JFL

The essence of science fiction is to give its audience food for thought through visions reflecting the phenomena of the existing society and world reimagined in their possible future form. Most cinematic contributions to the genre rather disregard that essence in favour of superficially stimulating attractions, particularly action sequences, dramatic twists, star actors and extravagant special effects. Though the use of animation would lend itself to that approach, White Plastic Sky does not rely on bombastic scenes, but rather on giving the audience impetuses to think. Nevertheless, as a sombre and melancholic mood piece, it avoids literal statements and concentrates on deploying as many of those small impetuses as possible, which the viewer either catches or not. After all, the journey across a futuristic Hungary after a global environmental catastrophe is conceived as a sequence of reasons to stop and present other perspectives on the central themes comprising the definition of humanity, clinging to life and the difficulty of accepting a perspective other than the existentially self-centred one.

A werewolf curiosity clumsily straddling the line between low-budget trash and serious horror drama, the result of which is that this attempt at a gothic movie set in the Philippines will satisfy neither aficionados of serious horror films nor fans of trash flicks. Though it offers a handful of bonuses for the latter – mainly in the form of the indefatigable journeyman actor Vic Diaz in the role of Satan tempting the protagonist in countless outfits. Nevertheless, such enticements only futilely breathe tremors into the lifeless corpse that is this film, in which there is very little that is scary or funny, and only a desperate attempt to weave an existential drama with Faustian ambitions out of C-movie material.

Lycan Colony is the ultimate movie miscarriage. Such superlatives, uttered particularly in relation to the broad field of the sewer of world cinema, automatically seem rather dubious. In spite of that, however, I won’t deny myself the right to use them here, especially with the passage of many weeks during which I cleared my head cluttered with the non-stop WTF astonishment from watching this piece of work. The maestro of untrained amateurism Rob Roy mercilessly grinds down viewers with something approaching the absolute bottom of the abyss of incompetence, as well as with the heights of delirious progressivity that proudly treads uncharted territory (where no reasonable person would dare step foot). This leads to the paranoid assumption that Lycan Colony must be a calculated product, because the number of violations of the rules of filmmaking here give the impression that the film is a comprehensive encyclopaedia of how not to make a film. However, every sequence radiates genuine artlessness and sincere naïveté that the calculating mockbusters of The Asylum, for example, can’t even dream of. Of course, what we have here in the masterful auteur who stands before us is not an obstinate Sisyphean genius at the level of Herzog’s Fitzgerald, but merely a fake diamond in the rough in the form of an ordinary small-town fantasist. But what’s even more likable is the deluge of woodenly “acting” neighbours and relatives (and their household pets), crudely framed “compositions”, drastically overexposed shots (many of them shot in broad daylight and subsequently converted into night scenes with a filter, though the shadows remain), idiotically utilised simple CGI effects from the menu of basic editing software, sound effects applied in an endless loop and images clumsily deformed in every possible way. And that’s not to mention the disjointed narrative in which Native American mythology is combined with werewolf lore and where generally functional scenes like those from a family sitcom alternate with crazy twists and fantastical elements. It’s hard to find more convincing proof that in some respects AI will never replace human creativity. At the same time, however, Lycan Colony can also be seen as a portent of a phantasmagorically contorted future of cinema, as Harmony Korine is currently proclaiming in relation to his similarly digitally irrational audio-visual flatulence Aggro Dr1ft. THIS IS CINEMA or Rob Roy is the real killer of the flower moon (that is, if Killers of the Flower Moon had been run through a colour filter in the wrong aspect ratio on a green screen).

The grandmaster of martial arts movies, Lau Kar-Leung, tried to push back against his own sense of obsolescence in the rapidly changing environment of Hong Kong cinema at the beginning of the 1980s, when it was taking on a modernist hue. Though Lau had made two grandiose masterpieces of the genre – The 36th Chamber of Shaolin and Dirty Ho – in the late 1970s, young viewers had lost interest in his style of traditionally conceived costume stories that thematise the diligence and effort required to eventually master the martial arts. His projects significantly lagged behind their contemporary competition, which in some cases could boast box-office receipts up to ten times greater than those of Lau’s films.  The Lady Is the Boss comes across as a commissioned work motivated by pressure from the management of his home studio, Shaw Brothers, to try something set in the present and containing trends that were fashionable at the time. The result is a work that expressively demonstrates Lau’s effort to somehow contend with the innovations while also saving face. So, here we have a story about a traditional martial arts school that the founder’s daughter, played by Kara Hui, comes to visit from America. She trains in an aerobics outfit and ignores other traditions, distracting the hitherto well-disciplined students and, mainly, disrespecting the wisdom and experience of the previous master, portrayed by Lau himself. Together with this, there are lines literally expressing the need to bring martial arts to today’s youth and present them in the context of young people’s interests and fashion trends.  Though this may be reminiscent of the ethos of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin involving the need to bring martial arts out of closed schools and monasteries and to the common people, there is a certain bitterness in the rendering here, which is quite possibly due to Lau’s dealings with the studio heads. The film certainly cannot be denied its effort at imaginative choreography in the fight scenes with dance choreography at a discotheque or with BMX bikes on a construction site. However, these also seem forced. In fact, viewers will better remember the more imaginative passage from the nightclub with cameras than these passages highlighted in the promotional materials. Furthermore, Lau cannot refrain from self-gratification, so the whole film culminates with a display of traditional styles and, mainly, Lau himself, as the privileged heroine gets taught a lesson and has to dutifully bow down to the older master and his skills. After this bit of chasing fads, Lau was more than happy to return to costume productions, which, however, definitively faded away with the collapse of Shaw Brothers two years later. Only the absence of his faithful employer forced Lau to again make films set in the hated present (e.g. the diptych Tiger on the Beat and Aces Go Places V, both of which were excellent, though stylistically atypical in the context of contemporary trends). But after the success of those later films, he gladly returned to romanticised costume projects recalling the good old days. Despite its considerable potential, The Lady Is the Boss,  remains a peculiar anomaly and an apparently unwanted child in Lau’s otherwise fantastic creative career. Yuen Wo-Ping’s Mismatched Couples from the same period is rather better at showing how to creatively combine kung-fu choreography and the fashion trends of the 1980s in a tremendously entertaining way.

Velvet Goldmine is the Citizen Kane of glam rock, which also makes it fundamentally different from that canonical masterpiece. Orson Welles forced us to be moved by the revelation that the wealthy magnate had a heart and a yearning for lost innocence. His film revolves entirely around the title character, whereas all of the other supporting characters serve only as vehicles to add more layers to the portrait of the protagonist (which also includes the fact that the reporter remains completely anonymous, as he has no relationship to Kane at all). Using a similar narrative structure comprising flashbacks motivated by journalistic appearances and framed by echoes of a crucial moment (though not necessarily identical in time and place, but definitely in meaning), Todd Haynes tells a much more intoxicating, fantastical, sweeping and, mainly, deeper and more personal story. Fittingly for its use of David Bowie and his Ziggy Stardust persona as the model for the film, Velvet Goldmine tells the story of everyone else and the star’s influence on his era, his surroundings and, primarily, the particular people who loved him and discovered themselves through him. It turned out in the end that Bowie’s refusal to license his songs and the Ziggy persona for the production was the best thing that could have happened for Haynes. Instead of a biographical film constrained by the approval of outside authorities, he could take absolute creative licence and project onto the screen not a specific personality, but an impression of it. The focus thus shifts from biographical information and a carefully guarded image to meanings, moods, emotions and perceptions. The resulting impressive collage is then conveyed not only through the words of the characters, but primarily through their bodies and costumes, as well as by the sets, which become supremely expressive and tremendously captivating means of enchanting the audience. And when that is further combined with the music, whether as background, concert performance or music video, the result is ecstasy (especially in the case of “Ballad of Maxwell Demon”, though that is far from being the only case). Haynes created the perfect cinematic fantasy of a musical decade (but with echoes of the two decades on either side of it) and its key stars, as well as of the music industry, society and queerness, or rather the imitation and performative presentation of queerness. At the same time, the film also tells a magnificent story of the search for oneself, which is difficult in any era, though at that time it was somewhat more obvious thanks to the alien and thus easier to find kindred spirits. Besides these major and minor stories, Velvet Goldmine also remains a spectacular ode to a single night, when it rains glitter and which is the culmination of everything around it. In its own way, Haynes’s delightfully captivating and beautifully intimate masterpiece ultimately becomes the equivalent of an old Oscar Wilde brooch – an impression of something great and personal, a kindred touch and a gift that unites all who pass it on.

Troy is notable primarily as a case study on how Hollywood adapts a classic work with countless characters, motifs and both supernatural and earthbound elements into the form of a spectacular mainstream popcorn epic needing fewer characters, a few cleanly resolved storylines and, mainly, the omission of everything that could be off-putting for the supposed majority of viewers, i.e. everything from deities to non-heterosexual relationships.

Charlie’s Angels is deliberate fluff, a self-reflexively exaggerated jiggle flick with playfully objectified superficiality. Or it’s simply boisterous entertainment that takes the basic strengths of the 1970s series on which it’s based (the concept, exaggeration, outfits, insipid missions, espionage and a bunch of familiar faces) and spins them into an unbridled, exuberantly wild ride at the peak of the MTV era, where excess, absurdity and hyper-stylisation keep the pedal to the metal while logic, causality and realism are bound and gagged in the trunk. “Never send a man to do a woman’s job.”

[SPOILER, or possibly only an erroneous minority report] ____ The paradox of “Minority Report” consists in the fact that we are so accustomed to kitschy Hollywood endings that they merely amuse or annoy us rather than leading us to question them because of their formulaic and clichéd nature. As the reviews and responses to this film suggest, most people just throw their hands up at the end of Spielberg’s film, expressing that it is simply a typical mainstream flick with the edges smoothed out into total conformist insipidness supported by screenwriting crutches. But what if the smooth denouement and sugar-coated ending is instead meant to offend and provoke us? Perhaps we will start to question the final shot of the idyll with the cottage and the tractor as being blatantly illusory. We might realise that the final twenty minutes of the film have a different colour palette and lighting than the preceding two hours. Particularly obsessive viewers may then look for ten differences in the production design and costumes used in those concluding passages and the depictions of them earlier in the film. Did we seriously think that Spielberg would bring shame onto himself by being the absolute only one to adapt a book by the master of paranoid sci-fi into a form of a dull sop for the supposed majority audience? Unlike with Total Recall, this time we don’t get a literal statement that maybe something is out of place. Here the uncertainty is many times more subtle, because the vehicle for the Dickian twist is the intentionally applied Hollywood tameness, naïveté and formulaicness. After all, we should also be struck by the fact that the naïve ending isn’t conspicuously inconsistent with the bizarreness of many of the preceding passages. But perhaps the presence of these eccentricities alongside the exceptionally smooth genre passages steer us toward further uncertainty. What if the protagonist, and with him the film itself, had not let himself be merely lulled into a dream fulfilled, but had untethered himself from “reality” much earlier and had given preference to the improved comfort of the drugs? In any case, Spielberg made a fantastic and fascinating movie that, perhaps even more than other sci-fi narratives, remains reliant on viewers’ willingness to accept its rules and stop doubting, instead allowing themselves to be carried away by the motifs and ideas that it presents.

Plebeian entertainment for the whole family in its most banal and, at the same time, least diluted form. The result is a film that borders on being a cinematic lobotomy. Trash master Alfonso Brescia tacked together a feature-length circus act offering not only acrobats, but also scantily clad women on horseback and cartoonishly exotic characters, as well as a duo of buffoons tossing out hopeless verbal jokes. Just as the film doesn’t conceal the fact that its visuals were created by recycling costumes, props and exterior sets from Italian studios, its content consists in recycling superficial elements from other low-brow flicks – from export trash about Amazons to the clowning of Spencer and Hill (with the participation of their stuntmen) and secret bases full of DIY gadgets with numerous paraphrases of Bond movies and comic-book flicks. In the interest of maximising the film’s commercial potential, its trampoline extravagance is then crowned its casting, complemented with ethnic couples, whose purpose was to ensure the film’s marketability in the US and the Far East. Super Stooges vs the Wonder Women is tremendously entertaining in its artless shallowness, extensive randomness, momentary pomposity and arduous insipidness. Here viewers separate the wheat from the chaff and the callousness transitions into purely mainstream vulgar degeneracy.

Tarantino imitated The Taking of Pelham One Two Three not only in the way that he named the gangsters in his debut after colours, but also in the way the dynamics between his characters in Reservoir Dogs in many ways resonate with those in this film. Primarily, however, Pelham is a masterclass in building suspense and in the topography of the narrative, from which most later urban thrillers combining various elements of the security and transport infrastructure – from Runaway Train to the Die Hard franchise (and not only the three films obviously inspired by Pelham, but also the previous two instalments) – draw inspiration. Joseph Sargent very aptly anticipated that the excellent screenplay would benefit from taking the action out of the subway and into the streets. Thanks to that, Pelham isn’t about only a kidnapping, but about New York as a pulsating organism populated by superbly sketched and cast characters. Thanks to the continuous alternation of perspectives, with even the most minor character becoming the protagonist of his respective sequence at any given moment, the film remains tremendously absorbing, unpretentiously dynamic and at times both appropriately tense and likably  laid-back throughout its runtime. This is the essential difference between the original and the remake directed by Tony Scott, which is constructed as a battle of wits between the hero and villain, which in turn completely overshadows everyone and everything else.