Othello

The basic problem with The Counselor is that Cormac McCarthy didn't write the movie script. And yet his writing is strongly recognizable underneath it all. Here, too, the characters are not really characters, but vehicles for the monologues that The Counselor follows and is confronted with. From that perspective, if the film can be compared to anything, it's Linklater's Waking Life. However, unlike Waking Life, here the key to deconstruction is still the main storyline, which even at the end has too many unknowns and is most likely counting on the viewer adding up the variables because of the way the characters have been sketched. Sure, The Counselor is unlikable – it is, after all, too ruthless and bleak and, more importantly, it translates that elusiveness of the Mexican business code in all its glory and, despite a certain tendency in Brad Pitt's character, realizes that there is no way to bring that code to a Western audience. If The Consultant were a book and someone capable of adapting it decided to do so, it would be just another No Country for Old Men.

Here it's normal that we all just fuck each other like this... A European art film drama in an almost pejorative sense, where I have two problems in particular: a) all the storylines seem to be hurtling towards a climax, but it either doesn't happen or is terribly bland because your attention is divided over two hours among more than ten characters in almost equal parts, b) stories about how ordinary, stupid people arrive at happiness through their passivity are imo unworthy of cinematic treatment.

As expected, Catching Fire doesn't particularly stand out from most of the high-budget ballast of the last year, mainly because of how terribly unambitiously the whole thing is directed, and its fundamental problem is that it's split into two different parts of completely different genres, whereas the switch doesn't surprise anyone because it's been expected all along. The flat revolutionary storyline is probably most amusing in how the oppressed working class achieves its greatest successes by being given a reality show and using its means of expression. Otherwise, though, top-notch casting, especially of the supporting roles: I either want to marry or kidnap Jena Malone. Despite all this, somehow, mysteriously, I think I want to know more about that world and I’m relatively interested to see how it develops.

Despite all my concerns, a heavily de-Hollywoodized Greengrass, where the central character is more or less definitively objectified from the second half onwards, as the points of view fragments between pirates and US marines. Captain Phillips isn't the kind of captain who would share photos of his kids with the crew or pats the helmsman on the back over coffee just because they ran into each other in the hallway. Likewise, the commander of the military operation doesn't shed a tear before giving the order to "execute" the poor Somali man whose anchovies have been fished out and has now turned to piracy, nor does he utter "kiss your ass goodbye" with the assistance of a low angle shot. And at the end, it's not a woman and child suddenly leaping out of a helicopter that await Hanks, but an android nurse who would say "You're safe now" in the same tone she would use to explain that she deliberately stepped on your guinea pig. Anyone sputtering at Greengrass's directorial fingering should realize that 80% of directors would shoot the second half of the film in 4 constantly intercutting shots, and they certainly wouldn't be looking for those 95 shooting angles in a 2 x 4 meter space. Which is about the only criticism I have, because having Greengrass shoot a significant portion of a film in an interior the size of eight banana boxes is like asking Debussy to compose a symphony on the ukulele.

I'll finish the joke for the movie: "...cunt is tight." I'm actually surprised that given how the film has obviously been cut like nine hundred times, and toward a completely different impression, it somewhat connects and makes sense. But any moral ambivalence is definitively abandoned this time around, and instead we're looking at more of an ode to the Democrats along the lines of "Yes we can.... No, you can!" It's painfully obvious that this was supposed to be a very different movie – tougher, more clear-eyed, and uncompromising. See the shootout between the police and the Black Panthers hinted at in the trailer – here the whole organization is reduced to a bunch of theorists from the Jericho cafe. Tarantino could mention the studio's brief use of the three submissive bumps on the skull of Lee Daniels' negro, but I was probably most entertained by the caricatures of the presidents exactly as Blue State sees them – the sympathetic idealist Kennedy, the totally incompetent overgrown child Nixon (I did a spit take at the screen during the first scene with Cusack), or the arrogant outlaw Reagan, who is always lit sharply from the right in the shots to evoke his most famous photo in front of the flag. The film was terribly hurt by downgrading its rating to make it a conscious, educational film and the moderate tone of the film that results, because if I'm going to drive hoards of teenage black men to the cinema, logically I don't want to piss them off. So it's racist.

What at first appeared to be a not particularly breezy, but thanks to the constant hinting that Rachel McAdams might show mammary glands, watchable romance in a genetically engineered Britain where there are hardly any minorities and one doesn't care about the ugly chick (whereas I would have assumed Curtis would have at some point been to England) degenerates into something unreal in the last third. I know that this sphere probably pays for cinema tickets, but the horrible final ode to the petty joys of the middle class of absolutely uninteresting people with whom I understand the viewer is supposed to identify somehow to embody an answer to the question of what a new mother’s discussion forum election spot would look like if Andrej Babiš were still trying to get publicity through it. And it would have been filmed by Renč.

The basic disconnect between public opinion and Rodriguez's work is that Rodriguez does not create tributes to (m)explotation or grindhouse, but to xplotations and grindhouse. Quite logically, he annoys the liberal snobs by referencing nothing but himself, the cheapness doesn't play well, and as significantly more ambitious as it is than its predecessor, it doesn't obscure the fact that someone has kicked ten mil off the budget compared to the last installment. Acknowledged shit is still shit, but I still consider it a cool obscurity of our times that this is able to make its way into global cinemas. And I think that's kind of cool.

In the second half of the movie, I was permanently in the situation that if Cthulhu suddenly appeared on the horizon and Detective Loki started repeating "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn", I'd think it actually made perfect sense. After all, Prisoners' greatest asset and at the same time its most malignant tumor is the same as with, for example, the Lost series. That 90-minute layering of questions and themes that culminates in a totally B-grade payoff cut from The Bone Collector or other late-90s Se7en exploitations is actually perfect trolling, where the viewer is kept glued to the screen with a classic Oscar-worthy morality drama about kidnapping, guilt, punishment, and justice, with only a very suspect-looking Gyllenhaal fumbling around with arm tattoos, a terrible haircut, and a Masonic ring. And all of this is sprinkled in with excellent direction, almost Elswit-esque godlike cinematography (Deakins could have bought that Oscar after this), and above-par acting, surprisingly from Hugh Jackman in particular. Villeneuve imho should have totally gone wild in the style of, say, Angel Heart; as it is, this is "merely" a technically brilliant genre film.

A complete reversal of the victim-victimizer relationship formula, its unwillingness to enrich that connection seems almost by design. It has an advantage in Norway, where the visuals sort of make themselves; after that, all you need is some Aryan hermaphrodite who can hold a crossbow, 3000 krone, and a composer who passionately believes he's doing the soundtrack to the next LoTR. The only deviation from the formula is the fact that the characters in the movie mostly act like idiots, but they're used to that from each other so they manage to respond actively to the immediate outcome of their idiocy.

You expect a boring mess with two action figures in the lead and suddenly you get a surprisingly mature thriller without exploding cars and the other instant thriller attractions. With two action figures in the lead. Admittedly, it doesn't quite know if it wants to be a poker movie (up to the first 20 minutes or so), a mafia movie (everything with Affleck), or a corruption crime drama against exotic backdrops, but on the other hand the timing of the dialogue, the pace of the individual scenes, the subtle camera magic, and the directorial confidence is something that isn't a complete given these days. The problem with the film is precisely its ceaselessness, where none of the things one would expect from a crime, thriller, or poker movie are actually present, and it's barely saved by the hideous redneck lumber of Arterton, a farmer’s daughter who finally makes me understand why the whole of Quantum of Solace cost about as much as a minor colony on Pluto – you could even touch her there. And tenderly.