JFL

One could easily give in to the temptation to declare Peele the new Tarantino in an attempt to elevate him as one of the most distinctive and unique talents of the contemporary American overground. Except the fundamental difference between the two filmmakers is that Tarantino is a self-regarding nerd who adores the mythology of cinema and fictional heroes, whereas Peele turns to reality, as he is not only a cinephile, but also a creator who reflects on society and the bizarre paradoxes of its apparatuses and status quo. Therefore, his films are not merely sophisticatedly enthusiastic games played with film formulas and eclectic monuments to fringe movies and filmmakers, but biting satires and multi-layered works that can be simultaneously entertaining and chilling. Peele’s third feature-length project is fascinating as a uniquely unpredictable narrative that builds a stunning monument to cinema and its pioneers on a foundation of mystery and contact with something alien. In his equivalent of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Peele doesn’t go the way of Tarantino’s illusory fiction and enchanted, adoring pathos, but creates a film that consciously works with paradoxes and contradictions. Nope is thus both a sci-fi movie and a western dealing with the bitterness of the entertainment industry, which catches itself in its own trap as it grooms viewers who demand ever newer and more spectacular attractions. It thus seems inevitable that this changing industry should leave its old strivers and pioneers in the dust. Peele pays homage to the obsession with the perfect shot, but he paradoxically does so with the background of a time when that perfection is already artificial and created without risk thanks to computer-generated effects and digital post-production. What is most surprising about Nope is that, though it deals with old Hollywood and its magic and pathos, it does not address tearful old men, but conveys that ethos to the younger generation weaned on YouTube and hanging around on social networks every day.

This music documentary with a wonderful sound mix for cinemas provides a magnificent audio-visual concentrate of Bowie as an icon, personality, star and artist. Hardcore fans must go to see this with the knowledge that will only remember and enjoy the object of their passion on the big screen, because the film will give them little new that they don’t already know. Conversely, I can say from my own position that the ideal audience is those who don’t know a lot about Bowie and know a few of his songs. For them, Moonage Daydream will be an intense extract of all of the emotions his fans experienced with the master. Like a trip through the decades, transformations and constant evolution and maturation of perfection, this expressive scrapbook is utterly impressive in and of itself and as a representation of everything that Bowie was.

Mr. Oizo remixes Contempt, or when sur/Reality dreams of watching a good movie on VHS, but this is just one mouse in the narrative maze of a discombobulated filmmaker in a creative crisis. Or a meta mind-fuck that will give some people a brain rash while others laugh at it in the same way they laugh at one of the protagonist’s screams.

When, at the very beginning of Strangler vs. Strangler, a title appears declaring that it is a “comedy of terrors”, it is equally an instruction and an intentionally false suggestion for the audience. Slobodan Šijan actually made both a deviant time capsule and a provocative satire that takes swipes at many of the authorities of the state and regional apparatus in the former Yugoslavia at the time. However, he dressed it up in the guise of a murder ballad that is simultaneously an absurd farce and disturbingly morbid, which in terms of style and narrative may evoke the more recent, similarly eccentric caricatures of society in the form of Bad Boy Bubby and Delicatessen. To a certain extent, Šijan based his film on the classic M – at least, he admits that he cast Taško Načić in the lead role because Načić reminded him of Peter Lorre. On closer inspection, we find several points of contact between the two films, as well as clever differences. Like Fritz Lang, Šijan portrays an entire city and its social structures through the search for the murderer, but with the crucial difference that communist Belgrade is unable to unite against a common enemy because, like the film’s main characters, it is mired in anxieties, frustrations and self-absorption.

Though viewers are rarely able to find their bearings in the narratives of Godfrey Ho’s films, they never get bored. There are a few legitimate film productions in Ho’s filmography, such as the excellent Ultra Force 3, but they are rather anomalies. Actually, Ho became one of the key dreck kings of video-rental shops through his association with the mafia hustler Joseph Lai and his company IFD Films & Arts Ltd. Their modus operandi consisted in buying up the international rights to several Korean and Taiwanese action C-movies, editing them and often even combining them, adding approximately 10%-20% of newly filmed shots, and slapping the whole thing together with a new soundtrack with English dubbing. In this way, they created many dozens of films, which they then proffered to western video-distribution companies. This practice led many to accuse Ho and Lai of plagiarism, parasitism and mangling of films. But their calculating nature was matched by their ingenious assessment of the requirements of the video market, or rather one of its essential target groups. Children, particularly pre-pubescent boys, enthusiastically devoured action movies and didn’t care if they were watching an ambitious, perfectly crafted blockbuster or a third-rate clusterfuck, as long as the movies provided the desired attractions. And in that respect, Ho and Lai’s joint creation is an absolutely perfect product that contains the maximum amount of attractions and the absolute minimum of everything else. Ninja Thunderbolt was a major milestone in Ho’s filmography, as it was his firm film in which ninjas were prominently featured. Lai allegedly saw the strong demand for Cannon Films’ Enter the Ninja at the Marché du Film in Cannes and decided to latch onto the ninja fad. Ho then rearranged the Taiwanese action-crime flick To Catch a Thief into a hotchpotch in which the dubbing and additional scenes with Richard Harrison provide an insanely naïve and campily entertaining storyline about ninjas. The rest of the film also manages to pull its own weight. Thanks to its frantic editing, the film jumps from one wild sequence to another and serves up exaggerated action scenes and chases, bedroom scenes, synchronised swimming, skiing, a spectacular fight involving dried peas and ninjas on roller skates. What the movie – both the Taiwanese source work and Ho’s fan-edit – lacks in terms of budget and filmmaking competence, it makes up for with manic editing that has no regard for continuity, unity of place or the internal logic of the sequences. Which, again, may outrage the adult smartasses, but for the ten-year-old boys in the age of video-rental shops and today’s lovers of trash flicks, it is an awesome spectacle.

“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” This applies not only to The Dark Knight but also to series. After a quarter of a century, South Park has offered up a tremendous number of things that deserve our admiration – from amazing jokes, frantic twists and brilliant storytelling, through the testing of the limits of television entertainment for an adult audience and the gradual development of the show’s technical production to meet a weekly schedule, which enabled it to address topical issues, to the grandiose transformations of the concept and its own world and the rules thereof (as in the brilliant 14th season reflecting, among other things, dark and gritty superhero movies). However, it is also appropriate to acknowledge that all of these many highlights are a thing of the past. It could generously be said that South Park, like The Simpsons, which it has criticised many times, has inevitably become another perpetually running series. But it’s not just that the novelty has worn off, the boundaries have been broken or the audience has become desensitised. Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s creation stayed on top for a surprisingly long time because it was able to evolve, transform and reflect itself. Nevertheless, in recent years it has unfortunately become apparent – or even worse, it has been denied – that South Park is no longer progressively iconoclastic, but simply boastfully coarse, and that it doesn’t disturb the status quo, but lives off of it and needs it for its own survival.

The most perfect form and absolute pinnacle of sports drama. Every viewer will have several other films in the genre that remain more intense for them in terms of their personal experience (in my case, for example, that would be the Japanese film Gachi Boy), but Warrior represents the incredibly flawless use and fulfilment of all of the elements and techniques of its category. In order to lead viewers to sympathise with both main protagonists, the narrative brilliantly composes and conveys information for the purpose of establishing and deepening their motivations and personal levels. The cast features not only Tom Hardy as a man who anxiously keeps his heart hidden away and the excellent Joel Edgerton, who radiates that captivating combination of intelligence, strength and warmth needed for the role of a likable dad and teacher who also happens to be an MMA fighter. This perfectly tuned emotion-generating machine runs at full throttle right from the start, so it is all the more surprising when it shifts into an even higher gear in the final third of the elimination bout. The tremendously dynamic camerawork and quick editing can be egregiously wild because the precise sound mix, screenplay and directing ensure that everything remains clear. The filmmakers not only make excellent use of the roles of the sporting-event hosts, but they also employ all of the preceding motifs to inundate viewers with stunning physical acts and emotional content. The fact that this film didn’t appear in Czech cinemas at the time, even though the rights to it had been bought here, remains one of the greatest wrongs perpetrated by the local distributor. I’m thus all the more pleased that we were able to right that wrong with at least one screening at the Aero cinema, because on the big screen, Warrior is a truly monumental and intense experience.

After the roughie debut Hot Summer in the City, which today elicits disgust as a racist exploitation flick and as an alleged image of its creator’s submissive fantasies, Gail Palmer set out on a stellar career in mainstream porn chic production. In this respect, Erotic Adventures of Candy is a focused star-making project, both for lead actress Carol Connors and for the director/screenwriter/producer herself. Palmer serves as the film’s narrator and even speaks to the camera at the beginning, thus presenting herself and her perspective. Thanks particularly to the filmmaker’s onscreen presence, the concept of adapting Voltaire’s Candide as an exaggerated porn-bimbo comedy thus proves to be an imaginatively daring approach, making it possible to make a porn flick that fulfils all of the standards of the time in terms of style, the required reach and the mandatory sex scenes, as well as in terms of gender clichés, while also exaggeratedly and self-reflexively subverting everything. Candy thus goes out into the wide world from her family’s home, where her strict upbringing by a prudish father made her a naïve girl. The trysts in which she later engages revolve around the absurdly moronic ways that men try to get between her legs. Despite Candy’s stylisation into a cartoonishly naïve bimbo, she never comes off as a victim. In fact, the director focuses mainly on her and her pleasure during the sex scenes. Contrary to the standard of the time, she instead fragmentised the men, only rarely showing their faces, thus reducing them to genitalia giving the protagonist pleasure. What stands out in her sexual encounters (with the exception of the humorously conceived mandatory orgy, which was one of the few at the time to include gay sex), are both the ode to masturbation as the physically and psychologically safest form of sex and the depiction of the protagonist’s first time. In the scene in which Candy loses her virginity, Palmer contrasts Candy’s romantic notions of sensitive lovemaking with the slapstick banging with the handsome Mexican gardener (who is both a racist stereotype and a parody of that stereotype in equal measure). In the film’s overarching idea, where the men think about how to trick the protagonist, who instead is the one in control, we can see not only the filmmakers’ view of the gender dynamics of the time, but also of the porn industry itself, which at that time could legitimately present itself as progressive thanks to directors like Svetlana and Gail Palmer.

Revenge can take many forms. It can be cold-blooded, sadistic, brutal, chaotic or even systematic. For South Korean director Park Chan-wook, it is mainly problematic on every possible level, from its conceptual and moral aspects, to the pleasure of carrying it out. In a gripping stylised form, Park maps the protagonist’s bloody odyssey to uncover the sense of his long imprisonment and the person who orchestrated it. In the ingeniously constructed story, the viewer is in the same position as the tragic hero, whose ideas about the course and further development of his revenge are constantly frustrated by his nemesis. At the time of its release, much attention was focused on the extreme scenes, but it has already been forgotten that Oldboy brilliantly combines excess, tense emotions, coolness, pathos, wrenching catharsis and humorous exaggeration, all of which work superbly here. In addition to that, Park goes much deeper in his screenplay and revenge thus becomes only a McGuffin in a wrenching treatise on anger and its ability to blind the one feeling it, the toxic nature of machismo, and the painful journey toward seeing the light. Here, the epiphany has the meaning of both transcending one’s own egocentric point of view and seeing what one has done to others, as well as the utterly devastating impact that it has on one’s own conscience and personal happiness, which can then be found only in oblivion. ____ Oldboy was Park’s first collaboration with Jung Jung-hoon, who subsequently became Park’s court cinematographer, and their symbiotic ambition, manifested in outrageous camera compositions and staging challenges, pushed the film, Park’s filmography and even international cinema to a new level. After all, it is no coincidence that many years later Edgar Wright chose Jung to shoot Last Night in Soho, which features incredible camerawork, where two versions of one character alternate in one shot without the use of digital effects, but thanks solely to the choreography of the actors and the movement of the camera.

While the archpriest of Zen film, Donald G. Jackson, swears that his films don’t fall into the realm of cliché and can be innovatively unpredictable thanks to the fact that he doesn’t use screenplays, Ruggero Deodato proves that even with a properly goofy script and appropriately degenerate directing, it is possible to put on a very WTF show. I don't believe Raiders of Atlantis was written by the two guys in their fifties who put their names to it, because here the logic of a six-year-old boy’s imagination plays the key role. If viewers let themselves be lured in by the thoroughly deceptive poster and learn nothing else about the film before watching it, it’s not enough to be amazed by the batty twists that occur in scene after scene, by which characters suddenly pop up somewhere, or even what genre the film switches to. Deodato’s work with the film space and the logical and topographical interconnectedness of events between shots causes even the master of the absolute frame, the self-taught purveyor of dreck David A. Prior, to turn pale. The entire film seems almost like a video game due to the fact that the narrative spawns the heroes in bizarre places completely at random and has them solving banal tasks in completely boorish ways. The characters here are not even one-dimensional, but rather sink into themselves through their anti-dimensionality, in which the expert on pre-Columbian languages excels among all of them, coming across as a lobotomised parody of boffins portrayed in movies. The film had a big enough budget to afford all manner of phantasmagorical genre positions, from disaster movie to adventure with sci-fi elements to post-apocalyptic action flick, but the budget was still small enough that the cardboard post-apocalyptic fakery, the special effects (from the childishly made miniatures to the extraordinarily shoddy gore effects) and the practical execution of individual shots induce diaphragm spasms.