Othello

My theory is that the director Vukotić deliberately shot material that left him free to go in any genre direction afterwards with only minimal editing as the situation developed. So in the film we can find the ideal basis for family science fiction, dreamy manchild, absurdist comedy, pure avant-garde, and soft porn. But somehow it didn't work out after that, apparently he lost interest in the film, so he just bolted it all together and dropped the mic. If this work is ever found by a real alien civilization, it will cook their brains.

There is a kind of meta-consciousness between living and not living that it is human nature to resist. The Death King is concerned with this alone, and without any sign of resolution. In six days God created the world. On the seventh day he killed himself.

It's hard to navigate a movie when "What the fuck is going on?!" is constantly going through your head throughout. With the live dubbing on this year's FOD, it was irresistible ("I can lend you a compass." "You're a compass."), but I'm afraid in any other setting it would have been unspeakable purgatory. Particularly with the insane one hundred and eleven minute director's cut, where the story itself is reduced to about 5% of the total running time, nothing can save you.

If you’re not even a little bit blown away by Psycho (what are you looking at?), it's hard to get a kick out of this unceremonious rip-off pieced together from redundant dialogue and transitions between three locations. Fortunately, with the arrival of a young version of Gott, who only turns his heel on set in 90° and 180°, it gets a whole new breath of fresh air, and his mere presence in front of the camera produces a scene that will more than once leave you giggling uncontrollably like a complete retard. Unfortunately, when the big reveal comes, his character even retrospectively transforms from irresistible cringe to creative intent, making it once again a gutted Hitchcock, so not that great.

[FOD] Amélie in which people get beaten up with a television. And with a drill, a mug, a shelf, an elbow, a knee, the barrel of a shotgun, etc. etc. In a full cinema, it's catalogue camp where you enjoy every punchline or bloody veneer. I was missing this.

The script for The Game was originally written back in 1991 with the simple aim of just giving it away to a studio for money, which eventually worked out and made it all the way to Fincher, who with Se7en screenwriter Andrew Walker spent 6 months rewriting so they could sew it together into at least this. It probably couldn't have been done any better without creating something completely different. I can understand the audacious ambition to present the viewer with a lie (which is an inalienable part of film in general) as an actual untruth, and it fits exactly with my idea of a young, brash Fincher wanting to challenge and unnerve the viewer; however he tries relatively successfully to hold it all together, by the end it slips away completely and the whole film implodes into annoying nonsense about a now-wiser curmudgeon who got to the whole finale mainly through an excruciating cavalcade of coincidences that must have made the entire glorious CRS company's forehead drip with sweat. However, the cinematography, lighting, and excellent portrayal of the characters through objects and space still make this a first-rate spectacle, even if the film's punchline, for example, completely degrades any future viewings.

Marco Bellocchio, for your utterly reckless, irresponsible, and god-awful use of a high-frame-rate digital camera in a film about the Cosa Nostra that takes place from the 1960s to the 1990s, I sentence you to nine years of community service, during which I expect you to reshoot the nighttime and interior scenes so that they don't look like they were shot on a phone. I have chosen a reduced sentence not only because of your previous clean record, but also because of my personal admiration for your ability to create a portrait of a strong, distinctive man through your everyday dialogue and lack of pathos without making him into an artificial idol. Your sentence begins today. Thank you.

Tying into the original Watchmen universe with socially critical blaxploitation might not have been such a bad idea if anyone could believe that this was the author's intention and not just a calculated business plan by the Warners, led by that marketer Lindelof, and I have no reason to believe that it's not just another rich white corporation trying to feed off the current social tensions in the US, which are otherwise a total mess. In Watchmen, this pissed off "we want to be terribly toxic and radical, but we don't have the guts or the capacity" attitude shows up in almost every sub-theme afterwards. Alongside that bunch of sighing amateurs in the role of the positive protagonists, the post-KKK Rorschach community, with its coolness, discipline, and patience, inadvertently looks like the most attractive pillar of this universe, which is probably not what anyone originally wanted. The biggest problem, though, is that as much as the series is indebted to Alan Moore's original work, it is unable to maintain its strongest asset, namely that painful moral ambivalence. Whereas the bitter truth of the original Watchmen was that humanity's existence could only be preserved through well-timed genocide, and the only guardians of that secret were self-appointed heroes sworn to fight crime, the series is unable to work with that bitter truth, insisting on its infantile thesis that crime must be punished, no matter the consequences, and ideally with a happy ending to boot. All of which ends up with practically nothing in common with Moore. It's just another infantile project where everyone frowns, talks dirty (heaaaaavy on the use of force, by the way) and it takes place at night to make you feel like you're watching an adult series. In any case, I'm not denying that it's fun at times.

A cinema visit to Little Women took me nostalgically back to my high school days at the mall. The full theater with only two men in it, or the lending of tissues between rows from the middle of the movie on reminded me again of the beauty of the collective cinematic experience that Netflix just can't give you. As for the film, it could probably get by with the fantastic performances from Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh alone, whose characters breathe with such life and energy that they redeem even a few of those Jehovah's Witness scenes full of Christmas tables, gifting the poor, and other kilos of goodness like a children’s book. Still, Greta Gerwig has chosen to break the entire two books into different episodes, which she stacks on top of each other, albeit without chronology, but in such a way that the events contained within them ideally have the strongest possible impact in terms of our moment-to-moment connection with a particular character. On several occasions we witness dialogue whose importance is revealed to us a scene later, which takes place either several years before or after the dialogue. Underneath all the liveliness, then, there is actually a clockwork that successfully tries to sell us, with the strongest possible impact, the most important personal moments in the lives of several characters. And it's quite possible that with a standard narrative, the film wouldn't have had such a strong impact.

The fatal finale to Joel Schumacher's wild career, and holder of the record for the fastest movie withdrawal from theaters of all time, when after 18 days and $25,000 earned (on a $25m budget) it was decided that it wasn't worth wasting electricity on the projector for this. In some ways that was good news, because Schumacher's creative fatigue was already terribly evident in the messiness of his last films, plus at least it proved that even the presence of two Oscar-deserving actors doesn't automatically fill theaters if the rest of them aren’t worth a penny. And like, truly not even. Watching a completely inept bunch of maniacs unable to arrange to get Cage's thumb on the vault sensor for half an hour, even though they have his wife as a hostage, is a pain. If you stop taking the impotent threatening seriously after ten minutes, partly due to a shotgun being reloaded menacingly about fifteen times, then what are you supposed to do in a home invasion movie? Admire the interiors?