Othello

A clever collaboration between the Icelandic Ministry of Culture and the Department of Tourism clearly intended to reduce the effects of overtourism to this Nordic island by portraying the suburbs of Reykjavik as the dismalands of Russian housing projects.

This reminded me of those situations where you start telling a story in front of people and then you notice that everyone is listening to you rapt right as you realize with horror that the story isn't actually very good or interesting. So you start flooding it with all sorts of minor details, sub-plots, and jumping out of your seat instead of delaying as much as possible the moment when you close with "...well, that's pretty much it." Here an American billionaire takes a bathyscape into the depths to a place where, simply stated, there is simply nothing. So he tries to litter it with all sorts of "dramatic sequences" with "dramatic music", 3D, self-doubt, constantly naming all of it, and jumping from descriptions of the technical aspects of the entire challenge to descriptions of the importance of discovery in general. And Cameron himself, an unsympathetic pragmatist, is certainly not a good guide.

"The water flows downward. It's wet." William Dafoe will be right back with more details! Without the commentary this would have scored one star higher, because the shot where the camera follows the stream of water flowing down the steep cliffs is simply something you will want to see in the theater.

I liked how the film works in an obsequious, fetishistic way with the newsreel, except that it then films everything with an ugly digital camera. Which also exposes how badly lit the whole thing is. Half the film takes place at night, where everyone has quadruple shadows of similar intensity as if they were being lit with someone’s high beams. In terms of content, it's sort of a juvenile declaration of love for film in general as a social event that bonds communities and influences social development. The characters pretty much pay second fiddle to this and mostly act like little kids, their motivations are very much forced, and they change their personalities hectically depending on where the mood of the film needs them to be at the time. At least the exteriors and the original setting/time period are interesting, but I still didn't find the film altogether believable, because my only experience with Zhang (Matt Damon in The Great Wall) so far suggests he's more of an overfed, over-the-hill movie whore.

I don't understand how anyone can say Johnny Depp won anything after seeing him doomed to struggle to collaborate with sniveling overplaying Japanese actors in this failed low-budget flick. Indeed, the most enthralling things is watching his discomfort, through which he still tries to escape with bits and tricks into his legendary alcoholic characters. For some reason, the Japanese actors here act a lot like Chinese actors in their contenders. In other words, like simple one-dimensional peasants in righteous anger, but with their hearts in the right place. Poor Depp then shuffles among them in visible discomfort, wondering what to do with himself. As if in revenge for this, the director assigns him scenes where he has to hold a crippled girl in his arms and sing a touching song to her. Beyond that, the film doesn't really know what it wants to be about, whether about Smith or about the circumstances of the Minamata industrial disaster, somehow failing to interweave the two storylines believably, probably because, a) Depp is visibly distanced from the other actors and b) at some point about halfway through the film, the first scene appears in which Smith is abruptly not there at all, suddenly making the film about something quite different. I also struggled with two issues while watching it: the insane writing of the romance between Smith and Aileen reminded me of Vaculik and Třísková's grinding in Nudity for Sale, and as soon as Jun Kunimura appeared on the scene, I got a terrible urge to watch Ichi again.

In the context of Cameron's conscious desire to once again create something like the ultimate blockbuster for everyone, this is absolutely a diamond in the rough. As in almost all of his previous films, he simultaneously tries to sell the film to stereotypical women (forbidden romance, natural scenery, ecological messages) as well as stereotypical men (robots, explosions, sci-fi) in order to create what at the time was still the ever-so-rare consensus of a couple over movie listings. What it clears out is everything else. Avatar is insanely calculated and calculating. There's not a smidge of personality or any creative daring in it whatsoever. The narrative makes use of just about every annoying cliché, whether in terms of form (three hours of visual spectacle where a narrator still has to explain the spectacle to us) or plot twists or its portrayals of characters and situations. It's true that the purely digital world presented here defies my aesthetic standards, probably due to years of trawling through the virtual worlds of video games that have inured me to any wonder at a completely digitally created universe, and yet when I see Arthur and the Invisibles and Avatar side by side, I see practically the same thing. The quality of the film does not lie in the quality of the render. What's more, it's all overlaid with pretty unbearable eco-esotericism that teaches a lesson about society's relationship to nature based on the laws of a completely fabricated world.

Kormákur has always struck me as a more or less competent director who doesn't really care what he's making. This time, however, Beast is just a sometimes unbearably silly B-movie, where you might still enjoy the ultra-long shots that the film is composed of and how difficult they must have been to execute, assuming you could tell they were difficult to execute. Instead, virtually any potential technical problem in a scene is solved here with post-production effects or scenes made entirely of CGI, which of course look terrible. Idiotic B-movies can be fun in that you occasionally think "how the hell did they do that?", "how many times did they have to shoot that?", or "I'm surprised that actor didn't get hurt." When the challenges are solved by computer, all that's left is the idiocy.

A frustration of a film that is all basically just variations on a single dismal performance the entire time, which plays out across countries, social classes, and intellectual assumptions, proving how low a person can slip just because of their desire and fascination for otherness. May his intentions be more noble.

With Titanic, Cameron finally achieved his benchmark in the field of the grandiose chick-flick, and its success then confirmed to him who really makes the decisions here about what’s worth a visit to the cinema.  Except that Titanic is also an insanely polished diamond in this regard, and it is almost irritating how clearly this can be seen in everything. Apart from the main love story, everything feels terribly mechanical, staged, stereotypical, and lifeless. Every character here has only one purpose: Rose's fiancé, for example, is almost comical in his villainy, always safely taking the worst side in every situation. Interestingly, the characters of Jack and Rose don't work on their own either, but thankfully they work perfectly safely together where it's surprisingly believable how Rose takes the initiative over Jack from a certain point onwards, to the point of motherly binding him to her bosom after their romp in the car leaves the boy so moved he's shaking. Unfortunately, the fateful night itself is terribly studio lit, the trick photography has aged a bit, and the whole space of the Titanic feels compromised to the point of theatricality.

In the film's prologue, a secret agent subtly infiltrates a tightly guarded party of bourgeoisie, speaks five languages flawlessly, seduces a beautiful art collector, and busts out a tango so classy it would make Argentineans throw their hats on the floor in frustration. And the agent is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who normally leaves wreckage behind him just by walking into a room and hasn't been able to learn English in forty years. Like sorry kids, but this is total comedy gold. Cameron is fully aware of what he holds in his hand so he knows that all he has to do is zoom the camera into Arnold's face at the right moment and he’ll bring you to your knees. Completely against current tradition, this action comedy is actually action (whereas these should be two automatically kindred genres since they're mostly about rhythm, pacing, and editing) and even though the second half falls a little short of the first half, once Schwarzenegger picks up an AK with his foot and shoots four people in a single second, all is absolutely forgiven.