Othello

Well, at least the existence of the Donner cut helps calm the wild theories about how the evil studio took away the young auteur's uncompromising vision in favor of simple-minded family entertainment. Both versions are exactly the same, frankly. Knowing both cuts, however, we can at least study the clash of two completely different directorial approaches – Donner's dynamic, postmodern, New Hollywood approach and Lester's thoroughly old-fashioned one, referring in its three-camera method to the Hollywood of the 1950s and early 1960s. The absence of the terrible sequences from Paris or from Niagara Falls, which Lester is behind, will be the biggest take-away value of this cut. Otherwise, the second volume remains a lazily written dud that languishes mainly due to bad bad guys and the resulting dysfunctional spectacle. When we were watching Superman face natural disasters and human casualties in the first volume, we were aware of his abilities and powers on familiar elements. As he struggles in slow-motion with three personified archetypes of evil (the lust for power, the lust for violence, the lust for suffering), he runs up against the limits of the technology of the time. Superman II wasn't a good film in either version, but knowing both cuts, it at least offers an interesting insight into the clash between a young and classic directorial vision. And you can at least say goodbye here through some previously unreleased scenes with the nonetheless awfully cute duo of Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder.

This is so beautifully, wonderfully stupid it's irresistible. The Wachowskis shot Joel Silver's script for this along with the script for The Matrix, and got mega bucks for each. This one was then rewritten for them by Helgeland at the request of Donner, who wanted to lighten it up and tone it down (script-doctoring was his Hollywood specialty). He succeeded so well that the Wachowskis did their best to have their names cut from the credits, but to no avail. From what I've figured out, the rewrite dumped the love sequence between Moore and Stallone (thank fucking God) and yet the final moronic twist was added (why the fuck?!). It's actually interesting to find the various details here already pointing to the fact that the dough has already been kneaded for one of the most important cinematic events ever. One of the heroes is a hacker nicknamed Electra, and the final contrivance with the sunglasses probably didn't fit the adventures of the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar either. There seems to have been some effort at this point to assign Banderas his typical shooting stance from Desperado where, usually ambidextrous, he fires his pistols in a manner that looks more like he's trying to throw the whole gun. This style of his, however, doesn't really fit into the cleaned-up, glassy 90s interiors, and it looks awfully clunky there. One of Donner's specialties emerges in this late-era Donner, and that's his ability to scoop the worst possible acting handfuls (kids, animals, Sylvester Stallone, Bill Murray, Marlon Brando) onto his shoulders and survive.

Richard Donner was not only the director, but the producer on almost all of his films. This was partly because he served as a reliable broker of ambitious scripts, which he expertly rewrote into a workable form. He ripped apart a six-hundred-page script by one Mario Puzo for Superman, gutted the script for the Dickens adaptation Scrooged, and completely rewrote Shane Black's original script for Lethal Weapon. He probably killed some bold creative visions in the process (and the original ending of Lethal Weapon, for example, in which a drug-laden plane was supposed to crash into the Hollywood sign while snowing all of Los Angeles with cocaine, involving Sinatra's "Let it Snow", is just a shame), but in doing so he probably made sure that some of the stories were filmed at all. He was called to Radio Flyer after the studio was very unhappy with the results of the shoot so far, which was entrusted to screenwriter and first-time director David M. Evans. He was originally given the director's chair, along with a huge fee, due to the fact that this particular script of his was the subject of a tug-of-war between Warner and Columbia, as representatives from both studios were completely crazy about it. The victorious Columbia then pulled the chair out from under him and gave the job to the veteran Donner, who cast his signature spell, i.e. rewrote the entire script, fired anyone he didn't like (including the entire original cast), reduced the number of special effects sequences, and increased the budget by almost 100%. So Evans' directing credit is misplaced here, in my opinion, because we don't see his work reflected in the final product. ___ The film's resulting commercial and critical failure, in my opinion, came from the film's inability to fully decide between being a suburban kid feel-good film (feel-good scenes of childhood games, comedic moments) or a sad depiction of domestic violence from a child's perspective. Given how sensitive American society is to the subject of violence against children, the resulting flop is understandable. Personally, I also find classic 80's boyhood adventures like E.T. etc. quite depressing, so I wasn't shocked in the slightest; on the contrary, I admired how carefully the bleakness of the environment in which the titular kids grow up is portrayed this time around. As in most other films of this type, they come from financially struggling families who have no time for them because of work, and their adventures are based on having nothing at home themselves, so they have no choice but to explore their surroundings and give things a new context. Radio Flyer, however, comes up with an innovative (and absolutely perfect) element where that childhood angle and context is actually transformed into reality at the end. For a grounded audience, there could be no lesser satisfaction, but those who are aware that the truth must never get in the way of a good story will have no trouble accepting that reality must never get in the way of saving a life. Cinephile shorthand: if you like Blow-Up, you can't not like this movie.

Maverick was our childhood VHS classic, and it amuses me terribly whenever I see my brother unable to shake off the role model the protagonist was to him. But try getting the money he owes you out of him sometime. Yet the film terribly fulfills that requirement of a non-committal two hours pieced together from simple, funny episodes that are also handled like poker also with the individual players. Everybody is aware of the rules and the penalties for breaking them, but still they just give it a try once in a while, once it works, twice it doesn't, and if it doesn't work, well, the penalty has to be endured. After all, even the money here is almost a kind of McGuffin that none of the local solitaires really need, but it functions as a driver of the plot and motivation for the characters to take action. After all, when the film ends in the spa, where the characters are happily smoking a cigar even after having a quarter of a million dollars stolen from them, they rejoice at the thought of how much fun it will be to get that money back again. I only knocked off a star years later for the terribly scenic nighttime exteriors.

"We wrote a fucking masterpiece. We wrote It Happened One Night. We wrote a story that could make you laugh and cry. You would have wanted to share it with your grandchildren every fucking Christmas for the next 100 years. The finished film was a piece of unadulterated, unmitigated shit." So said co-writer Michael O'Donoghue. And I guess I'm glad his fucking masterpiece turned out that way, because if there's one thing that helps Scrooged work, it's that cartoonishly brutal and manic layering of episodes and subplots, the nature of which don't actually make any sense in the overall context and were obviously created by rather crassly slow-cooking the script and combining it with the need for all sorts of cameos and improvisations. By the way, I count 163 speaking characters in this Christmas family comedy (I'm home sick, what do you want from me). The ending is really awful, but if I expected it to be awful like this all the way through, then it from the middle onward, then from the last third... and ultimately it was just the end.

My unreliable memory knew best. From my childhood years, I remembered Ladyhawke as a whispery, fatally dark, and atypically brutal spectacle. Dark and whispery probably because of the poor quality of our VHS copy, and the rest of my impressions were probably influenced by the fact that after the entire film, what stayed in my mind were the peculiar transformation scenes and especially the fatally gothic ending. Suddenly, the horrible synthesizers and the insufferable Broderick fall silent, and only the clashing of heavy swords and the impact of hooves on the church pavement echoes in the cathedral. Whereas this almost silent conclusion lasts maybe twenty minutes. Similarly, the tragic figure of the negative bishop, who sold his soul to the Devil because of a morbid consuming love, not because of worldly ambition or anything like that, works here even after all these years. The general enormity of love in this film is respectably functional enough that, by the nature of the plot, it contains a minimum of the usual common conventional scenes of displays of emotion. It's a shame we have to watch it from the position of a beleaguered pickpocket through cheesy and stagy narrative, and that what plays into that plays into it.

Actually a terribly cute misstep in its childishness (I came here with practically the same opening line as the "movie" above me, so I'm trying to cover it up a bit) with a terribly likeable and well-acted central character. The centerpiece here is an adorable little bar close to a home for the disabled, so it's all armless and legless and together they overcome their daily hardships over a game of poker and a beer. Particularly in the current COVID era, which is only furthering the evolution of the delivery era, it's a sad reminder of the importance of regulars as a therapeutic group, a familiar retreat, and a space to understand the faults of others instead of forcing them to overcome them. Admittedly, it's a bit unnecessarily hokey at times, listening to the old cripples constantly making bristly jokes about their own disabilities and everyone laughing like it's the end of an episode of an animated series, but the ending, where the humbly returning bartender apologizes, is nonetheless a delight, that he's forgotten about them because of his backgammon career, even though they're his family and whatnot, so he won't be playing his crucial game tonight, whereupon they all announce that, fine, but they've all bet good money on him, so if he doesn't play tonight, they'll probably kill him.

The original Superman transported me from space opera to the ropes of rural 1950s America, only to lead me through a hectic 70s journalistic whodunit to a superhuman adventure about a quest to save humanity and find oneself. Superman II led me somewhere from the worlds of Cannon Films' silly cheesy plots to amateur romances to somewhere in a Russian studio fairy tale of the 1960s. Almost everyone already knows how this came about, that creative and acting disagreements played a role, reboots that some actors haven't yet returned to, and perhaps Lester and Donner's different visual approach to filmmaking with comics. The result is nothing but self-aggrandizing camp with a screenplay so incredibly cobbled together (Mario Puzo wrote it for 600,000, it was 550 pages long, and Donner and Mankiewicz insist that not a single sentence from it was used in any of the installments) that the only way to really enjoy the film is to watch it, pick at moments like driving away from the North Pole in a car, Superman's agonized expression as he lifts an elevator just weeks after having straightened out the California tectonic fault before dinner, or his shitty superhuman dick moves like his amnesiac kiss of Lois Lane after he's fucked her, she's having a hard time taking it and he doesn't want to deal with it.

[SE] A giant piece of filmmaking that, in its fragmentation and ambition, reminded me perhaps only of Jackson's King Kong or Snyder's Batman vs Superman. Just as the setting changes several times, the spirit of the film changes completely. Sixties pulp sci-fi, rural American melodrama among the wheat fields, the hectic journalistic on-the-grid world of seventies New York, and finally a monumental heroic spectacle with a cartoon villain where anything is possible because literally anything is possible here. Donner himself has admitted that at some points seven crews worked simultaneously over each other, and he went straight into filming the second part (a fact that I thought had only become a habit with LOTR) and still managed to have a falling out, as it happens, with studio representatives, so much that they didn't say a word to each other, and Richard Lester, who was originally sent to mediate between the opposing parties, eventually had to finish the second part as director. The film thus has all the prerequisites for not holding together. And yet, thanks to how much time is devoted to the protagonist's backstory (ha ha) and how much life is in the civilian scenes, the whole story of the Übermensch (as Lois Lane, played by the excellent Margot Kidder, calls him), or more directly, the Son of God (as his adoptive parents like to think of him), isn't as funny as it might suggest. Unless, perhaps, you're the sort of person who wants some physical integrity from movies and scoffs at scenes in which the tectonic plates in the San Andreas Fault are straightened and the letters of the Hollywood sign are returned to their original place. Incidentally, it is in the scenes of the crowded New York streets and the wild newsrooms that one can read Donner's most important talent for the future, that of rendering in detail the chaotic liveliness of the big city, which he would later apply so much in the quadrology of Lethal Weapon.

The winged adage for (porn) directors is that the hardest work on set is with children and animals. And given that The Omen works the entire time either with one, the other, or a combination of both all the time, it's no wonder he was chosen to direct Superman for his next film. The Omen is clearly the biggest screenwriting splurge of the iconic Satanic trio (along with The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby), and it doesn't deny that it was made as a result of the general popularity of these themes and is heavily inspired by Friedkin's opus. Family crises, quests in the Holy Land, mysterious priests, there's a whole convenient package of artefacts for the Satanic sub-genre. But the script really doesn't make sense most of the time (the devil marks on photos how and when he's going to murder certain characters, what's that?) and after all, its author himself admitted he wrote it because he didn't have any cash and still marvels that people keep lapping up the brutishness. It's lifted up by the enthusiastic direction of the young Donner, who, apparently as a hopeful for becoming the next big name in New Hollywood, wasn't particularly limited in his methods and procedures by the studio, which makes the film, for example, have a really weirdly fast-paced editing track in places, even in scenes where I had trouble justifying it, yet also as a result it rather cleverly uses it to get out of a lot of scenes that would otherwise seem impossible to film without them looking ridiculous. Unfortunately, down the line it once again brings down the academic acting of almost everyone involved, and Gregory Peck reminds me in some ways of Petr Haničinec in The Woman Behind the Counter.