Othello

I can't remember the last time I watched a movie that was split across multiple CDs. Blood In Blood Out (later rechristened Bound by Honor, for fear that the posters would incite violence, a relevant argument when I recall what it did to me at one time when I kept seeing posters for Men in Hope on every corner) was from the beginning a redheaded stepchild from Buena Vista, i.e. Disney, as it came along at the most inopportune time, the Los Angeles riots, which delayed the film’s release by two years, caused it to flop, and left it waiting in vain to this day for colonization via BluRay or at least some sort of streaming. The question is whether it’s worth it. Blood In, Blood Out does cover the relatively neglected rise of the Latin Mafia in the US South between the 1970s and 1990s, but it runs into a few obstacles. The first is Damian Chapa, whose performance is quite possibly the worst I've ever seen in my life. And I've seen a lot of them! Forget Casper van Dien, Rae Dawn Chong, Neil Breen, Tommy Wiseau, this is beyond. This is all the way down the line next to Lukáš Vaculík in Nudity for Sale or David Švec in Mandragora. The painfully unwitting exploitation of a Mexican gangster who has to make every gesture 180% bigger than it should have been, and I don't understand how after some scenes anyone could have called out from behind the camera "Cut! That’s good, thanks everyone!". The other problem is Hackford's early inability to weave the episodes together, which makes them all feel disconnected from the rest. This is especially noticeable in the monologues, which are meant to bring us up to date on the current situation, and take place as two dudes walking down the stairs in the jail from lunch talk about how their situation in San Quentin is now, in 1982, and what they need to think about for the future. The third issue actually stands above all the others and explains why no one has preferred to pay much attention to the great Latino mafia stories and we are currently seeing mostly films where its microcosm, codes, and ephemeral qualities are dealt with in their consequences and effects on American society and the individual, see The Counselor, Breaking Bad, Sicario, No Country For Old Men, etc. In fact, Cormac McCarthy himself, through The Counselor, concluded his work with a statement about the insurmountable cultural barrier between North America and the rest of it. Blood In, Blood Out proves it – it's a white American take on Latin American gangster structures. Logically, then, it comes across as confused, hysterical, and infantile because it works only from what the writers saw but never understood.

An episodic mess where the writer fell in the sewer during filming. I'm able to forgive the theatricality of it, since it can be chalked up to fascination with the 1950s, which is unmistakably reflected in the film; the jumps in the plot after sequences that merely repeat information we already know as time passes, not so much. However, I can't deny my excited anticipation of what the filmmakers will glue to Hutton's face again to tell us that this is yet more passage of time.

Shot with the distinctive patina of the filmmaker, this is not so much a documentary as a celebratory memorial to an incredibly vivacious musician who will have you looking forward to turning 60. All the uncomfortable aspects of Berry's life are left out because he simply refuses to discuss them, leaving room only for the guitar righteousness led by psychopath Eric Clapton and heroin man Keith Richards. This documentary is worth it just for the chance to invite this bunch into your room during their still-creative period. Because besides that, it contains two bonus features. The first is that you get to witness how live concerts were filmed at the time. Whereas today all you need is a quarter-pound camera with a built-in stabilizer, here in the background of the concert you can watch cameramen gliding in wrapped in 40-pound steadycams, a hydraulic arm circling moronically above the audience, and a giant tripod focusing through shutters during the show. The second is the fact that there are no subtitles for the film in any language, and you can probably still manage to catch what Richards mutters as he descends into a heroin high, but once the living Louisiana stereotype Jerry Lee Lewis starts talking, you'll need someone to wipe your brow for you (a half-hour series of just that interview for this film can be found on YT).

Rich white folks solve their rich white problems by being generous to undisciplined immigrants. I can see where today's progressives see this as a problem. A movie that shits marble.

I was prepared to hate this movie, but in the course of watching it I found myself trying to like it instead. Unfortunately though, it mostly repeats the same tropes as the awful second Deadpool. It also repeats the patterns of other comic book originals, but thinks it rises above them by naming them out loud and breaking the fourth wall. Once again it lacks the courage to build this movie around one character and has to assemble an unlikely team (for god's sake, how many times?). Again, not funny, just disturbed and mischievous in the simplest way possible. Fortunately, unlike the above, at least Birds of Prey contains action scenes, and very decent ones at that, with funny ideas and, more tangible physics and realistic movements of the characters, especially for a comic book movie, since here they don't get back up in a split second. It's obvious that Margot Robbie didn't want to hand over her character to perhaps a more capable stunt double in these sequences either, and so there's a kind of sympathetic clumsiness emanating from Harley Quinn when she fights, though every punch here safely finds its face. It's just a shame that by the end, thanks to the development of the film, those action scenes turn into the usual fragmented team battle that lacks everything that has been achieved so far in terms of action. Further praise should be given to Robbie herself, who has reformatted the character of Harley Quinn from goofy manic pixie jailbait in Suicide Squad (which nerds have been fawning over since the trailers, and which in this form is actually what got Birds of Prey made in the first place) into a form that's fairly faithful to its comic book predecessor (who is so insufferable that no one in their right mind could imagine how anyone could turn this into a movie solo) and thankfully undergoes almost minimal development. At the same time, it has virtually no erotic appeal whatsoever, as it hovers somewhere between a mischievous kid and a manic diva who's been driven by years of drinking jimsonweed tea to come ringing your doorbell at 4:00 am to tell you she's seen a shooting star. With such an unlikely heroine, then, it's all the more galling that the filmmakers can’t seem to deviate from the stuffy team-up concept and thereby don't give her enough space to shine. Oh, and my last comment is the obligatory one, and that is that most of the exteriors and interiors are UNWATCHABLE. You just can't shoot a normal factory, or somehow digitally tweak it to your specific needs. You have to build the whole thing digitally. You can't find a suitable restaurant interior, so you build it in a studio and cram a spotlight into every window to represent daylight. And so on and so forth. There is barely a single space in this film that looks real. With the club and fairground scenes, I was already toying with the idea that this was intentional staginess, because some of the sets look like a Broadway musical and no one thinks for a second that it doesn't give the appearance of a real place. The good handiwork of the make-up and costume designers thus goes to waste completely, as the artificiality of the setting willy-nilly seeps into the other elements of the film and makes it all look equally cheap. In a contemporary sort of cheap way, where cheapness actually means that a scene where two people sit at a table and talk can be seen to have pointlessly cost a million and a half.

Enjoy the hell out of every fantastic dance number and then during the dialogue maybe bubble your drink through your straw. At least you'll find out where you stand with your breath.

A temporally and spatially sprawling multi-fail whose incompetence takes on such surreal proportions that at times it's reminiscent of 90s Lynch. This film was supposedly used by the same effects studio that produced Chris Hemsworth.

Hackford has already demonstrated his interest in the behind-the-scenes of the American dream and its infinite ability to corrupt in this, his debut. Though his beginner's impatience is obvious, and thus he skips some scenes that would have been quite important in portraying the transformation of certain characters, but he makes up for it with his typical flair for incorporating seemingly unimportant details into the setting and characters. The scenes of the first successful performances of his tired, pomaded models are the tumultuous climax of every stage of this film, where the viewer enjoys the same exhilaration and satisfaction as the protagonist, having been along for the ride during his efforts to transform a total redneck into a soggy panty factory.

It's as if some gentleman’s store with a men's boutique paid for this movie. All that was missing was free testicle perfume to go with it. It's an insane parade of manicured rich dudes in their 40s, so the target audience goes out the window. And I'm okay with that, because there's nothing like it around here yet. Admittedly, of the four Ritchie gangster flicks, this occupies the fourth/last spot with ease (in the following order: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels – RocknRolla – Snatch), because it just feels more tired and uncertain compared to the previous ones, it relies more on actors than form, and the plot isn't terribly subtle, just terribly overdistributed. It works seamlessly in the individual vignettes though: I burst out laughing twice, which doesn't happen much to a man at home by himself, there are minor little diversions for fun (beating up six experienced stuntmen who are supposed to be guarding a grow house), it's got momentum, and above all Colin Farrell, who portrays his respectful, intelligent, street-wise, disciplined Irishman (whose Irish is the most fantastic perversion of the language, right up there with Kelly MacDonald and Ardal O'Hanlon) with such glee that he makes the others next to him look like ugly ducklings.

Ethnically wild self-governing suburbs, that's my thing. In an age of fearful consumerist bourgeoisie, it somehow comforts me to know that metropolises around the world are unable to cope with near-autonomous areas where law enforcement, local authorities, and the mafia struggle day in and day out to keep the pressure cooker under the lid. Les Misérables has been much compared to Training Day, but in contrast, the confrontational scenes between the SCU and the residents of Montfermeil are shot in such a way that everyone here seems like a hostile and unknown third party (when the SCU bullies little boys in the doorway of a house, for example, the scene is shot from inside the house, not from behind the backs of the SCU whose story we are following). Up until the last moment, I assumed that the film would end along with that one day, because everything seemed to be wrapped up. Which actually projected the characters' cynicism onto me as a viewer, because everything was definitely not concluded, and then the subsequent explosive finale with Haneke's White Ribbon punchline offered an interesting and controversial vision that, by the nature of these risky suburbs, there's a far greater possibility of youth getting satisfaction for its considerable lawlessness than in the normal world. All it takes is one wave of a police shotgun. PS: it made me very nervous that the main character's face looks like the skin of an NPC from Half-Life 2