Othello

Somehow, despite all the formal quality, I felt like I was watching a failed gruppensex video where the actors are unable to get to the right place at the right time for it to happen. And by the halfway point, I was getting really, really bored.

I was prepared. A bunch of abused madwomen systematically dismantle the domination of disgusting and filthy men. At least they have the by now surely impotent Scott Glenn as a magical grandfather with a sniper rifle to help them. Sucker Punch is an awesome ideological counterpoint to Trier's Antichrist. PS: I felt like crying with delight at times during the action scenes... PPS: I'd love to lend Jena Malone a towel some morning at home.

Almost as action-packed as Bad Boys 2 in its better moments, and that's a hell of a school. There are two types of big-budget film – those that try to piss off the people who paid to make it and those that try to piss off the people who pay for the result. The latter (Bay, Verbinski) puts on a correct unpretentious spectacle and tries to tell the viewer that what they're talking about is really awesome because they know how to portray it – selling the form. The other has the viewer in its pocket, but tramples on the production and the ratings committee by formally concealing an inappropriate idea. The pioneers of this are mainly the Wachowskis – followed by Snyder. Fast Five is also from this cask, though admittedly not as artful, it's a classic leftist anti-corporate anarchy that relies on film studio executives not finding their negative caricatures. The main characters are all classic working-class people, who won everything they've ever gotten through hard manual labor, at war with the ruling intelligentsia that holds capital. Sophisticated socialism. All except for the ending where instead of squandering their wealth in poor favelas, the main characters instead rumble around in mega-sized cars with trophies pouring millions into roulettes in Monaco. Incidentally, this makes for an incredibly funny scene in this context, because in it two characters are shoving practically all their capital into one variant of winnings, which is a great open door for the next episode, where they'll all be poor as church mice again – i.e. working folk pissed off at the capitalist system they've enriched with a few dozen mega. Ho ho ho. _________ I love the hypocrisy in the action scenes, when the main characters drive off with a ten-ton safe and demolish absolutely everything in their path. Here something goes flying into a house, there a car runs over something. It's cut with shots of civilians who always beat it at the last second and just barely survive, because the characters are good. They're not good guys, they're festive bastards who don't give a shit how many schoolgirls they throw against the wall, these people are just lucky. ________ Otherwise satisfying – the Diesel vs. Rock battle has exactly that destructive feeling where you just know that being gifted one of those guns is going to disintegrate you into primitives, the shootout in the favela will leave you thinking of Modern Warfare 2, there's not a single ugly girl in the movie, and they strip down to their swimsuits in slow motion as a matter of principle, the pen obviously let the screenwriter down at times, but whatever... this is what summer popcorn is supposed to look like – Thor my ass and give me back Bay in a proper rating. Addendum: Dwayne Johnson isn't a non-actor, he's the anti-actor, take that Sean Austin. The killing of the villain is pretty stylish in this movie.

Excellent Sundance fodder that tries to convince the viewer all along with pretty clear direction that the movie isn't so bad and that it will make up for all the hero's setbacks with the final redemption. Which does in fact occur, but it convinces us that Take Shelter is ultimately a heavy bastard anyway. Right from the start, if you look at Michael Shannon (the brilliant Michael Shannon, by the way), a string gets plucked in your diaphragm that the film keeps humming very unpleasantly for two hours. For every minute of the film where someone smiles, or a hint of hope shines in the distance (learning with a deaf-mute daughter, for example) you are incredibly grateful, because that sense of that impending doom is always just around the corner. PS: *SPOILER ALERT* – I accept the argument about the set and spiked ending, which might leave you gaping at the end credits like a moron (I had a very similar experience with Trier's Melancholia), yet forces you to shift gears a bit from a story thus far about the progression of a rising mental illness.

It was a big deal back then. Deep beneath Hangar D at Hollywood Studios, in that top secret laboratory complex, a secret sect of Judeo-Bolshevik Nazis, paid by the corporate-run Illuminati, had accomplished the unprecedented. To create the first artificial intelligence that can make a movie all by itself. It was called Jim Kohlberg ver. 1.0. It did unprecedentedly well on its final exam, quite a tricky assignment: to create a movie for grandmothers, dads, pre-pubescent sons, practically the whole family, even with a dog and a guinea pig. The film has to appeal to the classic mainstreamers as well as New Age sensibilities, and it can be paid for at all costs with Monopoly money. Jim Kohlberg ver. 1.0 has done an incredible job – he has automatically extracted the theme of generations coming together through music, but wisely filtered out a contemporary manifestation where a son introduces his ZZTop dad to the secrets of techno or dubstep. He pulled out classic hits from the 60s and 70s, where the majority opinion is that anyone who doesn't like it is ignorant. In the montage, he moves the audience with Simmons delving into the tenets of hippie rock, finalizing the whole event at a concert where the previously skeptical father really lets loose. Sure, the arrogant audience may feel like they've got a broken record, but for the rest of us, we've got a first-rate load of the best: a chick from the diner who reciprocates the feelings of the biggest loser in her neighborhood (hopefully they'll fix the patch in the future), a son meeting his amnesiac parents after 20 years, a liberal mother and skeptical father, a nasty doctor representing a depriving nasty state institution, the ability to only express yourself when your favorite music is playing nearby (ho ho), it's all here. Even the inventors have formally acknowledged that the device relies more on certainties and we don’t have to worry about it creating any interesting sequences either visually or conceptually, but that's supposedly okay because the subject matter is sooooo heartrending that no one will care less that they actually went to see a film and will give this incredibly clichéd, boring, uninventive, wannabe independent, emotion-milking bullshit an incredibly high rating because it warmed their cockles. Golden sex and violence.

To bury such a beautifully anti-chauvinist theme with such lethargic and perhaps universally flawed direction is a feat. For example, if you listen at the door during a screening, you can't help but feel that you’re watching not a film, but a cut from a 60s dance school reunion, as the film drops one oldies song after another, which fits like whipped cream on chili con carne. The encounter with the eponymous woman takes place in slow motion, where the girl dapperly dons a leather jacket (?), and it practically looks exactly the same, even with the background music, as when Bay introduces us to Megan Fox. There are more of those points of contact – the wild lady here may have her armpits bare enough to take supporting roles in Wilkinson commercials, but the film doesn't bother to introduce us to the doe who's been chewing her pits clean. The editing between scenes is practically constantly resolved by intercutting, which imho is also a pretty passé thing to do, and almost no one in this movie can act. The highlight is the absolutely incomprehensible pair of teachers, who not only both look about 17, but their importance in the film is minimal and they completely take away from the plot with their problems. Actor Sean Bridgers, an unspoken parody of Colin Firth, does everything he can to make you not take the film seriously, and the final stage is the violence, which isn't there. Or rather, it wants to be, but just as it's happening, someone moves the camera so we can imagine everything... like in the new Seagal movies. What's left? The great story, the strong finale, and especially the absolutely fabulous scene of the marital squabble, which in the current context is the best I've seen in a long time.

Proof of the non-existence of the real Asgard is the fact that the authors of this fill-in-the-blank weren't found somewhere kicked to death by an eight-legged horse and pecked by overgrown crows, because that just wasn't an option. I have my limits of tolerance for how far an artist can go in mining from certain basics, but this is way beyond the horizon. An abysmally insufferable digital inferno in which the only forgettable element is the creators' cowardice. A lot of people here are spitting on a black Heimdall. For me I almost went down when I saw the absurdly digital Asgard, which, despite the fact that it's kind of a nirvana for Viking pigs, is all scrubbed and shiny as if my mother lived there. I closed my eyes and hoped it would all go away and be ok, but when I opened them, the handsome Thor had just swung a hammer in his hand and I knew it was going to be bad. Take his crew, for example. A carnival of characters straight out of Dungeon Siege – a painted amazon with perfectly shaved armpits (unexplained), a Renaissance fencer (again unexplained), a Japanese man (fucking unexplained), and a rather appealing version of a fantasy dwarf who nonetheless looks like he owns a hair salon. The antagonist winking mischievously with slicked-back hair, yet the film pretends like we're not supposed to spot the villain yet. Bwa ha ha, okay, since I ate the remote during the opening thirty minutes, I was forced to finish it. Folks, it didn't get much better. It's fine to cast sure-thing Earth-bound initiators like Skarsgård or the pleasantly shaggable Natalie Portman here, if it didn't hurt so badly that they're completely unnecessary in this movie. For crystalline proof, consider one of the "action scenes" (I'm still making my point), when the newly pacifist Thor (god!) goes to ask the metallic monster if he can stop trashing the city and tells these characters to evacuate the area. Which takes place by them running about 150 m, something explodes around them, they stop, and then return to the half-dead hero, and when he asks if all the people are safe they reply that they took care of it. Oh, and the action scenes are a chapter in themselves. I don't know how high inflation has gotten in the US in the last three years, but if Bay, by the way, has a big city being raided on all levels by giant robots folding into bulldozers, fighter jets, and helicopters at the end of Transformers, and Branagh, with a budget one mega less, has one five-meter-tall metal man kick a car and smash the aforementioned shop window, that makes for some embezzled funds somewhere. Thor, with rare exceptions (like, two or three shots), is not action-packed at all because it lacks any dynamism. It either does it with editing (the opening scythe with the ice giants) or cuts it off when I would have expected something to happen (the giant in the town), or kills it off with cluttered and overwrought CGI (the battle between Thor and Loki), or last but not least, messes it up with a blatant 3D effect (does anyone really care about that anymore these days?). Thor is all that much more of a mistake because, unlike Snyder, Greengrass, Cuarón, or Bay, it keeps itself disgustingly close to the ground, lacks any directorial signature, and is unaware of its position on the audiovisual market. And it's competing increasingly noticeably with video games, which can offer far more than the cinematic medium, but will always fall short in something, and that's the interplay of story, characters, and multi-angle physical action. Thor doesn't realize this, and that's why even White Fang won’t go looking for him a year from now. The only thing that works about this movie are the references and the jokes, and that's a pretty sad card for a summer blockbuster.

Looks like Andrew Niccol has been partying with Ken Loach. It's beyond my power of comprehension how a kind of pub idea that lays down its meaningfulness in a film right after the first confrontation could win 40 million, regardless of the box office. Putting aside the traditionally excellent Deakins behind the camera and the ever-divine Cillian Murphy (who, of course, makes the acting limits of both protagonists stand out), all that's left is a tiresomely immature anti-utopian vision crossed with incredible Bonnie & Clyde romance and boundless naivety. There's no point in addressing the sheer technical background of time as currency, and in general the entire internal economy of the film has the logic of a 15-year-old Greek leftist revolutionary's brain. Instead it's the Marxist railing against a system that resembles apartheid communism in its centralization (everyone works under a central evil company) that piques the interest. The fact that the film informs us that if an ailing bachelor lays out $315 billion in front of the workers on the street in the ghetto (see trivia), everyone will take their decent piece and go see the world is perfectly consistent with the perception of the world's problems from the armchair of a millionaire director out of touch with reality.

I've got a great idea for a movie – Othello spends long days and hours talking himself into watching something where Franco fingers a rock for five days and then saws off his paw with a can opener. Fortunately, Boyle has conceived of the problem as a visual cabaret, with a damn near biblical digital storm sweeping over the landscape and Scooby-Doo hiding around the corner. Surprisingly, 127 Hours isn't that physical a film, though the urine-drinking scene is so suggestively shot (the slowly rising level in the macro tube) that a severed hand can't ruffle us Southern exploitation-soaked viewers anymore. Admittedly, I was inclined to chew off a limb at times out of boredom, but that it was only sometimes and I’m saying it about a film with this kind of premise is a sign of perhaps the highest quality.

Formally excellent but otherwise a dud of a revenge film. In bullet points: 1) Jee-woon Kim does a good job of pacing the scenes, but not the film. That's because revenge, by design, has to work as a gradually accelerating carousel, with scenes escalating and reining in or, as in Lady Vengeance, maintaining the same mood line. I Saw the Devil jumps back and forth between them the whole time, which achieves at most the effect of knowing from the start how it's all going to turn out, and the director makes it clear that he's not concerned with the film as a whole, but just the (in the words of Rob Roy) attractions. These are successful (in particular the stabbing of two guys in a taxi and the murder of a policeman with a baseball bat are perfect shots), but many times unfinished (which, as I later learned, is the result of the film being edited down film to a more tolerable level, phew). 2) As a Korean director, someone must have explained to Jee-woon Kim the necessity of using that visual brashness that characterizes that cinematic nation, which here in turn gets in the way. With such a spare plot, I think such overblown visuals take away from the concept. In particular, the constant perpendicular shots from above make it clear that the director is rather trying to meet the stipulated criteria. What’s more, it is with this visual that the film mystifies and the entire time convinces the audience that they are looking at something higher than it really is. 3) The characters are geometric points, not people. They have no background, no history, and none of the audience’s trust. The character of the killer, while unprecedented, is without charisma because he doesn't work on mythicization (like Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men) or as a twisted parody of humanity because he doesn't come into contact with any humanity he could be parodying. The protagonist operates on the same motivations as Marv from Sin City; unfortunately, I Saw the Devil provides a minimum of perspective, making him pretty hard to relate to. It's just the violence that works best on this film, and not in its brutality, but in its aggressiveness. It's got an awful lot of pace, but also a lot of twisted ankles.