Othello

Somehow I'm getting lost here in the flood of "immortal", "classic", and "timeless". I mean, Psycho has undeniable value considering when it was made, but for all intents and purposes it's now just an outdated entertainment artifact. The script scrapes its dialogue from the bottom, the acting and general direction of the actors is severely laughable (apart from Anthony Perkins, who is quite out of step with the production of the time in both his performance and appearance), the early identification of the killer takes the edge off the scare, and the editing is downright prehistoric. The interesting reveal and cinematography were enjoyable, plus I believe that to experience Psycho in its time would be pretty psycho, but nowadays the film operates on significantly different algorithms.

Where have we ended up, that we’re filming pulp for the critics? Drive is an ovulating woman who, despite her classical preferences, is looking for a man strong like mountain who can provide security physically and financially for her and her future ragamuffin. It lacks the aftermath, though, when the girl in question realizes how dumb she was for landing the smelly individualist on the corner instead of just riding the funny-looking guy who winked at her. I mean, me. Four stars for form, and Refn can just shove the fatalism up his ass.

Formally excellent but otherwise a dud of a revenge film. In bullet points: 1) Jee-woon Kim does a good job of pacing the scenes, but not the film. That's because revenge, by design, has to work as a gradually accelerating carousel, with scenes escalating and reining in or, as in Lady Vengeance, maintaining the same mood line. I Saw the Devil jumps back and forth between them the whole time, which achieves at most the effect of knowing from the start how it's all going to turn out, and the director makes it clear that he's not concerned with the film as a whole, but just the (in the words of Rob Roy) attractions. These are successful (in particular the stabbing of two guys in a taxi and the murder of a policeman with a baseball bat are perfect shots), but many times unfinished (which, as I later learned, is the result of the film being edited down film to a more tolerable level, phew). 2) As a Korean director, someone must have explained to Jee-woon Kim the necessity of using that visual brashness that characterizes that cinematic nation, which here in turn gets in the way. With such a spare plot, I think such overblown visuals take away from the concept. In particular, the constant perpendicular shots from above make it clear that the director is rather trying to meet the stipulated criteria. What’s more, it is with this visual that the film mystifies and the entire time convinces the audience that they are looking at something higher than it really is. 3) The characters are geometric points, not people. They have no background, no history, and none of the audience’s trust. The character of the killer, while unprecedented, is without charisma because he doesn't work on mythicization (like Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men) or as a twisted parody of humanity because he doesn't come into contact with any humanity he could be parodying. The protagonist operates on the same motivations as Marv from Sin City; unfortunately, I Saw the Devil provides a minimum of perspective, making him pretty hard to relate to. It's just the violence that works best on this film, and not in its brutality, but in its aggressiveness. It's got an awful lot of pace, but also a lot of twisted ankles.

I've got a great idea for a movie – Othello spends long days and hours talking himself into watching something where Franco fingers a rock for five days and then saws off his paw with a can opener. Fortunately, Boyle has conceived of the problem as a visual cabaret, with a damn near biblical digital storm sweeping over the landscape and Scooby-Doo hiding around the corner. Surprisingly, 127 Hours isn't that physical a film, though the urine-drinking scene is so suggestively shot (the slowly rising level in the macro tube) that a severed hand can't ruffle us Southern exploitation-soaked viewers anymore. Admittedly, I was inclined to chew off a limb at times out of boredom, but that it was only sometimes and I’m saying it about a film with this kind of premise is a sign of perhaps the highest quality.

"A great day this has turned out to be. I'm suicidal, me mate tries to kill me, me gun gets nicked and we're still in fookin' Bruges!" Incredible work with audience anticipation that, after initial incredulity, draws the viewer into a wonderful world of ultra-violence, drugs, and surreal dialogue and sequences. The film manages the incredible feat of creating an endless desire to go to Bruges at the end of days just to be able to repeat Farrell's bullshit out loud.

It was a big deal back then. Deep beneath Hangar D at Hollywood Studios, in that top secret laboratory complex, a secret sect of Judeo-Bolshevik Nazis, paid by the corporate-run Illuminati, had accomplished the unprecedented. To create the first artificial intelligence that can make a movie all by itself. It was called Jim Kohlberg ver. 1.0. It did unprecedentedly well on its final exam, quite a tricky assignment: to create a movie for grandmothers, dads, pre-pubescent sons, practically the whole family, even with a dog and a guinea pig. The film has to appeal to the classic mainstreamers as well as New Age sensibilities, and it can be paid for at all costs with Monopoly money. Jim Kohlberg ver. 1.0 has done an incredible job – he has automatically extracted the theme of generations coming together through music, but wisely filtered out a contemporary manifestation where a son introduces his ZZTop dad to the secrets of techno or dubstep. He pulled out classic hits from the 60s and 70s, where the majority opinion is that anyone who doesn't like it is ignorant. In the montage, he moves the audience with Simmons delving into the tenets of hippie rock, finalizing the whole event at a concert where the previously skeptical father really lets loose. Sure, the arrogant audience may feel like they've got a broken record, but for the rest of us, we've got a first-rate load of the best: a chick from the diner who reciprocates the feelings of the biggest loser in her neighborhood (hopefully they'll fix the patch in the future), a son meeting his amnesiac parents after 20 years, a liberal mother and skeptical father, a nasty doctor representing a depriving nasty state institution, the ability to only express yourself when your favorite music is playing nearby (ho ho), it's all here. Even the inventors have formally acknowledged that the device relies more on certainties and we don’t have to worry about it creating any interesting sequences either visually or conceptually, but that's supposedly okay because the subject matter is sooooo heartrending that no one will care less that they actually went to see a film and will give this incredibly clichéd, boring, uninventive, wannabe independent, emotion-milking bullshit an incredibly high rating because it warmed their cockles. Golden sex and violence.

The studios are well aware that there are no new acting elites being grown, and the younger ones (who are now all over 40 anyway) like Depp have expenses that could turn something like Addis Ababa into a lucrative metropolis, so they're trying to pull all the old '80s and '90s hot stuff out of the swamp to justify this totally unimaginative and perhaps illegally primal spectacle. By the way, they have themselves to blame for the acting youth, because they look for new stars based on the right curl of their bangs or the obligatory pigmentation. Red works in part because, for example, Malkovich and Mirren were quite good. But is it worth including Willis anymore just to stand there or walk around? The man has completely given up on making any effort to act and he goes through the entire film with one expression, which isn't fair for that kind of money, am I right? Anyway, it's a film shot on a vacation for all involved with horrible elevator music, resulting in a disgustingly chill out spectacle for undiscerning retirees and proponents of the notion that movies are about actors. For me, The A-Team rules.

The idea that an alien being, an until recently fundamentalist Christian, and two basement nerds discover the world and are therefore not particularly different from each other has wonderful potential and invites endlessly funny confrontations worth multiple series. So why the funniest component of the film is a federal "higher power" on their asses is indeed a mystery. It's probably because the screenwriter decided that if there weren't at least 16 lighter moments in every scene, it just wouldn't be it. Unfortunately, though, he didn't think any deeper about the fact that to make it work it's good to build on the jokes and build up the jokes, not drop them like eggs onto a conveyor belt. As such, though Paul makes it through quite deftly every time it threatens to get bogged down in the ballast of sentimentality, just as often you'll find yourself while watching it dropping a "he he he" and a "why" in the same sentence.

A formally incredibly polished toy with that kind of "mwahaha" in the background, which goes a long way toward explaining why in some films you feel like Clooney is looking through the camera a little too much. He's got directorial ideas, a flair for cynicism and irony, a clever way with set pieces (which came in handy in his subsequent, shot-on-the-same-floor-of-a-house Good Night and Good Luck), and plenty of pals for funny cameos. He's just a badass.

The fourth star was squeezed out by the camera, because otherwise this family drama, which you can totally decode within an hour and you know exactly where it's going, has little to do with the mafia theme. Sadly, it's the takeover of the reins from the initially uncouth redneck Andy Garcia that makes it clear that the Corleone family corporation is effectively dead, because even distinguished behavior, an expensive jacket, and four liters of motor oil in his hair can't hide his true origins and violent nature.