Is it just me?

...or does "Flash Forward" have one of the best casts in current TV? (OK it might just be my Kretschmann crush...)

The Young Victoria **

Director: Jean-Marc Vallée
Cast: Emily Blunt, Rupert Friend
Miranda Richardson, Paul Bettany, Mark Strong
Thomas Kretschmann, Jim Broadbent

Before she became the symbol of all that is frumpy, strong willed and well, Victorian, Queen Victoria of England was a free spirited young woman with problems like every other teenager; including repressed passions, irrational decision making and a, Royal, family that didn't understand her.
Or so we are told by director Jean-Marc Vallée, who takes us to the years before and right after the Queen's coronation.
When the movie begins, with portentous title cards suggesting the melodramatic chaos that will ensue, Victoria is a child "jailed" within a palace under the watchful eye of her mother, the Duchess of Kent (Richardson) and her controlling adviser Sir John Conroy (Strong).
"What little girl does not dream of growing up as a princess" asks Victoria before Vallée turns her into Jane Eyre.
But this lasts only for a few scenes and before long the child grows up into Emily Blunt. As she approaches her eighteenth birthday, the soon to be queen, is harassed by the people who have some sort of interest in her.
On one side there's her mother and Sir John, who constantly try to make her sign regency papers to take over her crown. Then there's also her uncle, King William IV (Broadbent) who's set on having his niece marry his son and rule the country.
Across the channel there's her uncle King Leopold I of Belgium (Kretschmann) who needs British support to continue his kingdom and enlists Prince Albert of Germany (Friend) to go and seduce his cousin Victoria for him.
Before the Princess goes "nervous breakdown" on them all, her uncle dies and she is crowned. She moves to Buckingham Palace (the first English monarch to live there!), befriends Prime Minister Lord Melbourne (Bettany) and falls in love with Albert, while surviving political crisis (over ladies in waiting?), giving birth to nine children and an assassination attempt.
Told with absolutely no scandalous theories, shocking sexual romps in the royal chamber (despite the Prince's famous ring), or even the most minimal attempt of questioning, the film plays out as very by the numbers and becomes pretty forgettable.
The screenplay, written by Julian Fellowes, is stacked with over the top lines meant to be opulent and Vallée's directorial tactics don't help in toning down the cheesiness.
"Do you ever feel like you're a chess piece in a game being played against your will?" asks Prince Albert to Victoria, while they play chess and are surrounded by her family and advisers...
Vallée is certainly not the master of subtlety (his previous film "C.R.A.Z.Y" was an exercise in coming of age/coming out clichés) and he fills "The Young Victoria" with obvious symbols, lazy time fluidity and dramatic tension that is only suggested by ominous music, fast editing and actors with eyes wide open (or the hairs in their arms raised in what proves to be an almost laughable moment).
The ensemble provides the job one would expect from renowned British actors in period costume; Richardson plays regretful meek, Strong is cartoon villain and Broadbent screams like only a King would be allowed to.
Friend is rather delightful and surprising, playing Albert with the suave coquetishness of a silent film movie star and his scenes truly give the film the spark of naive romance that would make Jane Austen TV adaptation fans fall in love with him.
While Blunt, who looks absolutely radiant, gives Victoria a sense of serenity and ironwill. She is able to play Victoria like a woman full of life, while infusing her with the stern, melancholy she would acquire in latter years and the one we have come to know of her.
But even if their work is good, the director makes sure they never feel like actual human beings, but as movie characters.
On the hands of someone with more expertise, the romance between Albert and Victoria wouldn't have been so sure, they would've had you doubting your knowledge of history or even popular culture.
The director could've taken two paths and either make this an ironic melodrama or a tempestuous postmodernist revision of history, instead he takes the safest path and doesn't do a single thing with the material.
Fans of shallow costume drama will go ga-ga over this queen as visually it's stunning (every pan and tilt seem to be designed to make audiences drool and Sandy Powell's costume design is, unsurprisingly, excellent), but there is little emotional or cerebral background to keep you interested.
The director's seeming fear of disrespect leaves him with flat characters and no spice. You can note this in how we see Victoria drawing in several occasions, yet the camera never shows us the results. Is it because the pictures might not satisfy us and we would end up thinking the Queen to lack talent?
During one scene Victoria sits in the theater under the sneaky, judgmental watch of the entire audience, Lord Melbourne asks her to kick them out to which she replies "if I ban everyone who thinks me wrong, you and I will be left alone."
In his too reverential "The Young Victoria" even she has been banned by Vallée.

Valkyrie **

Director: Bryan Singer

Cast: Tom Cruise

Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson, Carice van Houten

Thomas Kretschmann, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp, Eddie Izzard

It takes but a slight knowledge of history to know how "Valkyrie" will end. The film chronicles the attempt to kill Adolf Hitler led by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Cruise) on July 20th 1944.

Teaming with high rank members of the German Army Stauffenberg planned a coup that would use the Fuhrer's very own "Operation Valkyrie" to take over Germany and make a truce with the Allies putting an end to World War II.

When the key members of the army are played by character actors like Branagh, Stamp and Nighy the idea of the kind of prestige drama this could amount to would get any film lover salivating.

But when this remarkable team is led by Tom Cruise, it works in a completely different way. Not even attempting to have a German accent, Cruise doesn't make a clown out of von Staffenberg, because we never even get to see past the actor playing him.

Whenever Cruise tries to be serious and muster some sort of gravitas, all we really see is Tom Cruise wearing an eyepatch and trying to kill Hitler.

Rarely has the public perception of an actor affected so much the outcome of an entire movie, but it seems that deep down Cruise has come to terms with the fact that he's a movie star and if you stop taking the film as a serious historical piece and choose to view it as an action thriller the results can be obscenely entertaining.

Singer, who directs like a stock filmmaker under the studio system, just goes with the flow and lets his star shine.

The director's meticulousness is outstanding in the small flashes he let's us see, like the care he has taken in showing us bureaucratic and logistic methods of the era.

Since there is absolutely no regard for character growth and background, scenes with extras and unknown actors in small roles showing the chilling efficiency of the Nazi regime make for a treat.

Singer choreographs the action sequences with just as much care, giving the plot an actual tension even if you know how everything will end.

"Valkyrie" often plays out like an appointed B movie made for propagandistic reasons, after all movie stars were used to draft people during WWII and watching Tom Cruise battling the Nazis, although preposterous and somewhat disrespectful, still is able to engage the audience on a primal level.

When it comes to entertainment "Valkyrie" is an effective, if inconsequential, accomplished mission, as cinema it stays merely as a drill.

Wanted *

Director: Timur Bermakbetov
Cast: Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy
Morgan Freeman, Thomas Kretschmann, Terence Stamp

Wesley Gibson (McAvoy) is an accountant who works in a cubicle with a boss he hates, has a girlfriend who is cheating on him with his best friend and has fifteen dollars on his bank account.
His life is pathetic, "just like yours" as Wesley assumes of the audience as he addresses us.
One day a mysterious woman named Fox (with that name who else could it be but Jolie?) saves him from a man (Kretschmann) trying to kill him.
He later learns that Fox is part of a secret society of assassins aptly called "The Fraternity", led by the mysterious Sloan (Freeman) who reveals to Wesley that the father he never knew was also a member of their society who was recently murdered by a renegade who betrayed them.
Wesley then is trained to avenge his late father and escape his ho hum life.
Members of "The Fraternity" have the special ability to raise their heartbeats to four hundred per minute, which causes an adrenaline rush so high that they can perceive the world around them in a completely different way and can manipulate time and space; power that Wesley had mistaken with panic attacks (suddenly making Woody Allen all the more comprehensible...).
These assassins can jump off high buildings, walk atop moving trains and curve bullets (which is expected to be the "whoa" inducing element for audiences), they have glamorous badass lives and believe they are fulfilling some sort of heavenly deed with their motto that by killing one they can save a thousand.
The visuals are simply stunning and the action sequences constantly push themselves into "what else can they do now?" territory, McAvoy's geekiness makes for a cute Peter Parker sort of thing and Jolie struts her stuff so well that you don't really need her to do much talking (which she curiously doesn't get to do much of either, she justs sits in the back grinning and narrowing her eyes).
But the film's problem isn't its preposterousness (you are after all sitting in a theater watching an Angelina Jolie summer film...), but the fact that it chooses to be so awfully condescending to its audience and then can't muster up the balls to stick to its hedonist view.
Wesley is supposed to be the everyman, a creature extracted from a version of "Fight Club" for the mentally challenged, but as it exploits the sick nature of violence and murder and reduces it to innocent teenage fantasies one has to also wonder what has made the filmmakers so sure that everyone hates their life?
What if there is someone out there who actually loves sitting in a cubicle working numbers? Why do people need to desire extravagant lifestyles as the only outlook for happiness?
Not to be confused with conformism, "Wanted" assumes every member of the audience has a fourteen year old, gun loving, horny teenager inside of them.
One for that matter, that eventually will outgrow this, atone for his sins and move on to an elightened, yet exciting, life.
If "Wanted" had been made in some obscure Eastern European country and was subtitled, people would accuse it of being subversive and inviting people to become murderers, but because it is American, released during the summer and stars Jolie's breasts, it's just seen as harmless fun.