Othello

A group of young spelunkers explores a large fissure in the earth. An old shepherd who has spent his life grazing cattle around it dies peacefully. Purpose, humility, comparison, joy, peace. I loved every character here. Claustrophobics, however, will consider this a horror movie.

Satire schmatire, I'd have to be more rigorous if I saw the film as merely an attempt to aptly poke fun at late capitalism, because making fun of influencers, models, trophy wives, old rich people, hypocritical leftists, or the devout precariat strikes me as the biggest and fattest target in this whole earthly disco. But what I appreciate about Östlund's latest here is his brashness. It reminded me of the delightful first decade of the 21st century, when teen comedies invaded cinemas and homes. They were always based on recycled archetypal figures whose characteristics and stereotypes were constantly reflected in rather crude jokes. These films mercilessly attacked the idiocy of adolescence, and yet teenagers projected themselves into them and accepted the set roles depicted in the high school hierarchy. Not to mention the key piece of every teen comedy, its climax with some innovative fecal or otherwise disgusting scene that made everyone give an obligatory cringe and laugh at the same time. And then, after finishing every one of those comedies, my classmates and I would discuss who was the class Stiffler and who was the class Finch, with everyone wanting to be present so they wouldn’t come out the worst from the assignment of roles. Which is sort of the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in Cannes being able to squeal until their yachts are shaking in the harbor after a movie that makes a sort of merciless joke out of them. But this acknowledgment of the top 1% that someone is perceptive and capable of making mischievous fun of them is actually, in the current social climate, something of a declaration of love towards them and, as in The Tourist, the multitude of themes hinted at here will ultimately offer nothing but zen nihilism and a bottle of hard stuff as a solution.

In a debate earlier this year, I was overruled in my opinion about the need to remove the stigma from sex work and make it more accessible by claims that expanding it would lead to deepening frustration on the part of their many clients unable to fulfill their romantic fantasies. But even though I ultimately nodded my agreement, I still side more with this film in the end. Indeed, its problems lie elsewhere. Because it is, of course, perfectly fine for a film to have a clear position on an issue it is trying to promote, but it should do so through its story, its narrative, and through its characters. Here, we can't avoid being wrapped up in a monologue at the end about what the film has actually been about all along, in case some dullard hasn't figured it out by now. Then the film just becomes a cliché of a self-important, encouraging YouTube video. Second, I have a problem with the position that we're all inherently beautiful, which just sounds like bad therapy. Look at the latest movies with the 60-year-old Emma Thompson. The woman is incredibly sexy just in the way she works her language, her body posture, her looks, how much you can feel her distinction and taste. That the film reduces her to a "shocking" full frontal scene at the end in the name of some universal human beauty is ultimately a cheap gesture and actually demeaning to her. PS: it's great that I can go to the cinema to see a film about two characters in one room while the new Andrew Dominik goes straight to TV.

The screening of La Commune happened to come just a few days after I finished reading Sinclair's "Kerosene", the second half of which consists almost entirely of a repetitive lamentation of how unfairly and corruptly the labor movement in the US was treated in the early 20th century. So, by the time I'd sat through nearly six hours of Watkinson's pamphlet fretting over the fate of the Paris Commune, its neglect in French memory, persistent class inequalities, cultural globalization, patriarchy, ketchup that won't come out of the bottle, and so much else, I was already feeling a bit of revolutionary fatigue. Nor am I enthusiastic about the way he has the actors analyze their one-dimensional figures, whom he leads quite obviously to where he wants them to be in order to confirm his own worldview. I like its anger at the whole world and I like the LARP with the documentary crew he created with a bunch of loyalists; and then there’s the running time, which is surprisingly reasonable. But it's just a scream of anger that just has unexpected force.

Good old Cameron, you’d like to say, but honestly – I think I quite believe the traumatic stories from the shoot, because the way Assonitis treated him is strikingly reminiscent of the attitudes of other Italian producers at the time (see Dino De Laurentiis, for example) towards cheap labor, whose only purpose for them was to secure financing from American studios. Cameron is reportedly only behind the morgue scene and the funny helicopter explosion (during which he even accidentally drowned the camera). He is also said to be responsible for the design of the piranha, and out of frustration he also took on the production design, as he had found out during pre-production that no one was doing anything there, so he at least started scouting locations and hiring local guides. I find it endearing that despite originally wanting to erase his name from the film entirely, he eventually embraced it years later, even taking the liberty of making his own re-cut (which is not hard to come by) and he has no problem looking back on it. The film itself is pure garbage complete with virtually every ingredient of guilty fun – a buffet of practices from more famous films, boobs, obscene performances, boobs, completely unnecessary exposition by a bunch of poorly acted characters who just disappear somewhere during the course of the film and don't reappear, boobs, terrible special effects, blood, and boobs. Too bad for the traditional Achilles heel of beach genre flicks where they so often progress to underwater scenes, which unfortunately by their very nature are slow and dilute the rhythm of the film. Which, to be fair, also happens in far more deserving works.

An appealing glossy positive construction satire in which Smoljak and Svěrák try to see what else they can get away with in the heyday of the Jára Cimrman Theatre. The scenes at the approval committees offer an answer to the question of where Smoljak's fondness for absurdist theatre came from. Time has not diminished how entertaining these sequences are, as anyone who has ever attended a grant committee or studio meeting knows.

I consider Murder in a Parlor Car Compartment to be the best Cimrman play, and this is mainly due to the arrogant persuasiveness with which Smoljak as Inspector Trachta pours out the most absurd motives and theories, unchallenged because his distinction and self-confidence precede him. (BTW I still suspect Rian Johnson drew inspiration from it when he came up with the Daniel Craig character in Knives Out) It thus aptly parodies popular eccentric detectives and proves that their popularity stems from their writers' ability to convince us that we should simply trust their powers of deduction without reservation, however infuriating they may be, because we ourselves simply don't have the capacity to see beyond them. Dissolved and Effused uses the same jokes and plot as the play but feels very different, and I don't think that's intentional. The whole thing is insanely static: individual sequences are disconnected from each other, shots take longer than they should; and what suffers the most as a result are its departures beyond the bounds of wild comedy, where timing is insanely important, and this movie really has no rhythm. The hose in the shoes joke is one of those "well sure" jokes, but milking it for three minutes goes beyond the pain threshold, if you know what I mean.

I’ve been too manhandled by extremes like Romeo Must Die or The Last Dragon to find the fusion of African-American and East Asian culture all that refreshing anymore. Apart from the atmosphere of a tidy American ghetto, what I enjoyed most was the notion that all the characters in the film – the mobsters, the samurai, and the ice cream vendors – are so passionate and exaggerated in their roles that the whole inner universe is kind of a perpetual LARP or, better still, a children's game where kids pretend to be adults. The film proves, among other things, that we simply choose what we are and no one can assign it to us unless we want it.

It suffers from pretty much everything that current mainstream biopics about music legends suffer from. 1) an unquestioningly noble protagonist as victim of the intersectionality of unsavory businessmen (Tom Hanks here is pretty much playing the Penguin from the comic books, with all the grotesque overacting that entails) 2) a narrative fractured into disembodied scenes, a year here, five years there 3) an attempt to anchor a potentially controversial hero in the mindset of the contemporary mainstream (Elvis, a queer icon, hangs sulking with his African-American pals). 4) When the filmmakers run out of mergle or get tired of it, along comes the green screen. I barfed at the final scene at the airport. ____ Unlike the other flat bio-memorials, however, Elvis has Luhrmann behind him, which... weeeeeell, it’s not bad news, but it’s not exactly good either. Because I have a recurring problem with this director – his methods of visual interpretation and indeed narrative as a whole is horrible kitsch, almost to the point of actually being an exploitation of kitsch. But one of the problems with kitsch is that underneath its perhaps flashy and colorful veneer you can tell at first glance that it’s not bringing anything new to the table. And yet here it is. Luhrmann can bust a gut in his effort to make sure not a second goes by without entertaining you and giving you something to look at. The image splitting, camera rotation, zooms, reflections, deliberate staginess, and frantic editing that often divides scenes into half-second shots are things that Bay, Neveldine/Taylor, or Gilliam got away with because they were intertwined with a comparably insane narrative. Elvis is just a conventional family spectacle about a kid from the suburbs where the camera pans dramatically to the Intercontinental Hotel eight times and the editing is all done with blurry rotation.

The ideal conception of a documentary about someone who, even in his own words, has no identity of his own but instead one pieced together from dozens, even hundreds, of outside influences. While the film lacks the depth suggested by its running time, I also realized that this is not just a film about David Bowie, but also about Trent Reznor, Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, or Mayhem. I don't agree with the oft-cited opinion that this is not a biographical documentary – this is exactly what I think an artist's biography should look like. It only spoils the cinema experience for some people (ahem ahem) when the lights come on in the auditorium and people start pointing at you "Hey, Bowie’s sitting right there!" That's not the point, morons!