JFL

--- TL;DR version --- 1) The Last Boy Scout enjoys the reputation of being a cult classic only in the Czech Republic. 2) It defined a form of masculine coolness for a generation of Czech viewers, but in doing so, it unfortunately set for them a pattern of chauvinistic behaviour. 3) At its core, it disturbingly has a lot in common with Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. 4) It’s a minor miracle, or rather proof of the talent of everyone involved, that the result ultimately holds together so well despite all of the problems that arose during production. --- long version with arguments --- Among Czech movie fans, especially those born in the 1980s, The Last Boy Scout is regarded as an absolute cult classic and the benchmark of the buddy/action-movie category. But that is only a local phenomenon. In the country of its origin, The Last Boy Scout conversely has the status of an obscure genre flick that few people remember fondly. This is illustrated by the variation in ratings in Czech and international film databases (IMDB: 7/10, Leterboxd: 3.4/5) and the low average of foreign ratings (Rotten Tomatoes: 46%, Metacritic: 52%). The film was also re-released on Blu-ray in the past decade. Unlike many other titles from the filmographies of the people involved – including The Last Action Hero and Hudson Hawk – The Last Boy Scout shows no potential for re-release by its parent studio, or even by any of the labels like Shout, Imprint, Arrow or Lorber that focus exclusively on releasing both popular and niche cult flicks. After all, the international rights manager for cinema releases marvelled at the fact that we returned this film to the big screen in the Czech Republic with screenings at the Aero and Scala cinemas. _____ The renown enjoyed by The Last Boy Scout in the Czech Republic is largely due to the original ultra-vulgar dubbing of the first VHS release in the country, which in the 1990s made the film a generational cult classic among adolescent boys and became a legend quoted in school classrooms. I myself was then one of the boys who watched the main characters’ macho trash talk based on cutting each other down, or at least brushing off an unseemly remark. I was also impressed by the adoration of the film’s masculine formulas and posturing. The Last Boy Scout celebrates heroes who show their feelings only for a fraction of a second and wrapped up in tough-guy one-liners or pathos-ridden fatefulness. I believed that the hallmarks of male coolness were sullen expressions, smart-assery, bitterness, cynicism and permanent pain, none of which could bring on a bout of whining. A significant part of The Last Boy Scout’s local cultural capital is due to how well it is able to sell and implement patterns of chauvinistic hypermasculinity. The film’s tepid or rather negative reception in the US was due to the fact that at the time of its release, critics there were already turning against not only excessive violence, but also the country’s gender dynamics, toxic masculinity and concentrated misogyny. In other words, things that were on the way out in Hollywood productions at the time were conversely welcomed with belated enthusiasm in the Eastern Bloc, which was intoxicated with new, unrestrained freedom. Actually, it is thus no wonder that in some local boys, their enchantment turned into uncritical acceptance not only of the film, but unfortunately also of the values that it so successfully foisted on them. My counterparts from MovieZone may indulgently turn a blind eye to this, but I venture to say that their confident personas, which they present not only to their readers and viewers of their video/pod-casts, but also to each other, are a telling illustration of the influence of The Last Boy Scout. After all, it’s not a coincidence that they possessively defend it with overly clever (post-)90s bullshitting about how foreign critics simply don’t know what is good. However, they are far from being alone in this attitude, as they are merely the most popular voices of that specific form of guyness (at least feigned in public), which, in comparison with younger bros, is imbued with Black’s typical cynicism with a significant helping of overweening arrogance and self-flagellating martyrdom. _____ Which brings us to the screenplay, which (when we strip away the fannish adoration) is nothing more than the misogynistic fantasy of a bitter egoist after a breakup. That someone would write himself out of the misery of a breakup is not a bad thing in and of itself. The same roots gave rise to, for example, the superbly self-reflective and cathartic (500) Days of Summer. But they also gave rise to Tommy Wiseau’s legendarily off-the-rails ego trip The Room. Shane Black shares with Wiseau the ethos that the hero is the world’s greatest guy. But whereas in The Room everyone else knows that about the hero, with the exception of the “unfaithful bitch” who betrayed him, in The Last Boy Scout Black wrote his own pomposity into a messianic hero who is opposed by everyone and everything. The greater gratification thus naturally comes when the hero, despite all setbacks, sticks to his guns, thus ultimately showing everyone that his way is the right way. Where Wiseau indulges in pompous gratification in the climax of conceited martyrdom, Black comes up with a less theatrical but all the more terrifying conclusion. The happy ending of The Last Boy Scout prescriptively re-establishes the traditional family and order, while at the same time highlighting their toxicity. The idyll sketched out in the epilogue is purely one-sided with the absolute authority of the father, to whom absolutely everyone submits and humbly salutes. Not to mention that the entire situation of the hero and his family is derived solely from certain preconceived patriarchal delusions that the man is supposed to take care of his family and be respected for it. Joe Hallenbeck is the idealised projection screen for all frustrated men who bottle up their fucked-up lives and think that the highest form of expressing their feelings is to tell someone to fuck off with a roguish smile.  _____ Unlike The Room, however, The Last Boy Scout is not artless, off-kilter dreck, but a very inventively constructed and tremendously effective spectacle. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Shane Black was a screenwriting star, combining would-be nonconformity with clever reflection of genre formulas. But at the core of all of Black’s work there is a typically fierce fanboyish desire to give back to the classic physical genres their coolness and wow effect with which they seduced their most loyal and enchanted audience, which, despite the age ratings, was always composed of boys on the threshold of adolescence. Black most honestly materialised this in what is clearly his best work, namely his debut screenplay for The Monster Squad, an excellent self-reflective children’s adventure with its roots in classic horror movies. But characteristically for the action genre as an obstinately would-be adult spectacle, his later works abandon the unbridled childlike exuberance and instead get buried in conservative myths about debauched and corrupt elites opposed by ordinary good guys. It is thus unsurprising that The Last Boy Scout is the cinematic equivalent of Frank Miller’s Sin City comic book series, which began publication in the same period but, due to the medium, could dare to be more ostentatious, objectifying, explicit and brutal. _____  In the end, however, the craftsmanship of the resulting film is praiseworthy, especially in light of the emerging stories of how the bloated egos of four men at the supposed peak of their careers – screenwriter Shane Black, producer Joel Silver, director Tony Scott and star Bruce Willis – clashed during production. In short, Black turned in a boorishly nihilistic and extreme screenplay (peculiarly elevated to the level of myth by Czech fans of The Last Boy Scout) for which he received a record-breaking fee in advance. The notorious control freak Silver meddled in every aspect of production, toned down Black’s rampant misogynistic fantasies and, after shooting had been completed, removed Scott, who was in the process of developing his impressionistic style with the film. And Willis couldn’t get along with his equally megalomaniacal co-star Damon Wayans, whose star was on the rise while Willis’s career was going in circles and his star was shining brightly only in the eastern territories. Unlike other productions plagued by creative differences, none of this is obviously evident in the final result, which Stuart Baird edited into shape. Since Scott was not involved in the final cut, it is rather surprising that the material that he shot was assembled into a final form that fits perfectly into the director’s filmography with its style, impressive surreal neon-noir visuals and fast-paced editing.

In the mould of Shin’ya Tsukamoto, Takeshi Kitano also banks on the samurai myth. Unlike the oppressive vision developed by Tsukamoto in the low-budget Killing, the master of deadpan humour has come up with a flashy costume epic that he approaches as a mercilessly caustic farce. In Kitano’s interpretation, the samurai ethos is shown to be absurdly empty bullshit that just destroys lives while having no real value or foundation. Similarly, the whole Japanese system consisting in the hereditary hierarchy is portrayed by the director, screenwriter and the actor playing one of the characters as completely demented nonsense that deprives people of their individuality and binds everyone to senseless subordination to the whims of a handful of privileged maniacs. The film’s narrative literally shows that this tradition, which is still revered by many Japanese today, relied on a senseless cycle of killing for promotion, so it is no wonder that those who went through it and held onto their positions for a while were driven to absolute madness. In addition to samurai virtues and the hierarchy of the period, Kitano also makes fun of many revered figures from Japanese history. He depicts all of the characters as buffoons and whores, though only very few of them are aware that they are such. But make no mistake, Kitano presents all of the above as spectacularly spiteful fun that gives his iconoclastic epic an appropriately sharp edge.

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.