Othello

The workers take back their space. And they take the die-hard capitalist view that everyone is responsible for their own happiness to an appropriate extreme. A bold thesis about a heroine looking all her life at the door slowly closing on her dream, deciding at the last moment to stick her foot in it. And we don't have much reason not to root for her seeing as how she's done the legal maximum of what she could so far to get her way, but even that wasn't enough. Still, it's not a one-sided hypocritical poor girl's war against the decadent and bored rich, because in her quest for happiness, she doesn't stop at brutally butchering mere arbitrators in quite possibly in the same social position as she is (janitors, prostitutes, Filipino maids, policemen). Either way, it's a bravura indictment of the system with incredibly brachial violence, where no one asked if this wasn't a bit much. With starring turns by a plastic puller, a carpet cutter, a screwdriver, a plastic bag with a vacuum cleaner, a hammer, a kitchen knife, a broken board, a revolver, and the will to get your way. Leave the pity and sense of justice at home. As well as the need for constant reminders that all of the protagonist's action is not really forensically bulletproof.

Ha! And I'm spreading the word everywhere that we have ten to twenty years before autonomous artificial intelligence is created to collect and analyze data based on self-created programs. And it will end up being five. That the first thing it will figure out is the need to eliminate the biological anomaly called humanity is a given; after all, that was clear to me, too. The apocalyptic tone of this documentary, despite the attempt at a spark of hope at the end (which apparently even its authors don't much believe in), is palpable for a time when we all willingly give away all information about ourselves to completely abstract code, knowing that we don't even have an alternative, so at least until it everything falls apart we can enjoy fleeting moments of rapture and pure beauty, a purpose served by the songs used in this documentary, for example, culminating with the incredible finale of Sigur Rós' Untitled 8.

Though the result of a collaboration of directorial and screenwriting misadventures, the second The Strangers is a surprisingly entertaining party flick for more conservative fans of the slasher film in its earliest form. And I for one am surprised at how much I enjoyed it. I mean, the whole movie copies practices long forgotten, but it's all the more endearing to see them again like this after a while. And it manages to do so without constantly pointing out how well-versed the filmmakers are in the genre by rewarding dabblers in horror of years past with verbatim quotes and winks. Instead, we get things like camera zooms, double-layered overlapping shots, dramatic string music with 80s synths, and insanely illogical behavior from (especially female) characters. We learn nothing about the villains' backgrounds, they don't move other than in a slow gait with occasional car rides always resounding with 80s hits, and the bodycount in particular is rather surprisingly fast-paced and unexpected. And the total darkening of the pool by the blood of one of the protagonists is a beautiful scene. If you spend your time counting down the mistakes and nonsense in movies, then ring the bell at another gate, but don't whine that they used to make better and smarter slashers. They were basically the same.

The voice over, as well as Nvotová's need to unnecessarily parade herself in front of the camera, exactly in the style of those childhood games of hers we get a taste of in the documentary, are absolutely awful, not so much in their essence, given that a portrayal of the disillusioning impact of the course of the turbulent 1990s on one free-spirited family could have been quite thought-provoking, but mostly by the way the film haphazardly utilizes them, just as padding between thematic and chronological shifts. As an informative documentary, though, Mečiar works very well, not glossing over its subject too much, not spending more time on individual aspects of his regime than necessary, and not leaving out anything crucial. Moreover, in this abbreviated form, it is fascinating to see how people fall for the same types of leaders over and over again because they need their idols, their daddies, people who will be strong for them and solve their problems for them. Just notice how much people like Mečiar, Fico, Trump, Putin, Okamura, Nixon, and Mussolini have in common in their speeches and methods. Yup, they’re all tough guys.

In anticipation of a new Hanna or Atomic Blonde, I was richly bored for a good third of the film before I realized that the expectations might have been the problem. And yet it was as if the film had anticipated as much, and when the protagonist moves to a secret training center where, instead of spy training she's treated to a stage from The 120 Days of Sodom, she complains about it the exact same way we do. The quicker you tune in to the channel of such a slightly different (yet in some ways almost classic, canon-adherent), reflective spy film, the more forgiving you become of the film. It's not easy when Joel Edgerton simply doesn't have much acting range and Jennifer Lawrence (again) looks the whole time like someone told an inappropriate joke in front of her. However, a few fairly unique scenes, occasional explosions of unexpected violence in an otherwise pretty polished area in front of the camera, and one brutal symphony involving several sharp objects and a potato peeler at least ensure that you might not forget the film entirely. 3-4, but we have to take care of pure genre flicks, so I’m rounding up.

If you have no idea what went on in the upper echelons of American politics in the 60s and 70s, and names like Lyndon Johnson or Bob MacNamara mean nothing to you, you're going to end up with quite the headache. The Post counts on having a knowledgeable audience, and even despite such a complicated historical period, it wastes no time in explaining who's who, immediately dropping names and situations in such a heavy cadence that, for example, in one scene (when I had to physically write out the characters on paper) I discovered that the film figures if character A is talking to character B about a Henry, I should sort of figure out they're talking about Henry Kissinger. Wow. Except I like it that way, the movie is better able to focus on the motivations and dilemmas raging within each character instead of making them pieces on a historical chessboard. On that front, there's not much to fault (I reckon Meryl Streep's performance got on my nerves on purpose), despite the fact that 80% of the cast all look the same, i.e. like Clark Kent. Half of all the heavy lifting is done by Kaminski's cinematography, if only because Spielberg still insists on shooting on film stock, so we can enjoy that increasingly rare feeling of film grain and light yet crisp haze. Plus, though we're in smaller or larger rooms most of the time, the picture is most of the time in fluid motion, following where the characters are going, and more than once, for example, surprisingly jumping from one character to another. Almost every shot here could be used as a tutorial on how to work with movement, light, and composition to achieve the desired effect. But The Post is not flawless. I consider its biggest failure to be the beginning in Vietnam, where we’re supposed to understand the whistleblower's motivations, but because of the persistent low accessibility and overall drabness of the scene, it doesn't have the desired effect. Likewise the trendy emancipation pose, which feels out of place in the film, and it seems to me that the whole movement for female-male equality is only done a disservice by these over-the-top gestures.

A commendable attempt at a social genre film with a few ideas and shots that no production should be ashamed of (the execution, the opening by-the-way crash outside the bank, a few slick fight moves, the unmasking of the main bad guy). But at the same time, while it works with the right action clichés, mainly highlighted by the masked vigilante hero or the introduction of the protagonist's mighty fight kick, which he eventually uses to take out the biggest badguy, it doesn't want to fall into complete caricature and tries to be socially relevant. And it fails (the film has trouble finding the right moment for the hero to take action, and the first half is a bunch of awful flip flopping) rather than succeeds (the villain's brief monologue about how he at least channels his money and activities into the community and his surroundings, as opposed to the rich hero spending his life in the isolation of his ivory tower). The proverbial balance is then tipped by poorly edited battles in the dark and an unappealing protagonist reminiscent of a combination of a young Vin Diesel and Martin Veselovský who can’t so much as swallow a noodle.

For me, probably the fifth failure in the field of universally acclaimed drama series. One is almost inclined to wonder whether the fault really lies with the works themselves, but those who know me know that it simply couldn’t be any other way. At the very least, Narcos surprised me at how all ten episodes manage to consistently feel like the prologue to something that never comes. Time jumps, disconnected scenes, the constant introduction of new characters that more than once we meet and bit farewell to within ten minutes of a single episode, stingy one-take sequences, and a terrible, unbelievably awful voice over from one of the protagonists. The latter is itself part of what is clearly the most unbearable aspect of the series, namely the storyline involving the American police officers (whose real-life inspirations were actively involved in the making of the series – aha). This pair of hard-boiled cops with their ironic smirks, six fingers of American whiskey in coffee mugs, porn, and tough guy comments in comically badass American accents come across as the work of an eight-year-old Clint Eastwood fan and reliably bury any scene, especially when compared to Wagner Moura's focused and charismatic performance as their antagonist. Beyond that, I still couldn't get past the form, which most of all resembles a dramatized documentary; some scenes are downright sloppy (the urban exteriors often feel like the unacknowledged result of guerrilla filmmaking), and the series never comes close to a sequence as well-constructed as the opening bar shootout during the first season. If this is the 3rd highest rated series here, that takes a lot of wind out of my sails.

All the blackness aside, it's actually a pretty typical Marvel creation with all the slow waxing of boredom and laziness over generic visuals and impassioned speeches. I guess it's understandable, since young black folks would also like to have a hero they can identify with in the Marvel universe, so they really only had to do the same thing they did before, except in inverted colors. Fine, but it's still a chore and I can't stop marveling at how little it takes to satisfy people. Namely, the protagonist has no character, he functions like a hero in FPS video games so that as many people as possible can project themselves into him. It pretends to be a humanistic story, but the whole thing is an elitist quest where members of the nobility solve their problems somewhere in a country we know nothing about because the film has no interest in telling us about it. This detachment from reality is probably already just a projection of the real detachment of the filmmakers, who only know the outside world from Facebook, so we can at least entertain the fact that whenever the camera decides to go somewhere down among the working people, there are always farmers' markets on that street, whether we're in the US, South Korea, or Wakanda. It's great how this builds up the illusion after the fact that while the main characters, who never eat and always look worried, have to worry about the big problems for all of us, while the everyday people down below are actually doing nothing but shopping and idling. And these are things that I might not have needed to think about if, at least in my eyes, the expectations of a comic book blockbuster had been met and there hadn't been only two and a half action scenes (of which only one is actually any fun anyway) for 134 minutes of running time. But the five white swans always fly reliably between the buildings in the panoramic scenes. So my advice: watch the first two installments of Blade and instead of the third, which sucks, watch Django Unchained, and then you'll understand what a properly fearless African-American should look like. And I'm advising you from the proven position of a European white guy with mixed Jewish blood and a not-so-bad salary, so you can't go wrong. If you have a problem with that, I can hire a black man to say it for me. Nudge nudge wink wink wink.

Torture movie and textbook blockbuster at the same time, in the most pejorative sense. Hard to find something so lazy and uninspiring. The story only moves through dei ex machina, the characters have no characters, they're all the same, the future world isn't achieved with a single technological innovation, the futurism is dictated by sleek building design and a bunch of blue monitors, the film speaks for the most part only in short sentences and without any emotional expression. The absolute record breaker is Dylan O'Brien, who I suspect never returned to the set after his injury and was replaced by a poor-quality digital copy, for which they didn't have the money to do motion capture on his face. It's usually fun to pick out the improbable coincidences and screenwriting crutches in a film. Maze Runner: The Death Cure is made up of nothing but. Even the first scene with the train ambush, which takes place while the train is moving, ends with the cars getting unhooked and the train slowly coming to a stop a meter away at the exact spot where the hidden rebels are waiting. When a badass drives off with a bus full of Immunes in a wild chase through the city, she only gets stopped by a police roadblock at the exact spot where a crane awaits her, which drags the bus incredibly stupidly to safety. The whole "the heroes are almost trapped, but suddenly a character who's not supposed to be there shows up and saves them" method is repeated to exhaustion. At the end, a war breaks out in the city streets, with entire skyscrapers falling to the ground, but the film doesn't show it, we only see the aftermath from a distance. It's a terrible, horrible, smoldering, moss-covered bore. I even frantically had to listen to the director and screenwriter commentary for a moment, simply because I couldn't believe they would be able to discuss this except in apologies. In the end, the commentary pretty much made sense "Yeah, we shot this scene in the Kalahari desert. It's looks kinda cool. You know, like, they're attacking a train, but not on horses, but in cars. I don't know, it's cool." A point at least to the Czech distributor, who guessed the potential of the whole work and gave it the apt title Death Treatment in the Czech version, a throwback to the 90s translations of titles that were always either "Death Something" or "Something Death".