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Reviews
The Expendables (2010)
just horrible
extremely boring and directionless movie. even for an action movie the dialogs seem extremely random, the characters are ultra simplified and childish. what kind of audience are the producers of this movie targeting ? children and teenagers ?
after watching this, standard crime movies like goodfellas and scarface suddenly appear like brilliant masterpieces to me.
randy couture should quit acting. even in a sub par movie like this he seems totally lost.
all the main characters in the movie are supposed to come across as extremely tough fighting machines. unfortunately for the movie that concept doesn't work. our heroes seem more like a bunch of pansies that are involved in a few extremely unrealistic action/fighting sequences that can't distract from their feminine characters.
Lucky Luciano (1973)
multi layered masterpiece
loosely focusing on Lucanio's life in Italy, this movie combines elements of documentary, gangster flick and political movie.
a Reality component is added to the movie by Charles Siragusa playing himself as prosecutor of Luciano. In the real world Siragusa failed to prove Luciano's involvement in drug trafficking from sicily into the US. and in this movie he seems to put an effort into using the results of his work to render luciano's role in the business.
in the first half of the movie there is an extended sequence about vito genovese's time in italy something that seems completely disconnected from the rest of the plot, no hints are given about his actual connection to luciano and his role in the Gene Giannini hit shown later in the movie.
things may be very confusing for viewer who doesn't know the biographies of people like luciano, vito genovese, joe pagano, meyer lansky and other mobsters as the movie constantly jumps between different periods of times, places and people without explaining their interconnections.
so that being informed on those characters should be necessary to understand what this movie is about.
for the whole time characters are elaborated very well and portrayed in a humanistic way supported by the brilliant soundtrack composed of a couple of 50ies jazz tunes and absolute top level cinematography.
the performances delivered by Volonte as Lucky Luciano and Rod Steiger as Gene Giannini are on a Level that remains to be seen in other movies.
culminating in the Gene Giannini hit where the atmosphere reaches a level of stunning dramatical density.
Les quatre cents coups (1959)
a brilliant masterpiece
Antoine Doinel is a 12 years old boy who is rather well mannered and sensible but his childish naiveness is enough for him to become an arbitrary victim of the machineries of parental disfunctionality and criminalization.
He is exposed to the ignorance of his mother who doesn't like him and on the other hand the oldfashioned schoolsystem that pays no attention to the specific circumstances in Antoines life. Even though he tries to satisfy the demands of both of these institutions the improved solutions that he thought up in childish naiveity lead to fatal consequences.
once he is classified a troublemaker by his teacher and parents there is no escape from the process where at its end family and educational system arrange his deportation to a working camp for juvenile delinquents.
Truffauts approach to the subject becomes clear in a scene where dozens of little children excitedly follow a puppetshow, pointing out how children all react alike to a well intended input from the grown up world, at the same time indicating that children enter the world with a pure mind and soul and consequently showing how grown ups settled Antoines fate as a juvenile delinquent.
without clumsy sentimentality but a very sharp sense for Antoine's in the beginning uncritical and naive perception of the process of his criminalization during that he gradually develops an understanding for what is happening to him, Truffaut depicts the drama that culminates in the final scene where Antoine runs away from the working camp to the nearby sea as an attempt to escape from the criminal identity and emotional pain imposed on him by parents and educational institutions.
Truffaut more or less portrays his own youth in this movie. And maybe that is the reason why he is able to describe the story of his protagonist with unmatched sensibleness and humanism.