J*A*S*M

So, again without “horror elements”… yeah, right. It’s full of horror elements. But in today’s glut of uninteresting and generic movies about exorcism that look like carbon copies, I think this Spanish take on this tired topic is surprisingly refreshing. The climax, where the cards are put on the table, takes it up a few notches without the need of any action horror apocalyptic hell. Even though at first I was bored expecting it would another of the thousand variations of The Exorcist, the film gradually grabbed my attention and it pleasantly surprised me in the end. It’s more ambitions than you would expect. 7/10

Certainly, a notch or two better than the first ABCs. Mostly, because it lacks the shitty and embarrassing rubbish that pulled the first anthology down so much. Instead, the worst letters of this sequel (H, L, P, Y) are only boring and below-par, rather than unbearable crap that made me feel sorry for their creators. But also the opposite end of the quality spectrum is an improvement, the stories that I would call definitely good are more numerous than in the previous one (A, B, D, J, O, S, V, X, Z), while the rest are kinda “OK”. So, zero expectations and a pretty pleasant surprise.

Big warning for anyone who doesn’t like slow-burners (horror films where not much happens)! Avoid this film, because in this sense it’s extreme. Nothing happens, hardly anyone speaks (I doubt there were even fifty sentences in that hour and a half), the script had two pages, if there was any script to begin with. Nevertheless, it’s very atmospherically shot, with very atmospheric sound, it takes place in a nice horror setting (an abandoned mountain village) and in a nice time for horror (night, fog, rain). It doesn’t play with anything but atmosphere, but for me it was more than enough given the circumstances – a production with low budget, if any budget at all, without many of those annoying things typical of such productions, like bad actors, clumsy editing and attempts at special effects. This film made me very happy and I’m looking forward to the director’s next projects, but I will not recommend it to most other people. It would terribly bore ten out of nine random viewers.

So far, the bullshit of the year and I don’t think anyone can beat it in the three months we have left. The promising Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo has perpetrated a thriller that’s ridiculously unlikely in every possible sense. The “formal” sense, the camera jumping between the windows in the protagonist’s laptop is not as conceptually focused as in this year’s much better The Den, it often feels absurd (modelling the frame from the boot of car), and by the end I wasn’t even sure whether I was still looking at the windows of the titular notebook, or if things had jumped to another device, or somewhere else entirely, or what. And that is only the tip of the iceberg. As a layman, I can’t judge the technical aspect – but even then I think most of the IT stuff was nonsense, though maybe, technically it’s actually possible, if the characters are leading experts or hackers... But then I would expect them to be more savvy in other things as well, but they aren’t. At all. The script is just awful, some of the twists and the clumsy reveals of the characters’ motivations made me almost laugh/cry hysterically. And most of the time it feels even more stupid than it actually is after the final reveal, and so much that I think many people will switch it off after half an hour, because they simply won’t want to watch such a bunch of idiots. And it’s actually that twist that brings the rating up to a merciful two stars, it turns an “absurdly idiotic film” into an “absurdly jumbled film” (where the main plot structure turns out to be relatively rational, though tragically unauthentic and unconvincing), which makes the diagnosis a little less serious.

Feminist absurdity that’s not smart enough, but also takes itself too seriously, and in the end is just ridiculous.

Unfortunately, this didn’t got further than the idea. I love this kind of cheap, mysterious and potentially paranoid indies like House Haunting or Enter Nowhere, but this film doesn’t deliver anything effective. The craftsmanship started to piss me off even before anything mysterious happened. I can accept the cheap jump-scare of one character accidentally scaring another once or twice, but this film greatly exceeds the limit of the tolerable and on top of that, it wants to look very serious.

I’d always had Polanski as a competent filmmaker, but so far none of his films had managed to captivate me. Between him, as a creator, and me, as a viewer, I’d always felt some sort of barrier that wouldn’t let me tune into the same vibes. Until now. Bitter Moon finally did it. I really dove into this study about an unhealthy relationship during a sea cruise, and I enjoyed it. The experience was both pleasant and unpleasant at the same time.

The 4.7/10 rating in IMDB is a lot more accurate than the multiple four stars here. A long-winded film that lacks a spark, where a couple of gratuitous brutal scenes are hidden under a layer of wannabe intelligent psychological quotes from the murder’s “diary”. But under that layer of poser pseudo encumbrance and brief episodes brutality, the film is empty, totally empty.

Jack Black is almost annoyingly unrestrained for my taste, but under the baton Linklater, even this plot cliché with a not very likeable protagonist ends up being 100% effective. Nice, non-conflicting film.

Finally I can watch this famous film as it should be: in peace, in the original language and without any interruptions from beginning to end… and it’s such a classic Ron Howard, when he has a solid script in his hands. Perfectly executed, though not entirely captivating. It’s missing a WOW! moment.