Othello

Very unsurprisingly, if Edwards is behind the direction of an individual episode, it rocks, the action scenes are the highlight of the year, the destruction of objects and bodies is dialed all the way to the right, and the cinematography comes up with some interesting tricks. It makes even the super-seriously rendered comic book plot with a bland protagonist pick up the pace and hook you, even though you know that's not really how things happen in any universe. Pure joy, up to and including the fifth episode, then the uninteresting directors Gens and Hardy take the chair, the chain almost completely comes off, and there are no action scenes for the remaining four episodes, the attraction I thought this series was made for in the first place. Otherwise, I have no problem with Edwards' need to create monumental mafia sagas whose world is concocted like a children’s notion of war (see also the second The Raid), but there's a guileless joy and childlike enthusiasm behind the heap of violence. But don't let anyone else interfere.

Actually a perfect return to the cinema. It's exactly the kind of film where a different row is laughing every moment, because the range of humor here is really wide. Occasionally there's a "yay!" from the left, a "dude!" from the back, and when someone sitting in front of you laments "Oh, shit" in one scene, you shake your head with a frown. Like the action scenes, which rival Gareth Edwards in brutality. Plus, it's a great grab bag of familiar faces (Mia Goth got fat? Dylan Moran can speak Danish? Is that the frog from Nachtmahr?) who are actually someone else. Plus, personally, I have a soft spot for movies whose cathartic punchline is how nothing actually matters. After all, how else to handle a story about how a crusade of male stereotypes (the most IT IT crowd, the most PTSD soldier, the most gay gay) avenge the death of a lady in a manner they're so forged into that they screw it up with grace from the ground up. The Egypt punchline is totally FTW, I'm still laughing at it as I type this. The first Jensen that sat well with me, though he's still clearly recognizable in this.

If you see Nobody and Naishuller's previous Russian pogrom Hardcore Henry on the same day, you'd almost think Ilya had farted a bit. Understandably, though, that's because this young directorial hopeful mainly had to show that he could make a film beyond gimmickry, with characters that were more than just amusing caricatures. While I don't know if it was very successful, but in a genre now dominated by overstylized John Wick spectacles, Atomic Blonde, and Gareth Edwards massacres, we could probably hold that bar a little closer to the ground. But it's a fact that nobody came here for character nitpicking, so let's stop worrying about the film (a dumbed-down mid-life crisis in which Kolstat managed to sell the same script a second time, doctored it with all sorts of picked-over heists from True Lies to The Equalizer, all in the name of small-town values) and address the action scenes. While what I remember most from the film is the awesome one-shot in which the antagonist walks into a bar, still I have to admire in particular the imaginative and joyful disposal of the poor and virtually mentally incompetent bad guys. Perhaps the blood is digital and the night scenes often don't look like they're set on planet Earth, yet most of the fatalities can still be enjoyed with fulfilling relish and the fifty-seven-year-old Odenkirk is simply believable. In the context of a TV movie (as we should approach a VOD production), a nice lunch break that will be fine for talking to your mates about how record companies should make the rights to use songs they own more expensive again, because this movie à la jukebox thing is becoming quite an annoying trend.

I like the admitted value connection here between the 50s and the 80s, where you're actually fighting for position in the bourgeois suburbs, not breaking out of it. Back to the Future is actually a Reaganesque ode to neighborhood and conservative certainties, where one can twist one's entire life in the right direction with a well-timed punch, while keeping one's integrity in check, and if there's one thing to rely on, it's science. Oh, and they're taking the invention of rock 'n' roll away from black people, which is actually fucking hilarious nowadays. I totally understand how seductive it must have been at the time and actually is now, especially since the movie has such perfect sequences (the concert!), exuberant acting (Lloyd!), and a great script. Value-wise, though, it's as much a guilty pleasure for me to watch the film as it is to be entertained by constructivist or normalization films.

Romancing the Stone holds the opportunistic trump card in that the whole shoddiness of the plot simply comes from the fact that it's deliberately a "romance/adventure novel for women", which was also written by a waitress (the writers listed here are just post-production rewrites, the actual screenwriter Diane Thomas died two years after the film was released and thus this was her only script). The problem is, Michael Douglas handles one role perfectly, that of a corrupt city bastard; and yet he doesn't quite work in everything else. The classic post-colonial romance about how a dangerous exotic country makes a romantic backdrop for two white people isn't such a problem in the end (at least if you're white and you just grew up on these stories), the problem is when I see this small-town boy brandishing a machete or shouting Travolta-like in a white jumpsuit and I'm supposed to feel like I belong in that environment. It's a shame, too, because of Kathleen Turner, who is top-notch here and she shoulders almost all the functional comedy.

"Used car salesman" has always been as much a pejorative term in the US as, say, realtor, auditor, or OVB employee would be here. And it's no wonder that an amoral comedy about a sleazy used car salesman found its time period somewhere along a dusty highway in the early 1980s. Used Cars is, in essence, a showcase of the amoral American hedonism of that decade arising from rapid economic growth and a deep breath after 2 uneasy decades in which the very essence of the American way of life had been called into question. The grime, sleaziness, and moral degradation here also seems so obvious as to suggest that it is not a deliberately set mirror. Used Cars is, imo, a pretty unflinching, if perhaps unintentional, satire of an era when you tossed trash over your shoulder, where telling the truth was a career liability, and some ethics were not permitted to stand in the way of capitalist ambition. If you accept it as such, you begin to marvel at how spineless the film is right up to the end, and how utterly unwilling it is to punish blatant character missteps at all.

I was going to label this film a calculated cashgrab targeting moms of the time who could reminisce about their younger years under Beatles posters at the movies, but then I read how it flopped. I Wanna Hold Your Hand has great scene choreography, pacing, and plenty of individual aspects worth highlighting (like the stunt performances by the female fans), but it's stretched too thin and foreshadows the problems I'll continue to have with Zemeckis and how he works with live actors as if they were animated characters. Incidentally, the ensemble cast here includes both the most beautiful (Susan Kendall Newman, Paul Newman's daughter) and the ugliest (Wendie Jo Sperber Bohdal) actresses of their time.

Brevity of information is basically the whole point of this concept, though I give credit to those who have a problem with it because they don't consider the 1960s to be a settled history with clear sides. The Sixties is essentially zeitgeist edits bravely cobbled together with hundreds of hours of material that attempt to provide context to the world-famous American events of the era. Virtually every two sentences spoken here would make a feature-length documentary of their own.

Easily the best written, best acted, and unfortunately the most visually memorable Verhoeven. The camera and editing have no face, the colors are washed out, it comes into focus automatically in motion, making it look like a fakin contemporary Dardenni, which please don’t mistake for praise. There's also an end to Verhoeven's cramming as much information as possible into a single shot, and it may be a bit of the reason why the film's other components are otherwise almost brilliant. Isabelle Huppert plays flawlessly and distinctively one of the best written characters I've perhaps ever seen. She's familiar as a mother, employee, lover, and sadistic acquaintance, yet she's utterly unpredictable in every scene. Verhoeven doesn't usually like to let actors improvise (after things got out of hand in Flesh+Blood), but Huppert reportedly adapted the role quite a bit because she didn't know what to do with the character. Her performance, then, is the pure essence of when three strong and experienced characters blend into one actor to create something as elusive yet real as the protagonist here. The best male-bashing film far and wide, which as a rule the current "strong women (TM) creators" of Twitter can't even come close to. The ambiguous Verhoeven, not giving us easy answers (if any), will be sorely missed in the binary age.

The comparison may be silly, but I just think Verhoeven would like it. I mean, how a director who practically fled the Netherlands for creative reasons to the US, where he successfully and happily created until he started feeling the production limits again there, returned with great aplomb to his homeland, where everyone patted him on the back and put together a grand fresco about the uneasy and ambivalent mood of collaboration. Black Book's (excessive to my tastes) formal purity is a reference to film canons, which of course makes it far more subversive. In doing so, as if on purpose, those comfort-ripping scenes about dyeing privates, blown-out brains, little SS dicks, or shit cauldrons do little to disguise the fact that the film is almost lacking a purely noble character. For example, the protagonist herself becomes an ace up the Resistance's sleeve just because of her background and her desire for vengeance over the death of her family, otherwise she would have happily spent the war by the pond. These aren't themes that Verhoeven is tackling for the first time; in fact, he's spent his entire life talking about nothing but the inherent corruption of human character, and anyone who's seen at least one of his earlier Dutch films will be virtually unsurprised by anything here. Even though Black Book is a clumsier film than we’re used to from this director (the occasionally palpable staginess, the visible artificial lighting, the amusing single-line roles of the female resistance fighters), it still preserves the director's reputation as an entertainer who can work as well with the drama of the film as the drama of the individual scenes, making it virtually impossible to get bored or drop out of the film.