Othello

All you have is a skeleton crew and a script pulled out of your ass. Who you gonna call? Michael Bay! Ambulance is a film that was made out of Bay's simple need above all to do something at a time when there was nothing to do, and the way the film was made in spite of that can often be so painfully seen that it comes across as a bit guerrilla. Especially during the shootout at the bank, you see crew members or security guards guarding the set in almost every other shot. At the same time, the script gives the impression that it was written on the spot, and anyone who has seen a single movie about paramedics and cops and robbers and is also fixated on realism and logic will die inside a bit here, because everything here sort of lands well on the first try and moves on without a second thought. Combined with the pacing of the film, it all feels spontaneous, like little boys playing cops and robbers in the backyard, creating subplots on the fly without thinking about their purpose to the story thus far, just so they can get back to riding and shooting. For me that's a perfectly fine way to make an action movie, and when the only director on the set who's been yelling into a megaphone enters the picture, we're in for a boogaloo, with drones and cars racing each other and all the sparkling, banging, dusting, blurring, and backlighting, where the important thing is not what exploded, but that it exploded. No one puts the camera down as much as Bay, few people today understand how much an action movie relates to the environment in which it takes place. And you all surely must be looking at it wrong, so pop open a beer, stick a smoke in the corner of your mouth, feet (in shoes) on the table, and give it another go! I want this place red by the end of the week, you hayseeds.

Apparently all the quality of the show was in that podcast that Netflix bought and handed over to a bunch of talentless fachidiots to execute. There are, in fact, a lot of tasty horror ingredients hiding here, which is such a sympathetic chronicle of 20th century American horror themes, and we find influences ranging from Lovecraft to The Twilight Zone to a fascination with the occult in the upper echelons of show business. The first episodes, which work with a lot of hints, still not connecting anything, instead trying to keep as many things under wraps as possible for as long as possible, are excellent and at times almost remind me of Lost Highway. But Archive 81 degenerates from the fourth episode onwards into a weary stodginess that lacks resources, courage, or any creative vision. What the fuck is the point of having a different screenwriter write a script for nearly every episode of a mere eight-part horror series anyway? Did I get caught watching some workshop? Fundamental errors in bullet points: 1) The series could have beautifully hidden its production limitations by working with film material, which the plot literally screams for. After all, we're watching a movie where the protagonist discovers mysterious events through the restoration of damaged camcorder tapes. Why can't it be a mystery horror mixed with found footage and even a silent black and white insert from the 1920s, where Episode 7 takes place? Well, because no one there has the guts to do that and they're afraid that switching between multiple formats and viewing angles would put unnecessary demands on the viewer's viewing experience. 2) I have eight hours to profile the characters, but I can't justify motivations for any of their actions other than family satisfaction. Again, this is probably so it can convene a television target audience who would have trouble relating to characters who embark on dangerous quests perhaps for the purpose of exploration, research, inner tension, or simple curiosity. 3) It would be great if Netflix could for once afford to cast, I don't know, actors in acting roles, because watching Dina Shibabi overact for hours makes me rethink my usual view that acting is an overrated cinematic discipline. Although I admit that anyone would probably struggle with a character this stupidly written. 4) Why do those witches look like they're from... ah, Rebecca Sonnenshine, shutting up now. 5) I'm sympathetic to stupid scripts, but when several stupid scripts by several people come crashing down on me within the same plot, the scenes where the analog film expert starts destroying hundreds of VHS tapes by randomly hitting them with a wrench, I'm like dude hit the brakes already.

Well, in essence, there was nothing to be done with it since the Notre Dame fire is a completely unrewarding situation cinematically. Everyone was evacuated in time, everyone was more or less unhurt, it was caused by a boring technical error, we all saw it from every angle in a first row seat, and it took place sometime in the early evening, so there was no time to forget that there wasn't actually any real drama. Not to mention, of course, the iconicity of the scene itself. But is that iconicity capable of wrapping an entire movie around itself? Uhhh, It's hard to say, Berg might have given it a go, but dude really, really, not a completely, but completely worn out Annaud. He probably simply realized that there's nothing to take from this, so he overwhelmed the film with absolutely awful mini-anecdotes about a frightened young fireman, a faithful young girl lighting a candle, a dramatic security guard hypnotizing a yellow button, a priest falling to his knees, and a spontaneously singing crowd under the cathedral, convincingly gazed upon with emotion and conviction by a fireman exhausted from the fire in the tower. The degree of cringe here is comparable to that famous subway scene in Wright's Darkest Hour, only stretched out to the length of the entire film. The filmmaker's cluelessness (culminating in a final shot of the firefighter putting out the fire, which is just a dramatic un-zooming and re-zooming of the camera on his face until the music ends) is then cemented by a soundtrack so epic that it feels like it's from a music bank, which is also revealed quite often by the fact that it's mostly pretty poorly used and tries to create epic scenes out of practically nothing. I normally reserve my boo! rating for films that somehow offend me personally, because I didn't think there was anything that was simply so poorly made that it wasn't also entertaining, thus forming an intersection between the poles of quality/non-quality. But Notre-Dame on Fire is truly just the worst kind of schlock movie where even death doesn't take (literally). Annaud's descendants should make sure that no one ever gets to see the films of his late period again.

A clever collaboration between the Icelandic Ministry of Culture and the Department of Tourism clearly intended to reduce the effects of overtourism to this Nordic island by portraying the suburbs of Reykjavik as the dismalands of Russian housing projects.

He handled the transition from animation to live action, he handled the transition from studio films to outdoor, he handled the breakup with his co-creator, he handled the huge budgets, the transition to the American way of production, and the attacks of Harvey Weinstein. In the end, it was Netflix that beat him creatively. Jeunet claimed in 2019 that he had been unable to find an investor for his next project for several years, and that he had Netflix as a last resort. There was a strong sense of reluctance to work under this studio, and I'm quite interested to see what their meetings with each other might have looked like. This also reveals an interesting paradox, where it's common knowledge that Netflix will give money to absolutely anything, while at the same time having a minimum of visually distinctive works in its portfolio. Because what has Jeunet been so far more than a formalist for whom every object in a scene was as important as any character. BigBug, with its setting on the stage of a single-family home, might have raised hopes that it would follow the dystopian Delicatessen, but the very first scene, which feels so fake, awkward, and lazily staged, will at most confuse us by telling us that the film is definitely set in the same late-capitalist universe as Iannucci's Avenue 5. Sadly, without Jeunet's previous magical stylings, suddenly all the nonsense, hysterics, and stupidity of the characters just feels silly, forced, and fake, because this time there's just the characters and nothing around them.

One of the most intense horror films I've ever seen, and the darkest denunciation of Hollywood since Lynch's Mulholland Drive or Inland Empire. I tried watching the film with a fever you and let me tell you, it's one big bad trip.

In a debate earlier this year, I was overruled in my opinion about the need to remove the stigma from sex work and make it more accessible by claims that expanding it would lead to deepening frustration on the part of their many clients unable to fulfill their romantic fantasies. But even though I ultimately nodded my agreement, I still side more with this film in the end. Indeed, its problems lie elsewhere. Because it is, of course, perfectly fine for a film to have a clear position on an issue it is trying to promote, but it should do so through its story, its narrative, and through its characters. Here, we can't avoid being wrapped up in a monologue at the end about what the film has actually been about all along, in case some dullard hasn't figured it out by now. Then the film just becomes a cliché of a self-important, encouraging YouTube video. Second, I have a problem with the position that we're all inherently beautiful, which just sounds like bad therapy. Look at the latest movies with the 60-year-old Emma Thompson. The woman is incredibly sexy just in the way she works her language, her body posture, her looks, how much you can feel her distinction and taste. That the film reduces her to a "shocking" full frontal scene at the end in the name of some universal human beauty is ultimately a cheap gesture and actually demeaning to her. PS: it's great that I can go to the cinema to see a film about two characters in one room while the new Andrew Dominik goes straight to TV.

TV series visuals, impotent record-scratch humor, and a tortured attempt at instant Japanese weirdness logically results in the most desperate train journey since the legendary Slovak Express. The film Bad Times at the El Royale often popped into my mind – for that too was an attempt at a Tarantino-esque screenplay with distinctive characters that failed on the grounds that, like here, it was written by a man who has spent most of his adult life in the back of an Uber somewhere scrolling through Instagram and doesn't know shit about how people work.

A strangely static Park variation on Basic Instinct, where I found at the end that I was focused on something other than what I should have been the whole time. Then I completely resonated with the last shot. PS: "After Parasite and Squid Game, another Korean phenomenon is taking the world by storm." – Man, it that really the best we can do?

Compared to all the other annoying monuments to rock-metal icons of the 70s-80s, Dio has the advantage of standing apart from all the excesses, however much he was actually the eye of the hurricane of the warmed-over stadium hedonism of the time. As a result, we don't face the otherwise typical contradiction where a celebratory documentary tries to keep the performer's brand alive as a salt of the earth and a good man, while at the same time not wanting to neglect the various controversial elements of his career that also made him famous, yet all in some sort of balance that doesn't offend so much anymore but at the same time doesn't detract from the illusion of unboundedness. Dio didn't bite anyone's head off or shove a shark down anyone's crotch, so at least this documentary gives us a relatively focused sense of who did what where and why. Of course, all of these facts are now being distributed by various more or less scary-looking people with grandfatherly appeasement. It's actually hilarious to watch how this infantile goblin in the garb of long-haired degenerates just wants to kill styrofoam Smaug dragons with a cardboard sword. Pimple-popping music nerds par excellence. But honestly, as shallow as his music is, and as much as this documentary is really just a glorified burial mound, I confess that through it I discovered that I actually like Ronnie James Dio for all his juvenile foolishness.