Othello

While watching this I couldn't stop thinking about the comment from the documentary Electric Boogaloo that even though spent the 80s and 90s shooting virtually the same stories with similar outcomes, the difference was that they were on the fringes of film interest and were making films with minimal budgets only to sell them to distribution companies later, their contemporaries nowadays are blockbusters with the most expensive actors and nine-figure budgets. Infantile times call for infantile deeds. Although engagement in the form of being drowned in something helps, because the dizzying scenes and the occasional destruction here and there can be pleasing to the undemanding eye, it's more likely that irritation will ultimately prevail over the poorly edited action, sleazy pandering to the Chinese market, dull motivations and characters, and Dwayne Johnson's unbearably incompetent acting (don't tell me he didn't indiscreetly feel someone up maybe a decade ago, come on, find the evidence. I'll give you money). Plus, the presence of terrorists in the building brings to mind the first Die Hard every now and then, and as soon as you’ve got that on your mind, the whole Skyscraper comes tumbling down.

He sends people to Dexter and offers them his own therapy, whereupon the audience, having paid their way in, dutifully leaves the cinema outraged. I love that bastard. Trier has cleared the bar he set in Nymph()maniac and is debating with himself the nature of art as redemption. In doing so, he struggles to come to terms with the agonizing duality of being both an artist and a pragmatic technician, which is the burr in his saddle as a director. Indeed, everything here is an offering to that auteur duality. It's bloated but apologetic. It's utterly selfish, but the film is the first to admit it. The question is how much the film works without knowing the context. Still, I was completely blown away here by the dream logic that runs through all the sequences. Everything is devoid of temporal or spatial definition; in a strangely dehumanized world, the plot shifts arbitrarily in sharp contrasts, and everything plays out at the very edge of believability. And just like the times when you lie in bed for an hour in the morning staring at the ceiling and trying to reconstruct a vivid dream that seemed meaningful to you, only when the film is over are you given the respite and space to start piecing it all together.

The final credits sum it all up – Ant-Man is really nothing more than a little tyke's Saturday afternoon with a giant Lego set. On the one hand, it's irritating in the randomness of the situations, where basically nothing has any greater internal integrity; on the other hand, it's pleasing to see a lot of creativity in the action scenes and generally the second half of the film, when a bunch of people keep tossing a building around between them like a hot potato. By the way, I'd like to see the interior of the building when it's enlarged. Unfortunately it’s never quite daring enough to make me respect the film, and instead still clings to juvenile humor built around a confused hero in a strange situation, with Paul Rudd playing pretty much a family-friendly version of Deadpool here, i.e. not funny and sorely in need of a beating. After ten years of this, we should all be asking for more from Marvel. I'm dropping it a star for that reason, though compared to Black Panther or Infinity War at least this was fun.

[spoiler party] Picking up from Villeneuve's Sicario, which in terms of execution is one of the most distinctive and profound contributions to the conversation around US-Mexican misunderstanding, is nothing more than an ordeal, especially given the almost complete replacement of the creative team. What's left, however, is screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, whose work continues to draw on themes hinted at in the first piece, the most prominent of which is the frustrating inability to grasp the essence of evil in order to root it out. Here the frustration is all the more powerful because of the link between the smuggling cartels and Islamic terrorism, which, though it drives the plot, we actually learn somewhere past the midpoint of the film that it was actually a red herring. The constantly recurring name of cartel leader Carlos Reyes should indicate that the story will somehow end with him, but we don't see him for the entire film. We do, however, see a number of gun-fetish scenes, perfectly coordinated military actions, and quite a bit of American military hardware that, while leaving a decent pile of bodies in its wake, never for a moment makes it feel like they're winning. Because Sicario translates the conflict of good and evil into a clash between order and corrupting chaos, which order can never win because chaos is inherently incapable of understanding. Therefore, the film is left with nothing but hopelessness and cynicism. _____ From a production standpoint, the original film remains completely untouched, of course, but this is far from suggesting that the sequel is poorly made. It just talks more than it shows, and it treads on thin ice in its revitalization of some of the themes from the first film (the nervous ride of the military convoy, the insight into the transition of the ordinary Mexican to uneven moral ground), where you can see how far ahead of everyone else Villenueve is. Yet Sollima is no Jan de Bont, but a director with his own sense of pace and space. I got to know him most in Alejandro's final journey down the road, where everything lasts a second or two longer than we might expect, and every miniscule gesture has an introduction and an epilogue. Unfortunately, as a new addition to the Hollywood stable, it's obvious that he was viewed with initial suspicion and clearly getting pushed into some pigeonholes.

Dynamic frat-pack fun that understands that the biggest mistake it could make would be to slow down. Given its ties to small-town comedy, we constantly find ourselves in obvious settings (a wedding, an office, a suburban house, a hospital, a golf course), but at least it admits that the characters aren't entirely happy in them, as they constantly revert to their non-committal high school years, whether through uninterrupted playing tag or drooling over their school crushes. As such, the film's most heated moment was clearly slapped on her dad's funeral. Otherwise, to list it off in points: 1) If Edgar Wright had made this, it would have been the movie of the year and fences would be toppling with glee; 2) I would have gladly tagged the insufferable dude Renner with the hood of a car; 3) The age gap between the female and male actors was minimized, but the girls certainly didn't look it, so it must have been an even more painful spectacle for female viewers in their forties. 4) The general use of female characters here is really odd, but that's probably based on the fact that none had much of a role in the real-life subject matter.

A who’s who of modern art via Cate Blanchett's thespian escapism. It's not a drama, it's an exhibition and a pure experiment that no one should confuse with "going to the movies". If you look at it that way you can stomach it and understand the wide range of ratings. It's not educational because the monologues don't have any introduction to what they're related to (unless you remember the forty names that appear in half-second slots at the beginning – Gaspar Noé just mischievously stuck himself in there without having to say a word, the punk), it's not analysis or comparison. More than anything, it's a wild hive-mind of the need for resistance, since the quotes come from the most radical periods of the aforementioned artists. If there's any correlation between the stylized sequences and the ideas being uttered, I didn't find much; indeed, the quotes from Marx in the ruins of an industrial building seem out of place, dictating the points of Dogme 95 to small children while drawing (in opposition to the previously cited art brut) is probably a weird joke, but as to what fluxus has to do with stage dancing or why Dadaism is quoted over a coffin, I'll have to eavesdrop from some side table in Café Jericho to find out.

Ghost Stories had an appealing pitch compared to the pathetic standard of contemporary supernatural horror. Three distinct horror mini-stories, which then coalesce into a single main thread, take us to an abandoned women's asylum, a dark forest at night, a super-modern mansion, an abandoned train station, and the corridors of an old sewer. The hero is not merely chased by a single oozing creature, but instead we encounter one-eyed girls, fiery-toothed corpses, and for a change an angry ent accompanied by Baphomet himself. Nor is the protagonist an everyday family man with no fault in the matter, but a skeptical scientist searching for rational truth (even if he is a completely passive moron throughout the film). This multi-feature reminded me in some ways of sweetly dumb horror compilations like Bava's Black Sabbath or Carpenter's Body Bags. Unfortunately, the whole concept is framed by an all-too-contemporary approach to horror, where basically all three episodes play the same formulaic game to the point of tedium, while the viewer waits with their legs spread wide open for a jump-scare that keeps getting put off. What's more, all of these barking scenes even have the same loud sample, once again sinking us waist-deep into the bog of current mundanity in the genre. Please don't let Hereditary be a disappointment, I’m begging you.

A fifteen-year-old metalhead in a leather jacket with button pins and a Bad Religion t-shirt walks past the Reagan/Bush sign, a walkie-talkie at his waist and a walkman with headphones around his neck. All while synth music is playing in the background. The four boyhood friends dash around the suburbs on small BMX bikes, which they dismount at a bowling alley, where they ogle not only sexy cheerleaders while playing arcade machines, but especially a scantily clad beautiful DJ under a disco ball who plays music off vinyl and used to babysit the hero when he was smaller. The protagonist's father watches TV and complains that the Cold War will probably never end, and when his wife hands him posters for the town festival he complains that some synth-rock band will be playing. Etc etc etc. My God, it's not a movie, it's a mausoleum. I could go on for an hour listing the obligatory 80s props of this boyhood adventure, but with the underdeveloped relationship between the characters (who are exactly what they appear to be from the first scene, i.e. glasses and shirt = nerd, metalhead clothes = tough guy covering up problems at home with his seeming coolness, fat guy = anxious chum with his heart in the right place) I can call it good. Summer of 84 is just as uncritically fanboyish a spectacle as the directors' previous effort, Turbo Kid – a movie for those who are just looking to see their favorite artefacts. Indeed, the vast majority of them the film just shows them and moves on, they have nothing to do with the plot, and since they’re so horribly violently shoved in front of the camera, they don't even help create a period atmosphere. I'm bumping it up a star for the ending, which somewhat relieved the film of its previous toothlessness.

Overestimating the well-engineered quality of the last Avengers film now means to lick away at some very prefab Disney ambrosia, carefully refined for kids aged 3 to 130. It's quite possible that it couldn't have been put together any better in the given running time, but that doesn't really matter, because the flaw is in the very idea of cramming twenty main characters into a two-and-a-half-hour film and then spreading them around space like butter on bread to get just enough everywhere. This results in them having absolutely minimal verbal interaction, no building of new relationships, and an inability to form any bond with them other than the one you brought with you from the previous films. Having opened up an entire vast universe, dimensions, and thus nearly infinite options for guiding the plot, this complete freedom is only used to allow pretty much anyone who has ever so much as uttered a sentence in the MCU universe to appear on screen during the course of the running time. Even so, the heroes still happen into the film at random and often for motivations that have no justification whatsoever. There's also the classic superhero malaise of the last few minutes of the movie, where to slow down the plot while retaining some momentum, an infinity of generic toothy monsters are unleashed on screen that are so ripped off and formulaic that the movie doesn't even feel the need to let us have any explanation or demonstration of them. ____ For a movie costing infinity billion or however much this cost, the stagy theatricality of every scene comes as quite a surprise. The characters in each scene move and interact within a very limited space where they are carefully arranged so each one can be seen. The cinematography is often quite calm this time around, trying to refrain from complicated angles and changes of perspective. Compared to the elusive orgy of superhumanity in Man of Steel, the latest Avengers movie drops like another tired safe bet afraid to demand attention from its viewer. Moreover, in Infinity War, any concern for the world, the universe, and everything has been dropped completely because it definitively has nothing to do with ours. Except for one scene, the poor Earth civilian is no longer seen in the film at all, his ability to interfere with anything is reduced to zero, and he's basically already been cleared out of the entire MCU universe because he becomes a sacred idol that can't even be allowed to be harmed vicariously, so everything now takes place in some safely cleared out space or somewhere behind a back door where they can't go. What keeps it on the level of average is the CGI/Josh Brolin character of Thanos, who is a more plastic character than anyone else, as well as a few punchlines (it reminded me terribly in places of old isometric RPGs like Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale, where there's some cool fighting, I can freeze the screen and give instructions, you activate the flame whip, you send the curse, you blind the enemy, the juggernaut turns into a berserker and stalls...) and the finale itself, which I didn't see coming, and if this ends the Avengers for maybe ten years to come, I'm going to bump this up a star. But I'm afraid that with all the announced sequels and the next Infinity War installment, the opening of options related to time and space, additional dimensions, etc., if they want to bring back some favorite characters, they'll figure it out somehow. I'm already dreading it. However, I am deeply amused by the idea of studio reps meeting with all the actors at an MCU meeting and announcing right off the bat "Here are the contracts for the next eight years, anyone who’s sick of it and doesn't want to do it, raise your hand" and then watching in shock as a mob of hands go up.

In retrospect, a project that strongly shaped my future perception of film. A story built on coincidences, flawed characters, natural surrealism, and drive. And the drive is incredible. The first fifteen minutes of the film are practically impossible to sit through. It was an experiment for Tykwer, he himself doesn't think in such formal terms, and the fact that he made Lola in this form makes him a really powerful director. Too bad I don't really like his other films.