Othello

I could probably spend twenty years of my life just watching Alexei German's films on repeat. Untangling each scene in turn, looking for what's related to the main plot line, what's related to the minor ones, dissecting the characters, figuring out what's related to the plot at all, and if not, why it's in the scene in the first place. A total mayhem that ties together none other than a terrifying caravan of anonymous black limousines pulling out of a monumental Kremlin nest. From my personal point of view, Khrustalyov is a testament to the ultimacy of the cinematic medium in portraying a certain zeitgeist, a subjective insight, and the inherent chaotic and elusive qualities of human nature.

Such a horribly badly made labor of love that it looks like a "sweding" of Jan Svěrák's late work. The artificiality and emptiness of the setting at times is unintentionally evocative of certain surreal nightmares or older low-budget video games.

Aesthetically innovative, yet carefully observational. One has to admire the filmmakers for how they managed to get so close to the people involved that they cease to perceive the crew even in the most unflattering, exacerbated moments. The Macedonian countryside here has a certain Tarr-esque ethos of timelessness that's easy to slide into, and yet at the end you're quite startled by the fact that this is how people on the same continent as you still live their lives. Anthropological porn I can handle.

Can we start using the acronym FCP (Festival Crowd Pleaser) as a standard designation for this film genre already? The Farewell is skillfully shot in individual scenes that cleverly supplement the important dialogue with some small unimportant subplot in which they take place (Chinese massage, searching for an earring). Taken together, though, it screams terribly of the need to be a cultural showcase about Chinese society for the Western viewer, but it's too superficial and more akin to a person who quite seriously considers a visit to a Chinese restaurant to be multicultural enrichment. After all, they're all wearing those outfits, there are pictures of waterfalls on the walls, and the speakers are blaring Guzheng. I'd rather watch the movie from the perspective of the poor Japanese bride who gets dragged by her stoner boyfriend of three months to somewhere in mainland China, with the caveat that she has to marry him immediately, where she can't understand a word anyone says, and no one there gives a shit because it's all happening for the sake of their dying grandmother who couldn't care less. Bummer.

Horace McCoy predicted that a public space would arise where every dumbass could get instantly rich at the expense of a complete loss of pride, and Sydney Pollack in turn hinted at roughly what that would look like. About people who would rather accept the rules of a game they have no chance of winning than try to change them. A sadistic horror film where everyone is to blame.

"Play melancholic song." A design showcase for the 21st century bourgeoisie that really doesn't go one step beyond a mere experiment with the romance movie genre with its theme of transhumanity, which is built on nothing more than the fact that she is an artificial intelligence. The visuals, reminiscent of an attempt to place images from an Ikea catalogue into a narrative context, raise wild theories about whether we are actually in some kind of horrifying Heinlein-esque dystopia where all the characters are actually silent accomplices leading their empty lives in gentrified cities where all the people are young, beautiful, rich, and have creative jobs. That and Joaquin Phoenix in the lead with the creepy gamepiece in his forehead (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOimTfNR110) pull the whole otherwise pretty awful spectacle of designer consumerism up to a certain level. "Play melancholic film. Play different melancholic film."

The first three episodes have the same effect as the character played by Hugh Laurie. A fake American shell that hides his British origins and the whole thing feels kind of false and goofy. The initial disappointment then grows precisely because Iannucci is known for dropping the best jokes of his generation into his scripts practically out of the blue, and because of their frequent absurdity and brutality, they often strike completely unexpectedly. Whereas in Avenue 5, the punchlines of jokes are cut for laughs, used for laughs, pointed out by turning off the music or with a straight camera zoom. Fortunately, from episode 4 onwards, the characters get going (mainly due to the fact that they are no longer capable of development) and the whole bizarre circus starts to click perfectly. A lot of scenes are then only funny because of how out of place everyone seems in them, and in fact the whole show starts to turn into a compilation of working running jokes. Though I cringed at the beginning, by the end I was giggling pretty much constantly and letting the wacky sets and costumes get to me because they fit the context of the lampooned society of über-consumerist late capitalism full of fake, confused cretins.

I'm pretty convinced that the scariest word of the 21st century will be 'satire'. There are bad scripts, and then there are scripts that are also bad but try to convince us that they are not by pointing out how aware they are of the genre rules they are not afraid to knowingly break. When you then combine this insufferable arrogance with an ironic statement about contemporary society, you'd have to be a real genius to get anything out of it other than a painfully spasmodic rant where even the script must have been written on Twitter, complete with hashtags. And it's probably not worth mentioning that Zobel is no genius. Aside from the final, surprisingly well done and distinctive fight scenes, it's mind-numbingly boringly shot in a typical Blumhouse production where everyone is wearing clean pressed clothes, the set is full of obviously artificial objects, and when he tries to shock, he does it with the aid of laughably digital blood. Lindelof is a filmmaker who based his entire screenwriting career on trying to emulate Joss Whedon, the king of bullshit genre self-reflections (God how I hate them), but didn't have enough talent to pull it off. Now he's just trying to make a buck off of the social and cultural internet wars, where he's trying to prove his ability to balance on a spectrum of opinion that’s pathetic. Plus, when you subtract the context from the film, notice how each scene is completely nonsensically constructed, how people behave in it, and what moves the plot along. This movie is sloppy AF. Too bad for Betty Gilpin, who the whole time gives the impression of either not being able to believe what just came out of her mouth or that somebody else is strung up in her face. She's actually quite funny when it comes to that. Like, for real.

A lesson in depression. The anatomically accurate rendering of imperfect bodies and their interactions is pretty creepy.

My great joke about it being as if the Romanian New Wave had been relegated to a genre setting fizzled after I found out that Porumboiu made it, so indeed the Romanian New Wave had been relegated to a genre setting. The horrible apathy and ordinariness is inspiring in some ways, and actually quite funny, but it often just got on my nerves. Most notably in the "humorous" scenes, which operate on a "Here's a joke. Yup, it’s lying right here on the ground. It's gonna lie there for a while. But you have to pick it up if you want to laugh. So, what's it gonna be? You don't want to? I don't care." In many ways, the protagonist is reminiscent of the protagonist in Sorrentino's The Consequences of Love.