Othello

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.

A thoroughly buried hebephile bizarreness that, although released in the US in two DVD editions at the start of the millennium, the road to release is now a very thorny one. Not surprisingly, it's not far removed from nightmares in which Long Live Ghosts! descends into lurid porn to watch a horribly rumpled Bronson (he and Donner reportedly didn't get on too well during filming) being jumped on by the sixteen-year-old jail bait Susan George, who's acting like she’s ten. Twinky does, however, have one iron in the fire, namely the totally immature Donner's direction, who here, especially through editing, tries a lot of oddball techniques that mostly make no narrative or conceptual sense at all, and most likely he is using them in an attempt to smuggle a sort of sense of youthful whimsy into the film. Something like when Janák, who is thirty-six years old, rejuvenated a scene in The Rafters by zooming in on the DJ with a camera that was a bit crooked. Donner gets it right here once (the dialogue at the crosswalk with passing cars), the rest of the time you stare at it in confusion like you're watching Last Year at Marienbad.

The attempt to continue the frat-pack tradition of world-wise bachelors with a drink and a cigarette who are thrown into a whirlwind of events far beyond them is met here with the nonsensical cartoonishness of crazy comedy. Which means that, in addition to the constant barrage of jokes, there has to be room for a demonstration of the protagonists' abilities (Sammy Davis Jr. with his musical interlude) and charm (Peter Lawford well I don’t know), which makes for a serious De Palma-esque life-saving sequence. As much as the script isn't completely dumb otherwise, cleverly working in a few running jokes, and the verbal zingers have some juice at times, once it gets to the action sequences where the bad guys fall to the ground half a meter before a bowling ball reaches them and the protagonists throw drums at them in the knight's hall for some reason (???), it's impossible to ignore what shitty, muddy filmmaking this is.

My theory was that during the space race boom, NASA commissioned a popularization film that would justify the giant investment in starflight to the common working folk through a reminiscent melodrama about the brave men behind the stick and their terrified wives waiting patiently at the stove. I was therefore quite surprised to learn that in fact the subject matter had been there first, and that the documentary form of the film was in fact because producer Bob Hope had secured the support of the Pentagon for it, and through them NASA and the USAAF, who supplied a lot of actual footage of test launches and flights, around which the rest of the original film's plot was then simply wrapped. The result is appropriately bizarre, with long technical scenes of dramatically measuring cabin pressure and switching between communication channels interspersed with theatrical kisses, fatherly monologues, or the angry smashing of a telescope by a child who no longer wants to be an astronaut. It doesn't hold together one bit, but for aviation buffs of a certain era, this may be quite the rarity porn.

An aging bank robber who has stolen $9 million from safes so far but hasn't spent a shekel of it because he's been living off the paycheck he got in the Marines in the early 90s this whole time, falls in love with a single divorced receptionist and decides to leave his past behind. Instead of donating the accumulated money to, I don't know, the needy, the community, organizations that care for the underprivileged, he decides to turn himself in and give it back to justice, whereupon things start happening. Lol, who’s writing this for God's sake? In my day, all sorts of wackiness used to run in cinemas too, but similar low-budget delusions about four characters and one stupidly edited fight were pretty reliably reserved for the dusty corners of video stores, where they had numbers available for pickup even on the Friday night before Christmas. Couple that with Gemini Man's most hideous cinematography, and we're sad to admit that cinema distribution couldn't have said goodbye worse in 2020.

There's more than one clue that the overall result was cut till it smoked, so the film doesn't reveal what it is until the very end, which is its big saving grace, because it's nothing more than a therapeutic monologue by a middle-aged man who finds a wife, a job, and thus a zest for life. In short, like something out of a magazine. But until then, thankfully the film (perhaps unintentionally) pretty much masks what it's about, still acting as exposition most of the time and involving us with more or less unrelated episodes that have momentum, wit, and are pretty well shot.

Not only because of the footage used, the film reminded me a lot of the prologues of the sex scenes of those ambitious 80's porn movies. It's so stupidly acted, everything around it seems so much like an apathetic backdrop, all the characters are such awful stereotypes. Except for David's mother. Director, no director, it strikes me as a calculated melding of contemporary European film trends, i.e. retro, coming of age, and queer. With all their usual crutches.

An old musician reminiscing about the old days. Because he's a guitarist, he's nestled between guitars. Because he's old, the camera rarely leaves his face. Because he used to get high like crazy in his day, he sometimes stops making sense. Because he's finally gotten over it, he has to hold the kids at the end and sing a melancholy song about hope.

Actually a very simple study of life after life of an ordinary man, which captivated me with its patience (I could watch the methodical work in a slaughterhouse for many minutes), the familiar setting (the Slovenian countryside is nothing like ours) and the aesthetic possibilities of 16mm film stock. Even though the director claims that it wasn’t the aesthetics he was going for in this case, he only wanted to make more difficult to orient in time in the film.

The first half is dominated throughout by Werich's bravura portrayal of the decadent, spoiled, and childish emperor, through which, incidentally, he brilliantly revives archaic vocabulary ("there will be no hackles"). The second half, crammed with the constructivist cackling of a street-wise baker, gets on the nerves a bit in places. Not perhaps because of what he’s preaching about (the times demanded that we just try it), but how he does it in a self-aware and transparent way. One can get past this, however, by purely objectifying scenes like "the protagonist gets confused by the color red and a plum, so he starts singing, without anyone asking, in honor of the utopian beauties of socialism." Hand on heart, who among you has never had that happen?