JFL

Bond has never been progressive in the sense of setting trends or coming up with anything new, and the films starring Daniel Craig are no different in that respect. This is most evident in the action sequences, where we find nothing that is particularly ground-breaking or unprecedented (compared to the rival Mission: Impossible franchise). The action in Bond movies adopts and very well applies current trends set by other films – from Casino Royale with its opening sequence referencing the contemporary fashion of parkour films, through the Bourne-esque formalistic chaos of Quantum of Solace, to the staircase one-shot of Atomic Blonde. And the same is true of everything else, including the (social) media hype around having Bond played by a woman. The franchise’s creators are aware of Bond’s contradictory position in the contemporary cultural world, where progressivism, emancipation and representation are more prominent, and they incorporated a reflection of that world into the narrative within and around the film. It is certainly worth mentioning the shift within the franchise, where for the first time there is a complete absence of blatant objectification, as well as the need to question or at least comment on whether female characters can be equally as capable as the male characters (which distinguished the first emancipatory instalment, Tomorrow Never Dies, as well as the Craig-era Skyfall). In contrast to all of the progressive elements in No Time to Die, however, the traditional concepts prevail in the end and the whole film remains disturbingly cautious and conservative at its core. To find a contrast, it suffices to recall how iconic characters and franchises were dealt with in the iconoclastic and truly progressive Mad Max: Fury Road and Blade Runner 2049. In comparison with those films, the makers of No Time to Die not only fail to tone down the fantasies and ideals of Bond and the audience, but rather continue to reinforce them. Though the film likably acknowledges that this world no longer belongs only to men, it still revolves entirely around Bond. In the end, all of the female characters eventually vacate the space without discussion so that the hero can stand out and walk away with a grand show of action and emotion. Bond thus remains a hero built on male myths of exclusivity, predestination and irreplaceability, even though there are various comments around him indicating that the iconic codename no longer belongs to him. But either he confidently shrugs it off by saying it’s “just a number” or others tell him that he is still the only one who deserves it. Despite all of his broadly proclaimed but, in reality, superficial emotional depth, Craig’s Bond remains a boomer character at his core. Though he makes the changing world around him familiar to similar devotees of the old order, he also manifests the dream that they can pass through that world with grace, with their heads held high, and everyone will still shed a tear for them. Unsurprisingly, bidding farewell to one portrayer of Bond is strikingly similar to saying goodbye to the first generation of Marvel films, which also began with the promise of a relatively fresh drive and ended up as teary-eyed dad cinema. It is logical that every franchise evolves with its contemporary audience. In spite of that, I am fascinated by the fact that Craig’s Bond movies have, for many viewers, apparently successfully humanised a character that was originally created as a campily exaggerated caricature, and still remains so at its core. Unfortunately, I have never believed its “emotions” and I found it rather laughable in its fake solemnity. P.S.: The inflated hype around who might be the next 007 is eloquently ridiculed by the trailer for Casino Royale (1967).

Mainstream is a not-so-amazing journey through the internet. Gia Coppola has made a modern variation on A Face in the Crowd, But whereas that ageless and phenomenal classic focuses on the interconnection between the media, celebrity and politics, Mainstream, characteristically of its time, is concerned only with social networks and thus the purely egocentric circles of self-presentation and the paradox of moral authorities heralding an awakening on the stultifying platforms. Coppola peculiarly works with both conceptual and formalistic literalness, and creates a simple duality of YouTuber-ish hyperactive evil versus indie alternative from the heart. On the other hand, certain themes and narrative patterns are simply repeated in culture and every generation has its own works that, although they may later remain forgotten in the mass of the historical flow of media, are formative for the young viewers of the given time. I thus believe that what Floundering once was for me, Mainstream will be for some of today’s teens.

If one omits the director’s name, Demonic remains a solid low-budget horror movie with several fine ideas and a well-escalated atmosphere of unsettling dread. But few people are willing to reconcile their expectations for the new feature film from the director of the superb District 9 with the fact that they will see not his next sci-fi spectacle, but rather a DIY project that Blomkamp paid for out of his own pocket and tacked together with a few close collaborators during the shutdown caused by the pandemic. Furthermore, the film has an element of technological gadgeteering and the ambition to mess around a bit with different modes of visuality within the narrative project. It is in these aspects that Blomkamp makes his biggest mark on the film, but at the same time, it is apparent that he did not pay nearly as much attention to the screenplay as he did to fucking around with volumetric capture technology and applying it for the needs of the film. As he paradoxically said himself, the film should be able to work as it is without knowing the context of its creation. Though that is very true, it is also just wishful thinking.

How to resolve the paradox that a company that bases its business on algorithms and creating dependency among its users produces a documentary about modern technology and its tools for creating dependency? By breaking up the statements of the talking heads with condescending and hyper-stylised scripted passages that turn everything that’s said into a literally mocking caricature. Five stars for the topic, four for the offered observations and one for execution.

Tango and Cash is an obviously fragmented project whose disparate segments, shot by different directors, were eventually patched together by Hollywood’s leading Dr. Frankenstein, Stuart Baird. The result is a pastiche in the sense of a mixture of influences and motifs, but also as a patchwork of different creative and production intentions. This is most evident in the ending, which was shot entirely by a different director and turns the hitherto relatively down-to-earth buddy movie into a bombastic and, at the same time, completely tasteless action extravaganza, mixing dime-a-dozen clichés and a Bond-esque villain’s lair with a juvenile phantasmagorical car chase like something from the later instalments of Fast & Furious. The film’s disjointedness is apparent not only on the level of style, but also in its unclear and blended orientation. Tango & Cash is unique in the way it reinforces toxic machismo and materialises the wet dreams of fascist cops, while also managing to be openly queer. The top bombastically masculine action movies of the 1980s either very unconvincingly diluted their homoerotic storylines with dysfunctional hetero motifs (Top Gun) or blatantly highlighted them (Commando). On the one hand, Tango & Cash waves the conservative banner by making light of police brutality, celebrating frontier justice outside the confines of the law, mocking the rehabilitation of prisoners and even letting cops dream about a division developing paramilitary technology (which seems tragicomic at a time when American police departments are buying surplus from the military). But at the same time, a camp thread of gradually removed clothes, cross-dressing and symbolic and literal comparison of dick sizes is woven through the film, and that’s not even to mention the supporting interpretation of the whole film as a story of a cautious coming-out in the hypermacho environment of the police department. ____ QUEER SPOILERS FOLLOW ____ If we expand on the dynamic between the titular duo, the straitlaced Tango emerges as a closeted gay hiding behind the buttoned-down façade of the uniform. His tragic storyline consists in the fact that, because of his fear of the reactions of those around him, he is unable to express his affection for Cash, who, with his open physicality, animalism and, mainly, confident fluid sexuality, is Tango’s direct opposite. Cash uninhibitedly undresses with other men in the elevator and puts on women’s clothes and stays in them without losing his own identity. Tango, on the other hand, pleadingly keeps up appearances even in the showers, though he simultaneously lets it slip that he had been eying Cash (in fact, the shower dialogue also suggests that Tango got aroused when Cash first tells him he’s a “peewee”, but soon refers to him as being “three-legged”). Peculiarly, Tango loosens up and lets it all hang out in a prison filled with oiled-up mastodons and permeated with promises of homosexual romps. It is no coincidence that there is dialogue about Tango’s lack of a “wardrobe” in prison. It is no wonder that when Tango is obviously pleased that he has established a homo dynamic with his cellmate, he is in no way inclined to take part in the proposed escape. He decides to go through with it only when he starts to miss Cash. Outside of prison, their paths diverge again at first, but as is said, they will always remember their time together behind bars. Their relationship becomes complicated when Tango starts to think Cash is straight and slept with his sister Kiki. Instead of the usual resolution in macho films, where he would punch his colleague in the mouth or simply give him his blessing, Tango, tormented by both his love for his sibling and his concealed gay love, only desperately tries to find out what really happened. Kiki and Cash, who clearly see right through Tango, are both amused by this and take the opportunity to tease him. Through the various twists in the two protagonists’ gradual coming together and synchronisation, we then come to the climax, in which the typical macho gamesmanship is repeated at first. But Kiki cuts that short with the line: “Why don’t you guys just admit it that you work well together?”, and then, after a cautious but eloquent confession, followed by a happy ending confirmed by the firm physical joining of the two protagonists (the suggestion of a bisexual threesome with a hint of incest is also offered up, but that would be too progressive for Hollywood). The camp dimension of the whole film is multiplied by the fact that the conservative Stallone is clearly unaware that he is playing a gay character, whereas the libertarian buffoon Russell plays his queer scamp with knowing verve. Of course, all of the above is just one possible interpretation, but it makes the film much more enjoyable.

This dystopian parable about feudal labour in a capitalist system and the need for revolt is hobbled by its screenplay, which tries to pile up mysteries, but then fails to maintain a coherent inner logic of its world. Paradoxically, however, the realism-shunning narrative is offset by the film’s main strength, which is the imposing location of a run-down mining complex enhanced with unobtrusive set design that adds a surprisingly realistic dimension to the film.

Kidnapped is propaganda that is so transparently formulaic and, at the same time, so skilfully crafted that it’s hard to believe that the whole thing wasn’t a deliberate parody. Whereas blatant propaganda like Tomorrow, People Will Be Dancing Everywhere clings to insipidness and lobotomisation in all circumstances, Kadár and Klos actually wrap ideological immorality up in the precise style of a thriller, as if to subvert not only the format of the propaganda film, but also western pulp thrillers. [Brakfest warm-up 2021]

Pure cringe. Can your Horst Fuchs do this?

I swim, to where I don’t even know, through a veil of rain to a sound that may be a memory of the past, a heartache and an echo of something ethereal. Perhaps all of it was a reality from which someone remembers everything. Or a dream from the sleep of someone who dreams of nothing. Maybe both. Whereas some films offer an enhanced experience under the influence of substances, others depend on a dozing viewer. With his films, Apichatpong Weerasethakul lulls viewers, always whispering a few sentences that after a while sometimes agitate our minds, sometimes merely amuse us with their gentle humour, and at other times force us to abandon useless concepts of reality, logic and linear continuity. Whoever accedes to this will not experience an awakening, but will rather spend two hours floating in a state where the touch of the universe has the same weight as the gurgling of rain. I wasn’t enchanted so much by Memoria as by the director’s more hypnotic and mysterious delving into the space-time of feelings, but it was still pleasant to let myself be carried away by the film. How paradoxical it is that such a film should open a festival whose viewers frantically stress out over the combinatorics of schedules and programming priorities. It is far better that it brings to an end the echoes of that festival. (Šary Vary 2021)

Verhoeven devoted his entire oeuvre to bringing back to the sacred (genre) worlds the profane (excessively physical and emotional) aspects that had been pushed out of them by the previous tradition. His (perhaps only for now) last film thus represents a magnificent culmination of this effort, as he turns his attention to the Church itself, following his treatment of Hollywood genres and national historical milestones and local social phenomena. Benedetta thus delivers a caustically funny deconstruction of the Church as a pragmatic apparatus based on the illusion of hope. As in his previous films, this time Verhoeven offers a seemingly one-dimensional spectacle. But lying just below the wholly functional (in terms of genre) and, for many, outrageous, grim and entertaining surface, there is a broad spectrum of thought-provoking layers. For some, Benedetta will remain a cynical or even exploitative and objectifying mess, but for others it will be, among other things, a sophisticated portrait of the wonderfully ambiguous title character. Through her, personal and organised faith is revealed to be an instrument of institutional and personal power and, paradoxically, within a certain historical context, of possible emancipation, though only in the sense of career and existence, but peculiarly not in terms of personal freedom. And, through the protagonist’s development, it also shows that spiritual foolishness and physical orgasm have more in common than many want to admit.