Othello

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.

It was a big deal back then. Deep beneath Hangar D at Hollywood Studios, in that top secret laboratory complex, a secret sect of Judeo-Bolshevik Nazis, paid by the corporate-run Illuminati, had accomplished the unprecedented. To create the first artificial intelligence that can make a movie all by itself. It was called Jim Kohlberg ver. 1.0. It did unprecedentedly well on its final exam, quite a tricky assignment: to create a movie for grandmothers, dads, pre-pubescent sons, practically the whole family, even with a dog and a guinea pig. The film has to appeal to the classic mainstreamers as well as New Age sensibilities, and it can be paid for at all costs with Monopoly money. Jim Kohlberg ver. 1.0 has done an incredible job – he has automatically extracted the theme of generations coming together through music, but wisely filtered out a contemporary manifestation where a son introduces his ZZTop dad to the secrets of techno or dubstep. He pulled out classic hits from the 60s and 70s, where the majority opinion is that anyone who doesn't like it is ignorant. In the montage, he moves the audience with Simmons delving into the tenets of hippie rock, finalizing the whole event at a concert where the previously skeptical father really lets loose. Sure, the arrogant audience may feel like they've got a broken record, but for the rest of us, we've got a first-rate load of the best: a chick from the diner who reciprocates the feelings of the biggest loser in her neighborhood (hopefully they'll fix the patch in the future), a son meeting his amnesiac parents after 20 years, a liberal mother and skeptical father, a nasty doctor representing a depriving nasty state institution, the ability to only express yourself when your favorite music is playing nearby (ho ho), it's all here. Even the inventors have formally acknowledged that the device relies more on certainties and we don’t have to worry about it creating any interesting sequences either visually or conceptually, but that's supposedly okay because the subject matter is sooooo heartrending that no one will care less that they actually went to see a film and will give this incredibly clichéd, boring, uninventive, wannabe independent, emotion-milking bullshit an incredibly high rating because it warmed their cockles. Golden sex and violence.

That long-haired walking holocaust especially, who gives soda to the main characters even with a fluorescent light down his throat, is really growing on me, and the fact that the animals are really, really badly hurting each other and it looks so real that I'm still not sure there weren't people dying in the filming, gives truth to the claim that films kicked off with a convo like "Here’s a building and a million bucks, do what you want." "Okay." might be the real thing.

Matthijs van Heijningen (fuck how does he expect to get into the subconscious with that name) may have played Silent Hill and Dead Space and enjoyed watching Hellraiser, so it’s kind of a shame he hasn't seen the original The Thing he was prequelling. An horror movie utterly devoid of ambition where nothing works apart from the two creatures, and it's distressing to watch the film try to pretend it’s not the case. The CGI is terribly boring, the characters are as flat as Milla Jovovich, instead of a final climax we get a routine visit to a spaceship (incidentally, the fact that the hole to it was supposed to be blown by the Norwegians is somewhat forgotten), and whereas in the original the space nastiness was rather sneaky and insidious, here it rearranges rooms with the nonchalance of the Hulk. Puke up and forget.

To bury such a beautifully anti-chauvinist theme with such lethargic and perhaps universally flawed direction is a feat. For example, if you listen at the door during a screening, you can't help but feel that you’re watching not a film, but a cut from a 60s dance school reunion, as the film drops one oldies song after another, which fits like whipped cream on chili con carne. The encounter with the eponymous woman takes place in slow motion, where the girl dapperly dons a leather jacket (?), and it practically looks exactly the same, even with the background music, as when Bay introduces us to Megan Fox. There are more of those points of contact – the wild lady here may have her armpits bare enough to take supporting roles in Wilkinson commercials, but the film doesn't bother to introduce us to the doe who's been chewing her pits clean. The editing between scenes is practically constantly resolved by intercutting, which imho is also a pretty passé thing to do, and almost no one in this movie can act. The highlight is the absolutely incomprehensible pair of teachers, who not only both look about 17, but their importance in the film is minimal and they completely take away from the plot with their problems. Actor Sean Bridgers, an unspoken parody of Colin Firth, does everything he can to make you not take the film seriously, and the final stage is the violence, which isn't there. Or rather, it wants to be, but just as it's happening, someone moves the camera so we can imagine everything... like in the new Seagal movies. What's left? The great story, the strong finale, and especially the absolutely fabulous scene of the marital squabble, which in the current context is the best I've seen in a long time.

Proof of the non-existence of the real Asgard is the fact that the authors of this fill-in-the-blank weren't found somewhere kicked to death by an eight-legged horse and pecked by overgrown crows, because that just wasn't an option. I have my limits of tolerance for how far an artist can go in mining from certain basics, but this is way beyond the horizon. An abysmally insufferable digital inferno in which the only forgettable element is the creators' cowardice. A lot of people here are spitting on a black Heimdall. For me I almost went down when I saw the absurdly digital Asgard, which, despite the fact that it's kind of a nirvana for Viking pigs, is all scrubbed and shiny as if my mother lived there. I closed my eyes and hoped it would all go away and be ok, but when I opened them, the handsome Thor had just swung a hammer in his hand and I knew it was going to be bad. Take his crew, for example. A carnival of characters straight out of Dungeon Siege – a painted amazon with perfectly shaved armpits (unexplained), a Renaissance fencer (again unexplained), a Japanese man (fucking unexplained), and a rather appealing version of a fantasy dwarf who nonetheless looks like he owns a hair salon. The antagonist winking mischievously with slicked-back hair, yet the film pretends like we're not supposed to spot the villain yet. Bwa ha ha, okay, since I ate the remote during the opening thirty minutes, I was forced to finish it. Folks, it didn't get much better. It's fine to cast sure-thing Earth-bound initiators like Skarsgård or the pleasantly shaggable Natalie Portman here, if it didn't hurt so badly that they're completely unnecessary in this movie. For crystalline proof, consider one of the "action scenes" (I'm still making my point), when the newly pacifist Thor (god!) goes to ask the metallic monster if he can stop trashing the city and tells these characters to evacuate the area. Which takes place by them running about 150 m, something explodes around them, they stop, and then return to the half-dead hero, and when he asks if all the people are safe they reply that they took care of it. Oh, and the action scenes are a chapter in themselves. I don't know how high inflation has gotten in the US in the last three years, but if Bay, by the way, has a big city being raided on all levels by giant robots folding into bulldozers, fighter jets, and helicopters at the end of Transformers, and Branagh, with a budget one mega less, has one five-meter-tall metal man kick a car and smash the aforementioned shop window, that makes for some embezzled funds somewhere. Thor, with rare exceptions (like, two or three shots), is not action-packed at all because it lacks any dynamism. It either does it with editing (the opening scythe with the ice giants) or cuts it off when I would have expected something to happen (the giant in the town), or kills it off with cluttered and overwrought CGI (the battle between Thor and Loki), or last but not least, messes it up with a blatant 3D effect (does anyone really care about that anymore these days?). Thor is all that much more of a mistake because, unlike Snyder, Greengrass, Cuarón, or Bay, it keeps itself disgustingly close to the ground, lacks any directorial signature, and is unaware of its position on the audiovisual market. And it's competing increasingly noticeably with video games, which can offer far more than the cinematic medium, but will always fall short in something, and that's the interplay of story, characters, and multi-angle physical action. Thor doesn't realize this, and that's why even White Fang won’t go looking for him a year from now. The only thing that works about this movie are the references and the jokes, and that's a pretty sad card for a summer blockbuster.

The fatal finale to Joel Schumacher's wild career, and holder of the record for the fastest movie withdrawal from theaters of all time, when after 18 days and $25,000 earned (on a $25m budget) it was decided that it wasn't worth wasting electricity on the projector for this. In some ways that was good news, because Schumacher's creative fatigue was already terribly evident in the messiness of his last films, plus at least it proved that even the presence of two Oscar-deserving actors doesn't automatically fill theaters if the rest of them aren’t worth a penny. And like, truly not even. Watching a completely inept bunch of maniacs unable to arrange to get Cage's thumb on the vault sensor for half an hour, even though they have his wife as a hostage, is a pain. If you stop taking the impotent threatening seriously after ten minutes, partly due to a shotgun being reloaded menacingly about fifteen times, then what are you supposed to do in a home invasion movie? Admire the interiors?

I wondered from the start why Fincher was throwing away the unoriginal but grandiose and clumsy Larsson source material. He clearly wasn’t that interested in it. He doesn't waste much directorial input on the investigation itself, and his typical subtle subversiveness is identifiable here perhaps only during the scene in which he suggests that Enya is arguably the world's whitest musical performer (I'll save my search for a connection to Dylan Moran's claim that if a vagina could talk, it would sound exactly like Enya, for another day). Fincher is only interested in one thing here – Lisbeth Salander. This builds on his study of the emerging new generation of young people who, through information technology and reckless pragmatism, are breaking down the centuries-old emeritus structures of elites, which he began in The Social Network (where, for example, recall the illustrative scene where, while the rich and the noble in funny hats, champagne in hand, get drunk watching the boys duel it out with their oars, Zuckerberg is silently extending Facebook's influence into Europe from his bedroom). Fincher's thesis in this study was that transhumanity, the merging of machine and human consciousness, occurs with the body becoming the carrier of data but still remaining a body (see the frequent and intense sex scenes), i.e. a voluntary transformation into an android that nonetheless does not encounter problems associated with its artificial "soul" because it basically knows from the beginning who is "king of its castle". I can imagine his disappointment when he eventually had to realize that transhumanity, on the contrary, occurs through the voluntary projection of his consciousness onto commercial network platforms, whose holders are, in the end, those same old, untouchable elites.

I've got a great idea for a movie – Othello spends long days and hours talking himself into watching something where Franco fingers a rock for five days and then saws off his paw with a can opener. Fortunately, Boyle has conceived of the problem as a visual cabaret, with a damn near biblical digital storm sweeping over the landscape and Scooby-Doo hiding around the corner. Surprisingly, 127 Hours isn't that physical a film, though the urine-drinking scene is so suggestively shot (the slowly rising level in the macro tube) that a severed hand can't ruffle us Southern exploitation-soaked viewers anymore. Admittedly, I was inclined to chew off a limb at times out of boredom, but that it was only sometimes and I’m saying it about a film with this kind of premise is a sign of perhaps the highest quality.

Korea's Magnificent 71, led not by Yul Brynner but by the Eurasian champion of gaping at the horrors of war. Not that I blame him. After all, filming with extreme resolution digital cameras requires that the film crew put their weight into the sawing. On one hand, the technology allows us to capture in sharp focus the finest flying specks of dust, not to mention explosions that throw thousands of tiny parts into the air that are no longer a blur, where each is in full focus and we can follow its trajectory comfortably as far as the length of the shot allows, but on the other hand we have to reckon with the necessity of absolute ultimata in terms of make-up, effects, costuming, and production design. If there's one place the film doesn't really fail, it's here. The ubiquitous dust, dirt, bloody pustules, worn guns, flying shrapnel, burning soldiers, and glorious explosions in the long shots leave the viewer guessing at nothing, and though it goes over the top a few times (an over-stylized shootout in the tall grass, almost funny gore), the eyes have their fun. And it actually quite masks the fact that the script was apparently written by a twelve-year-old nationalist after a three-day crash course in screenwriting, which means that while the film waves the epic history banner, it ends up pitting a literally bullet-riddled protagonist on a pile of corpses, machine gun in hand, against an arrogant bad guy in a white uniform firing a Russian PPSh-41 submachine gun single-handed.