Per Gunnar Jönsson
Per Gunnar's Activity
Per Gunnar reviewed...
Django Unchained (2012)
This is one of the best movies I have watched in a long time. It is a… More
This is one of the best movies I have watched in a long time. It is a pure Tarantino blast. The somewhat unexpected and quite hilarious start of the movie catches your attention from the start and from then on it is 3 hours (almost) of pure enjoyment.
The main actors are playing their roles very well. The Dr. King Schultz character (Christop Walz) is incredibly funny without being ridiculous, Jamie Foxx is excellent as Django and Leonardo DiCaprio is doing his role well as a plantation owner and slave trader. None of the rest of the crew stood out as particularly bad. Well with the possible exception of Tarantino himself then when he made his usual in-movie appearance a' la Hitchcock. Not that he was particularly bad but he is no actor either.
The movie starts of by Dr. Schulz liberating Django and proceeding to a small town showing Django what he is in the business of doing. Those first minutes of the movie are somewhat unexpected and very funny to watch. After that the movie gets more serious as Django gets to learn to be a bounty hunter and finally gets on with his quest to rescue his "Damsel in distress". It still has quite a bit of "Tarantino humour" sprinkled around in it though.
During the movie we are treated to a long series of stereotypical people with, let us say, an "attitude" towards African people. It is tempting to say "nigger haters" but that would not be true since a lot of these people did not exactly hate them. They just did not consider African people to be people but more than live stock for them to use as they wished. Unlike a lot of movies portraying these events this one never comes across as boringly finger pointing or overly morally lecturing. Nor does it in any way support or glorify the way things were at this time. It is a movie made to entertain set in a period where bad shit happened and using it for the story. Nothing more and nothing less.
As usual with a Tarantino movie there are some violent parts, some more violent parts and some bloody violent parts in it. The ending fights are a glorious show of destruction and blood splatter. I am sure some people are complaining about the "unnecessary violence". I am not one of those people. Without these parts it would not be a real Tarantino movie. As always it is made with the usual exaggeration that Tarantino is so good and which reminds you that it is "only a movie".
This is one of the few movies that I have given 10 out of 10 stars in a very long time. I enjoyed it immensely.
2 hours ago via Rotten Tomatoes
Per Gunnar reviewed...
Life of Pi (2012)
I did not have huge expectations on this movie since it is not exactly… More
I did not have huge expectations on this movie since it is not exactly my style of movie but nevertheless I have to say that I was disappointed. The movie is certainly quite beautiful to watch, at least part of it. However it is also a movie with a strong theistic agenda. Even though it is, luckily, not really religious/political extremism it is thick and intruding nonetheless. I was expecting Pi to actually learn something during the course of his adventure but he does not. He starts the movie gullible and foolish looking for meaning in life (religion) and the movie ends pretty much in the same way with him claiming that he had faith and therefore he survived. Yet none of the decisions he made was based on faith but simply pragmatical decisions of survival. If anything the movie proved that faith or religion had nothing to do with it.
As I said the movie was, partly, quite beautiful to watch and this is entirely what rendered it the stars that I gave it. For the rest it was a very boring movie. The only mildly entertaining part was the scenes on the boat with Gérard Depardieu playing the very unpleasant cook. As beautiful to watch as they were many of the scenes were quite unrealistic though and had an artificial look to them even when, I believe, it was not intended. We bought the movie because my youngest daughter loves movies about animals but not even she was overly entertained by this movie.
1 day ago via Rotten Tomatoes
Per Gunnar reviewed...
Cleanskin (2012)
Lately there have been a flurry of movies with Sean Bean in them on… More
Lately there have been a flurry of movies with Sean Bean in them on various channels on CanalSat. I do like Sean Bean and, in general, I have liked the movies that I have seen with him as an actor in them. Not so with this one. As I said in the title, I think this movie is a load of rubbish. That is not really the fault of Sean Bean though. He is doing his usual good work.The problem is with the script. The basic story, that an arms dealer should run around with suitcases loaded with Semtex and that robbing them should be a way for Islamist terrorists to procure explosives is quite far-fetched from the start. After the initial action sequences the movie just drags along with long flashbacks and sporadic outbursts of violence. It is downright boring.Throughout the movie we are constantly feed with long propaganda talks and justifications for why this guy became a terrorist in the first place. In the end Sean Bean does indeed get the bad guy, both the terrorist (one of them at least) and at the same time exposing that the terrorists actually had help from within thus throwing some shit at the British government and the fight against terrorism at the same time.When watching this movie I could not help but feel that this was just a, mildly concealed, political propaganda movie and that the killing of a few of the terrorists in the end was just to get it to pass as politically correct in the Western world. The only reason I did not give it a one star rating was because of Sean Bean's performance. I just wish that he had never played in this particular movie.
8 days ago via Rotten Tomatoes
