Othello

More of a pamphlet than a documentary, but I don't have that much of a problem with it. The one I do have is that women's achievements and struggles for equality are only weighed here purely as part of a system that is inherently based on segregation and oppression (the same problem that current mainstream LGBT+ movements have, i.e. seeking recognition within an unjust system rather than trying to change it). Feminism in this form thus comes to fruition again at the expense of another aspect of society. And then, in time, it is again overtaken by another phase. With this in mind, Woman is then a rather interesting insight into various women's issues across cultures, but as a step in the struggle for equality, it is merely representative of the trend of marketing slogans in a time of late capitalism built on the commodification of ideas.

A compilation of pagan music videos and illustrative animations in strategy video games for which I'm very glad they filmed it and managed to keep the scenic look without helping themselves to the usual downplaying. The collective experience in the cinema was first-rate, as the annoyed snorting of the cellphone-wielding dudes who went to see something like The Witcher took on the intensity of an asthma attack towards the end. It's got its problems – Dev Patel doesn't have the requisite charisma, the digital vixens' speeches shouldn't exceed the length of the phrase "Chaos reigns", and unfortunately for the film, we also have to work with the fact that it was made in the same world as Kurzel's Macbeth. Still, it would be a shame to nitpick and patronize it unnecessarily, if only because this type of experience is truly rare in contemporary cinema. And 15 freaking mega?! Believe me, it looks like it cost five times that.

Hmm, documentary... let's call it a presentation. 90% of the material is period photos, the rest is archive videos and new talking heads of old people. If most of the film hadn't been taken from excerpts of an interview with the protagonist that was only found during the making of the documentary, it would probably be an insufferable adoration of the dead over and over again. Guggenheim's terse, somewhat senile and condescending speech thankfully gives it some soul. Among other things, I actually enjoyed the fact that we're not watching a classic zero-to-hero documentary about "a woman who triumphs against all odds", but instead the story of how a wealthy daughter from a good family hobnobbed with insufferable bohemians in Paris for so long that when her inheritance landed, she simply opened a gallery to be part of them, often letting them discover her outside their previous sphere of influence. And they all kept fucking each other. Naturally.

The way it's Besson-esque in its raunchiness and a bit sleazy made me enjoy it more than the current animated first leagues who bust their asses to not accidentally get in someone's face too much and keep giving those motivations and good examples. Because here, like everywhere else, Besson is making a film for himself. But by the way it's honestly aimed at kids, it becomes a pretty unique uncanny object, with a 50-year-old Madonna kissing a 13-year-old Highmore who admires her ass getting into a car. This inappropriateness then actually makes it quite a unique viewing experience, only I'd rather have the curtains drawn while watching it.

An insanely instantaneous thing. Watchable, but a couple of hours after watching it I don't really know what to even mention, except perhaps that it features a pharmacist (who goes by the name of Kathy Bates, hee hee) who knows offhand that if someone eats a particular powder meant for dogs they'll lose feeling in their legs, but doesn't recognize the asthma attack happening right in front of her.

I haven't followed Andersson, so I'm probably missing the context. For me, these are fantastically produced images that speak to something I agree with. Whatever that may be.

Just imagining the party where this scenario was created makes my head spin. As I lay in bed last night, I was still recapping the plot for fun and happily laughed myself to sleep. It's worse to actually watch it, though, because the scenes in which the plot moves through the terrible dialogue of utterly paper characters in reality aren't actually insanely zealous or comically earnest in their pretense of sophistication, which would at least add to their entertainment value. Unfortunately, they're just boring figurines who don't know where left and right are, because they basically can't make any inroads into the plot of the film until the end anyway. In the first installment, the people worked perfectly as a touchstone because it was filmed from their point of view and in admiration of that elusive monumentality. Godzilla vs. Kong captures everything with the unerring eye of God. We watch the battles essentially as if we were playing them on a console. Here any earthly perspective is almost absent. The battles, however, are awesome, giant, with excellent choreography and more than one visual idea, which makes it different from its awful predecessor King of the Monsters, which was also completely moronic but desperately dull in what for all intents and purposes was the one task it had.

It's a lot better than I expected. It's more of a glamour movie than a Disney movie, the costumes are fantastic, Emma Stone is my kryptonite, and it's decently paced until a good two thirds in. But then there's everything else. Cruella doesn't have many reasons to justify not being an animated film. The actors act like a cartoon and the internal logic of the film is like a cartoon: everyone has infinite energy, they don't sleep, they do things overnight and unnoticed that normally take teams of people weeks and months to work on, the protagonists have a blank check for everything, there's no causality, and nothing happens in the world unless it's in a given scene. The environments are CGI for the most part anyway, and the camera flies around in them regardless of physical obstacles. And my eye truly ached whenever it beheld digital dogs. What puzzled me most, though, was why the film was practically about the fight against Cruella, who was supposed to be the main character. Here Emma Stone plays the usual slightly dodgy juvenile girl with a tragic past while Emma Thompson, her nemesis, is the one with all the makings of the classic Cruella. After all, the character has always been a model of the cynical establishment, while here, WTF, they make her a parlor anarchist standing in some kind of resistance to the system. So why does Disney entice us to see a movie with a classic baddie in the lead role when they leave nothing but the barest of the character and instead serve up the most hackneyed, annoying story with a family twist without a microscopic shred of moral ambivalence? Rhetorical question. I know, because Disney. Disney, who can buy the rights to any song, from the Rolling Stones to Nina Simone to the Stooges, and then pepper them one by one without taste or balance into a monstrous 100-200M original intended for a tween audience from the wealthy American suburbs. Well gee, I’ve gotten all worked up again.

A datadisc to a good video game. We already know the engine, we know the rules, we know the controls. New missions, new playable characters, new enemies and environments have been added. We don't need to hire a professional for the story, it's all about incorporating the new elements seamlessly. Totally fine. _____ I realized how long it's been since I've seen such cool work with framing, sound, camera movement, and point of view changes in newer genre films, and that's just for the purpose of the spectacle.

After a few annoying disappointments where a third of the plot of a normal feature film happens over six episodes of a series, I needed a reminder that a so-called quality TV series can, in places, defend their format. With this slight bitterness, I was already slightly more critical of Mindhunter, because on a second viewing the unnecessary personal overlaps stand out more, which though they have their importance to the story (the context of Holden and Tench's background, Holden's character transformation, but which appears practically out of nowhere in the last episode), but it is clear that they were mainly due to the show's inclusion of female, or rather queer, characters (the prefiguring of Dr. Carr; Ann Burgess is not a lesbian by the way). It's with Dr. Carr in particular that it rankles that the typecast and first-rate Anna Torv is essentially an alibi woman who serves the plot only to patronize or chastise the two protagonists upon their return from the field. But the rest of the series is otherwise a really first-rate and patient concept that doesn't try to hide its fascination with evil and the dark post-Manson 1970s zeitgeist, for which I have a particular fondness. The dialogue and performances of the killers it features are a total masterclass, and I keep coming back to the scenes with Edmund Kemper in particular with the passion of the main hero. To the point of making me a little nervous.