Hollywood is lying!

This is a great year to be in an country where movies aren't dubbed. The Dark Knight Rises, Avengers, Looper, Total Recall, Dredd, Spiderman (just kidding), Resident Evil (not kidding).

An interesting effect is how the message and even the genre of a movie can shift if you watch it with the idea of voluntarism lodged in your brain. You can even watch your favourite movies for a second 'first time', and they might not even be your favourites afterwards! Here's what I think:

Dredd:

It is the age of the remake. When it was first attempted to bring the Judge to the big screen, they gave him character development. And for that to work, they gave him a character. Who took off his helmet.

The new one is not a remake of that movie, but a new attempt to turn the comic into one, with a Dredd that has no character and no face. He is the law. He keeps his helmet on and is nothing more than what the Hall of Justice considers the ideal Judge. To give the movie a character, he gets a psychic sidekick who doesn't wear a helmet at all. Other than Spidey3's Venom, there is an explanation for it, it interferes with her abilities. Fine by me.

So, we have the 'good ones', fighting the 'bad ones', a drug producing gang that lives in a tower whose other inhabitants propably don't like the violence in front of their doors, no matter from whom. If you look past the good-bad thingy, the movie is no longer a crime-fighting action movie, but a nihilistic explodium. But that makes it all the more interesting. If you don't listen to the good-bad narratice to know wether an action is good or bad, but analyse it according to your own moral framework (say, UPB), this movie is as educational as it is entertaining.

And entertaining it is. No shaking cameras, beautiful slo-mo sceneries (Shut up, I like them). And they find an in-universe explanation for that, too: The drug itself is Slo-Mo! Brilliant! There remains just one question: when you use 3D, then why do you still need this effect where you shift the camera focus from a far object to a near one? With all the techology we have, can't we show everything clear, so I can decide myself what object I focus on?

My two cents in a nutshell: I enjoyed it and whould have seen it again, whould it not have vanished from the cinemas within two weeks.

Looper:

It is also the age of the new and original story that has never been before! Looper is from the subgenre of science-fiction wherein a technology is introduced into a society that resembles ours. The difference is that it is not used by the scientist who invented it (e.g. Back To The Future) or the military/police (e.g. minority report), but by reckless criminals who cleverly use it for their own profit (e.g. Inception).

It's been a while since I watched it, and I lost my notes on this one, but I really liked it. Willis doesn't want to talk about how time travel works because he'd be ending up drawing diagrams with ketchup? Brilliant! And following the important 'show don't tell', we get to see what happens to future you if past you gets captured... One of the most memorable moments of time-travel science-fiction is that most unusual chase scene.

Other than that, the world we see is not too distant from ours, but the telekinesis comes out of nowhere, that may have been solved more smoothly. But what do I know about writing a screenplay?

I should do some reading on how to write a decent movie critique, this is closer to what I talked about with other viewers afterwards. See it yourself if you want to know how it is.

Oh, I also watched Atlas Shrugged and was kinda disappointed. It feels rushed, they have to cover 400 pages in one movie. Also, the collectivists are too obviously evil, i.e. doing it to gain control by knowing the right people. As far as I see it, the councils were established with the genuin purpose of doing the best for everyone, and people only turned to personal favourism after they saw that altruism doesn't work out.