Matty

Limitless grows more stupid as the screenwriter runs out of pills. The idea on which the film is based is used skilfully at first and Burger succeeds in filling the holes in the logic (and in the chosen form of the narrative) with a boatload of optical effects. As the minutes pile up, the very simple initial situation begins to show signs of wearing thin until the people behind the camera seriously have no idea what else they can squeeze out of it (in the climax, they basically take a blind shot in the dark), at which point the film ends. The underused potential of the central premise is revealed by the cautious stab at politics just before the closing credits roll. If the plot had unfolded in this direction from the beginning, without the cheap subplot involving an Eastern European taxidermist desperately passed off as the main plot, Neil could have given us a nicely biting satire for our hour and forty minutes instead of another toothless thriller. 60%

The idea of two women in one body could surely be used for a heart-rending (without irony) narrative about how difficult it is for a teenage girl to be herself, trust her feelings and not cling to the surface. But that didn’t happened. What did happen is a kitschy, embarrassingly literal knock off of the New Hollywood drama Wanda and, at the same time, an apt product of the society of spectacle in which even one’s soul has to be visualised to please the eye. After most of this remarkably undramatic film, the protagonist of The Host (shouldn’t it rather be The Hostess?) journeys through her own inner world, while the “rational” male characters have to help her find her bearings because of her emotional instability. It wouldn’t matter how little happens over the course of two hours in this film (the “feminine” failure to take action could serve as evidence of ideological subversiveness) if the ideas on which it is based weren’t so extremely stupid. Not only are the anxieties of post-modern society (xenophobia, the need to return to the simplicity of western myths, the emotional aloofness of world inundated with technology, the escape from the global to the local) presented in a midcult wrapper without anything disturbing (when blood appears, it’s a minor holiday), but the filmmakers immediately offer us banal solutions that only support the false illusion that there really is no cause for concern and it suffices if we all love each other and multiply. For each of the few positives (a couple of impressive shots, a hint of a visual concept, the doctor that looks like Obama), there are at least five times as many reasons why it would be better to avoid this offensively flat story about the emotional disjointedness of teenagers (the robotic acting not only by the aliens but also by the Earthlings, no progressive build-up, no suspense, several endings and, mainly, the persistent feeling that someone is trying to make a big damned mountain out of a molehill). Appendix: Fans of Twilight can feel free to ignore my review and rating. 30%

In order for this film to be made at all, Tati had to promise the producers that 1) he would again play Monsieur Hulot (a character forced on him by external circumstances), 2) he would pull Hulot out of the gaggle of extras and put him out front and, in connection with that, 3) this time he would not test the viewers’ attentiveness and would shift the focal point closer to the camera. After the financial disaster called Playtime, his last film over which he actually had full creative control, he had no other choice. Despite the above-mentioned restrictions, Traffic is effective slapstick that tastefully satirises the almost intimate relationship between a man and an automobile. One of the several ambiguous gestures (the man kneeling in front of the open hood) raises motoring to the level of a religion whose shrines are thus various trade fairs and car shows. Tati was fortunately able to retain enough creative control that he didn’t have to tell a complete story this time. The plot can be fully summarised with a simple sentence: Monsieur Hulot goes to an exhibition. As in slapstick generally, the determining (meaning-making) factor isn’t causality, but the interaction between the characters and the setting. Tati plays with the blending of the animate and the inanimate to the point of absurdity when he becomes an immobile part of a family house’s “living” vegetation. The cars are similarly animatedly inanimate, as their simple movement sets the main tone of the geometric symphony in motion, which paradoxically becomes really interesting only after a pile-up, when people have to get out of their substitute bodily shells (extensions of their senses, as McLuhan would write) and start improvising. There aren’t as many well-thought-out scenes in this film as in Playtime, some shots are only filler and not even the critical targeting of Traffic can be compared to that of Tati’s previous films. However, it is entertainment that, in its better moments, exhibits the touch of a genius, a man who thought with his body and spoke through his film, and who bid adieu to the big screen with one of the cleverest scenes of his career. Hulot’s rain gear finally starts to make sense after it starts raining. The attributes that define the character are exhausted by their use, and so is the idea of Monsieur Hulot. There is nothing more to add. 75%

A seductively empty film in which nothing much happens, but it’s really nice to look at. Despite the minimal physical contact between the partners, I rank the chess match among the hottest erotic scenes. And the rest of the film is similarly playful and sexy. 75%

When he isn’t playing with crayons, making fun of feminists or staging one of his many baroquely spectacular murders, Dario Argento is constructing and deconstructing a detective story, simply and predictably, yet also entertainingly all the way to the bloody climax with a very unusual demonstration of how to paint a room red. 70%

Bad Day at Black Rock is a western in terms of its setting and character, a post-war psychological drama due to the time period in which it is set, and a Cold War thriller thanks to the time when it was made. The film can be interpreted in various ways, but because of Sturges’s reputation (it’s true that he made his best films later) and Tracy (who, conversely, could already choose the films that he wanted to appear in), I don’t believe that it was supposed to be merely an atmospheric movie with captivatingly “framed” shots and without a political-social reach. Only the symbolic taking of responsibility by young people… 75%

An absolute film. I believe that something like this runs through the minds of true cinephiles in REM sleep. Both emotionally and narratively, Final Cut is a surprisingly effective experiment that succeeds in evoking the impression of narrative continuity and is even able to evoke a kind of identification (not with the characters, but with archetypal romantic-film situations). Pálfi’s creative signature is most apparent in his full use of situations reeking of the most physical humanity (there is even a fragment of the “sugar” scene from Sweet Movie) and in the subversive sabotage of serious situations with a completely inappropriate shot of Yoda or someone/something similar. In fact, it’s a slightly more conspicuous use of the technique with which Tyler Durden improved children’s movies in Fight Club. Movie fans can surely engage in a contest of who can recognise more films (I would only ask that this be done at a private screening next time), but in my opinion, such an activity would not come close to exhausting the film’s potential for entertainment. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone eventually writes at least a bachelor’s thesis on the edited compositions and types of shot continuity (atmosphere, movement, shape). 90%

A long sequence of music-hall numbers whose integration into the narrative is even more atrocious than is usually the case in musicals. Songs by the biggest Czechoslovak pop stars of the 1960s, spliced together without any discernible logic and drowning out not only the trivial plot, but also both of the slogans that comprise the film’s foundation: “Who’s Czech is a musician” and “Make Music, Not War”. Today, If a Thousand Clarinets doesn’t stand up either as a musical or as a satirical fairy tale. At best, it is a film strip preserving a cabaret attended by an unusually large number of familiar faces. 55%

A performative documentary conceived as an intimate diary composed of shots filmed by the director and Láska’s own videos. Given Láska’s mental illness, the emphasis placed on the emotional experience (picturesque landscape shots, sentimental musical accompaniment), which is legitimate in the given context, and the associated assumption of the viewer’s identification with the social actor are original. Where a more observational documentary would require only sympathy, The Story of Mr. Love makes it possible to see the world through the eyes of a man who perceives reality more sensitively than so-called “normal” people and, at the same time, possesses a more advanced ability to engage in self-reflection than many of his healthy peers. Láska is a remarkable person and the director’s effort to artificially elicit sympathy is somewhat counterproductive.  Through the music and shot compositions, she induces in us a kind of reception that a perceptive viewer should easily be capable of even without the utilised “means of persuasion”. Furthermore, Smržová pointlessly attempts to cover an excessively broad range of issues and to fully observe a human being in his entirety, which simply isn’t possible over the course of just a few months and seventy minutes of film (the time-lapse method would have been more appropriate). It would have sufficed to choose and develop one of the many available motifs, whether Láska’s attempt to establish contact with the outside world through modern technologies or his search for a secure point that neither his grandmother, mother or more or less absent father can provide for him. The inability to find the key to the protagonist (which is evident in the exceedingly general nature of the film’s title) encumbers the viewing experience and raises the question of why this documentary was actually made and what we are supposed to take away from it. A good documentary needs more than just simple emotion over a human story and over the purity of feelings found on the fringes of our emotionally cold modern society (like in Love in the Grave). 60%

For film masochists, A Star is Falling Upwards is an almost deliciously exhausting substitute for western musicals that makes a terribly transparent attempt to make Karel Gott a “regular guy”. As a naïve and good-natured boy from the countryside, the protagonist has to understand that his purpose in life is not to sing for money, but for the Czech people (who don’t have any money). What he lacks in intellect, he makes up for with monumental narcissism, which we apparently are not supposed to see as a character flaw. And we probably aren’t expected have a negative view of the fact that everything good happens to the minimally enterprising protagonist without any effort on his part (he doesn’t need vocal coaching, as he got his divine voice from the Fates, and he becomes a superstar thanks to a donated vest). Achieving success is a matter of chance, not diligent effort. Anyone can be Gott. And it’s good to be Gott! Because it basically doesn’t matter how credulous, hypocritical and dim-witted you may be or how huge your ego has become, if you’re Gott, you will be forgiven for everything. The strait-laced nationalism is legitimised through the creation of the illusion that Gott, as a modern-day Schwanda the Bagpiper, is following an ancient folk tradition. As a singer of the people (and thus of the party), he should do the same thing that was asked of all citizens – give up your ambitious goals and sit on your ass at home. The film thus indirectly expresses contempt for all artists who sold out to the West, which is hastily outlined as a land of decadent banquets at which half-nude men dance wildly with shameless women. This is only one of a few unintentionally WTF moments of an otherwise absolutely uninterestingly bad film, by means of which Rychman committed creative suicide and Gott demonstrated his willingness to engage in the lowest form of intellectual kitsch. 15%