Othello

Pretty uncharacteristic for the late seventies in building a relationship between the film and the viewer, which makes the kind of details nobody cares about, like logic, acting, or story, completely incidental to the individual scenes. These, thanks to the aggressive lighting (which the characters don’t notice, only the viewer) and even more aggressive music, do not create a classic filmmaker's attempt to let the viewer empathize with the characters; on the contrary, they deliberately alienate them and push them into a voyeuristic position where the outcome of the subsequent development of the scene is clear, thus creating not a sense of fear, but a sense of guilt. Which is pleasantly sick.

A ruthless feminist romance where all the men are wimps and manipulators. Interestingly, it follows the standard romance scheme until the last fifteen minutes, which would be cool to communicate here graphically, but I'll have to make do with my legendary powers of expression. Imagine a graph that maps 10 points vertically and 8 horizontally. The vertical represents the protagonist's state of mind (the higher the score, the better); the horizontal represents the progression of the plot. Let's call point number one the Status Quo (value 3), where both characters are still unaware of each other, their lives intertwining, yet missing something. Probably love. Point two we'll call Encounter (value 4), followed by point three, with a value of 6, namely Enchantment. Point 4 falls under the category of Happy Experiences Together Against All Odds. This now has a value of 8, and is mostly a montage of picnics and the shared activities of the protagonists, despite the jealous and the uptight. Item 5 is the top on the vertical scale (10) and is First Sex/Paris/True Confessions, etc. And then comes the twist, i.e., the Disaster/Messup, which drops our vertical line down to number 1, from which then comes horizontal point 7, Running/Reconciliation (a value of 5), and then the last point 8, Reconciliation and New Beginnings, which also has a value of 8, but not higher, because the stigma of point 6 will be forever present and the characters are wiser/jaded, so their relationship will no longer have the drive it did in its beginnings. An Education taps into this formula after point 6 when there is not Running but actually Escape, so point 8 doesn’t represent Reconciliation but only Resignation, a departure from romance in general at the expense of education and the future, plus a bit of healthy sexism. As a result, the last point of the film never gets above a midpoint of 5, but the heroine becomes much more satisfied with herself. Otherwise, Carey Mulligan with her long man fingers, throaty laugh, and mega-dimples is a great combination of the be careful/be fascinated girl.

Half an hour into the running time, I learned that subsurface natural gas extraction and the companies that profit from it are evil. For the next hour I continued to learn that subsurface natural gas extraction and the companies that profit from it are evil, only in more detail. Oh, and plus the director's grim voice over and shaky camerawork as a symbol of the confusion and unkindness of the world we live in.

The added value of Martyrs is its demonstration of the freewheeling and encompassing nature of horror itself. The film moves from exploitation, to haunted, to torture porn, to monster horror, to body horror, to the religious sector, not mixing the subcategories together but instead, thanks to the unpredictable script, allocating them in sequence, with almost none of them brought to a satisfyingly conclusion. As a result, from the animated beginning (or 1st half), all shot handheld, where the average shot length is about 1 second, even given the nature of the violence (from wild, unpredictable, and messy to methodical, purposeful, and utterly cold), the shot lengthens and the image calms down. The final infuriating (non)point is brilliant in its underhandedness to the viewer, who has had to go through a lot just to be told to "keep doubting." _______ Make-up artist Benoît Lestang couldn't have bid a better farewell.

Hellboy 2 was supposed to be a non-narrative film from the start. The giants rising from the ground, giant flowers that bloom during death, and winged reapers could have silently told a story on their own, and their presence alone would have worked visually even as metaphor, which they are. They work on a fundamental level; everything around them does not.

Bay's answer to the constant questions about why his films, and by extension probably he himself, are xenophobic, stupid, exclusively commercial, Republican, macho, tacky, and incredibly profitable. Because the world is totally screwed. "This is still a true story."

The 6th installment of Fast & Furious accomplishes the same task as all previous installments in the franchise, which is to be a total reinterpretation of hip-hop culture into film form. But whereas in the previous installments the heroes' position corresponded to the socially conscious street offshoot of the genre where wealthy authority figures are an oppressive evil to be curtailed and stick to your family (i.e. your bros and hos), in the sixth installment, with eight-figure sums on the central characters' bills after the last heist, the series has definitively tipped into the tenets of mainstream hip-hop à la 50 Cent. The characters (literally) don't know what small coins look like, the target device they all covet is only mentioned in terms of its function once but six times in terms of its price, and they react to someone's insinuation that one of the characters can't afford something financially by buying up everything in sight and humiliating the skeptic in question. In that situation, it's exceedingly difficult to build any real empathy for the characters, all the more so if you don't have much of a relationship built up with them from previous installments. In fact, this installment is almost hospitable to anyone who DIDN'T grow up with the characters. It's not just the constant referencing and flashbacks, but the constant presentation of the characters' admitted aging, their more moderate outlook, and their attempts to settle down (imho a bit of a ruinous aspect for an action movie). Which is funny with action icons of the previous decade, when the same life situation is presented by action heroes like Willis, Sly, Schwarzenegger, Lundgren, van Damme, and many others – action stars who were in the limelight 20-30 years ago. The aspect of aging is also reflected in the action scenes, where only one out of three matches the target audience thus far (a school kid) and his playing with cars and tanks, where he completely disregards collateral damage and completely denies the existence of civilians in crushed cars. The next two scenes take place at night, a time when children do not play with cars so much and the presence of real death is more tangible. But in F&F6, even the death of one of the central characters passes with a hug, and then they're all smiling at each other and having a happy barbecue again. As a result, if the first installments of the series presented a Need for Speed video game, Episode 5 turned cars on their roofs, gave characters machine guns, and twisted the series into GTA, Episode 6 spiced it up with a dash of The Sims. Then again, I wonder if Jason Statham will mortally threaten Vin Diesel in the next installment by stealing the ladder to his pool.

Like the Bourne films, only shot worse, not logic-driven (written by a guy who thinks it's a good idea to ride down a 50-foot escalator on a railing), and horribly non-action-packed, especially in the action scenes. All this spiced up with a superhumanly retarded script, a central character you want to murder, and a budget that falls short of the filmmakers' original ambitions. Christiansen tries rather hard and manages to embellish some scenes with some pleasantly inventive flourishes. On the other hand, he tips the balance back the other way by his reliable inability to shoot the night exteriors in such a way that doesn't leave the confused viewer wondering why the screen is suddenly turning off and on. How this crossed the borders of Denmark, perhaps only Film Europe knows.

I wrestled with this film like a lion for its entire seventeen-and-a-half-hour running time because, ironically, Hallström isn't shooting like a total block of wood this time, and I even glimpsed something of a creative vision here and there. And yet how such a non-dramatic genre film, switching so insensitively between characters, with such a stupid script that never saw a story editor even from a distance, could ever have gotten released, you tell me. By the time the end credits rolled, I realized that two-thirds of the scenes in this film were completely unnecessary, and the withered Swedish faces, the constant gloom, and the stabbed little girl unfortunately couldn't save it.

An aggressively moronic visit to a toy store, where even we the childless get a taste of what it must be like to take our five-year-old to an overly colorful complex, who starts unerringly flitting around the racks of the most expensive artillery and gushing "I wanna be Stowm Shadow, he's gonna to dwess up like Snake Eyes to fwee Cobwa Commandew, and he's gonna help him cause he's got exploding balls, but Woadblock gets in the way. "I don’t want Duke, he’s dead." Whereupon you agree, and in an effort to shut up the result of your youthful indiscretion for at least half an hour you walk up to the cash register with two figurines that still show the blood stains of Chinese children, the clerk smirks at you and says "150 bucks, fucker" and you realize that for the rest of the month you will only be feeding on your own sweat. While Treehorn handles subjects like women, the makers of G.I. Joe: Retaliation are beyond giving the characters names, for example (no one in the film has a civilian name), and they define characters practically only by the caliber of the gun they shoot, or whether they do more kicking or punching. In comparison, the scenes are completely WTF where we learn about the family backgrounds of the plastic figures and are made to mourn their loss, even though we can always buy new ones. Fortunately, Retaliation fills out the formula of a total action movie quite successfully, where we don't have to wait more than 8 minutes as a rule for the next eye-candy shot or explosive shootout, with action somehow reminiscent of the better trailers for contemporary video games in its over-the-top, materialistic clarity and unusually long takes for action sequences.