Othello

Coincidentally, I just now saw Forrest Gump after a long time, two days after Bertolucci's The Conformist. And so I found connections between those films that I’m guessing no one who considers Zemeckis' opus a testament to the simple beauty of life, love, and everything would ever want to hear about. And since I'm still fascinated by the director's visual perfectionism, mise-en-scène, and choreography, which he was able to employ here thanks to an episodic structure tracing major turning points in American history, I had to look for ways to defend the film, because it really is terribly well made. (Note: on the first day after vaccination, I observed my brain's increasing natural resistance to writing sentences shorter than two run-on sentences, I'll continue to monitor that). Not knowing the Groom source material, the film then offered me a new reading, and that of the idiocy of 20th century American history. A century that punishes anyone who chooses to have a role in it (or idea, see the return to The Conformist) yet rewards the simpletons who can't or won't grasp its elusiveness, randomness, and complexity, and just follow the curriculum laid out by their (by no means sophisticated) mentors (Mother, Jenny, Lieutenant Dan). Thus they create a picture of a chaotic history in which a simpleton lives happily, resigned in their understanding by definition, and they reward him with a girl he loves and is unable to recognize that she is just coming to him for rehab or when her kid is at risk of going to the orphanage.

Two seasons in so far it’s a whodunit with a really excellent pair of investigators wrapped up in an overwrought script about a not particularly interesting case filled with uninteresting supporting characters played by not very good actors. The show shows great production limitations. It's overshadowed by its setting, rainy Seattle, but the pace of the filming and the finances didn't seem to allow for much running around exteriors, so we're constantly thrust into small apartments, cars, or glass-walled offices. It doesn't have very good makeup artists if they haven’t finished people’s tattoos, for example. The subplot about the election fight is terribly uninteresting and driven by really bad actors. And in general, we just spend a really pointless amount of time with all these characters, and yet really, aside from the issues surrounding the case, they don't have much reason to keep anyone on screen for several long hours. Ten years ago, it could have been one of the avatars of the rise of "quality TV" of the time because of its focus not only on the investigation itself, but also on everyone involved, especially the victim's family, and observing the days following the crime from so many perspectives. Moreover, by almost always having women behind the series and the individual episodes, the series promised a more sensitive approach to the whole situation. Which it did deliver, but unfortunately the direction afterwards was stilted, with no ideas or any exclusive character. But Holder and Linden keep me coming back for more seasons.

I was going for the theme, not at all expecting the visual delights that awaited me. Seeing the Bay-esque camera shots in the 1970s is breathtaking. The lighting and mise-en-scene work, while maddeningly stagey and mannerist in places, is really inventive on the other hand and adds to the importance of each scene. I'm sympathetic to the film's position, in which a man without an ideal is a natural servant of evil, and I'm quite interested in its further development to the current era of late capitalism, where ideas are again commodified, creating a new variant of conformity.

Zemeckis' excellent satire of Hollywood as a space for constant returns to the limelight that are all the more frightening and unnatural.  At the same time, it's actually a bit of a (God knows whether intentional) satire of himself, where the amount of information he packs into the one overlong, extremely realization-intensive shot here is almost laughable. Not to mention that a good half of the film takes place in mirrors. The over-the-top nature of almost all the performances gives the impression that the entire crew must have burst out laughing just after editing (the seduction of Goldie Hawn); Bruce Willis, cast totally against type, is inherently funny; the over-exploited prima donna Meryl Streep makes a scene just by being in it, and Isabella Rosselini is simply delectable. And Fabio makes a cameo! Anyway, it's got a really good and cohesive script with lots of ideas and the longest night in a movie ever (starting from the arrival at the book launch and ending with Ernest getting hit with a vase). "What will the neighbors say?!" "Ernest, in the 12 years we've lived in Los Angeles, have you ever seen a neighbor?"

If the character in therapy is your thing, you might enjoy this. It does have all those therapeutic phases. The protagonist keeps a lid on it at first, then logically it explodes (actors act), and in that exhaustion he finds reconciliation. Otherwise, the film has problems to the roof. You know those mods in current video games where you can decrease or morbidly increase facial expressions in characters? So for most of the movie I felt like some actors (Henriksen, Linney) had it turned up to 250% while others had it turned down to 30%. Lance yells, bullies, slurs, screws around, and everyone else around him just kind of exhales. This prompts the read that actually the fault lies with the protagonist who never took his father properly in hand and grandly left for a better life, which sounds arrogant on my part, but that ties into the second problem, which is that the film doesn't give any hint of the background and era that this father actually comes from, so instead of some local, period value framework that would allow us to work with the character, it just offers us a sadistic psychopath, interspersed with two or three scenes where he doesn't exactly tyrannize his family to show that the sky wasn't always just cloudy. But then the film loses the possibility of closure, allowing a final reconciliation to this terrorizing scumbag, even though we don't actually know what he's reconciling with. And I know what Mortensen was going for here, and it seems nice, but he wasn't able to film it in a way that made it readable. Why I'm leaving this otherwise poorly made film with an average score is the kind of appealing production trickery that brought this film into the world and that reminds me of the stories from old small productions. How Viggo and his brother used their second citizenship to secure co-producers, the director took the lead role so that according to the actors unions they could get money which they then transferred to the production accounts and put back into the film, etc. And of course the chronoscopy was a delight. PS: oh, and Mortensen isn't gay, which strikes me as a cop-out in the context of this film, because he's just using the homosexuality thing as hyperbole. Shame, shame.  PPS: Terry Chen's performance here is so awful that he reminded me of the character Seraph from the Matrix sequels, if he'd lost the Oracle somewhere and spent the whole time pretending everything was fine and hoping no one would ask about her.

If you've known the term "rape culture" for more than a year, you're not looking at the film through the spectacles of this fundamental issue, and thus you can see in all its nakedness how horribly written and filmed the whole thing is. Nowhere in the world do people talk to each other like this, the dialogue sounds like internet discussions read out loud or situations condensed from different articles. It's filmed like a sitcom, it's static (and often with insignificant poser symbolism), and in the faster sequences it's so badly edited that you can't tell exactly what happened. The film even has a reasonable musical structure, yet has no tempo, which I never would even have thought was technically achievable. And I've only seen a romance handled this poorly maybe in the film Obvious Child. Unfortunately, Promising Young Woman is exactly that case where a theme pushed from below gets into the hands of the middle class. It becomes a dull and silly hurrah farce that enjoys its untouchability and success under the wing of its subject. The whole issue of rape culture is thus relegated to a dumbed-down platitude, the trademark strong woman, and by continuing to be represented by similarly bad and calculated films it will retrospectively do a disservice to the whole fight against patriarchal society. Hashtag cinema at its worst.

"If you don't come out in ten seconds, everyone will know that Clint Eastwood is the most cowardly piece of shit in the entire West!" It really isn't usual for third installments, especially third installments that are filmed concurrently with the previous installment, to have any major character development of established characters. Yet this happened with the third installment of Back to the Future, and my suspicion is that it was done in order to create some new framework for the story, where the tropes already used in the previous episodes would not be repeated over and over again. You can tell then how Spielberg and Zemeckis thought of the characters as action figures on a road carpet, and sometimes they just had to get a character out of it. I think I like the third installment the best. It's the most compact, the most far-reaching in terms of execution and gimmickry, and the instrumental country version of Doubleback by ZZ Top is a terrible blast. Except that Doc in his western clothes looks unduly creepy to me, because he looks like a combination of Klaus Kinski from Fitzcarraldo and my cobbler. And the fact that the gravedigger wasn't a Tim Curry cameo took a bit of wind out of me, too.

The kind of Zemeckis movie where I'd believe there was no script, just storyboards. The individual sequences and ideas are awesome (especially the return to 1955 and the filmmaking challenges associated with it), and as a gimmick it just goes off without a hitch. The way the individual attractions are pieced together, however, is a disaster (Doc only functions here as a quest-deliverer, a Wikipedia of film lore, and a deus ex machina). It is, however, interesting to see the 1980s vision of the future (2015), which the filmmakers claim was created not to second-guess technological advances, but mainly to look cinematically entertaining. While the first Back to the Future followed the unifying lines between the suburban petit bourgeoisie of the 80s and 50s, it's interesting how much it manages to guess the bourgeois trends of the teens of the 21st century. The future is depicted here through a pop culture-infused society, spending time in faux retro venues where they can play sports and eat sushi at the same time (I still think with goosebumps of the old scary idea of Aero cinema, of droning along on exercise bikes while watching movies), the fashion exploits both that 80s era and the tendency to combine sports and loungewear. Poverty and lower social status here is not dependent on access to technology, there is greater inclusivity (police dominatrices and the updated membership of Griff's band of thugs), and mainstream culture is built on recycling (Jaws 19 directed by Spielberg's son). Given the vision of the future promised by the writers (mainly it has to be entertaining), one wonders if we're not currently living in some kind of 80s nightmare, which if you consider that the 80s is the most celebrated decade in history, is actually quite funny.

The blending of animation with live action is absolutely incredibly well done for 1988, the opening shot is insane, the allusion to 1950s noir is thorough, and the little details like references to ethnic segregation at the time through the intertwined world of cartoon and real characters in this type of film are pleasantly surprising. In fact, the whole vision is handled perfectly. But then it's all for naught when the arrival of the titular rabbit on the scene gives you a really bad headache.

Very unsurprisingly, if Edwards is behind the direction of an individual episode, it rocks, the action scenes are the highlight of the year, the destruction of objects and bodies is dialed all the way to the right, and the cinematography comes up with some interesting tricks. It makes even the super-seriously rendered comic book plot with a bland protagonist pick up the pace and hook you, even though you know that's not really how things happen in any universe. Pure joy, up to and including the fifth episode, then the uninteresting directors Gens and Hardy take the chair, the chain almost completely comes off, and there are no action scenes for the remaining four episodes, the attraction I thought this series was made for in the first place. Otherwise, I have no problem with Edwards' need to create monumental mafia sagas whose world is concocted like a children’s notion of war (see also the second The Raid), but there's a guileless joy and childlike enthusiasm behind the heap of violence. But don't let anyone else interfere.