Othello

In many ways a thematic precursor to Besson's La Femme Nikita, by which I mean in particular the adoption of complicated adult roles by completely unprepared young protagonists, which makes for some appealingly deranged, occasionally touching, and altogether unpredictable situations.

The writers of the original Dragon’s Den role-playing game have described a character with a conviction for chaotic evil as: "Chaotically evil characters are characters who do evil simply because they want to. They have no long-term goals or even plans, but often revel in chaos, destruction, battle, or the suffering of others. They tend to be very selfish and satisfy their desires without regard for anyone else. They make decisions based on emotions and moods and dislike being bound by any rules or laws; the only thing that can tame them is fear for themselves, for which they may temporarily submit to laws or a stronger creature though still craving freedom. Organizations or groups with beings of this persuasion only form around a strong leader and are held together only by fear of that leader, but usually the subordinates will betray the leader at the earliest opportunity and the organization will fall apart through infighting. Demons are a typical example. Another example is the serial killer, who satisfies his craving for murder, oblivious to the fact that it may one day cost him his life." Well, I think they wrote this only moments after seeing Bloody Friday, because few things better describe its main character.

The aptly portrayed downward spiral of old and young alkies that keeps delaying rock bottom by preferring for its characters to fail over and over again in their attempts to break free from the reins of alcoholism their own way, before it finally leads them to rehab. An uncharacteristically dark experience for where and when it was made. I ought to add that this cheerful song got me into the film.

According to the annotation, there were too many red flags fluttering in the air, but the authentically photographed damp Polish countryside (virtually identical to ours) and the integrity of the protagonist (as usual, the unflappable Ogrodnik), who is part rural yokel, part arrogant artist, and part loving human being thankfully pushes it far beyond the anticipated lameness.

A deftly grasped update of Russian fear, where the ubiquitous bogeymen are no longer men in hats hiding in cars, but pimply bald men in tracksuits. I am amused by the fact that the Stalinist period of the Soviet Union is such an incomprehensibly bizarre stage of history that everyone hides stories from it in comedies, unreliable narrators, or, as in this case, in a surreal red airship over your head.

The cup of patience has run over. In fact, I actually hesitate even to call this a film. I don't understand why no one else complains about how horribly the characters are keyed to those fake backgrounds, that no one minds that the framerate makes, say, the lab scene look like something out of Code Blue. I haven't seen something where everyone cares so much about everything in a long time. It has no beginning, no end, the actors aren't entertaining, the fictional worlds have no stakes of their own, and it's bathed in cliché. And the script's a real doozy, too. Sam Raimi is in a great position in Hollywood where whatever crap he makes, all he has to do is put a skeleton in it and a zoom shot to get people to cheer at how he references himself. I think The Last Children of Aporver would have been a better movie as a result.

[Final Cut] While it's great to see people staring in disbelief at some scenes from this movie again for the first time in the theater, as a native of the Redux version, the seat beneath me was cracking down the middle with the weight of my righteous anger. If Coppola and Co. wanted to work on the fluidity of the plot, they could have cut out the French, whose scene may have some amazing architecture and work with the transformation of the intense evening light, and yet is just a bunch of terrible lines spoken with terrible music. At the same time, getting rid of the rainy camp scene is a great misfortune, as the artificiality and futility of that sequence strikes me as iconic for an illustration of war that was nicknamed "The Bog". I suspect the intention was more that they didn't really want to defend a scene to the contemporary audience that was essentially gang rape with comic relief. The next deleted scene, with Kurtz reading a newspaper article and laconically cleaning off the enthusiastic children around him, is indeed a sequence I fell asleep to twice, but that's more likely due to the protagonist's palpable feverish exhaustion that comes across to the viewer at the end. At the same time, this scene gives another interesting insight into the incomprehensible ecosystem of Kurtz's camp.

An anthem film of the attention deficit era, and I can totally see its success in that. However, we Rick & Morty guys already kind of know all the problems with the multiverse, and we've had the improbability drive joke before. However, we haven't seen a live-action Spongebob since practically Scott Pilgrim. Moreover, the existence of this movie creates a desirable bit of reference material on how a realistic, chaotic, creative mind works in the face of a calculated studio pretense of chaos. But again, let's not make this into some smarmy punk; the film is ultimately conservative in its values, elegant, and by the end I was just half-asleep waiting to see if Vin Diesel would come out and tell us something about family. Of course, the moment one rock starts sliding towards the other rock and the other rock yells "Leave me alone!¨ I spit my beer out four rows ahead of me, so four stars alright. PS: if there is somewhere where the employee of the month award looks like a butt plug, shoving it up your ass is definitely not the most unlikely thing. My... my friend said so. PPS: The magic of the cinematic projection was accelerated by the fact that the switching from English to Chinese, or the complete absence of English subtitles in scenes where they speak but don't speak at the same time (you have to see it, sorry), caused some guy to have to translate half the movie silently into his seatmate's ear, occasionally spraying her face in bursts of unexpected laughter. It was probably the most romantic cinematic moment I've ever experienced.

Well, in essence, there was nothing to be done with it since the Notre Dame fire is a completely unrewarding situation cinematically. Everyone was evacuated in time, everyone was more or less unhurt, it was caused by a boring technical error, we all saw it from every angle in a first row seat, and it took place sometime in the early evening, so there was no time to forget that there wasn't actually any real drama. Not to mention, of course, the iconicity of the scene itself. But is that iconicity capable of wrapping an entire movie around itself? Uhhh, It's hard to say, Berg might have given it a go, but dude really, really, not a completely, but completely worn out Annaud. He probably simply realized that there's nothing to take from this, so he overwhelmed the film with absolutely awful mini-anecdotes about a frightened young fireman, a faithful young girl lighting a candle, a dramatic security guard hypnotizing a yellow button, a priest falling to his knees, and a spontaneously singing crowd under the cathedral, convincingly gazed upon with emotion and conviction by a fireman exhausted from the fire in the tower. The degree of cringe here is comparable to that famous subway scene in Wright's Darkest Hour, only stretched out to the length of the entire film. The filmmaker's cluelessness (culminating in a final shot of the firefighter putting out the fire, which is just a dramatic un-zooming and re-zooming of the camera on his face until the music ends) is then cemented by a soundtrack so epic that it feels like it's from a music bank, which is also revealed quite often by the fact that it's mostly pretty poorly used and tries to create epic scenes out of practically nothing. I normally reserve my boo! rating for films that somehow offend me personally, because I didn't think there was anything that was simply so poorly made that it wasn't also entertaining, thus forming an intersection between the poles of quality/non-quality. But Notre-Dame on Fire is truly just the worst kind of schlock movie where even death doesn't take (literally). Annaud's descendants should make sure that no one ever gets to see the films of his late period again.

Stand-up comedians no longer have to fake cancer to convince people they're funny. Hundreds of "terminal" situations seen hundreds of times combined with the kind of safely cautious but sort of cheeky humor that starts by poking fun at therapeutic bluntness and then reproduces it and applies it itself. To top it all off, he smuggles into your cinema advocacy of streamed performances as a full-fledged alternative to the collective experience, and he can kindly fuck right off with that. I lament Gunnari's physically present to the point of being intrusive camerawork that pretty much brings the whole thing to life, but when I see a poorly digested good french fry in a pile of vomit, I'm not going to immediately consider it something worth eating.