Othello

It kind of scares me that this is at least the third time I've used the term "likely pinnacle of contemporary nerd-service culture" in the past year, and if I ever use it again, I really don't know what that movie might look like. Fortunately, unlike Marvel (which insidiously still mostly references itself, creating its own sect of select artificially created nerd-in jokes), Spielberg can exploit hundreds of thousands of products of his own intellectual property at speeds and in contexts that spare the unknowing viewer too much suffering (except perhaps the unfortunate ones who missed Kubrick's The Shining), and even if you haven't seen/played the seventy referenced titles that appear during the car chase at the beginning, I guarantee you'll be on the edge of your seat. That sequence is incredible, and in turn reminded me of one of the only two films in the world that isn't alluded to in Ready Player One, namely Ben-Hur. Otherwise, the constantly shrieking music suddenly goes completely silent, edged out by sounds only of impact and destruction. The race is practically devoid of slow motion, despite several things happening in motion at once during the race, and most importantly, unlike in Speed Racer, everything involved has mass, so the physics don't disappoint. In the end the film can't catch up to that scene and honestly I spent the rest of the film hunting for any pluses to keep it at five stars. Sadly, Spielberg's formal mastery notwithstanding (note the dialogue scenes, which are often in one or two shots where the camera reveals in fluid motion the things and characters that need to be seen in the scene, and on top of that there's usually something crucial going on in the background), it's the entire universe behind the curtain where you actually realize that the entire outside world took place in a single backyard, consisting of the headquarters of an evil corporation, the slum where the protagonist lives, and this long grey street running between them where people run around in goggles, and though they’re mimicking all the running, fighting, and flipping going on in virtual reality, somehow they always stay on the sidewalk, don't step on anything pointy, or otherwise hurt themselves. Not to mention that the film doesn't offer much in the way of alternate readings and doesn't meaningfully go beyond the message of "have fun, but remember what really matters: sunshine, health, friends, and love. Oh, and Corporations Are Bad, Ltd." In this respect the film is still outdone by the Hollywood satire Sucker Punch (especially the SE) or the radically bleak vision of the loss of humanity in Gamer. Moreover, Ready Player One still comes to the table with a secondary trap, which is the painful experience of public screenings where everyone has to show off with affected laughter that they picked up on this reference or that. Dear God! PS: when I'm master of the universe, the first thing I'm going to ban is the use of classic song hits during explosive finales, I'm worried I'm going to have those fuckers on my plate all the time now [EDIT 2022] It's a completely phenomenally filmed piece of shit that’s pretending to be as non-geek as possible, with a plot that hinges on the current artificial vision of nerddom as something you can ultimately monetize in the real world and get a leg up on everyone else. Which is fictional corporate bullshit that was created so they could make MCU and SW movies over and over again with merch attached. The essence of nerddom on the contrary is to consciously devote all your energy and time to something that doesn't equip you for the real world, quite the opposite in fact. I can't even imagine how cretinous the book must be.

Three Sexy Girls in Tirol without three naked Swedish women and without Tyrol. But with a naked bushman and a lecture about how the bushmen rock and we're the demons. Without nostalgia or knowledge of, say, the legendary dubbing, it's worth a gunshot to the head, which I’m not giving a lower rating for the same condescending reasons with which this film looks at indigenous tribes.

The saddest thing about the new Jumanji isn't that it's a poorly made yawn that proves comedy directors simply aren't suitable material for shooting action or otherwise spectacular scenes, and the only thing that saves it is the casting of the central foursome of adults, with Jack Black in particular reigning supreme as a uniquely transgender character smuggled into a family film. Saddest of all is how the game of Jumanji itself has shifted from its promising origins. Whereas twenty years ago that board game gave us a breath of distant adventure in unexplored and dangerous wildernesses by confronting the protagonists with huge herds of game, giant insects, or quicksand, with the realization that some unspecified wilderness was out there close by, the new version brings us back down to earth. The reason is that this makes all too clear the end of unexplored lands, the end of experiences beyond the known, the end to bidding farewell to your doorstep, as the only way to begin a wild adventure is in an imaginary world in the body of an imaginary character, because there is nothing in the world left undiscovered and uncharted. The original Jumanji didn't particularly move me as a child, it didn't feel exhilarating, indeed the danger was tangible, much of the acting took place in a darkened attic full of old artefacts, the whole film was set sometime in a rainy fall, and the character of John Williams was essentially sadly tragic (he lost his entire childhood and adolescence somewhere on a white spot on a map...). This exuberant extravaganza poses no challenge to anyone, and it's tiresome as hell.

Such clever boys. At an age when I was writing love ballads to my teenage sweethearts and gasping for breath with socialism, Damon and Affleck came up with a truly adult script that opens up a whole range of themes glossing over a somewhat extreme example of the actually inevitable step towards adulthood, however much that means freeing oneself from selfish freedoms at the expense of a certain uniformity and generally discernible motivations such as acknowledging one's place in society or making sacrifices on the altar of love. What they’ve bitten off, however, is quite a mouthful for the two burly guys, as there are actually four storylines in the film (Damon-Williams, Damon-Driver, Damon-Affleck, and Williams-Skarsgard), even if they’re all tied to a single denominator, but especially the one depicting the slacker resignation of the Boston suburbs (the bottom of which is so perfectly portrayed by Harmony Korine in a brief cameo – heh heh you gotta love this guy), it's all too obvious that the film needs it, especially at the beginning and the end. In between, it just has to keep it alive through more or less comic scenes. Where I would have given Oscar nods like crazy would have been in the case of Minnie Driver, that girl is unreal, she defies the usual femme fatale stereotypes, clearly her character has a life outside her scenes and her relationship with Damon gets the strongest sequences, among them the excellent bed dialogue, shot only in close-ups with subdued lights, where the camera work and editing make spatial orientation impossible, reminding you of those stormy weekends when it's raining outside and you don't even know what time it is.

A fandom fetish for children aged 4 to 110, which this time hides its substance in a surprisingly clumsy way. It makes perfect sense that every new Star Wars movie hits the screens 14 days before Christmas Eve, when its main cash cows are not just the audience but, more importantly, an artificial, hand-crafted sect of fans who, as soon as they leave the cinema, are greeted by endless assortments of action figures ranging from thousand-dollar Amazon ones to tiny Chinese baby-blood-smelling trolls in every fucking happy meal. I'm not naive enough to get reflexively upset about this cycle of capitalism (especially when it comes to LucasArts), but the latest Star Wars films are so soaked in it that it spoils what little remaining viewer experience this franchise still has. So many unnecessary scenes and shots of otherwise unimportant creatures simulate the ancient comedic crutch of the "funny shot of a dog" and serve no purpose other than as a blueprint for the 3D printer. It suffers monumentally from trying to immerse itself in some imaginary universe when nothing has anything to do with it and there’s nothing to discover, because everything is thrown in front of your face for even God to see. Plus, there are too many iconic characters, machines, ships, and spaces for the film to have time to work with it in any way beyond "just get it in there". The beloved giant four-legged walking robots are only there to walk forward, shoot, and then stop in one scene. No interaction, no real battle. Which is almost a crime, since the film occasionally gives us a hint of breathtaking effects sequences to keep us mindful of what we're missing. I consider the sequence where Star Wars tries to be politically relevant by simply declaring that everyone filthy rich must have gotten their money through some kind of subterfuge to be downright dangerous. By which they will then presumably justify running over those poor Oscar Schindlers and Nicholas Wintons with five-ton horses. If Star Wars wants to do politics, they first need to create some society, some history, and some active, not just reactive, ideas. With the social phenomenon that the franchise has become, firing any political/social meta-theses is diabolically irresponsible, and the creators should at least have the conscience to stay out of it. Ugh... in short, I'm tired of this fanboy bitching, which this year maybe Marvel has now managed to get a taste of and teach the viewer to adapt, while here I have to watch some horribly miscast retirees who if they hadn't been in some crazy sci-fi in the seventies (actually fantasy back then) they'd be drinking piña coladas in a retirement home somewhere in Baltimore, but instead they're here running around in a bunch of horrible nonsense looking like some Jehovah's Witness recruitment film talking to a ping-pong ball on a green screen like freaks.

120 BPM is not a straight guy going to a queer bar with a gay friend and wearing a boa in solidarity. 120 BPM is a high-class queer guy who's been sitting in that bar since six and when the nervous boa-wielding escort arrives, he's like, "God, what kind of asshole is that?" At last, a queer film that isn't made for straight people to convince them to the point of exhaustion that homosexuality is normal, but a film that communicates with gay people themselves. No one begging for anyone's approval or sympathy, nothing reduced to caricature in favor of simplifying the whole issue (and, indeed, we pay for it with 140 minutes of running time). The opposing parties are relatively patient in their attempts to communicate, and the accusations made by ACT UP are never confirmed or refuted. There are no five-minute explanatory credits after the film. If I were gay, the film would be the strongest identifying experience for me since at least Top Gun. However, since I wasn't so lucky, I won't pretend that I was able to relate to the film properly. I am, however, adding a star for the fascinating encounter with a painful, tragic, slow death and the certainty of the moment of death in the last quarter.

It's a bit of a buzzkill when a film invites you out to a bar with a drunken old free spirit with a gun and a boring family man, then as the partner for your ensuing vacation chooses the latter. Because as soon as genocide is unleashed, we realize that this time we won't just be watching the protagonists deal with their various predicaments, but each situation will have a prologue where everyone will be yelling at each other that no way in hell and then all right fine, and of course an epilogue, where after each situation everyone will still have to pat each other down and ask if they're okay. And Dowdle doesn't offers no rationalizations for it, because he's making a genre film, not a raw realistic drama about a horrific conflict somewhere far away, but simply a thrilling spectacle with all the flaws and crutches that go along with it. And which features nothing but the walking mausoleum Pierce Brosnan referencing not only his most important film role, but also his legendary singing performance in Mamma Mia! Here the truth is actually preferable.

The original Flatliners may not have been a party hard in terms of screenwriting either, but we could at least believe the characters in their self-destructive zeal in pursuit of selfish knowledge, aided by the stylized, hyperactive direction of the exuberant Schumacher, who set the entire plot in the deserted gothic interiors and quiet streets of a host city moments before an unspecified apocalypse. In the remake, a bunch of spoiled kids inflict clinical death on each other in order to do better in school, dance, get laid, or BAKE HOMEMADE BREAD! Of course, there’s completely zero interest in the fates of these shallow, characterless creatures, despite the many uninventive jump-scares and horrors, and the film has nothing else to offer. Not even the visuals, which made the original Flatliners into something that at least we remember.

Branagh, after failed experiments with big-budget filmmaking (Jack Ryan, Thor), has managed to find the right chessboard in which he can dabble as a filmmaker, even with his theatrical sensibilities. The stage of four train cars is an ideal setting for him, he can play around with popular formal elements of the theater and still use all the possibilities of cinematic language. You can see his joy in this, the reveling in the various minute details, the blocking, and above all the movement through the scene, where we can either be fooled or collect clues just by working within the film frame. It's true that the film can never match the wildly overpopulated opening in Istanbul, in which one character after another arrives in the crowded streets of a wonderfully hectic big city, but then again there is a place for quiet admiration of the ingenious work with space, in which long, refined shots do their best not to repeat any previous steps. It's a reminiscence of the most classic filmmaking with the most contemporary of means, it's a beauty, and again after a long time a film where there was a storm raging outside, the cinema was leaking, the projection was a little askew, but I sat back, untroubled, waiting to see how the whodunit gets revealed, and wanted for nothing.

If George Clooney had spent less of his time in cafes with crossword puzzles, smiling and sipping Dolce Gusto (as the advertising banners try to convince me he does), and instead buried himself under the duvet with the script and tried to make the narrative coherent, perhaps, then maybe at least every scene wouldn't look completely disconnected from the rest of the film and the mood wouldn't constantly shift from quirky comedy to historical indictment. Also, maybe the supporting characters wouldn't just be there for one scene and plots wouldn't get dropped before the characters are defined. Maybe Matt Damon could play something other than the character William H Macy played in Fargo, albeit in a different setting. And, most importantly, it wouldn't look like a hastily hashed together artistic riff on current issues in the US that, most importantly, needs to be finished as quickly as possible so it's still relevant by the time it hits theaters. Which is probably something, unfortunately, that nobody really had to worry about in the first place. But he didn't, that cafe-dwelling beatnik. Well, I hope he enjoys his coffee.