Othello

FOD with simultaneous dubbing, ergo I have no idea what the film is, but A. Tesař delicately delivering the line "I like gay dicks" will stay with me forever. I was disappointed that the role of the school principal was not ultimately played by Donald Pleasance.

The dense Lovecraftian atmosphere of a backwater coastal village with crazed murderous inhabitants grabs you right from the start. The rest is then kept on the move by Stan Winston's terrific work, properly horrific set design (the ending with the projectors), and decent cinematography. It's just a shame that the dialogue fell victim to the film's radical change in genre (it was originally intended to be a horror comedy) following a change of sponsor.

I was looking forward to watching BoxOfficeMojo halfway through the film, whether this forlorn, static bore cost two hundred million bucks. And it did! Because if there's anything that downright screamed at me from this movie, it's the filmmakers' panic. And so it was probably from the fact that somewhere in the process they're horribly out of money and they're unable to figure out and patch up where. I don't see any other reason for why the movie looks like it cost a million and fifty. Like the similarly overpriced last entry in the F&F franchise, it alternates three types of shots: static mid-shots and medium close-ups with aggressive drone flyovers. Which reveals an unfortunate attempt to successfully divide the scene and the three elements that are supposed to sell it, namely famous actors and expensive locations. However, the filmmakers lack any sensibilities for this. On the one hand, there's a harrowing five-minute-or-so scene with Kevin Hart painfully searching for a joke the entire time and unhappily cutting between three static shots so pointlessly that I got the impression the actors involved weren't actually in the same room at the time. On the other hand, a telephoto drone circles furiously during a scene of Johnson and Kirby drinking beer on the shore. I was absolutely furious at the work of the production designer, who must have had it all famously up their ass, because if a location headline in a movie announces "secret tech headquarters of terrorist group in former factory" I expect anything but the interior of a movie studio, with four tents set up on the sides and white lamps running down the middle. The logical guess that it only took half a day to build the set again goes pretty much against the solid fact of a two-hundred-million-dollar budget. I'll skip over the pastel image, the completely CGI action scenes, the fact that Vanessa Kirby twists her face like a pike most of the time, dozens of other failures, and stop at the last one – namely the characters. Because if there was anything I was eminently uncomfortable with, it was watching two elite assassins who don't go far for a shot or a bullet cursing each other in accessibility for the whole family, feigning any mutual animosity by quirking their eyebrows and constantly varying the fact that someone has a small penis, someone has a big penis, and it usually comes with the fact that the one with the big penis has big testicles and the one with the small testicles has a small penis. Combined with dialogue like "You know, when we get there, you can't kill anybody, Hobbs." "Yes, Shaw, because we have to use their retinas to pick the lock." "That's right, Hobbs." we might as well admit that any affinity for this masterpiece is essentially an act of resignation to the action movie genre. "Oh no, it's self-aware and clever when it quotes Nietzsche!" Shut up.

Mandragora: Freelancer Edition (it’s not even short a rich music-loving sadist or drugging a client to clean out his apartment). I appreciate raw naturalism until the moment it turns into exploitation, and the vehemence to show the utter bottom by giving the tubercular protagonist nothing to do but drink from a puddle and sleep with his head on the curb in the middle of the street is getting dangerously close. If I can appreciate the film for not taking note of the salon straight liberals of Pride with its scenes, and admit that one scene emotionally wrecked me with its sudden tenderness (the doctor), then I can't overlook when the film, despite its point of inexorability, tries to have some development and is thus forced to drive the protagonist to the brink of mild mental retardation.

The cinematic equivalent of a cashless marketplace, which is most suited to people who have a 'Live, Laugh, Love' sign on their living room wall and the impression that they're living the dream because they can walk around barefoot in their open office. At the end of the film, I threw a molotov at the screen. Kill yourself.

United 93 is about as close to the term "objective reconstruction" as you can get with a movie. Which, given the subject matter, says a lot about the creative abilities of superman Greengrass. I'm in a similar mental state to a passenger waiting to die in a falling plane, and I'm personally in a similar state of mind when any landing of even the smoothest flight occurs, so I was able to empathize quite a bit.

The replacement of the tired old man Roger Moore, who needed a stuntman to stand in for him even while drinking champagne, with the amped up aggressor Timothy Dalton took me completely out of my comfort zone. In some ways it really is a throwback to the Connery-esque concept of a butcher dog who pulls women to him by the upper arm, acts like a cold-blooded psychopath in most situations, and the fact that girls are so prone to fall for his charisma is mainly because they're completely stupid. In addition, Dalton still oozes that 80's-style quickness, impatience, impulsiveness, and aggressiveness, which, while making him seem menacing and erratic in action and dramatic scenes, doesn't suit his attempts at gentlemanliness, romance, or witty glossing at all. As Bond overall, though, Living Daylights is a well-conceived adventure with tons of substance. Here we find ourselves in Gibraltar, England, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Morocco, and Afghanistan, despite the fact that this Bond so far has the fewest number of countries in which it was been filmed, with perhaps the exception of Dr. No. I'm quite looking forward to the second and final Bond film with Dalton, but I'm also glad he's going to fuck off after this one, because this take on the protagonist won't carry the entire multi-part series. There were plenty of heroes like that back then.

The reverent obituary of a walking Italian national stereotype that suffers from a complete lack of dramatic arc and the director's attempt to make a super-thriller out of every little hiccup that just goes with life (illness, divorce, etc). Plus, the presence of the all-important number-two Bono means that no work can ever climb above average, so I'm just giving my high C's in the alphabetical rating.

I can still remember as a kid hypnotizing alligators through glass in the zoo, waiting for dozens of long minutes to see if the lazy bastards, for whom I'd been taught a lot of movie respect, were capable of any movement at all. They weren't, not even when tropical toads set up a party tent on their backs, a hummingbird landed here and there, a snake slithered underneath, well, just nothing, barren emptiness, apathy, disinterest, eat me. Since then, I've viewed any film that tries to convince me that this unremarkable animal actually moves, or more to the point, might signal danger to someone, with considerable suspicion. I like Aja and his band of allied make-up artists. I like him even in his films, which I don't find very good, because he's one of the most adept at evoking a sense of imminent danger, and the setting, with the water level rising in a musty basement, several hungry lizards circling, and a fierce hurricane raging overhead, is just right for him. However, we're still talking about an hour and a half on the surface of a single house, where it was often necessary to stretch and tack on scenes to get the film over an hour, when it's precisely because of this running time that we're forced to focus increasingly on the crystal clear glacier water from the mountains that is flooding the Florida house, not to mention the alligators deliberately leaping through the glass windows. Aja was able to get the most out of it, but as far as subject matter goes, he's really whipping the shit out of this one.

That Jarmusch has taken the reins of zombie horror isn't really all that surprising. It's not the first time he's decided to paraphrase a pure genre film, see Dead Man, Only Lovers Left Alive, or Limits of Control. The problem is that the aforementioned films still managed to exist on their own, allowing their characters to coexist in the distinctive Dada universe where the stories in question took place. The Dead Don't Die is pure and simply a parody of the contemporary mainstream, its characters, practices, exuberant self-reflection, pop culture references, futile attempts at socio-cultural and ecological relevance, and repetition of centuries-old schemas. While the simple method of portraying all these aspects, albeit in a completely unspectacular manner and with actors who alternate dry declamations with unbearable overacting, achieves the desired results in places, it also fails to carry the whole film. The problem is that, unlike Jarmusch's previous films, DDD doesn't contain that distinctive universe where its story takes place and where its events would make some kind of sense. In this way, The Dead Don't Die is really just a pouting poke at the commercial cinematic present, but one that it helps co-create instead of mounting active resistance against it from the barricades of auteur independent film. For as the saying goes: if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. PS: anyway, clearly the best joke of the film is that the naked zombie character is played by the same actress who played the famous naked zombie in the original Night of the Living Dead from 1968. Too bad you can only pick up on that if you read the trivia.