JFL

Waiting for a Dick or Dumont 2.0. The concept of luring people to the cinema with the promise of smut and then letting them spend more than two hours watching rubberneckers wandering around in the forest and greasing their tangled dicks is essentially sardonic in a likable sort of way. However, that does not change the fact that it is empty conceptual hokum that will not survive the current festival season. The thesis that the libertines were just a group of chattering wanderers, grandfathers unable to get an erection and passionate women who hoped in vain for an orgasm is fine, but the point could have been put across in a quarter of the runtime.

Besides Vivarium, Little Joe is another film in the Cannes programme that would have worked better as an episode of The Twilight Zone. In comparison to the hopeless Vivarium, however, Little Joe is better developed and directed, though no less predictable. If we take Jordan Peele as the benchmark, Little Joe doesn’t come at all close to his work, including Us. Hausner simply set out on a career path, shooting a mercenary project that comes across as a more sedate variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, except in Little Joe the theme of unadulterated egocentric happiness replaces the fear of communism found in the original Body Snatchers from 1956 and the psycho paranoia of the 1978 remake. Nevertheless, any overlaps and ideas on this theme reach beyond the film itself, without being conveyed in the narrative. As it happens at festivals, Little Joe gets a fine context as a double feature with Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, which contains some similar elements and motifs, albeit conceived and developed in a completely different way.

Seen through the lens of Harmony Korine, the world of Floridian potheads has an element of captivating opulence and ridiculous absurdity. As in Spring Breakers, and in all of his previous films, the director presents to us deviant figures and their worlds, which teeter on the edge of reality and the imaginations of the protagonists. Therefore, The Beach Bum contains both surreal sequences and the occasional collision with reality, just as the gleaming aesthetics of music videos get a soiled and shabby tinge of worn-out rags and plain, wrinkled faces. At first glance, particularly after the formally aggressive Spring Breakers, the unexpected stylistic conventionality of Korine's new work is surprising, blunted by the repeat engagement of the elsewhere ostentatiously formalistic Benoît Debie. However, his formal conservatism gives greater force to the natural opulence and exaggerated external stylisation of the characters. After all, it is so varied and excessive that it actually resembles George Miller's post-apocalyptic vision of the last two Mad Max films. Except this time, it is not a post-civilisationvision that unfolds before our eyes, but rather the image of the deranged reality of a Floridian The Inheritance or Fuckoffguysgoodday.

SPOILERS INCLUDED: Every long-running franchise matures with its viewers and incorporates motifs that resonate with their current ages. Just as Harry Potter advanced from children’s adventures to teen angst and turmoil, Marvel advanced through 22 movies. However, it is rather humorous that the longed-for culmination is dad cinema in spandex. Unfortunately, this does not pertain only to the central dirty trick on the female audience in the transformation of the physiognomy of the whole series’ main hunk, but primarily to the central motif of Endgame. It’s nice that a certain percentage of male viewers will proudly admit that they shed tears, but is that actually evidence of their supposed sensitivity or even of the film’s qualities? Do we rather have nothing to do with the fact that the film’s creators captured the pain of the current crisis of masculinity, where men themselves have made the whip in the form of accepting the diktat that they have to provide for their family and, concurrently, that they do not have to abandon their own self-fulfilment? What does it say about our society that if, in bidding the hero farewell, we hear the standard “I love you”, that would be an object of ridicule, but if hear “Don’t worry, we’re taken care of”, young fathers and husbands shed emotional tears? I also said to myself that hiring Alan Silvestri was a fine attempt to add a bit of a melodic background to a series afflicted with the curse of forgettable music. However, I did not expect that the master would steal from himself, resulting in a programmatically intentional copy of Forrest Gump. While you don’t know what you are going to get out of life, everything in this box of chocolates is by the book, including, unfortunately, the development in the style of the oft-ridiculed cliché “I have two days until I retire and I am the only character who has a private life in which something like this could happen”. But it is clear that these are merely the bitter words of someone who is not invested in the series as a true believer. After all, the individual scenes cannot be appreciated because there is no continuity. Seriously? Isn’t this pseudo-argument simply a justification for the time invested, because the mechanically cranked-out scenes of absolute exertion without structure simply cannot in any way enrich any memories? The fact that Iron Man argues with Captain America is no deeper than when your parents argue for the millionth time. Not because you have seen them go through a relationship crisis, but because in both cases only those affected play transparent roles and act in accordance with automatically accepted formulas. Let’s stop kidding ourselves that the MCU is anything more than a brilliant PR victory over viewers and critics because it was able to create the impression of an event and a unique experience of something that is calculated to the smallest detail, not from the bottom up by individual artists, but by seasoned corporate creatives from the top down. And that it was a wild ride and not at all a sure thing from the beginning. Does anyone still remember Hulk today? Not Ang Lee’s version, but the one with Edward Norton. That was a critical moment in the whole Marvel campaign, because for the first and last time, the creatives let go of the reins and lost their control over the result, after which they deleted the film and destroyed Norton’s career. This was followed by a strictly managed one-sided campaign in which the directors were either no-name assemblers of a puzzle pre-designed by the showrunner, or craftily chosen names that, long before the premiere, lent themselves to shaping the viewers’ acceptance of the film as something serious (Branagh), dark and gritty (Black) or refreshingly light-hearted (Waititi), even though all Marvel movies are always built based on the same foundation. Those who resisted were not allowed in at all or were promptly sent packing (Wright). In this there is something unique, a value and place in the history of the cinematography of this mammoth endeavour, regardless of the fact that the emperor not only has no clothes, but struts around for his fans. The icing on the cake is the vanity found in the closing credits, where the stars of the series even condescend to sign autographs for their admirers. While, like every proper manipulator, the true creators and geniuses of the MCU enjoy their position in the shadows.

Completely biased five stars – For someone looking at it from the outside, The Rep is an hour and a half of naïve, nerdy talking heads jabbering to no end about their hobby that has become a job, and now they have their hands full with work. For the biased viewer, however, it is an emotional roller coaster and exciting thriller. Regardless of the degree of personal projection into events, this documentary deserves praise for its clever screenplay, which uses a standard dramatic arc so that in the end it more forcefully drives home the point underlining the central thesis of its topic: Doing cinema is a beautifully devastating affair of the heart with the most uncertain outcome, but also with unforgettable moments.

This would actually be a generally fine animated show if not for the fact that it is an obvious SpongeBob rip-off that is absolute repelling due to its lack of originality. The series does not offer anything new. Rather, it deals in an identical style of humour built on hyperactivity and identically concieved characters, just with different figures against a different backdrop. Instead of fast food, this time the scene is a supermarket, another showcase of capitalism. The strangest thing about this project is the fact that it was created based on the popular picture books by Melanie Watt, which are as far removed from the series as possible in terms of their style and stories – it’s as if someone had taken Peppa Pig and turned it into a superhero comic book. Some producer must have been higher than fuck on cocaine when he said to himself that he would buy the rights to books for small children, in which a cute squirrel is always afraid of something and then finds out that he can easily overcome his fear, and then said he would use only the title of the book series and have a facsimile of an international hit written, while emphasising everywhere that it is based on the original series of books in order to prevent Nickelodeon from filing lawsuits.

With this grotesquely warped horror movie reminiscent of The Twilight Zone, Jordan Peele has confirmed his position as an illustrious talent in the field of genre films. In Us, those who are so inclined can see a provocative parallel to the basic principle of capitalism, i.e. the presumed right to privilege and living life at the expense of someone else, which brings out the dark side of people. At the same time, however, it is simply a great, original horror flick that is not satisfied with the superficial tricks with which most current contributions to the genre are inundated.

At last, a full-fledged adaptation of Winnie the Pooh that retains the model’s deep reflection of childhood and adolescence, as well as its vital wisdom, playful humour and disarming philosophical nature contained in the kōan-like dialogue. Beyond that, it is a touching film from the life of plush toys, which is slightly disrupted by those passages with people blinded by their needlessly complicated problems.

Since the days the Wachowski siblings’ Speed Racer, this is the first film that conceptually works with colours and that captures every scene with its formal and stylistic creativity, as well as with its spellbinding kinetic nature. In addition to that, it is an incredible revelation in the field of animation that has no genealogical predecessor among feature films. The roots of this unique picture – and thus of its individual techniques – rather lie in video games and online videos. Despite that, however, we still cannot find any other single film that would bring them together in the same way.

First Man is an enthralling evocation of the time when spaceflight was not a matter of course and undertaken at the whim of millionaires, but rather an uncertain enterprise that required sacrifice and tremendous determination. At the same time, it is a perfect example of how to build an absorbing and thrilling narrative from a story whose end everyone already knows.