JFL

This video, which takes the inherently absurd classic cliché of music videos, where no one can resist the rhythm of the given song, to the grandiose maximum. The diversity of the two Daniels’ creativity in all its joyful franticness and random genius.

The two scenes that I consider essential for appreciating Raiders of the Lost Ark (though there are a number of others) are the sequences with the airplane and the submarine. The former is a masterclass in constructing action in space and narrative in the sense of layering information and details that will then be utilised for dramatic effect and causal scene development. In addition, this sequence also demonstrates Harrison Ford’s strengths as an actor, or rather how he is able to sell his charisma while concurrently enhancing the comic essence of the scene with his facial expressions and body language. I find the submarine sequence essential for understanding the entire Indiana Jones franchise and its self-conscious work with trash. It divides viewers into two camps. One will nonsensically debate how Indy could have gotten to the island with the submarine. The other camp will enjoy the genius of the editing ellipsis consisting in the fact that it doesn’t answer the question at all, because it simply doesn’t have to. Then, after a few episodes, the first group of viewers will disparage the refrigerator scene and the presence of aliens (even if they’re not bothered by the Biblical supernaturalism of the first and third instalments), while the opposite camp will appreciate them as further manifestations of how the filmmakers honour the saga’s roots in trashy film franchises and their straightforward logic and low-brow elements.

In the context of all of the names in front of and behind the camera (from producer Scorsese and classic film music composer Elmer Bernstein to the excellent cinematographer Robby Müller), Mad Dog and Glory peculiarly almost arouses anger due to how much potential is squandered and how it just doesn’t work as a whole. Director John McNaughton, a one-hit wonder who made his name with the disturbing Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, either absolutely fails to keep the project under control or tries to enhance the mediocre script with ambiguity, which falls flat because it’s completely nullified in the climax. The whole project is based on two desperately non-conceptual ideas. The first is a premise based on a would-be ingenious paraphrase of the expression “no guts, no glory”, where the last word is capitalised as Glory in reference to the title character. The film’s second joke is supposed to consist in the fact that De Niro and Murray are seemingly playing against their classic types. In the case of both actors, however, their parts are merely a very half-hearted warm-up for their fundamentally more well-developed roles in Jackie Brown and Groundhog Day, respectively. The film’s stumbling block consists in the fact that its characters only appear to be atypical thanks to surprisingly good dialogue in places, but they behave in a completely formulaic way. The narrative is deceptive in that it gives significant space to the characters and their frustrations, insecurities and life compromises, to the point that viewers may begin to think that the film will develop as a multi-layered drama that isn’t afraid to show atypical protagonists depicted outside of the traditional mould of masculinity. Despite all of this potential, however, the narrative that promisingly started out atypically then settles into the most traditional possible ruts. From a treatise on the fragile and usually concealed aspects of masculinity, the whole thing ultimately turns into a shameless “manic pixie dream girl” fable built, furthermore, on the moronic indoctrination formula by which a man can keep a woman if he punches someone in the mouth. ____ In many respects, Mad Dog and Glory is surprisingly the exact antithesis of Park Chan-wook's Oldboy, a brilliant deconstruction of self-admiring toxic masculinity. Both films deal with the strange interplay and complicatedly developing relationship between two men, where an essential role is played by a woman placed at the main protagonist’s side. They also contain images of often abrupt violence and fights filled with pain and exhaustion, and are set against the backdrop of the dark side of big cities with strange businesses and services for gangsters. Whereas Oldboy leads the audience from initial sympathy for the protagonist to a tremendously tragic climax and the realisation that he was actually the bad guy all along, Mad Dog and Glory merely presents any atypical and more complex aspects of masculinity as oddities and weaknesses that only limit the traditional virtuously heroic masculinity inherent in every man, which no woman can resist. ____ Mad Dog and Glory could be partially forgiven if, in accordance with the psychotherapy and anger management often mentioned in the film, we allowed for the possibility that it is the origin story to Analyze This.

Jarmusch studied poetry and a significant number of his films in some way thematise poets or their works, but Ghost Dog is his most poetic film. The director and screenwriter lets his cinematic poem sail on a flow created by remixing and combining entirely disparate genres and cultural traditions, as well as the present and history. Together with his previous Dead Man, Ghost Dog marked a fundamental transformation in Jarmusch’s work that corresponded with the time of its creation. Out of the post-Cold War enchantment with the ideal of freedom enabling people and cultures to come together, which was typical of his previous work, in both of these films he presents us with a vision of a then nascent and now fully formed world where the most bizarre cultural and historical traditions mix and enrich each other as if in a melting pot. Characteristically for Jarmusch, however, in this brave new world he highlights history and its artefacts and relics, admiring the antique patina that radiates melancholy while also coming across as bizarre or ridiculous in the modern world. As such, he approaches not only genres and traditions, but also characters, or rather people generally, with junk-shop love for all things old and a hipster’s enthusiasm for setting them in a new time and context. Just as he puts gangster flicks, samurai movies and animated slapstick into a mutually reflective and harmonious dialogue, he shows us how the mix of such contradictory influences and inspirations shapes us. Jarmusch’s poeticism and warmth are definitively manifested in the fact that he reveals the paradoxical harmony in opposites and shows us that behind all of the Babylonian chaos of different individualities and tribes, which seems impenetrable at first fleeting glance, there remains a common core of humanity that transcends the boundaries of race and language. Culture, or rather the sharing of stories, characteristically remains the bonding agent. Because those stories resonate with us, they allow us to mature and broaden our horizons, but they also connect us with others, either by enabling us to find a common language or by passing them on. The shared library of characters in Ghost Dog contains the whole spectrum, from canonical classics to rousing pamphlets to superficially likable trash, but mainly also types that few people know but that have played or will play an absolutely essential role in shaping particular people. And that is exactly what Ghost Dog itself has become and it was wonderful to see this timeless gem again after many years (again at Aero) and, in the spirit of the film, to hear how much it was liked after the screening.

On the one hand, film festivals have the power to shine a light on certain films and to kick-start the hype around them, as happened this year with Triangle of Sadness in Karlovy Vary. Unfortunately, however, they can also completely cut other films off at the knees by creating entirely inadequate conditions for them or by raising false expectations. That is the case with the little sci-fi flick Rubikon, which simply should not have been exposed to viewers caught up in the traditional fear of missing something important that everyone will be talking about later. It’s true that the film’s main strengths consist in the fact that it is a low-budget debut by Austrian filmmakers with a tiny international acting ensemble (which includes the charismatic character actor Mark Ivanir, who is known mainly to viewers of the action series Undisputed). But even outside of that context, their work is still a solid (not ground-breaking or innovative or captivating) contribution to its genre that fulfils the basic prerequisite of any good work of science fiction, which consists not in suspense or entertainment, but in presenting viewers or readers with something that makes them think beyond the framework of their everyday reality – in this case, specifically about the subject of humans in space and their ties to humanity on a dying planet.

At first glance, it may seem that Shinji Sōmai’s third feature-length project was merely an attempt to repeat the enormous box-office success of Sailor Suit and Machine Gun. Produced by the same company, Kitty Films (though without the participation of Kadokawa Pictures), it was another vehicle for a new bunch of neophyte actors led by another idol, the teenage Michiko Kawai. However, a closer comparison with the previous hit reveals not only Sōmai’s versatility, but primarily the distinctiveness of the most broadminded and creatively bold work of the director’s filmography. P.P. Rider also has a coming-of-age narrative that sets the worlds of schoolchildren and adult gangsters against each other. Whereas Sōmai’s second film, in line with the story of growing up to soon, focused on the repression and indirect expression of emotions, P.P. Rider represents an eruption of childlike playfulness, boisterousness and anarchy, which spills over from the characters themselves into the formalistic construction of the individual scenes. The director pushes the boundaries of the expressiveness of the medium of film, freeing it from nonsense such as traditional style and the suggestion of reality, and instead stages a children’s adventure road movie conceived as a Dadaistically absurd celebration of broadmindedness. This is also reflected in the central motif of identity and its unrestrained fluidity in childhood and, conversely, the binding concepts and pigeonholes of adulthood. The motif of adolescence and the attempts to put it off despite its inevitability is presented through, among other things, the character of an androgynous girl who has people call her Bruce and the scenes in which various characters ask her about her gender, as well as through an excellent, quietly tense sequence at the beach in the morning, when she runs into the sea to hide her period. However, the central trio, on what may very well be their last summer vacation trip together, still has the possibility to put away the roles assigned to them by their school peers and the soul-crushing predetermination of adulthood, which is expressed in a brilliant twist, when they exchange clothes and thus swap identities (but also complicate viewers’ orientation in bigger shots). In addition to that, P.P. Rider deals with violence in both the worlds of children and gangsters. In both cases, the film proceeds from social roles and their hopelessness, though the consequences are fundamentally different. Again, it is summer vacation, a time of freedom, that nullifies the existing roles and spurs the protagonist on in their quest to avenge the wrongs perpetrated in the schoolyard. In a certain respect, P.P. Rider is a highwater mark in Sōmai’s filmography, but it is also a beautifully bizarre anomaly. This magnificently formalistic and joyously anarchic work was also Sōmai’s only collaboration with the masterful cinematographer Masaki Tamura and his only film based on an original screenplay, which was the joint work of Takuji Nishioka and the married couple Leonard and Chieko Schrader.

Like, for example, Yasujiro Ozu’s films, one of the pleasures of Shinji Sōmai’s work is seeing how he reuses his characteristic formalistic techniques in every new film, but in a unique way. This refers not only to the long and complicated shots, but also to the subjective sound, scenes in the rain and the expressive stylisation of the entire mise-en-scène. However, Sōmai’s films provide not only the cinephilic joy of the creative handling of formalistic challenges that the filmmaker set for himself, but also a powerfully emotional viewing experience. Sōmai’s signature style was never an end in itself, but served as a means of distilling the effect from particular scenes and from the narrative as a whole. This is illustratively manifested in The Catch, which takes place in the setting of hardened fishermen hunting tuna on the open ocean. The serious drama is seemingly a complete departure for the Shochiku studio after Sōmai’s three previous coming-of-age idol movies. However, the difference in genre is offset by the consistency of the director’s signature style, which proves to be functionally universal for telling any story. Sōmai’s court screenwriter, Yôzô Tanaka, pulled from Akira Yoshimura’s novel the story of the youthful love between a daughter from a fishing family and a young man who, because of her, leaves his life in the city to become a fisherman. But the narrative focuses more on the brutish father of the fiancée and later bride, while gradually revealing fragments of his past foreshadowing the conflicts in the young couple’s relationship. The tragedy of the characters arises from the rarely verbalised but constantly felt existential distress that leads the men condemned to the role of providers to the usual obstinate macho paradox. They become so consumed with sacrificing themselves in the interest of their families, or rather in the associated messianic self-absorption and fear of not fulfilling their role, that they become toxic to their loved ones. In this case, this is compounded by the fact that fishermen’s livelihoods are physically demanding, hazardous to their health and extremely unpredictable with respect to their income. Sōmai brings all of these aspects of the central characters and their cohabitation and conflicts to the screen with almost depressing intensity. His long one-shot scenes lend the story a harsh naturalism, as they emphasise both the bleak setting of the fishing villages and, primarily, the toilsome nature of fishing in all its physical difficulty. With his stark and maximally effective conception of de facto manual fishing for huge tuna (with the aid of steel lines, hooks and ropes), he created sequences that, through their intensity, surpass even the wildest imaginings brought to readers’ minds by Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. And yet these are far from the most impressive and emotionally charged parts of the film. As the former wife of the central, tenacious protagonist, fantastically portrayed by Ken Ogata, notes, relationships are merely the equivalent of tuna fishing for him. The passage involving their reunion years later in a rainy, seaside backwater town indelibly burns itself into the viewer’s memory with its imaginative execution and massive range on the emotional wavelength.

White Magic can appear to be both Bogner’s most banal feature-length project and his most genuine and flawless. Like his predecessor, Arnold Fanck, a pioneer of the mountain-film genre, Willy Bogner says he was driven to make the film by his ambition to express what so much fascinated him about skiing, which was something he had never been able to put into words. Therefore, the film’s totally bland narrative is simply a pretence for stringing together a series of breathtaking and aesthetically captivating scenes and music videos that comprise an ode to the beauty of natural winter scenery and adrenaline sports, mostly involving skis and snowboards. Strictly in terms of aesthetic qualities, the bar is set by one of the first sequences of night skiing with flares. In terms of the symbiosis of all of the aspects that are typical of Bogner, however, the highlight of the film remains the sequence beginning with rappelling down a mountain peak (yes, of course, with skis), continuing through a descent on lava rubble and ice massifs and ending with water skiing among icebergs. Though Bogner can’t refrain from his beloved slapstick humour, he limits it to a few sequences, unlike in his previous films, or incorporates it into such spectacular adrenaline-fuelled stunts that it is drown out by the sheer amazement provided by the physical feats on display. A memorable sequence in this respect is the one of parachuting onto a hot-air balloon as an image of the heroine being chased by her persistent young lover. Bogner combines the best of Michael Bay and Jackie Chan. What he has in common with Bay is his pursuit of aesthetically flawless and maximally impressive composition of every single shot, but also the fact that he himself was behind the camera on all his of films, even skiing with it, backwards on a bobsled track. What he shares with Chan is a love for early slapstick and the ambition to come up with more spectacular and challenging physical stunts with each successive project. But even the most outlandish films by those two cannot measure up to Bogner’s screenwriting guilelessness. White Magic frames individual outdoor sequences as memories, dreams, fantasies and playful thoughts of the female protagonist and her fellow passenger on the train to the mountains. By traditional standards, that is the height of sloppiness and absurdity, but by the optics of the avant-garde, it is a display of pure genius in the interest of the overall impressionistic work. At any rate, you simply won’t see anything like it anywhere else.

With their indie work, director Claudia Weill and screenwriter Vicki Polon blazed a trail for the subsequent generation of filmmakers. They made their feature debut in primitive conditions with the enthusiasm and hard work of everyone involved at a time when the American film industry was, at least in the context of the studios, the domain of men, as well of stars and big stories. By contrast, Girlfriends was made entirely independently and presents a casually informal, immediately candid and bittersweetly funny portrait of women, their friendships and relationships in a style that had never been seen before. Weill and Polon convey their theme through the character of a young woman in her twenties who lives with her friend in New York, where she is trying to become a professional photographer. As she stumbles indecisively through her professional and adult life, she half-involuntarily achieves inner maturity through the way her network of relationships is transformed under the influence of professional, friendship and relationship peripetias. If this is conspicuously reminiscent of the premise of several decades of more recent festival and television hits, that is no coincidence, because their creators drew inspiration from it (e.g. Lena Dunham) or shamelessly copied it (e.g Noah Baumbach). But Girlfriends differs from its modern neurotic and chaotically abstracted successors in its mesmerising civility and immediate intimacy, which are derived from the director’s documentarian roots. With its subtly progressive approach to storytelling, the elliptical narrative highlights minor moments in everyday lives, where personality traits and tangled lines of relationships come shining through. Gestures, details of the setting and, mainly, the movement of the characters themselves in authentic locations take on greater importance. Thanks to that, even many decades after it was made, Girlfriends remains not only a great time capsule of New York in the late 1970s, but mainly an absorbing and honest look at interpersonal relationships and the still complicated process of growing up at an age when we tell ourselves that we are already adults, after all.

Unfortunately seen after the sequel, which is not only harder in line with its title, but also far more sophisticated and more daring in every aspect. Compared to it, the first Party Harder looks like a proof of concept video with which an aspiring filmmaker secured the resources for a professional production. Which is an exact representation of reality. Party Hard deservedly became an underground phenomenon, but Pohl showed what he was really capable of when we was later given the necessary resources. What’s actually surprising about the first film is that the  gags for adults work best, while the main adolescent storyline stumbles and only tries in vain to keep up. Pohl actually inverts the wisdom of Cosy Dens here to “Fucking is for old people. Kids will drink”, while also dispelling the inaccurate American Pie myth that the wildest acts of depravity are perpetrated by horny teenagers.