Othello

Spielberg, instead of taking a moment to think about the lazy script cobbled together from the most unique ingredients and solutions, hired representatives from technology schools, companies, and organizations to give him an expert opinion on likely technological developments by 2050. The result is a very outlandish vision of the future, with giant talking advertisements, singing cornflakes, and funny spiders that crawl up under people's duvets whenever the cop of the great evil state waves his hand. It makes any 1960s sci-fi forecast look considerably more realistic next to it, whereas this is really just a relic of Cruise’s profile period. But it's a fact that I have to admire Kaminski for taking his penchant for analogue color desaturation to such an extreme in a high-budget sci-fi film that it ends up looking like a movie rip from 2010.

A post-humanity horror film and a film that strays heavily from Spielberg's previous style. It feels very closed, isolated, surreal, and most importantly, fatal. Despite its piecemeal screenwriting and production missteps, it is an exceptional film in how convincingly it closes the human chapter. Not just in the story, but also in the work with visuals, with Kaminski working with a tightly defined, hazy space and the role of sounds and music here uncharacteristically subdued for Spielberg and Williams, giving the film the impression of a memory even as you watch.

I remember Irreversible, There Will Be Blood, The Revenant, Children of Men, and Se7en as films that moved me from needing to see a film in terms of its content to being a dusty formalist. This has now also turned me into a bitter poisonous old man swooning at digital semi-animated films with giant resolution and 60 frames, but I won't deny the occasional worry about whether I've just lost my sensitivity over time and simply become cynical. After the last screening of Private Ryan, I can be completely at ease because I didn't blink for 145 minutes (not counting the four terrible scenes that don't take place in Normandy). It's not just about the movement and composition of shots, but also about the material (Kaminski used a chemical to stretch the film windows to desaturate the colors by removing the silver fibers, a method made famous by Khondji in Se7en, by the way) or the acknowledgement and exploitation of technical limitations (fragmentation, the expansiveness of the light sources). All this in angles yet unseen, often giving the impression that the camera was there by mistake. After all, during the opening sequence, many of the actors and extras involved reportedly did not see the camera and crew at all through the smoke, explosions, and pervasive chaos. Not surprisingly, Private Ryan was at the birth of the perception of World War II and is behind the subsequent wave of films, TV shows, and computer games that have attempted to convey that chaos and destruction with a similar intensity to what was achieved here. PS: I recently saw a piece of this film on some modern TV at a friend's house, where the picture is edited to look like it was shot at a higher frame rate, and I nearly kicked the place apart. I'm kinda sad that a lot of people will only see the film in that format anymore.

A potentially interesting challenge to the field of courtroom drama where a multitude of different motivations collide is unfortunately overturned into a bouquet of fluff and instant emotion. Besides, the whole thing looks somehow like TV.

A blockbuster attraction, where digital effects were meant to play the main role, a breathtaking one at that. However, it was films like this one or Emmerich's Godzilla that made some people squirm and wonder if filmmaking might not also be about adapting to some limits. With them, the crew has to work with some pacing, shooting angles, editing; in short, things that are supposed to convince the viewer that the man in the piece of rubber is supposed to arouse some kind of experience in them. With CGI that can depict everything, you just, uh... depict everything. A tyrannosaurus eats a car on a street full of people? Here you go. A tanker has to drive full speed into a harbor? Here you go, head-on frontal view. Schwarzenegger playing King Lear? No problem. All straight-faced, no hiding, and you kind of watch it and wonder if they were truly serious when they made Jeff Goldblum the main character and gave him a daughter whose only active role in the film is to swing from a pole.

The right-wing view of the Holocaust is not something I agree with, but at the very least it's refreshing to be able to deal with it these days. Schindler's List could easily be read as a defense of capitalism, whose values are "supra-ideal" and pragmatic, making it incapable of the irrational evil that the Holocaust is generally considered to be (which is conveniently myopic, of course, since every young child knows about its economic motivations). Equally, it can be read as advocacy of a trickle-down economy, whereby a wealthy factory worker develops a relationship with his employees, tries to keep them, and gradually sees them as human beings whom he can use his abilities to save. That makes this film have far more problematic levels than the 100 times rehashed closing sentiment (as awful as it is). However, Spielberg and Kaminski (whose creative input here I tend to place higher than the director's; after all, look at what kind of cinematic leap this is from Jurassic Park or Hook) have managed to translate the methodical chaos of the Holocaust to the screen perfectly in several scenes here, creating the illusion of a documentary and a surreal nightmare at the same time, as the situation must have had on many in retrospect. Nemes's Son of Saul is a few paces farther ahead in this, but I think it stands on the foundation of what Schindler's List built in certain places.

A variation on film noir in the Romanian New Wave mode, so it's incredibly slow (but not melancholy), visually ugly, and unfulfilling until its finale, while still trying to both preserve and paraphrase the rules of the genre. The problem for many may be that we don't actually know the purpose of any of the scenes until the end of the film, and they can't even be enjoyed individually as they are very procedural and inelegantly shot, making them impossible to succumb to visually. When it clicks at the end, each scene suddenly makes sense and it's just fun to think about and realize the roles of each situation in the story (the piano playing, the gas station), but again, there's no need to celebrate the script because it's not that clever, it's just written in reverse. But for the patient quiet of the forest solitude, it's actually quite an appealing twist on the crime genre that I somehow strangely enjoyed watching.

A straight-up bad movie. All the things that Spielberg is faulted for (sentimentality, emphasis on family values, infantilism) are actually the cornerstones of the whole film here. Completely odd dramaturgy, which means that kids just don't get to see the passages that are more or less geared only towards them without fast forwarding. All the scenes are longer than they should be, the same information is fed to us several times through the film, and above all, it's all so unabashedly artificial that you feel more like you're watching strangers enjoy themselves on a ride at Disney World. Spielberg is apparently trying to create something like playgrounds into which he inserts a plot, but he doesn't know, or has forgotten, that the best children's games never took place in environments created for children, but instead in the real world, onto which you can pin any story you want if you don't understand it well enough. Two stars for Hook's double-tipped cigar.

I don't even want to get too much into this movie because I'd feel like I was kicking a disabled person. It's actually fascinating to watch a $110M piece of work that seems like every other scene was being concocted while the previous one was being filmed. An Olympics of the laziest screenwriting ("the governor of California decided to bring back the death penalty in light of these crimes" what the fuck?!). Kelly Marcel's role in Hollywood is to be given potentially problematic topics and then muddle them up in a way that doesn't offend anyone while still trying to appear superficially non-conformist. I don't know if they have no one better at Sony to do that, or if they just can't completely colonize certain topics, but nothing here holds together at all.

When René walks into a Norwegian prison and Charlie Hunnam walks out after a year, I don't think we can put together much of an argument against the Nordic prison system.