Othello

Probably the greatest movie I've ever seen. Of course, it raises the question of whether greatness should be the direction a film should generally go in. But if we measure it in the context of Jackson's work, one can't help feeling that he must have reached that zenith for the very reason that he was able to bounce back artistically in yet another direction, which is currently represented by the conversion of early war footage to full-HD color, which, in retrospect, suggests that Jackson, more than anything else, was always a technophile who was lucky enough to have his wife Fran Walsh at his back, who as co-writer managed to colonize his spectacular ideas into a coherent shape. There's an awful lot of that in King Kong, and all of it in overwhelming quantity. If my chin was already dropping at the, for some, unnecessarily long New York exposition, taking place in crowded streets crammed with period detail, by the end I had a disposable jaw not worth going back for. But why do those CGI scenes work for me in Jackson's untenable tsunami of digital gimmicks, even though I usually dislike them in other directors? Presumably it's because, unlike standard CGI work in which the actors are clearly separated from the computer-generated action, here the live characters are directly part of those trick sequences, making the viewer feel more invested in them, plus they act as a size scale. This does set the filmmakers on a harrowing journey that can never be completely won in terms of credibility (or even completely derailed in places, see the terrifying escape from the dinosaurs through the gorge), but when they do succeed, they have a far better chance of succeeding not only in terms of the action, but on an emotional level as well, working with the relationship between the eight-foot digital ape and the famed Naomi Watts. And incredibly, indeed, the film succeeds in this endeavor as well. Unintentionally amusing, then, are the scenes through which the filmmakers try to explain, with seeming patience, that they can make the audience relate to many of the supporting characters as well, so that we have enough clues during those three hours that this is not an animated film. The scenes involving the young sailor and his mentor or the chef and his Asian friend feel out of context, and when they're not naively funny they border on irritating pathos. Besides, they pretty much lead to nothing. That general naivety of the film is otherwise related to the overall concept, i.e. the creation of an actual giant blockbuster, completely devoid of postmodern thinking. In some ways, it's a miracle that this happened at all, let alone that it worked. PS: Someday I hope to live to see the lawsuit between Ondřej Soukup vs. James Newton Howard over the original ownership of the central musical motif, which is totally swiped from Accumulator 1, don't tell me I won't.

Promo reel for Jackson's newly formed CGI factory WETA Digital. Unfortunately, almost everything is subservient to this, and the whole film, in its incoherence, feels like a good-natured drunk who's been allowed to talk for too long. Not helped by an obviously bored Michael J. Fox. But Jackson's directorial hyperactivity is otherwise still impressive (that camera just won't stand still! It just won't!), and Combs' creature feature with a tragicomic Mansonian backstory written all over it is one of the more memorable ones. Anyway, from today's perspective, The Frightenersis above all yet another reminder of the how digital special effects rapidly deteriorate over time. Whereas with Dead Alive you still end up thinking "Wow, how did they do that?", here you often just smile indulgently at the limits of computer graphics back then. On the other hand, if it weren't for this movie, LOTR wouldn't look the way it did, so some recognition is still in order.

This kind of work with the image in a drama (constant driving that reveals necessary information gradually, alienating effects, point of view changes, the impossibility of relying on who actually owns the scene) is the kind of thing that Spielberg then started doing almost twenty years later (after all, he and Jackson did The Adventures of Tintin together). An enlightened handling of a tabloid subject that doesn't actually care about the murder, but rather tries to make us understand the seemingly exaggerated and naive bond between two friends at the prime of their lives, besieged by an ossified, rational, and limited world, is a thing that is still awfully rare today. A beautiful reminder of a certain time in life that I would normally describe as non-transferable, which ends with a bludgeoning with a brick.

An old fortune teller's magical talisman carves its way through the protagonist's mother's belly, where she has trapped her son so he won't run off with his immigrant love. Freud takes it on the ass in a big way at the end, and rightly so. For a story that was no doubt originally intended to be just a thread through an incredible compilation of death and mutilation, it really goes the distance. And I suspect Frank Walsh's writing hand behind it, adding a certain mischievous woman's touch to the scripts of this enthusiastic nutcase. Just as it was the first time as a young adolescent, and still is now, the greatest satisfaction for me is not the lawnmower dance, but the very final gasp after the protagonist is free of the reins of a basement full of corpses and the emotional blackmail of his rotting mother. I also kept falling under my seat laughing during the scene at the children's park.

A story told in half-whispers at night by sailors somewhere in the hold of the Obra Dinn. With each retelling, new elements are added and some fade away again. The resulting tale is all the more frightening for the fact that it is impossible to decipher which parts of it are based in reality, and therefore all aspects of it, however unbelievable, feel real in the end. The irrationality of existence. Audience pro tip: watch it somewhere in a half-empty summer cinema stoned out of your mind.

Proof of Life can be perfectly described by a scene from Black Books in which Bernard Black sells a vacationing couple the same book: "You, you want suspense, thriller. This does you both. It's this temp. She's 29 and she can't get a boyfriend. Oh my god." "Sounds great." "No way!" "And she's got 12 hours to stop a nuclear war with China." "Well, one copy each!" It's impossible to ignore that this is a direct assault on the "him & her in their 30s" audience, so we get kidnappings, guerrillas, green berets, helicopters, some explosions, and a super-professional ex-soldier, but there's also a sad Meg Ryan, a sense of belonging, an exotic setting, and forbidden love to go with it. In so doing, Hackford is actually returning to the themes of his universally failed 80s romances, which always worked with fateful and unlikely love in a male-dominated setting (the military base in An Officer and a Gentleman, the private eye in Against All Odds, American football in Everybody's All-American). The problem here, then, lies in the botched interplay between the romantic and thriller storylines, thanks in large part to the pathetic building of the relationship between Morse and Ryan, which, while the film tries to portray the heroine as a strong, indefatigable personality, makes us rightly suspect that she kind of doesn't care about the whole kidnapping thing. And then the forbidden love between her and Russell Crowe comes from three scenes – she gives him one casual pat on the back, then drinks from the same glass as him, and then wham bam thank you ma’am and it's all clear. Fortunately, thanks to the fact that nobody cared all that much about the romantic storyline in the end, the film spends most of its running time on the actual kidnapping and rescue attempt, which is just plain fun, ending with an honest-to-goodness shootout of a rebel village, a helicopter taking off, and a farewell to that dangerous Ecuadorian landscape as the credits roll.

I’m struggling a bit with a certain formal sterility, but I guess that kind of goes with the territory of hi-tech thrillers, and more than once I was snapped out of it by the fact that Elisabeth Moss often looks like Jeffrey Tambor wearing a wig. Still, I'm giving it full marks because I haven't seen such perfect drama in a genre film in a long time, allowing the film to graduate from intimate drama/horror to near-sci-fi actioner (a one-shot in which an invisible man beats up about ten people FTW) without retreating from the overarching theme of the seemingly irrational trauma of a victim of psychological abuse. Nor should Whannell's individual visual ideas be overlooked, such as the shot during the opening titles of a wave crashing from the ocean's perspective just before the waves break on the rocks. Or those sadistic camera glances into the void, depicting the protagonist's sense of the antagonist's omnipresence. It's really very clever. As an added bonus, I'd like to announce that I really wish more of the lead heroine roles were cast with these atypical, interesting, and adult types of actresses like Moss. Her character development works here in large part because she can believably play all the different roles she has here, and when she flips into the role of the hunter, that’s a satisfaction I sorely crave. Let the kids who bounce to movies from PornHub maybe shit themselves.

A movie based on a book written from true events that are still relevant today. Filmed by a director who has just returned from overseas, hat in hand, still covered in tar and feathers. The cards couldn't be dealt any worse. I remain mystified by the need to follow big stories where we know from the start that the hero is going to get away with it, we just get to watch him get brutalized for thirteen months, all spiced up by the fact that the wounds here are still too fresh for any revision or retreat from the simple strong story of the hero who endures. What was most interesting, then, were the passages with the ex-soldier delivering a ransom note in the desert outside Aleppo in the morning, meeting the family of the missing man in Copenhagen for lunch, and movingly breaking down at a funeral in New Hampshire that evening. The rest may be reality, but cinematically it’s run of the mill. Life sucks. Plus, I spent half the movie expecting Scott Adkins to somehow kick everybody thing and run away, only to find out that Adkins wasn't even in it. Sadness.

A fairly literal Nietzschean thesis about staring into the abyss which has the ability to become the story it’s telling. But maybe I'm wrong and you'll say Candyman five times in the mirror after you finish watching it. This film falls woefully into the category of a late 80's slasher, and it has only itself to blame in the moments where it can’t leave off of simply alternating classic jump scares, however much the brutality pushes the film slightly beyond the usual slasher comfort zone. And yet it deserves a much higher status, as it is nothing less than a general description of a myth, its genesis, its universality, our ability to project ourselves into it and, most importantly, its elusiveness due to the untrustworthiness of all its sources. The myth here is something unpleasantly abstract, but that makes it even more unpleasant, while the pain and death are quite tangible. And Candyman is a particularly well-turned myth, because while, like any other, he owes his existence to the people who believe in him, he sweeps away those who mock him by dusting off his reputation again for a few long years. Try to avoid that bulletproof clause. ____ Anyway, if on the night you see Candyman you are awakened by a sound like a knock on the door, you live alone in a small apartment in the middle of the city, you get up to go to the toilet, which a greedy architect designed with your back exactly to the mirror, to which you have to turn around, and when you've done all that, you return to the room where you had automatically hung your coat over the back of a high chair... well, you might as well get ready to meet dawn in person. Or at least that’s what my friend told me...

An ethnographic film exhibition about the Carpathian Hutsuls that takes your breath away with its wild formal techniques and often confuses you with its perspective in what the scene actually wants to tell us and from what position we’re actually observing it. But in this way, Parajanov purposefully achieves a portrayal of these Carpathian highlanders as a full-blooded, savage people battered by an unforgiving climate, for whom the constant presence of hardship and death often forces them into a malicious fatalism. It is interesting how the lives of these remote peoples some one hundred and fifty years ago actually bore a realistic resemblance to the settings of classic Howardian fantasy stories. The tragic tale of Ivan's madness contains events beyond the reach of man that affect his life and the weight of everyday life to a degree where mere existence is a dramatic adventure. We are promised the arrival of distant pilgrims or an encounter with a real magician. How universal all the stories actually are in their foundations is demonstrated by the moment when, after Ivan's second wife fails to conceive, he begins to practice witchcraft. In our country today, we call them Aesopians.