JFL

A delightful dead end in the field of blockbusters. It is tempting to say that we should be grateful for the box-office bomb Reign of Fire due to the fact that Hollywood gave up on original concepts at the beginning of the millennium and took the safe route of tried-and-tested comic-book movies. When it comes to absurdity, insipid dialogue, randomness of logic, unintentional comedy and flamboyant homoeroticism, this mish-mash of post-apocalyptic, modern spec-ops action and medieval fantasy can in no way compare to the highlights of the trash genre movies of the previous two decades. It is elevated to the level of camp gold by its magnificent casting, with the trio of lead actors doggedly playing against their usual respective types. Whereas Bale displays proper macho fatalism, Butler is surprising as the cheerful sidekick, but everything is subordinate to McConaughey, who conceived his commander of motorized dragon slayers as a mix of a hyper-masculine Tolkien dwarf and Apocalypse Now’s Colonel Kurtz on speed. Unfortunately for the film and for us viewers hoping for non-generic popcorn entertainment, however, Reign of Fire didn’t manage to fake the sense of depth and gravitas as successfully as comic-book movies. So, this is where we find ourselves today, in a world of tired, would-be intelligent blockbusters that are unable to entertain us even a fraction as much (whether intentionally or unintentionally) or imprint themselves on the memory (whether intentionally or unintentionally) as this deliriously bizarre movie in which American heroes use a tank, helicopter, explosive arrows and a large axe to slay dragons in a charred post-apocalyptic version of Arthurian England.

This enchanting and placidly flowing feature-length etude about friendship and New York dispenses with words entirely, despite which it engagingly and eloquently tells its story  solely by means of animation and the language of film.

Zapata is a meta film about the desire and ambition to make movies in contemporary Iran. The filmmakers adore Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie, as well as themselves, or rather their concept of a found-footage movie, so they bog themselves down in annoying, needlessly long selfie shots and literal references to their role models. On the other hand, it can't be denied that the film has moments of imaginative self-reflection and infectiously likable enthusiasm. A complementary work to Dark Matter, which was also screened at this year's Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Dark Matter is a meta film about the desire and ambition to make movies in contemporary Iran. The filmmakers adore the French New Wave and thus bog themselves down in rigid black-and-white compositions, literal references to Jules and Jim and haphazard attempts at formalistic subversion. A complementary work to Zapata, which was also screened at this year's Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Kim Jee-woon does not conceal his fascination with the South Korean film industry in the era of the dictatorship and its trashy productions. After a spectacular paraphrase of the Manchurian Westerns made in Korea in the 1960s and ’70s, he goes behind the scenes of the making of mystery crime drama of the 1970s. Cobweb deals with the desire of a second-tier director, who is considered to be a journeyman standing in the shadow of his late mentor, to remake a recently completed project according to his own sudden flash of creativity. The narrative intersperses behind-the-scenes peripeteias with sequences from the film itself, which mimic the theatrical acting and noirishly expressive formalistic stylisation of the time. Kim’s project unavoidably evokes Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, with which it shares – in addition to disturbingly specific parallels –  a general escapist view of the film industry as a chaotic melting pot of pragmatism, naïveté and a mythicised creative vision. Unlike Burton’s classic, however, the narrative here lacks a more coherent form. Cobweb falls apart into vaguely interconnected episodes and seems so dramaturgically random that one wants to believe that this mish-mash of the overwrought, the complacent and the literal must be some sort of deliberate meta homage. Otherwise, Kim’s new film is a surprisingly haphazard load of unfulfilled promises. And it probably really will be, taking into account that this is a production from the revived Barunson, which after years of collaboration with the distribution giant CJ Entertainment went its own way in the interest of its directors’ artistic freedom. But as we know from many similar examples from history, and paradoxically from the narrative of Cobweb itself, such fond hope for unrestrained creativity may truly be just one person’s obstinate wish and does not necessarily mean that the result will be refined and functional.

In Melville’s masterpiece, the director perfectly combines his cinematic concepts. He never conceived his films as images of reality, but as dreams. It is thus all the more remarkable that at the time when most French productions were shot in studios, he shot his films on location. However, he characteristically sought out corners and spaces that matched his surreal and supremely aesthetic vision of genre worlds. Like its protagonist, his fateful and melancholically veiled ode to hired assassins becomes an ideal that fascinates with its outward detachment, refined style and purposeful craftsmanship. Though Le Samouraï contains minimal dialogue, it remains perfectly comprehensible and, mainly, astonishingly suspenseful, at it draws its eloquence both from the power of film language and from cinema as a body of work and genre foundations that are universally comprehensible to viewers. It is thus no wonder that Le Samouraï became another essential work of the genre, adoringly used as a reference work by later greats such as John Woo, Jim Jarmusch and Johnnie To in their own odes to movie killers.

I stared into the hole, and it stared back at me. Then I closed my eyes, and we didn’t have much more to say about it.

Years after its release, Pierrot le Fou, or rather its protagonist, paradoxically became for some admirers of the French New Wave an adored monument to the pompous ideal of the existentially tormented intellectual. The paradox lies in the fact that Godard ridicules that icon and shows that there is nothing in it that is worth emulating. On the contrary, he brings the self-centredness at its core to the surface. With the same anarchic mockery, he also undermines the formulas of adventure and action movies and romances about lovers on the run (i.e. genres that made Belmondo an international star in his previous and, especially, later films). Pierrot le Fou is a playfully and Dadaistically subversive film with a formulaic beginning and ending, but everything in between is refreshingly random and creative. Every single sequence is an imaginative meta-treatment of a given formula, whether in the form of subverting it, parodying it, reflecting on it, trivialising it or simply omitting it altogether. Pierrot le Fou is actually an essentialist film because here the characters enter a room through a window. Godard literally fulfils the definition of a director as it was formulated nearly four decades later by the Japanese maverick Takashi Miike. According to Miike, the screenwriter writes “the protagonist enters the room”, whereas the director has to come up with how he enters – usually through a door, or perhaps through a window. While the non-conformity of other New Wave filmmakers now comes across as staid and mainstream, Godard never ceases to fascinate and even appeals to new generations. His subversiveness does not remain only on the surface, but cuts to the very core of cinema, thus defying the usual assimilation into the mainstream.

Megamind can serve as a typical example of DreamWorks Animation projects. Their productions have always lagged behind the competition in terms of technical quality, but their strength lies in their screenplays. However, besides Megamind’s imaginative and well-developed concept, which can be described as the negative antipole to The Incredibles, this time the studio also deserves praise for its animation, which is based on the plasticity of the characters and combines the exaggerated malleability of 3D models with the extremely expressive facial expressions that are typical of classic animated slapstick.

How did the creators of the film adaptation of Kafka’s novel Amerika get around the fact that it was unfinished? With a horribly kitschy happy ending, backed with a contemporary torch song by the band Lucie that doesn’t in any way fit with the style of the film up to that point. On the other hand, however, it superbly illustrates the pomposity of a blockbuster project that was supposed to be simultaneously distinctive, important and serious, but also viewer-friendly, marketable and saleable to the mainstream. Though Kafka himself, or rather his prose, is characterised by a problematic relationship to women, Michálek’s feature debut transforms the source work into an essentially ’90s flick that radiates all of the ills of the time. The Czech insecurity, overt misogyny and obscurantist ethos on display here completely overshadow Kafka’s motifs. However, it’s impossible to deny that Amerika has an imaginative formalistic grasp with expressionistically rendered large sets and, conversely, claustrophobically depressing semi-details of the interior sequences.