Othello

A short, fat gentleman goes to the psychiatrist. The doctor refers him to the examining table and asks what his problem is. The gentleman tells him that he feels sad, that he feels like the weight of the world has fallen on him, that he has no appetite for anything. The psychiatrist advises him that a circus has come to town, featuring the eminent clown Pagliacci, who has been bringing everyone to their knees with laughter, and that he should go and see it. The man on the couch bursts into tears: "But Doctor," he says through his tears, "I am Pagliacci."_____ It would have been such an excellent documentary if Jerry Seinfield and that asshole Orny had seemed like good comedians. That is, compared to the stand-up acts of, say, Bill Maher or Dylan Moran (who wouldn't dream of looking for the lost punchline of a joke on a piece of paper during a performance (God!) and repeating a thousand times that he just can't remember (maybe Moran would instead jump to a completely different topic at that point, as if he'd been talking about it for the past half hour). Plus, both of them (especially stand-up careerist Orny) are such awful, arrogant whiners that I just expected them to start comparing the value of their work to liberation army soldiers, astronauts, or those finding the cure for cancer. As such, the documentary is otherwise absolutely excellent, and doesn't adulate or take any kind of stand.

The problem with The China Syndrome is mainly the utter cowardice of the screenwriters, because we could be discussing all sorts of issues within the framework of atomic paranoia, such as nuclear waste storage or why John's newborn baby has his neighbor's eyes, yet the script winds it all around a certifiable evil and a negligent corporation, which in expertly B-movie fashion attempts to bury any suspicions that their nuclear power plant (really, it's so cute compared to, say, Temelín) was built by amateur Boy Scout campers. So it's important not to go looking under the semi-scientific title for a shocking study like Threads was, but really just a good thriller with commendable asides about the level of the media.

Since I don't have a TV at home and miss out on gems like Renegade, Walker Texas Ranger, and Cobra 11, I completely forget what people are capable of sometimes. Seňor Badass, master of Zen, wise strongman with his heart in the right place, chess grandmaster, martial arts superman, amazing lover, and responsible and humble protector of the underdog for about 10% of the film, beats someone up and spends the remainder of the running time gaping, advising, informing, teaching children and adults, and honoring the law of the street. Black Dynamite is more serious than this. If the whole movie were like the final two-minute brawl, I'd easily give it four stars, but this family film, most likely funded by a community center, almost killed me. By the way, if they're all such wrestling masters, why the in-shot cuts during the fights?

Ebert's idiot plot concept (no plot development at all would occur if the characters weren't acting like idiots) perfected to virtual perfection in all the tales. However, the last tale ("The Drop of Water") unexpectedly turns out to be a genuinely creepy affair, even with a touch of directorial invention (a dead woman's house covered with cats and dolls), which with the help of classic genre proprieties (lights going out, dripping water, a rocking chair, and one rather gruesome corpse) manages to evoke the most classic sense of dread, for which I'm grateful to Bava. Oh, and the self-depreciating last shot was also quite pleasing.

If I'm to nominally attack the means Fox uses to manipulate the viewer, I should be extraordinarily freaking careful not to use the same ones in a documentary devoted to it (especially background music, choice of guests, etc.). Of course, you can shrug me off by saying that, despite the name, a documentary need not be objective (which I'll accept), but even so, from the filmmaker's point of view, I would expect it to target a more intelligent viewer with more intelligent means.

After finishing watching Waste Land, I took the box with the chicken bones next to the computer, an empty bottle of Coke, and a plastic bag and threw it all in one bin, which I then took to the mixed waste in our backyard. This is clear evidence that the document had failed in its purpose. Otherwise, this piece impresses as much as it can with the quality of the means by which it was made, but otherwise it is extremely melodramatic, embarrassingly adoring of the main actor, and aimed at a new age bourgeois audience with the naive notion that modern art has value because it can change established practices. If I subscribed to this theory (i.e. the combination of a certain aesthetic with an attempt at social transformation), the atomic bomb in Hiroshima is the greatest work in the field of modern art.

The overacting Cusack, the post-production winds with utter social consciousness through a ridiculously dark Burton-esque Baltimore among half-dimensional characters, tediously rendered murders, and the twists and turns of a totally moronic script that gives the impression that every page was written by a different person with no knowledge of the rest of the story. Which is to say that every now and then, when you give the film some grace, an atmospherically pleasant scene materializes, only to get suddenly fucked up by some horrible 3D effect. Plus, the main protagonist somehow always gives the impression that Nicolas Cage wasn’t available (which sounds hard to believe, of course), and in general the more I write about this movie, the more it pisses me off.

A lovable comic book movie that isn't based on a comic book. Wondering why it's a comic book movie? No? Let me tell you. For example, aside from the utterly Bond-esque mega-overacting of the über-villain Guy Pearce, the setting of the scenes (when Mia Wasikowska is there, the sun and gentle breeze caresses her face, while conversely all the Bondurant ranch scenes are shrouded in grey or snow, stroking Hardy's boxer all over the places on his body where it hurts), and the overall explicitness, it's especially the framing, which almost eliminates informative shots, for example. The dialogue sequences, too, virtually nowhere stoop to a shot/countershot scheme, and for the conflict sequences, these are dominated by framing containing both the attacker and his victim in the same frame. The stylized characters and their perfect casting keeps the attention even of those who might not give a shit about the fantastic detail and period fidelity of each film location, the legendary sound, the tame script with which Cave ungracefully buries the otherwise perfect Proposition, and the spectacular direction in the action scenes. After that, you don't even mind the severely mismanaged finale, where no one really knows what to do and they don't quite figure out how to hide it.

The Bank Job is a film that attempts to trendily jack the viewer off with the grateful seventies, but forgets all about it after ten minutes. Instead, it's unafraid to air one narrative bridge of asses after another, and even establish eighty-four narrative levels (notably the one with the hideous non-actress as Statham's wingman) that it doesn't care about anyway, so it continues to engage with them very sporadically throughout. But it must suck to film if you have to keep explaining to Statham that in this scene he's just going to talk to the guy again and not be able to smash his face in with his fist. By the end, no one seemed to have the nerve to do it anymore, so at least they let him kick some pensioner and throw a brick at an ugly guy's face. A lot of what took me out of the concept of a "pure" genre homage was the naturalism popping up here and there, which somehow didn't fit, but what do you want when one of the storylines is about black revolutionaries. Anyway, now that I've got that out of the way, I might as well justify the four stars. Well... honestly... I didn’t go wanting for anything while watching the movie...

Given that I was expecting a formally conservative political thriller, this paranoid sicko raised creases in my face. A fantastically shot drama comparable in every way to Jacob's Ladder. But here it also hits hard, because what worked in the 50s might work today on a more metaphorical level, reflecting even more overtly American wounds than the conflict half of people have forgotten nowadays anyway. After all, every politician has a trigger chip and without necessarily needing to drill into his skull.