JFL

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

This grandiose mega-project is unfortunately illustrative of all of the attributes of Chinese animation, which still stands in the shadow of Japanese anime, which it also brazenly rips off, though unfortunately only in terms of form and style, without being able to focus on the strength of competitive screenplays. Deep Sea thus delivers a blatant variation on Spirited Away, but instead of Miyazaki’s multi-layered and empathetic treatise on growing up, the Chinese filmmakers just drastically overwhelm viewers with exaggerated milking of emotions and a stunning visual aspect which, however, is purely superficial at its core. Technically, Deep Sea remains disarming and amazing, but it’s rather disappointing that it doesn’t have the same ambitiously well-developed characters.

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”.