The Last Old Mod***MDP74 v. 3.0

The Road (movie) builds expectations. To be fair, it is a good, driving movie, painting a unresting picture of the future, raising interesting and valuable questions (despite they are not new and breakthrough), building and keeping the tension with minimum of instruments with great cast and visuality. Intimate yet epic, strong, beautiful and sad. Like life itself. You hardly can be disappointed.

But is it a future classic, the icon of the genre? To be fair, it is not a truly breathtaking cinema – leaving out the basement meat storage scene (you are not breathing because you are dead paralyzed – right) and the dog in the final scene (you are laughing so much you can’t breathe – wrong).

Death, fear, morality, parenthood are pictured with a light sentiment understanding the matter of things and some of these normally-over-the-edge scenes are the best I’ve seen – except the dog. Tasteful (leaving out the two mentioned scenes and the product placement scenes), with a fine sense of storytelling and extremely well fine-tuned level of CGI and other visually catching elements. But there are serious bugs. And they haven’t been fixed.

First of all, the music by Cave and Ellis is nothing special. You may dispute: Easy to say! And I would tend to agree and show some respect: It is not the easy film to do a score for. The fact is that the music these two master did just proves it.

It is sponsored by Coca Cola and unfortunately this is one of the main things kept in my head a few hours after seeing it. Honestly, some scenes merge immediately in my head with War of The Worlds (ouch!) and many other no-name post-apocalyptic movies of last few years.

Last but not least, a version of this film ending 2 minutes prior the DOG SCENE would make it way more iconic and ballanced. At least for me.

To summarize it: Despite The Road is an outstanding film (not so hard to stand out), there is a gap between expected emotional impact (according the story) and the actual emotional impact you get. And I don’t know why. Maybe because of the few disturbing moments building an invisible but impenetrable wall between you and the father with the son. Maybe it was just me, maybe it is that part of the story which can be hardly captured on a silver screen – that difference between a book and a film. I don’t know, I didn’t read the book. Just a cheap presumption. Finally, sitting with a handful of popcorn, you are ready to suffer a bit more that you actually do. You want to be dragged into their inner world but in some moments you find difficult to keep the track. And the dog? Try to forget the dog. Or, try to love it. Up to your taste.

“Up in the air” is shit. Pure shit, there is nothing to excuse such a silly film like this. “Thank you for smoking” was a very good profession-insightful american movie with a strong entertainment factor, good script and right amount of cheap jokes, “Juno” is simply brilliant and fresh, but the third film of young Jason Reitman tries to build on success of the first one and fails completely. The all-american bullshit, economic crisis, real love, shallow feelings, bad people, good people, sad people, businessmen, success, family, big cities, small towns, classic values, life changes and new hope. There is a lot of talking about Mr. Clooney magical smile in the film. One thing’s for sure. It ain’t save a lame government-ordered tribute to all people looking for a new hope, new opportunities, being sacked out of their jobs in todays America. It doesn’t work, at least not for me.

For people who already saw the film: “Imagine carrying a back-pack and you have all your favorite movies in it. It’s so heavy you can’t walk. What will you throw away the first?”

Doing a cooking show may seem to be the lowest career point of a film director (even when talking about advertising film directors duo). And I say: Don’t let blame yourself, it can be fun. Actually, it can be more fun one can handle. We were asked by Outbreak to create an internet-broadcasted cooking show with a twist for one rather old-fashioned food product. We said yes and started thinking how to make a program like that without just creating another silly cooking show we can see in TVs around the world every day. We were encouraged quite well by the original concept to push the limits of idiocy to unknown heights and we decided to elevate the hopeless effort of two main characters as high (means low) as necessary to stand out from the crowd. Tomina, czech comedy unknown superstar, was an easy choice, we know each other for years and our experience is great. Ivana came to the casting recommended by Petra Svarinská from Vivid casting and turned out as the best out of many. They created together a great looking disaster-couple with ability to fuck up anything including a world-wide revolution. Their redneck, provincial, friday-disco-to-bed style of humor was brill. I laughed so much during the two-days shoot that it seriously hurt me and I felt so tired like actually working. We created a cooking show which literally kills any cooking skills a make them look lame in comparison to the level of cheap entertainment we offer in our “Vaříme s Pejskem a kočičkou” series.

Before we will start the project at stream.cz, I am not allowed to post the videos, so here are some pictures from behind the scenes.

Starring Tomáš “Tomina” Jeřábek and Ivana Huspeková, make-up Tereza Prachařová, sound by Roman Sečkář, D.O.P. and lights Jirka Málek, second and third camera Martin Přikryl & Michal Nohejl, food styling Marek Všetečka, set & props Kristina Šedivá, wardrobe by Lela Geislerová and Josefina Bakošová, edited by Tomáš Klímek, production manager Kristina Šedivá, produced by Jirka Ptáček, Bistro Films. Directed by Mods. Based on a concept and screenplays by Lukáš Franz and Petr Hanousek (Outbreak).

Avatar is out of range, beyond the categories full-visual entertainment which really can entertain and fascinate, but with so stupid screenplay that it seems to be computer-generated, or worse, cut and paste from the worst templates of Hollywood all-time B-classics. It’s a gaming-console-ready story and gradation through the levels is obvious. Marketing of collectable merchandise items is not hidden but even further, almost promoted (frankly, who, being child, would resist to have the whole collection of dragons, the entire tribe and/or all the species growing, hunting, flying and hiding in the deep jungle of the planet Pandora). Respect to film-making skills of Mr. Cameron, respect to the environmental theme-copy of the movie and to the visual approach balancing on the edge of kitsch (in my opinion falling a bit off the edge). The theme of Pandora, being one organism, having all the elements of nature connected with the mother planet and creatures communicating through interlacing their teleneurons, is something I find as a big idea for a cross-generation movie saga, not necessarily original or discovering, but very supporting. But, all these cultural and environmental details are described with a perfection of films with Lara Croft: “Hey, the Aztecs! They were strange and very mysterious and they, God knows why, ain’t living anymore.” Similar impression you’ve got from Cameron’s projection of Pandora. It is amazing as well as it is flat and shallow.

Straight talking, with a matter like this you can do a lot more than a stunning 3D shit. Or maybe you can’t, counting the budget and the mass-taste. The math in this movie is done excellent, the chance to create a masterpiece wasn’t probably even in discussion. The aftermath will be for sure generous. But in my ears something repeats itself like a raven: film industry, film industry. With “film” being whispered a bit uncertainly as it remains just one small piece of an overall idea how to make loads of money. Nothing against it – back to my first line of this review.

The good news: The trailer is much worse than the actual film and it is easily viewable even for Dungeons & Dragons exorcists. Worth watching it if you don’t want to be aside from debates for next couple of weeks.

P.S. The czech dubbing didn’t help, of course.

The pictures bellow are partly from the movie, partly pre-releases from the video game.

If Copola’s Godfather is a classic in all means and most of following big silver screen mafia stories were literally following it’s genre-defining, hum, “godfather”, it’s obvious that the Cosa nostra genre needs a solid refresh.

The French action and cops films are something I personally don’t see raison d’entre in general. It’s like having snails ala California. Yes, there are probably some exceptions, like with the good mongolian indie-rock bands.

The less I believe in refreshment of mafia movies or in realness of french crime films the more I stood up in complete amaze last night in Mat Kino seeing Un prophète – The Prophet, a french mafia/crime/gangster/drama (more tags would be more appropriate) film by Jacques Audiard. Two and half hours of unusual tension inside of my body, staring at the screen, having no idea where the story turns next second, being blown away by the realness and believability of characters, cast, dialogues, scenes, costumes, locations, soundtrack, theme and overall execution and I left the cinema totally excited!

The realism meets surrealism. While the whole story is well told using realistic to naturalistic tools and you can see, feel, smell and touch roughness of a french prison, the surrealistic element of a ghost of a killed prisoner and dream/phantom sequences bring to the film even more believability and seriousness, which is strange, unseen and masterful.

The life path of a young, 19 years old arabian punk leading through the walls of a prison to heights of a mafia boss has no single gap I would be able to notice and which would disrupt me from drifting on a magic carpet of crime done with honesty, ease, bravery, brain and …a natural prophecy.

I am not an experienced film director, my work is far away from what we are talking about right now, but despite that I have some self-esteem as a moving pictures artist and I do believe in my ability to tell a story. But seeing The Prophet I was left behind clueless and puzzled with no idea how I would put a film like this together. Apart from I’ve already talked about like casting and story, the editing, the camera and the overall dramaturgy is outstanding and simply perfect. Together, hand in hand, Audiard and his team created one of the best movies I’ve seen, probably the best crime drama at least of the decade and definitely a milestone for both, the genre and the french film. Winner of Grand Prize of the Jury in Cannes and nominee for Golden Globe, the film you must see.

We have a new boss. And he’s a prophet.