Othello

[extended] The first one suits those who like distinctive characters and RPGs (by which I don’t mean rocket launchers), three is the nirvana of those who love epics, but two strikes a balance between them, and that's why I currently like it best of the trilogy (otherwise about on par with one, but I've seen that one a bajillion times). While the first is practically a standalone film and the third a megalomaniacal ending, the second is a sort of "intimate" awakening of the nations, where the stories of the individual characters and the whole development of the history of Middle-earth are fantastically intertwined. That's why these factors are constantly given far more consideration than in the previous installment. The Battle of Helm's Deep works far better than the Battle of Pelennor Fields because it's not so much based on Massive Armies as it is on heroic characters, helped by its setting – a ravine with a fortress and a huge wall with nowhere to retreat to at night and in the rain. Compared to the third "sure thing" installment, Jackson is still betting the farm on a bunch of ideas and experiments – try explaining to a special effects studio that you want the Ents to look like animatronic puppets, for example. Speaking of walking trees, the scene of the last march of the Ents is one of the highlights of the entire film trilogy, and it all just elaborates on Tolkien's line "...and so the Ents went out on their last march." What’s more, The Two Towers handles the two strongest stories of the trilogy for me, the one about Éowyn and the one about Merry and Pippin. The Scandinavian feel of the realm of the Rohirrim is just icing on the cake.

Let's put an uninteresting man in a coffin and watch how uninteresting he is. The main character's hideous defeatism at a point when he could at least try to break out those already cracked coffin boards, but he'd rather take revenge on whoever threw him in there by making his phone bill more expensive by making one international call after another. It also wasn’t until the second half of the film that someone finally explained to the director that fire takes oxygen, among other things, so we can't be surprised that for the first 30 minutes the protagonist lights his Zippo just to lie down. On the other hand, the ending left me feeling with a really bad taste in my mouth, and a film that takes place entirely in a coffin can be made little better.

94 minutes of narrative in shortcuts containing all of five shots that weren't worth framing. All this in the 90s underbelly of punk Edinburgh. I incredibly love the way Boyle shits on everything in this film (dead baby, a rather edgy fuck with Kelly Macdonald, et cetera et cetera)

Take Altman's The Player, mate it with Troma’s Terror Firmer, douse it with Peter Jackson, and voila!!!

A prime example of a botched adaptation, and I haven't even read the source material. The warring of the cinematic medium with the literary one here reminded me in part of the adaptations of Slaughterhouse 5 and Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, but even those didn't suffer from the relentless literalness, the inability to understand that what sounds possible in a book doesn't sound the same coming from the mouth of a movie character, and the general concepts of how a book is written and how a movie is made. Man, I haven't seen a movie in a long time that failed on so many levels at once. Then there's John Hurt, who just might shit himself...

A complicated web of relationships and factions at a sprawling high school is penetrated by the main character, who has decided to find out who was behind the death of his ex-girlfriend, who by the way he doesn't consider an ex. By any measure, the incredibly stubborn Joseph Gordon-Levitt works his way up the food chain, with each challenge adding a broken nose, a busted lip, or a deciliter of his own blood. At a time when Gore Verbinski is sputtering that he had to drop an entire $40 million scene when making The Lone Ranger due to budget cuts, it's hard to fathom that some Johnson guy could make a half-million movie that offers so much. Brick isn't rushing anywhere, it savors the individual scenes, it manages to carve each character into your subconscious, and in its homage to film noir occasionally falls into deliberate satire. The film doesn't spare the viewer its main character either – Brendan is a snitch, a sociopath, and hard-headed, and we admire his tough-as-nails persona throughout the film only to have him mentally fold before its over. The noirish separation bubble of the characters from their surroundings is palpable, the timing of some of the scenes (the execution in the tunnel) is superb, and such creative delights as the high school actress changing her communication style with the main character based on the role she’s preparing for are downright delightful. I guess that doesn’t sound like an objective list of the film's qualities; Brick is kinda personal -)

Christopher Smith is an interesting spider. He's clearly comfortable below the level of twenty million dollars per film, which allows him to do pretty much whatever he wants in movies, yet he’s ambitious enough to be envy of three quarters of current overseas filmmakers. Triangle somehow didn't particularly grab me the entire time, and impressed me at most with its very skillfully shot and uncompromising action. Among other things, the shotgun hunting of the heroes reminded me very much of the French film Martyrs. Except that then the film gets stuck in a loop just like the main character and everything happens all over again, and mostly in exactly the same way, which doesn't do much for the attention span. However Smith keeps trying to make the violence a bonding element between the viewer and the film. In the end, to be sure, the ending did get me nicely. Especially with its aggressiveness against the main character (I actually jumped at the mirror scene), the functional idea, and the depressing fatalism. Similar here to, for example, Black Death. Sure, towards the end it becomes clear how useless the whole ship actually is, but I'm still very curious how it will turn out when someone hands Smith a proper budget.

That 82% is a scary realization for me about how many multinicks my mom has here. A musical hell with implausible characters and a few decent songs after eight beers. Ugh, Travolta still gives me the creeps.

To criticize Eastwood is to spend the rest of my life looking nervously over my shoulder, but I've got the balls for it. Because the problem with Clint's directorial output of recent years lies mainly in the fact that he's a crappy psychologist, but would love to be one (i.e. the classic problem of all trendy psychology students, who end up psychoanalyzing their houseplants two months into their first semester, oh how many I've known). He can't seem to go deep into the characters, even though the actors help him tremendously with that. Tim Robbins' acting in particular should be watched just as a reward. Except that his monologues with cheesy metaphors (vampires, wolves) rustle the paper (or was it hustle?) and you don't believe a thing. The film's straightforward mystery storyline will please all crime fiction lovers because it's got it all and Fishburne and Bacon are likable to a fault. However, that shocking ending that the film doesn't allude to in any way beforehand squeals like a pig, no matter how well shot it is – especially the rather brutal and excellent skirmish from the unnamed characters. There's a very interesting (again, paper-rustling) scene at the end, with Penn's wife, whose relationship we've also learned quite a bit about up to this point, and will therefore cause a wrinkle on more than one forehead, and ironically it's this scene that stands out enough to clinch that fourth star, even though I still found the "traditional" bits the best part of the overall film.

That long-haired walking holocaust especially, who gives soda to the main characters even with a fluorescent light down his throat, is really growing on me, and the fact that the animals are really, really badly hurting each other and it looks so real that I'm still not sure there weren't people dying in the filming, gives truth to the claim that films kicked off with a convo like "Here’s a building and a million bucks, do what you want." "Okay." might be the real thing.