Othello

One of the reasons the 80s film industry looked the way it did was undoubtedly because that's when men with war experience or just seduced by the military propaganda of the late 60s and early 70s began to take executive positions, opposed only by a minimal counterculture exhausted by the activist 70s and drug binges. Combined with the ubiquitous Reaganite politics of individualism, this created the perfect breeding ground for films of this type, see Taps, Stripes, Private Benjamin, Up the Academy, and The Lords of Discipline. An Officer and a Gentleman, then, is a perfect example of the kind of film that the baby boomer generation grew up on. It's cynical, arrogant, misogynistic, and espouses the values of male friendship, discipline (overseen by tough but fair military authorities), and hard work. This, by the way, is also what makes this film amusing today, because in its ignorance it is unable to fundamentally rethink anything it stood for from the beginning, so it is virtually devoid of development and only works in individual episodes. These surprise you not only by how well they’re shot, but perhaps also by the surprising naturalism for this type of film. This actually makes the film quite adept at disguising what a terrible piece of crap it is, right up until the end, when it thankfully reveals its true colors in a finale with all the pomp and circumstance and even applause. Either way, Sergeant Foley's waterfalls of insulting drill speeches convince me once again that I should start collecting the film's parade ground scenes.

If you don't live to see the cinematic immortalization of your professional activities, you may end up an unlikely incel hero against whom the whole world conspires, or an incompetent journalistic whore who gets to her sources through the bedroom and realizes only too late what a bitch she was. It plays into Eastwood's hands that he's one of the truly last representatives of pure Republican thought in high Hollywood, so he makes Richard Jewell look refreshingly bizarre. In fact, he uses the same methods of building sympathy as any liberal biopic, but applies them to a character of the type who waits until 10:01 pm to call the cops that there are two people smoking down the street outside the pub. By looking at the protagonist through the veil of his own sympathies and ignoring his more than one problematic trait, he makes Jewell a funny harmless cartoon character, revolving in the twists and turns of a classic movie monument, and it's fun to see how it doesn’t work for the old man anymore.

One of the defining characteristics of an action movie, and why we enjoy it in the first place, is the willy-nilly ruthlessness, crudeness, and ignorance of its characters. You don't do a car chase without a third party being threatened in the process, you don't do a shootout in the streets without bullets flying past the ears of innocent civilians. The essential strength of Bad Boys II was the exploitation of this feature. Combined with the breathtaking action, the stupid, cheesy, but always spiced-up dialogue, and the emphasis on the rich and down-to-earth spirit of Miami, it was the definition of guilty pleasure. Bad Boys For Life refuses to build on this approach, fearing that it would be too problematic today. And with that, the franchise ceased to exist. All that's been created is another digitally re-colored B-movie with 60 fps action scenes that make it barely watchable. Smith and Lawrence, moving in different circles over the past 18 years, no longer have any spark between them; Miami, shot here mostly at night, is not one of the leads as it was before (those studio interiors and exteriors look awfully familiar); and if its interchangeability wasn't enough, AGAIN the film can't do without the protagonists now having to be part of a whole team. As an illustration of how the landscape for action movies has changed in twenty years, this is perfect. I reject this vegan Bad Boys in which every scene is a compromise of everything with everything.

I resent the general unwillingness to adapt and enjoy these purely physical genre films, especially when there's so much effort, skill, and a challenging but successful creative vision behind them. Underwater has ambitiously thrown a huge number of obstacles in its path – much of the film takes place in complete darkness, in a confined space, with disoriented characters wearing identical spacesuits. And yet it manages to maintain clarity in even the most challenging conditions without helping itself to any disruption of the original setup. It manages to do this in particular thanks to the shape of those diving suits, which since they have to withstand incredible pressure, look like something out of Warhammer, so that the characters who are otherwise piled on top of each other in these suits are actually farther apart and thus easily distinguishable. Navigating the positioning of the characters around the set, how they communicate, and what they are looking at, is also helped along by the sharp spot lights next to their helmets. And because of these kinds of different solutions to the challenges the film has set in its path, I enjoyed watching it immensely. Even if, from a technical point of view, I could have been grinning cynically the whole time (the highlight, of course, is when you can monitor your surroundings with 3D modelling in half a minute with one program and then, with a swipe of your finger, overload the nuclear core that the whole station runs on). Small bonuses, then, for the fact that the film is set in what is, for me, the most terrifying place on planet Earth and for the fact that Kristen Stewart’s character definitively tops the list of the most compelling movie characters since the invention of stone. I rank William Eubank alongside Christopher Smith, Christophe Gans, and Jaume Collet-Serra as one of my favorite genre directors.

While contemporary French comedies work with plots about how the old French find it difficult to assimilate into contemporary society, and they make films in the Czech Republic about the problems of being stuck in relationships, in Germany, judging from recent comedies, the biggest quagmire there seems to be the secure forty-something who is oblivious to life because of his constant work. But while the comedy of professional workaholics, the Japanese, usually involve at least one hilarious rape, seashells for nipples, and a gallon of blood on an octopus, in Germania they cope with the kanban by going for a summer ride on motorbikes and that's it. 25 km/h doesn't even try to make a joke, it's just a collection of heartwarming situations that, thanks to the background music, are always safely recognizable by how reminiscent they are of commercials for fruity summer beers. As entertainment, you can at least count the cameos of actors like Alexandra Maria Lara, Sandra Hüller, Jella Haase, Mateusz Kościukiewicz, and Franka Potente throughout the film, but I was probably most impressed by the unintentional portrayal of the German countryside as a kind of exuberant post-apocalyptic landscape, where you hardly meet anyone on the roads and where small towns are left behind by the wives and relatives of those who are making big bucks in multinational corporations somewhere far away in Asia. But the overall message of the film "try everything and continue to be nothing" is universally repugnant to me.

"Just look around. This guy literally lives on the Clue board." The dead guy is a wealthy author of successful mystery novels, one of the suspects is so old that no one knows how old she actually is, another one throws up whenever she lies. The rest are a bunch of poor, rich parasites, with no one seemingly having a motive for murder, so translated, everyone. And it's all investigated by a famous detective on the verge of incompetence, whose investigative methods lack perhaps only the method of strenuous squats. Once every five years, I'm regularly delighted to discover that the author of the perfect Looper and especially my beloved Brick is still alive and kickin', without being pigeonholed by Hollywood conventions, despite the fact that he probably had to be kept in chains by studio reps while filming the tired spinoff The Last Jedi. While it's a shame that his typical camera and editing gimmicks are lacking here, and the heroine is basically just the kind of innocent walking pair of eyes you wouldn't otherwise notice at a party of people like Craig, Curtis, Shannon, or Collette, let us be satisfied with the insanely unhinged script with Inspector Trachta at the helm. I'd rank Christopher Plummer's office here, alongside the shag-sub from The Spy Who Loved Me, as one of the coziest spaces I've seen in a film.

The old white French can, like few people, actually materialize their melancholy for the old days into a space that is typically a smoky café with a window in which to spend all day and observe your surroundings. From there they watched the revolutions, the transformations of society and the elites, from there they created their illusory safe space where they could sit in a corner for days and pretend to create or think about something big and groundbreaking. Then one day they suddenly had to get up and go outside for every cigarette, then they discovered that the café had actually become a wellness bistro with Wifi, and in the end it dawned on them that they were actually in their sixties and had no place to live out their days in all the social hubbub. La Belle Époque initially pretends to be about the extent to which we are able to accept illusion as reality just to have a chance to go back to the days of our youth, which is essentially a comment on why we love to hide so much in films from the 60s and 70s. In the end, however, following the trend of contemporary French comedy, the only way out is to adapt to the present, as depicted here by the protagonist who opens an Apple computer in the subway or plays ping-pong with one of the local corporate rats in the open space of his son's production company. Fortunately, the film doesn't devolve into one-sided condescending preaching, because there are multiple points of view in the film, and there has to be some sort of general compromise in order to reach a happy ending. Which is thankfully accomplished here without any character having to completely deny themselves.

A terribly basic film about the insurmountability of trauma and the voluntary exchange of life for existence against the backdrop of a frozen seaside town where the winter is so unkind that you don't meet anyone on the street and everyone lives their lives in the bedrooms, living rooms, and basements of their houses as best they can. The civility, the perfectly written and acted characters, the excellent and cohesive script where everything fits together so beautifully, all make the film a masterpiece. However, the editing is at times paced differently than I would have liked, and the crucial flashback scene intercut with Affleck squirming in the lawyer's chair strikes me as a terrible formalist misstep.

The degeneration of contemporary pop culture, which shows us stories of how a humble peasant came upon a great truth and then cleverly defeated it on his own terms, we can feel that They Live is actually a typical victim of 80s primitivism, where the truth is ideally reached with a fist, an elbow, or straight up with a shotgun. At least Carpenter does not mask in any way that the solution to the problem was basically reached by a muscular teenager who doesn't read Nietzsche in the evening, but rather Hustler and Guns & Ammo. The means by which he then seeks satisfaction simply correspond to this. And besides, Carpenter was very good at macho shoot-’em-ups and beat-’em-ups in the eighties, so it's a joy to watch.

If you can tune in to images like a naked man with elephantiasis gingerly padding across a damp, overgrown meadow under an overcast sky, you're in for some breathtaking visual manna at times. Despite the fact that underneath the skin of brooding heavy art there is actually a story about a little mermaid, where the change of the black-clad protagonist is represented by her association with white mist or snow. I notice that the official text of the distributor doesn't mess around this time.