Matty

A film that will grab you by the balls. Looking into Austrian basements with Seidl is the audio-visual equivalent of reading discussions on news servers. It is perversely entertaining and terrifying at the same time. The fact that you won’t find a similar concentration of exotic creatures even in all the of cable reality shows combined arouses the suspicion of a calculated attempt to shock. However, I believe that for Seidl, basements are a generally applicable metaphor for physical and mental isolation from the outside world. Several of the participants talk about how their past lives “out there” disappointed them and how only “down here", away from the prying eyes of society, can they fully satisfy their desires, whether that involves dusting Nazi artifacts, pulling plastic babies out of shoeboxes or spanking (one of the more normal sexual practices you will see here). Also, the brass band playing outside is always framed by the entrance to the garage, thus figuratively defining the mental horizons of the people being filmed. Confinement in one’s own world and the unwillingness to accept stimuli that contradict one’s established worldview are, I’m afraid, gaining strength thanks to the internet. It is easy to imagine a person sitting in front of a monitor instead of a figure standing in the middle of perfectly symmetrical shot compositions. Like the denizens of internet discussion forums, the people profiled in In the Basement also display a higher degree of exhibitionism, somewhat paradoxically, despite their desire not to let go of their fabricated micro-worlds. It’s not enough that you have a head full of fascist-sexist views. It is necessary to have a place where you can proudly spout them. Regardless of the degree to which some of the situations were staged, I didn’t register a hint of shame or insecurity in any of the social actors about how they spend their free time. Some perversions simply go so far beyond us that the limited space of our own consciousness (and subconscious) is not enough for them. Just as the obviously small cage is not enough for the woman in the last shot, who has had herself locked up in it. 75%

A clueless expression of cluelessness. If not for the mature camerawork and the assiduous acting of Tereza Voříšková, I would be searching in vain for a single reason why Laputa would not be shown on broadcast television on a Sunday evening instead of in cinemas. In fact, many low-budget television productions have an incomparably more sophisticated dramaturgical structure, better-developed characters, more convincing dialogue and greater storytelling value. Whereas Hana’s other recent generational statement managed to impress at least with its bold technical execution, Laputa has nothing with which to fill or cover up its content void. The film is just as tiresome and tiring as its weakling protagonist, who does nothing, deals with nothing, strives for nothing and changes nothing (the only major decision that she makes comes out of the blue and ultimately doesn’t bring about any change anyway). One of the few disruptions to her routine of surviving from day to day is when the boiler leaks, but she accepts it with the same apathy as she does all other events. While characters appear and disappear (some quite illogically after the midpoint of the film), nothing changes. Just more conversations about fire, water and the inability to do anything with oneself. You can probably understand that, regardless of the creative intent (to somehow convey the protagonist’s sense of resignation to us), this is about as comparably entertaining as watching paint dry. Johanka stereotypically and futilely seeks happiness in a variously committed relationship with one of her approximately five casual partners/friends, mostly self-centred jackasses (one is a jealous idiot, another sometimes deliberately cuts his own palm, yet another appears as unexpectedly as he leaves) who will most likely blend together in your mind just as the content and the mood of the film’s individual scenes do. The only sensible, practical man is a dad with a wife and two sons. I don’t know whether or not to take from this the lesson that only parenthood will make you a purposeful human being – especially since Johanka’s mother is clearly not okay. It’s fine that the narrative monotony is matched by subdued camerawork with muted colours and impressively “tired” and usually static compositions (only the scenes at the grandmother’s house and the single scene in Laputa, when it seems that Johanka has finally taken the right direction, are brighter), but if the film (and its characters) lack rhythm and pace, it doesn’t matter how faithfully you transfer that absence into the visual aspect. 35%

Like Birdman, Victoria fails to convince us that the one-shot approach is anything more than a way to show off (the director likes to boast in interviews that, unlike Iñárritu, he didn’t use “invisible” digital editing and managed to get the whole film down on the third attempt with the actors after ten days of rehearsals). That said, it starts promisingly. Despite the seeming spontaneity, a clear plan and consideration for the viewer can be perceived behind the construction of the plot. All of the main characters are introduced to us during the lively prologue and we can easily remember them thanks to their nicknames. A clever safeguard against occasional slips of the tongue and hesitations is the fact that most of the characters don’t speak their native languages for a large part of the film, so they sometimes have to search for the right expression for a moment. On the roof, potential conflict is indicated by drawing attention to Boxer’s criminal past. In the café, the relationship between Victoria and Sonne is deepened through authentically intimate dialogue, legitimising the girl’s subsequent decision to join in the action to come. When the narrative begins to conform to familiar genre formulas, it loses steam and nearly all of its potential to somehow surprise us. One cliché follows another (the need to find a substitute accomplice, the engine failing to start, the gunshot wound not revealed until long after the impact), the absolute majority of scenes last longer than is necessary, the initially rather likable characters behave increasingly like idiots (which, from a certain moment should clearly be partially explained by the fact that they are under the influence of drugs), and the predictable ending is delayed by a number of unnecessary feints that in no way deepen the characters’ psychology or expand the film’s slight intellectual foundations. Despite the impressive technical execution (the cinematographer rightly gets priority over the director in the closing credits) and the skilful guidance of our attention by alternating between greater and lesser depth of focus, the film is not engaging enough to work as an example of intense “experiential” cinema, nor is it suitably rich in motifs or appropriately specific in the setting or characters (the protagonists barely have enough character traits for a two-and-a-half-hour film) to be taken as a statement about today’s multicultural Berlin or Generation Y. Victoria has bigger ambitions and a bigger budget, but in the end, it’s an admirable failure.

The anti-Interstellar. Nolan’s sci-fi opus was a space colonisation western about the search for an alternative to our devastated blue planet. By contrast the “coloniser” in the delightful The Martian has to be rescued from a wilderness that somewhat resembles Monument Valley and returned to Earth. The celebration of the human ability to make maximum use of available resources is only one level of the narrative, which in the film is better interwoven with the parallel organisation of the rescue mission than it was in the book. The cutting between events on Earth and on Mars starts earlier than in the novel and the two storylines are better synchronised. As a result, the film has more momentum and, unlike Mark, it never loses its breath. Despite the individualistic title, Matt Damon’s lonely face on the poster, and its reputation as the ultimate professional drama for geeks, The Martian is, in my opinion, a particularly successful example of a story with a collective hero. Even in the interconnected world of high-speed internet, enabling media coverage of events in other countries, on other continents and even on another planet, it works best on the principle of mutual cooperation and coordination. Each of the many characters enjoys their own moment of glory. Thanks to their gradual introduction to the scene and the clear establishment of professional and personal relationships between them (there are no characters in the film who fight solely for themselves), we have no problem remembering them. Not only people of different races, ages and genders, but also of different nationalities join forces. The Martian creates the illusion that the individual comes first in a massive organisation like NASA, as well as in a totalitarian country like China. The creation of sound bridges between scenes and the precise editing, when a question directly or indirectly asked on Earth is answered in the following shot from Mars, reinforce the cohesiveness of the narrative and the impression of a global village, where even a distance of tens of millions of kilometres is not insurmountable. The Martian is outstanding feel-good entertainment that may not restore your faith in humanity, but it’s highly probable that your faith in Ridley Scott’s skill as a director will have been restored by the time the end credits roll. 80%

Inherent Vice(2014) In a traditional detective narrative, the central mystery gradually becomes clear, the individual pieces of the puzzle fit together and the protagonist inches toward catching the perpetrator by uncovering and connecting new information. In Inherent Vice, a stoned noir flick for sober viewers, you will be more confused at the end than you were at the beginning. ___ Anderson continues in the mission of his mentor, Robert Altman, and further confronts America with its true face. As he did in Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood and The Master, he attempts to capture the mood and express the essence of a particular moment in American history. He uses the tail end of the flower-child era, saturated with conspiracy theories, to point out the interconnectedness of the individual parts of a system that is so complicated that it’s impossible to actually recognise or understand it. Inherent Vice is told accordingly. ___ The film is set in 1970, when the utopian ideals of the unbridled sixties are being displaced by paranoia, fear, greed and strict adherence to rules. It is the start of an age of cruel sobriety after coming down from the high of the previous decade. The sudden inhibition, fatigue and numbness is personified by private detective Doc Sportello. His blank expression, slack jaw and constant running into obstacles (literally and figuratively) illustrate a loss of contact with the changing world in which he doesn’t know what to do. Dialogue scenes are often constructed to make us unsure whether they are taking place in the same room as the people who are talking. The marijuana haze enveloping the whole film makes it impossible to distinguish between what is really happening and what is merely Doc’s hallucination. ___ There is often a lack of establishing shots and we see only the character who is speaking in semi-close-ups, never the one who is supposed to be listening. The incomplete picture of reality corresponds to Doc’s fragmented perception of reality and his inability to put facts into context. Partly due to the influence of light drugs, a lot of information escapes Doc and we similarly have limited access to knowledge due to the adherence to the protagonist’s perspective. The commentary, which is rather more of a mockery of genre conventions than a useful orientation aid, is not provided by the protagonist, but by a woman who describes what we are seeing without the cynical detached humor and fatalistic urgency of courageous noir narrators. ___ The chaos, disorder and unpredictability of the era, which is heading in an unknown direction, are reflected in several interconnected cases and the effort to solve them. In fact, each new clue leads to a dead end and only adds another layer of ambiguity (in the manner of the layering of shots with which the film begins). The investigation goes nowhere, as does the movement of the actually rather dynamic camera, which generally approaches the characters very slowly during the long dialogue scenes, hinting at a major revelation, which of course doesn’t happen at the end of any scene or of the film itself. Even more than in the genre classic The Big Sleep, in whose plot twists director Howard Hawks allegedly got lost, the plot is complicated to the point of opacity. But in this case, that is deliberate. ___ The goal is not to get from point A to point B, but to use the two and a half hours of wandering to capture the feeling that comes with loss of direction. The absence of a point is the point and Doc is another one of Anderson’s aimless protagonists trapped in a cycle of events that lead nowhere. The investigation does not serve primarily to obtain new evidence, but to portray America’s confusion as the country enters the 1970s. ___ Inherent Vice is an unfocused, dramatically aimless and, like its protagonist, slowed-down reminder of a time of fundamental social change and the end of an era (including, among other things, New Hollywood, to which Anderson often refers in his work). Despite the narrative nonchalance, stylistic unobtrusiveness (there is no gratuitous approximation of ’70s style) and the improvisational feel of many of its scenes, the film undeniable has solid directing and a creative concept that is far clearer than anything Doc learns on the basis of his pseudo-detective work. 75%

Chuck Norris vs. Communism is an excellent supplement to the recent documentaries about Cannon Films (Electric Boogaloo and The Go-Go Boys). It is apparent from the film that watching videotapes of the Golan-Globus duo’s trashy productions helped many Romanians survive the final years of the Ceausescu dictatorship. In and of themselves, the testimonies of people for whom watching Chuck Norris kicking the asses of treacherous Commies was a form of defiance are a piece of honest and useful oral-history work for further research. As would of course be confirmed by domestic witnesses of the rigid era of illicitly distributed VHS tapes in a country with strict censorship and practically no possibility to travel abroad, even the dumbest western film was a welcome escape into a world of luxury cars, unabashed eroticism, brutal violence and stores with shelves overflowing with goods. This level is reinforced and supplemented by both aptly chosen excerpts from films of various quality and genres and staged scenes from the Communist era. The dramatisation, which takes on the style of Romanian New Wave social dramas (the depressing nature of gloomy prefabricated apartment blocks, furtive camera movements, distanced shooting in units), serves to reveal how it could happen that officially banned films entered a country with closely guarded borders. The filmmakers focus on the story of a translator who synchronously dubbed the films into Romanian (and whose fetishized voice many associated with freedom and forbidden fruit), and on an entrepreneur who managed to supply the Romanian video (black) market for several years thanks to money, daring and connections. The smuggling story, which includes the rapid dubbing of Rocky quickie in a dark basement and a hint of a connection to the secret service, resembles a cheaper, though still very suspenseful variation on Graham Greene’s books and thanks to the slow doling out of information, it manages to hold the viewer’s attention for at least the entire first hour of the film, despite the slower pace of the narrative. In the last fifteen minutes, it becomes apparent that there probably wasn’t that much supporting material available and a sixty-minute runtime would have been sufficient. One can also criticise the film for its uncritical adoration of two pioneers of the Romanian video market (facts that would not fit the image of the courageous almost-dissidents are not conveyed) or for depicting the reality of life in a Romanian housing estate in excessively dark colours. In short, the chosen stylisation and the engaging nature of the story are occasionally given priority over the more serious work with substantiated information. However, this does not take anything away from either the mastery with which director Ilinca Calugareanu (who, having been born in 1981, may herself have watched JCVD’s scissor kicks with the fascinated gaze of a child) executes her fusion of documentary and dramatic techniques, or from the richness of the motifs that she succeeds in developing throughout the film: systemic and internal censorship, the economic backwardness of the Eastern Bloc, community life in the housing estates, the relativity of the art that we consider to be valuable. Above all, however, this is an irresistible celebration of the ability of films, even those in which Chuck Norris bites a giant rat, to transport us to another, more exciting and more satisfying reality. 80%

The filmmakers’ indecisiveness about which of the roughly six more significant characters would be the main protagonist probably stems in part from the fact that they relied on the memories of all of the survivors and their loved ones in an attempt at a comprehensive view of the tragedy instead of relying on a single source (Krakauer’s book, which had already been made into the television movie Into Thin Air: Death on Everest, would have served the purpose). No time or space remains for the more thorough development of the characters, who comprise merely a few types; usually the more interesting they are, the more charismatic the actor playing them (the cocky Texan, the easy-going American mountain guide, the responsible New Zealand mountain guide, the humble mailman who wants to fulfil his dream, the loving and caring women). Despite the faint outlining of the characters, the first hour of the film is important, as that is when, in addition to the dangers that await them, we are presented with the relationships between the characters and their ambitions and motivations. We thus better remember their names and later, despite the layer of frozen snow and the dark glasses on their faces, we can recognise who is shouting at whom. At the same time, the fatal decisions that some of the characters make (the bond between Rob and Doug) are more understandable and we are also better able to find our bearings in the individual sections of the journey to the summit, which are presented to us in advance. Whereas the formula of a disaster film is fulfilled by spreading attention among multiple characters, the disaster itself does not serve as punishment for the sins committed by the immoral characters. Atypically, perhaps out of respect for the victims, this is a drama about a group of good people who try to help other good people (The Martian will probably offer a similar story soon). There is no enemy to be defeated, nor is there a character who is supposed to see the light and undergo a transformation based on experience (if he had been a bit more inattentive toward his wife, Beck could have fulfilled this pattern of development). The will to survive is crucial. There is something similarly and likably old-world about the idea of “we have to help each other” as there is about the strictly linear narrative with no flashbacks and with a single (inappropriate) dream sequence. All of the information conveyed, which seems needless on the surface, is put to good use by Kormákur in the film’s second, extremely intense half with astonishing momentum (literally in places) and only a few sentimental moments (though the narrative is structured around them – see the storyline with the unborn child – so they are not superfluous). It serves no purpose to confront the protagonists with the question that will probably occur to every viewer who is not a mountain climber – why do they do it? After all, the rules of the game are not set by people in the second half, but by nature. In the spirit of the cinema of attractions (not intellectual), the aim is to provide an immediate visceral experience. In hindsight, I realise that’s not much. Immediately after the screening (IMAX 3D), however, with the subsiding feeling that I had just descended from the summit of the world’s tallest mountain, I found that I could not have wanted anything more. 75%

“We're independent!” This ode to filmmaking renegades (starting with Griffith) is lightened up with affectionate mockery of the auteur theory. The director earns his position without much effort, chance hands him masterful shots and all of his efforts to keep the impetuous crew under control go to waste. He is definitely not an absolute ruler who has the final form of the work being created in his hands. The corners of one’s mouth rise at the mere sight of him, because with his round glasses and straw hat, he is strikingly reminiscent of an enterprising young man named Harold Lloyd. Like the earlier What’s Up, Doc?, the situations in which he finds himself also reveal Bogdanovich’s weakness for slapstick. Falls, kicks and punches are borrowed from Chaplin, Frigo and the Three Stooges without being simple rip-offs. Besides the plot, the formalistic techniques (intertitles, iris fades) and the all-encompassing feeling of haste, with which the early days of cinema can be simplistically characterised, are borrowed from silent movies, particularly from slapstick. Unlike other, more intellectual homages to moving pictures, you don’t have to love film in order to enjoy the straightforward Nickelodeon. It is entirely enough to love it for itself. 80%

This big-budget, star-studded film was intended from the start to be a commercial hit with the purpose of bringing viewers back to French cinemas. The positive commercial and critical response confirmed for the final time Melville’s exclusive position as an auteur director who is also popular with viewers. In The Red Circle, he succeeded, in the most elegant possible way, in combining the comprehensibleness of a standard Hollywood narrative with European modernism that gives priority to the form and style of the content. ___ With the exception of indicators of impending danger in the form of red circles, the world of Melville’s protagonists is blue-grey and cold, devoid of needless objects and emotions, let alone passions. Women are merely an unpleasant reminder of the past or beautiful objects, creatures from another world. Family does not represent a relevant value. Priority is given to work and relationships based on loyalty and professionalism. The film revives the Western tradition by emphasising traditional values and male togetherness.___ Horses have been replaced by automobiles, the vast prairies of the Wild West in the post-Civil War period have been replaced by the streets of contemporary Paris. What has remained, however, is the reluctance to resolve situations with unnecessary words, the brevity of gestures, the moral adherence to principles and the unyieldingness of the adopted worldview. Though the heist takes up nearly thirty minutes of film’s runtime, the forming of bonds between the men is, in comparison with American films, more important than the subsequent execution of the deed. The saying about the other half is completely fulfilled here, as Corey could not have pulled off the heist on his own. Each of the men has a clearly defined role and task within the group. They know exactly what to do and where their place is. ___ Corey, Vogel and Jansen think through every move and every look in both the short and long term and never say anything more than is necessary. They proceed methodically step by step, they don’t act rashly and they don't make mistakes. The film’s directing is just as precise and economical. Melville expresses his solidarity with the idealised masculine protagonists by adopting their austere vocabulary. ___ Whereas the sleek, almost imperceptible transitions between compositionally similar shots do not disrupt the smooth flow of the narrative, the sharp cuts force constant caution. Where the mise-en-scène allows, Melville favours reframing or camera approaches over editing. The flawlessness of the technique is more important than the action itself and that is why the procedural shots, which only prepare us for what is to come, are so exciting. ___ Like Sergio Leone, who used much more operatic means of expression, Melville was a master at creating suspense from the fact that nothing happens and banal actions take an unnaturally long time. Instead of quickening the pace, he keeps us in anticipation by slowing it down. Precise directing is a way to bring an understanding of the characters, whose lives are also based on a minimum of sounds and on expressive, precisely calculated movements. Friendship, respect, responsibility. Image, sound, movement. Cinéma pur. 90%

This minimalist portrait of a single room draws attention to its own form and duration while blurring the distinctions between animate and inanimate objects. Chantal Akerman thus merges with her surroundings while lying in bed. The character’s sense of belonging to the environment around her is taken to the extreme in the director’s three-hour opus Jeanne Dielman. Like that film, La chambre benefits from the surprises brought about by the variation of regular rhythm and the disruption of a seemingly imperturbable order. The film’s biggest twist comes when the camera starts panning from left to right instead of tracing a circle. Thanks to the runtime, this is a tolerably long variation on Michael Snow’s La Région centrale, though it will be appreciated especially by lovers of parametric narration.