JFL

Based on their internet videos, one might get the impression that the brothers Danny and Michael Philippou are just a couple of louts riding the wave of post-Jackass dumbfuckery and YouTuber bullshit. Their feature-length debut is thus all the more surprising, as it is a very intense genre flick with precision craftsmanship, as well as an absorbingly sensitive work that is able to thought-provokingly address a full range of the young generation’s frustration and general depressing issues without in any way coming across as being too clever for its own good or in-your-face. Talk to Me radiates fierce energy, formalistic boisterousness and devastating horror intensity that brings to mind the first Evil Dead, though Sam Raimi put his supreme talent to use solely in the interest of genre entertainment with very little reach beyond the confines of the screen. By comparison, the Philippou brothers expressively thematise motifs such as the depressing tension that comes with the pressure to fit into the group and the endless provocations and ever-present danger of making a fool of oneself under the watchful eye of social media. The backbone of the brilliantly constructed narrative consists in the coming to terms with the loss of a loved one and the associated risk of falling into the abyss of depression and blaming oneself. The film manages to present this subject with sobering empathy and a powerfully intense sense of dread.

It’s not too surprising that Stallone has never been able to understand that he simply cannot replicate one of the greatest successes of his career. The name Rambo has very little significance in relation to one fictional character. Its cultural capital and iconic nature are derived solely from Rambo: First Blood Part II and its association with the waning days of the Cold War. Stallone’s tenacious effort to continue the franchise’s box-office success was still endearingly entertaining in the third instalment thanks to the camp dimension of that film. The fourth one was just tiresome and toxic with it old man’s stubbornness and toxic conservativeness. Because Stallone doesn’t have any sense of humour or self-reflection, the title of the parody flick Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping describes his career. Like Sly, unfortunately, some of his viewers still hope to at least dip a toe into the old waters. To this day, I still remember the wearying disappointment creeping through the screening room at the cinema. It’s true that the particular screening was on the day of the premiere as part of a double feature with the iconic First Blood Part II at the Aero cinema in Prague. The futile digital effects and the drawn-out ideologically focused melodrama about the need to protect the US southern border were downright off-putting  for the viewers looking forward to bombastic action, which finally came after 90 gruelling minutes with truly devastating sadistic explicitness, so the irritated audience welcomed it with a clamorous roar of relief. However, that doesn’t change the fact that all of the other sequels only diminish the legacy and significance of Rambo: First Blood Part II as a pop-culture milestone. On the other hand, that’s a good thing, because we now live in a different era and a different world. It’s just a shame that Stallone still doesn’t understand that.

The problem with Ocean Waves (Umi ga kikoeru) is viewer expectations, which are primarily associated with the fact that it is a production from Studio Ghibli, but may also be based on what we have become accustomed to in the area of anime. This project is fundamentally and intentionally different from what we would expect in either case. Ocean Waves was initiated directly as a platform for young filmmakers from the studio’s ranks and as a departure from the projects of the then already old masters Miyazaki and Takahata. As a first attempt, it also had to be a deliberately inexpensive production that wouldn’t be released in cinemas, but on television as a one-hour special. Instead of Miyazaki’s fantastical worlds, this work of young filmmakers is supposed to be conceptually closer to Takahata’s simpler films. Unlike those, however, Ocean Waves lacks magical realism and the low-key celebration of the minor details of everyday life depicted with obsessive emphasis on perfectly capturing them in the form of animation. Ocean Waves is an adaptation of the book of the same name, which nostalgically turns to the time of adolescence and deals with a platonic triangle of two friends at a provincial high school and a newly arrived co-ed from Tokyo. In line with the book, however, the film’s depiction of the relationships is a radical departure from the typical affected hyper-stylisation and formulaic nature of mainstream anime. Instead of grand emotions, flashy chaos and condensed relationship clichés, Ocean Waves works with the motifs of shyness in expressing one’s feelings and the general insipidness of adolescence in the ordinariness of those feelings spread out over time. This is further enhanced by the fragile narrative, which presents all of the events not with an omniscient view, but from the perspective of one of the protagonists. The limitations of having a single perspective conditions the seemingly meaningless and undramatic peripeteias, the ambiguous clues and the uncertainties, which are usually not lacerating and intense, but merely authentically confusing. Ocean Waves is thus one of the simplest and unobtrusively fragile films about teen love, but because of that, viewers may find it to be rather inaccessible.

Even though Rambo: First Blood Part II, with its mission to rescue America’s self-confidence after the debacle of the Vietnam War, seems rather ridiculous from today’s perspective, it has two strengths that cannot be denied. The first of these is the outrageously honest craftsmanship of the action sequences. Though the film’s anti-choreography and concept of guerrilla spec-ops combat come across as quite laughable, all of these drawbacks are offset by the precise topography of the action, the dynamic editing and, mainly, the superb camerawork, which ceaselessly emphasises the real physical dimension of every shot (the composition with the view to the protagonist from inside the helicopter cabin with the landscape in motion in the second plane behind the glass was definitely copied by Tom Cruise’s team in Mission: Impossible – Fallout). The film’s other strength is its indisputable status as a pop-culture phenomenon, which is based on rare, inimitable harmonisation of the work’s ethos with the audience’s mood at the time. Though critics on both sides of the Iron Curtain slammed the film, it set box-office records in the West (both in the US and in Europe) and it enjoyed even greater success in cultural terms in the Eastern Bloc through illegal underground distribution, though of course without the financial gains. The bellowing hulk with a strip of cloth tied around his head, armed with a bow and explosive arrows, and killing cartoonishly depicted commies became the embodiment of the ideal of America at the height of the Cold War. Rambo wasn’t Superman or any other particular hero with specific traits and virtues, but like the Berlin Wall, the film concentrated within itself the mood of the decaying Soviet system and a society that had grown tired of the stalemate and the status quo. Whereas in America the film soothed the ego of conservatives and licked their wounds after losing a war, in both Western and Eastern Europe it represented an energising fantastical pressure valve for a frustrated society. Rambo: First Blood Part II became both an icon of and a synonym for its era and it remains embedded in society’s memory even in the new millennium. But everything written here refers solely to this particular film. Because of that and despite all of Stallone’s misguided attempts, none of the sequels can build on that legacy with all of its meanings, nor can they repeat its box-office success.

Rambo III embodies the swan song of the eighties-style action movies in which the heroes checked guile and tactics at the door and righted the world’s wrongs through lethal brute force in seriously bombastic spectacles. A closer look at Stallone’s career shows that, unlike his main rival Arnold, Sly didn’t have much of a feel for trends or for the mood of the given time. And so in the same year when Arnold hit the cinemas with Red Heat, reflecting the policy of glasnost and combining a tough macho thriller with the one-liner-laden good humour of buddy movies, Stallone tried to wring the last drop out of the stale subject matter of the Cold War and raise awareness about a conflict that no one in the US cared about. On the other hand, the screenplay of Rambo III obviously takes into account the changes in the genre and thus enriches the relationship between the title protagonist and Colonel Trautman with a bit of banter, which was absent in the earlier Rambo movies and was clearly copied from Lethal Weapon. However, the film’s foundation remains entirely identical to that of its immediate predecessor, but with double the budget. With the franchise’s second and third instalments, Stallone presented what was, in his view, a universal recipe for resolving any military conflict, which for some fetishistic reason stubbornly involves a bow with explosive arrows and dispatching bad guys in a helicopter. I remember that in my boyish derangement, when I took all eighties movies deadly seriously, I thought Rambo III was the most amazing film of the whole trilogy, which certainly had something to do with the fact that I could project myself into the story as the hero’s adolescent sidekick. Today, I still think that it’s the best of the Rambo movies, albeit solely from a cringe perspective. Jesus Christ, the film is perfection itself – from the well-made actions sequences and the imbecilic naïveté of the militaristic agit-prop to the hero who is so sullenly ridden with existential angst that he is totally cool with his permed hairdo. And on top of that, there are of course screenwriting gems like the dialogue about the blue light. It’s impossible not to believe the rumours that everyone but Stallone knew they were making a complete clusterfuck of a movie and so that’s how they approached it. But it’s a shame that the director originally attached to the project, Russell Mulcahy, made that fact too obvious and was thus fired. Because if it had been directed by that frantic music-video formalist, who made the phenomenal '80s exercises in excess Razorback and Highlander, Rambo III would have been the apex of camp. _____ Side note: The main obstacles in Stallone’s career have been his ambitions as an actor and the fact that he has always taken himself too seriously. Until the mid-1980s, when he finally reconciled himself to the action-hero image and, unfortunately, also completely succumbed it, his filmography was characterised by a regular trend of following every (essentially surprising and outsider) hit with several futile and money-losing attempts to show a broader range as an actor. Thanks, on the other hand, to the “talented actor” label that was successfully attached to him by the PR myth around the first Rocky, Sly was still considered a bigger star than Arnold for a significant part of the eighties. Schwarzenegger only gradually worked his way up from the realm of B-movies to the pinnacle of Hollywood thanks to the video market. In the second half of the decade, when Sly found himself in a one-sided rivalry with Arnold over who had the bigger biceps and less subcutaneous fat, he became the subject of open ridicule, which included a string of annual nominations for Golden Raspberry awards. More than anything else, today’s wave of renewed appreciation for Stallone, again underpinned by his return to the roles of Rocky Balboa and John Rambo, demonstrates both the selectivity of the public’s memory and the power of nostalgia. History is rewritten by the winners and, in the final analysis, Stallone has always somehow surprisingly been a winner –  maybe because we all want to believe in the myth of the poor, ordinary guy who makes it to the top solely through his own efforts. But even so, Arnold is still a better example of that.

This likable low-budget B-movie does not in any way conceal its production limitations, but rather manages to boldly contend with them. Unfortunately, before the film finally pulls its screenwriting ace out of its sleeve, it has spent too much time on insipidly staged action, overly complicated introductions of the characters and, mainly, needlessly drawn-out copying of the strong points of Verhoeven’s original classic, which this film’s creators are not quite able to pull off with a significantly smaller budget. But when it finally comes to developing the motif of faith as a form of madness and as a weapon for subjugating the enemy, the whole project luckily gets a second wind, thanks to which it entertainingly makes it to the bombastic climax with the alien-insect mega-vagina.

Proletarians of all countries, for the sake of your unrealistic ideals, stay in your fictional worlds or brilliant screenwriters like Pavel Juráček (in his student project, no less) will mercilessly make fun of you.

With depressing effectiveness, Juráček succeeded in capturing the quiet absurdity of the labyrinth of  bureaucracy. Behind its human face lies the apathy of zero comprehension and the feeling of unease stemming from the ever-present fear that the senselessness of the whole system will be revealed. Nevertheless, the cat-rental shop sounds like a great business model (that is, if we forget about the nature of cats).

Tsui Hark’s work as a director and producer, at least from the key period of Hong Kong’s colonial era,  stands on a foundation comprising a mix of formulas and revisionist revival of traditional Chinese genres and their intermingling with western influences. At the same time, his work is characterised by creative tinkering (in terms of craft and form, as well as purely implementational and childish) and emancipatory tendencies, when Tsui simply wanted to bring his own versions of western trends and genre milestones to cinema in his homeland. In the same year when the Tsui-produced Gunmen, a variation on De Palma’s post-modern gangster movie The Untouchables, was released to cinemas, his quite possibly most eclectic work, whose mishmash of styles and genres may be equalled only by his fantastic debut, The Butterfly Killers, also excelled on local screens. I Love Maria, also known as Roboforce, is an absolutely incongruous extravaganza in which special effects play the lead role over any sort of screenwriting logic or causal structure in the context of the otherwise very vague narrative standards of the Hong Kong mainstream. Everything here is subordinate to the ambition to let viewers constantly marvel at something while concurrently entertaining them. This refers not only to the special effects, but also to how the film’s sequences are interconnected (or disconnected), how strikingly effectively the characters move from one place to another, and how their relationships and plot twists are revealed completely randomly. And there truly is something to marvel at – at least for those with a properly open mind – because Tsui combines his adoration for Fritz Lang’s sci-fi classic Metropolis and Japanese tokusatsu films with the tradition of Chinese wu-xia stories and modern popular comedies, while not shying away from adding in particular inspirations from contemporary Hollywood blockbusters (from the dynamics of Back to the Future and the technological excesses of The Delta Force to the tumult of the Aliens soundtrack). With undisguised enthusiasm for the project as a producer, Tsui gets carried away with his vision of a futuristic world in which robots become new variants of superhuman wu-xia warriors flying through the air and deflecting bullets instead of punches. Tsui’s team enthusiastically embraces the production limitations and turns them into strengths in the interest of a delightfully naïve and purposefully inventive rendering. The futuristic metropolis thus helps to evoke a combination of rather anonymous locations and industrial settings shrouded in a blanket of artificial fog. The spectacular visual impression of the sci-fi technologies is similarly aided by smoke, steam and darkness together with fragmented shooting and comic-bookishly skewed camera angles. Unlike the contemporary film’s by Steven Spielberg (to whom Tsui was often compared in an effort to give western viewers an idea of his influence and creative ambitions), I Love Maria does not strive for sophistication and believability, which would have legitimised its fantastical nature in the eyes of adult viewers. Rather, it dispenses with clever tricks that would blur the line between fiction and fantasy, and conversely revels in the papier mâché extravagance with childlike joy. The essence of this is the giant robot, which renders the rockets launched at it harmless by opening a small door in itself to a miniature furnace, where it lets the rockets explode and then expels the resulting scrap metal from its backside like droppings. The verbal and slapstick tomfoolery is in a similar vein and is present only in the original Hong Kong version, because it was a bit too much for foreign markets. On the other hand, the film’s revenues indicate that this phantasmagorical sci-fi extravaganza did not entirely connect with the domestic audience. However, that doesn’t change the fact that I Love Maria is one of the most amazing, most original and most entertaining entries in Tsui Hark’s filmography.

Like other trash flicks about strong women from the period, whether from the Far East or the US, this contribution to the genre from the Hong Kong movie factory Shaw Brothers straddles the line between progressive emancipation and objectifying exploitation. Nevertheless, Big Bad Sis is appealing as an attempt to create an absolutely feminine alternative to the dominant macho stories about honourable gangsters, and not just by making a differently cast variation on such films. However, it is necessary to add that this feminine element sprang from the minds of men in the positions of director, screenwriter and producer. Though the film is related to B-movies about youthful delinquents and paraphrases mafia origin stories, everything is tied together in the context of a feminine melodrama. The title protagonist thus does not build a criminal empire, but rather a commune with the aim of helping other girls from the factory where she works through fundraisers for mutual financial assistance and by beating the hell out of their philandering partners and their abusive step-fathers. In and of itself, this is a tremendously fresh antithesis of the usual macho power structures built on patriarchal formulas. The film takes a similarly unexpected and even subservice approach to the nude scenes, a mandatory element of the genre that it stages with blatant absurdity – from the nonsensical rendezvous of the nude participants on bicycles in the forest to the grandiosely drawn-out and overwrought bedroom scene shot through a glass bed, evoking the formalistic sets in the films of Seijun Suzuki. On the other hand, the filmmakers were evidently afraid to be too progressive and thus regularly diminished the virtues of their work by boorishly ridiculing the supporting female characters, particularly with their girly way of fighting, as well as with outrageous adherence to the basic tenets of the status quo (so the protagonist would rather suffer for compassionately letting her father win at a mafia-run casino, where he came to squander the family’s and the company’s savings, instead of slapping him for being an irresponsible idiot). The film similarly relies on cameos by male stars rather than letting the heroines carry the film themselves. It’s thus not at all surprising that everything ends with a regulation formulaic ending in accordance with the rules of the time that called for any offenses against the law to be punished, so the female protagonist remains dependent on help from her male protectors. However, it is thus all the more pleasantly surprising that she is given the satisfaction of eliminating the main bad guy, which is a privilege that is often denied to many other strong female characters in genre movies. Big Bad Sis, which is rather an overlooked title in the filmography of the Shaw Brothers studio, is thus surprising as an unexpectedly stimulating, entertaining and progressive work. It can definitely be seen as one of the key antecedents of the ’80s wave of girls-with-guns movies and the elements and principles thereof. Furthermore, it boasts an impressive action-packed climax in a sand quarry, whose dynamism and drama are enhanced by excellent choreography and imaginative use of the setting for various action passages ranging from chases to fights, as well as interspersing the action with several deadlines and motivations of the characters.