Matty

The main and practically only unusual thing about Pompeii is the effort combine disaster-flick spectacle with antiquity action. The two types of film are melded together through the clever use of melodramatic conventions, as the essence of the genre calls for the extinction of both the gladiator and the individual facing the wrath of nature. Roughly half of the film consists in setting up the narrative background required for the individualistic hero’s effective engagement with external events and it is exceedingly obvious that Anderson does not enjoy directing actors (if anyone is interested how Kit Harington performs, he performs exactly as he does in Game of Thrones). Thanks to this basic arrangement of relationships and motifs, on the other hand, Anderson is able to engage in PG-13 fight scenes and spectacular Emmerich-esque destruction until the end. It’s a satisfactory spectacle, but it’s nothing special even in 3D, which only really works when the action takes place on multiple levels (roughly one or two scenes). The action scenes are muddled due to the quick editing and off-centre compositions (the characters nonsensically fight at the edge of screen multiple times). In addition to that, they are much more grounded and with less video-game stylisation that you would expect from the director of Mortal Kombat, multiple instalments of the Resident Evil franchise and Death Race. The games resemble “bird's-eye-view” shots of the city (as from an RTS), whose main purpose is to prepare us for the aforementioned combining of genres, i.e. for the biblical scale of the impending devastation. The religious subtext or, more precisely, the use of the principle of divine justice is the only instance of reviving the popular leftist story of a man of the people who stands up to a powerful empire personified by a greedy senator (Kiefer Sutherland delivers the only – and probably unintentionally – funny line in the entire film). Pompeii isn’t as blatantly stupid as Need for Speed; I’d even venture to say that it contains a small amount of historical truth, but as with Need for Speed, you will likely walk out of the cinema unsatisfied if you don’t appreciate how exemplarily it fills out the classic Hollywood narrative template and genre formulas. 65%

As one of the first instances of transferring the rage of English youth from books to film, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning no longer has the same impact of other social dramas that came earlier (On the Waterfront) or later (Accattone). With its unidyllic, aloof framing, Reisz’s portrait of an overly proud member of the working class is unable to convey the rage that the protagonist feels towards the older (and ruling) generation in a sufficiently evocative way. In this respect, Schorm’s drama Courage for Every Day is more impressive, as it is down-to-earth in more ways than Reisz’s film, though it also gives preference to dramatisation over mere observation (so the immediacy inherent in the cinéma-vérité style is lacking). Due to the conservative British culture, however, it is nevertheless necessary to appreciate the courage to show the behaviour of a few frustrated, irresponsible youths who disdain conventions and display a degree of animalism (Arthur often gorges himself on food and beer and does not restrain himself in the area of sex) without judgment, or rather without taking an unambiguous moralistic standpoint. The film also raised controversy in its time with its characters’ non-standard vocabulary and the issue of abortion (paradoxically, American censors were more outraged by this), which made Saturday Night and Sunday Morning a particularly historically valuable litmus test for gauging the mood of a society in which tumultuous changes were brewing. 75%

A flawless example of integrating CGI into the narrative. Thanks to the fact that dinosaurs also appear as attractions in the fictional world and the characters perceive them as such, they film still has a palpable “wow” effect to this day (exemplary in this respect is the scene in which the main characters first see the dinosaurs in all their glory). At the same time, it is an excellent (or reprehensible, depending on how much you despise capitalism) example of how to incorporate merchandising into the story (the uniformity of the film’s logo and the park’s logo, the “incidentally” filmed gift-shop selection). Jurassic Park is a self-assured Hollywood product that gives you your money’s worth by providing superior entertainment that works in every respect. What fascinates me the most is that its effectiveness, which only a few directors have come close to matching, comes across as simply a matter of course. 85%

A lot of figures, no characters. A lot of narrators, no narrative. A lot of movement, no direction. Anderson again balances on the edge of a chasm of gratuitous horsing around in grand style. The design of the individual settings and periods (red and purple art deco in the 1920s, grey and pink during the Nazi era, orange and yellow in the 1960s), the geometric perfection in the mise-en-scene and the seemingly hand-crafted tricks make up an unbelievably entertaining blend of the poetics of classic slapstick and Méliès’s more spectacular films. (A detail for connoisseurs is the fact that each era was shot in a different aspect ratio: 1.85:1 for the present, 2.35:1 for the 1960s, academic format for the 1930s). However, I don’t agree that Anderson has matured and has given us a sad and melancholic film in colourful wrapping. Any attempts at seriousness fail, whether in relation to the characters or to the theme of war and times long past. The war context, the hint of nostalgia and the multiple rewritings of Central European history serve mainly as an excuse for colourful fooling around. Zweig is present more or less thanks only to the nesting-doll structure of the narrative, the infrequent consideration of which over the course of the film raises a question that I had to ask myself repeatedly, despite my desire to let myself be freely carried away by Anderson’s imagination – “What is this for?” According to the principle of “why do something the easy way when you can do it the hard way”, the film contains a full range of prototypical situations that we would find in their unaffected form, which would better serve the story, in classic escape and caper movies. The acknowledged inspiration taken from Hitchcock’s thrillers (a persecuted innocent) and Lubitsch’s screwball comedies from obscure European countries (particularly Ralph Fiennes’s character and his attitude toward women, but not the “cleverness” of the dialogue, whose humour rather often consists in a wager on a sure thing in the form of well-timed vulgarity) is purely superficial. The intentional contrivance of the situations finds a response only in the actions of the characters, who respect strict rules and walk in diagonal lines, thus elegantly closing the circle, as the contrived world gives meaning to its lifelessness through artificial figures. I admire the precision with which Anderson builds his worlds and I enjoy the flawless comic timing of all of the actors, but I simply cannot find any deeper meaning, greater depth or narrative imaginativeness in Grandhotel Budapest. 75%

By gamers, for gamers. Or, more precisely, by people who present themselves as gamers (because doing so is favourable with respect to marketing), for viewers who consider those people to be gamers (young men from poorer backgrounds without higher education, dreaming that they will pick up beautiful women thanks to their driving skills). Waugh’s film is possibly one of the most thorough video-game adaptations and thus, more than other game adaptations, lays bare the limits of trying to be maximally accommodating toward fans of the source material. The plot is of marginal importance and serves primarily as an unobtrusive (though necessary) basis for the action. However, the mediocre dialogue, overacting, infantile humour and formulaic situations are significantly more irritating on the big screen than in the cut-scenes of the game (though their purpose remains the same – providing the possibility to give one’s eyes and ears a rest). The slavish adoption of certain formalistic techniques from video games (extreme slow-motion eye-candy crashes) necessarily come across as clichéd, since game designers like to go to the movies for inspiration. By faithfully imitating bad imitations of films – instead of drawing more from, for example, the quoted Bullitt or other 1970s action movies (knowledge of which the director can only boast about) – Need For Speed becomes a copy of a copy that doesn’t have any specific character of its own. However, I don’t think it’s a bad film, since it fulfils its mission (escapist automotive entertainment) more satisfactorily than, for example, the most recent, poorly focused instalment of Fast & Furious. In the context of macho action melodramas that, according to the logic of the genre, must contain unrealistic feats that are not conditioned by emotion or reason and red-lined moments of action, there really isn’t much for which to reproach Need for Speed. For me, it was a pleasant way to relax my mind, which I appreciated for not requiring any greater mental effort than playing one of the games in the series. 60%

The search for a lost son and a deep human story in a film that does not try very hard to be anything more than a deep human story itself. But if a drama is supposed to be pleasant and moving, then let it be pleasant and moving in the same subtle way as Philomena. The screenwriting duo did not succumb to the temptation to reduce an ambiguous story to emotional porn. Despite prioritising emotions over broader socio-cultural contexts, they offer more than a handful of clearly comprehensible truths, turning Philomena into a passive victim and the Church into an diabolical institution. Besides the nuanced fictionalisation of actual people, the film greatly benefits from its sense of humour. With precisely measured portions of humour, the dialogue protects the narrative from academic dullness and significantly lightens up the fatally artsy combination of religion, politics and homosexuality. Thanks to the actors, we can – similarly as in the recent Rush – sympathise with both of the characters simultaneously, even though their natures and worldviews are completely different. Whereas Frears takes care of the smooth transitions between investigative and intimate drama, we are responsible for switching between the sentimental (Philomena) and cynical (Sixsmith) framing of the story (the points of view of the two self-styled detectives align in the end, as expected). Philomena openly appeals for the favour of viewers, but in the context of heart-warming films for all ages, it retains its dignity in spite of its populism, which is an increasingly rare feat. 75%

I would like to believe that Clooney was inspired by the text of Kristin Thompson’s An Aesthetic of Discrepancy and it would thus be correct to perceive the variability of tone as a sign of formalistic richness rather than creative cluelessness. The actual drama in the film is the struggle between respect for the work of the real Monuments Men and adulation for lighter ensemble war movies (The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen). On the one hand, the book’s episodic structure and its loose connection of chapters through the use of letters is preserved; on the other hand, The Monuments Men definitely is not intended to be an objective, fact-based docudrama. It would also like to pay tribute to the group of men and women who were instrumental in preserving rare artifacts for future generations. Each of the participants therefore got his or her own scene (or two). However, these scenes add information to the micro-stories, which either go nowhere and lack a satisfying resolution (the love affair), or are too hastily brought to an end and used as an assault on the viewer’s emotions (Jeffries regaining his lost self-esteem). Th film needed to decide whether it cared more about the monuments or about the preservationists, because it’s not able to deal with both in the span of two hours in a way that wouldn’t seem incomplete. At the same time, it isn’t able to use for the purposes of the narrative the scenes that effectively convey its noble ideas and which will thus be all the more annoying the more you find American patriotism distasteful. The absence (or at least unclarity) of a firm core causes the narrative to break down into individual incidents, which sometimes work on their own (the antipersonnel mine, most of the grotesque interludes with Murray and Balaban), but do not fit into any greater whole with a clear direction or tone. Though the alternation of these incidents has a certain logic (assembly of the team and division of tasks after fifteen minutes, the team splits up after half an hour, they come back together after roughly an hour and then go their own ways again in pairs), we don’t spend enough time with any of the protagonists to be drawn into their personal stories. Not even the recovery of the Ghent Altarpiece and the Madonna of Bruges can be described as a goal to which the events lead in a focused manner. The preservationist do not gradually gain clues; in fact, we are not given the impression that they are in any way under time pressure (with the exception of the artificially dramatised climax, when they have to be faster than the caricature of a Russian leader), as they simply get to the two treasures at the right time (i.e. at the end of the film). They get there thanks in part to random chance (the incident with the dentist actually happened), and partly thanks to soldiers forcibly clearing the way for them. In the end, thanks to the great actors who obviously enjoyed their roles, I enjoyed a scene here and there, but the film as a whole didn’t manage to hold my attention for long. At the same time, I wasn’t bothered by it. Though The Monuments Men doesn’t know what it wants and reduces history to a struggle between good and evil, it’s not stupid or cheap (in terms of production values). Clooney perhaps failed as a director and screenwriter, but he still managed to retain his dignity for the time being. 60%

A farcical escape comedy that is livened up by an unreliable narrator, a notorious liar put behind bars for faking an assault on himself, and is then forcibly transformed in the final act into a raw, neorealistic social satire showing the other side of the Italian economic miracle (which corresponds to the fact that the film was directed by a “pink” neorealist). The same impression of incoherence is evoked by the digression from the “first-person” narrative (a conversation between one of the prisoners and his wife, which the protagonist was not present for) solely for the purpose of highlighting the social-realist thematic level. The gradual transition from ironic detachment to melodramatic pathos is accompanied by a sudden (and thus unconvincing) attempt to show the escapees in a better world. Due to the fact that for most of the time they are presented to us as a bunch of interchangeable imbeciles, it is difficult to suddenly start respecting them and sympathising with them. The film’s strong cast and a few humorously composed shots can’t overcome the embarrassment of its inconsistency. 60%

Young people in turtlenecks sit around in bars and cafés, discussing the end of film and human life. This could have been an excellent parody of French existential dramas, but The Wishful Thinkers doesn’t want to parody anything. Like a parody, however, it allows its characters to repeatedly step out of the narrative and draw attention to the artificiality of the world that they inhabit. Through the dialogue, breaking of the fourth wall and the technical limits of the film medium (the characters sit behind glass, so only the sound of the street can be heard rather than what they are talking about), we are made aware of the inseparability of the fictional world and the world in which the fiction is created. Despite a certain forcedness in the constant highlighting of the cinephilic qualities of the film, which, in addition to traits of the French New Wave, adopts some of the characteristic features of the Barcelona School (improvisation, episodic structure, jump cuts, “literary” division into chapters, the use of written texts, the impression that some scenes are missing, while the narrative flow comes to a complete halt in other scenes), The Wishful Thinkers gradually won me over with its sincerity and spontaneity both in front of and behind the camera. To reject such films on principle would mean taking it for granted that immediacy and imperfection today necessarily mean posturing. Maybe so, but I would like to foolishly believe that The Wishful Thinkers is more “cinematic” than more run-of-the-mill and commercial productions, not because of its belief in its own importance, but because of its creators’ love of cinema. 75%

“Where’s its scrotum?” Joel and Ethan Coen attempt to penetrate the inner life of another one their down downtrodden heroes and succeed at least as well as they did in the Kafkaesque Barton Fink (which also featured an artistic setting, the futile efforts of an artist and the thematisation of the relationship between art and commerce) or in the apocalyptic A Serious Man (the unfortunate feeling that the protagonist “owes” his misfortune to a higher power). The film also recalls the Homeric comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou? with its exploration of the roots of American pop music and the Coens’ revived collaboration with music producer T Bone Burnett. ___ It thus isn’t true that Inside Llewyn Davis would be a lesser “Coen-ian” film. At most, it is more perceptive with respect to its protagonist. And rightly so. In comparison with the characters in the above-mentioned films, Llewyn is both more active and more talented, due to which he is of course viewed with greater understanding and less cynical condescension, though the brothers leave it to us to judge whether Llewyn’s unassertiveness is a sign of defeatism or merely an unwillingness to sell out. ___ Llewyn’s multi-day struggle, during which he is mostly kept company only by an orange tomcat, begins with a slammed door and continues with the loss of his money, cheery prospects and even his own identity (when he loses not only his last few dollars, but also his ID). Though his agent likes people, this is manifested in his frequent attendance of funerals rather than in intensively seeking out work for his client. Conversely, the hatred that Llewyn’s ex-girlfriend holds for him is intense (Carey Mulligan again tries through most of the film to perform in the same acting mode, which this time is hysterical), as she is shocked by the protagonist’s ignorant attitude toward his own and others’ past and future. ___ It’s true that Llewyn doesn’t do much planning, he’s not strong-willed and he more or less freely lets the world pass him by. Perhaps because of his indiscipline and inability to take life firmly in his hands and assert his interests, he repeatedly finds himself in similarly unenviable situations, ending his ill-fated journey where it began. We can only wonder whether the film begins with a flashforward or ends with a flashback, whether the epilogue is supposed to be a statement on Llewyn’s incorrigibility or something else entirely. ___ Though he would perhaps want to, Llewyn Davis does not decide his own fate. Fate, perhaps embodied in a cat with a very meaningful name, rather calls the shots for him. With its absurdist hopelessness, the film is reminiscent of another story of a man who didn’t know what to do with a cat, Juráček’s A Character in Need of Support. The tone of the spiralling narrative is set immediately by the first of the soundtrack’s numerous balladic songs, in which Llewyn sings about how he has travelled around the world and wouldn’t mind if he died. It’s as if his acceptance of his assigned role as a supporting character is manifested in his choice of songs. It is characteristic of his life story that while Bob Dylan is onstage getting ready to enchant the audience, Llewyn is being beaten by a stranger in a back alley (the recurring image of Llewyn walking alone is an apt variation on the cover art of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, in which we see a happy pair of lovers). __ But to what extent is Llewyn’s passivity voluntary and to what extent does it stem from the fact that others accept (or reject) him. Most of the characters either cannot remember his name (the devilish John Goodman as a jazzman with an outsized ego) or – as if he did not exist in and of himself – try to assign him to someone else, such as to the infirm father who responds to his son’s musical output with a display of incontinence and thus paradoxically shows himself to be a more receptive listener than music producer Bud Grossman. ___ The reason for Llewyn’s unpopularity and the fact that he doesn’t fit into any environment may be his stubborn inflexibility, which prevents him from singing other people’s songs more often, for example. But is rejection by the outside world too high a price for maintaining his own authenticity? Though music is the most natural form of self-expression for him and he exhibits a certain self-assuredness only when he is playing, does Llewyn really know what his authentic self looks like? Or does confronting it make him uneasy, just like the knowledge that somewhere in Akron his child is toddling and babbling? He thought he had resolved the issue of the child, but she comes back like a boomerang, just as the cat and the thought of Mike’s suicide disappear and return. The feeling of loss never subsides. Instead, like a doppelgänger, it accompanies the protagonist everywhere he goes. ___ With cool visuals and settings such as narrow hallways with double doors at the end (of which Llewyn always naturally chooses the worse one), the Coens succeed in brilliantly expressing the anxiety of a world that is constantly pushing us to make fundamental decisions. Impactful editing and the equally apt use of interludes (the endless journey to Chicago), original swearing (“King Midas’s idiot brother”), bizarre characters (the man on the subway, the elevator operator) and even more bizarre names (Howard Greenfung) turn individual scenes into brilliantly timed gags. Bolstered by appropriately chosen songs, the melancholic atmosphere of failure is the main unifying element of the narrative. The film lacks a traditional plot structure with multiple dramatic acts and a catharsis at the end. The Coens do not try to combine the individual picaresque incidents into a unified narrative flow. The film is a drama without a third act, indicating – among other things – that Llewyn is the hero of a story taking place against the backdrop of bigger stories (in the spirit of Life of Brian). After the exposition and initial complication, there are just more and more complications. ___ The universal questions that the Coens examine this time involve the (in)voluntariness of choice due to one’s own convictions and the demands of the public. Instead of simple answers, they offer a wonderfully melancholic comedy that will resonate in my head for a long time to come. 90%