Othello

Name a cliché and oh my gosh you'll find it here. An incredible calculation to target an audience with the notion that conventions shape the genre and it's forbidden to rail against them. But also a subject for the formal study of how a video game movie differs from a comic book movie. They have tons in common (the elimination of close-ups and informative shots, the distinctive typology of the characters, especially in terms of their appearance), but they diverge once you start getting dynamic with the camera, because a comic book is static and thus relies on editing to capture action scenes, whereas a video game follows a character, or anarchically passes around the action as if there wasn't shooting going on, calmly making its way through solid obstacles because there is no apparatus, only the image. The narrative is also like a video game, where in fact we have a diverse collection of missions, including the last one, at the end of which you have to beat the boss. Not to mention the ending, where you flank the enemy during a firefight, your enemies spawn regularly when you cross a certain point, and you autoheal under cover. But I can't help it, it was so nice at the end with the shooting and the blood spurting out of people and… and… and I was on a high right at the beginning as Brolin beat the crap out of the whorehouse. It’s just been a while since I’ve seen a decent action movie that somebody tossed a decent amount of cash into (which, after the small box office takings of this one, will once again be a long time coming). Otherwise, though, this is purely a film adaptation of Mafia II. Except that the other one had a much better script. PS: Emma Stone is a broom and Gosling's accent is awesome.

I don't know. I'm as tense as a dentist's waiting room for most of the film, can't decide if the civilian atmosphere is unsettling me in a good way or a bad one, and after it was over I was still putting two and two together in the bathtub with a wrinkled forehead... and then it dawned on me. The whole point, the whole thing clicked into place and I was confronted with the triviality of the entire plot. While it’s not that bad, it's awfully similar to all that Thai/Korean/Japanese stuff, just a little more Nordic in its aloofness. And when you cook mashed potatoes for 4 hours, the result may not be all bad, but you kind of feel like a moron.

Contagion, as a study of a particular crisis situation, does not even attempt to educate, advise, and inform, but describes as many cogs as possible in the unstoppable mechanism of the spread of an epidemic. These are not subjectivized (there is not a single scene in the film, perhaps not even a single shot, that does not concern the contagion), they act according to pre-set patterns of behavior in a given situation, and for the viewer this is saved by the cast (the hahaha on the viewer with Gwyneth further underlined by the autopsy scene). But I see the film's perfection in its adult take on the situation, where for every problem there is a point of view that is countered and counter-argued again. And it's that absence of the characters' subjective point of view that prevents the creation of a universal truth, and we don't know anything at the end of the film that we wouldn't have found out on the internet if such a situation had actually arisen. A bunch of conspiracy theories that refute each other. Let everyone make up their own mind.

It really depends on the viewer's attitude, since The Experiment can easily stand as an entertaining genre film with a lighter sociological slant, but certainly not a study of the behavior of a sample of the population in extreme conditions, however much anyone may patronize it. Even from the position of a classic narrative film, it does have its share of holes (the script in particular reeks of the author having lost his virginity at the time of writing), but on the other hand, the surprisingly good story editing manages to keep the entire two hours of action in two rooms in front of the screen. Which is actually quite rare.

It's an inconsistent, unwieldy mess.

Serbian post-war horror isn't exactly a genre that, if you ask your nearest video store for it, they'll tell you "it's the big rack on the right", even though there is enormous potential in a devastated country where there are fifty landmines per person in the attic, half the buildings would make any structural engineer cry, and not so long ago it was a national tradition to cut off the head of a man who didn't laugh enough at your joke. Plus, The Enemy isn't at all the silly haunted/slasher the setting would dictate (an undermined building where a handful of disparate characters go a little nuts). And I find it hilarious that the fate of the entire world may lie with a handful of depressed poor bastards somewhere in the ass end of Serbia who aren't sure if the creepy Daba is really God, the Devil, or a freak who's just so pissed off about it all that killing him as a possible killing of the Creator could end all the world's problems, because there wouldn't be a world that had those problems. Sure, the script is a terrible construct and the direction isn't so sure of itself. But it's smart, it's innovative, and it creates a mood.

Not convincing Gemma Arterton to show her tits is utterly petty of Wirkola and foreshadows other ills. Thought the direction, like Dead Snow, is total anarchy (meant as a positive) that doesn't particularly worry about time, space, sequence, or characters, Hansel and Gretel often fails in its guilty pleasure potential. That is to say, the main sibling duo don't sleep together, though it seems headed that way several times, no children die, and the violence doesn't cross a certain threshold. On the other hand, the unbelievably long and retarded monologues of the main witch, who still has all of her members even two minutes after she opens her mouth, which is grossly inconsistent with the characters' approach to anything else, are outrageous. The action scenes are somewhat reminiscent of a video game in their conception (the witch running away from Renner and throwing various adversities in his path that he must overcome; the girl at the stationary machine gun trying to mow down all the witches in front of her, who come flying in from different directions) which I have no problem with, but overall I'm sorry that a scene like the one with the Gingerbread Man in The Brothers Grimm was more WTF than this entire movie.

Oh, and us formalists are bothered that the movie isn't "realistic" and instead sticks to some of the conventions of classical storytelling. I just can't forgive Bigelow for the five shots of a single helicopter explosion. No, but seriously. The problem with Zero Dark Thirty is that it shatters its attempt at obsessive and documentary-style dispensing of information without regard for the viewer with the director's ill-concealed sympathy for the protagonist (that cliché of the woman in a man's world is unfortunately unavoidable here, when I was hoping for the opposite) and its thoughtfully controversial balancing of the debatable aspects of the whole situation. Indeed, as much as the first fierce torture lesson plays into the hands of those opposed to American integration, the later frustration of the protagonist's lack of information due to the ban on waterboarding has the opposite effect because we're already necessarily sympathetic to the character in some way. That is, what, for example, Fincher managed to avoid in Zodiac, or Padilha in his breezily fascist Elite Squad. Moreover, the viewer develops a relationship with the main character practically only through her aggressiveness, which consists of using vulgarity at a completely unexpected moment. However, the systematic brilliance of the ending (I'm convinced that the entire final scene in the villa is shot without any added lighting) and the provocative lack of pandering (the bus explosion) is impressive.

The essence of Japan in two hours. A technocratic, immensely epic, visually stunning, and not exactly easy to comprehend youthful rebellion against the establishment. EDIT 2019: The 4 stars I gave here so far were probably because I had a personal problem at the time with the combination of the epic subject matter and the comical Japanese dubbing ("KANeDAA?!"). Years later, with having burst into my own little private universe, I will freely admit that I'm really not shy about giving Akira 4 stars.

A gritty thriller for breastfeeding mothers and salon gays to talk about afterwards in the sedan chairs between lobster tea and afternoon coffee.