Toxic Imaginarium Online

Toxic

Imaginarium Online, Movie Reviews Directed by Jan Sverák; screenplay by Zdenek Sverák F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote a piece on How to Waste Material, claiming essentially that there are only so many good ideas or so much artistic raw material available, and when bad or lazy artists use it up for bad or incomplete works, its not like somebody else can come along later and use it again; the idea is, for all intents and purposes, permanently botched. Going to the movies these days is much too often, at best, a painful exercise in sifting through a growing pile of wasted material and botched ideas. Of course, since the pile of botched ideas is dwarfed only by the pile of money that even bad films generate, its not likely that any Idea Protection Agency will ever be able to put a stop to this ongoing waste of our international resources. Whole forests of ideas are clear cut and not replaced; at least new ideas grow faster than trees, if thats any consolation for all the terrible waste. Meanwhile, the only way I have been able to connect with many films talk about them, think about them, engage with them is to muse over where they went wrong and consider what might have been done to prevent what is otherwise a movie not worth talking or thinking about or in any way engaging with. Kind of a mental thumb twiddling I give into at the theater when I find myself in the midst of a botched film. This drives my wife crazy, and if you think it might do the same for you, read no further, for I intend to spoil the film I discuss here in many more ways than one. Of course, who am I, short of being Michelangelo and I am far short of being Michelangelo to believe I still see outlines of the work of art in the original block of marble that the artist completely missed? The problem is, for whatever reason, that most filmmakers seem to me to be producing less a finished sculpture of David than something like those famous unfinished Prisoners of Michelangelo that remind one of poor Han Solo trapped in carbonite. Then again, I sometimes also pick out patterns in the tiles on our bathroom floor that I think would make really cool pictures. So all this may have mostly, then, to do with the admittedly-botched artist who seems to be permanently trapped inside of me. Be that as it may, the film that most recently got me musing in this way again was just released on DVD, Dark Blue World, a Czech film, for which I had high hopes and would have seen at the theaters except for an unsettling number of bad reviews. By the same father-son team that gave us the truly enjoyable Kolya and My Sweet Little Village, the film is about Czech pilots who flew for the RAF during World War II, after their own county had been gobbled up in Hitlers quest for lebensraum. This most expensive production in Czech film industry history is not nearly as good as that other recent and more cheaply-made Czech movie about coming to terms with the messy consequences and moral conundrums of World War and Cold War, 2000s Divided We Fall. Usually, Id just review the film I liked and ignore the one I didnt, except here, as so often, Im haunted by the film that might have been. Dark Blue World is a great-looking film, with some fine moments in dogfight sequences pitting Messerschmidts and Spitfires over the English countryside. The pyrotechnics are not so much that they pull focus from the relationships in the story, which would be fine, except it was the relationships that left me cold. I felt even worse as I listened to the director and his screenwriter father talking on the DVD Special Features about Toxic kind of movie they thought they were making: a film about friendship, set against a love triangle, amid war. Hey, this is a fine idea and its been done both well and badly; its one of those things that if you get it right is archetypal, and cliche-ridden if you get it wrong. For me, neither the friendship nor romance ever rose here above the level of cliche: the chemistry just Toxic not there for either Eros or Philia. More importantly, there didnt seem to be a moral center to anchor either end of the triangle, as was the case with the oddball love triangle quadrangle? in Divided We Fall, which was all about moral center. In Dark Blue World, one guy sleeps with the girl, the other guy sleeps with the girl, their friendship sketchy at best goes bad, sketchily, then the first guy inevitably sacrifices himself for the other: but in such a way as to remain as vague and anti-climatic as everything else. Meanwhile, the action occasionally flashes forward to the Communist prison where all these Czech pilots ended up after the war, where the friendship theme is still nominally in play, former enemies learning to love each Toxic under harsh conditions, blah blah blah. I was unconvinced and thought the flashbacks were both ineffective and unnecessarily took screen time away from the main story.