JFL

Gwendoline wants to be a mix of Barbarella and Indiana Jones, but the result is dull nonsense that is neither adventurous nor erotic, and also lacks exaggeration and, despite a sizable budget, capable actors and artists behind the camera. Just Jaeckin was rather fortunate to release the film Emmanuelle at the right time, as it became a global sensation, though it definitely did not possess any outstanding directorial qualities. In Gwendoline, this is brought to mind by the futile action scenes. Taken as a whole, unfortunately, the film is not dumb enough to be funny, but only tiresome, sterile and, furthermore, offensive in its antediluvian treatment of gender. Today, Gwendoline can serve only as a complementary work to the new version of Tomb Raider. Both pictures have essentially identical storylines in which a young woman sets out on the trail of her lost father to an exotic land, where she half coerces cooperation from a local hunk, who eventually becomes her ally. However, in filling out the details and the conceptualisation of the characters, the two films could not be farther apart. While the action-adventure Tomb Raider with the wonderfully charismatic and physically fit Alicia Vikander and the truly masculine Daniel Wu stands completely outside of gender and racial formulas, Gwendoline is a dullchick flickbased on formulas and prejudices to such an extent that it contains nothing more than that.

It could be said that Tomb Raider is merely a metamorphosis of the excellent reboot of the eponymous video-game franchise from 2013 into a live-action film, in that it takes on the game’s story and environment, as well as its characters and action concept. Furthermore, in comparison with the video game, the film very much comes across as a poorer relation in terms of both the design and variability of the environment, as well as the narrative and character development. This illustrates the advantages found in the potential of video games in relation to cinema, which is analogous to the comparison of cinema with television series. However, it is necessary to recognise that film does not emerge from this situation completely devoid of positive aspects, which consist in ever-increasing mass accessibility and the less time-consuming nature of films, as well as their ability to enchant through casting and formal nuances. With respect to most of the cinematic adaptation’s positive aspects – starting with Lara’s development arc and ending with the superb physical action – it can be said that the game offered these in a more intense and sophisticated form. What remains intrinsic and indubitable, however, is the cast, with the actress portraying Lara Croft at the fore, though by no means limited to her. With her physical condition and charisma, Alicia Vikander is captivating as a new icon and role model for female viewers. Some fans and viewers who are familiar only with the classic image of Lara gripe that she raises her iconic twin pistols only at the very end of the film. In this, however, lies the demanding nature of the character’s concept, in that she has to carry the entire film and be an action heroine with those traditional attributes, which must be balanced with physical ability. Thanks to the fact that priority is given to action in which physical fitness and reluctance to engage in shootouts take precedence, the film not only superbly relates to the revolutionary concept of the rebooted video game, but also brings into cinemas a breath of fresh air in the context of action blockbusters. Though the action scenes abound with computer animation, their foundation is comprised of the lead actress’s physical performance. At the same time, it is worth noting the film’s subtle progressiveness with respect to gender and racial stereotypes. Whereas the classic image of Lara Croft had viewers of the films with Angelina Jolie staring at her cleavage and derriere, in the new concept (again established by the video game), her muscular back and arms become her main attributes. However, these are shown in the context of the scenes and not as a result of objectifying shots, thanks to which the film is refreshingly simple. In addition to that, with the supporting character Lua, played by Daniel Wu, American cinema for the first time tears down the stereotype that Asian men are not masculine and sexy.

Panos Cosmatos exorcises the genre demons of his childhood (his father is the director of Rambo II and Cobra) with a trash revenge story transformed into a mystical psychotropic epic. The film completely fulfils Alejandro Jodorowsky’s dictate "I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs". Nicolas Cage is promoted to the role of a visual artifact in an airbrushed scene from the side of a van brought to life. Nevertheless, proclamations that Cage has reached the maximum level of madness in his acting are rather overwrought – in this respect, the second Ghost Rider still holds the lead.

A regrettably forgotten film that characteristically remained woefully misunderstood in its time due to its deviant peculiarity and flamboyant brilliance, and that state of affairs still persist to this day. At the same time, thanks to the incipient work of screenwriter Vince Gilligan, who is now finally revered as one of the most brilliant creative talents thanks to Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, it is somewhat easier to understand the merits of his debut. In light of the aforementioned hit series, the essence of Wilder Napalm is more readily apparent; it even proves to be a sort of more creative and fantastically over-the-top variation of Breaking Bad. The fantastical motif of pyrokinesis serves here as a catalyst that makes it possible to set a blaze in the limed space of a feature film the motifs that Gilligan allowed to slowly smoulder in the series – from the mundanity of everyday life of the lower middle class, which bubbles up into relationship crises, to a crisis of masculinity tied to illusory gender patterns of performance and social roles and statuses. In addition to Gilligan’s contribution, it is also necessary to pay homage to the other artists involved, as Wilder Napalm is also captivating due to its superbly polished form, where the camerawork, set design and costumes play a primary role. Together, they help to define the characters and express their dynamics and qualities, which again helps to cram a tremendous number of subliminal characterisation elements into the film (see the main heroine’s present but unheralded preference for green – thus costumes as a means of defining the characters).

The Third Dragon deserves credit as an attempt to make a (Czecho)Slovak variation on the contemporary (predominantly) American trend of fantasy adventure movies for kids with elements of sci-fi and horror along the lines of The Goonies. Unfortunately, however, the film does not hold together at all and is rather a rickety collection of random sequences, with one overshadowing the next instead of being interconnected into a coherent narrative. In their individual details, such as the bizarrely unsettling sequences from an alien planet, which lack context from the beginning, they are impressive nonetheless.

Why is everyone so astonished that Spielberg is a master of his craft? It’s no miracle that one of the best craftsmen and storytellers around is still able to do what he has always done. Ready Player One rather makes it clear how miserable other blockbusters in recent years have been. Even though RPO runs like clockwork, a rotten heart beats in its core. Behind the exalted adoration of 1980s pop culture, there is a tremendously depressing vision of the future. How else can we interpret a world that is unbelievably technologically advanced, yet culturally fixated on the artifacts of the eighties and nineties or, said more precisely, that voluntarily devours the pop culture of the 1980s and memorialises it in the smallest detail. Peculiarly, behind everything stands a forlorn, egocentric and megalomaniacal nerd who draws to himself and his favourite titles the absolute attention of the whole world with the siren song of mammon and power. The narrative of the film actually brings forth a terrifying vision of the futility of the lives of fans who hope that someone will remember them after they die, but then come to the horrifying realisation that the only thing that they have left behind is the large number of video games, movies and comics that they consumed. Though the author of the novel on which the film is based probably intended something different, Ready Player One shows an aging nerd’s wishful thinking that the titles he adores and that mean so much to him should have some sort of relevance in the mid-21st century. If we go even deeper, the whole film-adaptation project is a perverse myth which, when taking off the rose-coloured glasses, shows how pop culture devours itself while also shaping its followers and their idols thanks to the illusion that a fan can become a star. The film’s narrative only serves to reinforce the sad idea that obsessive knowledge of pop culture makes some sort of sense and could even be the key to success and wealth. Of course, there must also be the idealisation of pop culture as a work of inner creativity and not of industry, not to mention the illusion that its creations belong to fans and users rather than to corporations and license holders. Ready Player One combines all of these myths at the level of storytelling and in the project itself. It is impossible to view with anything other than amazement the ingenuity with which the corporate monster disseminates its gospel when it broadcasts to the world legends about how difficult it must have been to obtain licenses for individual cited artifacts and how the only one who could manage to pull it off is the universally adored Spielberg. But if we persist in our search, then one of us, the one who ties together all of the references in RPO, will be a star of the internet and, if it suits the corporate hydra, will shoot a film according to his or her own list. And the worst part of all of this is that it will actually be worth watching.

Let’s face it: children are simply evil. One minute, you’re enjoying life to the fullest and the next thing you know, you’re pushing a baby carriage and sacrificing your time, money and personal wellbeing for someone who has no consideration for you at all. As the years go passing by, it gets worse and you expect one jab after another until your investment in the perpetuation of the human race tells you to go to hell. But nature sees to it that the parental instinct overcomes even the biggest cheap shot in the end, so that we don’t murder the little bastards. But what would it be like if it were possible to switch off this natural and civilisational impulse? Director and screenwriter Brian Taylor used this obviously strongly introspective stream of thought as the initial premise of his likably rollicking variation on slaughter flicks. Years ago, Taylor gained cult fame in certain circles for his films made in creative tandem with Mark Neveldine. Their formally anarchistic, even avant-garde works such asthe diptych of Crank and Gamer polarised viewers with a cheeky cyberpunk mix of uncontrolled energy, an excessive juvenile fondness for shallowness and corporeality, andan exalted concentration of the multimedia chaos of the new millennium. But that was ten years ago. Though Taylor is miserly when it comes to disclosing details of his private life, his new work meaningfully fills a six-year gap in his filmography. Mom and Dad is thus not merely a hysterical acting performance by Nicolas Cage, but a sincere, unfiltered cry of a person whom the monsters he himself spawned daily attempt to take his life.

It is interesting to read those comments here on FilmBooster thanks to which I finally understood what viewers of detective shows consider to be quality: refined visuals and “original murders”. Viewers of classic episodic detective shows like Colombo are amateur investigators who enjoyed trying to solve the crime together with the detective or even a step ahead of the detective. But then along came dramatic detective series in which the murder was no longer the pivotal event, but rather a McGuffin that aids the characters in dealing with their relationships and personal dramas. Where true screenwriting qualities are concerned, the Danish series The Killing still ranks highly in this category, followed closely by the Icelandic Trapped. The creative duo of Mårlind and Stein gained international renown with The Bridge, in which they did not in any way enrich the frequently utilised yet, due to the difficulty involved with it, rarely well-executed concept. Instead of realistic characters, they came up with extreme opposites, which they inserted into an overwrought case with a perfect Bond-esque murderer, for whom every detail of his exceedingly convoluted plan turns out well. Thanks, however, to the superbly calibrated interaction of the central characters and the actors that portray them, this totally pulp premise worked and became a worldwide hit. If The Bridge stank to high heaven, yet still did an excellent job of attracting attention, then Midnight Sun is an utterly frill-festooned checklist revealing the true nature of quantity TV. In pursuing viewers or, more precisely, in the desperate need to keep viewers in front of the screen, it fakes originality with the most exotic variations of successful concepts possible. Thus, in Midnight Sun we have a pair of über-formulaically diverse detectives from different countries, who solve a series of the most bizarre possible murders in a breathtaking exotic location. We add to this a peculiarity in the form of a clash of cultures and ethnicities, which evokes a feeling of uniqueness and, primarily, a level of cognition a la the Czech documentary series Cestománie. We then wrap all of this up in literally every screenwriting trick available, and even in false evidence and hallucinations, which would have been considered a gross violation of genre norms in earlier detective shows (Father Knox could only shake his head in wonder). Viewers no longer work out how something happened, nor do they experience suffering together with the characters. Instead, they just wait to see how and if all possible absurd clues and spurious evidence fit together, or they rather morbidly wait to see what kind of outlandishly drastic murder the screenwriters came up with and the exceedingly masturbatory way they depicted it.

When you are in your teens and you pretentiously display your status as a supposed outsider, as you have seen in the current audio-visual media, this series will strike you as being very much for you and about you. You will even shed emotional tears at the obviously nonconformist finale. When you are twenty or thirty and stupefied by the self-proclaimed exceptionalism of Netflix and its marketing telling you that everything bearing its stamp is terribly unconventional and bold and outside the norm, you will force yourself to believe that this series is another nail in the coffin of linear television and its formulas. Except it is merely a very cleverly calculated project for the burgeoning youth audience or rather for the eternally immature who do not want to see realistically drawn young protagonists, but rather their genre-defined variations. The comic-book pedigree can be felt in this work a hundred times over, which means egocentric tension and a presumption of grand rebellion and nonconformity, when superficial emo orations are delivered with big-mouthed vulgarities and occasional splashes of blood. Having had its effect on American (not only) indie cinema, the cash cow of the M comic-book rating is trampling quantity TV. As a result, the series is most infuriating by going the way of the expected humanisation of sociopaths and does not live up to the false lure of the first episode, which conversely would have indeed brought forth something new.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is good or even excellent in its constituent elements, very progressive in its concepts and ambitions in the context of the saga, but unbalanced, rushed and half-baked as a whole. If episode five illustrated how jumping between plans should look while building a single overarching atmosphere, it is in this respect that episode eight, which vehemently plunders the fifth instalment in terms of style and motifs, fails the most. And that’s a shame, because its storylines demystifying heroism and the canon of the series itself, with Jedi knights at the fore, have tremendous power. But the film never lets them fully develop, as it has to abruptly return to some other storyline or recall that, as Disney’s cash cow, it has to quickly lighten the atmosphere with a wisecrack. Added to that, there are paradoxically a number of needless underdeveloped elements that detract from the viewer’s immersion in the film and encourage doubt and ridicule, so rather than a coherent work, they make a great breeding ground for parodies and fanfiction (though that can be a means of working with the audience and the brand). While the preceding The Force Awakens was a well-oiled rollercoaster, The Last Jedi is a larger colossus, but it wobbles and rattles that much more and the wheels come off. Paradoxically, the new characters had much more space and more effectively got under the viewers’ skin in the preceding episode, whereas the eighth film, though in many ways fleshing out those characters and letting them go in their own, new direction, ends up putting them in an even greater shadow of the iconic characters of the series. Despite all of the positives and new things found in the eighth episode, nothing remains other than to keep an eye out for the ninth one, where, for example, the series could finally go in an utterly new direction, as the eighth film has already cleared out the motifs and iconic sets of the fifth and sixth episodes combined.