JFL

The thought-provoking topic of this documentary is portrayed in a somewhat unfortunate way, as the dramatic reconstructions of the story of an iconic rapid-dubbing artist and her colleagues are interwoven with nostalgic testimonies of witnesses. At the same time, the talking heads are much more essential here than the effort to stretch the runtime with supposedly thrilling intermezzos. Rather, the viewer is enchanted by the fervour of the individual witnesses as they recall what shared video-evenings meant to them. In these testimonies, the film’s declared theme comes to life, along with its various other aspects, including the role played by American trash films in shaping the dreams, style and self-image of a particular generation of adolescents. (Abridged 55-minute television version viewed)

Killing is a deconstruction of the samurai cult, cut down to its marrow, which paradoxically had never been achieved before by any other Japanese filmmaker. All relativistic samurai films of the 1960s by filmmakers ranging from Kobayashi and Gosha to Okamota, always addressed the corrosion of samurai dedication, honour and ideals, as well as the status of the whole state of being a samurai. Characteristically for the extent to which the icon of the samurai is intertwined with Japanese society, however, no one had ever journeyed into the very essence of the samurai caste, which consists in killing. As the title of Tsukamoto’s film suggests, that is primarily what this distinctive filmmaker focused on – training to kill and dehumanisation of an entire social class and, in the figurative sense, society as a whole, which was defined by this goal. As usual, it suffices for Tsukamoto to have a handful of characters and a minimum in terms of production facilities and budget, as the power of his vision lies in searching for the central thesis and the depiction thereof in maximally expressive scenes with a considerable amount of symbolism. While Gosha’s samurai were dirty and ragged, they still had their honour. Tsukamoto’s samurai are ruthless beasts of prey, dehumanised masters of death and desperate individuals in whom the basest instincts are bound with inhuman social ideals and values. Tsukamoto brings back to the act of killing the plane of absolute boundaries – between being and non-being, ideals and emptiness, innocence and pain, and between the student and the master.

Is it a horror film or is it not a horror film? The short answer is yes and it is damn good. For the long answer, we must first define what a horror film is. Horror movies are not made up of scares (the best ones do not have any at all) or the supernatural (a full range of great horror movies get by without it), and even gory scenes are not unconditionally necessary (as Poltergeist shows). When we come to the full essence, we reach two parallel paths, where one follows the effects on the audience and the other the internal principles of storytelling. On the first path, together with the greats of film criticism and theory, we find that horror is a genre that evokes intense responses in viewers in accordance with the depicted scenes. Linda Williams’s legendary essay likens horror to porn and melodrama, where viewers also observe certain situations that are supposed to elicit their directly proportionate physical response in relation to a given bodily fluid (blood, semen, tears). On the other path into the inner workings of horror stories, we can get to the very essence of horror, which consists in the fact that certain elements penetrate the characters’ inner or outer world, disrupting their deep-rooted values and certainties, which suddenly cease to be valid and the characters have to come to terms with that. The intrusive element may be a serial killer who turns a peaceful suburb into a nightmare or ghosts who turn the characters’ home into a place of life-threatening danger. Besides all manner of classic horror movies, both of these stripped-down definitions can also apply to films that are otherwise assigned to absolutely different categories, from brilliantly disturbing thrillers such as The Hitcher to Ingmar Bergman’s agonising psychological dramas, particularly Persona and Cries and Whispers. Ari Aster took a similar path, whereupon he shot one of the most physically intense and most suggestive horror films of recent years, which thoroughly disturbs the audience by confronting it with a world where completely different values apply and where the most frightening thing happens in broad daylight and inside the main character. Furthermore, Midsommar has phenomenal camera work and dramaturgy, reinforcing the concise vision. After Jordan Peel, we have another significantly distinctive talent who shows us that horror does not have a single universal form, but can rather be a space for original creative realisation.

Let’s leave aside the nagging doubts about how Welles’s last project would have looked if he had been able to finish it himself instead of it being later completed by his admirers and collaborators on the basis of master notes and a working fragment of the theoretical final version. When watching The Other Side of the Wind, one cannot help but to associate the finished work with the great auteur. As someone aptly noted in connection with the recent premiere of Almodovar’s Pain and Glory, every great filmmaker will make their own 8½ sooner or later. That is exactly what The Other Side of the Wind should have been for Welles. In keeping with his troubled career, however, Welles (like Fellini) does not compose an ode to his muse, the inner anguish of the artist and the intermingling of his own life with the work. Welles’s critical film shows cinema, or rather filmmaking, as chaos and a bustle of characters with completely disparate and conflicting interests, while the creator’s work made from that, or rather in spite of it, gives the impression of being an outright miracle. In the constituent motifs, it also touches on the question or inevitability of the tyrannical aspect of the creator, whose vision demands that others abandon their individuality and subordinate themselves, and thus their bodies, to the creator’s interest. Welles depicts the contrast between the artist, the work and its subjugation by viewers and criticism as a delirious struggle in which one side wants to control the work and the creator and overpower them with a barrage of questions and interpretations, while the other side needs nourishing attention, but also wants to escape. All of this shapes The Other Side of the Wind into the form of a progressive formal collage in which dozens of aspects personified by individual characters and various lenses create mad chaos against which the film-in-film passages stand as an admirable monolith of uncompromising vision. With its style, it evokes the works of leading creative personalities of the time when the material was created, with Antonioni at the fore, and Welles demonstrates his brilliant functional formalism. There is no doubt that, despite its distinctiveness and formal avant-garde nature, The Other Side of the Wind would have found in its time, i.e. the 1970s, a more responsive audience in tune with the then current style of the sovereignly auteur work of the canonical masters. On the other hand, its contemporary appearance as a relic from the grave gives the picture a superstructure of that great treasure, which is finally emerging from the depths of time to the surface and speaking to our stale cinephile core.

Luhrman created a captivatingly timeless adaptation of an immortal classic. His version is not the insane plan of an unreasonable formalist, but rather an inventive reflection of Shakespeare and the principles of Elizabethan theatre. He directly stated that his aim was to shoot Romeo and Juliet in the manner that the bard himself would have done it if he’d had access to film. Let’s at last leave aside the distorted view of Shakespeare – that he was an untouchable genius – that has been beat into our heads since elementary school. His mastery consists in the fact that he was able to appeal to all layers of Elizabethan theatre, where the upper crust came into contact with ordinary people (albeit in separate sectors of the playhouse) and at that time it was mere entertainment whose competition was murder ballads and jugglers. Shakespeare was simply the era’s leading pop-author, who constructed even his most fragile romance as a roller coaster of emotions, where the infatuation and clarity of great love at first sight run up against a humorous perspective (it is too often forgotten that this is not about first love and Romeo’s broken heart from a previous relationship is superbly commented upon by other characters), dramatic conflicts, bombastic skirmishes, heart-rending tragedy, exaggerated wisdom and delicate declarations of emotions. Furthermore, all of this is accompanied by dialogue in which new love is carried to romantic heights, but does not look beyond its physical dimension. Luhrman was able to create an ideal framework for Shakespeare's verses by bringing the story into a hyper-stylised and kitschy overwrought world reminiscent of music videos, where the aesthetics of the wealthy’s tastelessness are blended with the sweatiness of beach bums and the self-adoring pomposity of hip-hop videos. Like the libretto, the film’s style perfectly mixes together kitschy wisdom, tense theatricality and fragile emotions. The genius of Luhrman’s approach consists in the roughly half-hour introduction, when he literally hurls viewers into a tempest of total passion, which, however, lays the groundwork for the subsequent soothing of the romantic passages, whose sincere youthful naïveté is not such an assault on the eyes. At the same time, the small details (especially in the characters’ gestures – see, for example, Juliet’s entrancing initial sequence with her mother) and the fresh approach give new life to the classic and makes it exactly what it is supposed to be – a story for teenagers. Not an insipidly superficial story as when cynical adults and eternal adolescents make films for teenagers such as American Pie, but rather an absolutely empathetic story that understands the agitated emotional state of youths and the feeling that one is the star of one's own video or film, as John Hughes superbly managed to capture. Under Luhrman’s direction, DiCaprio and Danes created what is indisputably the best version of the star-crossed lovers ever. The scene in which they first meet abounds with mutual enchantment, romantic fragility and adorableness, as well as the horniness that is usually omitted elsewhere. After more than twenty years, the film still works just as perfectly and seeing it in the cinema was a dream come true and proof of its qualities – while at the beginning viewers fidget and laugh at the pompousness of the entourages of the Capulets and Montagues, the next two hours are filled with alternating emotions, enchantment, amusement and emotional tension, and at the very end in the church, you could hear a pin drop and the tension could be cut with a knife. Luhrman simply managed to fulfil the master's words: After all, eternally will the heart receive Juliet’s grief and Romeo’s pain.

At the time of its release, Jim Jarmusch’s melancholic and peculiar variation on the vampire theme was mostly tolerated by critics of the middle and older professional generations, who spoke of quirks, hipsterism and emptiness. Over the years, however, Only Lovers Left Alive has become a popular film among the younger generation, whose moods and thoughts Jarmusch appeals to with precision. It could be said that it is not Jarmusch who has aged and lost his poetics, which were valued by his current critics, but rather that they have lost the sensitivity that once led them to adore this icon of American independent film. Conversely, Jarmusch remains the same and speaks best to the same audience, which comprises romantically tattered young people. As Jarmusch himself says, genres fascinate him because they represent frames in which each artist can paint his own picture. This is exactly how he approaches vampires and creates from them the immortal (and thus polished-by-centuries) powers of his earlier characters of existentially ragged dead men and nocturnal creatures desperately longing for kindred spirits while simultaneously despising society, as well as the history and traditions of refined amalgams of devotees of world culture. Jarmusch’s vampires are cool, romantic intellectuals and artists elevated above earthly needs and devoting themselves to the beauty that is associated with that which has stood up against time and fashion, while suffering the loss of that beauty from today’s hectic world.

Another in a series of documentaries that both lived from and fuelled the DVD market boom at the time, which brought to light the sunken treasures of the trashy history of (not only) American cinema, which to a significant extent was supported by Tarantino and Rodriguez with their Grindhouse joint project, as well as with their previous films. The filmmakers replicatea previously proven concept, strengthened by Mark Hartley, for example. A sequence of clips, which make the cited films look many times better and more attractive than they actually are, is accompanied by testimonies from an attractive ensemble of filmmakers-witnesses, knowledgeable experts and narrators guaranteeing entertainment (the always satisfying John Landis). American Grindhouse attempts to cover a very broad field and it is necessary to acknowledge that, given the brief runtime, it does so very well. Thanks to the knowledgeable speakers, the film has a few inspiring observations even for informed viewers and it succeeds in building a nice arc across the decades. In the meantime (and even before), other documentaries have been made onthe individual subtopics, which in this film are organised into chapters divided by titles, and a number of publications have been published that analyse them more thoroughly and more broadly, but this document fulfils its purpose as an initiating work of popularisation. Furthermore, its creators deserve recognition for the fact that, unlike other identically conceived documentaries about trash flicks, they do not conceal the fact that, for the most part, the films in question are not treasures, but simply trash, though characteristic of their time.

Mr. Blockbuster, Jerry Bruckheimer, produced a bombastic amplification of the saying “so bad it’s good”. Con Air gives the impression of being a unique phenomenon –a film that is simultaneously infinitely stupid, perfect in terms of craftsmanship and bearing all of the hallmarks of an A-level film, but is still unreasonably proud and megalomaniacal in accordance with the showboating of its creator (Simon West was only a skilled hired hand). On the other hand, however, it is not unique, but rather a product of its era, because everything said at the expense of the film is true of the nineties. The following decade also benefited from this, though it was able to more sophisticatedly mask the absurdity of its concepts. After all, Bruckheimer was a pioneer of the trends on which the crafty producers of Marvel movies built their success in the new millennium. They also legitimised the magnificently bombastic spectacles by engaging character actors, who, purely with their presence and aura, added an apparent dimension to two-dimensional characters. However, it can be said that the Marvel showrunners are starting to be more inventive and are no longer coming up with such overblown ideas as to make the pompous method actor Nicolas Cage an action star and give him the amorphous John Cusack as a partner on the telephone. As an adolescent, I watched Con Air (recorded on video from a schoolmate who had HBO) with my mouth hanging open and, in accordance with the contemporary articles in Cinema magazine, praised it as a contribution of a new and better style of action movie (I still recall an article announcing the new blood of Hollywood in the form of directors weened on commercials, throwing Michael Bay, David Fincher and Simon West into the same bag). Today, Con Air seems like grandiose trash, which, with its tenacious bombast, makes it even more entertaining, especially on the big screen ;). I am already looking forward to watching some of the current blockbusters in twenty years with the same liberating point of view.

House of Cards demonises politics as a rotten evil, the Danish government presents an explosive ideal of how politics should look, the classic satire Yes, Minister ridicules the incompetence and stubbornness of top politicians and the Czech Kancelář Blaník takes the blame off of politicians and depicts professionally depersonalised and opportunistic lobbyists as the instigators of all evil. This map, on which every viewer can choose which of these image of politics suits his or her prejudices or ideals, is essentially supplemented by the British satirist Armando Iannucci, who, unlike all the others, depicts politics as uncontrolled chaos. Thanks to this, he is characteristically able to include in his screenplays, with the phenomenal – and for many epigones, inspiring - political sitcom The Thick of It at the fore, all of the above-mentioned views on politics through individual characters. The initial situation of The Death of Stalin is exactly Iannucci's characteristic political chaos, not only in the sense of what started immediately after Stalin's death, but also in the sense of the entire degenerate totalitarian regime of the USSR of late Stalinism, where only incompetents, nutcases, toadies, manipulators and morons remained in high positions, because all of the capable people had been eliminated.

Based on real events and state propaganda. Dante Lam in China’s pay – on the one hand, less of his usual kitsch, overwrought pathos and fatefulness, but also less of his distinctive style. Operation Mekong thus has a single advantage, which is that it shows that even Lam’s most delirious creations actually had something to them. This film is merely a hollow work that aims to add pomposity to the propaganda fairy tale, but when you see a compositionally identical crane shot or eye-catching CGI effects (predominantly poorly designed greenscreens) on multiple occasions, it starts to be rather ridiculous. Furthermore, Lam openly copies iconic action sequences of the past, particularly the mall scene from Police Story and the jungle camp from Predator, as well as dozens of cheap action flicks from the Vietnam War.