Othello

As a guilty pleasure, it doesn't work. Not only does all the comical retardedness get sucked out in the first twenty minutes, but that perfect goofiness is just pulled out of the film by the palpable 80's hell, which is nonetheless not as aggressive as, say, Cool as Ice. The fairly successful (!) fight choreography is also a downright disappointment. The protagonist is more of an asshole than a funny asshole, and that's kind of how the whole thing comes off. What is downright horrific is most of the runaway action scenes, which are a montage of disproportionately (for an action movie) long shots that only cut off when all the characters have left, which mouthfucks the momentum hard, which brings us to the point – Gymkata is boring. So I hope it's not because my bar for guilty pleasure entertainment is set disproportionately high by Birdemic and The Asylum production studio.

An almost ingenious combination of horror and apocalyptic depression that not only made me unable to look at my moldy wall with detachment anymore, but even made me take a moment while watching to think of something other than the ways I’d like to shag all the female characters in the film. God, I can never go to Japan. Anyway, I was worried that over the course of two hours Pulse would soon run out of things to say, but information was still being doled out, albeit over and over again, since the most important monologue takes place halfway through the film, thus depriving you of any subsequent catharsis (the apocalypse in the last act is sort of an afterthought), which is also pretty much the fault of the characters, who with all due respect, you don't care about because a) they're morons, b) they're poorly acted, and c) the film pretty much neglects them, mixes them up, and generally makes it clear that it kind of couldn't care less about them. Formally (apart from the terrible special effects), Pulse is exceedingly accomplished, the creaking bows in the background, the rotten panning camera and the relentless editing really gave me a hard time in some scenes. Plus, the film doesn't stoop to any stupid jump scares and lets all the supernatural stuff appear in an orderly fashion, which is pretty darn unnerving. I love how Japanese horror filmmakers immediately react to new technology by incorporating the farts of the deceased and reminiscing with a smile about the days when they had to make do with a window and a mirror.

SPOILER ALERT!!! Personally, I have my own opinion on communicating through all those social networking sites, dating sites, internets, and suchlike, plus I'm paranoid even with people I know, hence I suffered quite a bit in the first half over a bunch of laptop-wielding investigative discoverers of America who can't believe their own eyeballs that someone might be pulling their leg through Facebook. But Catfish pulls an ace out of its sleeve, especially in the second half, with that immediate confrontation with the reality that no one on the crew bargained for. There's that tough talk about how they're going to whip the creator of the existing imaginarium into the woods and grab them by the balls over a Heineken, because suddenly everyone realizes that no one makes themselves Tony Stark on the internet to hunt down virtual prey, but as an escape from their own smallness and incompetence. And the sadly honest last quarter of the film actually inadvertently describes the way the internet has been working for the last few years. It's like a Dr. Frankenstein device in which petty people create their own monsters out of the elements they always wanted to be but are too lazy or incompetent to make it happen. It's just a shame about the filmmakers' cheap call for sensationalism, treating this problem of internet identities like an African famine and letting the film end with a retarded monologue by the lead character's totally effeminate husband, which was supposed to explain metaphorically why people like her are important. Which is as stupid as taking seriously the debaters (heh sorry about that word) on news sites. EDIT: If the Illuminati, ZOG, NWO, or any other conspiracy organization exists, the internet is their most powerful product because it gets people to act out into thin air thinking someone is listening. If the internet had existed back in the 80s, kids would still have a picture of Lenin above their blackboard. Imho, if the current European situation had erupted fifty years ago, the Old Continent would be in flames. Protests today take the form of the "like" button on the FB room "For the return of the old ways!". You can do it from home, you can eat while you do it, and no one can tear gas you through your monitor...

Mangold did the unprecedented, he forced Cusack into a performance that downright pissed me off. It was probably a pretty simple thing to do, all he had to do was say "for the love of God don’t act!" and the result was self-evident. The baton was willingly taken up by Liotta, who practically now meets the brief of "A Van Damme who can't kick" quite faithfully, giving the acting performance of a ten-year-old kid. The third spot of acting hate here goes to supporting character Jake Busey, who people keep trying out without realizing that his face simply can't sustain a natural acting performance. Well the last time I saw him in anything he was parked somewhere near The Asylum and from there the only way out is suicide by aquarium fish, so things should be all good now. ________ So I’ve barfed on the acting, what’s next... ah yes, the script. It sucks, of course, because it wraps a good idea (the proof that it's good lies in how Molina presents it) in fluff, which is why we end up with, for example, a main character who, even nothing is happening yet, just happens to open the wringer door out of boredom and finds – watch out now – something there. *SPOILER ALERT* The final twist with the Omen brat, who incidentally manages to take out a number of grown-ups by, for example, shoving a baseball bat down their throats, is downright embarrassing to mention. And so on and so on. Not that I didn’t enjoy it, one of the actors gets hit by a car way too nicely for that, but I tend to enjoy bizarre snafus...

The most positive thing I've ever seen. I otherwise have a terrible barrier built up against positivity, but... fuck it.

It's such a grim symptom of the times when a once idiosyncratic author adapts a book about the beauty of being different and distinctive storytelling and comes out with a completely pure, first-rate, contemporary blockbuster with all its diagnoses. Once again it has an implausible cast of characters that dilute any interest, once again we go two-thirds of the way through the film before picking up some kind of plot, once again the whole thing feels like a walk through a freakshow where we pause for a moment at each specimen only to continue unmoved to the next. The best moments here are pulled out of the sleeve of the subject matter (though it's again Harry Potter like crazy) with some cute ideas, the film itself on the other hand lacks any kind of handwriting altogether. The main problem is that the whole imaginary world doesn't work on its own, but only for the viewer. There is no second layer, each aspect of the alternate reality must be given its own few shots and duly commented on, presumably so that they can be used in the final climax. This, however, suffers from a Marvel-esque overstuffing, where basically thirty people are doing stuff, leaving the viewer in the role of the spoiled child of divorced parents, showered with so many toys that he has lost all inclination to play with them. The only thing that ultimately clashes with the whole concept are the gruesome horror scenes of slendermen devouring children's eyes, which admittedly feel a little out of place in all the superficial exuberance, but anything that feels out of place in these calculated films is simply welcome by default.

I often give three stars to some crazy nonsense, but Silence is not nonsense. It just catches up to the fact that Scorsese, especially in his later years, can't work very well with visuals and imagery. A humble, slow, intimate, spiritual theme is not, in my opinion, ideal for stimulating with so many words, so many graphic shots that clearly explain what the scene is supposed to be about. As a result, the film breaks into four parts, where the first hour is like a cut from a TV Noe production (half-measured combo of quiet sensitivity and humility), which then breaks into classic sequences of abuse, during which we watch scene by scene the protagonist's breaking under various influences. This ends with part three, which is an essential dialogue with his teacher, and the rest of the film is a bad adaptation of the book in the style of a voice over saying "There were Dutch merchants in the harbor" and we have a shot of Dutch merchants. I completely understand Scorsese's fascination with the subject and his respect for it, but there's more of the subject than there is of the actual film and that's not how it’s supposed to be. I'll keep knocking on the door of The Revenant, McQueen, or Tarkovsky for religious movies. Those films may not be smart enough, but they have the potential to give the viewer more of a boost than the filmmakers themselves intended, which Silence doesn't have.

Compared to all the other annoying monuments to rock-metal icons of the 70s-80s, Dio has the advantage of standing apart from all the excesses, however much he was actually the eye of the hurricane of the warmed-over stadium hedonism of the time. As a result, we don't face the otherwise typical contradiction where a celebratory documentary tries to keep the performer's brand alive as a salt of the earth and a good man, while at the same time not wanting to neglect the various controversial elements of his career that also made him famous, yet all in some sort of balance that doesn't offend so much anymore but at the same time doesn't detract from the illusion of unboundedness. Dio didn't bite anyone's head off or shove a shark down anyone's crotch, so at least this documentary gives us a relatively focused sense of who did what where and why. Of course, all of these facts are now being distributed by various more or less scary-looking people with grandfatherly appeasement. It's actually hilarious to watch how this infantile goblin in the garb of long-haired degenerates just wants to kill styrofoam Smaug dragons with a cardboard sword. Pimple-popping music nerds par excellence. But honestly, as shallow as his music is, and as much as this documentary is really just a glorified burial mound, I confess that through it I discovered that I actually like Ronnie James Dio for all his juvenile foolishness.

In terms of production values, a respectable representative of hedonistically grandiose films. For one thing, the hundreds of teeming extras in period costumes and masks among ten-meter sets look like attractive cinematic excess; for another, the epic crowd panoramas are often repeated for no reason and often fail to inform you visually as to what you should be looking at in any particular shot. The result, then, is more of a kind of appreciative head-nod at the relative restraint of this clown show where there’s no one looking into the camera too much and no one confusedly scratching their ass during the battle sequences since they forgot to sign up for the enemy during rehearsals. Plus, of course, Chaney's suitably repulsive leaping goblin, whose acrobatic feats on the cathedral walls has served as the inspiration for the source material, the Assassin's Creed series. The 100-minute version I saw also has an excellent, at times a bit dungeon-synth musical score by the duo of Laura Karpman/Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum.

A typical representative of movies about a young punk from the city who returns to the country to find his roots, his humility, himself, blah blah blah. Except that here the countryside is India. Twenty-year-old Shyamalan self-financed a project in which he wanted to prove how capable he was of making a conventional film. As such it's terribly cautious, full of clichés, and lacks the kind of youthful, passionate ruthlessness you expect from the debuts of twenty-something directors. It's just terribly boring.