go hungry to school, but my property value would go down if I allowed you to live anywhere near me".
That brings me to Athena. There might have been a general idea why she started to train, but in the hot second she saw Crystal, her hurt pride over losing her CEO position kicked in, and she didn't bother to check if they got the right person. She wanted a punchable face, a negative outlet. A flesh and blood person to own, to enact revenge for the slight she suffered.
It's a touch of genius to bring up Animal Farm, not just because it's quoted less, than 1984, but because he wrote it after experiencing first hand how Stalin's paranoia, that manifested in the Great Purge reached Spain and plenty of innocents got caught in the crossfire. Snowball was George himself, cast out for now opposing them.
The Nun (2018)
Et ressurexit tertia die, secundum Scripturas... or let's hope it happens
I rarely do reviews anymore, since most of the time I just watch movies for fun. I go so far to the wall that if a plot and execution generally captivates me, I can give them a pass on such arthouse solutions, like the two protagonists watching literally an empty wall for the last five minutes of the movie. This might gauge how patient I am.
Then, along comes this movie... In the '70s and '80s there used to be a trend called mondo filmmaking that capitalized on the duality of the Western world being physically cut off from regions they were familiar with (Soviet satellite states) and being in one camp with former colonies they didn't care to learn. That's how when Cannibal Holocaust advertised animal cruelty, the filmmakers had to testify that it was actually just fiction.
This is where the story's first cardinal sin comes in: if you claim to write a story based on actuality then you can't have it both ways by setting in the Transylvania most only know from Bram Stoker books. That's an insult to the intelligence of people from there, who used to live and the moviegoers too.
The second cardinal sin comes in the form of a missed opportunity. The communist secret police in 1952, when Romania, like any other country under Soviet occupation, was totally cut off from the Vatican (oh hai nonsensical plot, you're my favorite customer), committed so many unspeakable horrors that the story was practically a low hanging fruit: make the villagers authentically hate outsiders, so that the protagonists can't decide between being spied on, followed and attempted to be turned into their agent, what are genuine human mind games, and what are works of a demon?
Before I venture onto the third point: the argument "just enjoy the movie for what it is, lay back and don't think too much", I present this counterargument: because during writing The Conjuring 2 the authors were more familiar with England, they went to painstaking lengths to recreate it. Bear in mind even though Sokovia doesn't exist, the MCU pulled off a convincing generic Eastern European country.
Maurice Theriault...in today's world where immigration has become again a political tool used to stoke fear into the hearts and minds of people... the only way a Westerner was allowed to move as freely as he did back then is that he was a confidential informant on the outside (and on the inside, sister Ouda). American Catholics don't care much for this since they've not yet given a pope, but the appointment of the later John Paul II caused concern the Soviets are just playing a long con by keeping opposition alive (a tactic used under Stalin after the war), so the Vatican was well aware that the Soviets will turn local churches into spying servitude (and they were right). Pretty much the basic premise doesn't make sense, it should have been set after Billy Graham held his crusade there.
There are two factors for a big anti-American sentiment in Eastern Europe, one's economic, and less grounded than the second which is criticism in the lack of agency. Heck, Comrade Detective was a comedy and that was way more authentic.
The only thing this movie has accomplished that it has shown the medieval infrastructural beauty and the picturesque landscape of the region.
Red Dawn (1984)
Well edited, decently to tolerably acted... but the writers should've consulted defectors
I've seen the remake back when it came out, and saw this one with a complimentary track from Joel McHale and Michael J. Nelson.
Something, it turns out I needed badly. The original is, well... a great disservice to American patriotism as it perpetuates the idea, that the adversary is dumb, only got lucky at the first try, and the supposed underdogs have everything at the ready to beat them.
There's a reason the invasion at the Bay of Pigs failed, the Soviet spy organization had better sleepers and NOCs then vice versa. A case that to this day remains unchanged, but I digress.
Leaving the typical '80s macho action premise aside, here's how actual Soviet invasions succeeded: they have begun their subversive activity well in advance.
By the time they had arrived, the mayor, the sheriff, even the emergency services would be collaborators. That's a practice well known to Americans as special interests have long started influencing the elections of judges, prosecutors, sheriffs and mayors.
So the idea they just arrive unprepared was funny, but far from real. Remember Cuba, or Afghanistan, they always rally the populace around themselves, implement a coup, weaken democracy and only then take over.
Similarly, independent from the jokes, I've found it funny that they just waltzed into town without checkpoints, despite the lady in the shop telling them they're being wanted. There was once a soldier who fled his Russian barracks (he was part of the occupation force), and they sent trucks, jeeps and some tanks to find him, locals like us be damned.
Which is why I wasn't surprised even the guys spotted the camp being one where you just walk up, 'cause that's a thing. At least you could say, hey, Mission Impossible IV got Russian prisons right.
I get it, people like their freedoms, I do too, only I remember not having them. Imagine such an invasion like being a runaway slave before emancipation, and try to figure who you can trust. The darkest terror doesn't come from what you don't know, rather from those you thought you knew, as they're the ones who know or make up dirt on you so they can keep the cozy lifestyle.
Truckin' Man (1975)
If an overburnt turnducken transformed into a movie...
I have been of the opinion these past few years, that some films exists purely for stoners and the inebriated, this, I felt, is somewhere in between.
On a few occasions I've lambasted Slater for hammy acting, but that was before I knew the range of his father. Granted, compared to the rest of the cast, at least he could deliver the lines on the first try.
The fight choreography is not of this world, literally. Seriously, a light shove onto soft grass takes one down for the count? Many times I felt they just asked a kid what he thought a cool action scene looked liken before Bruce Lee movies came along... except even the knockoffs after his death have better fights.
Last, but not least, at one point the movie broke Newtonian physics by wanting to tell me, that in that narrow corridor (when Mike confronts the guy who cut his breaks) he had comfortably could move and turn, and the professional was already waiting for her. Must have been, because, taking their sizes into account, there's no room for her to get on top on the bottom bunk of the bed without going in second. Which brings me to how the "hero" has almost raped Karen, or how Karen was made out to be a femme fatale to make Mike look good.
Then again, it's a movie where a 40-something can play a college kid, who allegedly already had experience in trucking before going to college...
Red Sparrow (2018)
In the eye of the beholder, quite literally
Hello all,
Since there's nigh 600 reviews here already on this title, I'm trying to deliver one from the aspect of where it was partly shot and how it's obviously a movie.
Way back when, there was this semi-authentic joke about easily discovering an American spy because they read the newspaper from the front. It's authentic in the sense that I too have learned to start reading from the back, and thus, any movie shot in Budapest and generally in Hungary I take with a grain of salt. I felt no compelling to open a goof tab on errors in geography when the characters quantum jump all across town, that being the only explanation how places really far away from each other just share a corner.
Yet, there are other signs this is simply a movie. Yes, it's genuine that applying for a pool membership only happens in Hungarian, and Dominika is still Mystique because she knows what expression means what. Nice feat in a language that isn't even Indo-European. Even more amusing that the public transportation is never late, or, that the subway cars don't catch fire as they do in reality.
Nate is also a magician or has found a cool way to rip off Uncle Sam without him batting an eye. I'm basing that on him ad hoc renting that very quiet, very downtown apartment by his lonesome. Such places in reality only go on a yearly basis and they are not cheap, not even by Western standards.
I haven't read the source material so I'm unaware how much of it was used, but I do know that it was published 5 years ago, at which point Hungary's foreign affairs started to stray away from NATO and into courting Russia, so in real life it wouldn't be too smart for an American agent to operate under hostile conditions.
I did enjoy it, and the one thing I do say to detractors is this: it's not inaccurate to portray Russia as a continuous system of exploitation and favors, voters do acknowledge this much by looking to the state for solving all their ailments. It's also accurate to state that there are many things that Russia censors from its citizens to "keep societal order".
Having said that, this movie had showed me Lawrence's limitations. Either production wanted to save on preparation costs or she simply can't do it, but that accent was atrocious. I can buy a Russian operative not speaking the language publicly to keep a cover (Richard Sorge pulled that off for decades), my beef was a different scene, where she used an Americanism. When in control, actual Russian operatives would either use a transliteration of a Russian adage, or an internationally known one, not something from the enemy which they genuinely view as decadent weakness.
Álom.net (2009)
Color coded for nobody's convenience
Well, what can I add that hasn't been said before... other than, if you love bad movies or ones with cult following, the names of Roger Corman and Godfrey Ho will be familiar.
If anyone gets the chance to watch this, be aware, that neither Corman nor Ho was involved, but definitely inspired the filmmakers. So, there was this movie, where they needed actors who look nice on screen, and in that sense the movie delivers. The reason I gave this 3 stars is because from a technical aspect, the movie is watchable, the mute button exists for a reason.
Anyhow, since Hungary is a small country, that has more celebrities, than a retainer of soap opera level beauty actors, the choice was made to give it the Ho treatment, and dub the actors over. I mentioned soap opera for a reason because the young voice actors and actresses do dub soap operas, high profile movies and video games. Imagine like having Scarlett Johansson lip sync to the voice of Idina Menzel, it's the level of how easily you recognize, who's on screen, and who's actually speaking. In other words, this movie felt like a failed Dawson's Creek or One Tree Hill pilot, where in addition of seeing butts and boobs we've also got the bonus dubbing voices at the ready.
Speaking of dubbing, whereas Mr. Reviczky is completely unknown beyond his home country and foreign theater circles, he voices Robert De Niro in localization, which makes this a different take on the Rocky and Bullwinkle movie if they were measured in embarrassment.