Othello

It doesn't really matter if it's the first Czech science fiction film or if it's an important representative of Czechoslovakian 1960s naive futurism when it's so poorly written, painfully unfunny, and stars a confused Kopecký, who is painfully unsuited to the role of a neurotic moron opportunist and has to come out with lines like "I'm a jellyfish in love!" with no context. The best joke is when, in a utopian future, where everyone thus far has had perfect shapes, solid features, and distant glances, suddenly Menšík is standing at the bar. That was the day Stierlitz was closer than ever to getting caught.

My third attempt to swallow Farhadi and it turned out exactly the same as the previous two. A Hero reminds me a lot of Romanian New Wave films, which I also have a problem with, in that they are theses that are merely serviced by the film. The whole thing then offers no joy to watch, with only uninteresting and mechanical situations thrown in throughout to support the resulting thesis. And so, in order to make the ending as legible as possible, it has to help itself with sometimes very convoluted situations and very muddled characters. As a result, after you finish watching A Hero, you'll be nodding along with your fellow viewers at what this movie is right about, but you won't be talking about the movie at all, just the idea, as if it were a magazine article or a book. And that's not what I think a discussion after a movie should be like.

Even with the third Larraín film I've seen, I can't quite grasp why the director chooses the subjects he does, why he understands them the way he does, and why he emphasizes certain things over others. As a result, it delivers a very unpredictable experience for me, even the third time around. This is truly a horror film where that horror is represented by an evil rarely seen but that can thus appear only from the position of the neurotic and manic Diana, through whose lens we watch almost the entire film, even though it is virtually impossible to fathom her. Greenwood's music, the uncomfortable editing, the fantastic period cinematography, and the focused performances of practically everyone involved (Timothy Spall stands and looks straight ahead, and you get physically nauseous) perhaps obscure the fact that the film is actually rather banal. Then again, what horror film isn't?

The visual creativity here is amazing. The shot through the burning paper, the shot through the shot-up TV, the camera zooming out from the lit window with Everett on the phone boredly shooting zombies, or the view of planet Earth and the moon, where it is subsequently revealed that the Earth is the decoration of a tomb, the moon reflected in the water, all overseen by a miniature of Böcklin's "Island of the Dead". Cemetery Man deceives us from the beginning into thinking its sort of a cute postmodern goof, only to surprise us in the second half by revealing that it's actually a mindfuck flick where every shot so far has had to be watched. A lot of the charm and, for some, probably the flaws (like the grotesqueness of the characters and the theatricality of some of the performances and sequences) imo stem from the extensive co-production in which five languages were spoken.

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.

Such a freaking mess in every way, it gives you that sadistic pleasure (I expect a similar type of experience from Podskalsky's Revue Made to Order). A film that was made to promote friendship and tourism between Yugoslavia and Prague, so the whole thing takes place in iconic areas of both destinations, full of hearty and helpful locals. At certain points, it builds that great optimistic atmosphere of internationalism and openness of constructivist films, which masked the oppression and decline of the time (except that there is no antagonist). At the airport, French, Russians, Arabs, and blacks stand side by side, and the tourist buses in Split echo with "It is beautiful, darling" and the common language between the people and the strict customs officers is a cheerful musical number. But I'm very much going against the grain in this reading, because otherwise it's a completely incoherent mess with an inability to articulate who or what the film is actually about.  Not to mention that it switches between several subplots and narrative styles in a completely non-existent drama and terrible, terrible songs. PS: Bonus points for the fact that young (sic!) Ginger here looks and acts like Klinger from M.A.S.H., and young Kopecký (sic!) is the absolute John Turturro of his time.

"Don't worry, these are the smelliest guinea pigs in Austria-Hungary!" It's wrong from the start, because the contained Hašek stories in it don't have good cinematic potential, so they often repeat the same situations and each one takes an unnecessarily long time on top of that. You're safely set up for this by the utterly desperate first story, which is all about several people not being able to open the door to the toilet without making any kind of funny point. That the film itself struggles with the material is evident just by the fact that it uses virtually every narrative crutch, and by that I mean that there is, among other things, both overvoice and off-screen text describing the plot. If you remember anything from the film, it's the reminiscence of Caddyshack, Ludmila Píchová's manic performance, and a fairly credible attempt to formally conform to pre-war framing and narrative style. It's only overrated here because of Werich, which is a general problem in the Czech Republic, because prickly folk wisecracks are a local disease of civilization.

It's interesting to see how the circus milieu, which is inherently extravagant, enclosed, and a bit "Western decadent", meets here with the knowledge that the circus itself is actually the ideal leisure reward for the working class, because it is entertainment without any intellectual pretensions, and it's within this framework that the film tries to blend the two worlds. Well, it tries; it's clear here that the film serves more as a stage to showcase the various circus acts, which still raise a lot of eyebrows (especially with how much it's possible to let animals degenerate). Here Lipský introduces his directorial method of gradually accelerating the plot into surreal mania, and it's bizarre to see the young Kopecký, Kemr, Hlinomaz, Sovák, Hrušínský, and even Věra Čáslavská as one of the acrobats. František Filipovský, with his hair here, has unwittingly created a model for J. Jonah Jameson.

The first half isn't bad at all, as Reitman keeps managing to portray those teenage characters and the ethos of youth quite nicely. Even though the character of fifteen-year-old Trevor is written totally like the character of Morty in the first season of Rick & Morty, and the whole setting is actually an insanely moronic attempt to sell us "80s nostalgia" in the present day. All it takes is a sleepy, undeveloped town in Oklahoma with no cell service and we can have a drive-in diner on roller skates and a substitute Ryan Reynol... sorry Paul Rudd playing 80s horror movies on VHS for the kids. I mean, what do you expect from a movie where memberberries are actually incorporated into the story. But okay, I'll be nice, the film is surprisingly patient at first, a little wordy and relatively on its feet. Except I kept wondering why I wasn't enjoying it so much. The problem is that the original theme, which served to get a bunch of funny people together, dress them in funny costumes, and create situations for them and the effects people (and, by extension, the viewer) to have fun in, is suddenly turned into some completely nonsensical lore that fetishizes every nut and bolt from the original films. Then, in the clueless conclusion, it's downright obvious how this material isn't at all suited to expanding its universe, so in a panicked reaction, it overreacts by finishing with digitally rejuvenated actors or outright holograms of dead people, all in a way that makes you think damn, is it truly possible that I won't be at peace even after death? Anyway, I'm more generous towards the film than I normally would be thanks to its first half, though this fake "nostalgia for the 80s that never was" doesn't deserve it. It is, after all, a genre created by 40-somethings to sell the memories of their childhood to younger generations who, when they've shaken off their youthful openness to change, will only retain the information about how great America was under Reagan.

The Hen and the Sexton is a classic constructivist movie with dancing and singing that simply serves two purposes. The first is to agitate the Moravian, more isolated and God-fearing countryside towards cooperativism, apparently in response to the Vatican's warning against cooperatives (it's mentioned several times in the film). As such there is a rather indiscriminate attack on the clergy, typically represented by an opportunist churchman, although quite surprisingly the film also includes a progressive priest, which is likely because otherwise it otherwise wouldn't have resonated with the target audience. By taking place in a Moravian village during the harvest festival, the film is thus able to incorporate not only the idyllic scenes of smiling peasants and peasant women harvesting under the heat of the sun, but also the subsequent festivities and traditions, to make it clear that in these cases collectivization will not threaten them ("After all, a water line is better than always going to the well. And it’s not like anybody’s forbidding you to go to church."). The class enemy then has no choice but to defend himself against unionism by sabotaging and manipulating the child with American Brahmin literature ("That’s what you get from those Arizonas of yours!"). The second purpose was the constant and intense humiliation of Vlasta Burian as a representative of First Republic comedy and subsequent collaborator, which makes the film a truly uncomfortable spectacle. For Burian uses the same acting register of the distracted troublemaker for which he was famous before the war, but applies it to a slimy, divisive, stupid, and selfish character who comes across as unpleasant and unnaturally twisted, even exploitative.