Othello

That's the beauty of those 90s movies, you get to watch a scene where a lawyer played by Kevin Spacey sinks a witness based on his 30-year-old rape accusation that took place on 9/11. At least there's some joy in this overwrought mess according to hypocrite-in-chief John Grisham. We can only envy the man's ability to calmly fight the death penalty furiously with his left hand and peck out a novel that defends it through enormous hyperbole, sadistic descriptions of crime, and appeals to the racial frictions of the American South with his right. The film treatment then doesn't problematize the novel at all, and on the contrary is almost completely faithful to it, with occasional bursts of Goldsman’s screenwriting flubs (the lawyer protagonist and his righteous fisticuffs, disastrous characterization scenes). McConaughey trying to play himself to death here at least recalls a time when he was a truly insufferable piece of slime.

Boyhood adventures in the adult world of lawyers, mobsters, private eyes, crooked cops, and slimy mobsters. If the whole concept of the story is based on a ten-year-old silly Jack Sprat outsmarting all the wise-asses, it's hard to execute without all the adults acting like complete idiots. And Schumacher, with his Foglar-esque (wink wink nudge nudge) fondness for plucky, marginalized youths, was certainly never capable of that.

It was Vidocq in 2001, it was Public Enemies by Mann, Gamer by Neveldine/Taylor, or the entire Hobbit trilogy. These are all pioneers of the digital barrier in film who, however much they were previously blamed for it, have broached uncharted territory for others without the constraints of film stock and twenty-five frames per second. And now this Segal-esque action flick will join them. Gemini Man runs at up to 120 FPS under specified conditions, which to the unprepared eye can seem like an incredible abomination. And an abomination it is. The action scenes are still manageable if, following my example, you spend a fair amount of your time in virtual worlds (and the film tries to identify with the viewer in this way through various first-person shots), but the civilian scenes are harder to handle. The over-sharpness and huge resolution struggle with how easily artificial lighting reveals and discards any other planes in the shot. Indeed, if the distant object is in focus at the same rate as the foreground object, the image starts to look two-dimensional instead of spatial because you’re already so used to working visually with the simple limits of your eyes. If the filmmakers' need to increase the number of frames per second is motivated by a desire to bring the viewer closer to what is happening on the screen, this ignores the fact that human attention, sight, and perception also work subjectively. Good action scenes in movies take advantage of this, and in a field of constantly changing and frenetic situations, they throw us keys to fix our attention on what they want us to see. Gemini Man feels like it doesn't need such keys. It settles for focusing the action to the maximum and all it wants us to do is watch. Then again, the action scenes themselves aren't bad at all (except for some really gimmicky special effects), but they don't give the impression that there are live people in them. Which is a problem with a story about hard-hitting killers who are supposed to bleed and suffer. _____ Interestingly, I didn't want to write about this at all originally, because more than the technical side of it, I was struck by the fact that it's used to reveal the utter exhaustion of former Hollywood first man Will Smith. He looks more tired and useless here than any contemporary Bruce Willis, and the triple-digit frame rate mercilessly never wavers from him. The man is no longer even able to enter a room naturally, and the fact that the film is all about him and his WETA clone is more fascinating to me than all the technological advances demonstrated. I know the Chinese don't want much more from their domesticated acting whores, but here we're at the point where it’s unpleasant to wind up with a clearly uncomfortable actor being in the same piece of work. It's no secret that the script for this gunk existed back in the 90s, and for quite some time Nicolas Cage was attached to it. It's amusing then to see how apparently the only change from its original form was the addition of a female character. She stands confusedly in the background for a good half of the scenes, not knowing what to do, while the two Will Smiths talk about the scars on their souls. This makes it evocative of when one of the players doesn't make it to a D&D gaming session and you have to play out the scenario with the other players and pretend like his character is there in the story with them. And so it goes on and on. Every word is a gem: "It's not a gun time. It's coffee time.", "I cannot sleep. There is where the ghosts are.", all spoken by an actor who, with each syllable, becomes more and more aware of how he's at the end of his career. If David A. Prior was in on the original script, I would believe it. And that was honestly the thing I enjoyed most about the film. It's like watching an old Cannon film knowing all the risks involved. Do you laugh at tabloid stories about poor people who win a hundred million in the lottery and spend it on booze, dope, and hookers in two years? This poor bastard won 140 million from the deadly Bruckheimer-Chinese combo and blew it in a few months on the cinematic equivalent of toluene with a crocodile. Crazy times.

I have a lot of sympathy for the role of the young, ambitious Czech filmmaker who has to endure the grueling conditions of co-productions in an attempt to break out of the domestic milieu, only to get so carried away that you can catch those European role models right from your seat as they fly out of the screen. But if I only let my sympathies speak, that would be condescending of me, so tough luck – A Certain Kind of Silence undoubtedly has its individual merits, but a completely flawed concept that explains the background to absolutely everything depicted only with closing credits. Until then, it offers not a single clue as to what kind of film it is and dances along with a half-horror plot about a totally dehumanized community of rich people reminiscent of, say, the Dutch Borgman. Moreover, the whole film is heavily stylized in image and sound, so when we learn at the end that it is a variation on real events about a real organization, we realize that we have just been the victims of a really thorough manipulation, no matter what we might otherwise think about that organization. Personally, I have less of a problem with this than most people should, because I'm aware that film in general is manipulation. Still, here an imaginary line has been crossed.

On the one hand, the silent and unhappy battle of a bourgeois intellectual for his position in a changed world is breathtaking in its palpable, subjective documentation of Cuban post-revolutionary everyday life; on the other hand, it's consistently irritating with an unbearably aggrieved protagonist. He gives the impression that his choice to remain alone in communist Cuba is motivated only by taking a vacation from his duties as an intellectual, which he spends bitterly glossing over the surrounding futility. And that’s supposed to be my project.

A decent psychological drama about an incurable reprobate or the excellent comic origin story of an elusive and provocative bad guy. The latter contains everything that is most essential to revitalizing a classic comic book character – revision and updating. Daring to make the Wayne Family the most negative element we can without any major frills may seem to pander to current commercial demands reflecting contemporary class friction, but it's still a terribly radical step, because that’s the position Batman, as a pure symbol of the guardian elites who decide good and evil from a position of inherited position and wealth (thanks largely to Nolan's visions of a chaotic enemy coming from below), has maintained thus far. If, in the end, Joker does indeed launch a new Gotham universe, it'll be fun to watch the Batman get tossed to filmmakers who have more sympathy for radical incels than those who want to make decisions about them and stop their actions.

From the moment you realize Sorrentino is going to bring this whole thing down to parent issues, you're praying he'll wrap it up as quickly as possible and not totally decimate everything that made half of the series so breathtaking. It was a close call this time around, but the question is whether his general tendency to pull all the truths of the world down to one simple point will stimulate or irritate me more in the future. On the other hand, I will not deny that this question is for me more than for him.

About the only interesting thing about this film is how it is unable to conclude and fulfill even a single hint of the plot or subplot it sets in motion. We don't get to learn about the nature of the plot detour with Vincent D'Onofrio (originally and according to the script, he was some sort of rival in love with Geddes, however this line didn't make it past the test audience), the class conflict between the protagonists completely fails because the portrayal of the world that the character of Hilary comes from is completely abbreviated, unspoken, and after a while the film completely stops paying attention to it, the film is not even able to fulfill its commitment as stated in its title (because it also failed to make it through the test audience) and personally I still had a big problem believing that Geddes is straight because with every smile, sideways glance, and lowering of his eyes he completely denies it. Schumacher himself admitted he lost the reins on this one.

When the protagonist paints a self-portrait in front of a mirror placed in her lover's crotch, or when she wipes the tears of the unfortunate girl with a toddler placed next to her during the abortion process, you get the feeling that the filmmakers are literally jumping under the saw. And while I'm on the subject of criticizing, the struggle to have the absolute maximum of diegetic music in the film, but still needing it for the cathartic scenes, is actually easy to attack as well. However, so what if the film so accurately describes the subjective surrealism associated with not recognizing oneself in an irrational emotional storm. Thanks to increasingly advanced emancipation and communication, I'm increasingly convinced that we need the label of queer film less and less, as films like this and Call Me By Your Name prove the universality of both feeling and loss across sexual preferences. In the end, it's all about the codes, the shifts, the insecurities, the hints, and the secrets. All love is forbidden. On the other hand, if Claire Mathon had captured my life the way this film does, I'd feel like it made sense, too.

A horrific fable in the embrace of Schumacherian visual opulence that salvages what it can from a barren script. The imagined world in which "religion has failed and philosophy has failed" and which is pervaded by emptiness, decadence, decay, and resignation can only be saved, according to the film, by overcoming the limits of self and knowledge. The November gloom, with all the daytime shots filmed either in the morning or evening, the interiors resembling empty temples (including the characters' apartments), and the side streets filled with dealers, prostitutes, and illegal abortions contrasting with the depopulated main streets – all reminiscent of the fatigue of the decade of 1980s hedonism from which Schumacher had benefited so much in his previous films. The decade in which Filardi wrote the screenplay for Flatliners, and so in the end the story is about young students challenging death in their own arrogance, which pays off in the end because it gives them therapy that can be solved by saying sorry to the girl you called a cunt twenty years ago. Mm, I don't know.