Othello

Somehow I can't get along with the Romanian New Wave. It bothers me that once again the film becomes a movie in the last act, when before it was just an exposition of the bleak relationships and conditions in contemporary Romania. And this is shot in a raw, civil method with very few clues, where the only thing that holds your interest is the promise of an ending where everything comes full circle. While this method has its perks, here capitalizing especially on the scenes of the horrific relationship between the protagonist and his wife, it makes each scene lack anything more than that first layer, where the two figurines pass on information that will be useful in the final reckoning (which, fortunately, doesn't come, which is quite nice). Moreover, it seems to me that contemporary Romanian cinema is floundering in the same "desperate, stupid people in a desperate, stupid country" morass over and over again and not really going anywhere. Which actually makes the film thematize itself in an arch way. Isn't that fun? Well, actually, not much.

Therapy Germany. Slavoj Žižek says that one of the main reasons for Rammstein's mass popularity is their übermensch stylization, strong gestures, firm step, combined with their constant undermining of these very elements. They allow us to fall back after a long time into a form of expression, which at any time before had quite problematic connotations in connection with the rise and stylization of Nazism, yet the passion to succumb to it is somehow a subconscious part of every human being. Rammstein have given people the opportunity to indulge in it again, but without those problematic connotations, although the band has never resisted any controversy; on the contrary, they have benefited from it throughout their existence. Thus, Rammstein concerts are perhaps the only ones nowadays that can exploit the monumental potential of the ten-thousand-capacity stadium arenas in which they perform, because the mass of fans is part of the whole concept. Concert footage thus mostly sensibly avoids shots of individual attendees, but captures them as a noisy amorphous mass, obediently repeating the gestures the band wants them to make. It works equally well with the arena space, which for a very long time defies any notion of its size, height, orientation, or whether the hall is closed or open. What emerges is a wondrous illusion of the Rammstein world, full of fire, blood, movement and dystopia, from which nothing is able to lead. Rammstein is not just a band – it is an entire artistic audiovisual concept that cannot be replaced and can never be fully seen. This combination of nazi-queer-trance-technophile-autocratic-macho-sado-mass-burlesque charade would be a shame to miss.

With Life, it wouldn't matter that it's actually just a more bombastic slasher, that the actors are playing themselves from other roles, that the alien entity wakes to life automatically with blueprints of the orbital station in its head, that the behavior of the hyper-trained astronauts is very "Welcome to Jackass" from the start, or perhaps that it's actually a collage of dozens of motifs from other films. Namely, perhaps all of them. The problem with Life is that it has no charisma. It has no space, time, or character. The space station is generic, uninteresting, spatially unutilized. A crew made up of dummies, where everyone has a clear role they never step out of. The alien creature may use its entire body as receptors, but it still has to have a bleh bleh alien head and dozens of other tedious micro-details that together are responsible for making the movie just not matter. Espinosa has adapted into a director who understands technology and form, yet he doesn't reach into the scripts and merely executes them, which grossly backfires here because the writing is really left-handed (an absolutely terrible conversation between Gyllenhaal, Bakar, and Ferguson about nothing, where after every sentence there's a five-second dramatic pause to reveal it in full nakedness). It's a shame, especially because old-school space horror movies that don't aspire to philosophize themselves to death are a like saffron, and here the true orbital fear of something unknown out there has already been set up. Those who are happy with the girl just being pretty probably can't complain, but I'd just prefer it if she was a little fun to talk to.

"On the 23rd, you'll have a double penetration with Mike. There will probably be some dialogue. On the 24th, a casting with Rocco. So I've scheduled your funeral for the 25th." Who cares about another "When I was a kid, my parents told me to 'study hard and eat funny porridge'" documentary when they can get a behind-the-scenes look at the current commercial porn business? Aside from a few gratuitous flashbacks to his childhood designed to make the Italian Stallion shed a manly tear, the documentary thankfully spends little time on the usual descriptive plague of how the protagonist became what he became. Instead, it uniquely charts the strange micro-world of porn agents, creators, actors, and studios, the creative processes, and the relationships between the actors. Rocco himself is no slouch (Yeeah, You are beautiful. Sexy, sexy, sexy.), this is doubly true of his court director Gabe, and a certain conceptual initiative fires off only in the last third with the vivacious dragoness Kelly Stafford, but from what I've had a chance to watch thus far, Rocco is on the outermost edge of the trend of combining narrative and documentary (a trend often attempted by Ulrich Seidl, by the way). With just a few tweaks, this could be a classic feature film, maybe even with fictional characters, and it would work just about the same. Quite deliberately, the camera does not function as an objective observer, but is purely subjective, ambient, often almost lyrical. Rocco is not so much trying to inform as to make you feel. Which, in the case of its subject, is a bold path worthy of commendation. This "documentary", for example, is more plot-driven than Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience, which, though narrative fiction, uses more documentary techniques.

Don't even try without activating Besson mode or your head will fly off. The rest of it is a loving B-movie with such a lack of self-reflection in any of its components that you'll choke on your fries more than once. How do you get rid of one of the characters the film no longer needs? Umm hmmm so maybe... got it, let's have an orbital station crash into a space prison! And yet this only happens when the viewer is already in complete zen because they've been in a long post-coital rip from arguably the worst digital chase ever, comparable to the rendering of the intros to 90s video games. That's just the way my B-action heart beats.

Whether you like it or not, a heart string press based on actual events is its own category, too, and within that category Lion doesn't deliver anything downright tasteless or silly. That's mostly due to the focus on the cheerless conditions in India, especially if you're a kid who's sick of permanent rape, and especially the almost documentary-like cinematography of this magically chaotic landscape. The camera also helps, which spends the first act skillfully scanning the surroundings, often from the position of the five-year-old protagonist, or following him almost neorealistically through the clutter of the city from afar. The actual searches and the visually depicted emotional bonding became a little yawn-inducing, but I think that's mostly due to the more challenging empathetic connection of a white, contented bastard from central Europe (me, that is) who has little in common with an Indian adopted orphan. I don't blame the stroking of the wall and the melancholy soaking in water at all, and if I did, every five minutes of Rooney Mara is a funfair for me.

A live broadcast from cinematic hell that isn't afraid to base its entire existence on a two-hour repetition of a single joke, but one that isn't even particularly good, let alone original. Considering the nodding heads of overseas bloggers excited about feminist overreach, I'm glad I don't have a vagina, or I'd go throw up immediately.

After Syriana, it was hard for me to imagine a better plated table than the one I'm once again invited to join with a smiling Robert Elswit and Stephen Gaghan, along with McConaughey smoking in the background, whose acting method of taking his shirt off during the film is a particularly drastic experience here. But it's this overload of egos that makes Gold a first-rate, dynamic, and entertaining spectacle, though unlike Traffic, Syriana, or, say, There Will Be Blood, it lacks any socio-economic relevance and fails to bridge the character of a slimy little man who, while not evil, is ultimately not all that interesting. The only thing that makes him a distinct character is McConaughey's method of "A Slimy Creep in Three Steps; chapter Teeth, Baldness, and Pimples". I must confess, I ended up missing Elswit's brilliant framing of even simple dialogue scenes, never settling for three cuts of talking busts, characters entering the frame from uncharacteristic close by, or the camera gradually revealing the structure of a scene with its movement. But to set it in a bigger whole than an actor's Oscar-hopeful ramblings in a story based on a true event, I would have fallen asleep better.

Go have fun, here's 175 million! And Guy Ritchie indeed had his fun. An audiovisual hedonist's paradise. Thirty-five years ago, Boorman was shitting out fabulous processed meals of Orff, double-bladed axes, and a mighty fistful of armor. Now it’s Ritchie shitting them out in his concept of post-modern fantasy (the costumes alone, or the way they talk), helped along by killer editing, unscrupulous and megalomaniacal CGI, complete resignation to the formal standards of the "great glorious epic", and presenting a coked-up ride where anything goes and, except for rare moments, there’s never any time to think about why what's happening is actually happening. It cleverly intersperses prologues to the individual scenes with scenes like ("Let’s take him to the Dark Land." "No way!" – "Welcome to the Dark Land."), for example, so we're not rocking the usual boat of relax-relax-relax-action, but constantly riding the Shikansen to the God of War finish. The soundtrack, the greatest ride since Mad Max, accompanies this perfectly, at times seizing the reins of the entire experience, and there won’t be a shortage of joggers breaking their necks when they pop it into their headphones. Add to that, here we have Arthur running around in sped-up shots from which the frames are cut, characters wearing an Aronofsky-esque first-person steadycam on their bodies, slowing down, stopping, the camera whirls around like its life depended on it, pans, macros, micros, Malá Fatra, Veľká Fatra, you name it. Too bad it doesn't earn its keep, because this is not a film you'll do much relaxing with. PS: Please nominate the protagonist's coming of age montage for the Nobel Prize for editing.

The biggest problem with The Teacher is actually that it exists at all. Not so much because of the Hřebejk/Jarchovský duo's already rather tired dwelling on criticism of normalization, but because of the fact that in an age where the problem is more likely to be a quivering teacher who knows that for every bullet he dodges, he’s approximately three minutes away from a bullet in an MMS from the parents, a theme about the tyranny of parents and children by an educator is somehow unnecessary. Hřebejk has a way with actors, settings, props, and the period stuffiness of normalization. He often uses medium close-ups and close-ups of the warring parties, building a good illusion of a small/big problem. The interior furnishings don't look like clean props worn from a warehouse onto the set, but rather build a good illusion of the prefab hell of trapped families. Unfortunately, every now and then one of the characters turns a page in the script and starts coughing up paper so vehemently that it easily wakes you from the context and starts trending Jarchovský invective, but the whole perverse variation on 12 Angry Men where, instead of a black boy, the men of character are arguing over whether 5.A will have a substitute instead of the old communist Drazdechová, I find it telling of the coldness of the pre-revolutionary society whose cross we still bear. And I find the payoff of the anonymous signing line after you've abstained from the whole decision-making process quite apt and amusing.