Othello

Somehow, with Christmas this year, anything that swept across my monitor and had at least half a hair on it must have rightly felt a bit nervous. After the two installments of the blockbuster video game Riddick (Escape from Butcher Bay and Assault on Dark Athena), there was still the third installment of the movie trilogy left, and while it didn't live up to the aforementioned games, still this organic mecca of all survivalists, so tough it only shags lesbians with a bed full of wet concubines on call 24-7, still has something to offer. The advantage of the Riddick universe, after all, is that there's simply no alternative to it, and most people are kind of stuck with it. That's why Twohy can treat the property pretty much any way he wants, build a film on a fairly atypical plot that actually mixes 2 films together, stuff it with tons of CGI ranging across the quality spectrum, and still pretend like that isn't all, folks. And of course I don't mind at all, because you can see that the author has a load of new ideas up his sleeve, his not lacking in balls, and the protagonist still has a working vocal. And to top it off, he completely pointlessly gets the horny nerds off to Katee Sackoff – who by the way, with that last name, I guess there's not much else for a man to do but play militant lesbians.

A monstrosity of excruciatingly drab persons still plagued with the classic sleepy film school cafe utterances in the vein of "I don't know... hard to say... I think I've finally found myself... it's hard to explain". I would have appreciated at least one exploding helicopter, anything but this monstrous ode to mundanity that spends three and three-quarter hours solving the same problem that 70% of the population has ever solved. It was incredibly reminiscent of long train journeys, where a hapless lonely person sits down in a compartment and the whole time he's droning on about how everything used to be better and now it's kind of fucked up... oh yeah now I see it was 77 minutes long. Unbelievable.

I feel guilty that I was entertained by a fossil extravaganza so morbid that the forty-eight year old Mary-Louise Parker plays a little vamp with pigtails in it. Painfully unambitious celluloid that either does or doesn't suit the mood. I'm drunk, what's your excuse?

pffffff the trend of smuggling sociological dilemmas and allegories into exploitation has definitively found its limit. The most idiotic concept to be seen this millennium, depicting the situation of DeMonaco's homegrown theory that vomiting out everything negative in 12 hours will keep the light in the survivors' souls for the length of the year doesn't work. Bravo. The incessant criticism of the American mentality doesn't much appetize either, given that it relies on a non-existent phenomenon, and the infinite inanity afflicting even the characters, where you don't know if you should feel sorry for half of Ylvis, Ethan Hawke, or Lena Headey for what they're putting their talents to under to this rockin’ good idea. It's good enough for three stars because of the disruption of the murder formula in the last third and the sense that you don't get this kind of obscurity in your living room all that often, but the imbecility is painful.

Another hugely emancipated thriller that apologizes for the eighties and nineties, or possibly just for Lars von Trier. Notwithstanding the fatal plan of the main villain, the heroine this time is mainly concerned with humiliating the oppressor rather than killing him, as therapy for the involuntary buttfuck she took three years ago and carries with her in the form of a scar over her breast. Just see if it's not a bit of a disservice to demonstrate the supremacy of female inscrutability over male pragmatic logic by sticking him in the throat with a pen (mightier than the sword) and transitioning from the mode of a tightly-written dialogue thriller on the stage of an airplane seat (where the man has the upper hand) into a B-grade final showdown at a house in the suburbs (where the woman has the upper hand). As an added bonus, most of the female users' ratings are limited to the godliness of Cillian Murphy and his eyes. So I guess I don't know.

Miike is now gradually already moving beyond the borders of the entertaining, and his formal flourishes suffer incredibly from a story and characters that are more or less defined only by a final performance from a shotgun. But during this, everyone behaves so unbelievably, really unbelievably stupid that it’s not even saved by the scene where the teacher recognizes a student by smelling her panties (good boy, raping his charges, and doing it to them with his mouth), while his skull is subsequently shot so thoroughly that pieces of his brain smash the camera lens.

As much as my Friday night and, by extension, Saturday morning view of the world around me can say I could have gotten used to it by now, my problem is that I still can't seem to take a stance on surrealism and don't really know how to view it at all. As a parable, a metaphor, an association, a bunch of unrelated ideas unanchored by any rules? Mood Indigo mainly gives the impression that it takes all of these approaches to that artistic movement, and not all at once, but doses them gradually. In particular, the ruthlessness of the last act, where Gondry attempts to make the viewer his emotionally exhausted bitch, pays off because the previous relationship between the two protagonists is built on the universal appeal of Audrey Tatou, who fails pretty hard in the role of the lovable rogue. Either film the surreal or film the plot, sorry.

I definitely have to commend Wan after the awful Insidious. Lesson learned this time; he doesn't try to render the digital finale on his cell phone alone, and more importantly, he's formally keeping pace with the times. I even snorted with delight at three shots – the lighting at the Warrens' first lecture, the intensity of which also determines the depth of focus of the shot, which informs the viewer of the setting of the scene by shifting the focus from the closeup (the lecture ticket in the visitor's hand) to the long shot (the packed auditorium with the Warrens on stage); the Perron family's move into their new house in a one-shot take, beginning as a crane establishing shot and then moving through the house, leading the camera through all sorts of obstacles and then a confusing camera sweep from under the bed to the door. Wan has done his homework, you can make a list of all the essential horror films of the 70s and 80s and tick them off as the film progresses. He does a great job of selling a thousand well-established routines to an audience only marginally watching horror. The problem, however, is if you’ve watched dozens of hours of this horror subgenre. For this reason, The Conjuring unfortunately doesn't have much more to offer me.

To my own surprise, after the scene in the car I stopped watching where the actors were reading their dialogue from, which I suddenly started to have a tendency to enter. Linklater's concept of relationship wrought into resigned feminist dogma (I chuckled maliciously at the scene where the women prepare dinner while the men sit and talk about literature, i.e. the scene the protagonist later leans into) works with the premise of accepting fictional identities that suppress the real identities already mapped and scorned by their counterparts. And I'd like to keep watching that final spark that jumped between the chrononaut and the naive literature student. Even though neither of them exist.

Somehow, despite all the formal quality, I felt like I was watching a failed gruppensex video where the actors are unable to get to the right place at the right time for it to happen. And by the halfway point, I was getting really, really bored.