JFL

This is a pitiful attempt at a comedic variation on the concept of a film set in a single house in the style of classic detective movies (i.e. a bit like Knives Out), which was supposed to be aimed at teenagers, but was apparently made by people who do not understand teenagers at all.

After the director’s previous films, Dark Lies the Island is a tremendous disappointment. The film, which perhaps was supposed to be some sort of Guy Ritchie-esque story from the Irish boondocks, spins out such a bizarre spiral of skewed relationships and clumsy characters that it reaches the realm of lifeless boredom.

With the end of the saga, the time has come to remember the man who started it all and who is only artfully recalled here and there so as not to be mentioned – see the nostalgic promo videos perfectly crafted by Disney's marketing team to create the impression that the saga now finally belongs to the fans and that the fans conclude it for the fans (thus Lucas is found there in the grand total of only one shot). It is fascinating how the corporation succeeded in cutting George Lucas, who had always been mentioned in the same breath with the franchise, off from Lucasfilm within a few years of acquiring the brand. Lucas was not only the creator, but also a malevolent god who does whatever he pleases with the films and ignores the prayers of the fanatical admirers of his work. This distant memory makes a refreshing impression today, when we conversely live in an era when marketing campaigns and the entire PR product are often more important, powerful and characteristically even more expensive than the blockbusters that they promote, and when the films themselves are made according to PR plans and not on the basis of any vision or ambition. How paradoxical it is that the cleverly designed return of the saga to the fans and, furthermore, the evident subordination to their taste gave rise to the most unforgettable and most unanimously panned film of the entire series. If the highlight of the series still remains the fifth (strongly atypical in the context of the whole saga) episode with its outstanding narrative structure, which perfectly alternates between the environment and the characters so that it never gets bogged down, then the ninth instalment, following the example of its hyperjumps, rushes to cram as many elements as possible into its monumental runtime. However, the resulting effect is merely a blur of colour from which nothing remains at the end of the closing credits. I vaguely recall that the ninth film nullified (seemingly) everything innovative and fresh from the previous episode and replaced it with nonstop fan service, which made even hardcore fans nauseous. But, as is the case with few films, you have to see it in the cinema, because you will not get the gradual disappearance of the crowd’s enthusiasm and incredulous cries and outbursts of desperate laughter anywhere else. Personally, I decided that I wanted Porgs, Ewoks, Jawas and Gungans to be present at the end of the saga, so I am 75% satisfied with the film.

The Deuce does not bring forth a dramatic narrative, nor does it have an all-encompassing arch or a main character. On the contrary, it uses the series structure to spread out the chronicle of a single place, mapping a certain them. That place is the titular part of Manhattan at the time of the pornography boom or, more precisely, from porn’s emergence as an industry at the beginning of the 1970s, through its peak as a creative medium and offshoot of show business at the end of the decade, to its destructive focus on quantity in the 1980s with the rise of video. The show’s creators inventively divide these three periods into separate but interconnected series. Individual characters representing real people or composites of multiple archetypes infuse this environment not only with life, but also with personal peaks, valleys and everything in between, thus creating a captivatingly textured evocation not only of the time, but primarily of the system around sex work (whether in front of or behind the camera, or on the street and in various kind of establishments) and the commodification of the body and pleasure, which deprives these themes of one-sided arguments and, conversely, shows the ambiguity of this entire world that is simultaneously dirty, gleaming, repulsive, exciting, superficial, ambitious, predatory, career-focused, cruel and fascinating in its intertwined nature and complexity. Although one can marvel at the perfect evocation of the period, The Deuce is not a retro series, but rather a provocative chronicle that calls for consideration of the various aspects of pornography and sex work, as well as gender norms, misogyny, emancipation and the roles that people adopt for themselves, which help them to accept the status quo of their surroundings. At the same time, thanks to the varied cast of characters, the narrative does not fall into a dry didactic thesis, but rather brings to consciousness the fact that with each similarly seemingly depersonalised and general social theme, the particular stories, faces and emotions of people, most of whom having already “fallen into the embrace of time”, are valued.

Whereas some lenient reviews assert that the second Zombieland offers essentially the same thing as the first one, that is not entirely true. While watching the film, you repeatedly say to yourself that specific scenes and shots are a variation of something from the first film, whether that is slow-motion splatter shots or the characters pushing each other around. But that is merely just mechanical fan service and thus basically the exact opposite of the very essence of the first Zombieland, which became a sensation in its time because it came up with a fresh approach to zombie flicks and managed to transform them into clever entertainment by means of a detached view and genre reflection. The second film, on the other hand, is shocking in its failure to offer anything fresh or original. It is as if the returning filmmakers had suffered a severe case of dementia over the preceding decade and are thus merely repeating what they did last time. Furthermore, whereas the first film had a certain degree of causality and, above all, it managed to build a functional and coherent world, here everything falls to pieces. The result is an unwanted travesty in which the characters find themselves outside of their world, while the new reality lacks any cohesion (which is most apparent in the absolutely dysfunctional and interchangeable environment of the climax). Everything could almost be saved by claiming that this time the filmmakers came up with a brilliant meta concept which, following the example of typically insipid direct-to-video sequels, offers a deliberately cheaper and more shoddily made variation of the original hit, but nothing in the film indicates such a degree of detachmentand conceptuality.

So, let’s summarise: A group of Greek immigrants producing trash films in Los Angeles saw A Nightmare on Elm Street and said to themselves that they would satisfyviewers’ hunger for similar flicks. They decided to approach their work in grand style, so they blew most of the budget on paying choreographer Toni Basil, whom they inexplicably cast in one of the lead roles, and the band Devo, which ultimately did not particularly distinguish itself on the soundtrack. And, of course, it was necessary to cast a Playmate who would willingly shed her t-shirt whenever necessary. However, that left hardly anything in the piggy bank for the group of pitiable thirty-somethings who would play teenagers, one stuntman to set on fire, one outhouse explosion and a very small handful of gore effects and masks. And, of course, one of the first budget items dissolved in the preceding list was the screenwriter’s fee. When the filmmakers furiously brainstormed about how to add another attraction to their hopeless project, they came up with the idea of shooting the whole thing on Alcatraz, because they would thus already have great locations and interiors at the price of apparently low rent (a condition of which was that they had to shoot at night so as not to get in the way of sightseeing tours). But because the rent still cost something, they decided to use absolutely all of the shots of the old prison that they had taken. The resulting film is ideal as a drinking game with the following rules: Have one small shot whenever there is a shot of the bay with Alcatraz or any of the prison grounds and building, but you must have a double when the concrete railing or the façade with windows appears. You are guaranteed to have alcohol poisoning by the end of the film.

Mortuary Academy is a hopeless video clusterf*ck that was elevated in the original by the splendidly elegant Paul Bartel, who put forth another of his stunningly humorous, depraved characters, and his always enchanting creative colleague Mary Woronov, who were first brought together by the king of trash, Roger Corman. In the Czech live dubbing, it was further elevated thanks to the captivating freaks of the duo Imanuel Lubrikant and Kafilerie Zawadská, whose melding with the characters prompts speculation on how much the film and dialogue correspond to their own life together ;)

From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, the two greatest blockbuster titans, Arnold and Sly, competed with and responded to each other, but as we will discuss, Arnold always came out ahead because he thought about the audience and took everything with good humour. As their respective careers wind down, it seems that both men have remembered that period and brought their most iconic characters back to life. Both the fifth Rambo and the sixth Terminator are set on the border between the United States and Mexico and reflect the topical theme of migration to the U.S. Whereas Stallone’s entire movie slides into a feeble-minded conservative delusion, where he puts himself in the foreground, Arnold leaves space in the new Terminator for other characters to tell their stories. Though Dark Fate walks in the shadow of the first two films in the series, the awareness that it can never surpass them makes it possible to use its heritage to its advantage. Despite the fact that it relies heavily on fanservice, it does so light-heartedly and with charm, but it mainly has something to offer in addition to that. The shared scenes with Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger will please every fan, but there are much better and more essential scenes developing the character of Sarah Connor and even a whole storyline involving Grace, a soldier from the future. One could fault the film for merely following the list of liberal themes and motifs of today’s America. But like Cameron’s own films, Dark Fate depicts strong women not as a fetish or cliché conforming to the times, but simply based on the dramatic potential of female characters who, in the face of the given circumstances, fulfil their potential as active initiators of events and are cool characters. Likewise, the creators did not go the route of “updating” the franchise for the modern day (like the foolishly recombined preceding instalment), but rather used the dramatic potential of “minority” (in the sense of previously standing outside the mainstream) stories to strengthen their own narrative. So, even if one does not resist the euphoric statement that after many years, we finally have a properly entertaining Terminator here, it is all the more pleasing that it can also provide a properly feminine, freshly Mexican and simply functional perspective thanks to the superbly written and rendered characters. If you had previously hoped that at least Arnold would return in the next instalment, this time you wanted Linda Hamilton and especially Mackenzie Davis to return. ___ SPOILER -> ___ Incidentally, Dark Fate serves as a great practical example of the importance and power of representation for forming positive role models. This is due not only to the effect that it has on the audience, but also to one of the central motifs of the narrative, which is the dynamics between the characters, especially the central pair (where the film steers us toward anticipating a certain form of relationship in order to finally show that the core of that relationship is in fact admiration and respect). ___ <- SPOILER

If Anna had been the work of some newcomer, there would have been great admiration for the cleverly written screenplay and solid directing. But for Luc Besson, it’s not all that astounding. The film rather looks like one of his genre flicks, which he had previously passed on to his younger collaborators. Perhaps it should have been handed off before his EuropaCorp was impacted by debts and Besson and his colleagues were forced to lay people off and sell the company’s subsidiaries. In the context of that part of Besson’s filmography, where he figures in as the creator of the theme, co-author of the screenplay and producer, Anna deservedly ranks highly as a precision-crafted variation on the masterwork Nikita, updated to a glossily more superficial form and made special by it outstanding screenplay, which after a certain amount of runtime always rotates the field of view, thus transforming the viewers’ perspective not only on events that they saw a moment ago, but also on the titular heroine. From an originally apathetic object, she first becomes a clever tool and then, after a few turns, she appears as a sophisticated manipulator and, primarily, a chess genius making plans numerous steps ahead of the viewer and the other characters. In addition to that, we have action scenes that do not deny the inspiration of Atomic Blonde, and even though the ambitious and causally designed choreography cannot come close to that of Atomic Blonde, they still offer a refreshing hyperkinetic physical spectacle. But then one remembers that this is an original work by the same man who was once able to do much more enthralling things with the characters of women who find themselves in the unwanted position of action heroines. In Nikita, he showed the world of spies as a ruthless and sordid place where the heroine desperately faces helplessness and, like a predatory beast, has to fight not only for her life, but above all else for her sanity and whatever remains of her innocence. In Lucy, on the other hand, Besson released the whole genre from the shackles of unnecessary rationality and let his heroine transform the connective tissue of reality/film and, through this destruction of rules, create a cyberpunk innovation that showed us how unnecessarily limited films are when they sacrifice imagination at the expense of believability. Besson was a filmmaker who enchanted viewers, cooked up modern-day fairy tales and thrilling fantasies, sought out poetry in the grimy corners of everyday environments, opened our hearts to hired killers and extra-terrestrial beings, and invited us to new worlds beyond the boundaries of our own imagination. If the publicists’ predictions come to pass and EuropaCorp is hit with bankruptcy and Besson by numerous accusations, Anna may paradoxically be his last battle for viewers. Perhaps Besson is a relic of another time and can no longer easily find an audience that is sufficiently in tune with his vision. Perhaps for today's audience, Anna can be a welcome refreshment and a good genre treat. For witnesses whose love for cinema was at least in part inspired by Besson’s early films, however, it is rather a sad denouement.

A film like a Rubik’s Cube composed of giallo ornaments which, however, viewers are not supposed to piece together, but instead only immerse themselves in it and wander in its seams.