JFL

Just go see this film and avoid the trailers, which unfortunately are spoilers and could raise misleading expectations. Love Lies Bleeding has a neo-noir heart pumping blood to the organs of post-modern shifts that include a rural desert setting, refreshingly subtle 1980s retro stylisation (no kitsch as in Stranger Things) and a crowning gender+queer twist. Fortunately, there’s no cartilaginous connective tissue here, as everything is driving by the massive musculature of captivating physicality, vivid stylisation and a distinctive creative perspective. Rose Glass confirms that she belongs among the makers of intensely sensory films, thus expanding this hitherto male-dominated club (with Gaspar Noé, Jonas Åkerlund, Jonathan Glazer and Harmony Korine at the fore) with a fresh, unique voice that in certain respects is more down to earth while at the same time managing to incorporate a much broader range of motifs. Like the other aforementioned filmmakers, Glass works with exaggerated visual stylisation, highly distinctive characters and a modern visuality unbound by the limits of mainstream hyper-realism. She spins the symbiosis of these elements into a captivatingly physical experience for viewers. Accordingly, her work with noir is not limited to the usual formulas such as the concept of the femme fatale or the narrative structure of an investigation. She goes to the instinctual and dark essence of the genre, even diving into the dark, viscous waters of Southern Gothic. She highlights passion, obsession, the dreadful appeal of violence and the power of the manipulativeness of blood ties. She also manages to weave into the main story a number of complementary motifs, from the monstrousness of ego to the myth of the land of limitless opportunities. In doing so, however, she still tells of love and its power to crush us and everything around.

Never go full Lucas. Furiosa doesn’t deny the ambitions in its execution, as it contains many great elements and is frequently breathtaking and absorbing. However, the project undermines itself not only with its shockingly blatant CGI artificiality, but primarily with its prequel concept. All of the previous films in Miller’s franchise are not so much sequels as they are different variations on a post-apocalyptic myth. Every Mad Max movie contains identical elements (including details such as a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun and shells, key events like a convoy battle, and the overarching message in the motif of escape and return). But not only does Miller also alternate these elements based on the myths of various ancient cultures, but he mainly conveys them in the different context of a different culture or tribe in a devastated world. Though Furiosa is fascinating as a post-apocalyptic opera, in the guise of a visually bombastic spectacle it offers only a repetition of a previously seen world built on the principle of DLC video games, where the audience gets only another piece of a familiar map with a new boss (and there has to be a literal franchise easter egg). But this not only has zero benefit for the main narrative that is already taking place and rather trivialises it, but it hardly stands on its own. The old lament that contemporary franchise-based pop culture lacks drama because the audience for prequels simply knows which characters will survive and which will not is very much substantiated here. Taking cues from fan-art creators, Miller dawdles by putting most of the prominent supporting characters from his hit back in front of the camera, thus making Furiosa a mere set of biographies of familiar characters. Fury Road became a milestone of both the action genre and modern cinema because it was a brilliantly concise, well-thought-out and narratively polished vision that Miller had refined over the course of many years. That film’s narrative tied the audience to the hood of a roaring car and let them take in the whole world of the film and its mythology in an adrenaline haze. In Furiosa, we travel the same route in a sightseeing bus, whose driver occasionally puts the pedal to the metal, but we spend most of the time just listening to the jaded tour guide as he gives a long-winded explanation of what we’ve already seen. Despite all of the disenchantment, however, Miller is still able to captivate with brilliant staging and originality, the opulence of his vision and the enthusiasm that comes with being able to start over with popular characters and wild new vehicles that seem rather like comic-book fantasies free of realistic dimensions and physical proportions. Furiosa is still dramaturgically more functional, generally more original and more sophisticated in terms of craftsmanship than most contemporary blockbusters, but those are only minor mitigating factors. In the context of Miller’s filmography, it is an ideal bridge between his post-apocalyptic milestones with campy, unreasonable parallel storylines and the cheerfully unfettered wildness of, in particular, Happy Feet and The Witches of Eastwick. _____ I can’t refrain from a more detailed rant ____ While reading reviews and viewers’ reactions to the film, I was surprised how willingly a lot of them parrot the promo narrative, according to which Furiosa allegedly has more complex characters and a more sophisticated world. The truth, however, is the exact opposite. Just because we see more action, that doesn’t mean that the characters are depicted in a more complex way. We’ve already learned from the previous film that Furiosa was abducted from her idyllic society as a child, grew up in the pain of the wasteland, adapted to the conditions of her surroundings, became a respected warrior and spent the whole time planning her return. Here we see only the circumstances in which all of that happened, but we don’t learn anything more about the character herself. Rather, it becomes apparent that the desired complexity was actually a characteristic of Fury Road, where each character had their own well-thought-out personal story that only resonated in the current situation and conditioned their motivations. The fact that the prequel literally shows us these stories rather strips the character of their non-specific multi-layered nature. It’s the same with the way the prequel works with its own world, which is most evident in the depiction of Gastown and the Bullet Farm. Fury Road spends relatively little time in the bowels of the Citadel, but through the set design, costumes, the characters’ motivations and their role in the narrative, it managed to give a complete picture of that society, its hierarchy, mythology and practical functioning. Furiosa doesn’t show us anything that we don’t already know, instead just repeating the same information in a different time period or dully putting it in specific terms (like when a historian explains what Valhalla means). In a number of cases, it outright depends on the audience’s familiarity with elements from the previous film. And we learn absolutely nothing about the operation of the other two fortresses; we only see how they look and who their leaders are at a certain moment.

The Hollywood blockbuster has finally developed into the form of pure camp. For many years I dreamed that a movie consisting of pure, unadulterated silliness would come along and displace the would-be sombre and fanboyishly over-clever spectacles. The New Empire is aware of its own silliness and roguishly cranks it up. So here we have phantasmagorical technobabble, exceedingly stupid human characters, superficially calculated twists and paper-rustling peripeteias, but everything fits beautifully into the overall colourfully crazy world where the boneheaded alternative hollow-earth theories become their own absurd caricature. This papier-mâché  puppet theatre then gets perfectly trampled by a full range of giant monsters. The human characters are relegated solely to the role of narrative crutches that bridge the monsters’ individual storylines, for which purpose they utter absurd nonsense. The monsters have finally have broken free from western individualism and human exclusivity. The New Empire turns the genre’s perspective back to its Japanese kaiju roots, thus making the titular titans the main characters and bearers of both the narrative and the overarching point of view. The character that guides the audience’s perspective is not one of the ant-like humans with their insignificant plans, but a mini-Kong. Of course, I remember almost nothing about the film just a day after the screening, but I know that during my ride on this roller coaster, my eyes were glued to the screen just like when I saw the goofiest kaiju movies from the delirious sixties. P.S.: My perverse dream is for Werner Herzog to deliver the special commentary on the Blu-ray release.

In the field of action movies, Monkey Man is a revelation similar to what the first John Wick was in its time, but it gets essential extra points for having a lot of heart. An extremely likable aspect of Monkey Man is that this straightforward and formalistically well-worn revenge flick packed with fighting was made as its creator’s dream project, making it even more resistant to all kinds of adversity. Dev Patel, whom everyone sees as an actor who plays sensitive characters, returns here to his adolescence, when he practice taekwondo at the competitive level. Or, as the case may be, he goes even farther back in time, when he enthusiastically watched the physically captivating and  emancipatory films of Bruce Lee. In addition to that, he also makes good use of his thorough knowledge of martial-arts action films and their Western, Far Eastern and Indian milestones from the decades that followed. However, Monkey Man offers more than just enthusiastic references, which Patel acknowledges and highlights. He is able to self-sufficiently use those references as a foundation and push them further – not necessarily through any sophistication or purposeful bombastic radicalism, but through the long built-up desire to show what he has within himself. The notional boxing ring of the action genre has been dominated in recent years by the 87eleven stable, which still manages to bare its teeth with each new John Wick movie, but because its style has become the mainstream standard, it already seems noticeably hackneyed and worn-out. In this analogy, Patel and his team represent those young, aggressive and hungry outsiders whom no one believes in at the beginning, but who then capture the hearts of the whole crowd by the time the fight is over. Patel’s combination of Bollywood colourfulness, eclectic multiculturalism (in terms of aesthetics and genre, as well as the traditions of martial arts) and pervasive enthusiasm would suffice to make Monkey Man something special and give it the decision on points. But there is also the brutal choreography and, primarily, the extraordinary camerawork by Stephen Renney, newly promoted from stuntman to camera operator, which tear the established competition to pieces with their aggressiveness, rawness, uncompromising physical energy and wild dynamism.

Ryan Gosling is the action hero that modern masculinity needs, and this film is a magnificent culmination of the roles that he has played so far and his image. Instead of bombastic macho tough guys, here we have a guy who can handle wild physical challenges, but he also knows how to come to grips with his emotions (even if it’s only by listening to plaintive songs in his car) and can be sensitive, supportive and friendly towards others while taking himself with a sense of detached humour. And on top of that, he’s also both hot and adorable. In addition, The Fall Guy offers up a bombastic tribute to stunt work that comprises a grand culmination of the work done by the stunt and choreography group 87eleven, or rather its production division, 87North. Besides the trademark style of fight choreography, the filmmakers fortunately focused primarily on the logistically more challenging aspects of stunt work with automobiles, explosions and collisions, and every possible kind of fall, which they execute not only for the camera, but also for the narrative. All of this is done mainly with the aim of lobbying for the rectification of the nonsensical neglect of stuntpeople at the hands of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (However, it could possibly be argued that the Academy doesn’t overlook stuntpeople because it would want to somehow draw attention away from the behind-the-scenes magic of film, but solely because most members of the Academy don’t understand the industry and the results of voting would correspond to that, as is the case with the animation category.) In light of all of that, The Fall Guy also works as a refreshingly exaggerated romantic comedy that takes the female point of view rather than the usual male perspective. Though it’s true that the film is somewhat handicapped by the uneven screenplay and exceedingly obvious utilitarianism of the individual peripeteias, which serve as an excuse for staging particular bits of choreography, this is offset by the fact that the filmmakers know how to shoot everything with maximum effectiveness and entertainment value, which is not true of the film’s spiritual ancestor, Hooper (1976), by the first stuntman-turned-director, Hal Needham.

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.

It’s frequently obvious that this film was made as a semi-amateur enthusiast project by a group of queer people during the coronavirus pandemic, but that in no way detracts from its likability and heart turned up to eleven. It is easy to be distracted from the occasional creative cluelessness with respect to how to move on from the accumulated peripeteias in some sort of constructive way by the spectacularly unbridled enthusiasm of those involved, the iconoclastic approach to everything conformingly sacred and the clichés of superhero movies. The phenomenal confrontation between the Captain and his Nemesis in front of the hot-dog stand easily overshadows the previous highlights of the genre, with Nolan’s clash between Batman and the Joker at the fore.

This gets one less star because of the kicking of the bear cubs and because of the precisely crafted trailer, which created the impression that this poorly directed exercise in futility might actually be good. Some films are bad not in an entertaining way, but simply in an uninteresting and soul-crushing way.

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.

This Swiss Thelma and Louise is a by-the-numbers Netflix production, a localised genre movie with solid craftsmanship and the promise of being atypical, but it comfortably remains in the realm of the commonplace while using variations on motifs and sequences from various cult films. So it is actually an example of “If the competition doesn’t give us a popular classic, we will produce our own knock-off in Europe, thus also fulfilling the requirements for contingent EU projects”.