Othello

It suffers from pretty much everything that current mainstream biopics about music legends suffer from. 1) an unquestioningly noble protagonist as victim of the intersectionality of unsavory businessmen (Tom Hanks here is pretty much playing the Penguin from the comic books, with all the grotesque overacting that entails) 2) a narrative fractured into disembodied scenes, a year here, five years there 3) an attempt to anchor a potentially controversial hero in the mindset of the contemporary mainstream (Elvis, a queer icon, hangs sulking with his African-American pals). 4) When the filmmakers run out of mergle or get tired of it, along comes the green screen. I barfed at the final scene at the airport. ____ Unlike the other flat bio-memorials, however, Elvis has Luhrmann behind him, which... weeeeeell, it’s not bad news, but it’s not exactly good either. Because I have a recurring problem with this director – his methods of visual interpretation and indeed narrative as a whole is horrible kitsch, almost to the point of actually being an exploitation of kitsch. But one of the problems with kitsch is that underneath its perhaps flashy and colorful veneer you can tell at first glance that it’s not bringing anything new to the table. And yet here it is. Luhrmann can bust a gut in his effort to make sure not a second goes by without entertaining you and giving you something to look at. The image splitting, camera rotation, zooms, reflections, deliberate staginess, and frantic editing that often divides scenes into half-second shots are things that Bay, Neveldine/Taylor, or Gilliam got away with because they were intertwined with a comparably insane narrative. Elvis is just a conventional family spectacle about a kid from the suburbs where the camera pans dramatically to the Intercontinental Hotel eight times and the editing is all done with blurry rotation.

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.

Taken as an unapologetic indie survivor burner from an aspiring debutante, I'm happy with this. Sunburn, mere non-specific references to the world beyond the desert, sandstorms, and a permanent feeling of being completely drained. Except I kind of think he's pining for Lighthouse. I mean, bleak limbo, hallucinations, animals munching on your liver, misanthropy in full force, and a former teen idol trying to rebrand himself (but on the Pattison scale he's currently at the level of The Rover). And the whole film can safely wreck itself against that comparison.

In a debate earlier this year, I was overruled in my opinion about the need to remove the stigma from sex work and make it more accessible by claims that expanding it would lead to deepening frustration on the part of their many clients unable to fulfill their romantic fantasies. But even though I ultimately nodded my agreement, I still side more with this film in the end. Indeed, its problems lie elsewhere. Because it is, of course, perfectly fine for a film to have a clear position on an issue it is trying to promote, but it should do so through its story, its narrative, and through its characters. Here, we can't avoid being wrapped up in a monologue at the end about what the film has actually been about all along, in case some dullard hasn't figured it out by now. Then the film just becomes a cliché of a self-important, encouraging YouTube video. Second, I have a problem with the position that we're all inherently beautiful, which just sounds like bad therapy. Look at the latest movies with the 60-year-old Emma Thompson. The woman is incredibly sexy just in the way she works her language, her body posture, her looks, how much you can feel her distinction and taste. That the film reduces her to a "shocking" full frontal scene at the end in the name of some universal human beauty is ultimately a cheap gesture and actually demeaning to her. PS: it's great that I can go to the cinema to see a film about two characters in one room while the new Andrew Dominik goes straight to TV.

If this had been made twelve years ago, I would have taken it as an entry in a contest where Lars von Trier and Alex Garland are competing to see who is the greater cinematic edgelord. At the same time, both films have plenty of reading options, and both are at their best when you ditch the reading and approach them as feverish horror films. At the same time, though, the comparison would come out clearly in favor of Trier, whose contribution is the credible work of a sophisticated person. Garland's got the paintings, he pretty much doesn’t mess around (even if it all feels safely artificial), but I'm a little worried that, for how bizarre it seems, deep down it’s really as banal as I think it is. Plus, that's how I was able to tolerate the hideously high perspective taken by the film's narrative. It would be absolutely ideal if Men turned out to be a prequel to the fourth series of True Detective, returning to the themes and characters from the first series.

The ideal conception of a documentary about someone who, even in his own words, has no identity of his own but instead one pieced together from dozens, even hundreds, of outside influences. While the film lacks the depth suggested by its running time, I also realized that this is not just a film about David Bowie, but also about Trent Reznor, Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, or Mayhem. I don't agree with the oft-cited opinion that this is not a biographical documentary – this is exactly what I think an artist's biography should look like. It only spoils the cinema experience for some people (ahem ahem) when the lights come on in the auditorium and people start pointing at you "Hey, Bowie’s sitting right there!" That's not the point, morons!

Excellent in terms of Peele's creative limits, and in terms of the current creative limits of the contemporary mainstream it’s one of the films of the year. Anyway, who am I kidding, the movie itself is divine. If, like me, you're lucky enough to have seen the film as a complete "tabula rasa", you're in for a magical hour and a half of gradually unraveling mysteries in Hollywood Hills, during which various scripted red herrings and plot contrivances scramble around you, hilariously referencing the magical idiocy of 1990s American TV that Tarantino, for example, was so fond of talking about. After all, after his last film, I think Peele is much closer to him than to the oft-cited Hitchcock. It works as a genre piece, but with even a minimum of knowledge of American pop culture it starts to become apparent how insanely great the whole film is. The charm of big horse eyes, Harambe, the haunted aura of Hollywood ranches, cameramen measuring guns, Wincott pulled out of somewhere by his collar, a soundtrack that steals from both Morricone and Badalamenti, and a cloud that doesn't move for six months without anyone noticing. And Hoytema behind the camera. Yep.

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.

The year 2041: an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on "The new nihilistic wave of late Hollywood": "Pinocchio is an ideal illustration of the creative nihilism that characterized the era. It was the remake of a classic cartoon, produced by a major film studio in the hands of a formerly renowned director and technical innovator. The film combined live actors with digital objects and environments, even when it would have been no problem to make the environment or objects real. The result ultimately demonstrates the creative chaos that was then unfolding in the freshly acquired and merged studios and the production companies attached to them, where the resulting work is a hectic clash between a seventy-year-old director's idea of a technologically advanced film and the inputs of dozens of focus groups and elusive external forces such as the COVID-19 pandemic or changes in distribution trends, all backed by many millions of dollars. We end up with a fairy tale that is muddled, unappealing, and (due to the poor quality special effects) creepy, obviously having completely slipped the hand of any creative contribution. The palpability of how much everyone who had anything to do with the film had already given up during production was another element that added to the collective depression on which the culture wars of the time were based."

It laughs out loud at The Babadook, The Witch, and Hereditary for being pretentious bore and then lets us spend two thirds of the film watching close-ups of uninteresting people dealing with family relationships. It comes across as XXX-parody, because the film comes across as terribly cheap (like there's no money for extras at a high school or hospital) and the actors look like porn actors. And I don't mean that as an insult – they do really look like that.