Lima

Jiří Trnka was a world-class filmmaker, as evidenced by the many international and festival awards this film has received. There is obvious inspiration from the work of Josef Mánes and Mikoláš Alš, but Trnka remains his own, full of pictorial imagination. By making the narrative very poetic, it may be a bit terse, but that didn't detract from the experience. At the same time, the film is free from excessive pathos, although the time and the theme might have tempted to go that way. As is Trnka's custom, the image is very dynamic – the camera frequently changes angles, circles, swims in any direction, zooms, and Trnka does not avoid mass scenes, which must have been very demanding in terms of realisation. In terms of imagination, Trnka was comparable only to Karel Zeman or Břetislav Poyar, and in this context I wonder when will we see DVD editions of his work in this country? As with Zeman until recently, our distributors have a large debt, or rather lack of interest. But what do I wonder, in a country where 600,000 people saw Babovřesky in a few weeks.

In this day and age, full of social and cultural uncertainties, you need at least one thing you can count on. And here you have it: beefcake Taylor Lautner is going to take his shirt off again in 5 minutes :) Otherwise, of course, you can't make anything other than a silly and stupid movie based on a silly and stupid novel. Not even Chris Nolan behind the camera could have helped here.

I am an omnivore in music, but not an uncritical one. I love the 1960s and 70s the most, my favourites are Pink Floyd and The Beatles, who moved music forward by several decades, but I also like the work of Iron Maiden and the first four albums of Metallica, and from the opposite pole, Depeche Mode and Bjork. Robbie Williams's pop output is a bit beyond me, but I can't deny him one thing, at least for a short time, he popularised to the masses a wonderful period of music when swing ruled the world. And in this concert, he goes all in, flawlessly intoning, gliding across octaves with enormous panache, like perhaps Sinatra himself, until one regrets that he didn't stick with swing instead of mediocre pop (he hasn't released a proper album in perhaps 10 years, it's clear that his songwriting guru Guy Chambers is sorely missed). Compared to these immortal swing tracks, the sexlessness and uninspiredness and – I'm not afraid to say shittiness – of contemporary music "idols" like Justin Bieber or One Direction are now revealed as the emperor’s new clothes. Well, to each their own.....

Sometimes you need a fairy tale like this for your audience's mental health, even if it is painfully predictable, but it has a positive feeling, which is never enough.

Poster tagline: ENTER AN AGE OF UNKNOWN TERRORS, PAGAN WORSHIP AND VIRGIN SACRIFICE!!! The legendary Hammer studio not only made horror movies, but also produced this pseudo-adventure set in prehistoric times that were so popular in the late 1960s and early 70s. The script might as well have been written by a lobotomized chimpanzee, it's a completely plotless hodgepodge, mixing together dinosaurs, Stone Age hunters, and even stressing (and having some relevance to the flimsy plot) that the moon didn't exist at the time and was just forming (yeah), evident in the final scene of raging earthly disasters. Prehistoric women have long, well-kept hairstyles, are clean-shaven and wear leather bikinis, while all the men beards to distinguish them from today's men. What I can't deny this film, though, is the truly excellent effects, something this kind of crap doesn’t deserve. Great, and I underscore that, great post-window-scanning puppets of prehistoric animals (I counted eight) that seem to have come out of Ray Harryhausen's workshop in its heyday. The effective rear projection and the interlacing that doesn't hit the eyes is simply a joy to behold and I understand the Oscar nomination. Maybe I would have rated it more positively overall, but the lack of plot, the overacting, the eternal running around the rocky landscape and the babbling in incomprehensible gibberish, which was supposed to add a touch of authenticity (only at the beginning there are about 10 English words), were very tiring towards the end. If you really want to try a genre-similar film, try One Million Years B.C., which unleashed this trend of pseudo-adventures and is much more entertaining.

What elevates this film above the sci-fi B-movies of the Golden Age of the 1950s is its remarkable soundtrack, penned by Van Cleave, which stands out from all those uniform symphonic products in the genre-related films of the era. Exclusively accompanied by piano, using at times discordant elements and occasionally deep, fateful notes, sometimes straight out of George Gershwin's works, he creates a very unsettling atmosphere in this Frankensteinian tale. In the first two thirds, the story of a scientist who fits the brain of his slain genius son into a 2 metre-tall robot (which looks like Kryton from Red Dwarf) would deserve a 4*. It's confidently directed, narratively restrained (no B-movie tropes or bad special effects), even asking some of the eternal philosophical questions that Frankenstein movies have always asked. But from the first kill (the robot whips deadly rays from its blinking eyes), the film makes it clear that we are in B-movie waters, and the final carnage in the United Nations building, where the victims stand idly by like a flock of sheep, is comically inept. Still, a satisfying 3*, for the great atmosphere and the not-so-futile screenplay (though of course it's just a modern take on Mary Shelley's novel).

Poster tagline: THE MAMMOTH MONSTER THAT TERRORIZED THE EARTH! TODAY IT’S DESTROYING AFRICA, TOMORROW… THE WORLD!!! If I had to show someone a film where the plot is stretched out just to fulfill a studio contract that says the runtime must be at least 60 minutes, it would be this one. It starts quite normal, though, with scientists sending living animals into space to see how cosmic radiation affects their bodies. Due to technical difficulties, a rocket loaded with a crate of wasps goes astray and lands somewhere in Africa. There, in a jungle under an active volcano, the wasps grow to enormous size (due to the effect of the radiation they have absorbed in space) and terrorise the local population. And so our two main characters, scientists, set out on a journey to put a stop to it. After the initial wasp attacks, when they frighten animals and kill two black men, we walk, walk and walk through the jungle for about 45 minutes, occasionally fainting from lack of water, visit one massacred village, then, almost imperceptibly, there’s a spark between a charming scientist and the daughter of a local doctor, and we walk again. The journey itself is the result of a combination of footage from somewhere in the Californian hills and actual African landscapes, and this blending of visually disparate images beats each other up until your eyes hurt. Then in the final showdown with grenades and flowing lava, the special effects are so rudimentary that even Ed Wood and Bert I. Gordon would be embarrassed. The only plus point is the monster itself – a puppet (at the end even three in one shot!) of a big, fat cross between a flesh fly and a wasp, with large elephant-like tusks and terribly cute, gently fluttering wings. Boo, boo, boo. Truly a monster to love, suitable for your monitor wallpaper :o)

For the first half, I was seething with the words: "This isn't a movie, it's just a dusty attraction!". A chain carousel that gives you the creeps, a product for one purpose: so that the capos at Disney can afford new limousines. But there is one big BUT. Although I subscribe to a completely different world of cinema, I ended up feeling like someone on a weight loss diet who visits a candy store with all its delicacies wrapped in colorful and at first glance tempting packaging, and bites into one of them. Superficial, I know, but sometimes you just succumb to something like that easily. The last act improved the final impression, and the incorporation of technical conveniences into the fairy tale world was reminiscent of the best of The Wizard of Oz from 1939, or Vaughn's Stardust, which is still proof that a fairytale can be done in a clever way. So in the end....in the end, it wasn't as silly and overwrought as the disastrous trailer might make it seem.

Poster tagline: HAIR RISING! ONE BITE FROM A GIANT SPIDER TURNED HIM INTO THE WORLD'S MOST HIDEOUS MONSTER, WITH AN EVIL LUST TO KILL!!! A brilliantly bad film? Well, this story about a shipwrecked girl's dance club that survives on a deserted island after a plane crash and are threatened by the director of the club, mutated into a monster after a spider bite, is just bad, I wouldn’t go as far as to call it brilliant. But there are some “remarkable” moments. It’s worth mentioning the crash of the plane, in which the director used a shot of a downed fighter plane, probably from World War II, which falls perpendicularly into the sea, and there are brief shots of two screaming women somewhere in a dark room. Also remarkable is how they show the monster. You can tell that the close-ups of the face (the monster looks like a werewolf from old Universal horror movies) were shot in one take elsewhere, presumably in a studio, in the dark, with the same bush in the background, whereas when the rest of the body is shown on the island, the actor's back is always turned to the camera so that it's not obvious that he's not wearing the same fancy mask, thus saving money. This bizarre combination of sudden changes of day and night, face and back is like the best of Ed Wood and his ilk. The women here are all thrown indiscriminately into the form of moaning twats, mindlessly submissive to men (no matter which ones) and with a head full of coquetry and the need to walk around only in their underwear; they are, therefore, a disparate, fractious group that leads only to bickering (and one wholesome fight). The men, on the other hand, mainly walk around only in trousers, so that their hairy chests can be properly seen and both of the male and female spectators can have their own. And since the spider and the monster are only second fiddle here due to their few second performances, the main role is played by the chatter of the squabbling women and their two partners about which of the men and women is chic, who is not, who is tearing up the group, who is screwing who, and there’s no time or space for any stupid, life-threatening monster to be discussed. Unfortunately, this is by no means interesting, or even entertainingly silly. I dropped the Boo! rating from my scale a while ago (I only reserve it to ideologically disingenuous or harmful films), but in this case I wasn’t very far from it.

Poster tagline: THANK GOD IT’S ONLY A MOTION PICTURE! SCIENCE MISCALCULATES... UNDERGROUND ATOM BOMB EXPLODES EARTH’S CORE... AND THE WORLD TOTTERS ON THE BRINK OF DESTRUCTION! Not as silly as the synopsis might make it seem. Scientists are trying to get at the Earth's core to harness its energy, but its edge is so hard and tough that even diamond drill bits can't do anything, so they use the power of an atomic bomb to trigger an unintended effect, a rift in the Earth's crust that spreads across the globe. Of course, if you think about it a bit and don't have Emmerich's mindset, it’s scientific and logical nonsense that cannot be accepted even turning a blind eye. This is a sci-fi fairytale with a likeable narrative, a very good production design, and decent special effects, which was pigeonholed in the catastrophe genre that was becoming popular then and would peak in the 1970s. Moreover, the performances are superb, including the necessary eye-candy in the form of the charming Janette Scott, who’s the anchor as the centre of a love triangle with a dying scientist and husband – an emotionally tormented wife – and a doubt-filled fellow scientist and unwilling saviour of the world. The effects aren’t many, they take up about 5 minutes of the total runtime, but when they do happen – the atomic and magmatic eruptions – they are very spectacular and impressive, and the descent into the volcano is perfect. Leaving aside the naive premise, the otherwise quite intelligent script relies mainly on the gradual building of tension and escalates excellently in the end, although a viewer tuned to a more realistic-sounding tune might say that it was too much, but not for me, I loved it.