Othello

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

It's the kind of creative failure where the crew is unable to film a royal ball in such a way that it doesn't look like a neighbor's barbecue, but instead wastes budget on a hideous digital squirrel. As a fairy tale it lacks any stylization, as a fantasy it lacks everything, and on top of that the whole thing is riddled with directorial, dramaturgical, and editing errors that the first two hours of a twelve-credit "film basics for dummies" course at a private general film school must surely be able to eradicate. A little of this could only help.

One of the reasons the 80s film industry looked the way it did was undoubtedly because that's when men with war experience or just seduced by the military propaganda of the late 60s and early 70s began to take executive positions, opposed only by a minimal counterculture exhausted by the activist 70s and drug binges. Combined with the ubiquitous Reaganite politics of individualism, this created the perfect breeding ground for films of this type, see Taps, Stripes, Private Benjamin, Up the Academy, and The Lords of Discipline. An Officer and a Gentleman, then, is a perfect example of the kind of film that the baby boomer generation grew up on. It's cynical, arrogant, misogynistic, and espouses the values of male friendship, discipline (overseen by tough but fair military authorities), and hard work. This, by the way, is also what makes this film amusing today, because in its ignorance it is unable to fundamentally rethink anything it stood for from the beginning, so it is virtually devoid of development and only works in individual episodes. These surprise you not only by how well they’re shot, but perhaps also by the surprising naturalism for this type of film. This actually makes the film quite adept at disguising what a terrible piece of crap it is, right up until the end, when it thankfully reveals its true colors in a finale with all the pomp and circumstance and even applause. Either way, Sergeant Foley's waterfalls of insulting drill speeches convince me once again that I should start collecting the film's parade ground scenes.

If you don't live to see the cinematic immortalization of your professional activities, you may end up an unlikely incel hero against whom the whole world conspires, or an incompetent journalistic whore who gets to her sources through the bedroom and realizes only too late what a bitch she was. It plays into Eastwood's hands that he's one of the truly last representatives of pure Republican thought in high Hollywood, so he makes Richard Jewell look refreshingly bizarre. In fact, he uses the same methods of building sympathy as any liberal biopic, but applies them to a character of the type who waits until 10:01 pm to call the cops that there are two people smoking down the street outside the pub. By looking at the protagonist through the veil of his own sympathies and ignoring his more than one problematic trait, he makes Jewell a funny harmless cartoon character, revolving in the twists and turns of a classic movie monument, and it's fun to see how it doesn’t work for the old man anymore.

One of the defining characteristics of an action movie, and why we enjoy it in the first place, is the willy-nilly ruthlessness, crudeness, and ignorance of its characters. You don't do a car chase without a third party being threatened in the process, you don't do a shootout in the streets without bullets flying past the ears of innocent civilians. The essential strength of Bad Boys II was the exploitation of this feature. Combined with the breathtaking action, the stupid, cheesy, but always spiced-up dialogue, and the emphasis on the rich and down-to-earth spirit of Miami, it was the definition of guilty pleasure. Bad Boys For Life refuses to build on this approach, fearing that it would be too problematic today. And with that, the franchise ceased to exist. All that's been created is another digitally re-colored B-movie with 60 fps action scenes that make it barely watchable. Smith and Lawrence, moving in different circles over the past 18 years, no longer have any spark between them; Miami, shot here mostly at night, is not one of the leads as it was before (those studio interiors and exteriors look awfully familiar); and if its interchangeability wasn't enough, AGAIN the film can't do without the protagonists now having to be part of a whole team. As an illustration of how the landscape for action movies has changed in twenty years, this is perfect. I reject this vegan Bad Boys in which every scene is a compromise of everything with everything.