Movie Review: Only Lovers Left Alive [2013]

Thanks to number of dumb vampire movies, we all imagine them to be long living, careless sons of bitches who just enjoy sucking human blood. Or they are so cool that many of us desperately want to be one of them and live forever.

 

Well, Jim Jarmusch did his best to prove contrary and show boringness and madness of eternality. Only Lovers Left Alive is a desperate and heartbreaking saga about two vampires Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) who've been in love for centuries (yes, it's the Adam and the Eve). It's the time when vampires refused to kill people and instead get blood supply from hospitals or "blood dealers".

 

I found Jarmusch's vampires very human, sensitive, alone - something you can't find in any of similar ones. This is maybe because Jim wanted to point to how silly & killing immortality is. Both characters feel very real: Adam loves music, he composes them and plays, he's fond of rock and roll - the only thing making dreadful life happy. Eve finds salvation in dancing, she's quite different from Tom's character, because regardless all this senseless eternal life, she still tries to find courage and sense the beauty of surroundings.

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TV Series: Amazon Originals Pilot Series - Part I

After quite unsuccessful attempt to make something good and original by premiering Onion News Empire, Amazon decided to launch 9 pilot comedy & drama series. But those are only pilots and if you take a little survey, you will contribute the decision making process of turning those series into full TV Shows. Obviously, not all of them are going to be one. All pilots are available for free on Amazon.

I the Part I I will review three of them The After, Mozart in the Jungle & Bosch.

The After - pilot rating 10/10.

these are not aliens

In case Chris Carter does not say anything to you, I'll say that he created The X-Files, probably one of the best sci-fi tv series of all time and now he comes back with very creepy alien show The After. 

The show opens with introduction of Gigi, an eccentric actress with sexy French accent, who unsuccessfully auditions for her dream role. Going back to hotel, before flight back home to her husband and little daughter, she is stuck in elevator with 4 strangers: a cop, a clown, an old lady and a bad guy. It looks like a "must people for any horror movie" and so it is. Many things I saw in the first episode reminded other shows or movies of same genre: exploding helicopters, mass panic scene in the streets and escaped prisoners.

But, then this well-known mess evolves quite quickly and in a very interesting direction. As the small group of survivors (the ones from elevator and plus some other) flee to old lady's fabulous house, they face even more danger from something that even I can not explain.

Perfect rating to pilot goes jut because it bring a good material for further development and its creepy and definitely worth checking for. It can easily become a lot more interesting. It is important that pilot made you want to watch further episodes and this one just did it.
 

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My top 10 Directors according to their Movie Ratings

My fellow blogger Tom from At the Back came up with a brilliant idea of ranking directors according to the ratings you gave to their movies. When I did some calculations, results were quite surprising, so I decided to share them. Some of the directors, who made final top ten, are not actually qualified as my favorite ones, at least when someone asks who my favorite filmmaker is, I never say their names. 

How it works: I took a full list of my feature film (including animations) ratings from IMDB and calculated average ratings for each director. Only those with at least 5 movies in the list made final top ten.

It turns out that Steven Spielberg is the most popular director for me, because I saw 17 of his movies, followed by Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and David Fincher with 8 films. Pete Docter (Up, Monsters Inc.) & Lee Unkrich (Finding Nemo, Toy Story 3) are the only directors who have perfect average score 10, but since I saw only two feature films of each, they did not make top ten list.

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TV Series: The Following [2013]

The Following is a saga of psychological terror, mind games, serial killers and everything frightening you can see in your life.

"FBI estimates that there are over 50 serial killers in the United States. What if somebody leads and unites them?!"

My obsession with serial killers and thrillers makes me proudly say that I've seen all TV-Series evolving around these two issues and quite a big number of films. But this show tells an exceptional story of mass murderer Joe Carroll (James Purefoy) - a former charismatic literature teacher, who was convicted for killing 14 girls, his students. He was caught by Agent Ryan Hardy (Kevin Bacon) during committing another crime and that girl was the only victim who survived.

Joe, as a widely spread cliche says, has his own pattern to kill. He finds it beautiful. Being a huge fan of Edgar Allan Poe and influenced by his works, especially by unfinished one The Light-House, he decides to create his own form of art - the art of death.  Carrol, just like Poe, believed in "insanity of art" and that it needed to be physically and emotionally "felt". He is a very interesting character, terrifically talented and smart, unemotional but sometimes "funny", determined and cold-blooded. He's gathered every possible mass murderer in 50 states and brought to do something big and step by step destroy Ryan, who put him death penalty and slept with his wife.

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Movie Review: Ender's Game [2013]

Finally, kids are important in the future.

In the year 2086 alien species called  Formics attack the Earth. Commander Mazer Rackham sacrifices himself to save the planet. 50 years past without any sign of alien form of life on our planet but humans are still getting ready for future battles, that might come any moment. The only weapon they have (except than machine that cost 7 billion USD) are genius kids - specially trained highly intelligent people.  Most outstanding of them is Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) - a 15 years old boy with brilliant military tactics. He and another dozens of youngsters were permanently instructed and prepared on International Fleet's base in the space. However, they were never taught to be friends with each other, because only one of them would be "the chosen one" to lead the rest. If you look at Ender, he is an absolute outsider - a tiny, feeble, shy boy who sometimes turns out to be the biggest geek. But here comes a "surprising" plot twist that he has to defeat enemy that killed thousands of brave soldiers (no, seriously, this is not a plot twist, at all).

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