Othello

Given the distaste with which Carpenter approached this film, I'm quite inclined to think that at some point he just stopped coming to the set, so the rest of the crew just shot close-ups of the child actors' faces in each location and then edited the result from there. Then if there's one thing the script completely resigned itself to, it's translating the 1950s subject matter into the 1990s and American realities (a California village becomes a zone where everyone falls into a deep sleep for six hours and it doesn't leak to the media, yeah right). The highlights are the performances by Mark Hamill and Christopher Reeve, which could knock you off your horse.

Kaufman here is very much reminiscent of 70s exploitation directors in the way he revels in unique visual ideas, but apparently no one ever taught him how to put them all together. Invasion shifts between several formal languages, but almost none of them have a narrative purpose. Half the shots are uncomfortably long because for no reason they forget to cut away in time. The lead actors then build separate humorous interludes in scenes that are actually supposed to be serious and dramatic instead. So if you can tap into that exploitation wave, you’ll enjoy a terribly entertaining idiocy, where one bit of silliness replaces another and you feel good. All other approaches lead to disappointment, unhappiness, and a slow death.

However it may be overly stagey and slow in places, and in some ways reminiscent of that scene in The Simpsons when a desperate Marge tries to find at least one film at Sundance that doesn't beat her over the head with overwrought depression, this is still one of the deepest and darkest treatments of dying I've seen. The ending turns into a beautiful catharsis in melancholy.

Admittedly, almost nothing that the film was made for (Chevy Chase's efforts to stretch himself into more serious roles, a semantic reinterpretation of the book's premise focusing on the existential and practical problems of invisibility, making money from the theatrical release) came to fruition, but thankfully that doesn't mean it's not completely devoid of fun. Plus, it contains the familiar Carpenter-esque bits that I enjoy picking out, like the casting of at least one actor who absolutely missed the calling (Gregory Paul Martin) or the alarming inability to work with female characters in any way whatsoever. I’m also including invisibility in my catalogue of nightmares because of the remark that it makes it possible to see through closed eyes.

Alexei German's son worthily follows his father's filmmaking methods, so the scenes are usually chaotic, many words are spoken into the wind, and many of the characters just walk and talk around the mise-en-scene without us knowing at first whether we need to be paying attention to them. This time, however, the form is much more stagy, with the characters mostly moving horizontally and the background acting mostly as a vague theatrical backdrop. But that background is in fact what the whole film is about, even if it pretends to present us with a coherent story. A group of people on the outskirts of society or interest watching the country being rebuilt before their eyes and losing their souls. While in Khrustalyov, My Car! by the older German the leitmotifs were the anonymous passing black cars of the KGB, here they are the ubiquitous Kyrgyz construction workers that no one understands.

Somehow I'm getting soft or something, but during the last scene on the beach I could barely see the screen through my eyes. Yet from the start I wanted to criticize the film for using that tired crutch to bring the viewer closer to irrational youthful passion, namely the cancer plot. In this case, however, it's not a heavy blanket trying to add weight to the film, but really the entire plot hinges on it and everything builds from it. Whether it's the seemingly pointless exhausting love for a wild young drug addict as a way to chase as much unlived life as possible into her final moments, the "worst parenting ever" mom and dad whose motivations and questionable decisions can be understood in the context of wanting to accommodate their dying daughter, or Moses' motivation for seeing Milla, which combines emotional attachment with access to prescription drugs. Besides, Rita Kalnejais is an experienced theatre director who is aware of the traps laid for a story about a dying minor, so she is incredibly careful not to have her characters fall into the usual suffering or fatalistic patterns, so they all usually behave virtually opposite to expectations. I don't think it was probably the original intent for the greatest resolution to be ultimately given to practically the most negative character, who abuses his position to keep his surroundings drugged with tranquilizers so that he himself can have peace. But I take it as evidence of when well-written characters start to kind of come to life on their own in a script, and then their story and outcome are not entirely under the control of the writer. Coming of age, coming to death.

Prince of Darkness was the first Carpenter film made under the banner of Alive Films, which he joined out of disgust with the terms of the big Hollywood studios. He made a deal with Alive that he would get 3 million for each film and complete creative control. This put him in virtually the same situation he found himself in when he made Halloween or The Fog. Even with those, he had the choice of either throwing himself into a more ambitious, big-money project with producers up his ass or raking in a few hundred grand and doing whatever he wanted. It was a sensible move for Alive Films, remembering how Halloween made nearly eighty grand for 320k, especially since Carpenter still showed no signs of creative decline (despite the convictions of the critics of the time, who incidentally totally buried him with The Thing). In Prince of Darkness it is easy to see the director's relaxation, the release from the pressure he hated so much. Unfortunately for the viewer, it contains many of the flaws that cost him so much effort to eliminate in The Thing, and you can sense from here the slight disillusionment that he wasn't going to waste time with the treatment as he did at his zenith back when no one appreciated him. Whereas in The Thing he spent months rewriting the script, selecting the cast, doing two weeks of rehearsals with the actors, which was unusual at the time, as well as reshoots and pick-ups, here it's pretty much plain to see that he's done away with those elements and gone back to the "as long as the camera’s rolling" method of his early days. The cast ends up being a horrible collection of patients in their eighties (the real horror occurs whenever the protagonist smiles under his moustache), most of the information is provided during a session in one room and anyone who isn't in that room is probably wandering around one of the two corridors somewhere, where his transformation into a servant of evil already awaits. On paper, however, Prince of Darkness rests on an exceptional, original, and thoroughly radical story, which is nothing less than the invocation of a Nega-God tying in secret societies, time travel, forgotten languages, meta-worlds, and cosmic anomalies. Which is awesome. So nobody’s going for a more capable remake?

I've avoided this for years because the English version is rather hard to find, I don't normally trust American remakes, and I've never gone corporate so I was worried I wouldn't get into it. Whatevs. The Office is mostly absolutely a meticulous study in awkwardness. There are places that are almost physically painful; more than once the show pushed me into downright agony. No laugh track, just excruciating pauses, disgusted looks, burnt-out office rats, and button-up shirts with short sleeves. And the entire time the individual jokes and character typology here are so terribly well-rehearsed that I completely feel sorry for the filmmakers, because they must have actually come into contact with someone like Michael Scott over an extended period of time. Plus, I was pleasantly surprised by the well-written and really nice, tender romance between the two main characters. _____ In the second episode of the second season, you won't even have a chance to roll your eyes at how prophetic it is nowadays. When after a meeting with management about the need to curb sexual harassment in the workplace, Michael walks out among his subordinates and sulkily begins his speech with "I just want you to know that, this is not my decision, but from here on out, we can no longer be friends", that's exactly where I saw a gimp like Jakub Horák or Dan Vávra instead.

The pinnacle of an 80s boy adventure with the mentality of an eight to ten year old, best summed up by the dialogue in which Jack Burton incredulously tries to convince his partners that he's not going back to the Chinatown underworld for a woman after all, but for his car. The rest of the film is a reinterpretation of an old-school video game dungeon in movie form. A barred window from a side alley leads to a dingy basement, from which you crawl through skylights into a forgotten warehouse. From there, the elevator only goes down, where there's a medieval torture chamber, centuries-old sewers, pimp cages, a giant temple, and all sorts of shafts of shafts, pipes, and secret passages in between. Anyone who has played the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks will be right at home in no time. Plus, Russell really rules here as a parody of the 80s macho, who, while he has the same kind of cocky mindset as other protagonists of that type, is nonetheless pretty incompetent throughout, taking himself out of the fight several times. I burst out laughing all the more during the scene where he takes out the main bad guy. Partly because of how ruthlessly quick the editing in this scene is. I see a lot of people here writing that they used to get a lot of mileage out of it when they were young and now they're ashamed of it or something. I screamed in horror when I noticed that I had given it a mere three stars here some years ago with some heated commentary like a jaded film critic. Corrected. Je suis Jack Burton.

The hot potato of Starman's long-circulating script, which needed to get on screens as quickly as possible after the success of E.T., landed in Carpenter's lap because he supposedly wanted to try something a little different with the characters and their relationships, but in retrospect even he admits that this was mainly due to the fact that he simply didn't have much to choose from after the disastrous reception of The Thing. In the end, Starman impresses the most with its original, sometimes quite epic special effects (the fall of the UFO into the forest is luxuriously grandiose, the subsequent formation of the alien into a human being is again rather disgustingly uncanny) and its appealing inclusion of various B-movie archetypes and situations. But I don't at all swallow the romance between the alien being, with grimaces resembling a bad trip trying to break through layers of Botox through which he utters phrases like "Define beautiful", "Define love", or "I gave you a baby." Ugh. The general poignancy of a childlike, guileless protagonist who unravels our life certainties with the kindness of simple questions, combined with an Oscar nomination (say whaaaaaaaaat?!), reminds us once again of the need to succumb to these little princes and their simple truths, because it's just easier than slowly and patiently unraveling and defining one's complicated and chaotic existence. Plus, thanks to this movie, another insufferable space smartass has fallen from the sky, prot, so the black spot for this one.