Othello

Two-and-a-half-hour socks in sandals. This genre is exactly what I expected. The spears are made of paper, the chains are made of rubber, the walls are made of cardboard, and the costumes are from television variety shows. The men are as sweaty as a busboy in summer and the women on barbiturates stare blankly into the abyss. But I got the urge to install Age of Mythology again, you know I did.

I came back to this movie after ten years because of how much the personality and the look of the protagonist remind me of the main character in the computer game Disco Elysium. And I'm really quite surprised that there's no mention of the connection between these characters. Either that vision of the broken detective is so visually homogeneous in European culture that the film and game know nothing of each other, or the writers of Disco Elysium didn't acknowledge the inspiration. But if we push that element aside, we're still left with a very unique crime drama with a morally quite problematic script. SPOILER ALERT: Here, while trying to cover his tracks after drunkenly shooting three people in a bar, protagonist Santos unwittingly uncovers a much larger plan, the successful execution of which would result in the deaths of hundreds of innocent people. This is done, among other things, by completely resigning himself to technology and disconnecting himself from the bureaucratic police system that is thus unable to stop him or deflect him from his axis. By contrast, the inspector who, through the people Santos shot, is on the trail of the same case, is unable to solve it within a police system that constantly blocks her path, knowingly and unknowingly. In the manner of the old crime stories, we are thus told that in the chaotic world of organized crime, it is not possible to succeed by conforming to its system, but that you need, from time to time, an unguided missile that is able to pierce to the core and rip out the heart, often at the cost of your own life. Except that Santos is not a controversial bon vivant in the mold of Belmondo, but a cynic, a wreck, and a murderer who doesn't claim any sympathy from the viewer with any scene. Whether or not this film is a vindication of his approach I don't know entirely, but it is certainly an excellent defense of one film genre.

The subject matter, the cartoonishly overwrought characters, and the structure of the scenes make this a classic nightmare. And in this case I mean that catechetically and existentially. Which strikes me as a pretty compelling testament to writer/director McDonagh's abilities. "I didn't realize how much you hate me." "I don't hate you. I'm saying you're have no integrity. Which is the worst thing I can say about anything."

I can see why it flopped so terribly (the intersection of themes addressed has virtually no target audience), but I'm actually quite sorry in the context of the director's MO, because you can't deny the frank autobiographical elements and thus actually the acknowledgement of his own vulnerability with someone who was once one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. Even though this is based on a true story. Zemeckis, like Hogancamp, is also not very good at distinguishing reality from fiction. In fact, his digital graveyards of blank faces, with which he has tried to create a warm Christmas atmosphere, are as bizarre a project as Mark's Marwencol.

I find it commendable to try to translate the source material in all its obscurity into an audiovisual story intended to bring it more in line with contemporary audiences using the most modern technologies. The problem, however, is that it is not the source material but the production that is the cause of the most frightening experiences, which make it almost certain that anyone under the age of 12 who saw this film at the time of its premiere is no longer alive today. Visually it only looks okay in the foreground, please don't examine what's going on behind its shoulders until you see it. Dead faces, simple textures, repetitive objects, in short the things you tend to nitpick when you’re complaining about a computer game are ubiquitous here. When we see Tiny Tim's character with a deadpan expression and unnatural facial expressions, while the story informs us that the poor guy won't live to see next Christmas, it adds a more oppressive, unsettling atmosphere to the whole experience; I realize that, in the manner of Ebenezer Scrooge, I actually experienced an identical nightmare watching this film, which suggests to me that maybe I shouldn't sit so long and so often in the fake world of video games and visit my mother sometime to ask how she's doing.

If we accept Sidaris' creation as a purely commercial product, then in principle we can't complain, because we got everything we were promised. Boobs – check, explosions – check, guns – check, artificial exploding owl – check. Let's not mention the fact that all the Sidarisian attributes listed are about at the level of quality of that owl. I was quite taken with the attempt to capture the hustler spirit of 90s Los Angeles while documenting its streets in pointless breakthrough scenes. Their upbeat tone makes it seem as if the filmmaker is professing a certain love for that city of sin, because within its walls he has been allowed to fully realize all aspects of his sleazy life. Too bad that the other half of the film takes place on the carefully mowed lawn of some California tree farm, and the closer we get to the end, the more it resigns itself completely to everything, making it seem like the last 5-10 scenes were shot in 2 hours.

In terms of the script, Beowulf is surprisingly a very atypical and bold piece of work that is strangely unfocused (100% Gaiman's work) and enriches the heroic epic with the theme of bravado in the face of the awareness of one's own vulnerability. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean it's a well-written screenplay. Avary and Gaiman were dealt a "go wild!" card by Zemeckis during rewrites, saying that if a minute of film was going to cost a mega, let it be seen. Yet they failed to get two thirds of the film out of one pub and instead demonstrate their screenwriting freedom through one-liners like "My mighty lust limb can transport you to paradise, to ectasy, and back". A certain deliberate woodenness and naivety inherent in the myths, then, is the sort of thing that perhaps a classic filmstrip wouldn't pull off as well as a full-CGI one, which we naturally tend to see as a kind of stylization, though Zemeckis doesn't attempt much of one. Then again, the problem (see my review of The Polar Express) is that digital technology will always age rapidly, and today Beowulf already looks worse than interactive titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 or Witcher 3.

It's a risk of technology-obsessed directors that they occasionally choose that proverbial Cimrman-esque dead end, and Zemeckis has been looking for a way back out of it for three films. Perhaps the most distinctive attribute of The Polar Express is "scary". When a bunch of dead-faced chefs burst into the carriage and start splashing chocolate all over everyone, I believe it was meant to be debauched and funny. I hugged my knees in horror and tried to maintain my sanity, eyes bulging. As for the experience with the then groundbreaking facial-motion-capture technology, there in particular the darker-skinned girl's facial expressions reminded me of the 2011 video game "L.A. Noire", which featured the same technology at the time, only used in favor of an interactive concept. In retrospect, this proves how terribly fast digital technology ages and how much it dehumanizes the overall result. In films with animatronic models, masks, and real sets, there is a certain unwritten contract with the viewer, who likes to be fooled by artificial things when they see the long work of strange hands and original visions behind them. But for most, the digitally created image is really just an abstract process in which you cannot admire the individual technological aspects, but only the whole. Here in the best moments it merely strips the subject of all tangibility and poetry; in the worst moments, it looks like nightmare fuel.

I sat and didn't move until the last act. As a survivor of the first BioShock I felt right at home during the perfectly filmed plane crash sequence. The subsequent introduction of the island and the pudgy misfit Hanks makes you feel as happy as he does for the unfortunate guy’s every little accomplishment. It's got beautiful cinematography, great locations, and it works quite humorously with the "American way of life" of the time (even then a bit old-school), with the character quite understandably fetishizing the objects and brands (Wilson) that FedEx delivers. Incidentally, the way he comes out of it I wouldn't be surprised if they paid for the whole film. On the other hand, they did come up with some pretty funny advertising through the film. Unfortunately, my empathy strings snapped during the widely criticized conclusion. You couldn't ask for a more hopeless romantic, yet I just don't buy it when a half-crazed castaway having spent four years on a desert island returns home and the one thing that's on his mind is his last girlfriend. I know it's a strong theme, but from the little I've read about people who've been orphaned from civilization for even a fortnight and are still recovering from it mentally, the whole cavalier ending seems totally phoned in.

Unlike the rest of the world, on the other hand, I enjoyed the ending, where the film suddenly started acting like the delivery room attendant in a Monty Python sketch who brought in the most expensive machines for the sake of the visiting boss. After all, shelling out 100 million (about the budget of one LOTR installment) to have the camera drive around an overacting Pfeiffer crawling around the house isn't the best way to disguise the fact that we're watching a film that was made primarily as a fat paycheck for the cast, because otherwise there's not much reason for it to cost that much. I remind you that Contact, three years older, cost 90 mil and Forrest Gump, six years older, cost 55. Somehow, that's how millionaire hubris oozes from this movie. And unfortunately I don't have the ability to connect with a spoiled middle-class housewife who drags herself around the really hideous white interior of a giant house and makes gift baskets in her spare time. I'd give the film a Best Bathtub Scene award, although maybe not so much.