JFL

Though bullying and a shooting are the main motifs of The Dirties, the filmmakers did an excellent job of avoiding exploitation and formulaicness, instead basing their treatise on an ambiguous connection between reality and fiction. In this respect, the found-footage format is not merely a fashionable quirk, as it rather offers the first of the clues that are intended to draw viewers’ attention to the ambivalence of the world presented in the film. Fiction in the guise of a recording of reality gives us a look into the world of the main characters, who stylise reality into fiction not only by constantly referencing films and cliches, but also by playing a certain role in front of those around them. The massacre itself is thus disturbing in how it fits into the creation and manipulation of reality, when it actually becomes only the fulfilment of a script that has already been acted out numerous times in the minds of the bullied protagonists. In this respect, the film provides crucial insight into the minds of school shooters. Thanks to the fact that one of the characters incessantly ridicules the way murderers and psychopaths are presented and intentionally works with manipulating his own image by repeatedly contemplating appropriate costumes and subversively fulfilling the profile of murderers, the film demolishes those psychological formulas. Conversely, it even relativises the roles of victims and attackers when it shows the shooters as people incessantly exposed to bullying, who, in response to the everyday wrongs perpetrated against them, seek refuge in their own made-up “scripts”, where they stand up to their oppressors. The Dirties thus in fact flawlessly lays bare the hypocrisy of the media, various interest groups and the public when attempts are made to pin the blame for massacres on movies, video games and music. Is it really so difficult to understand that when someone is exposed to abuse day after day, against which they have no defence or support, that person will start to be so consumed with thoughts of violent retribution that they will eventually make those thoughts a reality? The Dirties is thus a similarly crucial contribution to the discussion on bullying and mass shootings as Marilyn Manson’s chillingly articulate answer when Michael Moore asked him what he would have said to the Columbine shooters if he’d had an opportunity to speak with them: “I wouldn’t say a single word to them. I would listen to what they have to say, and that’s what no one did.”

Every sentence is a story. This brilliant official slogan precisely captures what gives this essentially melodramatic series set in a women’s prison its power. The narrative about a young woman from the upper-middle class who gets sentenced to more than a year in prison in a minimum-security prison because of a past transgression is only a taking-off point for a variety of captivating life stories and the personalities of other prisoners. The series brilliantly weaves together several narrative strands starting with a classic “fish out of the water” story in which the ordinary protagonist, whose successful little life had previously revolved around picking out organic foods and making luxury soap, is sent to prison, where she is absolutely out of her element and helpless. In addition to this, we are presented with the world of the prison and its internal rules and dynamics, as well as the relationships between the prisoners, including romantic relationships. By themselves, these storylines would be enough to hold viewers’ attention across episodes, but when all of them are combined into a single unit, such as in the famous screwdriver episode, Orange Is the New Black is capable of bringing viewers to their knees. In addition to the excellent screenplays and autobiographical source material, it is of course necessary to highlight the cast. The very fact that we have a series in which women are not portrayed according to the usual stereotypes and comprise the overwhelming majority of the characters, whereas men are relegated to supporting roles, would be reason enough to praise the series. However, what we get here is an ensemble of great actresses of the broadest range of ethnicities and physical types, all of whom equally get from the screenwriters an opportunity to portray fascinating, multi-layered characters. Orange Is the New Black is a great, sometimes funny and sometimes tremendously emotional melodrama  that avoids formulas and clichés while showing the world of a women’s prison, the individual characters and lesbian, heterosexual and non-sexual relationships with maximum openness, empathy and complexity.

Lars von Trier is the art-house equivalent of the celebrated trickster William Castle, whose films were always only a fraction of the overall experience without the additional attractions and means of promotion prepared by the master. Von Trier has elevated the contemporary trend of massaging the media long before a film is released to a concept in and of itself, and has raised marketing and PR to the level of art. He took those originally utilitarian tools and made them part of the overall work, where the film is not the objective, but rather the culmination of a single grand performance – in this case, it is a culmination that has been greatly delayed, as Nymph()maniac is divided into two parts and released with a title informing viewers that they will see only the censored and abridged version of the fabled director’s cut. Von Trier and his collaborators are simply masters of packaging and promotion (which is brilliantly evident in the trailer for the second part, which first appears in the closing credits of Volume I and raises grand promises, which of course remain unfulfilled).  At the core of von Trier’s work like ambivalence between the cult of the auteur that he has built around himself over the years, as well as the highlighting of the manipulativeness and falsity of art and artists. The director’s latest piece looks like a frank treatise on human sexuality, which clearly is supposed to go against the grain of bourgeois notions of normalcy, but at the same time, it comes across merely as a calculated act, a way to profit magnificently from the age-old adage “sex sells” in today’s ridiculously strait-laced world. Nymph()maniac itself is surprising as a film hypertext, simply a sort of nymphomaniac.wiki, that doesn’t give viewers only text to analyse and interpret, but directly gives them all interpretations and references with citations. The lofty phrase that there is nothing to add to a film because it already has everything is absolutely entirely true this time.  It’s as if the aim was to make a film about which there is nothing more to say than the primitive “I liked it/I didn’t like it" (if you don’t want to quote what was said in the film or draw attention to the obvious). So, let’s say that Nymph()maniac is mostly entertaining (particularly in its minor details, such as the brilliant birth sequence), but it’s more often rather overly clever, as it constantly refers to and adores its own narrative. The fourth wall doesn’t get broken here, but is actually set up behind the viewers (just as in the case of browsing the internet, especially social media, where perceptions from individual links and threads immediately disappear in the next text). As a result, the film’s main positive aspect remains the fact that, even though sex has the role of a commodity and an attraction in the project and in the promotion of Nymph()maniac, the narrative doesn’t approach sexuality in an exploitative way, but rather with fondness and empathy, particularly with respect to its potentially more shocking forms presented in the second part. Generally speaking, however, it is absurd, albeit apt, that the labels “provocateur” and “enfant terrible” have been assigned to a filmmaker who, at least in his last two films, hasn’t done anything but simply show themes such as sex, family and relationships in a more sincere, or more cynical, form in comparison with the sentimentality of mainstream and festival midcult films.

After seeing Miike’s new film, one could almost say that the situation with Japanese cinema looks very good. After all, we would be hard pressed to find anywhere else the equivalent of a star-studded, big-budget blockbuster in which the main attraction isn’t action and plot twists, but rather ethical issues that get under the skin of viewers. Furthermore, the film ranked among the year’s fifteen top-grossing domestic films. But on closer inspection, it becomes apparent that everything is unfortunately still how it was before. The Japanese film industry suffered for years from a lack of original ideas, for which producers are not willing to provide funding. Unfortunately, this is true not only of the mainstream, but also for the indie segment, from which fittingly no new talent has emerged for a number of years. The only certainty remains a handful of still active directors from the ranks of filmmakers who gained international renown at the turn of the millennium. One of the unfortunately diminishing group of such veterans is Miike, who has smoothly transitioned from the area of indie productions and video genre flicks to the mainstream over the past decade. Despite the certain categorisation of his work in the area of shonen films, here he is nevertheless continuing with the trend of using each new film to expand his portfolio with a previously untried genre. Shield of Straw again demonstrates the universal nature and precision craftsmanship of its director, who for the first time has dived into the waters of spectacular modern thrillers with a number of crowd and exterior sequences. In accordance with the rule that Miike always manages to precisely grasp a screenplay written by someone else so that he gets the maximum out of it, this time he leaves aside any humour and instead focuses on the gradual build-up of the premise. As previously mentioned, the action here does not in any way serve as an attraction, but as an expressive catalyst of the initial situation and the relationships between the characters. The regular repetition of the same questions of morality is not an error; rather, it is intentional, as attention is returned to the core of the narrative after every dramatic event and new revelation. Thus we have the age-old clash of order and chaos,  elaborated as a conflict between adherence to social rules and evil in opposition to traditional values. Unlike in The Dark Knight, which leave it up to a comic-book hero to settle the same conflict on behalf of humanity, in Shield of Straw everything rests on the shoulders of five cops with different personalities, who have the task of transporting to court a brutal murderer and paedophile, on whose head a victim’s grandfather has placed a bounty of one billion yen.  Though the narrative touches on the financial crisis and the indebtedness of society, the main focus is on the uncomfortable questions of whether and at what cost society’s system of rules can stand up against absolute evil, which the film provocatively leaves unanswered. Though most of the film’s positives are derived from the Kazuhiro Kiuchi’s book on which the film is based, under Miike’s direction the original source work nevertheless receives a more than respectable rendering that superbly escalates its urgency and makes an unsettling impression despite its commercial targeting.

The most celebrated film by Radley Metzger, a leading American porn director, is a humorous pornographic variation on Pygmalion that transports viewers into a world entirely devoted to sex. Sexologist Seymour Love bets that he can turn the third-rate prostitute Misty Beethoven into a mistress of pleasure who, furthermore, will be declared a sex star among the debauched upper crust. Misty’s thorough training, which is approached in the spirit of sports movies like Rocky  with clearly assigned goals and their gradual achievement, gets an appropriate context in the wider world, where sex-focused tabloid newspapers are published and sexual airlines take to the air. Paradoxically, however, the overabundance of sex, conceived as a purely everyday, performance-oriented and quantifiable activity, leads to the fact that, even though not a minute passes without penetration or stimulation of genitals, everything actually comes across as absolutely unstimulating. On the other hand, we can assume that this was the director’s intention, which is evidenced by the choice of formalistic treatment, when sex is often shown in almost anti-erotic clinical macro-details. However, we find support for this theory mainly in the film’s narrative, which gradually reaches the conclusion that striving for absolute perfection in sex causes it to be devoid of pleasure and emotion. Under Dr. Love’s guidance, Misty is absolutely transformed into an object finely tuned to deliver the best performance. In the climax, however, she rejects this, takes the initiative and ultimately returns pleasure to her instructor. Just as Pygmalion essentially ridiculed the British class system and turned its humorous premise into a treatise on a woman’s independence, Metzger’s film also upends its own concept of narrative porn and becomes a biting commentary on the age of sexual independence and the pornography boom as a social phenomenon, when individual films used all possible means to compete for the audience’s attention. Whereas The Opening of Misty Beethoven takes viewers to a number of the world’s great cities and, through opulent exteriors and studio locations, shows that even though gilding and technical parameters are nice, feelings will always be the most essential ingredient of sex.

Whereas other porn flicks with a creative concept generally have a single idea that sets them apart or a better-than-average formalistic approach, The Kinky Ladies of Bourbon Street stands out due to the fact that, beyond the framework of the original premise and the progressive and feminist impression that it makes, each of its sequences has its own additional detail, idea or exceptional formalistic rendering. The film can be described as a feminist sexual paraphrase of Ferreri’s The Big Feast. Instead of male-oriented satire of consumerism, viewers get an absurdist film about a group of women who, out of frustration over the chauvinistic world, decide to commit joint suicide by means of sex, where they free themselves from their role as objects of male lust and actively make way for their own pleasure. The retrospective narrative first presents individuals and their ridiculous dismal experiences, which lead them to conventional suicide attempts. Based on this, they are addressed by the mysterious Maude, who challenges them to resist clichés instead of taking the embarrassing conventional ways out of this world, reverse the traditional roles and, together with her, set out on a pleasurable journey to their desired demise. And thus after sharing several moments of pleasure, each of them dies one by one in grotesque circumstances before the film reaches its bitingly funny climax. Each of the numerous sex sequences is shot completely differently – from unrestrained camerawork and humorous close-ups during the sexual encounter between the flight attendant Charlene and Idi Amin (!) to the impressively filmed death of Alice. These sequences are never conceived merely as conventional penetration, but are rather extraordinary due to the imaginatively rendered situations and certain details in the staging. The surreal interior of Maude’s home is a chapter in itself, as it looks like colourful paintings by the Czech surrealist Eva Švankmajerová, if those paintings had been composed entirely of the shapes of penises and vulvas. The Kinky Ladies of Bourbon Street is simply an absolute highlight among porn films on a global scale. On the basis of a screenplay by Claude Mulot, a leading creator of the Golden Age of French porn who was behind imaginatively original works such as Le sexe qui parle and Shocking!, director Didier Philippe-Gérard made a film that not only surprises with its creativity, inventiveness and filmmaking quality, but also parodies chauvanism and highlights female sexuality, on which the provocative narrative is built, while remaining entertaining and sexy throughout.

Your mind is the scene of the adventure: http://youtu.be/5awc2j65UWU ____ This milestone of modern pop culture, which redefined more than just the field of animated television shows, ended last year with a spectacular finale. But the concluding whirlwind of emotions and visual creativity also reminded us that, at its core, this was not the phantasmagorical trip that a lot people mistakenly considered the series to be, but simply the story of a boy who wants to be a hero. But this world of sugar kingdoms, magical dogs, mystical wizards banished from Mars and characters whose tragedy consists in the fact that they have forgotten their past or, conversely, that they remember it, is just as complex and ambiguous as our reality. Finn’s journey through nearly three hundred episodes to come to the understanding that heroes are not what we see in trashy fantasies, but instead are those who are able to resolve conflicts within themselves and others, even if that’s damned difficult, helped the several generations that grew up with him to find their bearings in their own complicated worlds.

15.12.2013 Who would have expected that an early 1980s American porn flick by a director of Czech origin and with a French starlet in the lead role would turn out to be a film that can boldly measure up to today’s pornography for women, including movies by feminist filmmakers? The captivating Julia Perrin plays a French au pair who passes through several American households in the film’s episodic narrative. Unlike many porn videos today, however, the premise of the au pair in Love Dreams doesn’t take the form of a typical male fantasy about an easy young object of lust or a passionate plaything in the marital bed. On the contrary, the film is conceived as an imaginative odyssey of a somewhat timid girl, during which viewers are presented with various forms of sex as both a means of pleasure and a part of relationships. On the one hand, the narrative satirises and caricatures traditional relationships and, on the other hand, elevates sexual freedom and celebrates sex as a source of pleasure and an expression of feelings. The film does not use women as mere masturbatory objects, but rather shows them as active characters who set the course and mood of sexual activities. Like contemporary progressive porn films, Love Dreams doesn’t rely on close-ups of penetration and a certain kind of performance, but instead gives priority to erotic tension, pleasure, enjoyment and the dynamic between the characters during sex. This is reflected in the fact the action is captured predominantly in broader and longer shots. The film also emphasises the women’s orgasms and contains a minimum of cumshots, which are used not as a way for the men to mark their territory, but in connection with the women’s passion. The film’s highlights are the first sex scene set in a secluded home of a wealthy family, where the wife, played by Bonnie Holiday, enjoys herself with her lover, and the climax, in which the protagonist’s dream man introduces her to the full experience of pleasure.

Shangri-La provides further proof that the perception of Miike as a director who delights in perversity and violence was extremely limited even at the time of his greatest fame. Miike is simply a creative director who can imaginatively bring any screenplay to life (he has only ever written one screenplay himself, when the screenwriter got sick; otherwise he has made films based on other people’s screenplays and ideas). In Shangri-La, he has thus created a social comedy that subtly celebrates the solidarity of ordinary people against the all-consuming power and heartlessness of the capitalist system. The tale of a wise and resourceful leader of a homeless community who, together with a writer whose inspiration has abandoned him, saves a small businessman from insolvency can make an almost classical impression. After all, the film’s playful depiction of a group of people from the fringes of society resembles Kurosawa’s Dode's-Ka Den, but we will also find here allusions to the iconic compositions of people on the banks of the river in Yasujiro Ozu’s films. We can find Miike’s creative signature in the film in the overall exaggeration and levity, which is apparent primarily in the various satirical moments. In addition to that, the film features actors who frequently collaborate with Miike, particularly Sho Aikawa, a famous portrayer of tough cops and yakuza gangsters from B-movies, who plays the atypical comedic role of the protagonist. The shooting of scenes on busy streets without in any way hindering the movements of passers-by is another typical trait of the film.

In the category of action video trash, David A. Prior’s top films, among which Night Wars is a standout, are the equivalent of Steven Spielberg’s films for children. Like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Hook, Prior’s movies have the power to transport us adult viewers back to childhood. Whereas we had to grow up and accept the ambiguity and unsettling incomprehensibility of reality, Prior is still running around with a cap gun in the woods behind his house, where with rose-tinted glasses made up of the aesthetics of eighties action B-movies and guided by juvenile logic, he conducts one heroic battle after another. As the Peter Pan of trash, he calls on us to set aside our everyday glumness in which we are mired by today’s “realistic” and “sophisticated” action blockbusters and to return with him to a world which he will straight-up tell us is “a dream. anything can happen”. With Night Wars, he again lays out before us an absurd idea of war corresponding to the perspective of a twelve-year-old boy who thinks black-and-white adventures are now too naïve for him, but whose idea of seriousness and bleakness comes from mainstream comic books and simple-minded war movies. Of course, the film also contains action choreography and dramaturgy that bring to mind boys playing at soldiers, when the enemy’s cannon fodder never hits anything, the best cover in a firefight is a thin tree and the heroes run through the pandemonium of war without helmets (though it must be noted that their eighties manes are certainly more durable than a bit of sheet metal). However, everything that people associate with Prior based on his most famous film, Deadly Prey, is present here only as a substrate for an utterly breathtaking narrative that we can describe as a delirious mix of Platoon (1986), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Jacob’s Ladder (1990), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Inception (2010) and the films of Satoshi Kon, the vast majority of which came out after Night Wars, as can be seen from the years of production. The master’s forward thinking is further confirmed by such eccentricities as a long shot of veterans contemplating the stigma of war on the shore of a lake conceived as a composition in the mould of Yasujiro Ozu and a reference to his own work that was relatively innovative for its time (the protagonist has a poster from one of Prior’s earlier films in his home). After all, the film’s concept indicates that Prior should not be underestimated as a mere action journeyman without a distinctive vision: the nightmares of two Vietnam veterans begin to seep into reality, so they have to venture into their dreams in order to win the war and save a friend who was captured in Vietnam. The numerous details connected with the intertwining of reality and dreams and the transition from reality to dream are paralysing with their inventiveness, as is the bizarre absurdity of the absolutely serious concept. The sequence involving the protagonist’s first journey into his dreams under the watchful eye of his fellow veteran is utterly phenomenal, as it actually breaks the fourth wall of fiction and, like present-day blockbusters, shows us its ideal viewer for a moment and becomes both a guide and a blessing for the desired viewer reaction. The film’s richness of interpretation is confirmed by the fact that the “Vietnamese” are played by guys in blue uniforms that look like pyjamas. Everything is capped off with a brilliant climax in which Mr. Prior – unlike his mentor Winsor McCay – doesn’t merely leave us looking astonished like Little Nemo falling off the bed after a grand dreamlike adventure. No, like a true Peter Pan, he staves of the nightmares and again lays before us an enchanted place in the forest where his lost boys with cap guns can still go out and play.