It is not a spoiler in 2025 that the message of Luc Besson's 1997 film The Fifth Element is "Love". The fifth element itself ( a revelation in the end of the film ) appears to be Love. And the thesis is that Love is the thing that can defeat the evil in the world. But looking at the film and the behind the scenes drama around it, you can say that Besson didn't really mean love in its purest sense. But he was instead preaching a Bonobo Philosophy. Where "love" or in modern language sex, is used to deescalate conflict. Bonobos are known to fuck each other instead of fighting with each other, making themselves more peaceful. Looking at how horny The Fifth Element ( and Luc Besson ) is, the Bonobo philosophy theory sounds to be a much more plausible reading of the film. Making it very tragic indeed.
I remember sitting at the entrance to a local cinema near me, shivering from a new kind of depression. I was waiting to enter the screening of Avatar: The Way Of Water, which was released in cinema just after The Fabelmans. The previous film I have seen in that very cinema, maybe already a week before that, was The Fabelmans and that dreadful feeling I had was caused by that movie. I was committing an act of masochism going back to cinema right after the trauma I experienced, and I was pretty sure Avatar 2 would only make it worse. I didn't care. I went anyway. Thank god that James Cameron decided to limit references to himself to a few nods to Titanic and stuff, and instead made a movie that is pretty much designed as a joyride. I don't know if I was alive today if Avatar 2 was anything like The Fabelmans.
In my review of Transformers 4 I touched upon the uncanny resemblance of it to Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones. I have not seen the movie when I did that. I knew it existed. I knew what it was about. I've only seen it now, for the first time. And the uncanny resemblance ( as in, the father is played once again by Mark Wahlberg and the villain is played once again by Stanley Tucci and we have Steven Spielberg's involvement ) is rather strange. It begs a rather profound question, what was the point to make the movie?
So it's 1990 and Kathryn Bigelow writes and directs an action thriller about a police officer. The police officer is female and the movie almost refuses to sexualize her. Bigelow casts a nice half-Jewish girl Jamie Lee Curtis. And pretty much the whole movie, not a single shot of her emphasizes or admires her body ( apart from one sex scene where we see a very erotic closeup of her stomach ). Making that movie technically feminist. Few years later, in 1994, as James Cameron ( who was married to Bigelow between 1989 and 1991 ) is trying to find the actor to play the wife in his film True Lies. He is reminded of Blue Steel by Bigelow. And decides to cast Jamie Lee Curtis in his film. Giving us that very strange, almost pornographic scene where she does a very erotic strip-tease scene with Arnold Schwarzenegger. More than a decade later, in 2009, both Bigelow and Cameron make a movie. And both of those movies are nominated for the best picture. Yet Bigelow takes home the price. Did Cameron lose due to his pussy curse?
Critics gave negative reviews to 2004 Tony Scott's film Man on Fire because of "grim story that gets harder to take the longer it goes on". Are you fucking serious? How then Lars Von Trier movies get good reviews? Something isn't quite right here. To be frank, the film is very ultra-cinematic. Which could rub some critics the wrong way. Scott doesn't just direct the shit out of it. He also edits the shit out of it. Making one of the coolest directed films in existence. Which if you think about it, isn't particularly what critics find as a serious picture. And yes, the film is grim. At times it feel like a horror film. Not just a thriller. But the film is a rather satisfactory experience.
Freedom is something we all fight for. Some succeed more than others. But there is no fully Free society yet in the world. By fully Free I don't mean a total anarchy. This would not be fully Free since it would be possible for people to have power over other people. Which is not freedom already. It's a different form of control. But fully Free means that every person would have the most freedom that person can have without it becoming power. This is very far from the situation right now.
2016's Steven Spielberg movie The BFG ( or the Big Friendly Giant ) is about a relationship between a little girl ( played by Ruby Barnhill ) and a giant old man ( played by Sir Mark Rylance in his second collaboration with Spielberg ). At some point the movie becomes about a conspiracy to manipulate the Queen of England herself ( played by Penelope Wilton ) to use her help, so that haters of BFG's relationship with the girl will be defeated with military force. So obviously it begs the question: Is this movie actually about Jeffery Epstein?
Am I bad guy for being so positive about a movie of a person I do not care much about? Well, there is nothing to fret, as the 3D film directed by Billie Eilish is palatable for everyone looking for entertainment. Certainly no masterpiece, the film still hold water in its flow. 3D doesn't work if there is no parallax. And parallax just out there doesn't work if there is no reason for it to exist. The documentary provides ten times that.
It is abhorrent to be living in times where political structures poised into existence on ideas of Liberty advocate for removal of essential Freedoms. United States and Europe both have their form of "chat control" currently being debated. And country leaders see in this total mass-stalking nothing but a tool to fight some, scary sounding form of possible oppression. They've convinced the public that they are right, so much that when we are trying to come up with a reason of why what they are doing is wrong, we fail even to start the train of thought. Their justification appears to be solid. It appears that there is nothing to do, but to shut up, agree and do nothing about it. Today I am about to shutter their arguments once and for all.
Often it is required of a storyteller to say less in order to say more. Steven Spielberg had to censor the most gruesome parts of the holocaust in order to make a movie that was actually watchable, and his intuition was arguably right. The movie ended up being a hit, exposing millions upon millions of people to the the holocaust. But it wasn't the horror. It was a watered down version, made so people would not be too upset watching it. The reality of the situation was so much worse that Spielberg didn't even think a movie showing the actual truth was possible. Nobody would be brave or masochistic enough, he thought, to actually see it. A similar story happened to Dunkirk, another World War II movie, this time by Christopher Nolan, who deliberately avoided the worst aspects of a war film to make a film which the audience could watch without taking their eyes from the screen, and as a result, a film that is arguably scarier because of that. Nolan's masterful management of tension is so good that the movie doesn't need violence and blood to be visceral. And yet, to some extent the movie is a watered down version of what war supposed to be. And some argue it is a lesser film because of it.
So a real cinema movie project is being developed, and as explained in my previous article about it I don't have the money to shoot a real chase scene. Instead I gonna use CGI as much as possible, to cut down the costs ( but not my sanity ).
The 1970s are an interesting time when it comes to cinema history. It is the time after the code was changed into the MPAA rating system ( allowing more violence, nudity and harsh language on the screen ) and yet before new blog-baster Hollywood was born. 1976's Carrie by Brian De Palma was already released after the 1974 Steven Spielberg sensation Jaws. But still before George Lucas broke the planet with his Star Wars. Everybody knew the movies were intense at that time. Some of the most depressing shit came out at the 1970s. And with it, there was also Carrie. A psycho-sexual revenge-tale about child-abuse.
As I explained in my article on the matter a quality of a film could be measured in how well it "corrupts" the audience. And being a motherfucking genius Paul Thomas Anderson decided to show everybody, who's the boss. His 2021 film Licorice Pizza which was nominated for the Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay at the Oscars. And has a fairly decent 90% score on Rottent Tomatoes, is doing the same thing as Luc Besson's Leon: The Professional, but better. To put it lightly, it shows a romance between a minor and an adult. And it says that "it's okay, actually".
While Brian De Palma was making Carrie ( as a part of his Alfred Hitchcock imitation films ), Alfred Hitchcock himself was making his last picture Family Plot, where he used the composer from Steven Spielberg's JawsJohn Williams for the score. De Palma, probably knowing Williams through Spielberg, decided to mess around with Hitchcock himself, making a sort of yet another Carrie ( a film about people with superpowers ) but this time hiring John Williams himself for the score. And weirdly enough ( while Spielberg was finishing Close Encounters and starting 1941 where his camera sexually obsessed over De Palma's GF at the time Nancy Allen ) De Palma hires Spielberg's girlfriend at the time Amy Irving for the lead role.