From the female characters Barbie herself, played by Margot Robbie is kind of boring, to be honest. She is the kind of perfect blank slate character that goes to do something, but ultimately is there just to meet other, more interesting characters. I mean, she is a dull. Get it? But Ken and Allan where both more interesting dolls. So I don't know. Though the weird Barbie played by Kate McKinnon is a fucking comedy gold. Also an interesting character in the movie is played by America Ferrera who has an interesting plot twist which I'm not going to spoil and a very cool monologue scene. About that monologue scene. I don't think it is only about women's experience. I am a guy and I can totally relate to everything she says there. Maybe it was the point.
In France the movie was released as just "Leon" and that's what I am going to call this movie here. I don't want to be typing "The Professional" every time I want to mention the name of the movie. Also I have to make it absolutely clear that this movie is half French. Yes, the film is about an Italian man. But he is played by Jean Reno, a French actor. The director of the film Luc Besson is a French director. And a lot of the crew were French as well. I'm saying that because there is a certain cultural divide between the United States of America ( where the movie is set ) and France ( or Europe ) where the movie was conceived. And therefor some decisions made in the film, for an American person would feel strange. Also I will be reviewing the extended director's cut of the film. Some people prefer this version to not exist. But I believe that this is the definitive version of the movie and if I re-watch Leon I make sure that the version I watch is the extended director's cut. To be honest I saw the original maybe only once. So I don't even remember what were the differences. For me, the theatrical cut of this movie does not exist.
It seems like United States of America has a unique problem related to guns. I certainly don't remember being taught at school in Israel or earlier in Ukraine about how to survive a potential gun shooting by a rouge student or other kind of terrible person. Here in Israel they do point us to the direction of a bomb shelter. So we would know where to run when a siren is heard. But that's about it.
I remember earlier than that when I was a teen I was exposed to an idea that American sensibilities permit more violence, while seeing sex as more of a taboo subject. Unfortunately it was so long ago that I don't have a link to that. On the other hand European sensibilities view sexual expression as more normal than violence. Which is wonderfully demonstrated by the types of cinema both types of cultures do. American cinema is mostly glorified violence. And even romantic films are very tame with sex. Films like The Room are often criticized for having way too many sex scenes way too frequently.
The movie An American Pickle seems to be a movie about Seth Rogen and feelings he has towards his ancestry and stuff. The movie is about a Jewish man from one hundred years ago, who travels time in the most ridiculous way ever and meets with his gray-grandson. Both of which are played by Seth. So the movie can be interpreted as a kind of inner dialogue of a person struggling with his identity. One side is this ultra-religious Yiddish speaking bearded man in black clothes. And the other is this modern high-tech person who develops software and doesn't believe in any god. And the comedy of the movie is about the differences between the two characters clash in an ideological sense. While also learning that they are, in a way, the same.
It seems like there are two main reasons Europeans hated Jews in those days. One of them being that Jews are often clever in how to accumulate wealth. While something like a Christian tradition sees wealth as something unholy. Jewish tradition sees poverty as undesirable. And sees nothing wrong with rich people. Therefor it seems like the major economic players in the entire Europe in those days were predominately Jews. Which lead to a lot of people to think that it was somewhat unfair to the core population of Europe. A similar tension is now possible to see with American economy. And places like Hollywood. Where Jews are the major players.
It's a movie similar in concept to something like American Psycho where a business person starts slowly going more and more insane, to the point that he starts committing murders and being all kinds of silly. But while American Psycho is more of psychological thriller, Vampire's Kiss is straight up black comedy. It's a story about a guy who slowly comes to an idea that he is a vampire, while he is not. And the movie has a lot of fun with this concept.
Also we probably have to talk about the current AI situation in the world. And people loosing jobs to AI. This movie uses this to it's advantage. To make you side with the humans at first. But it flips sides between AI and humans in a plot dance, so you feel properly conflicted between the two ideas. To be honest, I believe the film is a bit too naive about how terrible AI can turn out to be. It's not The Terminator. The movie views the problem of AI as a kind of racism in a way. AI in this movie lives in Asia. And Americans are there to kill it.
The incredible hatred of American people to expressions of utter sexuality in media made Showgirls an easy target for mockery. People perceived it as a rather surface-level soft-pornography, and not a film. And the critics scores of various websites reflect that consensus. Yet I am not one of them. And I think if Verhoeven did the same exact movie, say in Denmark, or some other place in Europe, the film would have received a much greater praise. Just look at Nymphomaniac by Lars Von Trier.
The acting in the movie is very good. There is a believable sadness in Dan Aykroyd's character which is perfectly balanced by the complete joyfulness of Vada, the main character played by Anna Chlumsky. Macaulay Culkin is in it. And he shared with Chlumsky an award from MTV in 1991 for the best kiss scene for this movie. The second love interest of Vada is played by Griffin Dunne who you may know from An American Werewolf in London. And there is a surprisingly good performance by the legendary Jamie Lee Curtis considering that her character is basically there just to be a love interest to Aykroyd's character, which stirs some drama in the film.
Natalie Portman is an interesting figure in the world of cinema. And the movie May December is a meta-analysis of Natalie's psychological journey through Hollywood. It is not a surprise that her first movie Leon: The Professional caused some levels of controversy. It was mainly an action film, so there was not that much controversy. But the dramatic elements of the film were questioned a lot by American audiences. Even Natalie Portman herself, being half-American described Leon as "cringe". And it seems like the growing obsession with all kind of sexual misconducts in Hollywood together with growing feelings of cringe from Leon made her into needing a movie like May December to evaluate everything and understand the phenomenon better.
The city of New York in the movie was made with a mix between real photography of New York and a set that was dressed to look like New York which was built in England. Stanley Kubrick didn't want to travel all the way to America to make this movie. So a set was made. But this set added to a weird feeling of strangeness to the whole place. Perhaps also a stylistic choice.
Asian cinema is different from American cinema. When in America filmmakers are often armed with enormous budgets, Asian cinema is trying to survive with what it has while still delivering the same, if not more, entertainment value. It's not that hard when dealing with dramas. There most of the time the story is about a few people in few locations, talking and crying with one another. Which is not expensive. But it's an entirely different challenge when you are trying to compete within the action-film market.
In 2012 ( this is definite because I remember listening to The All American Rejects album "Kids In The Street" which came out in 2012 and thinking how cool it was that I was listening to the music that just came out ) I started trying to make the movie sets on the computer. It was also the time when Blender Animation Studio were developing their film Tears Of Steel. I was obviously following the production of the film religiously. But most importantly I was hoping that their workflow could be replicated by me to make a grand epic alien movie.
Perhaps some 2 decades ago, when terrorism was a hot new topic in the United Stated of America, people actually looked, even if briefly, at the murder as is. As murder. And using terrorism for excusing surveillance worked like charm. Even big pro-freedom fighters were briefly okay with United States suddenly listening to every conversation in hope that it will prevent the next nine-eleven from happening. But since today about a half of the population of the planet sees terrorism as a kind of rebellious expression of being oppressed, the "fight with terror" excuse no longer has the same merit. And therefor is being fazed out for a bit more personal excuse.
Both good people like Stallman and Spielberg ( who is by the way a freedom fighter if you carefully look at messages in his films ) and terrible people like Zuckerberg and Rothschild family ( which got through the first anti-trust lawsuit in America ) exist. It's not about being good people or bad people. Or any of that bullshit. It's about having a skill that you can learn. Yes you! The reader of this article. You can learn that skill. You just need to surround yourself with so much insanity that your head melts. And hopefully, if you get out alive, you could choose for yourself, whether you want to help humanity or cause total collapse of human rights, or do nothing and hack your TV at home.
But then we go back to America and there are no action scene in the movie from that point on. Oh... There are! Well technically it's not an action scene. At least in the script it wouldn't be an action scene. But Steven Spielberg goes out of his way to present it as one. Tom Hanks's character learns that he needs to get somewhere quickly. So he talks in his phone in the car while driving at a bazillion miles per hour. Sitting in the cinema I though that it must be a Visual Effects shot, since who in their right mind would allow their lead actor drive so damn fast while talking on the phone!
In Israel - a country with "Freedom of Speech", there is a law not allowing you to deny holocaust. And if you do you will be sent to jail for 5 years. In the United States of America there isn't that kind of law. But both Israel and United States and many other countries that say that they have Freedom of Speech they still have censorship laws for one thing or another. Most countries, for example, make it illegal to spread child pornography.
Problem number one stands with the fact that people themselves might not be interested in freedom that much, but rather in other superficial things that lead them to choose those who will lead the whole system to value those superficial things more than freedom. For example things like "The Greatness Of The Country" could be one such example. Which for example had completely ruined the Democracy of such countries as Russia ( which at this moment has less freedom than it had during the Soviet Union ) and nearly ruined the United States Of America.
I didn't expect to find a Red camera in the same price range and a Black Magic camera to be honest. Red camera's prices remind me of the prices of Sony Venice more. They are at least 5 digits long in American Dollars. But then there is KOMODO 6K costing only $6K. Which is also the resolution of the camera. Even though, the 12K Black Magic costs roughly the same amount.