The Leverton Review

 So I picked this film because it's in Czech, and I'm trying to learn Czech. I'm also trying to learn Dutch, and I recently watched a very bad Dutch romantic comedy. This is not as bad as that one, but I feel that it might be a case where if you don't understand Czech you might miss some of the humor. Some jokes made me chuckle a bit, but it seemed like an endless series of jokes rather than a coherent movie. But on the other hand, it might be that this movie is like Airplane!. A movie like that would be immensely hard to translate and for people who are not native speakers of the language to find funny.

 This is a good examination of the lives of professional wrestlers. Although to call them professional would seem to be a bit of a stretch because did they barely get paid. The series ends up being a good examination of why some people choose to pursue a career in a profession where the chances of becoming successful are even less high than in other professional sports. Wrestling is a weird combination of athleticism and acting. The series also does a good job of explaining the work it takes to deliver a believable story in this world. Another thing that sprung to my mind while I was watching this is that sometimes the difference between someone who is talented and someone who is successful just boils down to Charisma. For example, Hulk Hogan was not the most talented wrestler ever to wrestle, but he had undeniable charisma. And it kind of shows why some of the wrestlers are wrestling not for more successful promotions, but for a third tier promotion. I was inspired by this to watc...

 This is one of those films that I am sure I watched when I was a child, and I'm sure that I enjoyed it. But upon rewatching it an adult, it is problematic. It's problematic thematically, and it's also problematic in terms of the casual racism and dated humour. There are a couple of scenes that are digs against the counterculture movement, which makes sense because the film was released in 1968, but they don't really hold up today. It would be like somebody complaining about Millennials in a movie and then having that movie be watched 40 years later and people would have no idea what you're talking about. Obviously, we know what hippies are, but the way that they make fun of hippies is very specific to that moment in time. The Casual racism involves Chinese characters speaking with bad English accents, but it is slightly subverted when one of them turns around and speaks perfect English, although that character is portrayed as the wise old Asian man stereotype. And ...

 While certainly not a bad film, this slacks the heart and charm of its predecessor. Shadow, the older dog, was almost certainly an afterthought to the plot, but in the previous film he was a crucial older mentor figure. Sassy, the cat character, it's just mean and not sassy anymore. The animals have gone through a traumatic experience in the first film, and the Chance character has been traumatized by an experience in a pound, and yet the cat character brings this up quite often to him as a kind of joke which seems really mean and not something a friend would do. The first film was an adventure through a wilderness, and this one is the trite idea that the city is an urban wilderness. The film is set in San Francisco, but there seem to be packs of feral dogs running around in the city. This seems to be a tad unrealistic, but is a feature of many films in which there are talking animals. The American city with the biggest problem with stray dogs is Detroit with 5,000 in 2023, so we ...

 In a world where time is literally money, watch as people have giant bank account numbers flash in their arms and then die in ridiculous ways and movements when their time is up. It's a heist movie pretending to be a social commentary movie in the guise of a Sci-Fi, where is the Sci-Fi technology makes no sense at all. In a world where everyone can live forever, time is somehow rationed to people. How does this work? Do people have bombs attached to their hearts? Is there somehow a parasitic time worm that can count time? If this movie were a tab more entertaining, I wouldn't really care about these questions, but alas it's not that entertaining. Amanda Seyfried it is nice to look at, but apart from that you could probably skip this movie.

 I recently watched the original version of this movie called the Incredible Journey, and while certain aspects of both films are similar, the big improvement is that the animals can actually talk in this one, and we know what is going on in their brains. Not that the first movie is bad in any way, because it isn't, it's just a totally different kind of movie. This movie is the best talking animal movie of all time. Do you have a very obscure genre of movie that you really like, and you don't have any rational reason for liking it? My obscure movie genre is the genre of talking animals. I just love them, and this is the greatest example of why these movies are fun in my opinion. Michael J fox does the voice of Chance in a charming and affable way, as is usual with most of his roles, and Sally Field is great and sassy as the cat Sassy. The writing of the movie is great, and some of the lines that Chance says are really profound. The movie doesn't make a lot of sense if y...

 The only reason I started to watch this was to practice Dutch, I regret my decision. It's a romantic comedy filled with the same kind of horrible people you find in other romantic comedies, but to an extreme. If the film had had any sort of self-awareness, it would have been more interesting. The main character is a selfish, obtuse woman. The main love interest is a pathologically toxic man who cannot countenance a woman not fitting the standard definition of attractiveness because she wears glasses. Best to avoid this one.