Othello

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.

Pretty uncharacteristic for the late seventies in building a relationship between the film and the viewer, which makes the kind of details nobody cares about, like logic, acting, or story, completely incidental to the individual scenes. These, thanks to the aggressive lighting (which the characters don’t notice, only the viewer) and even more aggressive music, do not create a classic filmmaker's attempt to let the viewer empathize with the characters; on the contrary, they deliberately alienate them and push them into a voyeuristic position where the outcome of the subsequent development of the scene is clear, thus creating not a sense of fear, but a sense of guilt. Which is pleasantly sick.

A ruthless feminist romance where all the men are wimps and manipulators. Interestingly, it follows the standard romance scheme until the last fifteen minutes, which would be cool to communicate here graphically, but I'll have to make do with my legendary powers of expression. Imagine a graph that maps 10 points vertically and 8 horizontally. The vertical represents the protagonist's state of mind (the higher the score, the better); the horizontal represents the progression of the plot. Let's call point number one the Status Quo (value 3), where both characters are still unaware of each other, their lives intertwining, yet missing something. Probably love. Point two we'll call Encounter (value 4), followed by point three, with a value of 6, namely Enchantment. Point 4 falls under the category of Happy Experiences Together Against All Odds. This now has a value of 8, and is mostly a montage of picnics and the shared activities of the protagonists, despite the jealous and the uptight. Item 5 is the top on the vertical scale (10) and is First Sex/Paris/True Confessions, etc. And then comes the twist, i.e., the Disaster/Messup, which drops our vertical line down to number 1, from which then comes horizontal point 7, Running/Reconciliation (a value of 5), and then the last point 8, Reconciliation and New Beginnings, which also has a value of 8, but not higher, because the stigma of point 6 will be forever present and the characters are wiser/jaded, so their relationship will no longer have the drive it did in its beginnings. An Education taps into this formula after point 6 when there is not Running but actually Escape, so point 8 doesn’t represent Reconciliation but only Resignation, a departure from romance in general at the expense of education and the future, plus a bit of healthy sexism. As a result, the last point of the film never gets above a midpoint of 5, but the heroine becomes much more satisfied with herself. Otherwise, Carey Mulligan with her long man fingers, throaty laugh, and mega-dimples is a great combination of the be careful/be fascinated girl.

Half an hour into the running time, I learned that subsurface natural gas extraction and the companies that profit from it are evil. For the next hour I continued to learn that subsurface natural gas extraction and the companies that profit from it are evil, only in more detail. Oh, and plus the director's grim voice over and shaky camerawork as a symbol of the confusion and unkindness of the world we live in.

The added value of Martyrs is its demonstration of the freewheeling and encompassing nature of horror itself. The film moves from exploitation, to haunted, to torture porn, to monster horror, to body horror, to the religious sector, not mixing the subcategories together but instead, thanks to the unpredictable script, allocating them in sequence, with almost none of them brought to a satisfyingly conclusion. As a result, from the animated beginning (or 1st half), all shot handheld, where the average shot length is about 1 second, even given the nature of the violence (from wild, unpredictable, and messy to methodical, purposeful, and utterly cold), the shot lengthens and the image calms down. The final infuriating (non)point is brilliant in its underhandedness to the viewer, who has had to go through a lot just to be told to "keep doubting." _______ Make-up artist Benoît Lestang couldn't have bid a better farewell.

Hellboy 2 was supposed to be a non-narrative film from the start. The giants rising from the ground, giant flowers that bloom during death, and winged reapers could have silently told a story on their own, and their presence alone would have worked visually even as metaphor, which they are. They work on a fundamental level; everything around them does not.

Bay's answer to the constant questions about why his films, and by extension probably he himself, are xenophobic, stupid, exclusively commercial, Republican, macho, tacky, and incredibly profitable. Because the world is totally screwed. "This is still a true story."