JFL

How the hell is it possible that this magnificent action flick has so drastically sunk into oblivion while every possible piece of dreck from the VHS era, where some desperate people chaotically wave their arms and someone occasional fires a gun, are seen as the heartbeat of a generation. Well, the answer is relatively easy. The reason consists in the fact that the film’s creators put together the best action sequences for their grandiose stunt showreel, but somehow didn’t bother with distribution. The directorial debut of the self-proclaimed stunt legend John Stewart is lightly based on the buddy movies of the day featuring black and white lead actors, but unlike the classics of the genre, such as 48 Hours and Lethal Weapon, it doesn’t bother with developing the characters and their dynamics, because the screenplay is appropriately makeshift and serves only to very vaguely lay the groundwork for the next breakneck action sequence. Fortunately, the movie does not take itself seriously at all, so the characters and individual scenes rather come across as caricatures of genre clichés. Whereas the more recent trend is to incorporate action into drama and to connect it to the characters so that it is not merely an attraction, but also something that draws viewers in, Action U.S.A. glorifies the tradition of spectacular stunts that put the plot on hold and make viewers marvel at what the obviously suicidal stuntmen are going through to get the wow effect. Today, this style is completely out of fashion, but in the 1980s, whole movies such as the showreel Fire, Ice and Dynamite and series like the iconic The Fall Guy were built on it. Stewart and his sidekicks can’t compete with genre legend Hal Needham and his Hooper in terms of either budget or spectacle, but they definitely offset that deficit with the dangers that they face, as well as with the guilelessness with which they make their own self-realisation the priority in the film’s logic. Viewers should not shake their heads at the fact that whatever the car crashes into will explode, but instead should simply accept this fact and admire the outsized explosions and the ambition to risk one’s health and the equipment in the interest of the most effective shots. In this respect, Action U.S.A. offers amazement and rambunctious entertainment like few other films.

The Kingdom is a precisely constructed and directed thriller with a generic plot that very much conforms to the American geopolitical agenda of the time, but also attempts to disguise its propagandistic dimension by building kitsch-laden sympathies for some of the characters of other nationalities. In the end, it even allows itself to poke at the supposed moral superiority and unambiguous firm resolve. But, of course, it remains solely at the level of an easily digestible mainstream flick that resolutely does not go against the grain. However, the effectively built team of main characters, each with their own role in the narrative, and especially the action are definitely worthy of praise. Though viewers will have to wait until the end for that, it is the natural culmination of the preceding events and the depicted characters, and above all it is realised with an outstanding symbiosis of dramatic construction, spatial topography, nervous camerawork and quick editing, as well as astonishing physical dynamics.

As the maestro Sidaris himself aptly stated, this is a relatively atypical movie among Malibu Bay Films’ productions. Unfortunately, this means that it is absolutely, arduously boring. The best flicks from Sidaris’s MCU (Mammaries Cinematic Universe) overflow with excessively phantasmagorical action scenes, boudoir titillations, insipid twists and burlesque exaggeration, while providing a lot of campy potential. But when they decide to keep their feet on the ground, the result is a tiresome chain of sequences in which planes are constantly in the air and someone walks back and forth on the beach. And there aren’t even many Hawaiian boobs here. _____ In the context of the Sidaris MCU (Mammaries Cinematic Universe), following the example of categorising Marvel movies, we can refer to this movie as the final title of Phase 1, defined by the presence of the agent duo Donna and Taryn (portrayed by Dona Speir and Hope Marie Carlton).

The flood of emotions together with the cinematic originality and agonisingly gripping themes of young love, adolescence and bullying give me the impression that I find myself taken back nearly two decades. At that time, Asian cinema brought out breathtaking films that provided a spectacle many times more intense, original and progressive in comparison with Western productions. For a long time, however, I had not felt such excitement and enthusiasm from Asian films, either because of my own jadedness or because productions from the Far East had become mired in mundanity and no impressive new talent had emerged that would disrupt the monopoly of established names and their expected standards (of course Parasite, for example, is a work of pure genius, but one doesn’t expect anything else from Pong). Better Days evokes the same enthusiasm and engulfs the viewer in an absolute fountain of emotions like Go by Isa Jukisada and All About Lily Chou-Chou by Shunji Iwai, with which it shares, in addition to the above-mentioned themes, boundless empathy for its characters, pop-formal energy and captivating narration. It is not specifically subject to chronology, but is governed by emotional and dramatic dramaturgy. The film conceals certain information from viewers, but simply only fragile moments from the relationship between the central couple and releases that information only when it has the appropriate emotional impact. Thanks to that, Better Days continuously adds new layers to its characters while bringing elements of a thriller into the formula of a high-school drama and teen romance. ________ The utterly agitprop conclusion and the exceedingly rosy depiction of the police, which make the necessity of appeasing the Chinese censors conspicuously apparent, are drawbacks. On the other hand, however, these aspects do not erase all of the good and emotional tension of the preceding two hours. ________ Derek Tsang Kwok-Cheung grew up in a family of Chinese migrants in Hong Kong, established himself as a character actor and now, with the aid of leading Hong Kong filmmakers in the role of producers, creates great co-productions that impress critics and, mainly, viewers in China and Hong Kong. Such success straddling the border between those two diametrically different markets and audiences is very rare. Tsang thus not only confirms his status as a major emerging talent, but together with, for example, Chinese director Bai Xue, whose social drama The Crossing become a hit in Hong Kong, also fills this long-time fan cinema from that part of the world with hope for the future.

David DeCoteau graduated from the Roger Corman school with an advanced degree in hucksterism. As one of Corman’s most teachable but also least talented students in terms of filmmaking, he did not rank among Hollywood’s distinguished filmmakers, though he did create for himself a stable position in the ranks of ultra-cheap trash that was hopeless with respect to craftmanship. Just as in the case of Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama of the same year, this time he again serves up an exemplary direct-to-VHS fraud, where the perfect cover of the cassette works like a Trojan horse via which viewers let this shitty flick invade their screens. Fortunately, this movie is significantly less boring thanks to the female lead’s ridiculous lack of acting ability. Her strenuously pinched expressions make every scene a bitter spectacle. Unlike his master, DeCoteau did not have sufficient presence of mind or budget to cast in the lead role a physically fit actress whom viewers would believe could stand up to the movie’s gallery of inept bad guys. Peggy McIntaggart is so ineffectual that not even the desperate attempt to stylise her as a hard-ass with a Rambo-esque headband and sunglasses helps (not to mention the fact that it seems they preferred not put her on cassette cover, where it is quite possible a different woman is hiding behind those sunglasses; at the very least, she has a noticeably different costume than that worn during shooting). However, DeCoteau otherwise tries to maintain at least a basic supply of genre attractions, so in addition to regularly placed anti-erotic scenes with bare breasts, he mainly invested in action scenes, which, in line with common practice, were shot by the second crew, while the car chases exhibit a much higher level of craftsmanship than the rest of the film made by DeCoteau himself. That doesn’t exactly mean they are anything to write home about and the chase scenes are interesting rather as evident manifestations of a poor budget, such as shooting in out-of-the-way industrial areas (whereas the movie is otherwise set in an upper-middle-class neighbourhood). But one explosion during a car crash is utterly perfect – it is a euphoric superlative in the case of films bearing David DeCoteau’s signature.

This biographical film about the formative years of the most important Canadian prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, is impressive in how it essentially sets out on a path that is anything but standard. Instead of a credible retro setting and fidelity to facts, it gives viewers an insanely absurd dive into a dreamlike subconsciousness shot in a style inspired by German expressionism and other avant-garde trends from the early days of cinema and beyond, where surreal symbolism is melded with manifested Freudian anxieties. Some domestic conservative viewers may find The Twentieth Century to be a tasteless iconoclastic provocation. Despite its seeming randomness, however, it is a surprisingly conceptual work that, with its deviation from the norm and the crackpot nature of individual scenes, leads viewers to start finding out the facts about the central historic figure and the whole phantasmagorically depicted time for themselves. Not only does this film provide such impetus for self-study that the creators of conventional biographical dramas could only dream about, but it also shows that WLMK was a rather bizarre personality, despite his public image.

This devastating minimalist drama is eloquent in and of itself, but it also coincidentally serves as a complement to the excellent horror film The Invisible Man, not only because both films’ central aggressor is in some way invisible and that both draw attention to people who had been previously overlooked. Whereas The Invisible Man was astonishing and frightening, but in the end offered a properly genre-based pressure valve for the topics of toxic relationships and domestic and sexual violence, The Assistant is paralysing and depressing as it gradually maps the system of abuse of power and harassment as a terrifyingly normalised and unexpectedly extensive swamp.

In its fourth instalment, a gerontic reunion held years later, the iconic buddy-movie series Lethal Weapon set out on the path of a sitcom or television genre show for middle-aged people. With its protagonists a decade older, Bad Boys makes a bee line to the soap-opera genre for seniors. On the one hand, it is fully conscious of that fact, which adds the necessary exaggeration to the film. On the other hand, the exaggerated soap-operatic moments of kitschy melodrama will paradoxically remain in the viewer’s memory longer than the diligently constructed action sequences, which are undermined by the need to digitally insert the aging stars into sequences with physically fit young people.

The walking, talking special effect known as Scott Adkins is not only keeping the sector of trashy, low-budget action flicks alive, but also repeatedly demonstrates that with the appropriate ambitions and physically fit actors, furious attractions can be created that the big-budget sector can’t match with its CGI colouring books. Furthermore, it is obvious from each of his collaborations with Jesse V. Johnson that Adkins, as co-producer, is building up a portfolio of unique acting parts and challenges with which he compensates for portrayal of generic parts in projects that he does mainly as a job. Avengement is the peak of this collaboration not only in terms of Adkins’s role, but also in terms of the screenplay and choreography, as well as the overall stylistic concept of the fight scenes. Instead of the spectacular acrobatics of Adkins’s previous top projects, here we have an unrefined, brawling style superbly combined with a coarse, loutish paraphrase of The Count Monte Cristo from the British underworld. Though it is merely the culmination of this whole brutally physical movie, the closing fight scene deservedly ranks among the best fight sequences of the decade.

Ritchie’s gangster flicks can be looked at as a genre screen on which the direct projects himself, or rather the current point in his life, career and position in the film industry. At the very beginning of his first film, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, we have a group of self-confidently cheeky youths who have not only talent and ambition, but mainly more luck than sense, when they heedlessly set out into the world of omnipotent old structures. Coincidence plays a much smaller role in Ritchie’s second film, but the director, together with the protagonists, gets into a much bigger game with foreign players in a different weight category, from which he cannot allow himself to escape only with a skinned knee. The already forgotten existentially pessimistic Revolver shows the former wunderkind in his element, which he had been away from for a while, consorting with overly powerful people and now doubting himself, so he tries to kick off a big game that will get him back to the top while simultaneously reassessing his own life. RocknRolla expressed a feeling of newly replenished assuredness and, at the same time, bidding farewell to his island roots while also peculiarly focusing on the position of England/Ritchie between Europe and America. Therefore, The Gentlemen isn’t so much a comeback as an attempt to show others and himself that “the king’s still got it”. He has come a long way and from an untested, clever lout, he has developed into a man of elegance over the years and the owner of a stylish pub and his own hipster brewery, which he does not hesitate to advertise. Though he still sympathises with streetwise hooligans with their online projects, he is far removed from them in his pursuits. He mulls over retirement now that he’s in the company of the cream of society and he’s raking it in with lucrative projects, but this seemingly final money spinner put new vitality into his veins in the end. Predation, courage and cheekiness have been replaced by sophistication (albeit in the snobbish superficial sense rather than true sophistication or ingenuity) and pretentious refinement. Gangster movies have always been founded on the motif of the changing of the guard between generations, or rather the conflict between the young and old schools, so in line with Ritchie's age and self-image, this story from the underworld takes an atypical direction that would not have occurred to him in the early days of his career. The question is how this glorified flaccid middle age will be perceived by today’s young people, who are licking their chops at their own opportunities in the genre world of gangsters – in recent years, francophone productions such as the excellent Les Misérables and the hyper-stylish Gangsta have reigned supreme. However, this in no way diminishes the fun and agility of The Gentlemen, which would have ranked among the most satisfying titles in broad distribution in another, stronger year (at least from the perspective of a boomer viewer).