Othello

All you have is a skeleton crew and a script pulled out of your ass. Who you gonna call? Michael Bay! Ambulance is a film that was made out of Bay's simple need above all to do something at a time when there was nothing to do, and the way the film was made in spite of that can often be so painfully seen that it comes across as a bit guerrilla. Especially during the shootout at the bank, you see crew members or security guards guarding the set in almost every other shot. At the same time, the script gives the impression that it was written on the spot, and anyone who has seen a single movie about paramedics and cops and robbers and is also fixated on realism and logic will die inside a bit here, because everything here sort of lands well on the first try and moves on without a second thought. Combined with the pacing of the film, it all feels spontaneous, like little boys playing cops and robbers in the backyard, creating subplots on the fly without thinking about their purpose to the story thus far, just so they can get back to riding and shooting. For me that's a perfectly fine way to make an action movie, and when the only director on the set who's been yelling into a megaphone enters the picture, we're in for a boogaloo, with drones and cars racing each other and all the sparkling, banging, dusting, blurring, and backlighting, where the important thing is not what exploded, but that it exploded. No one puts the camera down as much as Bay, few people today understand how much an action movie relates to the environment in which it takes place. And you all surely must be looking at it wrong, so pop open a beer, stick a smoke in the corner of your mouth, feet (in shoes) on the table, and give it another go! I want this place red by the end of the week, you hayseeds.

At first it seems like the sort of insufferable folk satire that looks with an ironic sneer at our simple human endeavors, which is always a totally unbearable practice. Fortunately, thanks to censor interference in the second half, the film devolves into a deliciously Dadaist jumble of exaggerated situations and confused performances by characters and actors alike. This brings it close to the benchmarks of Czechoslovak Dadaist sci-fi, The Flying Saucers Over Velky Malikov City or The Monster from the Arcana Galaxy, its main problem being that it doesn't rise to their level of feverishness.

Sort of an Iranian Little Miss Sunshine. For some time a dysfunctional family is nearing a moment of great parting, but is no longer able to communicate with each other at all. First-rate yet economical cinematography, superbly written and acted characters (especially the sage and selfish father who continually fakes his way out of any responsibility), and perhaps the first Iranian film I've noticed that has humor in it. If it didn't have those tendencies to press the poetic key too hard (figuratively and realistically), I'd bump the rating up a notch. Considering that I've been using Persian films as a pejorative epithet for academic tedium, this is actually a big thrill.

"So get married!" A perfect illustration of my (un)favorite theory that true freedom exists only in rejection. "So don't get married!"

These Svěrák/Smoljak haha-heehee scripts where the quantity of jokes is the only quality get on my nerves quite a bit, but then again, if they had films like Marecek, Pass Me the Pen! or Joachim, Put It in the Machine, throw it in the hopper to serve as a dumping ground for weaker jokes that didn't fit into the Cimrman plays, then thank god for them. Still, I have to admit that the enthusiasm with which some of the actors throw themselves into their lines here occasionally makes you want to rewind some scenes and rewatch them. Kovarik's knocking lower lip during the traumatic "But Mlha..." scene, or the monologue consisting of one sentence and eighty-three words delivered by Weigel (which apparently made him a role model for Lukáš Grygar) would be some examples.

Little children and a musical are words I am said to mutter occasionally in my most feverish nightmares. Long Live Ghosts! does have a pretty nice summer vacation atmosphere, but it's ultimately a kind of confused pioneer agitprop where everything happens kind of by accident because everyone (except Němeček, whose trick with the gnomes I really admired and couldn't quite figure out the trick until one pub jumped out of perspective at the end) just kind of goofs off in front of the camera spouting truly awful drivel.

Obviously a very expensive partnership for promoting the Russian circus, both the individual acts and groups and the new State Circus building, which from a technical point of view is still fascinating today. Obviously, what the story was going to be about was the last thing to be figured out. With Lipsky's circus films, I'd give a lot to know what the animals who have to dutifully endure it think of the clowning fools around them. I confess that I didn't realize the close relationship between the Bolsheviks and the circus until recently, but I'm glad I did, because I hate both quite intensely.

It could have been an interesting probe into a normalization spring in the agricultural industry, underpinned by unintentionally funny constructivist interjections like "the zookeeper at the Planned Agricultural Collective hasn't eaten or slept for three days and is silently watching a spot on the wall because she has a mortality rate one percent higher than the plan."  Unfortunately, unless any of the Lipský films can lean on someone else's script, they result in the usual idiotic attempts at mischievous humor and quirky characters that really make you squirm with at how pathetic it all is. Lubomír Lipský was, in my opinion, a virgin for the rest of his life.

I feel like my strongest cinematic moments to date (whether directed by Gaspar Noé, Aleksei German, or cinematographers Lubezki or Benoît Debie) stem from here. It's Hard to Be a God in its moments of literary monologues. In all other moments, it is a stunningly, unflinchingly intense, painful work, a relationship I summed up in our private convos with FilmBooster user Bush13 "I'm always sort of thrilled on an animal level by Zulawski's films, but I simply can't crack them the first time. I'm not even sure if that's the right way to handle them." Yeah, that's exactly how I'm gonna get out of this. Nachtmahr Kraftstoff.

How cathartic, after all the motivational, reduced, updated bio-shit, to be able to rely again on Kurzel and his description of a hideous dirty world where nothing is right and nothing is fair. Nitram doesn't shy away from its Tasmanian Forrest Gump, but neither is the film willing to portray his environment in a way that offers him any way out of his situation (despite the fact that he's a rich guy who travels the world freely), which is why the film's denouement ultimately relies on gun-control advocacy, simply because it wants to convince us that the conditions for creating lone gunmen will always be there and therefore the only way to reduce them is to reduce the number of guns in society. This premise, however, stumbles a bit with the comic scene of illegally purchasing automatic weapons. But I still think that addition was an afterthought, and Kurzel and Grant had to protect them in order to secure money for their next inspection of the irrevocably damaged mind. Knowing that sometime between The Snowtown Murders and Nitram, Kurzel managed to convince Fox he could start a crowd-pleasing franchise based on a successful computer game amuses me like little else. Hopefully the eggheads will forget about it and the next Star Wars will be made by, say, the Safdie bros.