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Reviews
Alien: Covenant (2017)
Alien: when writers go on strike
I won't go into the details as many reviewers have already done a better job.
It could have been a great movie. I actually liked Prometheus and the new story lines it brought even though it was far from a perfect film. However, there was a plot and characters and a story.
This time, the plot and characters and the story are lacking in the extreme. The humans are all bumbling idiots with zero training or common sense. Mighty Engineers have degraded to the point of cartoon characters. The Evil Android is.... ridiculous. Even Fassbender - an excellent, first rate actor - can only do so much with the script he's been given. And the story.... let's just say that the Days of Out Lives writing team would have done a far better job at coming up with something that was memorable and made sense.
One star for the great visuals.
The Midnight Sky (2020)
Meh
It starts well, with an Interesting beginning, spectacular visuals, and a potential for a gripping story.
Something happened, the Earth population is preparing for some unexplained cataclysmic event that will erase the civilization, and the staff of a large Arctic observatory is being evacuated to the mainland, apparently to go on to some underground shelter.
A middle-aged scientist (Clooney) with an unspecified terminal illness decides that he might as well die in peace in Arctic wilderness, as he has no one waiting for him and no home to go to. So he decides to stay behind on the fully autonomous station.
Some time afterwards, he gets in contact with a crew of a space mission sent to a Jupiter moon that has a breathable atmosphere and Earth-like conditions, who are now coming back after two years without any contact with the outside world, and are unaware of the catastrophe.
So, a story with a lot of promise. But over the course of the film, this promise is largely wasted. The film is just... boring. Predictable. Uninspired.
On top of that, being a movie about scientists (well, to some extent), they don't seem to know very basic biology. No, a man and a woman can't start a new humanity all by themselves... incest is not a valid strategy for long term population growth.
E for effort...
Tot samyy Myunkhgauzen (1980)
A new twist on an old story
The film is based on a brilliant screenplay by G. Gorin.
It uses an all-star cast of some of the best Soviet theater actors, so it borrows a lot (in a good way) from a theatrical performance, while still remaining a "movie".
The film succeeded in creatng a witty, powerful, sentimental yet funny story of a very uneven battle between color and dullness, between personal freedom, especially freedom of mind, and constricting pressure of conformist society that tries to destroy anybody who refuses to be just like everybody else.
I gave it 9 points.
Mimino (1977)
It's not the plot but characters that make this movie
The following may be a spoiler.
The plot is very standard, in a way - Valiko, nicknamed Mimino (georgian for "Falcon") is a Georgian helicopter pilot, hauling sometimes very odd goods and people between remote mountain villages. One day he meets a friend from a flying school - now, a pilot of a transcontinental airliner. The friend is accompanied by a beautiful stewardess that Mimino falls for. He decides to change his life, start doing bigger and better things. After much trouble and misfortune, his dream becomes true - only he soon realizes, that his heart really belongs there, in the misty mountains of Georgia.
This film would've become just one of hundreds of similar feel-good movies, that are forgotten soon after release. However, it was filmed by a great Danelia, and so the plot became secondary, and the characters, their interactions, their feelings and personal and cultural differences became the main driving force. The film cleverly exploits (to the extend allowed by the Soviet censorship at the time) the often unflattering stereotypes that Caucasian people had in Russia, the cultural clashes between different characters (the guy that Mimino befriends in Moscow is an Armenian, a neighboring nation that had sort of a cultural rivalry with Georgians; he also comes from a different social background). It also has some thinly veiled criticism of Brezhnev-era corruption. Some of the characters are not as well developed as the main two, but movie is still very good. Unfortunately, a lot of plot's cleverness will be lost on someone unfamiliar with Soviet society in that time period.
Still a very good movie to watch !
Zerkalo dlya geroya (1987)
A very interesting movie, for its time
* Some of it may be a spoiler*
Two friends, typical average middle-class Soviet men of late 80s, are walking along when one of them trips on a rusty wire, sticking out of the ground. Miraculously, (and at first unknown to them) they are transfered some 40 years back, in year 1949, the zenith of Stalinist era. They are forced to re-live the same day in '49 over and over again (this movie was filmed some six years before Groundhog Day, and I wonder sometimes if it inspired it in some ways). They can't change the events but they themselves change, and find out what each of them is really worth. The movie title, translated in English, means "A Mirror for a Hero".
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006)
I liked it, but..
The sudden turn from realism to fantasy was a bid too sharp, almost in an uncalled for sort of way. The surprise is not always a good thing - to me at least it broke the mood and the flow of the movie, like watching a different story in the end. I did not read the book, I assume it was presented there in a more carefully prepared way, saving the continuity of the story.
Otherwise the film is very good, and the lead actor is amazing. His movements are fluid like those of a ballet dancer.
Also Alan Rickman, in a supporting role, has a tremendous presence on screen.