Othello

Even without the transsexual context, it would be possible to generalize the feeling of the film beyond that into the irreversible loss of a man who was the only one who understood who you were. Formally, therefore, the film does not film the protagonist in the usual facial close-up, but rather from a distance, so that she fills only part of the space in the frame and appears lost and lonely. And yet the whole concept is dragged down by the same typical figures of hypocritical cis women, ideally from a higher social class, so I'm still not impressed. Anyway, I'm also kicking off a competition to make a transgender-themed film where no one looks in the mirror more than three times. So show me what you can do.

None of what makes this film an experience is fundamentally related to the film. The screenplay, where the protagonist walks in and out like a bad adventure movie and hears from various great thinkers "that's how it was back then", is terribly afraid to make any demands on the viewer, who is simply expected to be saddened and fascinated by what's unfolding in front of him. And that, to be honest, is hard to resist. It's a new kind of visual experience, that two-dimensional tangibility that beckons you to reach out and touch the ever-changing brushstrokes. It's a different kind of immersion in a cinematic microcosm that reminded me of little kids drawing detailed pictures of places they wish they were.

Although the premise of the first installment was original and interesting, its success came mainly from the tempting offer to sum up all the world's problems under a single heading. There was certainly room for a second installment, especially in an era rife with alternate interpretations of history, but Schenkman's (Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies or the legendary Lusty Liaisons) idea of conceiving this as a high-school whodunit whose reveal is what the first installment is all about shows a truly peculiar loss of judgment. It almost doesn't matter in the end either, because the film is virtually unwatchable. The way it's lit, the way the cameras move, and the way it's focused, it's reminiscent of the less successful 90s romance series that are now in their final season, and the whole thing is imbued with a sectarian exuberance where virtually every shot recalls a photograph from The Watchtower. The characters fall prey to a similarly simplistic perception, with the quartet of protagonists consisting of a nerdy Asian woman, a white Catholic man, a funny black man, and a white vamp. So bring your crayons with you.

It's just so tricky to do these movies as pure social metaphor, because it’s terribly appealing to fall into simple, totally bitter theses. At least Lanthimos regularly churns these types of movies out with absurdity, comfortless visuals, and regular shrapnel erupting out of otherwise slow pacing and postmodern form. Instead, Payne has no distinctive formal method, and so he just kind of opportunistically flails around in it, at one point wanting to move us on a humane level or get us to empathize with his characters, then switching them whenever it suits him into simple caricatures that manage to redefine themselves abruptly in the span of a single sentence. Thus, in Downsizing, we find scenes straight out of South Park (the explosion of the vault entrance, Matt Damon suddenly drumming in hippie rags at sunset), scenes that look like the result of a movie fan party (a trashed Matt Damon partying with Christopher Waltz and Udo Kier), and scenes that are long enough and sensitive enough that someone might actually realize they're supposed to be sobbing and shaking their head with a wistful grin at the power of love, even in the most unlikely moments. And my nerve centers in my brain are simply no longer flexible enough to switch between all these modes so quickly and randomly.

#metoo movie. Sojka told me wed be seeing these movies quite often now. So what the heck, worse things have happened, the story isn't so bad, after all, especially if you have no idea what you're getting into ("Jesus it's going to be all about him torturing her on the bed and her trying to escape." "Jesus, it's gonna be all about her trying to get herself out of bed." "Jesus, it’s gonna... yeah, that."), the atypical plot development pretty much keeps you in your seat. And yet the maudlin middle section, stretching seemingly endlessly, the unbalanced performances, and the fact that 80% of the film alternates between only about eight different shots doesn't justify the 103-minute running time.

Some spoilers: Inspired by Douglas and Gilmour93's unconventional defenses of the film, where the director himself admitted that it had no beginning, middle, or end because there was ultimately nothing to use to piece the film together, I also picked up the thrown gauntlet of alternative readings of this jumbled mess and came up with the idea that actually the only thing in the film that's real is the last scene. The rest is a glimpse into a perspective on Detective Harry Hole's past, warped by years of alcoholism and exhaustion, that superimposes disjointed, surreal scenes of his previous cases and burned-out relationships on top of each other. Right when he can just barely reach specific occurrences in his memory, he disappears right before he can touch them under the ice of an irreparably damaged mind. Postmodernism lives even if it doesn't want to, and old Lynch is somewhere in the back, nodding approvingly over his cigarette. PS: it still looks better than a lot of other adaptations of Nordic mysteries, though, and Alfredson's handling of space, camera work, and (wherever the wind keeps him from tripping over his own feet) dynamics is exemplary. But unfortunately, you simply can't turn a concentration camp into a bouncy castle by simply redoing a few barbed wires.

After every other film from the Czechoslovak New Wave, I wonder how it’s possible that we’re not extinct. *** I still have an amusing memory of Black Peter from my university days, when at a college party a classmate glowingly explained the principles of the CNW to Indian and Korean students, which culminated in everyone high-fiving each other for immediately watching Black Peter, with the catch that I, who signed on to do the subtitles for the TV series, would translate it simultaneously. The Erasmus students picked up chips and beers and excitedly spread around the room in anticipation of the comedy that their classmate (perhaps Miloš?) had promised them. Sometime around the dialogue "Shall we dance?" "But there's no music." "Well, I'll come again." they had definitely become convinced that I didn't speak much English and was just making up the lines from scratch. So they slowly began dropping off, establishing a base on the balcony behind a wall of apologetic smiles. We finished the film with a classmate who kept insisting I keep translating from the English, even though there was no one to translate for. I didn't even mind, because as the Erasmians disappeared, so did the ban on smoking in the rooms. What was that classmate's name...?

The premise, which turns cheating on exams into a suspenseful heist, isn't bad at all, and you quiver when the heroes send each other the answers to the questions created in barcodes on the pencils they hand out during the tests. The rest is truly a crisis of dreadfulness, with hideous camerawork, knee-jerk editing, and amateur acting flopping around in 130 minutes of grayish images that could have been cut down by a fifth just by running the ever-present slow motion at normal speed. I was in a more conciliatory mood thanks to the exhausting thrills the film slips in while bypassing the international SITC test, but the whole thing was brought down for me by the finale, where we are told that the right actually lies on the side of pointless one-and-done liberal arts tests that determine whether or not you’ll be someone in your life and not the other way around, when it should be more on the side of the characters who, with their clever and innovative circumventing of the ossified decision-making system will eventually win against the system and thus humble it. It is indeed a letdown here, even though the system only wins because one of the characters eventually spills all the shenanigans to the authorities out of his own selfishness. The confirmation of this status quo after two hours is simply a betrayal, comparable to if at the end of Ocean's Eleven, George Clooney had gone to the police to rat out his partners in crime and all the money they stole got taken away and returned to the casino. I don't know.

The second installment of The Terminator was the pinnacle of Cameron's career at the time, mainly because he managed to completely refine the script into the perfect crowd-pleaser. In his previous three films (Piranha II doesn't count), you can feel that he had to force a lot of things and therefore they felt more auteur, idiosyncratic, and innovative. In Judgement Day he already knew exactly what to add, what to trim, what to emphasize, what to cut. It's technically competent, but what can we say, it lacks heart. Suddenly we've got comic figures, a badass villain, would-be on-the-spot musings about humanity, and an jacked-up Linda Hamilton whose character is pretty much written as a militant feminist for no other reason than Cameron had been getting big props thus far for how he'd been working with female protagonists and their abilities to make it in a man's world. After all, he himself said in the 80s that he himself doesn't understand how the film industry can ignore the 50% of moviegoers who are still 80% deciding which film to see.

Koyaanisqatsi for the slowest of the slow. Beautiful National Geographic screensavers, the caveman championship in hiding penises for accessibility, and a voice over that would make you stop sorting your garbage. Plus, it kept calling me Mama, which unnerved me. Next! [clink!]