This crap might well be the best example of what turkish cinema could produce of worst in the eighties, stealing Hollywood's successes and replacing the north-american propaganda by turkish themes and characters.
Cüneyt Arkin (unrelated to Alan Arkin, nor to Alain Delon) was the biggest star in Turkey, back in those times where kicking some red stuffed giant monster asses, making toilet-paper mummies, or shooting hand-drawn-directly-over-the-film-stock laser beams wasn't that much ridiculous.
Note that this awful 1982 movie, though being one of the worst thing one could possibly watch in a movie theatre (which I actually did, for the fourth time I've been watching this crap, and in France's best movie theatre, MK2 Bibliothèque, s'il vous plaît !), still has many funny things, funny exactly because they weren't intended to be funny, and are most often very mistakenly brought to screen (bad actors, wrong subjects, no story, ridiculous fights, ridiculous -falsely- muslim propaganda, use of "Moonraker", "The Black Hole" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" 's main themes over "Star Wars" 's stock shots, incoherence between the foreground turkish actors and the background stock shots, or even hand-drawn AND hand-moved opening credits...).
But the worst of all isn't part of this film itself ! It's that it had a sequel 24 years later, which was really worse (a tasteless "navet" -literally, turnip- as we call it in french), because this time it was intended to be a funny parody of the first opus, and thus had completely missed the point of what shall be funny in a "cult bad movie" ("nanar", in french) - hence not being part of the latter category...
Although normal movie-goers wouldn't see such a bad movie very often, this one truly deserves to be watched at least once (it's funny enough not to kill yourself immediately, but I admit that watching only excerpt may suffice), as an introduction to the great world of "
nanar" (as we in France call any ridiculously funny bad movie). Trust me (for those who might think they knew what cult bad movies are), even "Plan 9 from outer space" was better !
Anyway, I've seen "Turkish Star Wars" 4 times, and am still alive... But I've seen worse (like for instance : the sequel, and of course the legendary worst film of all times, "Manos, the Hands of Fate").
Not much to say about this pretty little french movie. The style is good, the aesthetic somehow minimalistic (and then full of fractals...), the story simple yet not uninteresting (Pierre Bordage surely has a lot of talent as a science-fiction writer).
Until their 2 last movies, Pixar's productions had always got better and better. According to me, "Ratatouille" and "WALL-E" had both reached the highest level that the studio could offer. But now for the first time, their new film is a little under what I would have expected from Pixar.
This movie has, aesthetically speaking, nothing absolutely exceptional.
Almodóvar claims his love of cinema in this wonderful movie. Of course, it's not the best of what Pedro Almodóvar can do, as an important director with his own style, but it is still a beautiful declaration of love to the very art he's been nourishing so well for years now. The story is very good, but it seems that the director's first idea of another longer edition might have let some little flaws happen in this yet very good movie.
This wonderful film, although being fictitious, is a good way of summing up England's history of illegal radio stations on boats. The characters, all funny and charming in their own style, also represent every genre of music/drugs/political beliefs from back in the 1960's, and are played by huge actors (Hoffman and Nighy above all !). The music is obviously excellent (a whole radio-boat crew bringing to England's young ears the best of musical artists the sixties had to offer), and there is, of course, a *fuckload* (as Simple Simon would say) of memorable dialogs (my favorite might be the scene where someone first says the 'F word' on the radio waves...).
