JFL

The Video Dead, another magnificent ode to the magic of the absolute frame (what is not seen in a shot doesn’t seem to exist, and not even the characters in the film can see it or they only notice it when it enters the shot), unexpectedly captivates with both a premise and a concept of zombies that are entirely original. The idea of a television from which anything appearing on its screen enters the real world (it’s a shame that it only has two channels, on which a talking head occasionally pops up) is great. With his bizarre trash flick, amateur director Robert Scott was actually ahead of his time, getting a jump on the Japanese cult movie Ring by a number of years. What’s even better is the film’s insight into the mental state of zombies, which apparently attack people because people’s fear reminds the zombies that they are dead. This absolutely unpredictable movie offers sufficiently openminded and slightly drunk viewers entertainment that is spectacular and nonsensical, though we can only guess the extent to which that nonsense was intentional.

The Bodyguard from Beijing to a large extent copies The Bodyguard starring Kevin Costner, but it also surprisingly seems to have taken a lot of inspiration from Red Heat, which is manifested in the mutual ribbing between the Chinese bodyguard with machine-like efficiency and his counterpart, a simple, sedate cop from Hong Kong. The film belongs to a group of productions that calmed the intense emotions that people felt in the period before the handover of Hong Kong to China and, instead of ominous visions of devastation and decline, showed that mutual cooperation could be a path to success and prosperity. And thus, whereas in the original Hollywood movie Whitney Houston makes the plane stop so that she can bring her ambiguous relationship with her bodyguard to a clear conclusion, in the Hong Kong version the heroine’s call for her rescuer rather suggests her awakening from her negative prejudices against China and her yearning for the moment when they can finally fall into each other’s arms following the handover in a few years. After all, most of the film is based on the Chinese and Hong Kong sides sizing each other up, so the casting of Jet Li (who is rather ideologically engaged here as a positive example of a Hong Kong megastar with a Chinese birth certificate) and the master Corey Yuen’s directing raise the expectation that there will be some action-movie death, but those who anticipate that will have to wait until the end, when the film finally rewards patient viewers with Yuen’s typically spectacular choreography overflowing with ideas.

Ryoo Seung-wan squeezed his way into the Korean film industry as a self-taught enthusiast whose dream was to make aggressive action films built on the attraction of actors and making minimum use of stunt doubles. After his rapid rise to ever bigger budgets and more sweeping action spectacles was brought to a halt by the box-office failure of the comic-bookishly overblown foolishness of Dachimawa Lee, he returned to the action genre with the simple but formalistically refined dialogue-based thriller The Unjust. Ryoo’s new film, The Berlin File, is a spectacular action comeback that bears the signs of lessons learned from previous failures and shows viewers a polished director at the peak of his powers. The Berlin File successfully plants the South Korean flag on the soil of the previously exclusively Hollywood genre of action-packed spy thrillers shot in international locations. The film’s creators strive hard to give the standard formula a local flavour with motifs involving relations between South and North Korea, but these are rendered in a strictly black-and-white form that plays, in the manner of tabloids, with the fiendishness of the North Korean usurpers of power. Purely in terms of genre elements, the screenplay also tries a little too hard, particularly in the countless twists in the style of switching sides and allies, which can lead to a feeling of apathy among viewers. Fortunately, however, Ryoo regularly goes back to the action sequences, which are built on maximum intensity and imaginative staging. Every conflict has some small detail that gives the action a bit of originality and purposefulness, while at the same time guaranteeing that the sequences stick in the viewers’ memory thanks to their eccentricity and unusualness. Whereas post-Bourne American action films are focused on creating an impressive jumble that’s held together only by the soundtrack and music, Ryoo always uses these expressive details to make the action clear and he sets it firmly in the given space, which becomes a part of the overall attraction. The introductory part of the film is brilliant in this respect, as it establishes expectations by drawing attention to the strangely shaped wound on the backs of the protagonists, the origin of which is explained in a long flashback passage. The final fight between the protagonists and the villain is enhanced by the work done with the setting comprising broad ropes of tall grass with scattered boulders and, in particular, the aggressive choreography with well-thought-out elements inspired by MMA.

According to the main protagonist, the mobster Vedral, the worst thing is to die of fear. That is perhaps what the filmmakers said to themselves, so the most notable aspect of Story of a Godfather is its complete predictability – not in terms of plot twists, however, but in terms of the whole concept. If we approach the film as if it’s another addition to the bountiful czechsploitation category, it has absolutely nothing with which it could surprise us. This is how it differs from other czechsploitation movies of recent years, such as Kajínek, Unknown Hour and Czech Made Man, where it was possible to appreciate at least the genre and stylistic ambitions of the filmmakers or, conversely, to laugh at their artlessness and incompetence. Story of a Godfather is just a straightforward tabloid feature-film version of an investigative-journalism TV show that indirectly confirms for us the decadence of contemporary Czech society, whose prejudices and values it indirectly reflects.

The Stone Age Warriors is a telling illustration of the era when Hong Kong cinema was at its absolute peak. Where else than in an industry that enjoys immeasurable power and, thanks to its popularity at home and abroad, has a guaranteed supply of funding, would it be possible for a talented novice director to be given responsibility for a project shot almost entirely in foreign locations? Thanks to strong foreign demand for local action productions, that absolutely could happen in Hong Kong in the late eighties and early nineties. At that time, after all, foreign locations were not solely the domain of top-tier productions with major stars, but also of outright B- and C-movies. Proof of this comes in the form of The Stone Age Warriors, which offers a pure, though unfortunately less successful example of Hong Kong B-movies of the aforementioned era conceived based on the principles of the cinema of attractions. To expect a sophisticated or even an ordinary formulaic screenplay from a Hong Kong B-movie is of course nonsense, but this film’s narrative pretexts for chaining together attractions establish a new level of sloppiness even for the Hong Kong practice of brainstorming sessions over the screenplay. Whereas elsewhere the plot motifs that have been raised eventually circle back and are somehow resolved, nothing of the sort happens here. Not only do we not learn in the opening sequence where the scientist and his retinue are going or for what purpose before the natives attack them, but no one troubles themselves with the other motifs either. Everything is thus merely a pretext for incorporating more attractions. Unfortunately, this time the attractions don’t comprise so many action scenes, for which the viewer has to wait nearly until the end, but shots of the aforementioned foreign locations, which are interspersed with insipid humorous sequences based on the hick concept of “one of ours in a foreign land” or, more specifically in this case,  “a spoiled urban lady in the wilderness”. The result is a mish-mash of scenes that borrow elements from Romancing the Stone, Armour of God and vaguely even from Predator, but if viewers expect more from the film than just shots of African natives and sequences involving running to and fro in the rain forest, they will be disappointed. The Stone Age Warriors is now rather a memento of the Golden Age of Hong Kong cinema and a noteworthy curiosity for enthusiasts who are interested in the background of the director of Police Story 3.

In the past five years, Dante Lam has come out with ever more spectacular and bombastic action films, but this time he has dispensed with all of the grandiose and sophisticatedly staged shootouts, chase scenes and explosions in favour of an intimate sports drama from the world of MMA in his best film (so far). As a trainer says to his student in the film, “you have to know why you are standing in the ring”, Lam built his fresh variation on the classic Rocky theme on that exact principle. Though he previously attempted to add a dramatic undercurrent to the spectacular attractions, his films’ narratives were ultimately afflicted with a serious case of kitsch (The Viral Factor) or overwrought would-be bleakness (Fire of Conscience). In Unbeatable, however, the genre formulas are well balanced with unforced sentimentality and, together with the great charisma of the two lead actors and the brilliantly shot fight scenes, comprise a coherent and maximally captivating whole. Furthermore, on all of the above-mentioned levels, Lam always presents viewers with something more than just the standard. Though the narrative faithfully retains the iconic elements of the genre established in Rocky, it also brings forth its own enriching elements and twists. The characters are likable if only because their reasons for getting in the ring are more pragmatic and personal than merely the motivation to win and to prove something to the world. That alone would be enough for the fights to have a great dramatic edge, but thanks to Lam’s directing, they are also supremely intense spectacles that are so compelling that they cause the viewer’s muscles to tense up. The fights and training sequences work superbly thanks to the excellent actors, who are not only able to convey all of the dramatic aspects of their respective roles, but were also willing to physically transform themselves into athletes as they prepared for the film over the course of nine months. In this and other respects, the film’s brightest light is Nick Cheung, who at the age of forty-five underwent a complete physical transformation and, furthermore, reached a whole new level as a dramatic actor. After Dante Lam seemed to have become a stone-cold specialist in increasingly ambitious yet essentially empty attractions, with Unbeatable he found it in himself to deliver a gripping performance as a director. As was the case with The Beast Stalker, he is again deservedly   reaping nominations for annual awards and high box-office revenues, and we can again look forward with great expectations to what he will come up with next.

The white knight became a white buck-passer, or Tomáš Magnusek’s exploitation trilogy reached its inconsistently messianic end.

The lamentations of the elderly that culture only goes around in circles and that we have seen it all before can mostly be taken merely as senile mutterings and clinging to a time that has long since passed. But maybe the old folks have a point after all. Today, film publicists sing the praises of movies and filmmakers who approach the heritage of 1980s pop culture with a sense of detachment or mere nostalgia and make clever pastiches out of its various elements. Characteristically for a world that lives only for the current moment, these films are often highly rated because they make a positive impression on those publicists who come from the ranks of film fans weaned on the respective reflected culture, but no one stops to consider whether those films can survive past the period of their own hype. The now forgotten Night of the Comet, which was enthusiastically received and positively reviewed in its time, can serve as an answer to this question. With it’s concept, it seems like a work of the present day, as we have here a fictional world reflecting pop-culture inventions that the film’s creators share with their audience, and there are also references wrapped up in an exaggerated narrative combining different genre conventions and ridiculing their formulas. However, the difference here is that Night of the Comet, like some other eighties movies (e.g. Night of the Creeps), looks to the B-movie genres of the 1950s, which had nurtured an entire generation through frequent airings on television in the 1960s and ’70s. In terms of the sophistication of its allusions, however, Night of the Comet is not in any way comparable to the films of today. Like Scott Pilgrim and all kinds of other young men behind the counter, the heroine here works in a temple of commerce and pop culture, specifically a single-screen cinema showing trash films, and the greatest value in her life consists in achieving the highest score on an arcade game in the lobby. In that sanctuary of decadent culture is where she survived the disaster that turned most of humanity into dust and turned the remaining people into photophobic bloodthirsty beasts, and it is from that sanctuary that she later emerges into a world that no longer has the form of an inhospitable reality offering zero prospects, but is instead a genre universe where anything goes and where “girls just want to have fun”. In addition to the constituent quotes and references, the frame of reference comprising 1950s trash culture is absolutely materialised in the climax, when the characters themselves are stylised into a family of the atomic age and figures from youth films that appeared at the end of that decade. At first glance, the film may give the impression of being a gender-progressive work when it establishes sexually active girls who know how to handle guns as the main characters, but their roles in the narrative nonetheless make it clear that this is a product aimed entirely at a male audience. The film’s sexism becomes apparent in a particularly absurd light, when the rule established by Alison Bechdel is applied. Though the main characters are two sisters who have survived the apocalypse and are now enjoying their freedom after the fall of conventional society, they never talk about anything other than men. Both of them are basically defined by men (their father taught them how to use guns) and are incomplete without men. In order to avoid threatening the status quo, neither of them will ever shoot any man, regardless of how great a threat the given man may be to them. The privilege of having power over life and death is again held only by men, specifically the bruiser who is the object of the main characters’ desire, but also the bad guys, who kill their lackeys rather than let them fall into the heroines’ clutches.

Copper is a typical by-product of the era of quality TV and concept series, i.e. a second-rate production that tries to fool a gullible audience. In terms of concept, we have here an almost paint-by-numbers checklist of how to pretend to be an HBO product: an ensemble cast composed of familiar faces, an established filmmaker as executive producer and the promise of an epic spectacle. But this isn’t HBO, so the production boasts the name of Barry Levinson (who probably makes his living simply by lending his name to the credits of television productions), the most famous star is Franka Potente and the grand concept falls damned far from it apparent inspiration, Gangs of New York. Copper is appealing (and basically entertaining) in how it obviously and superficially tries to impress viewers. It becomes clear in the first ten minutes of the first episode, with its high concentration of clichés and formulas, that Copper does not intend to leave anything to chance: we start with shots of grime and poverty so that viewers can see that nothing is being sugar-coated, then we throw in some modern action with blood spatter, and then we cram in some bedroom scenes and bare asses in order to make it clear how grown-up this series really is. Of course, everything is rendered in the hyper-realistic style of blockbusters (so the filth and boldness are truly artificial) and all of the exteriors are filmed in medium shots or with a view that is in some way obstructed so as to save money on sets. On the other hand, it’s necessary to admit that such series are actually ideal fare for the average television viewer. Thanks to their overwrought yet essentially empty melancholy and bleakness, they offer attractions similar to those found in their much better competition, but they don’t burden viewers with any real complexity. And thanks to their pretentiousness, they give audiences the impression that they are watching something extraordinary.

- the first generation, or the first two season – Skins was peculiarly nominated for a bunch of awards in drama categories, but not comedy. Despite the misleading or, said more precisely, enticing first episode, this is not a teen comedy built around the usual motifs of losing one’s virginity and out-of-control parties. With each subsequent episode, the drama further crystalises as it focuses on relationships and developing the individual characters. The series has a clever dramaturgical concept by which each episode focuses on a different character. Thanks to that, all of the characters outlined in the first episode (the stoner, the virgin, the sex kitten, the confident show-off, the basket case) get their own personality and ambiguity, as well as their own conflicts, feelings and desires. Both in its characters’ natures and in the chosen style, Skins remains entirely faithful to its target audience. Whereas all of the adult characters, i.e. parents and teachers, are portrayed as caricatures in accordance with the way that teenagers see them, the adolescent protagonists are fully developed without any prejudices or pre-determined patterns. In the case of the first generation of the series, this means that the protagonists do not fit into any outsider or rebel subculture; they are in fact the core members of the class who devote their free time mainly to copulating. Parties, smoking weed and popping pills are only the backdrop for the main thing that makes the world of teenagers go round – intensely dramatic relationships, which are the be-all and end-all of the whole series. In addition to that, particularly the second season of the first generation of Skins brilliantly depicts the end of the last year of high school as a bittersweet time permeated with the feeling that comes with the approaching end and fear of the pain arising from conflicts and the collapse of idealistic plans. Skins is a series about young people and for young people that is in every aspect (including style and great music) uniquely faithful to its target group, but it cannot be said that is naïve.