Lima

Mad Max is an Australian cultural treasure that should have only stayed at three or four episodes. For the first hour, it felt like a sequence of mini-stories, with the disgustingly overacting Chris Hemsworth twitching like a pigeon eating grain and his performance actually making it into a kind of interlocking semi-comedy sketches that I really don't want to see in the Mad Max saga. He was the weakest link in the film. The other one was the overuse of obvious green-screen and over-stylized colors. Back then, years ago, with the first two episodes, I admired the punk spirit that came out of them. A punkness that was related to the low budget, when everything was handmade, so to speak, when the wastelanders were played by real bikers, the cops by real cops, the props were invented in the breaks during filming, and it exuded a wildness and realness that George Miller partially revived in the equally wild Fury Road. This is rather closer Thunderdome, which was also over-stylized and implausible in its depiction of the post-apocalyptic world. I didn't believe it. Mad Max doesn't benefit from a swollen budget because then Miller can't keep it up and in trying to cram in as much as possible, it's like that dog and cat fairy tale where they cooked a cake with so many ingredients that it made them puke (the quarry scene is too over the top). As time goes on, you find that you don't really care much about Furiosa's fate because, unlike Mel Gibson, she's not a pivotal defining character for you, you don't experience it with her, and you pray all the while that there's as little Hemsworth as possible. In fact, the only thing worth singling out is the ten-minute attack on the tanker, because you can feel the punk genuineness of it, where the stuntmen have honestly worked their magic along with those who came up with the choreography. And that's not enough for me, George. Too little.

In the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, Hollywood made about 270 low- and high-budget sci-fi films, and this piece is one of the last representatives of the 'Golden Age of vintage sci-fi', when the demand for this type of films gradually began to wane. Very nicely produced, with nice visual effects and a cinemascope format that was not standard in sci-fi films. It's basically the granddaddy of Ridley Scott's The Martian, 50 years older. Here too, a stranded lone astronaut struggles to survive on inhospitable Mars, and in fact the entire first half is a bit of a solo for him, his ape companion and one inhabitable cave. It's all commensurate with the scientific knowledge of the time, of course, so our hero parches around Mars without an oxygen mask, indulges in a refreshing bath, in short, things Matt Damon could only dream of. Towards the end, it turns into total nonsense, with a native "Friday", aliens whipping deadly rays from a flying saucer in orbit, and changing ecosystems that include fresh snow. The whole thing looks pretty nice, but I can't shake the impression that the long running time is rather untenable given the sparse filler.

More than a decade before falling ignominiously into the clutches of normalization's "cleaning up", Zbyněk Brynych was making good films. Really. Here, too, as if his inspiration came from the best bits of Italian neorealism, he tackles a serious social problem of the time. Having a child out of wedlock in the 1950s was a major trauma for young girls of the time, along with the misunderstanding of those around them; today, of course, nobody gives a shit. And not only did the then debutant, not-so-beautiful Renata Olárová capture it superbly as an actress (today they would give out Czech Lions for similar roles) but also the brisk direction helps it tremendously, the authenticity. The cinematography is always in motion, with some great visual ideas, and the lead actress is more than a worthy partner to the "Brad Pitt of our grandmothers" Jiří Vala, who perfectly combines fluttery immediacy with doubt. What's more, it's nice to see that the word "comrade" is only heard in one single scene and the Socialist ethos is completely absent. The biggest star of the 50s, Jana Brejchová, has only a small role of an excited twit and Eduard Cupák is completely ignored. The ending is atypical, but all the more interesting.