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As Good As It Gets

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Police, Adjective is about Cristi, a cop, whose conscience interferes with his police work. He does not want to arrest a pot-smoking teenager he has been tailing - who may or may not be dealing - because the drug laws will soon be revised. Good golly, Miss Molly, if every cop's conscience dictated his/her actions - not to follow police procedures and the oath he/she took - there would be chaos in every town and city throughout the world. Despite that cops all over the world take an oath to uphold the law, writer/director Corneliu Porumboiu thought he had a story to tell anyway.How does Porumboiu tell his story? With too many unnecessary, long, drawn out scenes. It's as if Porumboiu did not consider what he was focusing upon in his scenes to help him determine what the length of those scenes should be. And, so, what could have been told in two minutes with a clock on the wall, is told in six minutes. We get it, Mr. Porumboiu! Really, we do!The final scene in the movie is between Cristi and his superior, Anghelache, who puts a dictionary in Cristi's hands and makes him look up several definitions. The scene goes on way too long. It's like looking into a grade school classroom, except the student is a cop. Ouch! Anghelache's point is lost because he spends too much time making Cristi look up too many words. Words one would have though a grown man would know the definitions of already. On top of that, a cop has to be reminded that the law is the law? The only thing I appreciated about Police, Adjective is the simplistic camera shots. If Porumboiu had shown us that the kid's mother was an invalid and living in squalor - and why the cop all of a sudden has a conscience - then I would say conscience vs. police oath might be a good story. But he didn't, and so his story and his too many lengthy scenes makes Police, Adjective a wee bit too tedious and stale to enjoy, or believe.

I'm not the type that demands lots of action for a cop movie to be good, I just want SOMETHING. This movie had very little. The story idea was great but if moved slower than a turtle in a snowdrift. I sat watching this hoping it would get better, just a little. I was glad I had the option of fast forwarding. A scene where the main character eats while in the background his wife listens to music. WOW, that's entertainment. For a minute, two maybe three minutes I could deal, but this scene was closer to 5 minutes, or at least is seemed like it. Watching the house was far longer than it had to be. The acting was flat as a pancake. I know real life conversations are not always animated and I don't want a lot of that, but everyone sounded like they were stuggling to stay awake, which, if not for fast forward, I could identify with.I applaud the moral and ethical soul searching, I just wish it had been cut to a 15 minute movie.

This is a film about a policeman and a matter of conscience. There's a circle of three friends, two boys and a girl, one boy has denounced the other boy to the police for supplying marijuana, it appears that this is so he can have the girl to himself. Our policeman, Cristi is being pressed to slap the cuffs on the kid by his superior, the charge is a life-wrecker, seven years in prison for smoking joints at lunch break. Cristi spends the movie trying to avoid this outcome. As he says, it's a foolish law.Cristi is pushing against a bureaucracy that simply doesn't care, and ends up looking like a fool when he talks to people who are more educated with him, for example suffering his girlfriend's overanalysis of a ludicrous ballad, or the pseudo-dialectics of his boss, a masterpiece of sophistry. The point is that language or words often constitute another form of aggression, as the Athenians knew, you can win any argument once you have mastered rhetoric. Of course, as soon as anyone raises their voice or gets upset, this is taken as a sign that they've lost the argument, the intellectual warfare, losing having nothing whatsoever to do with being right or wrong of course.The film is about conscience, something that totalitarian societies tried to eliminate in favour of the wisdom of the law. Good film although some of the intricacies of the discussions were lost on me not being a Romanian, and unable to follow the thread of Romanian spelling and grammar.I actually loved the movie on an aesthetic level, I doubt it was intentional, but I always pick up on dashes of yellow in visual arts, an eccentricity of mine. For example in the street where the kid under surveillance lives, all the utilities pipes that come out onto the street are painted bright yellow, the young girl appears first wearing a bright yellow top under denim, and Cristi uses a yellow lighter and a yellow pen, most of the rest of the colour in the movie is very dull and subdued, I enjoyed these flashes. It's also nice seeing old communist offices, nowadays in the west everything is open plan and new, no-one has offices except the capo di tutti capi. Here there's peeling plaster, old caved in lockers, and a little peace and quiet. Hell I even liked just seeing Cristi sat down eating. Then there's the formal way where letters and plans are just shown on the screen with no background. I like the style of the police reports.I would just point out that based on my understanding of the film, the English title is a mistranslation, politist is like the French word policier, which all we can translate as is "police procedural"; another translation is "policeman". The translations are nouns though so I was a little confused as to why it's being referred to as an adjective. Maybe the error is meaningful?

This is surely the most boring and pretentious movie I have ever watched. Even for the artsy standards you can encounter at a festival such as Cph Pix, I found Politist to be a tedious experience. Luckily I persuaded my friend to leave after 70 minutes, at that stage I was outright puzzled by how such a boring piece of cinema could have won such critical acclaim. In fact, I think it is because the movie naturally makes one reflect and meta-analyze about the movie as it unfolds - it is simply not possible to merely enjoy the movie, relate to the characters, get moved by the story - the only way to cope with this miserable movie is to start thinking about it as it unfolds. The story is simple and I suppose the director and proponents wants to make a Kafka/Camus-kinda point about the absurdity of life in some bleak post-communist provincial city in Romania. How this cliché of a movie can be considered prober art and/or entertainment by any intelligent human being is simply beyond me. My advice: don't see it unless you want to see a text book example of boring and pretentious cinema.