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Szürke senkik (2016)
One of the best Hungarian movies ever made
Hungary has no Hollywood. Hungarian filmmakers are on a tight budget. Some YouTube enthusiasts can spend more bucks on their WW2 reenactment bullshit than a serious and talented Hungarian film crew on their vision. But this is also what we love in Hungarian movies. They have to strike a perfect balance between budget constraints and artistic qualities. Give too much money to a Hungarian studio and it's almost as bad as not giving anything. The best ones are always the ones on a budget.
Grey Nobodies is one of the most powerful Hungarian movies recently. It's a peculiar one already because there aren't many WW1 movies around. Trench warfare isn't very spectacular, it can't be made into flicks like The Longest Day or Saving Private Ryan. And what else can a WW1 movie tell about than trench warfare? On the other hand, what can any war movie possibly deliver which hasn't been delivered yet? Yeah, war is hell, people die, we get it, thanks... But Grey Nobodies not only strikes the sweet spot between budget and value, but masterfully delivers a war story which is unlike any other.
The cliché characters are there. The scared young rookie boy. The grizzled veteran commander. The cynical other veteran who just wants to survive. The coward. The enemy with a human face. Yeah, so?
It's the setting that makes this movie. It's the First World War, and it's the Italian front. A story Westerners rarely even know. The characters are storm pioneers on a secret mission; today we'd call them special forces, but at the time they were a unique and novel approach to warfare - specially trained and equipped soldiers, a possible solution to the stalemate, while the Allies came up with the tank. This is interesting, but still dull until the spice is added. And it's the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy itself, its peculiar situation at the time of the events, and its history and ethnography. The only army in which such a small team may consist of four different ethnicities, of which one is even supposed to be the enemy, a Romanian. All against the Italians and a communications outpost somewhere deep behind enemy lines.
No, you can't tell what is going to happen in the next moment. This is not your average war story. The only thing you know is that people will die. Who will and why, that's a mystery. The climax will leave you on the edge of your seat, and the ending is perhaps the most terrifying plot twist in any war movie ever.
This story can only work in WW1, and only with Austro-Hungarian soldiers. You can't adapt it to any other war, and not any other army. From the very first minute to the last, it's just great. There is no downtime, no empty clichés and no loose threads. The few shots fired do more justice than a whole battle scene with tons of explosives and spectacularly flying limbs.
This movie is not an experiment. It's a masterpiece, polished and shining. Well done! I'll recommend it to everybody who asks me about good Hungarian movies.
Lone Survivor (2013)
*yawn*
Yes, this was a very disrespectful title, and I apologize right away. I didn't mean to offend the actual servicemen or anyone else in real life. But this movie was simply boring and dull for anyone who is not American. Even for a military history buff like me.
They say that life writes the best screenplays. Well, this one wasn't worth watching. Just because something dramatic and terrible actually happened, it's not necessarily movie material. What we got is a docudrama which hardly documents anything the world should care. Here is what happened:
America started a war. America sent in some soldiers. Yeah, Navy SEALs, I got it. Many people were killed, finally the Americans had their asses kicked too. Then they made a movie about it. "Hey, look how terrible this war was!" Aww, poor America, you got spanked again? Wanna cry about how your well-paid volunteer mercenaries were shot at? Poor guys. Some even died? Oh my God.
Who is the hero: the one inserted into enemy territory with the world's best equipment to go kill and destroy... or the one who picks up a battered AK with no training and face them on his own soil, in his own village, not running away even when dozens of his buddies, many of them family members, bite the dust against these invincible bipedal killing machines?
For a non-American, this is a miserable movie, and there is little pride in what it depicts. The Germans could make a similar movie about an SS raiding party attacking a Russian partisan village. The Russians could make a similar one about their Afghanistan war.
The greatest problem with this movie is that it tries to depict the main characters as some heroes. They are not heroes. They may be in their compatriots' eyes, but anywhere else in the world they are merely victims of war. The same kind of victims as those "haggies" who die in a split second here and there throughout the movie. Who cares what any of the Afghanistani victims wanted to buy for their girlfriends as a birthday present? On the other hand, who the heck cares about that stupid horse? Yes, we got it, this guy will be the first to die. And the cute rookie boy will also die pointlessly, it's also obvious from the moment he shows up on screen.
There is nothing this movie can provide for its viewers' improvement. It's a hypocritical, dull war movie, regardless that it's based on real events. The acting is excellent, but there is little to excel in characters who merely shoot, fight, stab and roll down hills. I give it though, the fight scenes are masterfully scripted and executed. But that's why we have Hollywood.
I would like to see the same movie from a Taliban fighter's viewpoint. They may be assholes, but they were fighting the same war. I am sure their families were mourning after the battle too.
Zootopia (2016)
A very subtly brave movie
It's perhaps not the best Disney movie ever made, but still a very lovable one, and technically absolutely fantastic. (As all Disney CGIs ever.) The characters are lively and lovely, the story is somewhat predictable, but the lore takes it all the way. A ton of cultural references spice it up for adults, from tongue-in-cheek references to Frozen to Godfather and even Breaking Bad. That's all I can tell about it in general. It deserves a 7 out of 10, for it could've been much more than it actually is, yet the storyline could've used some more polishment.
A subtly brave movie I called it, and for a reason. It is a movie which actually dares to criticize multicultural society. The whole set is an utopia, a Zootopia, a city where predators and prey live happily together - also, it's an obvious reference to the Bible - but in fact it's only a hollow ideal. Different animals may coexist, but differences can not be set apart. Stereotypes exist for a reason. Foxes are sly, sloths are slow, rabbits are good at multiplying, and so on. This movie doesn't teach kids to act as if there wasn't any difference between members of different social groups. It doesn't propagate Hollywood's usual and banal clichés about racism and prejudice. It doesn't teach that even acknowledging differences is racism. No, it takes a more rational approach. What Zootopia teaches is this: good persons and jerks come in all shape and color, but stereotypes exist for a reason and the world is not a big happy family, even despite having surpassed violent antagonisms.
I personally loved Zootopia for this. I am glad that political correctness and social justice warriors did not stop this movie in the making. This is exactly the voice we need in today's madness when liberal and conservative fundamentalism both try to claim the world for themselves. Also, while the city Zootopia is a biblical symbol, there is a much more stronger biblical message at the end. "Sanctify what you are." A very nice moral teaching. A fox can't be not a fox. But he can be a fox for a good purpose.
Batman (1989)
One of the biggest disappointments of my life
When this movie came out, the Iron Curtain has just fallen and my country, Hungary was just transforming into a free market economy. Although we weren't hermetically sealed from everything Western, superhero comics and movies never reached us. The only superhero I've ever heard during my childhood was Superman, however I've never seen Superman comics or anything about it. All we knew that there is this flying superguy who is a kind of a cultural icon in America. And yes, he looks cool. For some strange reason there was a brief time around 1986 when Hulk stickers were considered cool. Nobody knew who or what is Hulk. Some business-minded person apparently bought some comics in some Scandinavian country, brought them home and selected a few neat looking frames to be printed as stickers, sold to kids for a few forints. Hey, it looked very Western, it was in some weird alien language (probably Danish) and it was violent, so it was only cool! That's all what East Europe knew about superhero comics before 1989...
One day it was announced that a new American movie will arrive soon, and it's titled "Batman". A very unusual marketing campaign was started. Unusual for us, Hungarians - we never knew that movies are sold as commercial products in America. Of course we had movies, even American movies - we had all the 1980s classics from Star Wars and Terminator to Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. - but they were not really advertised apart from a few posters, only shown in movies. Now came this Batman thing, and it was everywhere you looked. They discussed it on TV, they were counting the days to the premiere, there were Batman quizzes on the radio, Batman merchandise everywhere (something we never saw before!) and what not. The whole nation thought this Batman thing must be something really, really big and awesome or they wouldn't talk about it this much. Yes, we, naive citizens of a just recently freed ex-Soviet Bloc country naively believed that the media tells the truth and only discusses important things. (As it was actually more or less true in the Communist times, save for the political news!)
So an entire nation excitedly awaited Batman (Denevérember, if you need the Hungarian title and the name of the character, which nowadays sounds odd - nobody translates the names of superheroes) and expected some cinematic revolution, some unforgettable experience, something vastly, overwhelmingly new, a taste of Western freedom. We expected something next level and unimaginable, as it was anticipated that everything will be so next level after the fall of communism.
Then we sat in the cinema, and the movie was on... and we were... shocked... then disappointed... and devastated. Oh my God, WHAT IS THIS UTTER SH1T?! Even the weakest Soviet kids' movies were way, way more exciting and immerse. Batman was ridiculous, cheap, boring and pointlessly violent. It is THE worst movie I've ever seen in my life, no kidding!
Batman was more than a bad film. It was a cultural trauma. A punch in the groin. A message to us, East Europeans that America is not better than the Soviet Union. They just deliver differently smelling crap. Different lies.
There is a reason why my generation throws up on the mere thought of seeing a superhero movie. Many of us don't even let their kids to see any. It's for the best: superhero movies are dull, boring, violent and stupid. If I want my kids to see superheroes, I show them a historic movie. An old one, pre-1989. Perhaps a Soviet movie. But not Batman, for God's sake, no. And not Hulk either.
Saul fia (2015)
Defies expectations in a very good way
This film is very special for the Hungarian audience, and for a good reason. Not very recently we had a liberal government with palpable Israeli influence on local politics. (Most notably, Israeli soldiers dressed as Hungarian cops and firing rubber bullets at peaceful people on the streets on 23 October 2006, on the 50th anniversary of the 1956 revolution.) This government and their Israeli friends did everything to push the Holocaust down the throat of Hungarians and force them to admit their responsibility for it. Hungarians didn't take it well. All they achieved was to convince an entire generation that the Holocaust is a propaganda tool in Israeli politics and the leftist agenda. This movie was not received with too much awe in Hungary. It is viewed as another propaganda piece about a falsely represented historic event. I can't remember any of my friends ever watching it, but I also can't name anyone who hasn't despised it without seeing.
They are wrong. This movie is good. Even if it's just a work of fantasy. It is largely based on the memoirs of Miklós Nyiszli, a Jewish doctor who claimed to have worked for Dr. Joseph Mengele in Auschwitz. His account was the first ever published about the death camp in the 1940s-- and the first to be debunked by historians. Nowadays it's widely accepted to be plain forgery. Nevertheless Holocaust propagandists keep reprinting his story as "authentic".
But this won't make it a bad movie. We all love Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and many more which we also know are not true. Still we feel for its characters and genuinely feel for them. There are many WW2 movies which take place in a historic environment, in battles fought in reality but with fictional characters. Why hate a work of fantasy which takes place in a fictional death camp?
And for that, it's brilliantly made. It truly deserved an Oscar. The novel and unique approach to the protagonist's perspective is unlike I've ever seen. It plays brilliantly with light, sound and emotions. We know it didn't happen this way. Saul Auslander did not exist, his story is not more true than Bambi. Still, death camps did exist. Not this, and not this way, but something very similar did. What if Saul was a German POW in a Siberian death camp? Or if he was a Chinese in a Japanese camp? Or a prisoner today in North Korea's camps?
Definitely not a piece of propaganda. A nicely made movie about humanity. Or well, not so "nicely" - the entire movie is deliberately bleak and unpleasant. I loved it.