Othello

Nowadays it's actually a beautiful fairy tale experience to see humanity cooperating and listening, how it’s humble, patient, and empathetic in the face of an encounter with something alien. It's actually a rare spectacle to watch professionals from all sorts of disciplines work together in the face of knowledge of the unknown, without being made into elitist upstarts above common sense. A film without a negative character, a film about fascination, indulgence, and knowledge. It must have been an amazing time, to be able to believe that.

Noir is a genre that has that magical quality where if such a film fails in style, it becomes terribly funny. And with Reminiscence, I was chuckling like a madman at times. By which the film proves once again, among other things, how that famous "best unrealized screenplays" label doesn't guarantee anything, because it's just a crappy rip-off of Strange Days (despite there being no comparison). With more capable direction and especially set design, this could have withstood a lot, because the subject matter isn't entirely bad; but just the way it all feels artificial and cheaply staged makes it stand out for how stupidly written, acted, and produced it is. Still, I'm glad someone took on this retrofuturistic neo-noir without trying to "instructively" look down on it, which is rare these days.

Obviously a major inspiration for American postmodernists like Lynch, Tarantino, Jarmusch, and Refn. And quite understandably so, as this surreal journey through an America full of lost lonely weirdos builds the most authentic sense of lostness and burnout, yet still gets us to hold our breath at the incredible police chase scenes. In fact, the father pointing out that he could have endangered innocent people with his driving is such a barometer of where you stand here. But this film is about resistance not only against the rules, but especially against sense and rationality. Of course, I'm not going to apologize to Honza Kočka for stealing flowers from his grave now and then.

Insufferable New York WASPs played by the worst actors of their day have an inter-dimensional romance. I get that TV nostalgia is a bitch, and ceramics classes have been a tradition in my house since grade school, but tell me, how did you manage to put this pair together? I mean, I swear she doesn't move a face muscle the whole time and he's a pompous twit without a shred of character. Not to mention that the fictional rules of the afterlife only work here for the actual needs of script development, and when the filmmakers had the chance to do a love scene between Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg, they cowardly backed out. I'm hoping Zucker only made this movie because he needed to have material to parody for the sequel to The Naked Gun.

The beginning of that sad tale of a young, relentless director who, despite the studios and the conditions, broke uncompromisingly into the big game. Surprisingly, the latter didn't chew him up or conform him, but instead sadistically granted him unprecedented creative freedom to show that the public doesn't want his films so much, but likes those stories about filmmaking rebels. District 9, Elysium, and Chappie all have the same parameters. Incredible set design, a fantastic sense of editing and camera angles, interesting themes and attractions. But neither of them were able to string these together with a script that didn't rely on unlikely clichés and one-dimensional supporting characters. With visual directors, this is better tolerated the first time (see here), less so on subsequent attempts. See the subsequent general disappointment with Blomkamp's imo best film (and one of the best action sci-fi films perhaps ever), Elysium. It came with exactly what everyone actually wanted from the director (dirty audiovisual hedonism), but when they got it they suddenly started thinking about the story, the script, and the message.

I like The Matrix comparison a lot, because it illustrates the transformation of the perception of pretty similar themes. The Matrix is about the problem of disconnection from an oppressive system, Free Guy is a film primarily about adapting to oppression and ultimately defends the artificial system. It pretends to be an anti-capitalist fable, with the antagonist, the evil businessman, ultimately being punished by the invisible hand of the market. Similarly, it pretends to be a film about the need to break free from repetitive mechanisms, but in the end it merely replaces them with other repetitive mechanisms. And no, it's not a conscious thing. It offers all this with the white-knuckled grin of a podcaster trying to sell you his Kickstarter project with artificial enthusiasm. Cyberpunk dystopia has been around for a long time, and it's pretty faithful to its predecessors. Yet they still failed to appreciate that such a reality would look not like decimated metropoles but like ubiquitous sunny franchises full of coolness and camaraderie, because they apparently didn't think to work with the powers of marketing capitalism at all. Thus, twenty years after young directors succeeded in making prescient science fiction about how humans are unable to disconnect from the system through which machines have discovered, among other things, that the human condition is defined through suffering, we are faced with a conformist blah film shot like a Starbucks commercial that tries hysterically to pretend how fresh and young it is. Except it's devotee shit from a 50-year-old director with a 45-year-old protagonist, made for the assured man-children on whom the whole system rests and whose idea of resistance is Movember and dry February. Oh, and it's 80% on Rotten Tomatoes. So shoot yourself immediately.

Funny southern accent, endless dry plains, breaded chicken, and a rifle under every pillow. The Sugarland Express reveals more and more that it's actually Texas itself, its conservatism, its inaccessibility, its ruthlessness, and, within that framework, its inherently certain comicality, that really plays the lead role here. "Howdy folks."

That's the essence of latter-day Besson. A purely perfunctory funhouse whose script does little more than string together desirable scenes and contains characters so terribly written it would make you want to stab yourself. Which is simply the problem of aging egotists who, from certain points on, have completely resigned from making any effort to understand anyone other than themselves. But is it a problem for Valerian? It doesn't matter, because the primary concern here is the fantastic world through which he guides us and of which he wants to show us as much as possible. Even in a literal shortcut, for example, where the protagonist runs through the city through the walls and we find ourselves in a completely different environment every two seconds in an absolutely breathtaking scene. As expected, it's obviously a madcap patchwork (though what cinematic space opera isn't), but I have more sympathy for it than, say, contemporary Star Wars, because in its goofiness and frank puerility it's simply more authentic than a hollowed-out marketing mogul that swaps creativity for "creative producers".

A corporate-derived illusion of punk and enlightened filmmaking for an artificially created group of fake nerds, which in an era of comic-book meta-movies based on constant reminders of their own cliché consciousness is itself becoming a cliché. Or did anyone believe that the opening fight to introduce the team would actually be the right exposition? The problem with meta-movies is that once there are too many of them (more than one, understandably), they absolutely stop working in all other aspects because you just don't trust anyone or anything. The Suicide Squad has a decent pace, some cool technical ideas (a fight shown in the reflection of a helmet), and at times decent "ground level" camerawork through which to keep an eye on the perspective of the characters through whom we're watching the film. The problem, though, is that there's nothing tangibly there. Digital violence doesn't hurt, and besides, it’s not what violence looks like. The body is not a tomato. The swearing doesn't offend anyone and the guns feel artificial. The only thing that really makes an impression is a pissed off Ayer somewhere in the background, who Warner made the biggest buffoon in Hollywood after they totally blew the soul out of his vision which they manipulated him into when they tried to launch their "dark" universe, but one that would be accessible to everyone at the same time. After the failure of that studio-castrated bore, they threw it overboard, brought in Disney's jilted Gunn, gave him 185 mega, an R rating, and the article "the" before the title. The result followed the trend of movies trying to appear anti-systemic, but behind the anti-systemic attitude was a conference room full of pragmatic yuppies with freshers in hand. As a consequence, we are seeing the replacement of an era of accessible films trying to appear adult with an era of "inaccessible" films so infantile that an eight-year-old child would be embarrassed by them, but thirty-year-old men will squeal with delight at it.

I suspect there was a far more interesting and clever script behind this originally than what eventually made it into the movie. That plot about an inter-generation raised solely to preserve the human genome before it reaches a colonizable planet is excellent, and quite timely in this day and age when many young people similarly see their role in preserving humanity in the shadow of climate change. The problem is that the film doesn't develop the most essential information needed for the plot at all. If we're faced with a group of people raised in complete isolation from the rest of the world (so they don't suffer from mourning for earth), and all we see of their upbringing is the performance of abstract tasks, that's not enough to understand the experiences and patterns of behavior they continue to act upon. Without that, we are sadly left with a simple-minded genre tale about how some of us are naturally bred for the gallows, with representative democracy being the solution. Which, given the potential of the subject matter, is a pretty lame outcome. Especially when the physical cinematography and quieter narrative suggest the film had ambitions elsewhere.