Othello

It's filmed pretty clumsily (especially the camera and editing during the dance scenes), but it's a pleasure to watch the exuberant youth sitting broke outside with a cigarette in familiar solidarity. Plus, I enjoyed watching the Georgian boys pull the same sort of subtle stunts we tried with the girls when we were 16. The universality of love, indeed. Extra points for the great panicked reviews here from dudes who clearly haven't quite figured themselves out yet.

It's not a popular statement, but in my opinion the only thing that doesn't fit the whole concept from the original Alien series is the second installment, which resigns itself to one of the most important assets of the Alien universe, which is to set the whole story on the periphery of a future human society. While the first installment is set on a filthy mining ship, and the third installment is on a forgotten prison planet, and the fourth installment is on the outskirts of the galaxy on a decommissioned military ship where semi-legal experiments are being conducted, the second installment makes the mistake of introducing us to the society of that time in a more expansive way. In fact, with this franchise I've always been more intrigued with the second plan, which suggests that whatever the future of humanity turns out to be (the apparently unstoppable Weyland-Yutani hegemony of the first three movies is replaced with the presumably all-powerful United Systems Military in the fourth, which Weyland-Yutani mocks simply because it was bought by Walmart years ago), the result is always the same – any system trying to encompass such a monumental space for its activities will logically scatter its forces to such an extent that giant, forgotten, crumbling peripheries and their attached social classes will emerge. Visits to these bleak places have always been more interesting to me than the actual fight with the aliens, so I was pleased to see that the fourth installment rides in this style as well. _____ Alien: Resurrection is an interesting example of having a very American screenwriter (Joss Whedon) team up with a very European director (Jeunet), offering a very shaky combination from which no collaboration could emerge, only a winner. Thankfully, it was Jeunet, who was surprisingly given quite a lot of creative freedom (as opposed to Fox's gestapo-like oversight of the making of the third installment), which has made him pretty happy with the film and Whedon unable to stand it. This is despite the fact that his script has been largely kept intact, including the dialogue. But he said it was all acted differently than it should have been, with different intonation than he wanted, and the camera did different things than he imagined, not to mention the music. As an argument about the dominance of a director's distinctive visual sensibility over the overall cinematic vision, even in such an established brand, it says plenty. Unfortunately, Whedon's hand is still the weakest part of the entire film, which unfortunately drops the chain after Ripley actively inserts herself into the story and starts to macho and overact unbearably, though the idea that she actually represents that Alien fan here, who knows the previous installments and mocks how everyone around her is repeating the same mistakes, isn't entirely a bad one. _____ I'd like someone to explain to me why girls in the 90s had posters of DiCaprio, Harnett, and Damon plastered in their bedrooms instead of posters of Michael Wincott. Whenever this god appears in the shot, I wet my seat, no matter the gender.

"He may be big, but he's not an adult." Caro and Jenuet weren't lacking self-reflection. In The City of Lost Children, the pair basically just upgraded from one building in Delicatessen to an entire city. Otherwise, it works with it in practically the same way. The harbor is a wonderfully structured multi-level space, full of bridges, staircases, canals, docks, crossings, pipes, sewer hatches, etc., with some dangerous secret (like a crazy diver living underwater in the harbor's underbelly) or adventure lurking around every corner. In this, for example, it often brings to mind the notion of the old city as a playground familiar from Foglar's books or non-linear video games like BioShock. For 1995, the film contains breathtaking special effects, amazing nonsense ideas, and absolutely uncompromising sets and costumes. Except that vegans, animal activists, and radical opponents of pedophilia will vomit out of the window, to be sure.

Fifth screening at the cinema. Lessons learned: 1) Bones crunch way scarier in cinema sound. 2) The breaking of arms, legs, jaws, and other bodily appendages is great to share with an unsuspecting audience, leaning away from the screen and showing solidarity with the characters by exclaiming in pain. 3) The previously excellent dialogue increasingly comes across as paper thin. Especially due to the pacing of the film, in which everyone is always letting things get said all the way and many sentences are pure rhetorical monologues. 4) When one of the guards starts to vigorously beat Bradley with a baton in self-defense and it just doesn't do anything, I realized for the first time that I actually felt a little sorry for the guards here. 5) When Kamil Fila is sitting in front of you in the cinema, it's very hard not to paint a cross on the back of his head with a marker.

There's not an inch of that building the film doesn't explore. Voices carry through empty water pipes, guerrilla sewer commandos shimmy up the risers, the sound of knives sharpening carries through the air ducts, and if somebody’s humping on an old rickety bed, their tempo simply sets the rhythm of the whole building as the sound of screeching couples carries down the chimney shaft throughout the structure. Anyone who has ever lived in an old apartment building in Paris will immediately understand where the authors got the idea. I once stayed for a week in a cheap hotel, spending most of my time trying to figure out why my room smelled like rotting garbage. After two days, I discovered gaping pipes under the bed, coming out of the floor and leading to God knows where, with the smell pouring out of them. Every morning I plugged them with toilet paper and every evening I found them leaking again and the toilet paper in the trash. Room service for the master. Anyway, it's still strongly evident in Delicatessen that Jeunet and Caro are originally animators, because all the live actors who wander around this morbid dollhouse act like cartoon characters too, they look like it, and the film mostly frames them that way. If nothing else, the film can always serve as a catalogue of positions to put the camera in.

An anecdote about how a Chinese guy goes to the chief factor for milk stretched into a terribly tender bromance where lonely men bake cookies and carry flowers in a harsh and cold wilderness where death ultimately feels like a caress and satisfaction. And somehow, mysteriously, it still plays completely hetero.

After making King Kong, Peter Jackson wanted to continue to focus primarily on his video game studio Wingnut Interactive, but things turned out differently, and with virtually every film he's made since Kong, I think how awesome it would have been if his entry into the field of video game design had actually happened. Jackson already works with people purely as objects, bearing distinguishing features based on their specific environment. Where in The Hobbit I admired the attention given to each piece of clothing or the design of the interiors, and suffered at every attempt at a more human rendering of some of the characters, with They Shall Never Grow Old I raised my eyebrows at the effort to supplement silent film footage by dubbing the voices of those involved, painting blood onto bodies with splatter comic sensibilities, or exhibiting an inclination toward the concisely episodic. But when more space is given to a scene where someone falls into a latrine than to explaining the friction between Germans and Prussians in the enemy lines, one can't be surprised that the pretentious final anticatharsis doesn't quite work, because the whole thing feels like someone trying to tell you about their months-long trip around the world, but having only two stops to do so before getting of at their stop. Someone put that guy behind a computer already, let him use his proverbial perfectionism to create NPCs, sounds, and level design for a good PC game, and not try to burden us with painful reality. Which reminds me, judging from the promo reel, I was expecting the technology to revive old footage to be much more advanced than the result would suggest. Even Russian Technicolor films look better and more realistic than what we see here.

As someone who has been watching Smoke every week for years, I can't hide my excitement at the fresh remaster, which reveals not only various additional details in the already complicated mise-en-scene, but also new story plans. Smoke is nowadays almost exhausting to watch with how much is going on in each scene and on so many levels (and yet it's fucking hilarious the whole time). I hope after its well-deserved revamping that Smoke finally makes it out into the world, because applying this distinctive allegory with its unique genius loci to a foreign audience could be quite entertaining.

The Tiger King series is not the unrivalled revelation it is considered to be, it’s just a prime example of how a documentary should be made. Picking a rich subject, gaining the trust of everyone involved, and being able to become part of their space until they ultimately forget the ubiquity of the documentary crew. With any luck, the dramaturgy will then take care of itself. Which is what happened here. Far from being pure observation, however, there are classic narrative shortcuts, cross-cuts, and quite obviously blatant antipathy towards the protagonist's nemesis Carole Baskin, even though the creator of the documentary, Eric Goode, as a lifelong animal advocate, is fundamentally on her side. Scenes where the camera slowly follows her cold eyes as someone's voice over lists off the evidence for her having murdered her millionaire husband years ago, or slow-motion shots of her cuddling with her husband's shrimp after Joe Exotic was given what essentially amounts to a life sentence builds an indiscriminate monument of a universal enemy of taste and humanity in general. The circus around Joe Exotic itself then contributes wonderfully to the mythology of "the freest country in the world," the upturned face of the American Dream, and to the catalogue of haunted mystery ranches and their associated characters, where it can stand somewhere alongside Waco, Neverland, or Spahn Ranch, retroactively proving how accurately the underbelly of rural America was portrayed in the first season of True Detective. PS: Anyway, the eighth episode with the world's most embarrassing man as the host is a blast. PPS: As a hint for the beginning, the only more or less positive characters in the series are identified by the fact that they are missing more than half of their teeth or at least one limb (this doesn't include John Finlay, who doesn't have the mental capacity to become either a positive or negative character) PPPS: Here we meet clearly the worst assassin since our Citrón.

Lynne Ramsay was originally supposed to adapt the novel into a movie before the soft cuties Spielberg and Jackson took it away from her and made it into a bouncy castle that made the novel’s author herself want to puke. Esoteric vegan lemonade for parents who need to cope with the loss of their offspring by imagining that they're in a better place now, all of it seasoned with the greatest stereotypes and clichés in the character of Stanley Tucci. As goofy as the film is, I'm all the more annoyed at how it drowns out some masterful visual ideas (no, I don't mean the ones in the heavenly veil, but the dollhouse tour, for example) or entire sequences (the creaky floorboard in the pedophile's house). Jackson is slowly becoming the kind of director here who even adds leaves to the sidewalk digitally, and that's not a good way to go.