Othello

Well well well, so here we have the dueling of two 1960s teenage youth magazine clubs for the New York slums. One is Polish and the other is Puerto Rican immigrants, all of which kind of doesn't matter because this whole patch of heaven is going to be gentrified by an excavator in a few weeks. Into the mix, reformed delinquent Tony falls for the sister of the gang boss next door, but she's promised to a timid Puerto Rican, and together they plan to disappear, while the rival clubs finally want to give each other a decisive shake with an outcome that will finally settle who's going to be the boss of the neighborhood for the few days before the city lets the place get demolished to shit. All of this is watched by a transsexual from a hiding place. If that's not too many dogs for one rabbit, I don't know what is. I guess the musical is supposed to be able to handle all of this, because all these subplots and subplots are just to motivate those dance and singing parts that we're all surely looking forward to. The reality is that while the dancing parts are truly fabulous, the singing parts are total gulag. So we the film ends up split into two completely different parts: scenes that I could play over and over again, in which impossibly statuesque immigrants jump on anything in the vicinity, fight over a gun, and rebuild a police station in incredible choreography, and scenes where the protagonists rip the proverbial singing shirts off each other in horribly stupid and pathetic duets where the words don't even fit the melodies, but they're trying so vehemently to get the biggest end notes out of the actors, and they're all in unnecessary high notes. It's a pure 5 stars vs. 1 star conflict, so the rating could be budgeted according to how much running time any given scene takes up, but the singing ones number subjectively in the hundreds, and can only be endured by trying to discover where the subconscious motivation for a blowjob is encoded there. And then there are two other contradictory elements. On the good side are the fail-safe anamorphic lenses and the properly lubricated camera crane arms of the best choreographer of them all, Janusz Kaminski. However, his obsession with opposing lights has by now reached such a level that the gunfight scene ends up with two suns shining against each other. Oh, and on the dark side is Ansel Elgort, who I think will be an excellent character actor sometime after he turns 40, when that dramatic look of his can be combined with some sharper features and a more polished delivery. At the moment, unfortunately, he has no charisma. He comes across as a nerd who knows the script backwards from memory, went to singing school six days a week for two years, ate nothing but egg yolks for six months, but doesn't really bring any personality to the film. PS: Ironically, the most sympathetic character in the film is Krupke, the cop who has to keep an eye on those bunch of over-the-top demented dudes, be their angel cop at the dance, and they make fun of him all the time, even though he clearly has a never-voiced sympathy for them. Likewise, the film uncharacteristically defends the penal system because it revolves entirely around a character who has returned after a year in juvie actually reformed and wiser than the others. You wouldn't exactly expect a film like this to side with the system.

"It’s Winter Sleep. I haven't seen you since 2014." "You know, I left early after you burned my film reels and wrote on them, ‘get out of town, you pompous monologist’." "And what part of ‘get out of town, you pompous monologist’ didn't you understand?" If a Saab had spent three hours going zoom around the unglamorous parts of Japan and we could just listen to it go from tunnel to tunnel, I'd be totally cool. Unfortunately, Hamaguchi and Oe have decided to create a monument to academic filmmaking, so for three hours we mostly listen to the theater-director-coping-with-loss-through-multilingual-elaboration-of-Chekhov's-play, and in between he introduces his mute driver to the mystery. Oh, the prizes this will win. With some of the endless monologues in the second half of the film, I had to remind myself how fantastic visual art can otherwise be in its ability to compress themes. Otherwise, it would always look like this. In the future, I'd love to have a wordless cut of the film. In the meantime, I invented a drinking game for you in the cinema. Don't worry, it's pretty cool. A sip of beer whenever a car enters or exits a tunnel and a shot whenever there's a shot of a record playing. Three hours later, it'll sink in nicely and you'll go home uplifted and in good spirits.

A brilliantly over-ambitious attempt by Steklý to combine constructivist naivety with historical trauma. Scenic revolutionary suggestiveness and the Russian constructionist school meet here with a reconstruction of the shooting of the workers and the description of their hardships filmed in and around the real Kladno mines. From an aesthetic point of view, this creates an interesting paradox, whereby the film, following the model of socialist realism and its admiration for industry and the agricultural cultivation of nature, creates dramatic spectacular images in which tall smoking chimneys, blackened walls, and statuesque miners are portrayed with admiration for their power and monumentality, yet at the same time, contrary to the rules of social realism, all of this seems threatening because none of it yet belongs to the working people. The mine, the tipple and the factory act as centers of humiliation and danger for the workers. And yet the film can't help but be properly unionist in its fascination with those spaces.

Considering how Aerofilms is cramming this film through every orifice (I've seen its trailer a good fifteen times) and is clearly trying to patch up two years of COVID losses with it, I automatically went to see it already in an oppositional mindset. And thus began our fantastic mutual war that lasted until the very end. One of my first attacks was the accusation that it’s all well and good to build up an independent and idiosyncratic heroine when the film assigns her to such an idiotic and one-dimensional male character. Except that when it lets the characters talk about something other than relationships for a while, suddenly they're not so dumb and they actually drop some pretty interesting details. But what if these passages too are describing some classic male cliché, which I don't realize because I AM the cliché? And then there were those moments when I resisted jumping in on any of the suggested topics because I feared I was walking into a trap. A couple of times this proved justified, and yet I still occasionally fell for the traditional audience feel-good cliché "She's literally me!" (definitely in the scene where the heroine wanders around town, squeezing herself into someone else's party, where she’s advising others "from a medical position" on how to raise their children with two semesters of medicine under her belt), only to laugh at the film afterwards about how it has to help itself with a cancer plot. But that is suddenly the strongest passage, with a real palpable presence of finality, and it made me think of Verhoeven's Turkish Delight. By the end of the battle, I had almost acknowledged my full surrender before the film finally couldn't help itself and had to demonstrate that theme of female independence through the dilemma of having/not having a child and I was terribly annoyed by the last shot because who the fuck puts a monitor right next to the stove?! So the win goes to Trier, however in boardgame terms he didn't make it to Major Victory in the end but only to Minor. But I worked up a sweat.

He handled the transition from animation to live action, he handled the transition from studio films to outdoor, he handled the breakup with his co-creator, he handled the huge budgets, the transition to the American way of production, and the attacks of Harvey Weinstein. In the end, it was Netflix that beat him creatively. Jeunet claimed in 2019 that he had been unable to find an investor for his next project for several years, and that he had Netflix as a last resort. There was a strong sense of reluctance to work under this studio, and I'm quite interested to see what their meetings with each other might have looked like. This also reveals an interesting paradox, where it's common knowledge that Netflix will give money to absolutely anything, while at the same time having a minimum of visually distinctive works in its portfolio. Because what has Jeunet been so far more than a formalist for whom every object in a scene was as important as any character. BigBug, with its setting on the stage of a single-family home, might have raised hopes that it would follow the dystopian Delicatessen, but the very first scene, which feels so fake, awkward, and lazily staged, will at most confuse us by telling us that the film is definitely set in the same late-capitalist universe as Iannucci's Avenue 5. Sadly, without Jeunet's previous magical stylings, suddenly all the nonsense, hysterics, and stupidity of the characters just feels silly, forced, and fake, because this time there's just the characters and nothing around them.

You know when you go for a walk somewhere beautiful, where the birds are chirping, the leaves are rustling, the frogs are croaking, and the brook is bubbling, yet all the while you can't get rid of someone's screaming children getting underfoot while they chase each other with a magical bazooka? That's Totoro for ya. Those beautiful mountains of clouds, massive trees, dense meadows of tall grasses, and the amazing multi-level landscape, with trams running on embankments over green rice paddies and high tension wires running from somewhere above it all, is constantly interrupted by screaming heroines and suspiciously passive and well-adjusted adults, to the extent that I spent the whole time wondering if there was something mysterious and dangerous behind their unnatural smiles and unnatural permanent positivity. (Spoiler) There isn't. (end of spoiler)

Reeves's The Batman is a well-informed original that knows that few are curious about another long introduction of a hero mentioned hundreds of times, and therefore assumes the viewer is already familiar with the general Bat-canon. That's why he only spends the first twenty minutes (which feels like a long montage and is utterly grist for the mill) describing the deviations from previous takes on Batman, so that he can then get straight into developing the character. And he does this through visually lavish episodes that leave you marveling at just how deep into darkness a scene can be plunged for anything to be visible at all. From a technical standpoint, it's a breathtaking spectacle that, in the action scenes for example, creates almost self-defeating obstacles. It either takes place in complete darkness and we navigate through flashes from gunshots or faint reflections on characters' costumes, or it takes place in a completely smoky space. And when the car chase comes, the camera captures almost all of it from fixed positions on the vehicles. I've so far considered Reeves a successful presenter of Weta promo-reels, but there's so much work going on here that I have to apologize to him. It's not likely to be as good anywhere else than in the cinema, since you simply won't see a good half of the film at all.

Judging by the reviews and comments, Verhoeven has a specific charm through which he can surprise the viewer with every film he makes by how he deconstructs something, even though he's basically been doing nothing else his whole life. Whatever he touches – genre, society, period, zeitgeist, character studies, or the subject matter – he dissects down to the flesh, laughs nihilistically, drops the mic, and heads off for some other revision. Benedetta is an interesting blend of his earlier Flesh+Blood, (an exploitation of a medieval era full of filthy bandits, plagues, degenerate church representatives, and naked harlots) Showgirls/Keetje Tippel (an ambitious woman uses her body to rise on the backs of others in an emeritus, ossified world) and Basic Instinct (ambivalence and uncertainty about where the truth lies and whether it should be sought out is maintained until the very end). And I was intrigued by the extent to which it treats the theme of religious ecstasy as an erotic experience in a similar way to Besson's The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. Verhoeven's last two films under French productions have been marked by clearly the best scripts he's ever had, but unfortunately also the ugliest direction. Benedetta often looks like footage from a musical, looking terribly staged and artificial. It's funny, then, that the erotic passages work best in this framework, as they're reminiscent of the usual porn videos you have open on the next tab.

In high school, my friends and I commandeered a tape recorder, which was our entry into a world of endless fun that consisted of lounging in the park, drinking boxed wine, and making up the most ridiculous stories and plots any of us could enter at will. Until now, I didn't think that could be a relevant creative method. And as a matter of fact, I still don't.

I just have a problem with these metaphors, because once it gets going, you actually find that everything is terribly banal, and the surrealism just masks it as being nothing. The guy gets a wooden stick, with which he first manages to orchestrate his life perfectly, before he discovers drugs that make that orchestration impossible. When he then seeks solace in faith or society, he is literally plucked. Two dudes with hats made of maps and dollar bills prevent an old guy from getting to his chicken. The police have the keys to everything and everyone's number, but they're bureaucratically rotten drunken monsters. At a three-way junction, the hero can take either the path of the gnarled stump (chaos) or a neat wooden block (order). All the while, he carries his own self in a bag, which the wild women want to steal from him – but enough already! I understand quite accurately that Bartalos has joined forces with Matthew Barney, whose Cremaster cycle also left me rolling my eyes into unconsciousness.