Othello

I would gladly have blasted the film as an Oscar-winning ethnic warm-hearted gay pleasure cruise if I hadn't just a month ago listened to the stories of an acquaintance who had spent a year in Afghanistan. And that's why I appreciate a film that not only explains why the country is a barren dry yellow wasteland and the national pastime is to sit and stare straight ahead for five hours, but more importantly, explores the legacy of a once-proud nation without wiping its ass with the specifics and adapting them to Western perceptions.

A surprisingly clever, quite innovative, and very well made... uh.... psychological comedy. Seriously...

The problem with Lorepretty much lies in how it reminded me of the art teacher short in the film Ghost World, where they flush dolls down the toilet and repeat "mirror, father, mirror". Because, in the same way, this is truly universal art, behind which I tried vehemently and in vain to find something more than "intimate polemic over collective guilt" and "the transformation of a girl into a woman under strange circumstances". In reality, Lore is quite misogynistic in contrast to Trier's Europa trilogy, which is close to his setting, because while that one manages to raise many themes and issues from the perspective of a male observer, Lore doesn't get any further with its female active protagonist than the eternal stigma and mother protector. Which is only emphasized by the fact that it was filmed by a woman. And for a change it's very proficient formally, though I feel lately that cutting from close-ups marking some emotional advancement to long shots made up of informative footage is now such a general recipe for sticking an arthouse together for pennies.

The Perks of Being a blah blah blah is absolutely as much of a bummer as all the main characters. I mean, for all its attempts to be an independent, open-minded, and liberal piece of work, it's a shallow, bigoted, arrogant atrocity about people trying to stand out from the mainstream (the eccentric gay, the indie harlot, the quiet intellectual with a past, the goth, the junkie, the punk, etc.), all the while being taken from an uptight middle-class perspective. It's not just that the characters are extremely predictable, it's that the entire film degrades their attitudes into youthful horseplay, unable to distinguish them from the classic teenage schema. As such, there is no logical conflict of differing schools of thought, as the aforementioned are cemented by the fact that they are all different – which is such arrogant hogwash that is accentuated by the character of the main character's father – a hardened Republican who is addressed as "sir" by his own children. He's basically the main winner of the whole story, because exactly as he imagined, the kids mess around together, then it's revealed that his son was groped by his aunt (I would have liked a more open sequence here, because that's as far as the film takes my imagination), which actually makes sense as to why he occasionally goes wild, which solves it, and we have a chat about hockey at the dinner table after prayers. In other words, source material or no, the film in its sweet collectivist universe doesn't acknowledge straying from the mainstream, just pats itself on the back with an indulgent smile. And from this comes a lot of very hilarious moments, which include among my favorites the part when the father of a homosexual beats his son into a model hetero before dawn (they say he can't be cured, ha! there you go, liberals) or when the main character bursts into a room at a party where two gay men who have been dating for a long time are giving each other soft kisses on the nose _______ No one here knows how to act! It's sheer agony watching Emma Watson explain that she used to drink and fuck horribly and now she's trying to get rid of that past. Ezra Miller plays it like he's trying to end his acting career, and he's not alone in that. Once the film even starts to crawl into the Donnie Darko space, it's already done and can’t hope for more than 2 stars. I'm happy to banter with Stephen Chbosky sometimes, but I wouldn't buy his memories of his troubled youth even if he gave me money for it. Blech.

The biggest addict for festival welcome drinks, Ki-duk Kim, is fondling the Golden Lion again and I'm getting the feeling that the guy’s got a punch clock on the scene. It's all here – raping his own mother, lying in a grave, suicide, a mother masturbating her son, tears, penance, semen, animals. To top it off, all the characters act so independently demented that in real life they would never survive so much as buying baked goods at a convenience store. What's absolutely fascinating is how the director is unafraid to put the film in front of you and tackle all sorts of formal challenges. It just doesn't worry about them, and anything that reeks of someone having to take five minutes to accomplish is resolved by editing or by the film not showing it at all. SYMBOLISM!!!!!! is the credo of the entire film, manifested, for example, in the hero's alleged mother sitting beneath the painting of the revealed bust of a woman the hero is throwing a knife at. So deep!!! A true festival, art, all-destroying evil. Then again, the reveal wasn't totally totally stupid (though logically totally WTF) and there are worse things in the world. Like the holocaust. PS: I read the other reviews after mine and I refuse to rewrite it.

Name a cliché and oh my gosh you'll find it here. An incredible calculation to target an audience with the notion that conventions shape the genre and it's forbidden to rail against them. But also a subject for the formal study of how a video game movie differs from a comic book movie. They have tons in common (the elimination of close-ups and informative shots, the distinctive typology of the characters, especially in terms of their appearance), but they diverge once you start getting dynamic with the camera, because a comic book is static and thus relies on editing to capture action scenes, whereas a video game follows a character, or anarchically passes around the action as if there wasn't shooting going on, calmly making its way through solid obstacles because there is no apparatus, only the image. The narrative is also like a video game, where in fact we have a diverse collection of missions, including the last one, at the end of which you have to beat the boss. Not to mention the ending, where you flank the enemy during a firefight, your enemies spawn regularly when you cross a certain point, and you autoheal under cover. But I can't help it, it was so nice at the end with the shooting and the blood spurting out of people and… and… and I was on a high right at the beginning as Brolin beat the crap out of the whorehouse. It’s just been a while since I’ve seen a decent action movie that somebody tossed a decent amount of cash into (which, after the small box office takings of this one, will once again be a long time coming). Otherwise, though, this is purely a film adaptation of Mafia II. Except that the other one had a much better script. PS: Emma Stone is a broom and Gosling's accent is awesome.

I don't know. I'm as tense as a dentist's waiting room for most of the film, can't decide if the civilian atmosphere is unsettling me in a good way or a bad one, and after it was over I was still putting two and two together in the bathtub with a wrinkled forehead... and then it dawned on me. The whole point, the whole thing clicked into place and I was confronted with the triviality of the entire plot. While it’s not that bad, it's awfully similar to all that Thai/Korean/Japanese stuff, just a little more Nordic in its aloofness. And when you cook mashed potatoes for 4 hours, the result may not be all bad, but you kind of feel like a moron.

Contagion, as a study of a particular crisis situation, does not even attempt to educate, advise, and inform, but describes as many cogs as possible in the unstoppable mechanism of the spread of an epidemic. These are not subjectivized (there is not a single scene in the film, perhaps not even a single shot, that does not concern the contagion), they act according to pre-set patterns of behavior in a given situation, and for the viewer this is saved by the cast (the hahaha on the viewer with Gwyneth further underlined by the autopsy scene). But I see the film's perfection in its adult take on the situation, where for every problem there is a point of view that is countered and counter-argued again. And it's that absence of the characters' subjective point of view that prevents the creation of a universal truth, and we don't know anything at the end of the film that we wouldn't have found out on the internet if such a situation had actually arisen. A bunch of conspiracy theories that refute each other. Let everyone make up their own mind.

It really depends on the viewer's attitude, since The Experiment can easily stand as an entertaining genre film with a lighter sociological slant, but certainly not a study of the behavior of a sample of the population in extreme conditions, however much anyone may patronize it. Even from the position of a classic narrative film, it does have its share of holes (the script in particular reeks of the author having lost his virginity at the time of writing), but on the other hand, the surprisingly good story editing manages to keep the entire two hours of action in two rooms in front of the screen. Which is actually quite rare.

It's an inconsistent, unwieldy mess.