Othello

I'm not knocking Quentin at all, he's a really powerful directorial demon, for example he often plays with the camera until it looks good, but to stretch such a banal story to 151 minutes....

I was prepared. A bunch of abused madwomen systematically dismantle the domination of disgusting and filthy men. At least they have the by now surely impotent Scott Glenn as a magical grandfather with a sniper rifle to help them. Sucker Punch is an awesome ideological counterpoint to Trier's Antichrist. PS: I felt like crying with delight at times during the action scenes... PPS: I'd love to lend Jena Malone a towel some morning at home.

Proof of the non-existence of the real Asgard is the fact that the authors of this fill-in-the-blank weren't found somewhere kicked to death by an eight-legged horse and pecked by overgrown crows, because that just wasn't an option. I have my limits of tolerance for how far an artist can go in mining from certain basics, but this is way beyond the horizon. An abysmally insufferable digital inferno in which the only forgettable element is the creators' cowardice. A lot of people here are spitting on a black Heimdall. For me I almost went down when I saw the absurdly digital Asgard, which, despite the fact that it's kind of a nirvana for Viking pigs, is all scrubbed and shiny as if my mother lived there. I closed my eyes and hoped it would all go away and be ok, but when I opened them, the handsome Thor had just swung a hammer in his hand and I knew it was going to be bad. Take his crew, for example. A carnival of characters straight out of Dungeon Siege – a painted amazon with perfectly shaved armpits (unexplained), a Renaissance fencer (again unexplained), a Japanese man (fucking unexplained), and a rather appealing version of a fantasy dwarf who nonetheless looks like he owns a hair salon. The antagonist winking mischievously with slicked-back hair, yet the film pretends like we're not supposed to spot the villain yet. Bwa ha ha, okay, since I ate the remote during the opening thirty minutes, I was forced to finish it. Folks, it didn't get much better. It's fine to cast sure-thing Earth-bound initiators like Skarsgård or the pleasantly shaggable Natalie Portman here, if it didn't hurt so badly that they're completely unnecessary in this movie. For crystalline proof, consider one of the "action scenes" (I'm still making my point), when the newly pacifist Thor (god!) goes to ask the metallic monster if he can stop trashing the city and tells these characters to evacuate the area. Which takes place by them running about 150 m, something explodes around them, they stop, and then return to the half-dead hero, and when he asks if all the people are safe they reply that they took care of it. Oh, and the action scenes are a chapter in themselves. I don't know how high inflation has gotten in the US in the last three years, but if Bay, by the way, has a big city being raided on all levels by giant robots folding into bulldozers, fighter jets, and helicopters at the end of Transformers, and Branagh, with a budget one mega less, has one five-meter-tall metal man kick a car and smash the aforementioned shop window, that makes for some embezzled funds somewhere. Thor, with rare exceptions (like, two or three shots), is not action-packed at all because it lacks any dynamism. It either does it with editing (the opening scythe with the ice giants) or cuts it off when I would have expected something to happen (the giant in the town), or kills it off with cluttered and overwrought CGI (the battle between Thor and Loki), or last but not least, messes it up with a blatant 3D effect (does anyone really care about that anymore these days?). Thor is all that much more of a mistake because, unlike Snyder, Greengrass, Cuarón, or Bay, it keeps itself disgustingly close to the ground, lacks any directorial signature, and is unaware of its position on the audiovisual market. And it's competing increasingly noticeably with video games, which can offer far more than the cinematic medium, but will always fall short in something, and that's the interplay of story, characters, and multi-angle physical action. Thor doesn't realize this, and that's why even White Fang won’t go looking for him a year from now. The only thing that works about this movie are the references and the jokes, and that's a pretty sad card for a summer blockbuster.

Hahahaha hahaha, come to terms ahead of time with the fact that many of you will simply be unable to keep up with this film. Playing any scene out of context means quite possibly one of your biggest WTF moments of the year, and it's not exactly easy with the context, either. Take Sucker Punch, season it with a good dose of coulrophobia, sprinkle in a ridiculous dose of ultra-violence, hop it up on crack and voila... The Last Circus! While history teachers may be able to use the film to demonstrate the Spanish Civil War, they would probably get arrested. Álex de la Iglesia interests me. PS: personally, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Timur Bekmambetov was the director's consultant.

About 15 American soldiers and give or take a bajillion Somalis die in the film, with the focus on the dying Americans occupying over twenty minutes of the film in total and the shots of the dying Somalis about 40 seconds. I didn't care about any of the characters (okay, except Sizemore, but I knew nothing would happen to him), and I didn't care about the heroes throwing grenades in exactly the same shot as the athletes throwing the javelin in Triumph of the Will. Of course, I don't give a shit, and I pretty much welcome recruitment films, because then there'll be enough material for more movies about botched military actions that can be handled by someone like Ridley Scott and I’ll be able to sit there for two and a half hours, snorting loudly with delight and thanking God that there are so many Somalis that the movie will still take over an hour. There were certain passages where I seriously considered sending my fellow viewer home, user Marla Singer, because I was jealous of the fact that she was watching the film in Blu-ray quality with me. The incredible gradation of some of the scenes, the perfectionist work with the shot, the well-used filters, the surprisingly slower editing, the believable brutality. War is beautiful.

As a guilty pleasure, it doesn't work. Not only does all the comical retardedness get sucked out in the first twenty minutes, but that perfect goofiness is just pulled out of the film by the palpable 80's hell, which is nonetheless not as aggressive as, say, Cool as Ice. The fairly successful (!) fight choreography is also a downright disappointment. The protagonist is more of an asshole than a funny asshole, and that's kind of how the whole thing comes off. What is downright horrific is most of the runaway action scenes, which are a montage of disproportionately (for an action movie) long shots that only cut off when all the characters have left, which mouthfucks the momentum hard, which brings us to the point – Gymkata is boring. So I hope it's not because my bar for guilty pleasure entertainment is set disproportionately high by Birdemic and The Asylum production studio.

An almost ingenious combination of horror and apocalyptic depression that not only made me unable to look at my moldy wall with detachment anymore, but even made me take a moment while watching to think of something other than the ways I’d like to shag all the female characters in the film. God, I can never go to Japan. Anyway, I was worried that over the course of two hours Pulse would soon run out of things to say, but information was still being doled out, albeit over and over again, since the most important monologue takes place halfway through the film, thus depriving you of any subsequent catharsis (the apocalypse in the last act is sort of an afterthought), which is also pretty much the fault of the characters, who with all due respect, you don't care about because a) they're morons, b) they're poorly acted, and c) the film pretty much neglects them, mixes them up, and generally makes it clear that it kind of couldn't care less about them. Formally (apart from the terrible special effects), Pulse is exceedingly accomplished, the creaking bows in the background, the rotten panning camera and the relentless editing really gave me a hard time in some scenes. Plus, the film doesn't stoop to any stupid jump scares and lets all the supernatural stuff appear in an orderly fashion, which is pretty darn unnerving. I love how Japanese horror filmmakers immediately react to new technology by incorporating the farts of the deceased and reminiscing with a smile about the days when they had to make do with a window and a mirror.

SPOILER ALERT!!! Personally, I have my own opinion on communicating through all those social networking sites, dating sites, internets, and suchlike, plus I'm paranoid even with people I know, hence I suffered quite a bit in the first half over a bunch of laptop-wielding investigative discoverers of America who can't believe their own eyeballs that someone might be pulling their leg through Facebook. But Catfish pulls an ace out of its sleeve, especially in the second half, with that immediate confrontation with the reality that no one on the crew bargained for. There's that tough talk about how they're going to whip the creator of the existing imaginarium into the woods and grab them by the balls over a Heineken, because suddenly everyone realizes that no one makes themselves Tony Stark on the internet to hunt down virtual prey, but as an escape from their own smallness and incompetence. And the sadly honest last quarter of the film actually inadvertently describes the way the internet has been working for the last few years. It's like a Dr. Frankenstein device in which petty people create their own monsters out of the elements they always wanted to be but are too lazy or incompetent to make it happen. It's just a shame about the filmmakers' cheap call for sensationalism, treating this problem of internet identities like an African famine and letting the film end with a retarded monologue by the lead character's totally effeminate husband, which was supposed to explain metaphorically why people like her are important. Which is as stupid as taking seriously the debaters (heh sorry about that word) on news sites. EDIT: If the Illuminati, ZOG, NWO, or any other conspiracy organization exists, the internet is their most powerful product because it gets people to act out into thin air thinking someone is listening. If the internet had existed back in the 80s, kids would still have a picture of Lenin above their blackboard. Imho, if the current European situation had erupted fifty years ago, the Old Continent would be in flames. Protests today take the form of the "like" button on the FB room "For the return of the old ways!". You can do it from home, you can eat while you do it, and no one can tear gas you through your monitor...

Mangold did the unprecedented, he forced Cusack into a performance that downright pissed me off. It was probably a pretty simple thing to do, all he had to do was say "for the love of God don’t act!" and the result was self-evident. The baton was willingly taken up by Liotta, who practically now meets the brief of "A Van Damme who can't kick" quite faithfully, giving the acting performance of a ten-year-old kid. The third spot of acting hate here goes to supporting character Jake Busey, who people keep trying out without realizing that his face simply can't sustain a natural acting performance. Well the last time I saw him in anything he was parked somewhere near The Asylum and from there the only way out is suicide by aquarium fish, so things should be all good now. ________ So I’ve barfed on the acting, what’s next... ah yes, the script. It sucks, of course, because it wraps a good idea (the proof that it's good lies in how Molina presents it) in fluff, which is why we end up with, for example, a main character who, even nothing is happening yet, just happens to open the wringer door out of boredom and finds – watch out now – something there. *SPOILER ALERT* The final twist with the Omen brat, who incidentally manages to take out a number of grown-ups by, for example, shoving a baseball bat down their throats, is downright embarrassing to mention. And so on and so on. Not that I didn’t enjoy it, one of the actors gets hit by a car way too nicely for that, but I tend to enjoy bizarre snafus...

The most positive thing I've ever seen. I otherwise have a terrible barrier built up against positivity, but... fuck it.