Othello

I’m struggling a bit with a certain formal sterility, but I guess that kind of goes with the territory of hi-tech thrillers, and more than once I was snapped out of it by the fact that Elisabeth Moss often looks like Jeffrey Tambor wearing a wig. Still, I'm giving it full marks because I haven't seen such perfect drama in a genre film in a long time, allowing the film to graduate from intimate drama/horror to near-sci-fi actioner (a one-shot in which an invisible man beats up about ten people FTW) without retreating from the overarching theme of the seemingly irrational trauma of a victim of psychological abuse. Nor should Whannell's individual visual ideas be overlooked, such as the shot during the opening titles of a wave crashing from the ocean's perspective just before the waves break on the rocks. Or those sadistic camera glances into the void, depicting the protagonist's sense of the antagonist's omnipresence. It's really very clever. As an added bonus, I'd like to announce that I really wish more of the lead heroine roles were cast with these atypical, interesting, and adult types of actresses like Moss. Her character development works here in large part because she can believably play all the different roles she has here, and when she flips into the role of the hunter, that’s a satisfaction I sorely crave. Let the kids who bounce to movies from PornHub maybe shit themselves.

A movie based on a book written from true events that are still relevant today. Filmed by a director who has just returned from overseas, hat in hand, still covered in tar and feathers. The cards couldn't be dealt any worse. I remain mystified by the need to follow big stories where we know from the start that the hero is going to get away with it, we just get to watch him get brutalized for thirteen months, all spiced up by the fact that the wounds here are still too fresh for any revision or retreat from the simple strong story of the hero who endures. What was most interesting, then, were the passages with the ex-soldier delivering a ransom note in the desert outside Aleppo in the morning, meeting the family of the missing man in Copenhagen for lunch, and movingly breaking down at a funeral in New Hampshire that evening. The rest may be reality, but cinematically it’s run of the mill. Life sucks. Plus, I spent half the movie expecting Scott Adkins to somehow kick everybody thing and run away, only to find out that Adkins wasn't even in it. Sadness.

A fairly literal Nietzschean thesis about staring into the abyss which has the ability to become the story it’s telling. But maybe I'm wrong and you'll say Candyman five times in the mirror after you finish watching it. This film falls woefully into the category of a late 80's slasher, and it has only itself to blame in the moments where it can’t leave off of simply alternating classic jump scares, however much the brutality pushes the film slightly beyond the usual slasher comfort zone. And yet it deserves a much higher status, as it is nothing less than a general description of a myth, its genesis, its universality, our ability to project ourselves into it and, most importantly, its elusiveness due to the untrustworthiness of all its sources. The myth here is something unpleasantly abstract, but that makes it even more unpleasant, while the pain and death are quite tangible. And Candyman is a particularly well-turned myth, because while, like any other, he owes his existence to the people who believe in him, he sweeps away those who mock him by dusting off his reputation again for a few long years. Try to avoid that bulletproof clause. ____ Anyway, if on the night you see Candyman you are awakened by a sound like a knock on the door, you live alone in a small apartment in the middle of the city, you get up to go to the toilet, which a greedy architect designed with your back exactly to the mirror, to which you have to turn around, and when you've done all that, you return to the room where you had automatically hung your coat over the back of a high chair... well, you might as well get ready to meet dawn in person. Or at least that’s what my friend told me...

An ethnographic film exhibition about the Carpathian Hutsuls that takes your breath away with its wild formal techniques and often confuses you with its perspective in what the scene actually wants to tell us and from what position we’re actually observing it. But in this way, Parajanov purposefully achieves a portrayal of these Carpathian highlanders as a full-blooded, savage people battered by an unforgiving climate, for whom the constant presence of hardship and death often forces them into a malicious fatalism. It is interesting how the lives of these remote peoples some one hundred and fifty years ago actually bore a realistic resemblance to the settings of classic Howardian fantasy stories. The tragic tale of Ivan's madness contains events beyond the reach of man that affect his life and the weight of everyday life to a degree where mere existence is a dramatic adventure. We are promised the arrival of distant pilgrims or an encounter with a real magician. How universal all the stories actually are in their foundations is demonstrated by the moment when, after Ivan's second wife fails to conceive, he begins to practice witchcraft. In our country today, we call them Aesopians.

One of the greatest crimes the Bolsheviks perpetrated was to bury this direct formal successor to Eisenstein and Welles in the bowels of a vault with such thoroughness that even today the film doesn't get the attention it deserves. Especially when compared to the nationalizing opuses of the time such as those where Buchvaldek and Švorcová pranced around beyond the pale.

Watching it, I never would have guessed that Devil's Advocate went through five years of pre-production hell and that the filming was beset with difficulties and delays. Because everything about it feels like a totally coherent original vision that was fun for everyone to work on, from the actors and camera work to the sets and music. After all, even dead wood like Keanu Reeves gives a decent performance here. The best part is how the main story is propelled through interesting and intense subplots, and when the film opens with a close-up of the confused face of an underage witness, no one thinks that two hours later the main character will be shooting himself in the head surrounded by flames and black candles. Given the way the film slowly doles out information and odd situations, I would give anything to see it for the first time with no knowledge of what's behind it all. This is how genre movies were made in 1997, kids. Years later, I was quite taken aback by Al Pacino's prescient monologue about billions of Eddie Barzoons entering the new millennium. Tony Gilroy writes, others cry.

Aside from the partial missteps (an overlong therapist/investigator ending with the overacting Leigh), a very nicely written mystery that successfully meets the ethos of a forgotten island at the edge of the world where more than a few mysteries lie hidden in both the characters and the place itself. Except that the attempt at a feminist dimension fails with the usual 90s crutch, where even though the heroine is a capable, individual, and independent character, she nevertheless seems ill-suited to the role and is neurotic, wracked by panic attacks and pill addiction.

The setting in post-war Leningrad is merely a backdrop, as the story of Beanpole is actually universal, and given that the film almost exclusively tells it through the characters rather than the setting it champions, it's actually a bit misleading. The overuse of long close-ups of characters staring at each other, looking for answers or at least relief in each other's eyes, can ultimately degrade the power of this mode of expression because, as young sensitive directors will hopefully learn one day, a facial close-up is a terribly important and powerful type of shot that needs to find its place in a space and time that often no one has built here. It goes from a close-up in one space to a close-up in another space. While the cinematography and color work are occasionally impressive in the way they forgo the proffered grayness of the post-war big city and splash pastel colors in the promise of a gradual return to better times in the illustrations of Russian storybooks, it's ultimately useless when the film for all practical purposes forgets to work with that setup in the end. It's a shame Alexei German didn't get to make something from this era.

It took sufficiently intense political frustration and social shock, but we got there. Slovakia has started to dust off the forgotten tradition of czechsploitation. Almost everything from that category can be found here – the impatience and disgust of the filmmakers with current conditions, the complete dehumanization of the negative characters, people as caricatures, the quota for goats met within twenty minutes, and the hastiness due to the need to send the film to the cinemas before Kuciak's body got cold. Then again, such urgency is not so unusual among Slovaks, if we recall (ha? who?) Devínsky masaker. Most of all, the film suffers from the performances, where in the shadow of events that were still fresh, the filmmakers are clearly afraid of portraying the bad guys as insufficiently evil or the positive characters as insufficiently sympathetic martyrs. Like, for example, the scene where the ugly fat mobster and the arrogant corrupt orphanage director-slash-pimp have sex and sigh, "Ave ty" and "Ave já." (probably a Slovakian mafia variation on the dreadful Czech "good on ya" and "good on me") recalls the golden days of the nonsensical lesbian sex between the evil nurses in Renč's debut. Nevertheless, Vajda does his half Depardieu, half Pesci mob boss thing pretty well, and I'm kind of sorry that his Wagner probably won't be dragged into some purely genre crime spin-off where he'd be a great fit. Then again, that one could be made by Solčanská, who already showed with her previous film that she can work within budget constraints, emphasize certain production values, and emulate the style of Western crime films well, which makes it not at all difficult to watch her films, but at the same time stands as a barrier between being a total explosive unleashing and not a completely hysterical indulgence. Which is a pity.

The coming-of-age of a Guatemalan Indian Mayan oppressed by traditional patriarchy with a piggish parable. It must have been like 75000/10 on Vice. More or less. An anthropological three stars.