Othello

A film cobbled together from slogans, references, allusions, and reflections, a film that basically doesn't exist because there's nothing original in it. No scene or character here has any integrity. A masterpiece of the world's laziest screenwriting in which a 50-year-old Landon tries his "How do you do fellow kids?" thing on us again and foreign critics swallow it in a panic lest they be branded out of touch. That after a brilliant career reboot Vince Vaughn feels the need to clown around like Rob Schneider is literally quite sad to me.

"Once upon a time there was an old man. He was such a sage. He would get up in the morning and, because he had a total of nothing to do, would go out for a walk and humorously gloss over the world around him. With understanding irony he smiled at human foibles, and with gentle humor pointed out minor wrongs and iniquities. He could start a conversation with anyone – from diggers to shop assistants, workers to clerks and managers; they all knew him well. No wonder the people one day conspired to beat the old man to death."

Watching it, you can no longer wipe away the knowledge of the huge commercial flop, supported by not a lot of scattered filmgoers, after you've experienced packed houses at Villeneuve a few days prior and the cinema box office still has a marker-scrawled sign reading "Dune sold out :-(". But then again, you can share that awful cringe with fewer people during the endless trailer for My Sunny Maad. At first, when the film was bathed in layers of mud, dirt, and very naturalistic battles, I thought this was probably meant to be a film for those who permanently bitch about how nothing is being made these days, swooning when they see a black man waving a chalkboard at the Battle of Hastings (which I can understand) and its failure is the ultimate proof that this audience group is no commercial guarantee of anything and therefore no longer to be taken into account. As the film's real subject matter is revealed, a patiently systematic description of the nature of rape culture in the patriarchy, I actually began to feel sorry that the target audience for these themes (which of course should be all of us, but you know) was so aggressively uninterested in the film. And I'd like to think it's not just because instead of empty screaming emancipatory slogans the film works with the historical context of the issue, which while it prevents the female protagonist from being an active agent in the plot, allows us to follow her perspective by making her an active narrator. Scott, who is riding now on his ninth set of tires, has unusually excelled as a director here. The film is raw, gritty, and radical, and I'm sorry to say that it will probably cut his feet out from under him for the future and sour the old man on it. After Disney ate up 20th Century Fox, we'll probably take a break from this kind of film experience for a while.

An interesting attempt to portray the deadpan character of the backwoods of the South of France, which is quite reminiscent (as is the whole film, by the way) of Romania. If you choose to see the punk filmmaking behind it, when there wasn't enough for so much as a beer, it's actually not bad at all. And Teddy himself is an fabulous goofball. By the breakup scene with Rebecca, I found myself actually knowing him and feeling sorry for him (oh, and there's a werewolf and stuff, but whatever).

This is a horror movie where space is the enemy. That space is a vast, photogenic, and uncluttered beach. It threatens us with reminders of our own mortality, degradation and degeneration of body and mind. It is not in vain that we observe all the changes on half-dressed people in swimsuits. The only way to defeat the antagonist, the imminent proximity of our own decline and end, is to acknowledge it. A very uncomfortable spectacle in places, with first-rate camerawork designed to permanently take control of the situation from the viewer. Old is in many ways a physical, almost Cronenbergian horror film and for that reason it is rather disappointing here that it chooses to keep a low profile in some scenes in the interests of maintaining a lower bar of accessibility. Here the compromises are quite blatant.

I'm not a fan of the source material, so I'm more interested in how Villeneuve manages to compress that giant load of lore with the exhausted tale of the Chosen One, empires, and brave natives into some kind of coherent shape. And so, first and foremost, I'll preface this by saying right up front that I stared at this for two and a half hours with my mouth agape and can't remember the last time I explicitly begged the screen not to let it end yet. The new Dune is all about bravura work with scale. It manages to depict the weight and importance of certain situations in a clean visual way, as well as the essential role of certain artifacts or elements. He can maintain an intimate atmosphere in large units when he wants to, and he can still create an epic scene from just a shot of shifting sand. Of course, the completely off-the-leash Zimmer helps, but it's not the music itself that's behind it, but its layout and especially its frequent overflowing from scene to scene, which gives the film a surprising compactness. Next, watch the shot order, the angles, and the editing in the scenes with equipment. That initial reluctance to immediately reveal the scale of the scene and the gradual revelation of the monumentality of the entire sequence. Yet there are several such sequences in the film. When this approach culminates in the first encounter with Shai-Hulud, you're faced with one of the greatest scenes you've ever seen. This is something that Disney and Netflix professionals combined simply can't pull off in essence. I sometimes think of POM's remark on Children of Men when he writes in 2006 "I think that just as Spielberg, Coppola et al. got a dying Hollywood on its feet in the seventies, Cuarón, Greengrass et al. will take it to another level now, in the age of calculated digital crap", which is still perfectly apt 15 years later, except we can update the names to Villeneuve, Nolan, or Miller. It's absolutely incumbent on everyone involved to finish the series and then allow us to get together with our buddies on the weekend and do the whole thing as a marathon, just like we still do with LOTR. A cinematic event and the second best adaptation of the source. ______________________ The accumulating boo! reviews from interchangeable morons seem to come primarily from the couch comfort of HBO Max, where the film is unfortunately airing in parallel with the theatrical release. I infer this from the recurring remarks about switching off halfway through or clicking through. It's further evidence of the importance of dusting off the importance of cinemas as cultural centers and distributors of a collective experience that accentuates the power of film, if only because the viewer actually has to do something for it too (pay for a ticket, physically get there, defend their opinion to others after the film, etc). This creates an unrepeatable conjunction between humanity and space, which among other things helps engender greater sensitivity to the work and cannot be simulated elsewhere. So television still remains television and is intended for the same television people as it has always been. And having your choice of programming doesn't change that. People didn’t get smarter when they opened libraries, either.

[original version] The best flying dog in movie history! I don't think Chaplin and I will be friends otherwise. The character seems insanely creepy to me, which is probably helped by knowing about the comedian's personal life. However, somehow, putting a small child around him seems naturally like sheer senselessness. Most plebs, if they had a time machine, would use it to warn their old selves, kill Hitler, or some such cliché. Those with a real heart, however, would travel back in time to the filming of The Kid and prevent Chaplin from being on the same set with Lita Grey.

Any episode of Walker Texas Ranger (including moral appeals through war veterans and Native Americans or sympathy for the working class versus inherently corrupt suits) on the big screen. That Netflix is slowly returning to television its role as a distributor of resigned brain dead entertainment we know, but how is it possible for this kind of lameness to make it into theaters? What the fuck is going on?

Chaplin needlessly lingers here with an uninteresting plot and long prologues to the attractions. These aren't particularly breathtaking compared to Buster Keaton's suicide escapades, for example; rather they are unnecessarily drawn out. The bravura of the scene with the destruction of the magician's stage is obscured by the fact that the final stunts on the rope look rather artificial, overdone, and static. Plus I found the character of the Tramp kind of annoying and I tend to wish her life imprisonment for vagrancy even if it’s a matter of life and death. If the crumpling and discarding of the star at the end was indeed an act of anti-communist resistance, it's great to see it in a film whose theme is how the circus owner exploits everything around him, including his daughter, whom he regularly spanks, and the only way to humble him is to smash his face in and marry his daughter off to another guy.

Manson's sAint, only real shit. Depp, Haynes, and Leary went to Frusciante's place to get high, for his part he even dressed decently for it, but when they got there their legs got heavy, they filmed the host's ex, and sent it out into the ether as their own art. Except, of course, for Leary, who just came to bring a paper and also of course he’ll have some, dammit. Lol, you don't pick your friends. Fascinating insight into a 1990s crackhouse with unnecessary post-production effects in the first half. The house speaks for itself. Proof that no matter what the life and house of a true music enthusiast looks like, guitars are always on stands and records lined up on shelves.