Othello

If Besson was fifteen, please. At the very least, I would have respected the juvenile story about the cowardly little loser escorting a four-meter angel from a modeling runway so she can show him on the way how to love or at least respect himself. And I'm actually more of an apologist for his immaturity. However, Angel-A comes across as unsympathetically underdone and uninspiring. From the man behind films like Subway and Nikita, I would have expected the main Angel-A to demonstrate its true character in a way a bit more distinctive than a levitating ashtray. And that’s how it is with everything here. Arbogast's cinematography may make for pretty postcards, but it's terribly flat and has only one plane almost all the time (the two club scenes are an honorable exception). That makes the film a first-rate Rie Rasmussen promo-reel, but nothing else. Still, I understand that the wheels of Europe Corp. must have been greased with the ink of Besson's 4 scripts a year back then, and Angel-A looks exactly like that. It's a trite, written-in-two-nights fable that no one ever reads afterwards, and it provides its greatest entertainment only in watching how the writer/director projects himself into it. That is to say, as a neurotic totem with an attractive woman at his side who, though she at first teaches him how to live, he actually ends up teaching her how to live when she understandably falls tragically in love with him through her tears. Despite the fact that he does absolutely nothing to earn her favor the entire time. Unless she's turned on by the constant tugging on her arm when she goes somewhere. There's so much of that in the movie, it should have its own place in the credits.

The greatest charm of The Power is the frequent uncertainty about which angle we are currently watching the plot from and what level of reality the film is currently operating at. This is aided not only by the learned practices with the drama (it's not a Blum-esque day-night-day-night, but just one night), the second plan, and especially the strange editing between scenes (which feels so weird that at times I couldn't tell if it was the intention to unsettle or just plain bad editing). These factors make it easy to immerse yourself in the creepy world of the darkened hospital. Unfortunately, the viewer is brought back down to earth through a few topical clichés (when a white man shows up on the scene, the plot is practically wrapped up, no matter how much the film tries to pretend we're in for a big reveal) and Rose Williams, who plays a naive nurse like a schoolgirl in a porn movie.

Somewhere recently I was joking that a period fresco shot in the Aleksei German method, i.e. a seemingly incoherent chaotic jumble of scenes full of half-crazed characters, is impossible to film in today's boring pragmatic environment. Lol, what an arrogant complainer I am. In reality, just set the camera on any spot in Bucharest and things happen. The first two thirds of the film are absolutely divine Bethlehem, partly because it’s still a film. It's not until the third act that it turns into a theatre of caricatures, where everyone is already sort of obligatorily chuckling because it's just a materialized gehenna of conflicting opinions on social media. And yet Radu Jude just can't master that "constructive, positive satire", and his resignation to Romanian society (which is practically the same as ours, sorry) will never even allow him to master it. And that's just as well. Except all I could do is stare for two hours at a woman walking through Bucharest where everyone is completely messed up. But they've got big cars. "Mathematics tells us what would happen if everything could be."

I once knew a girl who had "Don't wait, live!" tattooed on her in that stupid curly font, and I'm convinced this is gonna be her very favorite movie. Soul is the perfectly animated combination of a paid therapy session and esoteric life-coaching, and a packet of Xanax will spontaneously appear in the cabinet behind your sink after you finish watching it. I'm giving it three stars for the sheer amount of animated closeups in the New York streets, and also because I expect more animated films with a similar message from Docter, so I need somewhere to drop my rating in the future. PS: notice how Pixar has been repeating the exact same jokes for ten years now

If you're seeing the movie for the 100th time, you can peel off any piece you want and still enjoy it. Last time we watched the movie we watched it through the lens of when is the last time Indiana washes up throughout the entire movie. If we assume he showers at Omar's after he's learned the length of the cane from the old man, the last time we see him smelling good (apart from the Washington epilogue) is when he and Omar infiltrate the Nazi camp in disguise. We can't blame him, of course, for not showering in that camp, or during the all-night dig, the subsequent escape from the closed crypt, the battle at the airplane, or the subsequent car chase (so far a pretty intense 2 days), but the fact that he says the hell with it even in the safety of a friendly pirate ship and then just takes a sporadic sea bath while chasing a submarine only to continue chasing Nazis to the center of the island gives the film a whole new reading. The most nerve-wracking scene in it is the one where Indy climbs into the white linen bed in his disgusting sweaty shirt, and Marion's silent agony at the final ritual is definitely grounded in who she has to be chained to the same bedpost with. Yuck. Well, as the popular rapper Tyler Durden says, "I wonder what we're gonna learn tomorrow."

A dark spiral into the apocalypse, where we perpetually chortle at the waterfalls of absurdity, even though we know it all probably played out this way down to the last word, and we'll live our entire lives in its aftermath. It's like the Russians watching The Death of Stalin in 1956. But the gradual unraveling of this capital screw-up is somehow cynically, nihilistically fulfilling in The Big Short's portrayal, which seems to say that, like the filmmakers, we don't expect much from civilization anymore. The tragedy of the main characters, who have made a fortune betting against the system and who can only subsequently spend it in a world they have stopped trusting, is telling enough.

Alchemical Furnace confirmed for me a few days after screening The Man with Hare Ears that Šulík's portrayal of the aging, selfish artist hit the nail on the head. Old Švankmajer shares more than one character aspect with Krobot's character. In contrast, Alchemical Furnace is a celebratory documentary, backed not only by years of evidence of the artist's abilities or his advanced age, but also by an often disarming honesty, often defending the author's stubborn self-adulation. This is matched by the format of the documentary, where we are not informed, for example, about who is who and whether this person is Švankmajer's film producer or some old beer buddy. This corresponds to the protagonist's perception, where the viewer simply knows who Švankmajer is and who the others are, dude doesn't care. Note that any time, no matter how moronic the question, the famous artist manages to answer it with a paragraph. If you're not into that, take a shot any time someone says "tactile" or "imagery" in the movie and say goodnight. I felt like I was at my dad's cottage the whole time and laughing at how similar all these artists from that one era are.

For all the attempts at weirdness and uncomfortableness, I just can't shake the idea of people laughing forcedly at this movie in turtlenecks whose previous comedic standard was set by Napoleon Dynamite.

I quite wonder how Besson's grievance against Kathryn Bigelow, who had this project ripped out of her hands after a decade of work, resonated in its day when she refused to cast his then-wife, Milla Jovovich, in the main role. Because foreign and domestic critics ("HySteRicAl ScrEamER hic hic") are uncharacteristically unanimous in their condescension and incomprehension regarding her performance. Here Besson is thematically following on the theme of Nikita with the character of Joan of Arc, i.e. the story of a girl assigned a role who is not given the opportunity to grow up on her own. Here, however, that assigned role is ambiguous, contested, altogether traumatic, and Milla Jovovich is utterly unrealistic in it. She resists male-gazing and because the story is told from her point of view, she becomes an unreliable narrator. Here, Besson once again confirms his ability to create a dominant female character who, contrary to the current trend, is not written as a man but actually as a woman. And even if all of that weren't there, we'd give it five stars for the cinematography, wouldn't we? The latter, by the way, is behind the fact that we find arguably the best battle scenes in the pre-digital era.

It's interesting that of the three biggest directorial toys of the 90s, (Besson, Jeunet, Gilliam), each managed to build their own hebephilic magnum opus (The Professional, The City of Lost Children, Tideland), which is quite creepy at certain points, however much the viewer tries to accept the narrative innocence. I'm not saying I'm offended by this, I'm just mentioning for future adventures that this film will one day undergo some clever revision that fans won't like. But The Professional has plenty of other things to admire apart from the main relationship. The first thing you can see in it is Besson's gratitude that he finally made it to the States, and his fascination with the vastness and vibrancy of 90s New York. The battered old flats, the sweaty hotels, the tangle of corridors, subways, and staircases, the wild streets, the clutter, the mobs of people, and the anamorphic lenses of the cameras that capture it all. Even Serra this time seems to have realized he's actually doing the music for a film, and The Professional's "godfather" motif adds an unexpected layer of darkness to this much-stylized film (not least because it keeps bringing the protagonist back to his difficult Italian past). The shot alone when Matilda and Léon go up to the roof of the building above Central Park, the scene opens up into a vast expanse in which we watch that giant city, and dramatic loops swirl in the background. Incidentally, one of the proofs of Besson's early directorial wizardry is that everyone, even those who have just finished watching the film, is convinced that The Professional is an action movie, among other things. Yet it does not contain so much as a single action scene.