Othello

The hot potato of Starman's long-circulating script, which needed to get on screens as quickly as possible after the success of E.T., landed in Carpenter's lap because he supposedly wanted to try something a little different with the characters and their relationships, but in retrospect even he admits that this was mainly due to the fact that he simply didn't have much to choose from after the disastrous reception of The Thing. In the end, Starman impresses the most with its original, sometimes quite epic special effects (the fall of the UFO into the forest is luxuriously grandiose, the subsequent formation of the alien into a human being is again rather disgustingly uncanny) and its appealing inclusion of various B-movie archetypes and situations. But I don't at all swallow the romance between the alien being, with grimaces resembling a bad trip trying to break through layers of Botox through which he utters phrases like "Define beautiful", "Define love", or "I gave you a baby." Ugh. The general poignancy of a childlike, guileless protagonist who unravels our life certainties with the kindness of simple questions, combined with an Oscar nomination (say whaaaaaaaaat?!), reminds us once again of the need to succumb to these little princes and their simple truths, because it's just easier than slowly and patiently unraveling and defining one's complicated and chaotic existence. Plus, thanks to this movie, another insufferable space smartass has fallen from the sky, prot, so the black spot for this one.

The president’s plane crashes in Manhattan, which is a giant self-governing prison, and the biggest tough mudafucka with an eye patch has 24 hours to get him out of there like FTW. If I'd known this movie when I was a kid, I wouldn't have made it out of third grade. And I'd probably starve to death in front of the video. The ideal cure for a creative crisis, I think, would be just listening to kids play on a road carpet.

A half-crazy old man and Bulgarian disco bouncer making art. So there's lots of yelling, gesturing, running from left to right, and complaining about everyone else. Landscape art doesn't interest me personally, so I enthusiastically embraced the concept of the documentary as the filmmaker's constant war with technology, people, and his own communication skills. Too bad it’s visually just a well-cut collection of ugly digital camera shots, as is the case with virtually all documentaries of this type at the moment.

Due to budget constraints (and the need to shoot on expensive Panavision) the early Carpenter coined the slogan "shoot as little footage as possible and extend the scenes for as long as one can". It's possible that as a result his early films have uncomfortably long exposition and the whole thing is edited into a rather lethargic whole. Despite this, however, the first half works paradoxically well before the events mentioned in the film's title ever occur. But then the long, cold wait loses a bit of its impact in the end, when you learn that it wasn't the director's intention, but a method of stretching the film to feature length. The resulting action, dialogue, and lead actors are then the usual 70s exploitation cringe, dominated mainly by Laurie Zimmer, who must have had someone constantly throwing pills into her drink, because most of the time she gives the impression that she doesn't even know where she is. As is so often the case in the end, the scene for which most people remember this film is also the scene Carpenter is now most ashamed of. Today, all Kathy would have to do is write a disgruntled review on Google and the plot would be over.

Brendan Fraser, Bridget Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg! It's the end of the 90s like crazy. Plus, if, like me, you see in Monkeybone an attempt to follow up the cult classic The Mask with Jim Carrey or an attempt to translate the Cartoon Network's aesthetic of hyperactive tastelessness into a feature film format, it works. Monkeybone is a film that would have a problem once that whole whirlwind of screaming, nonsensical, and totally wild ideas came to a momentary halt, which thankfully doesn't happen.

An anthropomorphic insect befriends a little boy with dead eyes. Nightmare fuel for years to come, I call foul.

The plot, building on endless contrasts, is a bit hackneyed nowadays, but the visuals, plasticity, and almost self-flagellating perfectionism (I really want to try turning stop-motion animation into wild camera movements) still make this a great fairy tale. Compared to today's trends, moreover, it's quite exceptional in terms of meaning, because the hero here comes to an epiphany on his own, and that epiphany takes the conservative form of the view that everyone simply has their place in the world and there's no point in trying to change it. And that itself takes place through the process of "Well, I tried it, now I know it was stupid, so shut up."

The Perfect Secret is incredibly the sixth remake of the Italian film Perfetti sconosciuti, which was only just made in 2016. The Koreans, Poles, and Turks all have their own versions. If I can think of a similar case where the writers of the original can make a living just by renting out the rights, it's the Flemish Loft, which was identically remade by the Dutch and the Americans (the latter even under the direction of the director of the original) within a few years. Both The Perfect Secret and Loft share the same common factor – both films deal with the world of the upper middle class, but seek to elevate and satire it, while being made for an audience made up of its ranks. For no one else would be able to accept an idiot-plot about a bunch of bored rich kids and careerists reading the news of their disgustingly boring and fake lives over their plates, even though everyone knows it's going to be a disaster. We have learned to rise above Czech lifestyle comedies for their amorality, yet here we find ourselves in the very same world of spoiled losers, where the female and male worlds are built on a constant conflict with their own twisted yet understandable natures. The virtually identical and audience-successful translation of this plot into different cultural settings ultimately suggests how interchangeable the social class depicted is, no matter where the story is set. The apartments are all the same, the kitchens the same. If there's any cultural globalization to worry about, it's undoubtedly this one. PS: The German version, unlike the Italian version, still has an utterly insanely upbeat epilogue, which accurately references the exuberant tastelessness of contemporary romantic comedies about flamboyantly entrepreneurial forty-somethings, often utterly obscene acting, and incredibly caricatured characters, the benchmark being found in the character of the "alternative" girlfriend of one of the protagonists, whose first sentence in the film, which she says while sitting in the car, is: "I'd like to bake homemade bread." Shoot yourself immediately, and I mean immediately.

Until the arrival at the high school, this was the movie of the year with one of the scariest horror scenes I've seen in a long time, by which I mean the entire visit to the parents' farmhouse. This sequence feels like a specific scene from Mulholland Drive played in a loop, where the protagonists return home from the theater with a found key to a blue box, and it's really very uncomfortably shot (was it me, or were some of the characters' movements intentionally sped up?). Unfortunately, once they enter the empty corridors of the school, the film then turns into a pure allegory about dancing and singing, thus turning from the hitherto Americana nightmare somewhere into the world of obligatory irony (which, at least according to the Wikipedia synopsis, the book avoids and in that case I want it now), which is a shame, but in the context of Netflix, it is a really wild departure to be appreciated. Plus, like almost all of Kaufman's films to date, this one takes place in a cyclical surreal world made up of neuroses, phobias, masks, frustrations, and exhaustion, and we speak a pretty similar language.

Of Alexei German's last three films, one is shot from the position of a stranger in a civilization on a strange planet (Hard to Be a God) and two as a memoir of an old man's childhood (this one and Khrustalyov, My Car!). Leaving aside the fact that these last two films confuse the viewer by, among other things, posing as the director's autobiography (which neither of them is), it offers these jumping-off points as an ideal starting line in the effort to navigate the uneasy narrative form that characterizes German's films. His stories are told not only in purely subjective terms, but through the distant lens of a child who doesn't fully understand the confusing adult world unfolding around him. All of this is further combined with the fact that much of the story was told to the narrator only later by his father, who was not even present for most of the events depicted. The first shot of the film, in which the camera pans across paintings, photographs, and artifacts of the narrator's apartment, offers the final pieces to the puzzle that makes up the story. Rarely do German's films combine the unreliability of memory along with its interpretation, but he nevertheless offers it as a way of coming to terms with a distant period that’s not easy to grasp. Anyone who, as a child, listened quietly to the dialogue of drunken parents and their friends, however they misunderstood it, will better understand how and what this film is about.