Othello

Sort of an Iranian Little Miss Sunshine. For some time a dysfunctional family is nearing a moment of great parting, but is no longer able to communicate with each other at all. First-rate yet economical cinematography, superbly written and acted characters (especially the sage and selfish father who continually fakes his way out of any responsibility), and perhaps the first Iranian film I've noticed that has humor in it. If it didn't have those tendencies to press the poetic key too hard (figuratively and realistically), I'd bump the rating up a notch. Considering that I've been using Persian films as a pejorative epithet for academic tedium, this is actually a big thrill.

"So get married!" A perfect illustration of my (un)favorite theory that true freedom exists only in rejection. "So don't get married!"

These Svěrák/Smoljak haha-heehee scripts where the quantity of jokes is the only quality get on my nerves quite a bit, but then again, if they had films like Marecek, Pass Me the Pen! or Joachim, Put It in the Machine, throw it in the hopper to serve as a dumping ground for weaker jokes that didn't fit into the Cimrman plays, then thank god for them. Still, I have to admit that the enthusiasm with which some of the actors throw themselves into their lines here occasionally makes you want to rewind some scenes and rewatch them. Kovarik's knocking lower lip during the traumatic "But Mlha..." scene, or the monologue consisting of one sentence and eighty-three words delivered by Weigel (which apparently made him a role model for Lukáš Grygar) would be some examples.

Little children and a musical are words I am said to mutter occasionally in my most feverish nightmares. Long Live Ghosts! does have a pretty nice summer vacation atmosphere, but it's ultimately a kind of confused pioneer agitprop where everything happens kind of by accident because everyone (except Němeček, whose trick with the gnomes I really admired and couldn't quite figure out the trick until one pub jumped out of perspective at the end) just kind of goofs off in front of the camera spouting truly awful drivel.

Obviously a very expensive partnership for promoting the Russian circus, both the individual acts and groups and the new State Circus building, which from a technical point of view is still fascinating today. Obviously, what the story was going to be about was the last thing to be figured out. With Lipsky's circus films, I'd give a lot to know what the animals who have to dutifully endure it think of the clowning fools around them. I confess that I didn't realize the close relationship between the Bolsheviks and the circus until recently, but I'm glad I did, because I hate both quite intensely.

It could have been an interesting probe into a normalization spring in the agricultural industry, underpinned by unintentionally funny constructivist interjections like "the zookeeper at the Planned Agricultural Collective hasn't eaten or slept for three days and is silently watching a spot on the wall because she has a mortality rate one percent higher than the plan."  Unfortunately, unless any of the Lipský films can lean on someone else's script, they result in the usual idiotic attempts at mischievous humor and quirky characters that really make you squirm with at how pathetic it all is. Lubomír Lipský was, in my opinion, a virgin for the rest of his life.

I feel like my strongest cinematic moments to date (whether directed by Gaspar Noé, Aleksei German, or cinematographers Lubezki or Benoît Debie) stem from here. It's Hard to Be a God in its moments of literary monologues. In all other moments, it is a stunningly, unflinchingly intense, painful work, a relationship I summed up in our private convos with FilmBooster user Bush13 "I'm always sort of thrilled on an animal level by Zulawski's films, but I simply can't crack them the first time. I'm not even sure if that's the right way to handle them." Yeah, that's exactly how I'm gonna get out of this. Nachtmahr Kraftstoff.

How cathartic, after all the motivational, reduced, updated bio-shit, to be able to rely again on Kurzel and his description of a hideous dirty world where nothing is right and nothing is fair. Nitram doesn't shy away from its Tasmanian Forrest Gump, but neither is the film willing to portray his environment in a way that offers him any way out of his situation (despite the fact that he's a rich guy who travels the world freely), which is why the film's denouement ultimately relies on gun-control advocacy, simply because it wants to convince us that the conditions for creating lone gunmen will always be there and therefore the only way to reduce them is to reduce the number of guns in society. This premise, however, stumbles a bit with the comic scene of illegally purchasing automatic weapons. But I still think that addition was an afterthought, and Kurzel and Grant had to protect them in order to secure money for their next inspection of the irrevocably damaged mind. Knowing that sometime between The Snowtown Murders and Nitram, Kurzel managed to convince Fox he could start a crowd-pleasing franchise based on a successful computer game amuses me like little else. Hopefully the eggheads will forget about it and the next Star Wars will be made by, say, the Safdie bros.

What about the fact that the movie admits early on that it is only fiction based on reality. What movie isn't? Actually, if we wanted to dig into it, The Holy Mountain falls into a similar category. In the end, despite that opening warning, Margaret does not deviate spectacularly from historical fact. There was indeed a case of "False Olaf", except that he, having accepted Margrete's invitation to court, revealed that he couldn't speak a word of Danish and wham, burned at the stake. Problem solved. No Sophie's Choice. For some, perhaps an insufficient dramatic arc, for me a very entertaining idea of a Monty Python-esque conclusion to a dramatic historical story. But okay, I accept my marginal position here. Let's go back to the beginning. It's understandable that historical films have to edit facts for the purposes of dramatization, poeticization, gleichschaltung, bagatelling visual information, but how am I then to understand that all of this is done in service to perhaps the most boring film I've ever seen. God, I was bored! Nero wasn't this bored, Oblomov wasn't as bored as I was during this movie. The whole thing looks like one of those cheesy fiction documentaries, and if it were less well lit, I'd expect Marek Eben to come out from around the corner any minute. The cheapness of the sets, the databank music (medieval_north_theme_drama.flac), making the protagonist a modern progressive heroine, and the instant "dynamic scenes" that were obviously shot for the trailer because they didn't need to be in the film at all and look mostly terrible, constantly take away from the illusion of the period. When the film returned for the third time to the same room shot from the same three angles, I experienced a long-held fear of looking to see how much running time was still left, and for the fifth time I had to apply eye drops to make it to the end. Mercy! For some people, just seeing people walking around a movie in leather must truly be enough to satisfy them.

Bearded women who ring alarms at work for demonstrations refuse to shave for men until they invent a way for you to lose your beard for good. And that's even if they're in the middle of a movie with a script that comes straight from the UN. Apart from that, Janžurová takes the first (polaroid) selfie in movie history. Well, tell me this doesn't look like the worn plot of some contemporary liberal with the demise of the Roman Empire in his lapel, terrified that emancipation will take away his acquired privileges. ___ Another one of Lipský's misfires, that stubs its toe on his inability to keep the rhythm of a comedy that according to the script, was supposed to keep building. But then there's the problem of not getting bogged down in messages about the horror of the atom, long stripteases (though I admit I'm not the target audience, as for me Brejchová is the visual equivalent of Monika Babišová), poorly lit shootouts, and multiple endings. Plus, I felt it was done under some pretty dull editor’s scissors, where lines like "You have some strange manners at that Princeton!" tend to slip past instead of potentially good jokes. Anyway, I don't give Janžurová movies less than three stars because the woman is just a fantastic bimbo.