Othello

Just to be clear, if anyone were to criticize the ending for being unrealistic, that would be acknowledging the historical and technical fidelity of the rest of the film up to that point, am I right? In other words, once again, Ayer does what he knows how to do. Yet again he portrays the guardians of freedom in a way we don't want to see and which has no comparison. Of course, most modern WWII films have already worked with the theme of corrupted soldier ethics in the face of the ugliness of war, but so far nobody has really had the balls to make that the basis for a film about liberators. I was intrigued, for example, by a foreign review that criticized Fury, saying that it asked us to root for Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. For this mental mess to find some kind of favor, they don’t scrimp on the physical here, where there is no shortage of children being hanged and shot, bodies strewn across muddy roads, faces torn off, and prisoners being executed. After seventy years of more or less the opposite approach, I'm impressed by how war no longer makes boys into men and polishes a man’s character, but does the exact opposite. The most refreshing thing about the film, however, is the individualism that gives even the most obscure extras an identity. The old man on the street pointing the way to the soldiers, the refugee woman in a wedding dress, the prisoner of war trying to survive by waving pictures of his family, the SS soldier silencing a hidden defenseless American, the burning tank soldier shooting himself in the head, or the highlighted passage with the two German women. Ayer is a director we need. And the montage accompanying the closing credits convinced me that he should get his hands on a generously financed miniseries about European war as a counterpoint to the formally and technically bravura but ideologically cumbersome Band of Brothers. Thank goodness the film grossed over two hundred mega (surprisingly enough in my opinion, but I guess World of Tanks is also a bit to blame). Otherwise, talk of American patriotism and promoting the military is absurdly out of place in this case, and can only be released into the ether by morons who had an opinion on the film before it even existed.

It’s not everyone who can really have a clear idea of what might fall under the term Nordic gangster comedy. In Order of Disappearance does absolutely nothing to change that fact, and that's pretty cool.

A Walk Among the Tombstones is a noir film for people who don't know all that much about noir films and badly want for them to be like this. I don't hold any major grudge against it, and after the prologue (a smoke-filled morning bar, haggard bartender in the background, the shot through the coat, a scruffy Neeson and his drunkard’s dance on the stairs) I even found myself thinking I might love the film, but then the individual flaws began to line up behind each other at an increasingly less tolerable frequency. There are an awful lot of unnecessary characters who are given way too much space, a lot of the actors are obviously quite badly miscast (Dan Stevens, Sebastian Roché), and there are some merciless screenwriting perversions in an attempt to justify their existence in the film ("Dani here has a sniper rifle, but he's short-sighted, so give it to the junkie here who goes to AA meetings with Neeson and has been weaving her way into the frame so we can get some closure"). Besides, the early unmasking of the central killer duo made it impossible for me to stop thinking about Cronenberg's A History of Violence, which worked incredibly better with this motif.

I don't know if it's a good idea to create an agitation for equality by saying that everyone involved – white, Arab, Jewish, Chinese, or black – has only one thing in common, and that's that they're all morons. The women here are male-dependent Cosmopolitan hysterics, either completely vain or mentally unbalanced, and the men are overgrown five-year-old brats. It tries to be a little irreverent, but it would have had to have been made by someone with some balls and, more importantly, the ability to build timing for the individual jokes. As it was, I found the funniest moments to be the ones that didn't actually involve racial or religious diversions at all, like the casual discarding of an electronic cigarette or the running gag with the ultra-depressing images of one of the main daughters.

When I actually realize what the movie was about (arrogant big city lawyer returns to his armpit of a hometown to reminisce and bring closure to some of the stages of his awkward youth, mend his relationship with his family, and ultimately defend his father, through which he finds his way to him), I suddenly realize what a horribly murderous 140 minutes it could have been. Except that The Judge has one big notch, and that's Robert Downey Jr. playing Tony Stark again, except with an R-rating so he can swear like a heathen. Besides, his coked-up, neurotic posing, I confess, has never ceased to amuse me. However, I had the feeling all along that the pair of writers were blatantly fighting with each other during the writing process. They often tackle the old American family drama standards, but they take a slightly different approach and sometimes cleverly help themselves in quite original ways, as in the scene of Downey and Duvall arguing over a childhood scrape, which might not have worked so intensely if a hurricane hadn't raged by. On the other hand, again, some of the characters (most often the young lawyer) are in the film to comment on the obvious, and thus advise the viewer. Anyway, Duvall will not be up for an Oscar.

That John Wick has a completely primitive plot I consider a plus, because stories like this always come from such basic triggers. I, for one, don't give a damn about world balance, the notion of applying universal justice, or moral dilemmas over the transformations of individuals, but if someone steps on my guinea pig, I'll chase them to the ends of the earth. Almost brilliant from an action point of view at certain moments (the nightclub massacre), at other times at least with above average action or just pleasantly bizarre (this closed world of assassins with its rules feels like a camp game). It's mostly due to the stunt experience of the directors and the hard-working Keanu Reeves, who makes it so this time the action comes not from the editing, but actually from the characters. And the debut of gun-fu (though I think it debuted in Equilibrium a few years earlier) could catch on as a regular feature in my cinematic experience.

It's terribly unoriginal, it's got elements of Nikita, Leon, and Bourne, and for a straight B-movie it’s got a kaleidoscope of characters. However, Zoe Saldana's physical charisma, often shot like a stealth game poster, and Megaton's coked-up and exceptionally predatory directing, editing, and ideas (killing off the main boss's right hand) allow you to forgive a lot. Again, it's strictly feminist, as befits EuropaCorp, where the protagonist has essentially the same proposition as 90s B-movie heros – i.e. a completely moronic plan, in the execution of which she is maximally effective. One of my favorite scenes is definitely the bad guy briefing, where they say that the protagonist is like a mouse in the corner of the room, like fog under the door, and then it cuts to an incoming missile being launched by the hundred-pound Zoe Saldana. The critical rants of self-proclaimed action movie fans only underscore how challenging it is to push the genre a little further when it has to be pitched to a canned majority who would ideally watch the same thing over and over again.

Ayer is once again digging into the nastiness of the guardians of the American dream in a way no one wants to see, except with more stones in his path than he's used to. The fact that Schwarzenegger hits his acting limits just by saying hello is simply a problem with a character who is basically unparalleled in his career to date due to his character layering, and it's not helped by the writing hand of Skip Woods, whose B-movie mentality occasionally kicks the ball well out of reality and we have to wait quite a while before it lands where it's supposed to again. An interesting aspect of Ayer is his high and unforced emancipated attitudes, which few would expect from a specialist in police themes. The women here are not the parents and bearers of liberal values in a humdrum world of drug cartels and rotten cops, but the movers of the plot, equivalent to the men, and sources of moments of surprise. As a result, the wider audience suffers too, unable to come to terms with the fact that there’s no instant sex symbol, just the insane butch Mireille Enos and the ironic investigator Olivia Williams, both excellently played.

Three hours of German's no compromises, working the medium as thoroughly as anyone before him and refusing to show mercy to anyone. There's no music, no hope, no guidance, wisdom hangs from the nearest branch (literally) right next to the dogs, and legions of deformed masses wade ankle-deep in enough filth to make me rethink some of my nightmares. A rare case of a film that can't be fully appreciated, even with multiple viewings. It's utterly fascinating to watch the obsessive care taken in working with the setting, props, extras, and space, and while the obvious metaphor of contemporary Russia comes through clearly at first, there's no time or space to dwell on it. I can't wait to see it for maybe the sixth time. The dark side of Russian lyricism, untouched by the sun. EDIT 2021: Sadly, it's still not a film for this day and age of fetishizing audience comfort and celebrating cynical idiocy, but in the context of exploring the possibilities of cinematic storytelling, it's a crucial component that shouldn't be overlooked by anyone who wants to engage with film in general. Fresh from reading the source material, for example, I'm fascinated by how much the adaptation is fundamentally faithful, yet just as difficult to navigate. As with his other films, German is not interested in making us follow the plot, but in making us feel it.

Blindness as both an open gateway to one's own imagination and a license to project oneself fully in it and make everything in it allowed. Not to mention the fact that some things are already slowly losing their contours, colors, or merging with others. Excellent and ambitious art (but in this case, not to be feared), sympathetic in the way it plays with the script (key objects appearing here and there in the plot) and the camera (changing environments during one scene and confusing the viewer as to what is actually reality and what is not). A terribly successful debut.