Othello

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.

[extended] The first one suits those who like distinctive characters and RPGs (by which I don’t mean rocket launchers), three is the nirvana of those who love epics, but two strikes a balance between them, and that's why I currently like it best of the trilogy (otherwise about on par with one, but I've seen that one a bajillion times). While the first is practically a standalone film and the third a megalomaniacal ending, the second is a sort of "intimate" awakening of the nations, where the stories of the individual characters and the whole development of the history of Middle-earth are fantastically intertwined. That's why these factors are constantly given far more consideration than in the previous installment. The Battle of Helm's Deep works far better than the Battle of Pelennor Fields because it's not so much based on Massive Armies as it is on heroic characters, helped by its setting – a ravine with a fortress and a huge wall with nowhere to retreat to at night and in the rain. Compared to the third "sure thing" installment, Jackson is still betting the farm on a bunch of ideas and experiments – try explaining to a special effects studio that you want the Ents to look like animatronic puppets, for example. Speaking of walking trees, the scene of the last march of the Ents is one of the highlights of the entire film trilogy, and it all just elaborates on Tolkien's line "...and so the Ents went out on their last march." What’s more, The Two Towers handles the two strongest stories of the trilogy for me, the one about Éowyn and the one about Merry and Pippin. The Scandinavian feel of the realm of the Rohirrim is just icing on the cake.

Let's put an uninteresting man in a coffin and watch how uninteresting he is. The main character's hideous defeatism at a point when he could at least try to break out those already cracked coffin boards, but he'd rather take revenge on whoever threw him in there by making his phone bill more expensive by making one international call after another. It also wasn’t until the second half of the film that someone finally explained to the director that fire takes oxygen, among other things, so we can't be surprised that for the first 30 minutes the protagonist lights his Zippo just to lie down. On the other hand, the ending left me feeling with a really bad taste in my mouth, and a film that takes place entirely in a coffin can be made little better.

94 minutes of narrative in shortcuts containing all of five shots that weren't worth framing. All this in the 90s underbelly of punk Edinburgh. I incredibly love the way Boyle shits on everything in this film (dead baby, a rather edgy fuck with Kelly Macdonald, et cetera et cetera)

Take Altman's The Player, mate it with Troma’s Terror Firmer, douse it with Peter Jackson, and voila!!!

A prime example of a botched adaptation, and I haven't even read the source material. The warring of the cinematic medium with the literary one here reminded me in part of the adaptations of Slaughterhouse 5 and Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, but even those didn't suffer from the relentless literalness, the inability to understand that what sounds possible in a book doesn't sound the same coming from the mouth of a movie character, and the general concepts of how a book is written and how a movie is made. Man, I haven't seen a movie in a long time that failed on so many levels at once. Then there's John Hurt, who just might shit himself...