terceiro-2

This is a great movie. I have watched this movie a few times and have enjoyed it on each viewing. it tells the story of the return of a progressive politician to a totalitarian state with a corrupt police force. His return is to deliver a speech in the lead up to general elections. The movie shows the steps which the government and the police will go to try and firstly stop him from delivering a speech and secondly from trying to silence him permanently.

The main reason I like this movie is because the characters are so well developed and original. There are no clichés in this movie when it comes to any of the characters. Even somewhat minor characters have strange little personality traits, which distinguish them from the run of the mill supporting cast. For example, the witness who decides to come forward to the police turns out to be quite a complex character when one discovers his motivations are coming forward.

The only person that seems a bit wasted in this movie is Irene Papas , who virtually says nothing through the whole movie. Indeed she does little more than make a succession of intense facial expressions throughout the movie.

Despite the heavy themes that this movie is seeking to explore, there is also quite a lot of humour. I particularly liked the scenes which showed the desperate attempts by a succession of police officers attempting to escape the media through a locked door.

I was attracted to this movie by the line "Makes the Matrix look like child's play" on the promotional flyer. What a misrepresentation. Matrix is a vastly superior movie to ExistenZ. In fact ExistenZ is simply a very ordinary movie, which looks like it was made on a shoestring budget.

I have really enjoyed a few Cronenberg movies such as Scanners and Videodrome, but this was not even close to being as good as those movies. In fact there was clearly a great deal of influence from another awful Cronenberg movie, The Naked Lunch, in this movie.

Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh are both excellent actors, but they seemed lost in this movie, wandering around trying to work out what to do next. There are other heavyweights such as Ian Holm and William Dafoe whose roles are must have been intended to be caricatures.

The scenes which depict the civil war are some of the least convincing and low budget efforts I have ever seen in a movie boasting such a good cast.

Watch this one with your expectations set very low and, who knows, you may be pleasantly surprised!

I watched the Wadja War Trilogy back to back, so you can imagine I was looking forward to the final instalment which is generally considered to be the best of the three. However, I was quite disappointed. The reason for my disappointment was because O felt the lead character was trying much too hard to be a Polish James Dean. The only difference being that the odd things James Dean used to do when he was acting, didn't seem weird out of place. Unfortunately, you don't get the same feel from the weird things that the lead in Ashes and Diamonds keeps doing throughout this movie. Even the final scene seems to me to be quite strange and almost comical.

Having said that, the plot is great and Wajda does a great job capturing the atmosphere of confusion which must have existed in Poland on the last day of the war. Nationalists and communists were no longer fighting a common foe in the Nazis - rather they were now fighting each other for the right to rule Poland.

Despite my reservations about the lead character, this is still worth watching. Given the other reviews I have read about this movie, I am clearly in a minority in my views about the lead character.