Othello

After making King Kong, Peter Jackson wanted to continue to focus primarily on his video game studio Wingnut Interactive, but things turned out differently, and with virtually every film he's made since Kong, I think how awesome it would have been if his entry into the field of video game design had actually happened. Jackson already works with people purely as objects, bearing distinguishing features based on their specific environment. Where in The Hobbit I admired the attention given to each piece of clothing or the design of the interiors, and suffered at every attempt at a more human rendering of some of the characters, with They Shall Never Grow Old I raised my eyebrows at the effort to supplement silent film footage by dubbing the voices of those involved, painting blood onto bodies with splatter comic sensibilities, or exhibiting an inclination toward the concisely episodic. But when more space is given to a scene where someone falls into a latrine than to explaining the friction between Germans and Prussians in the enemy lines, one can't be surprised that the pretentious final anticatharsis doesn't quite work, because the whole thing feels like someone trying to tell you about their months-long trip around the world, but having only two stops to do so before getting of at their stop. Someone put that guy behind a computer already, let him use his proverbial perfectionism to create NPCs, sounds, and level design for a good PC game, and not try to burden us with painful reality. Which reminds me, judging from the promo reel, I was expecting the technology to revive old footage to be much more advanced than the result would suggest. Even Russian Technicolor films look better and more realistic than what we see here.

As someone who has been watching Smoke every week for years, I can't hide my excitement at the fresh remaster, which reveals not only various additional details in the already complicated mise-en-scene, but also new story plans. Smoke is nowadays almost exhausting to watch with how much is going on in each scene and on so many levels (and yet it's fucking hilarious the whole time). I hope after its well-deserved revamping that Smoke finally makes it out into the world, because applying this distinctive allegory with its unique genius loci to a foreign audience could be quite entertaining.

The Tiger King series is not the unrivalled revelation it is considered to be, it’s just a prime example of how a documentary should be made. Picking a rich subject, gaining the trust of everyone involved, and being able to become part of their space until they ultimately forget the ubiquity of the documentary crew. With any luck, the dramaturgy will then take care of itself. Which is what happened here. Far from being pure observation, however, there are classic narrative shortcuts, cross-cuts, and quite obviously blatant antipathy towards the protagonist's nemesis Carole Baskin, even though the creator of the documentary, Eric Goode, as a lifelong animal advocate, is fundamentally on her side. Scenes where the camera slowly follows her cold eyes as someone's voice over lists off the evidence for her having murdered her millionaire husband years ago, or slow-motion shots of her cuddling with her husband's shrimp after Joe Exotic was given what essentially amounts to a life sentence builds an indiscriminate monument of a universal enemy of taste and humanity in general. The circus around Joe Exotic itself then contributes wonderfully to the mythology of "the freest country in the world," the upturned face of the American Dream, and to the catalogue of haunted mystery ranches and their associated characters, where it can stand somewhere alongside Waco, Neverland, or Spahn Ranch, retroactively proving how accurately the underbelly of rural America was portrayed in the first season of True Detective. PS: Anyway, the eighth episode with the world's most embarrassing man as the host is a blast. PPS: As a hint for the beginning, the only more or less positive characters in the series are identified by the fact that they are missing more than half of their teeth or at least one limb (this doesn't include John Finlay, who doesn't have the mental capacity to become either a positive or negative character) PPPS: Here we meet clearly the worst assassin since our Citrón.

Lynne Ramsay was originally supposed to adapt the novel into a movie before the soft cuties Spielberg and Jackson took it away from her and made it into a bouncy castle that made the novel’s author herself want to puke. Esoteric vegan lemonade for parents who need to cope with the loss of their offspring by imagining that they're in a better place now, all of it seasoned with the greatest stereotypes and clichés in the character of Stanley Tucci. As goofy as the film is, I'm all the more annoyed at how it drowns out some masterful visual ideas (no, I don't mean the ones in the heavenly veil, but the dollhouse tour, for example) or entire sequences (the creaky floorboard in the pedophile's house). Jackson is slowly becoming the kind of director here who even adds leaves to the sidewalk digitally, and that's not a good way to go.

Probably the greatest movie I've ever seen. Of course, it raises the question of whether greatness should be the direction a film should generally go in. But if we measure it in the context of Jackson's work, one can't help feeling that he must have reached that zenith for the very reason that he was able to bounce back artistically in yet another direction, which is currently represented by the conversion of early war footage to full-HD color, which, in retrospect, suggests that Jackson, more than anything else, was always a technophile who was lucky enough to have his wife Fran Walsh at his back, who as co-writer managed to colonize his spectacular ideas into a coherent shape. There's an awful lot of that in King Kong, and all of it in overwhelming quantity. If my chin was already dropping at the, for some, unnecessarily long New York exposition, taking place in crowded streets crammed with period detail, by the end I had a disposable jaw not worth going back for. But why do those CGI scenes work for me in Jackson's untenable tsunami of digital gimmicks, even though I usually dislike them in other directors? Presumably it's because, unlike standard CGI work in which the actors are clearly separated from the computer-generated action, here the live characters are directly part of those trick sequences, making the viewer feel more invested in them, plus they act as a size scale. This does set the filmmakers on a harrowing journey that can never be completely won in terms of credibility (or even completely derailed in places, see the terrifying escape from the dinosaurs through the gorge), but when they do succeed, they have a far better chance of succeeding not only in terms of the action, but on an emotional level as well, working with the relationship between the eight-foot digital ape and the famed Naomi Watts. And incredibly, indeed, the film succeeds in this endeavor as well. Unintentionally amusing, then, are the scenes through which the filmmakers try to explain, with seeming patience, that they can make the audience relate to many of the supporting characters as well, so that we have enough clues during those three hours that this is not an animated film. The scenes involving the young sailor and his mentor or the chef and his Asian friend feel out of context, and when they're not naively funny they border on irritating pathos. Besides, they pretty much lead to nothing. That general naivety of the film is otherwise related to the overall concept, i.e. the creation of an actual giant blockbuster, completely devoid of postmodern thinking. In some ways, it's a miracle that this happened at all, let alone that it worked. PS: Someday I hope to live to see the lawsuit between Ondřej Soukup vs. James Newton Howard over the original ownership of the central musical motif, which is totally swiped from Accumulator 1, don't tell me I won't.

Promo reel for Jackson's newly formed CGI factory WETA Digital. Unfortunately, almost everything is subservient to this, and the whole film, in its incoherence, feels like a good-natured drunk who's been allowed to talk for too long. Not helped by an obviously bored Michael J. Fox. But Jackson's directorial hyperactivity is otherwise still impressive (that camera just won't stand still! It just won't!), and Combs' creature feature with a tragicomic Mansonian backstory written all over it is one of the more memorable ones. Anyway, from today's perspective, The Frightenersis above all yet another reminder of the how digital special effects rapidly deteriorate over time. Whereas with Dead Alive you still end up thinking "Wow, how did they do that?", here you often just smile indulgently at the limits of computer graphics back then. On the other hand, if it weren't for this movie, LOTR wouldn't look the way it did, so some recognition is still in order.

This kind of work with the image in a drama (constant driving that reveals necessary information gradually, alienating effects, point of view changes, the impossibility of relying on who actually owns the scene) is the kind of thing that Spielberg then started doing almost twenty years later (after all, he and Jackson did The Adventures of Tintin together). An enlightened handling of a tabloid subject that doesn't actually care about the murder, but rather tries to make us understand the seemingly exaggerated and naive bond between two friends at the prime of their lives, besieged by an ossified, rational, and limited world, is a thing that is still awfully rare today. A beautiful reminder of a certain time in life that I would normally describe as non-transferable, which ends with a bludgeoning with a brick.

An old fortune teller's magical talisman carves its way through the protagonist's mother's belly, where she has trapped her son so he won't run off with his immigrant love. Freud takes it on the ass in a big way at the end, and rightly so. For a story that was no doubt originally intended to be just a thread through an incredible compilation of death and mutilation, it really goes the distance. And I suspect Frank Walsh's writing hand behind it, adding a certain mischievous woman's touch to the scripts of this enthusiastic nutcase. Just as it was the first time as a young adolescent, and still is now, the greatest satisfaction for me is not the lawnmower dance, but the very final gasp after the protagonist is free of the reins of a basement full of corpses and the emotional blackmail of his rotting mother. I also kept falling under my seat laughing during the scene at the children's park.

A story told in half-whispers at night by sailors somewhere in the hold of the Obra Dinn. With each retelling, new elements are added and some fade away again. The resulting tale is all the more frightening for the fact that it is impossible to decipher which parts of it are based in reality, and therefore all aspects of it, however unbelievable, feel real in the end. The irrationality of existence. Audience pro tip: watch it somewhere in a half-empty summer cinema stoned out of your mind.

Proof of Life can be perfectly described by a scene from Black Books in which Bernard Black sells a vacationing couple the same book: "You, you want suspense, thriller. This does you both. It's this temp. She's 29 and she can't get a boyfriend. Oh my god." "Sounds great." "No way!" "And she's got 12 hours to stop a nuclear war with China." "Well, one copy each!" It's impossible to ignore that this is a direct assault on the "him & her in their 30s" audience, so we get kidnappings, guerrillas, green berets, helicopters, some explosions, and a super-professional ex-soldier, but there's also a sad Meg Ryan, a sense of belonging, an exotic setting, and forbidden love to go with it. In so doing, Hackford is actually returning to the themes of his universally failed 80s romances, which always worked with fateful and unlikely love in a male-dominated setting (the military base in An Officer and a Gentleman, the private eye in Against All Odds, American football in Everybody's All-American). The problem here, then, lies in the botched interplay between the romantic and thriller storylines, thanks in large part to the pathetic building of the relationship between Morse and Ryan, which, while the film tries to portray the heroine as a strong, indefatigable personality, makes us rightly suspect that she kind of doesn't care about the whole kidnapping thing. And then the forbidden love between her and Russell Crowe comes from three scenes – she gives him one casual pat on the back, then drinks from the same glass as him, and then wham bam thank you ma’am and it's all clear. Fortunately, thanks to the fact that nobody cared all that much about the romantic storyline in the end, the film spends most of its running time on the actual kidnapping and rescue attempt, which is just plain fun, ending with an honest-to-goodness shootout of a rebel village, a helicopter taking off, and a farewell to that dangerous Ecuadorian landscape as the credits roll.