Othello

It could have been edited down to two hours perfectly fine and it would have been infinitely better. As an opponent of watching in multiple sessions, I had to make a fourth effort to finish watching. Fundamental problems: 1) as crucial as the Battle of Gettysburg was to the development of the war, it is of little cinematic merit because its outcome was clear from the disposition of the troops 2) with a TV budget, it is hard to reconstruct a battle with over 160,000 participants, though it can be masked. But no, we have to have panoramic shots and extreme long shots. 3) The advantage is that there are many clubs in the US that are involved in reconstructing this battle and therefore know what to do, they will play for free, and basically bring their props with them. The drawback is that you can't believe they could maybe die for the life of them, because when they climb over a wooden fence during the battle, you can totally see how careful they are not to get a splinter or strain their hips. And that's despite the fact that they're under full fire. 4) Maxwell's reliance on "everyone knowing what to do" has resulted in crowd battle scenes where, at times, some people clearly don't know what to do now, or where to turn. If this had been filmed a decade later, the extras would probably be answering their phones during the battle. 5) The awful gentlemanliness, kindness, and self-respect (I'll stick a guy with a bayonet and then grab his hand and tell him he'll make it) is so comical that I got the impression that the Civil War was actually the most beautiful thing that ever happened to mankind.

The fact that Skip Woods suffers from screenwriting elephantiasis, and that anyone with a heightened sensitivity to moronic dialogue and story in general will probably get cancer while watching the new McLane escapades is unfortunately pretty much covered up by the fact that, from a directorial standpoint, this bullshit is surprisingly innovative and masterful. In fact, the alpha and omega of AGDtDH is that 20 or so minute car chase in downtown Moscow, where all the trump cards are laid out and, in fact, justify the entire existence of this film. The authenticity of the clashes here is aided by the multiple shots of the same situations from different angles, as well as the editing, which cuts away from the collision that the next shot records from somewhere else. Imho, it was purely deliberate that one of the shots ends at an angle where we see a crew member in a helmet along the right edge, controlling the vehicle on which the camera is placed. Combined with the senseless (but impressive) destructiveness of the entire scene, this makes every impact doubly felt and almost brings back that good old feeling of crossing your fingers for the stuntman, wishing him a speedy recovery. Moreover, the armored transport starring in this scene is actually the link between the chase scenes in Terminator 3 (a slow, multi-ton, virtually indestructible crane) with those in The Bourne Supremacy (fast, punchy, unconcerned with consequences), thanks to its destructive potential and not inconsiderable speed. In fact, everything before and partly after – the camera, for example, hiding fearfully behind a car during a gunfight, the shooting of situations from inside passing cars, the escape on the roof that we see from an aerial shot and hear only the echoes of gunfire – are the viewer's preparation for this scene. ________ Yeah, but otherwise it's really terrible crap, which in places defies the very basic creative precepts ("The whole room is contaminated with radiation" "Don't worry, luckily we have a secret substance with us 24/7 that will get rid of the radiation" – no kidding!) and the characters work about the same as in the snuff videos. McLane isn't in this movie, but I think he'd like it on TV.

An experience that from the viewer’s perspective is something that combines orgasmic feelings with getting your fingernails ripped out, when you had the misfortune to be born with twenty fingers on each hand. The subjective running time of 300 years admittedly hypnotizes you with its visual fetish and almost hollowed-out narrative, where Gosling, for example, could easily have been replaced with a plush imitation of himself and it wouldn't have mattered. I don't begrudge Refn making films for himself; what bothers me is that he's considered a fantastic director, with his obsessive fascination with the image proving that, as a director, he's actually incompetent and lacking any kind of insight. And I don't buy his dedication to Jodorowsky as an alibi. Only God Forgives is essentially a photo-novel due to its static nature, and perhaps the likes of Greenaway would eat it for breakfast. In all its negatives, the film is reminiscent of the director's American debut, Fear X, or the anti-intellectual I Come with the Rain. But I can't help it, it's delicious eye-candy and offended me only a little bit. Now it's up to Refn what he comes up with next; I'd recommend a genre film, otherwise he doesn't have much of a place in a world where Gaspar Noé, Harmony Korine, or Danny Boyle are making visual art spectacles. I look forward to the reviews.

The problem with Lorepretty much lies in how it reminded me of the art teacher short in the film Ghost World, where they flush dolls down the toilet and repeat "mirror, father, mirror". Because, in the same way, this is truly universal art, behind which I tried vehemently and in vain to find something more than "intimate polemic over collective guilt" and "the transformation of a girl into a woman under strange circumstances". In reality, Lore is quite misogynistic in contrast to Trier's Europa trilogy, which is close to his setting, because while that one manages to raise many themes and issues from the perspective of a male observer, Lore doesn't get any further with its female active protagonist than the eternal stigma and mother protector. Which is only emphasized by the fact that it was filmed by a woman. And for a change it's very proficient formally, though I feel lately that cutting from close-ups marking some emotional advancement to long shots made up of informative footage is now such a general recipe for sticking an arthouse together for pennies.

I don't know. I'm as tense as a dentist's waiting room for most of the film, can't decide if the civilian atmosphere is unsettling me in a good way or a bad one, and after it was over I was still putting two and two together in the bathtub with a wrinkled forehead... and then it dawned on me. The whole point, the whole thing clicked into place and I was confronted with the triviality of the entire plot. While it’s not that bad, it's awfully similar to all that Thai/Korean/Japanese stuff, just a little more Nordic in its aloofness. And when you cook mashed potatoes for 4 hours, the result may not be all bad, but you kind of feel like a moron.

Not convincing Gemma Arterton to show her tits is utterly petty of Wirkola and foreshadows other ills. Thought the direction, like Dead Snow, is total anarchy (meant as a positive) that doesn't particularly worry about time, space, sequence, or characters, Hansel and Gretel often fails in its guilty pleasure potential. That is to say, the main sibling duo don't sleep together, though it seems headed that way several times, no children die, and the violence doesn't cross a certain threshold. On the other hand, the unbelievably long and retarded monologues of the main witch, who still has all of her members even two minutes after she opens her mouth, which is grossly inconsistent with the characters' approach to anything else, are outrageous. The action scenes are somewhat reminiscent of a video game in their conception (the witch running away from Renner and throwing various adversities in his path that he must overcome; the girl at the stationary machine gun trying to mow down all the witches in front of her, who come flying in from different directions) which I have no problem with, but overall I'm sorry that a scene like the one with the Gingerbread Man in The Brothers Grimm was more WTF than this entire movie.

I don't give a fuck about some logic and I honestly don't care how much an adult Kevin McAllister could spread around a house in two hours just to get it in there. What irks me more is how the film tries to be enlightened and innovative in the slasher genre and ends up piling on the same bunch of clichés that don't define this subgenre (get a clue already), but instead relegate it to the level of the already seen a billion times. There's that horny teenage duo again, there's that stupid hope in the arrival of a cop, there's that ending sucked out of a finger or something. Oh well.

Pineapple Express in bullet points: 1) It's like watching your stoner buddies who won’t even give you a puff and you realize how much you actually hate them. Not for being stingy, but kind of in general. 2) All the characters here, except the main duo, are absolutely horribly written, their relationship sort of sketched out but supremely dysfunctional (the gangster and the cop – WTF?), so you either hate them (in the way you hate a complete stranger who accidentally bumps into you on the sidewalk and doesn't say anything) or you don't give a shit about them and you're just pissed that they're occupying the overlong running time 3) absolutely terrible editing, which imho was caused by one of the main characters reliably stumbling in the dialogue and dragging the action scenes (both of them – and bad ones), which implies 4) the film has NO dynamics – the dialogue feels improvised, which is a detriment here, the motion jokes escalate absolutely wretchedly (unlike the excellent trailer), and for every good joke there's ten minutes of wallowing in shit 5) if you’re making a comedy about stoners, you should focus on the contrasts and clashes between the world behind the green curtain and the normal world, not the "when a reindeer meets a reindeer" method. 6) So as not to just throw stones, Pineapple Express isn't completely stupid garbage, it does have its scripted strong moments, like the heroes arguing in the style of "Your wannabe sucks, my wannabe is better", but the filmmakers don't seem to be too amused by that so they go back to the original concept of "Hey dude... moth" – so we're back to point one. 7) Apatow could use some friends already.

A brutal screenwriting construct whose dialogue rustles the paper so badly that it nearly drove me away from the monitor. Whereas Dogville herded its concept through a distinctive main character, Grace here (played by the unimpressive Howard – incidentally, she must have been crammed to the gills with hormones in Spider-Man 3, otherwise it's hard to explain her C's there, but that's just the comment of my internal cinephile) takes a back seat to collective events, but Trier was unable to causally catch hold of them in a way that didn't sound like mere preaching. What’s more, he no longer makes practical use of the theatrical form for narrative, which was one of the strongest centers of gravity of his previous opus. Sure, Manderlay is an intelligent film, but perhaps the thing that gets to you the most is that Trier is, with all due respect, a crappy storyteller, and that's rubbed in your face disproportionately often in this film. So I'm glad he's now abandoned this trilogy and gone back to cutting clitoris and throwing alien planets at the globe again, even though there will probably never be another Europa trilogy. P.S. I apologize for terms like construct, causality, narrative, and Spider-Man 3.

If I'm to nominally attack the means Fox uses to manipulate the viewer, I should be extraordinarily freaking careful not to use the same ones in a documentary devoted to it (especially background music, choice of guests, etc.). Of course, you can shrug me off by saying that, despite the name, a documentary need not be objective (which I'll accept), but even so, from the filmmaker's point of view, I would expect it to target a more intelligent viewer with more intelligent means.