DaViD´82

It is brimming with proper funny ideas and gags, but I couldn't get rid of the impression that if it was taken seriously (and the premise is there), I would have had more fun in the end.

Approximately 3650 reasons (based on the director's info that it's about ten years of Groundhog Day) to hate the song “I Got You Babe”, but at the same time the same 3650 reasons to love this movie. And to watch it again, and again, and again. And then once again. And then again, and again...

A horror which in purely screenplay terms has no weaknesses. Excellent actors. Atmosphere mostly powerful (when not spoiled by superfluousness like the contents of the “child’s" coffin). First-class music. But it fails in one fundamental respect. It’s not in the least funny. Which is a problem mainly because it’s trying much harder to be a comedy than a horror (a genre that suits this picture much more).

Unbalanced. If the creators hadn’t been afraid of cutting out all those dumb age-old wisecracks, completely ignoring the three dames and letting the aspects that work shine through, this could have been much better. It had the material for it. I expected improvisation, I got it. But I didn’t expect that the creators were going to have something to say. And they certainly do. It doesn’t work as a comedy even for a second, but as one big melancholic nostalgic sigh, it plays its role surprisingly well.

Such a good idea for a punchline certainly deserves better than this family (non)idyll with a stupidly behaving herd of adults and zero atmosphere. Or if not better, in any case shorter. While the first hour still works great, it gradually starts limping during the last half hour from one dumb cliché to another, in the last ten minutes becoming a parody of all of the worst genre clichés known to man. An unintentional parody, I should add. P.S.: It’s crying out for a Czech remake, we even have a perfect main protagonist (!SPOILER!) already.

For all the tripping up, dancing around and hitting of heads with a imaginable things, they forgot about... Well, about everything, in fact. All hail the exceptions in the form of the original dubbing, what was written on the rocket and those few good nods to the monster/UFO B-movies of the fifties.

The square root of film adaptations of Phillip K. Dick, both the good and the bad ones. A generic and stupid sci-fi B-movie with a not stupid idea that the right hands could be the base of a new Blade Runner. In the end, it’s actually like Total Recall, but without the action.

And I want a real-life actors version while Leonard Nimoy is still alive! The pure essence of depression, the outcome of which I do not consider at all pleasant or even relieving, but on the contrary, a depressing and forlorn confirmation of the unadulterated despair and depression. By the way, did I mention the word DEPRESSION yet?

A fairytale for adults, or how a small-minded Czech screwed up his life but then found relative happiness. The only thing that bothered me is Strach’s well-known habit of casting the most famous possible actors into every (every single) role. It’s so awful... Cheap and counterproductive. While in The Angel of the Lord he had his reasons to do so, here it’s just really out of place. On the other hand, it’s refreshing to see that even when you cast all the roles on paper exactly as everyone would expect (i.e. each one caught in their own little niche, doesn’t anyone have the balls to let Trojan play a slightly different type of role?), if they actually have something to act, then they put on a darn good performance.

If had been half as long, this would be a phenomenal tale with an atmosphere full of sleet, remote sprawling snowy wastes and fog. However, since it was so long, I began (however much unhappily) to realize half way through *yaawn*, that during the middle bit *yaawwn* nothing at all happens *yaaawwn* and the finale, which gives this finally gives this some balls, is still a long way off.