Othello

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?

By focusing the story on a late high school community, the film held out hope that Schumacher would remember his first major directorial achievement, the bravura frat-pack flick St. Elmo's Fire. Unfortunately, however, the septuagenarian director past his creative zenith couldn't find the energy, not to mention that he was apparently no longer able to relate to the transformation of high school communities and their problems. After all, a quarter century has passed since Elmo. Twelve contains virtually every flaw and crutch in the narrative: omniscient voice overs, flashbacks, a huge number of characters who are not sufficiently developed, relationships between characters that are supposed to emerge from one characterization scene, it's not clear by the end what the film is actually about, and whatever starting point you choose in spite of all this comes off as horribly banal. A tragic fail.

Town Creek rides the wave of brutal thrillers from the late oughts and early nineties, when the New French Extremity wave was rampant in France (Inside, Martyrs, and Frontier(s), of which the film is in many ways reminiscent) and the vogue for dirty exploitation was at its peak in the US, the banner of which was most successfully carried by the Saw series and by Rob Zombie. Thus, apart from a few gory details, the pattern is mainly one of underexposure, fast editing, constantly changing viewpoints, and darkness. Unlike the canonical works of this wave, it doesn't contain any iconically brutal scenes, but there's a man-eating zombie horse attacking, and that sure as hell counts.

This film initially delights with well-written characters and an interesting and concise plot as the mundane trapping service member starts to get to know the hard-boiled detective in the book with the femme fatale in his bed, and with a pretty interesting twisted journey, which leads us to the finale, where everything jams, rattles, overheats, catches fire, explodes, sets the whole house and the orphanage nearby on fire, and ends in smoldering ruins. So maybe next time.

I gagged on my own blood. But I'm afraid there was nothing else that could be done with Webber's script (Andrew Lloyd himself is thrilled with the film). The Pilcher-esque script, the awful, pathetic music, and those lyrics, for goodness sake. An ordeal comparable to watching a two and a half hour concert of Nightwish, Within Temptation, or a similar haunted castle where the actors have to change their clothes every ten minutes. Knowing that the film is faithful to the original musical and was worked on directly with Webber, I vow to keep a respectful distance from this world.

Ford v Ferrari is interesting in the way it assembles its entire form through individual, seemingly unimportant details, to which perhaps an entire episode is devoted that seemingly has no point in itself. However, these episodes and details patiently and gradually build up a picture of what to focus on when everything in the film is at stake. In this way, the film avoids the usual problem of having the protagonists semi-pathetically explain to us what is actually going on in the finale to give the viewer a sense of direction. In the final race, it is assumed that the viewer has so far learned everything necessary to orient himself if he has been paying attention. And it's one of the many reasons why the races themselves then work so well. Not to mention how superbly filmed they are and how unassuming even in the most dramatic moments. There are, of course, those moments when, in a pinch, the top racer has to be told to ride like a dragon and suddenly he floors it and passes everyone. There's the badass wife character to keep it from being a bimbo slapped in there, there's Bale's pining for an Oscar even though he accidentally interpreted his character as a 1901 oil tycoon, but those are the compromises you have to put up with sometimes in a blockbuster. Otherwise, I'd want blockbusters to look like this. PS: with this film, I'm unfortunately forced to amend my favorite joke, "What do you call Jon Bernthal in a blazer? Will the defendant please rise" to "What do you call Jon Bernthal in a jacket? A marketer with a conscience."

This is what a movie must look like for people who are always complaining about things from their favorite books being left out of movie adaptations. And in doing so, it's the perfect proof of how false their argument is. Doctor Sleep [very aptly titled in the three-hour director's cut] is a literal adaptation in a killer TV treatment that could practically be described as a video book. The film is nominally divided into chapters (which I last saw, perhaps, in Sphere); most of the running time is taken up with two characters locking themselves into several minutes of static dialogue consisting of two shots. Then, in the finale, the film does stray from the book's premise, but only to follow an awkward virtual tour of the Overlook Hotel with one stilted quote after another. And really any recollections of the original Shining this film awakens make it look all the worse standing next to them. Because this is the complete anti-Kubrick.

What a crappy documentary. Most of the aestheticized footage chronicling troubled industries would be fine for the bosses of those companies to hang proudly above their desks. The communication the film establishes is often only with local workers at the very bottom of the industrial chain, instead of dealing with the higher echelons and the private/government nexus, the real culprits in the current environmental crisis. We can either mourn at the sight of the expansion of open pit quarries or we can finally admit the truth that there are some 200 specific people in the world and if we don't have a single photo of us holding the severed head of at least one of them, we have done virtually nothing to save the environment.