Matty

Paterson is the Jeanne Dielman of post-industrial America. Jarmusch has always been able to get to the essence of the story, whether he is shooting a western (Dead Man) or a vampire love story (Only Lovers Left Alive). In his latest film, he peeled away all of the unnecessary layers of a “slice of life” drama about the life of a working man and shot a film that flows naturally, as the protagonist, form and style are in perfect harmony. Paterson loves the poetry of William Carlos Williams and his ordinary life, giving him the certainty that he will wake up tomorrow morning next to his beloved girlfriend, eat cereal with milk and set off to drive his number 23 bus. Thanks to the fact that he spends most of the day driving on autopilot, he can occasionally switch into poetic mode and come up with a few new verses about, for example, a matchbox. ___ In the same free verses, Paterson reflects the reality around him, as if the whole film were being narrated. This does not involve a series of causally interconnected events, one following the other and leading to a set goal. Variations and contrasts are essential. When Paterson meets a girl after work, it is an unexpected encounter, and we wonder what will come of it. When he wakes up in bed alone, we are interested in knowing where Laura is. Paterson maintains a Zen-like calm, giving the impression of a man from the early 1900s (when people didn’t use mobile telephones and computers) and he has no intention of changing his routine. Conversely, Laura is action-oriented and comes up with something new every day. ___ Some motifs are not developed at all (the kidnapping of a dog, the chess tournament), while Jarmusch focuses on others only for our amusement (the tipped-over mailbox). The result is simply not as important to him as the process of creation, which is captured, in the case of Paterson’s poems, by words gradually appearing on the screen. The search is more important than whether we find something. ___ The visual rhythm, expressed in the two-tone scenery and the dresses that Laura makes, in the repetition of a limited spectrum of shot compositions and editing techniques, and in other instances of doubling (the twins, the similarity between Laura and the heroine of Island of Lost Souls), helps to transform what we see and what is outwardly so ordinary into something poetic and unique, even without the aid of symbols and stylistic ornamentation. The same logic is applied to all human life in the final conversation with the Japanese tourist. ___ You can work as a doctor or drive a bus and still be a poet. All it takes is to not strive for something at all costs, to not chase after something (because then you will just be disappointed that things didn’t turn out the way you had imagined) and accept the stimuli that the world around you has to offer. Then you will begin to discover poetry in the commonplace, the everyday, the obvious. Jarmusch managed to embody this almost Buddhist wisdom in the structure of the film and make it universally comprehensible. In its simplicity, which is reminiscent of Ozu and Bresson, Paterson is an incredibly powerful film whose message is far greater than the sum of what happens in it. 90%

This crime thriller about the fine line between determination and obsession starts off promisingly and then branches out in multiple different directions without losing sight of the disappearance referred to in the title. The secondary storylines functionally complement and push the main one forward and, at the same time, are variations on Tony’s story. Other characters also struggle with their natures, hiding something dark from others and trying to do their best for their families with a certain stubbornness. After the riveting start, the alternation of two time planes helps to hold the viewer’s attention. The jumps in time rouse curiosity about how what we see in the present came to be in the past and raise questions, some of which are answered in the given current episode (why Rini has a neck bandage), whereas others are answered much later (why Baptiste walks with a limp, how Emily got together with Mark). Each episode revolves around a moral dilemma, which contributes to the thematic cohesiveness of the individual episodes (in the episode revealing the circumstances of the divorce, for example, it is discovered that the perpetrator of a certain crime snapped after breaking up with his wife). Thanks to the raising of more and more questions and cleverly doled out twists (often in the form of cliffhangers), the pace does not seem to be too slow and the excessive space devoted to the suffering of individual characters isn’t overly bothersome. Despite a certain degree of inertia in the later episodes (Baptiste and Tony usually find a new witness, who, however, conditions his or her cooperation on something and, after the condition has been fulfilled, sets the protagonists on the trail of someone else), The Missing still manages to be surprising due to, for example, its unreliable narrative (a dead character is presented as alive but turns out to be a figment of another character’s imagination) or a dive into very dark waters, which retroactively relativises the initial image of a harmonious family (somewhat stereotypically, only the wife remains an innocent victim until the end). A superbly directed one-shot car chase elicits regret that the series does not contain more action scenes. On the other hand, The Missing demonstrates how viewers can be effectively hooked for eight hours without such scenes. All that requires are excellent actors, focused direction and a screenplay that does not offer any easy solutions and does not make compromises with respect to the characters. 80%

Though it is filled with passion, I didn’t feel any passion myself for Down By Love. Adele looks like a frightened animal with the gaze of one too, but she should be playing a femme fatale causing men to lose their wits and depriving them of their peaceful family life. It doesn’t matter that the film is based on real events when the animalistic attraction between the lead actors is not believable and the amount of space and time they find for their amorous games behind prison walls is equally improbable. For an archetypal story of mad love built on the foundation of an ancient tragedy, the film is too literal and not very timeless. The filmmakers have taken from Phaedra, which Anna reads in the film, the ambiguity of who the culprit is and who the victim is. They achieved that, however, simply by concealing from us who the protagonist was before she went to prison. She is unreadable due in large part to the fact that we are given nothing about her that is readable. Jean does not come off much better than Anna. While she is characterised by her vanity (she constantly grooms herself in front of the mirror, taking great pains to look good) and nymphomania, Jean considers running a prison to be an art (how French!) and can think of nothing better to do during a passionate moment with his wife than answer the ringing telephone. Down by Love is a rather insipid study of sexual desire based on the model of two characters who are so captivated by each other that the world around them ceases to exist (accordingly, even we don’t know what's going on around them and how others perceive them). Such a promising theme deserves bolder execution. Any given episode of Orange is the New Black offers a more intense viewing experience, a more authentic look behind the walls of a women’s prison and characters acting in a more reasonable manner. 50%

“You know the best thing about necrophilia? You don’t have to bring flowers.” After a disarming start, which for me is the new standard of verbal diarrhoea (I would like to have a similarly rich vocabulary shortly before I turn 70), Carlin engages in colourful storytelling using words that no one has the courage to use today. He describes the issue of suicide from a practical perspective and reflects on our fascination with assassination, torture and mass murder. He doesn’t fail to throw in some caustic remarks about Americans’ self-destructive consumerism and offers his opinion on autoerotic asphyxia (“You don't know if you're coming or going”). Carlin then concludes his apocalyptic vision of a society gone mad and a decimated world with a story about bears on amphetamines. Of the Carlin stand-up specials that I have seen so far, this one is not only the darkest, but also warningly prophetic (wasn’t it the “Uncle Daves” who helped get Trump elected?). It only occasionally loses momentum due to the comedian’s inability to abandon a thought that has already been exhausted and move on. 85%

Autour de L’Argent is the still-fresh ancestor of today’s films about films. Thanks to its creator’s commentary from 1971 (the version available on the bonus disc of L’Argent from Masters of Cinema), this is not only a superbly rhythmised symphony of the production process, reminiscent of Joris Ivens’s early documentaries, but also a very informative resource for students of silent cinema shortly before the advent of talkies. You'll see and hear what lighting equipment was used, how camera operators achieved a regular rhythm when turning the crank, how fade-outs were done and why viewers with lip-reading ability sometimes laughed during serious scenes. However much the then twenty-year-old Dréville mainly wanted to find out everything that could be created with a camera, the film has a head and heel in addition to its poetic and informational value, and it can thus be enjoyed even without knowledge of the work whose creation it depicts.

The Red Turtle is a captivating magical-realistic robinsonade with an environmental subtext. It is a concise, stylistically pure film packed with symbolic imagery and based on the idea of the interconnectedness of the individual components of the living world. For communication with the viewer, the film primarily uses images that are both concrete and symbolic, and gradually reveals to us the unique yet universally comprehensible inner logic of the fictional world. Thanks to the cyclical repetition of situations, we get the impression of the organic interconnectedness of everything. If something happens to an island, then naturally something must happen to the people who inhabit it. Cleansing simplicity is a feature not only of the story, but also of the visual stylisation, which may remind comic-book readers of the work of artists such as Jean “Moebius” Giraud and Georges “Hergé” Remi. Thanks to its unusually beautiful animation, the film is enchanting even at moments when nothing particularly dramatic or lyrical is happening. At the same time, the artistic aspect, which straddles the line between magical and realistic, leads us to the same realisation as the film’s plot – we don’t have to understand the natural order, but we should respect it. 80%

If the child version of Andrew Garfield had been hit in the mouth with a brick at the beginning of Hacksaw Ridge instead of his movie brother, the whole film would have made a lot more sense. I wasn’t really sure how seriously I should take a young man with the face of a divine simpleton who isn’t overly familiar with how interpersonal relationships work, let alone international politics. In any case, the film takes him seriously enough to gradually lose all credibility. Instead, it offers an enormous dose of stupidity. It seems to me that the final Assumption scene wandered into the film from an unaired Monty Python sketch. The concept that forms the basis of the entire film is reminiscent of the theatre of the absurd. To make the hero of the biggest explosion of disembowelled guts and blown-off heads since Saving Private Ryan a very devout pacifist who rejects violence of any kind strikes me as a rather cruel irony. It doesn’t seem, however, that Mel Gibson is aware of that. He doesn’t use the scenes of slaughter (which soon become numbing rather than shocking) to lead Desmond to the realisation that war is a lot more hellish than he imagined it would be (in which case the contrast of the first and second halves of the film would have worked better), but to show how hard the boy will have it if he wants to survive longer than a split second without a rifle in his hand. The creation of a hero who rejects violence is thus paradoxically conditioned by pervasive violence. If his buddies had not been torn to pieces by the bullets and grenades of the savage Japanese (an ethnic stereotype that went out of fashion along with John Wayne), he could not have become a hero. I don’t doubt that someone else will find clear logic in what I myself see as an irreconcilable contradiction, but even if it didn’t seem to me that the film is ridiculous at its very core, I would have a hard time finding reasons to recommend it to anyone as an example of the best of what has been made in Hollywood this year. We have seen powerful and generally uncluttered depictions of the pandemonium of war many times before, and the clear narrative structure and textbook segmentation, thanks to which such films never even start to be boring, are qualities that have characterised American films for many decades. Hacksaw Ridge, however, is somewhat underdeveloped both intellectually and formalistically. 60%

As the minutes passed, I better understood what the Dardennes were trying to communicate and, at the same time, understood less why they were communicating it in such a terribly overcomplicated way. They would have done better if they had completely abandoned the very (and intentionally?) unsatisfying pseudo-detective storyline containing too many detours that lead to nowhere and instead used the minor everyday conflicts between the doctor (a role for which Adèle Haenel was superbly prepared) and her patients to point out the mistrust in the community and the problems that arise from it. The film’s main strength consists in its simple, stylistically pure observation of Jenny at work, without any specific objective. Conversely, its weakness lies in its gradually increasing didacticism, which is manifested in the robotic behaviour of the female protagonist, who seeks redemption and rejects compromises, as well as in the oversensitivity of the supporting characters, who are walking theses. We are convinced of the selfishness of people strenuously looking for someone else to blame for their own misfortune through, for example, a teenager who is sick to his stomach at the mere thought that he should be involved in the search for a girl, whom he was one of the last to see before her death. This strange blend of three incompatible genres (social drama, detective story and morality play) culminates with a deus ex machina. Instead of catharsis, we have disappointment. Though that was perhaps partly intentional, (unlike fiction, it does not offer an elegant resolution), but it is largely the result of how poorly written the characters are and how unconvincingly motivated are the actions that the film’s creators forced on them. 55%

If the opening assault on the eyes (especially male eyes) was supposed to capture the female protagonist’s lack of taste and judgment (because we find ourselves in her gallery), it would be possible to understand her subsequent enthusiasm for Edward’s trashy novel built on the most moronic plot twists and populated with caricatures of Southern rednecks, hysterical husbands and indomitable sheriffs. If, however, the film really required us to keep a critical (and cynical) distance from a protagonist who is so unprepared for the real world that she can’t even unwrap a package that she receives (after cutting herself, she leaves the job to an assistant), the melodramatic conclusion, which instead relies on our identification with Susan, would not make any sense. I’m not sure how seriously Ford wants us to take Nocturnal Animals. In any case, it can’t be taken too seriously. The characters are one-dimensional. Instead of impactful statements, we have trite phrases, which the characters use to reveal their emotional state to us (instead of acting it out). In Susan’s world, everyone and everything primarily has to look good, which sometimes applies and sometimes doesn’t in the world of the book Susan is reading. It is thus probably not true (or at least not all the time) that she projects into the novel what she wants to have in it as its plot materialises before our eyes. Or perhaps the fetishes of women from better society include Aaron Taylor-Johnson ostentatiously wiping his ass? I suspect the director himself did not have a clear idea of how (self-)ironic and deliberately campy he wanted the film to be, nor how much he wanted the romantic and spiritual to take precedence over material values. The result is a trio of films – a Southern thriller, a melodrama about class differences and a satire of the world of snobs who judge others based on whether they own the latest iPhone – that are all quite entertaining in places, but most of the time come across as much more serious and self-important than would be fitting, considering their hollowness. 65%

I would be interested in knowing if Penélope Cruz knew when she signed on to this project that she would appear in the same film as Mark Strong’s testicles, Gabourey Sidibe’s crotch and a hectolitre of elephant ejaculate. The film succeeds in presenting all of the above without coming across as a random sequence of gags (though it’s not far from it) and without the punchline (always) consisting in the distastefulness or imbecility of the given joke. With his guileless rejection of what is proper in a civilised society, Cohen’s Nobby, proudly claiming to be English scum, fulfils a purpose similar to that of the earlier Ali G and Borat – he shows the pretence in which all intellectuals, petty bourgeois and snobs live, as they reveal their true face and true intentions when confronted with a man whom they despise too much to take seriously (among other things, this year’s American presidential election showed us what that can lead to). The other characters are (unintentionally) led to being exposed by Nobby, and the viewer is then (intentionally) led by the redneck jokes, which are drawn out to the point of absurdity. Sure, The Brothers Grimsby is very much a hit-or-miss affair, the editing could have been less frantic and the seriously depicted flashbacks (and the whole storyline about the importance of family) disrupt the pace and tone of the narrative, but I still found it funnier and more subversive than most mainstream comedies. The fourth star is for giving Donald Trump AIDS. 70%.