The Alienist

The show is good but my previous comment on the "Dark Materials" remains in force. Auteurs follow an absurd fashion which came with the GoT of the extremely dark palette that for minutes there is nothing to see on the screen other than a few reflections from random objects. Daniel Bruhl is a right typecasting but his acting is so overwhelmed by Evans, Fanning and even novice Rosy McEwen that otherwise well measured tempo and visuals miss the point. 

His dark materials.

Literally "His Dark Materials". The authors enthused by the GoT so much abused the flashback narrative and the dark palette that the story became incomprehensible for all but the most avid fans of Philip Pullman. 

Covid-19 Epidemic.

Movie theaters are closed. Have to review HBO and other TV shows. 

Undying appeal of the "Pretty Woman". Thirty years in the making.

The "whore with a golden heart" is as much of a Hollywood invention as a "gentleman gangster". Orson Welles who could not avoid knowing "the boys" as an entertainer in the 1930s New York had reported that compared with even smartest of them, a truck driver was an intellectual. I suppose that during after-Depression years, truck drivers were quite intelligent.

A real hooker meeting Richard Gere's character would probably concoct up a cockananny plot with her red neck boyfriend to part the amorous banker with his money. At least, a literary source for the Blau Angel, Professor Unrat, proposed exactly this outcome. Why then, with all its ridiculous improbabilities, the Pretty Woman remains a popular movie thirty years after the premiere? Obviously, because it is a Cinderella story sufficiently spiced for the modern audiences but insufficiently burdened with practical details to raise its parental warning label.

The New Pope by Paolo Sorrentino.

PS is simply genius, the only great Italian director who had burst out of confines of Apennines peninsula since the death of Federico Fellini 27 years ago. He is so weird, brilliant and nothing makes sense in these series until it finally does. Also he looks like a stray dog transmogrified into human form.

Uncut Gems

Perfectly made and flawlessly acted movie about people and situations you do not want to know anything about. Masterpieces of this genre were previously made by Charlie Kaufman ("Synecdoche"--a masterpiece, "Anomalisa"--well, not--come to mind) but above all--Gaspar Noe.

JoJo rabbit

I was extremely skeptical about the comedy on the subject of Nazism but the brilliance of Taika Waititi in telling this parable convinced me that it may be an ultimate humiliation for Hitler that in 75 years after the war he will is played by half-Maori, half Russian Jew.

Though not a forgotten masterpiece as his "Hunt for the Wildepeople", this movie is sufficiently sound to stand on its own. Even street hangings of the "enemies of the Reich", which happened in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus but never in Germany proper, are not terribly out of place because, otherwise, the tale of unparalleled brutality of Nazism had to be told by un-cinematic means. And this was accomplished in one stitch by the child recognizing his executed mother by her red shoes. There are other out-of-place relics like the provincial city half-occupied by Americans and half--by the Soviets in reference to post-War Berlin, which can be only understood as a parable but, magically, TW holds all this nonsense unevenly together.