Othello

Jee-woon Kim's ability to make the viewer tolerate unbelievable plot twists and WTF characters and their motivations lies in creating a fictional micro-universe that, if you embrace it, gave you the experience the director wanted you to have. The Last Stand may have had all the makings to follow its predecessors in this, but somehow it all got screwed up. The FBI command room destroys the illusion of the fatalistic isolation of the heroes, the governor is an extremely inept actor (one you'd almost forget), and no one has drilled into the director's head enough that there's a marked difference between making a movie in Korea and the US. That's why some of the action scenes look pretty lame, even as the camera whizzes past on a crane when the characters are just standing around and talking. As a result, The Last Stand doesn't so much resuscitate Arnold's career, but the era of 90s B-movies with Van Damme, where main street stands in for an entire city, the supporting characters shoot the bad guys with one hand, fall in love with each other with the other, and the heroes don't give their honor away for free. I don't blame the director, though. Given that he still didn't know a word of English during filming, the blame clearly lies with his translator.

A perfect notch in the movie set list for the US Patriot Corps or the White Aryan Resistance. However, I can finally say with my fourth Almodovar film that my dislike of his work is not just subjectively due to his choice of themes that keep repeating themselves and don't really interest me. He's also a pretty incompetent director, you know? For example, his editing skills are equivalent to my elementary school crochet works in home ec classes, so you can see that he wants badly to get at least a C, but you can't light it, it's dead wood. And the camera again keeps trying. Here, for example, he conjures up an impressive shot with mise-en-scene and leaves it in front of everyone's eyes long enough for them to realize how much the cameraman was messing with it. But narratively, it's meaningless. It's like a fishbowl without the fish. And that good script? Like where Satan comes in ex machina at the end and Clarissa explains it to us in 20 minutes of dialogue? Have you seen Rambo lately?

I don't give a fuck about some logic and I honestly don't care how much an adult Kevin McAllister could spread around a house in two hours just to get it in there. What irks me more is how the film tries to be enlightened and innovative in the slasher genre and ends up piling on the same bunch of clichés that don't define this subgenre (get a clue already), but instead relegate it to the level of the already seen a billion times. There's that horny teenage duo again, there's that stupid hope in the arrival of a cop, there's that ending sucked out of a finger or something. Oh well.

I'll warn you up front that I just supremely like Ill Manors – the film has balls, it's not afraid to experiment technically, the actors are decent, more than one situation is perfectly escalated (the execution by the river is a frontrunner for me), and the gritty in da hood atmosphere is quite authentic. Plus, the whole shebang cost GBP 100,000. To give you an idea, that's half of what a single dialogue scene in Sherlock Holmes costs. The cons of Ill Manors can practically all be put down to the fact that Ben Drew wrote and wrought the whole thing himself. And it's actually kind of fun to pick out the little flaws. The script, for example, creates a good half of the events through horrible coincidences, which is really the stuff of a first/second semester creative writing course. Equally ill-fitting is the director's attempt to somehow cinematically wrap up the whole mosaic at the end, which no one really wants him to do, and the fact that the main character has a stronger moral code than I do doesn't help the believability either. But still...

It's hard to find a better subject for a demonstration of the technological advances of high-frequency cameras than a fascist enforcer, where even a guy like Almódovar could have a go at psychology. Which is nicely hinted at, among other things, by the scene where the telepath declares that she feels something like-... and is promptly cut off by her superior, and the film never returns to this theme throughout. Who wants it to, either, when Dredd's means of expression is catered for throughout the running time by his trusty hand cannon, which has a small black hole in the ammunition chamber, so he can mow down an entire house with one handheld multi-function pistol (OBI Fall 2012/Winter 2013 catalogue), which he explains in advance to all the occupants with the courtesy of a civil servant. Then one will forgive even the fact that Karl Urban's helmet is a tad large. Dredd is a cinephilic B-movie, fondling every shot, creating the effectiveness of the action sequences not by editing but by framing the shot, and most importantly a film in which the use of spectacular slow motion is grounded in a narrative structure that is simply revolutionary. And Lena Headey is nipping cruelly at the heels of Batman's Bane as one of this year’s baddies.

Bekmambetov's casting of pearls before swine. Indeed, the magic of Vampire Hunter consists in particular of how it resists all attempts at cinematic analysis. Not that the finger-prodding of history serving as a backdrop for a supremely B-movie spectacle is anything unprecedented (Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS based its entire career on it... well, okay, maybe more of a D movie), but perhaps no one has ever worked with such a premise like Bekmambetov. Indeed, Abraham Lincoln abounds with the same devices as the director's previous opuses, namely the elusiveness of the fictional universe, the physics in service of the scenes and not the other way around, that very unique sense of humor (that is, unless you find comical a scene where the protagonist holds his opponent's head in a forge while diligently stomping on the bellows, then yes, the film is lacking in lighter moments), an incredibly unscrupulous handling of the connection between fiction and reality, or characters that do not allow the audience to empathize but force them instead to take the position of observers of the events. In this case, unfortunately, the film cannot even rely on its actors. The result is a film that works far more naturally when there are gunshots through the eye, horses getting tossed about, or trains getting picked up than when the protagonist's son dies and black men rise up against the slave driver’s whip. Indeed, the crux here lies in the incredibly brilliant action sequences, where this Kazakh visual pervert wipes the eyes of all directors who frame one or two establishing shots with an entire scene, while here the drooling Bekmambetov creates a gallery of visual perfectionism with every shot, creating a pure cinematic comic book. What's particularly funny here is how the use of 3D effects falls especially on the bad side, which is then brutally destroyed by horizontal action through the main character. Oh yeah, and the film cost less than 70 million to make. That’s right, not even close to half the budget of the last Pirates of the Caribbean (where nothing at all happens). The last question: who is the target audience...? Probably not "we're going to see a movie based on a comic book", probably not "they're showing something about Abraham Lincoln", and "I heard there’s a new vampire movie" is probably not going to be exactly the brass ring either. So the target audience will be mostly "come see the new Bekmambetov!"

Satoshi Kon's problem with Paprika is mainly that he's envious of his audience's work, so like a sulking little child he decides he's just going to get something out of it too and starts fiddling with the script. A script that, while appearing genuinely complex and Inception-like, helps itself move the plot along with basic screenwriting crutches (deus ex machina, lack of causality, terrible coincidences), which it masks with anarchic visuals and a theme of "where anything is possible". He simply decided to enjoy limitless dreaminess in his own way. The problem, then, may be for the viewer who approaches Paprika primarily as a film. On the other hand, he admits it himself; for example, the lines with the detective at the dawn of the big city, kissing a comely victim while clutching a six-shooter in the other hand are not just bullshit for the audience, but a real deliberate cathartic element. "We’ve got to go. The happy ending is getting closer." PS: Anyone who didn't sing at the end credits is a moron.

Pineapple Express in bullet points: 1) It's like watching your stoner buddies who won’t even give you a puff and you realize how much you actually hate them. Not for being stingy, but kind of in general. 2) All the characters here, except the main duo, are absolutely horribly written, their relationship sort of sketched out but supremely dysfunctional (the gangster and the cop – WTF?), so you either hate them (in the way you hate a complete stranger who accidentally bumps into you on the sidewalk and doesn't say anything) or you don't give a shit about them and you're just pissed that they're occupying the overlong running time 3) absolutely terrible editing, which imho was caused by one of the main characters reliably stumbling in the dialogue and dragging the action scenes (both of them – and bad ones), which implies 4) the film has NO dynamics – the dialogue feels improvised, which is a detriment here, the motion jokes escalate absolutely wretchedly (unlike the excellent trailer), and for every good joke there's ten minutes of wallowing in shit 5) if you’re making a comedy about stoners, you should focus on the contrasts and clashes between the world behind the green curtain and the normal world, not the "when a reindeer meets a reindeer" method. 6) So as not to just throw stones, Pineapple Express isn't completely stupid garbage, it does have its scripted strong moments, like the heroes arguing in the style of "Your wannabe sucks, my wannabe is better", but the filmmakers don't seem to be too amused by that so they go back to the original concept of "Hey dude... moth" – so we're back to point one. 7) Apatow could use some friends already.

After watching Citizen Kane, a lot of contemporary movies just started making sense to me. Plus, I realized that Fincher was actually making remakes.

A brutal screenwriting construct whose dialogue rustles the paper so badly that it nearly drove me away from the monitor. Whereas Dogville herded its concept through a distinctive main character, Grace here (played by the unimpressive Howard – incidentally, she must have been crammed to the gills with hormones in Spider-Man 3, otherwise it's hard to explain her C's there, but that's just the comment of my internal cinephile) takes a back seat to collective events, but Trier was unable to causally catch hold of them in a way that didn't sound like mere preaching. What’s more, he no longer makes practical use of the theatrical form for narrative, which was one of the strongest centers of gravity of his previous opus. Sure, Manderlay is an intelligent film, but perhaps the thing that gets to you the most is that Trier is, with all due respect, a crappy storyteller, and that's rubbed in your face disproportionately often in this film. So I'm glad he's now abandoned this trilogy and gone back to cutting clitoris and throwing alien planets at the globe again, even though there will probably never be another Europa trilogy. P.S. I apologize for terms like construct, causality, narrative, and Spider-Man 3.