Othello

That beautiful, screwed up, screwed up time. In some scenes (you'll recognize them) I recommend you turn around in the theater and check out the goofy smiles of your fellow viewers. I can't wait to enjoy this with a beer in my hand in front of the screen at the Klubovna Cultural Center in Dejvice. Unfortunately, the naturalness of the film's depiction of this microcosm probably also comes from the extent to which the mindset of Russian society hasn't changed.

If anyone has the right to sharply rephrase the problems of the contemporary US, it’s undoubtedly Spike Lee, who was probably addressing aspects of multicultural coexistence in the States when he was in the cradle. BlacKkKlansman is probably the worst contribution to his extensive catalogue of those I've seen, but fortunately it still rests on his characteristic trademarks, my favorite of which is always the dynamic and chatty depiction of a beleaguered police family, who most of the time seem to have stepped out of a stand-up routine. This again wins an A or B, depending on who grades the final exam. The problem comes in when the double-identity hard-ass blaxploitation detective story starts juggling ultra-serious connotations to current events, which in this case feels like a hot dog with whipped cream and still makes you want to throw a cup of beer in the theater, giggling "hihihi that was a Trump reference". In fact, unlike his previous works, Angry Lee is no longer capable of the detachment on certain subjects so typical of his previous works. This new approach culminates in a scene that cuts between a KKK bar mitzvah and an old man's recollection of black lynchings at the beginning of the century. It's as if someone has suddenly become frightened that he's been making fun of people who we should realize how dangerous they are. Except I just think the worst thing you can do to dangerous people is indeed to make fun of them. Then they get angry, kick their feet, do bigger and bigger things, and then wake up one morning and find they're not even taken seriously by their own slippers. Thus, unfortunately, the film's strongest moment is its painful epilogue, which is sure to activate a cavalry of pundits who will spout wisecracks like how they think film and politics shouldn't be mixed together and other such bullshit. Just you wait.

"Hahaha ho ho ha haa. And I thought my jokes were bad." If you’re going to make fun of something, you need to get better at it and not just do the same stuff and turn to the camera and say you know what you’re doing. Deadpool 2, above all, seems to be an endlessly chattering parody of entertainment that fails most of the time at everything it attempts, yet thinks (God knows why) that it’s too grown up for it all. Granted, there are sequences where I laughed out loud or was delighted by a rather hackneyed idea (clearly the best sequence of jumping out of an airplane, mowing down half-naked yakuza to the sounds of Enya, or exterminating a den of Russian mobsters), but in terms of the overall concept, I have nothing but harsh words. From the start, half the water in the pool is splashed out by the fact that the comic cavalcade of maiming and killing is followed by the hero's sweetheart suddenly dying and we're now supposed to be moved by real emotion, with everyone then patting themselves on the back in the credits, like aren’t they cool for not letting Deadpool's girl die. Throughout the rest of it they repeat all the vices of superhero products, including the multiple loosely connected storylines where half of them just dry up, the tedious creation of a superhero team and the resulting unfocused action scenes, where it turns out that even director Leitch, who delivered some of the best fight sequences in a long time in Atomic Blonde, can't make an interesting action movie for 110 million under Marvel’s wings. The final 15 minutes are the most drawn-out bore of the year, which is saying something, especially for a film that wants to poke fun at similar fails. The humor in this is an ever-recurring disaster built on someone saying a serious thing and the protagonist knocking it down with either an inappropriate simile or a trip through the fourth wall. I guess I'll never understand why a good ten minutes of the running time jogs through painfully drawn-out jokes where Deadpool provokes those around him by acting gay when he's not. Is that the controversy and incorrectness they’re all talking about? Just so I don't miss it. In closing, I'll confide my one secret dream, and that is to create a project at a premiere somewhere in some crappy multiplex full of people while screening this travesty such that after a few random jokes that make everyone laugh their hearts out, I would stop the movie, shine a spotlight on a random unfortunate in the crowd, and they would have to say out loud into a microphone why they just laughed. I don't think they'd like the movie that much after that.

As a quiet observation and evidence of the failure of Europe at its core, it's perfect. As soon as it tries to be an informatively engaged documentary, Ai WeiWei's lack of filmmaking sensibility and tendency towards megalomania becomes apparent. It truly hits bottom whenever the great savior himself starts parading in front of the camera, nodding his head sensitively. Fortunately this doesn't happen too often. Still, you’ll be surprised that out of 900 hours of footage, the final cut includes a shot of a fat WeiWei unable to fit through a revolving door. Unfortunately, I couldn't find my hoodie this time either. (I mean, in 2015 I participated in a couple of refugee fundraisers, and during one I accidentally threw my beloved Solstafir hoodie into the pile of donated clothes, which some lucky refugee must be wearing now. Since then, I’ve been carefully searching through all the photos of refugees from the Balkans to see if I can find one wearing it somewhere, and if I can somehow arrange to get it back. No luck yet.)

[180 min. cut] Episodes from the life of a Finnish soldier very loosely linked into some sort of chronology, held more or less together by the distinctive character of the brilliant but problematic soldier Rokka. We are indeed introduced to over a dozen other key characters, but they disappear from the story, only to reappear after their two-hour run around the film's battlefield, only for someone to pump them full of lead and they’re gone forever. I definitely wouldn't fault the pathos of this film. My most important comment might sound pejorative, but I don't mean it that way: If you're not interested in war movies, or war in general, there's really no point in watching this movie, because it has no artistic merit. It has clear cinematography, good colors and make-up. The explosions, the cutting down of trees, the tanks, the technology, the sound, all of it is a bravura documentary of the Finnish war. But there's nothing more to it. A war that, incidentally, is unique in that it was almost entirely fought in swamps and forests, which the film doesn't hold back from, so don't expect crumbling churches and street warfare here either. If I were being a naughty genderist, I'd label this film Mamma Mia for men; the roles of the few female characters are pretty clearly drawn here. Anyway, even at three hours long, you can feel the frantic editing and the resulting somewhat clumsy episodicity. The fact is, so much material was shot that a 4-part miniseries on the Finnish War will be released on Finnish TV this winter, with an hour each episode, and it's just an even longer version of the film. That's what I call squeezing the absolute maximum out of a film.

4 stars kind of out of starvation, but enthusiastically so. The core of Rape & Revenge hasn't changed over the years, it's just that the rapists are no longer degenerate rednecks, but degenerate, secure rich townies with families. The main bastard then is a catalogue hunk with a great body and an ass on his chin that would make Ben Affleck cry in the corner like a little girl. There's no longer a need for the whole herd of beasts to take turns at the splendor (© The Butcher), but just a single bastard, with the other guilty party choosing to ignore the rape and the third guilty party trying to cover it up. The girl, however, turns a blind eye to the out-of-court settlement and chooses a much more painful path, but with all that much more catharsis. The initial nuisance of an apparently low body count is offset by the sadistic glee of each kill. The characters have dozens of gallons of blood inside them, which come splashing out while you wait. Whereas in ordinary films a gunshot to the shoulder is practically a yawning affair that barely rips your shirt, here this kind of gunshot wound barfs up a good eight liters of hemoglobin, and this is by no means the close of the unfortunate man's fate. Removing a shard from your leg must be a great collective cinematic experience, the shotgun round the bloody mansion is really what I expect from a thriller, and the make-up artists have done a great job on all kinds of injuries. And yet I must concede that the 108 minutes really weren't necessary and the film often wriggles out of certain situations in a very funny way. Still, an avenger with a burnt-out phoenix on her belly from a Mexican beer can. I fucking love that. PS: It's nice to have a little wink in Ken Russell's direction.

And how come no one thought to attack the aliens with sound when everyone knows how sensitive they are to it??? And why do the creatures at one point hear every single fart, when a scene earlier the characters are acting like they're at a gypsy wedding and it doesn’t worry them at all??? Etc etc etc. The local connoisseurs of horror trash here who speed-surf through six movies a week out of a sense of duty so they can label themselves fans, specialists, or experts, are unhappy as always because it pisses them off that they had to watch a movie again out of obligation, except they think the problem is the movie. Not to be taken seriously of course, A Quiet Place is an excellent genre exercise, and as long as you stick with that perception to the end, it's virtually flawless. Of course, the premise is such that the audience is constantly alerted whenever it strays from it, but that's simply an occupational hazard that will forever beleaguer films about time travel, for example. For me, for real, the real winner is the decision to have offspring, which from my perspective is about as good a decision as put pavers throughout a farmhouse surrounded by hypersensitive intruders who, at the drop of a pin, are on your doorstep within three seconds. Still, it probably fits that other reading of the story, where we certainly can't imagine that the main family would be a supporter of the pro-choice movement under any circumstances. Indeed, the film uses the alien invasion to construct the most traditional notion of an American family, one that has undergone pretty much no evolution since the 1950s. The caring but strong father (well-kept beard and furrowed brow) is a hunter, technician, handyman, and builder. The exhausted mother, of course, beats another drum, and while the man fetches the food, she gets the baby’s room ready and hangs out the washing. That their shared favorite music would be country is, of course, obvious. All this on a remote, broad, and self-sufficient farm, well-equipped for all threats and dangers. The wettest of dreams for any survivalist, sectarian, or generally any men who seek purpose in life. Apart from that, one interesting aspect (this time in a good way) is that the film basically goes nowhere the whole time, and from the second act to the end it's basically just damage control, where a final resolution only comes at the very end. Until then, the film can be admired for its stalwart adherence to its premise (except on two occasions) and its excellent grasp of the challenge of exposing another world without words, just by showing the routines of the characters and its use of the background. Something tells me that we'll be seeing more and more plots like this (people isolated in their mansions and bunkers, with other people just a threat), see 10 Cloverfield Lane or The Survivalist. Times are bad.

That's the stuff. Buffalo '66 in some ways embodies the pejorative connotations of the term "art film", especially in the way it props up a story based on completely nonsensical, atypical, and implausible situations and motivations, just so it can be. But it's kept afloat mainly by the cinematography, a certain goofiness, and an absolutely bravura, brilliant ending that amused, delighted, and stimulated me like few things have in recent times. Maybe it was helped by the fact that Vincent Gallo was really playing himself. Well consider how, after finishing the film, he said of cinematographer Lance Acord that he was just pushing buttons, a man with no ideas, no aesthetic vision whatsoever, and basically all the credit given the cinematographer should go to the director. The director of photography had been changed before; Gallo himself wanted to get behind the camera, but the studio was against it. He called Christina Ricci a soulless puppet and shot off his mouth about Angelica Huston, whom he blamed for the film's failure at Cannes. He also insisted on using 35mm semi-transparent film (like slides are made of) during filming, even though he hadn't bothered to find out if they were still capable of developing the film anywhere. Last but not least, he exploited the film's budget about as much as Tommy Wiseau – out of a total budget of 1.5 million, he blew 20 grand alone on a wig for Angelica Huston, and had to bring 100 grand in cash in a paper bag to Mickey Rourke (who was at a complete low point at the time) for his minute and a half long session in front of the camera. Gallo eventually managed to fulfill his artistic standards with his next piece, The Brown Bunny, where he convinced his then-girlfriend (and amazing actress) Chloe Sevigny to do a fake on-screen fellatio, which he incorporated into the film, thus writing her out of acting associations altogether for many years, which is to say, almost out of the world of film. At least, given his complicated filmmaking history, she became the only crew member he was ever happy with.

The Knick certainly isn't the TV series revolution that many critics and viewers proclaim, but it's certainly a testament to the superiority of the auteur series, especially because of how formally unsettling and insular it is in its unkind world. Soderbergh does an excellent job of masking the scant locations (one street and about 15-20 rooms) by constantly changing the camera angles, often using low depth of field to lock the suffering characters away from the outside world, from which each is hiding something, and swooping through rooms and hallways in long unbroken takes, which explains the overall darkness since it's almost impossible to artificially light a scene under such circumstances. And the likes of Clive Owen pretty much makes any episode just by being in it. If he weren't an actor with such unrelenting qualities anywhere he appears, one could certainly talk about this as the role of a lifetime. The Knick, however, suffers from that somewhat tired "no one is what they seem and everyone is kind of the antithesis of what they appear to be" concept. Combined with its repeated (over and over and over) traipsing into contemporary social issues, it kind of forgets that the joke is on them, because then how am I supposed to explain that the film wants me to be shocked that a nun can also be a midwife, a renowned doctor a first-class junkie, or a black man a good doctor? Besides, The Knick has no purpose, it's just a series of relationship episodes and personal dilemmas set against the backdrop of a troubled time where a mask of gentlemanliness, elegant fashions clothes, and ornate house gables belie the abortion clinics, illegal operating rooms, opium dens, and the offices of loan sharks. As one user here wittily remarked, "The Rose Garden Clinic for better folk". Still, I'm happy to delve into that dark, murky world of torment and misery in the second season.

Quite rightly, Dead Calm has kicked the vast majority of those involved, from the director to the writer to the actors, into the Hollywood big leagues. In fact, the film offers far more than the forlorn plot summary would suggest. Namely in three points: 1) Billy Zane plays not the usual trendy cool movie psycho, but a real narcissistic psychopath, whose background (meaning backstory hehe hoho) remains for the most part a mystery to us. He comes across as uncomfortably familiar, like a coked-up marketer guy who talks for four hours about how he's going to write a book that will change the world one day and can't be gotten rid of. 2) The protagonists are intelligent and capable. They don't panic and are constantly adapting to situations as they arise, both the guy and the girl, where no one is waiting to rescue anyone, but each actively building a plan to get rid of the unwanted passenger themselves. 3) It wasn't just the presence of Sam Neil that got the Orpheus reminding me of Event Horizon in some ways. The crumpled, dark hold with a pile of corpses playing in the background, with an unpleasant amateur video suggesting the events leading up to the crew's deaths, is a subtle but just perfectly effective hint that there's some kind of crack in the wall concealing absolute madness behind the story we're watching. And the film doesn't allow us to touch it, only feel it.