Othello

It's a bit of a paradox that this hyperkinetic street thriller actually feels anachronistic today, because it actually tells a story set against the backdrop of old New York City, the face of which has been heavily transformed over the past decade to suit the lifestyle of young yuppies, giving the whole glorious big-city street-life a pretty big beating. Even as a kind of reminiscence of those times, we can enjoy the depth and muted colours of a thirty-five-millimeter film in the hands of the most talented, Darius Khondji, who desaturated the colors of, for example, The City of Lost Children or Se7en. It's ironic that the Safdie bros meet exactly the demands of a predatory young directorial duo, but that's mainly because of how they ignore the formal developments within the last, say, fifteen years, after the widespread advent of digital.

It’s the excretion Olympics! Because absolutely everything possible gets excreted here. Pregnant brides excrete amniotic fluid, which is then licked up by dogs. They in turn excrete on the pavements of the city, which excretes black waste into the sea, on whose shores grow beautiful flowers, which in turn excrete worms and insects. The only thing that doesn’t get passed here is the possibility of finding horse's eye among the gastronomic specialties of a luxury restaurant. The mirrors are covered in vomit and the poop is beet red. Verhoeven off the leash here reminds me of a combination of beatnik non-conformists with seventies exploitation (the latter thanks in particular to a wild handheld camera), and it's terrible fun. Somehow they're all there (quite knowingly) for the rollercoaster ride. I'm intrigued that this cliché of the torn narcissistic artist hasn't changed much in the intervening years, because a lot of the guys I know from the Academy of Visual Arts are exactly these kinds of pricks surrounding themselves with overgrown kids, which they then realize themselves on.

If you're expecting erotica, you’ll come out well. The only thing preserved here is that naturalistic unattractiveness specific to the 70s and 80s and the mischievous yet cynical vivacity. And the familiar post-synchronization. What the protagonist engages in is more like LARP therapy, so it's quite fun in the end. The film's testimony to the practical impossibility of male/female cohabitation is probably an answer to the then freshly outed Albert Mol, the author of the source material, who even has a funny role here as an uptight would-be matchmaker. As well as being Verhoeven's feature debut, it's also the first major film by cinematographer Jan de Bont, whom Verhoeven later brought with him to Hollywood, where he subsequently enjoyed the kind of success from which he ultimately fell flat on his face once he tried directing.

A fairy tale about how silly Honza saves a passive princess, shot from the princess's point of view. The things that are perceived as negatives here are what I enjoyed most about Jupiter Ascending. First and foremost are the erratic plot dynamics, which, while defying any precepts about how to build, structure, and develop a story, nevertheless make the development of the entire adventure quite unpredictable. They say it lacks humor. How can anyone say that about a film where in one scene we are told that the protagonist hasn't been stung by a bee in her entire life because she’s royalty, which bees can always tell, and in the next scene we’re told that Channing Tatum is the result of a cross between a wolf and a human who had his synthetic angel wings taken away as punishment? Rather, what I see behind the critical and financial debacle of Jupiter Ascending (besides being sunk by Warner’s lack of promotion and ill-timed theatrical release) is a situation where all media space has been filled with established sci-fi franchises from Star Trek to Marvel to Star Wars, and the auteur's (sic cheesy and semi-retarded) vision of an original space opera could not compete in this space with the established brands, their mammoth marketing, and the full-tilt industry accompanying it.

Revolutions, while retaining most of the ills of the second installment, quite adeptly reduces their intensity. The digital sequences now primarily involve clashes of dirty metal, which is easier to animate and thus doesn't take away from the intensity of the Battle of Zion with mangled CGI. Plus the exoskeletons are really cool. The dialogue here is aware that we're about to close up shop, so it's finally going somewhere. Oh, and the Zion Respect Festival scenes are thankfully pretty strictly limited to war sequences in industrial dock settings. But why five stars? In Revolutions, The Matrix has finally managed to conclude a truly ultimate cyberpunk masterpiece (or rather, esocyberpunk masterpiece) and has stopped dodging the fact that the only options are that reality is nothing or that reality is everything. Codes are reformatted into atoms, minds create matter, all as a result of electrical connections between neural systems. It's all about electricity. The Matrix is actually a bit of an anti-humanist series, telling us how humanity's only goal is to destroy the machines, while the machines' main goal is to adapt to humanity, which makes them undergo more than just one problem, including fatal ones.

When the Wachowski duo put together the first Matrix, their main motivation was to bring the visual forms of Eastern anime and fighting movies into a feature-length whole and a different setting. Thus, they had to create a script that would be able to incorporate all the elements of these films in a meaningful way into a Western pop culture setting. In so doing, they allowed an alternative computer world to emerge, within which time and space can be bent in every possible way to create a new perception of familiar situations for the viewer. The first Matrix was released at exactly the right time. At the end of the static period of the "end of history", when the workings of the world's systems seemed unthinkable, the rigid organizations of the powerful unbreakable, and the only thing moving forward was computing, creating a brand new communications environment as an alternative to that unchanging real environment. Thus, the original film succeeded not only because of a well-written script, a well-delivered macrocosm, or a rewriting of genre conventions, but also because it came at the best possible time. Had it been made in 1994, when it was written, it's possible that it would have been nothing more than a Strange Days-type underground cult today. ________ This soaring introduction is necessary for understanding why The Matrix Reloaded looks the way it does, and why it also features a completely unbelievably cretinous parody of a script. It's no use obscuring the fact that after the monumental success of the original Matrix, the Wachowskis started to think quite highly of themselves. And no wonder. Listening to the mouth-to-mouth odes from all quarters about what visionaries, philosophers, and mouthpieces of your generation you are would influence even the most impenetrable solipsist. When this sense of self-aggrandizement meets unlimited creative resources, The Matrix Reloaded is the most glaring example of completely understandable... uh, huh huh.... causality. The Wachowskis continued to insist on creating a never-before-seen visual spectacle while at the same time creating a massive philosophical work that would suck in all schools of thought and religion like a sponge and place them in different contexts. From a screenwriting point of view, then, it's a total disaster. The film consists almost entirely of monologues, which mostly try very clumsily to pass as dialogue. Whereas these only serve to take the film from one visual episode to another. The result often seems to be that one character meets another character who has some information needed to move the plot along. First, however, there must be a virtually uninterrupted lecture on some aspect of the Matrix universe. After that, in two sentences, the character learns what must happen in order for the plot to move forward. With the monologue scenes themselves spanning the quality spectrum – from the amazing anti-climax of The Architect, where I devoured every word, to the mind-numbing wtf scenes with Persephone, maybe written by a child. ________ The problem with Zion: the Matrix shits completely in its own mouth with the Zion scenes, because its strength thus far has been in young disconnected malcontents hacking into an artificial, machine-controlled world to destroy it from within and free the people connected to it. Suddenly, though, we find ourselves in a situation where the "free people" are actually the old world who care about nothing less than guarding their threshing floors from their enemies, while everyone there lives in some industrial paraphrase of suburban houses, goes shopping, and still looks terribly bourgeois thanks to the fact that they're all sporting threads from Sanu Babu. I guess I get the design idea, where in the last gasp of humanity at the Earth's core, everyone is dressed in tribalism and Africanism, but there's nothing to be done, it looks really, really incredibly idiotic. About as idiotic as a normal Zion press conference ending with a rave between lava pools (sic!). Which, by the way, Trinity dressed up so nicely for only to have Neo bring her home again immediately after her arrival, where he did her missionary style, prematurely ejaculated, and cried while doing it. Anyway, at least the elaboration of the Morpheus myth, where this infallible mentor of the first installment pays in the second installment like Zion's answer to Jaroslav Dušek, where while everyone is counting guns before the invasion, he's gotten some myth about the Chosen One out of a crossword puzzle he keeps annoying everyone with, is quite amusing. ________ Last item: the spectacle. The Wachowskis were absolutely obsessed with the idea of coming up with something never before seen in the movies for the second installment. They not only had at their backs the shadow of the effects innovation of the second installment but they also couldn't ignore the rapid technical advancement that LOTR had overcome audiences with. At the same time, they had themselves fallen under the spell of the very rapidly advancing CGI possibilities, where what was utterly unthinkable three years ago was now just about render speed. In this blank-check special effects euphoria, where the only limit was not to do anything that had already been done, they created sequences that, while truly unparalleled in terms of choreography, imagination, and framing, showed how terribly fast and comically digital technology can get old. When you’re watching a film today (2021) where digital characters fight who seem graphically stuck in a 2010 video game, and the film isn't afraid to shoot them in full light and enormous slow motion (!), you almost wonder if a pre-production rip of the film has made its way to you. What’s more, the film otherwise suffers quite a bit from a certain general "sloppiness", with me spotting the film crew several times in all sorts of reflections (those glasses are a plague, sure), the digital characters occasionally blurring textures (the virtual Smith suffers quite a lot from this, his hair falling through the collar of his shirt at the back of his neck, that would be the first thing I'd yell at the Architect in the Q&A if I were Neo), and I was downright annoyed when the film's spotlight shone completely openly on the characters in two scenes.

The sharp zooms on actors and objects, the camera passing through walls, the macro shots on objects, and the flying lenses around static characters – sure, the trademarks are there. After all, by the time Bound was made, the script for The Matrix had already been turned over to Jon Silver, so this film was meant to serve as a testament to the Wachowskis' abilities. Beyond that, I was particularly taken with the claustrophobic framing of the shots and the Lynchian feel of the mafia's inner world of strange men in suits, moving from black cars to mysterious apartments, with the promise of extreme violence in tow. When people have sex here, they have a lot of it; when they cut, they cut terribly. And the camera zooms in and out around them. If the central duo hadn't overacted so crazily, I'd go all in. (Or rather, with Jennifer Tilly, I know that's just her acting method, but Gershon, with her constant theatrics, reminds me of someone from a 90s music video where she can't express herself with words, only with theatrical positions)

It's lures you in by pretending to be something it's not, since there's virtually no metal music going on here. Somehow we initially wade through some quality sludge that comes from the musical project Jucifer, who were originally the protagonists of an unfinished documentary from Marder with the same theme as this. Sound of Metal is mainly about the problem of a former drug addict who managed to reformat his addictive tendencies into the intense music that a hearing impairment has now taken from him, and thus his struggle not to fall back into his old vices. Sic halfway through it gets a bit bogged down in the classic clichés about someone who didn't want something at first but then tried it and after a while found that it was actually good, so even though the setting the film explores is portrayed believably (it's clear from the concert scenes that Marder is no stranger to alternative foreign filth, and in the therapeutic compound we're again surrounded by their real inhabitants) and it's well acted. I've been passively watching Riz Ahmed almost since his acting beginnings, and I'm delighted to see him finally getting roles that require more than just a freaky Arab, and especially how perfectly he can handle them.

These are the people I want to watch, these are the stories I'm interested in, this is the face of the USA I want to explore. A semi-documentary ode to one of the last avatars of the original American idea, where we meet (with two exceptions) a whole range of real old-school nomads (as that term has been discredited by the bourgeois trend of "digital nomads") whose integrity makes it virtually impossible for them to act badly because they're just being themselves and the film doesn't put them in situations they don't know. In general, there's a great sense of humility from Chloé Zhao in this film, because just from how natural everyone involved seems you can tell that she must have been moving among them for some time, very subtly, until they got used to her presence and the camera. Otherwise there’s almost no point in talking about McDormand, the actress is absolutely incredible and along with the likes of Helen Mirren or Jennifer Jason Leigh demonstrates the power of ageing proudly.

It’s pretty much a slam dunk by the halfway point since the central pensioner scam is a believably foul business, the plot unravels slowly and suspensefully, Peter Dinklage has a great accent and charisma, and Rosamund Pike successfully makes progress in her acting struggle not to come across as a living being. Plus, it has an interesting unspoken subplot at the start about there being a skeleton crew of women in executive positions across the system who look out each other and watch each other's backs in various types of semi-legal trouble. Once the cards are laid on the table, it knocks itself down a few times, stops making sense, and starts peppering us with one tendentious cliché after another. In bullet points (spoilers): 1) the film outright states several times that this will be a conflict of different ways of solving problems, i.e. the fear and brutal violence the mafia antagonist works with versus the cunning and outwitting of the system within it, which is the protagonist's domain. In the end, however, she achieves victory by electrifying the antagonist's security guard with tasers and then drugging him and leaving him dumped in the woods, thus achieving victory over him by his own means, in exact opposition to what she has convinced us of so far 2) Rosamund Pike's character here comes across as a clichéd Strong Woman (TM). To support her, the film thus puts her in situations where a dirty redneck in a red baseball cap threatens to rape her. I find this translation of the Twitter mindset into the medium of film extremely annoying 3) the film is shot in such a way that it could take place practically anywhere there are a few houses, as the camera doesn't take up any space at all and we mostly watch static focused faces in a narrow focus strip with a completely blurred background. Most of the semi-closeups and closeups of faces look like something out of a corporate annual report. 4) When the film does dare to go all in with everything and familiarize us with the space where the scene takes place, for some reason some places are completely nonsensically lit in purple or red, for example, and there's a turquoise light shining out of the windows of a normal apartment building that no one really shines at home. This isn't the first contemporary film where I've seen this, and I'd like someone to explain why they’re doing this to me.