JFL

“Calling all guards, be on the lookout for trespassing ninjas!” It’s one thing that the independent B-movie production company E.O. Studios, which focused on cheap action flicks for drive-ins and the foreign video market, created a deliberately exaggerated paraphrase of Bond movies as its most ambitious production, but Jesus, did it turn out to be the ultimate 1980s action trash flick in which absolutely everything is naïvely over the top and played with a straight face. The hell with James Bond and Ethan Hunt and the rest, because none of them can measure up to Duncan Jax, who is not only a secret super-agent, but also a ninja! And he has a kung fu baboon! Of course, he also has his own M in the form of a prim major-domo and his own Q, who is an easy-going Asian smartass who keeps the protagonist on guard, much like Cato from The Pink Panther did for Inspector Clouseau. Needless to say, women fall into the hero’s arms, but he always finds time for teambuilding with his female comrades-in-arms in the hot tub. In Unmasking the Idol, the first of unfortunately only two films featuring Duncan Jax (the other being The Order of the Black Eagle), he and his army of black ninjas, with the substantial assistance of a baboon, must overcome an army of red ninjas on a remote island who serve the most evil villain of all time. How else to describe a masked villain whose exposition consists in throwing a couple of disabled pensioners shipwrecked on his island to the piranhas? And he has two henchmen with costumes straight out of Flash Gordon. There’s also a pile of gold and a submarine manned by a German with gold teeth. But the whole second half of the film is mainly composed of a fights, shootouts, explosions, helicopter rescues, an amphibious invasion and, finally, a spectacle involving hot air balloons. On top of all that, most of the action sequences are based on visibly physical and contact attractions, with masked stuntmen and athletes giving absolutely as much of themselves as the low budget would allow. I consider it a tremendous shame and a historical injustice that this franchise is not better known (which is due to the way the studio approached distribution in the interest of remaining independent), because the attractions here easily overshadow anything with Norris, Seagal and other overrated action heroes of the ’80s. And, in the mould of Arnold’s best movies, Unmasking the Idol doesn’t take itself seriously at all, conversely making fun of the whole genre.

Garbage pile fire: the movie. The Garbage Pail Kids Movie is a typical phenomenon of film production that was possible only in the 1980s – a film adaptation of collectible cards, which originated as a parody of popular dolls, with straightforwardly humorous and mostly disgusting scenes and a bit in the spirit of Mad Magazine. However, the film is nothing more than a futile paraphrase of children’s movies of the time, as it attempts to give its characters some sort of genesis and lore in the style of Gremlins while framing everything in an absurd narrative about a little boy who tries to pick up a teenage girl who likes sewing but hangs around with boorish goons. Unfortunately, it is not nearly as unrestrained as the video-game movies of the early ’90s, which had a similar style and ethos, but everything in them was multiplied by the cocaine-fuelled exuberance of the time.

Delightfully guileless trash, which was admittedly made by the director in collaboration with his then adolescent son. The result makes an impression not only with its absurd mechanicalness, remaining precisely faithful to the child’s perspective and an insipid screenplay with an absurd and predictable twist, but also with an overabundance of honestly (though by no means innovatively) conceived stunts and one explosive car chase that, through its dimension of realism and precise grasp, easily outshines most similar sequences of the digital era.

School of Rock unfolds like a standard movie about a character undergoing a positive personal transformation, this time set in an uptight elite elementary school, and in doing so, it confirms the validity of this category’s viewership, even though what makes it likable is mainly the casting and directorial approach rather than superficial emotional manipulation. Linklater understood the unrestrained force of nature that he had at hand in the form of Jack Black and he adapts the filming of the scenes in very long shots that firmly plant Black’s frantically clownish persona in an otherwise rigid environment. Though Black’s protagonist is the chaotic centrepiece of School of Rock, the film as a whole stands on the shoulders of the brilliantly and non-formulaically cast and directed child actors.

Caligula is a profligately perverse and operatically opulent work not only in the sense of what was finally shown on the screen, but also in terms of the production concept and the collision of the multiple obstinate visions of the pompous egomaniacs who came together for this project. Caligula allegedly exists in multiple versions and I am personally of the opinion that in order to fully appreciate all aspects of this work, it is necessary to experience the longest version available, with a 156-minute runtime. Of course, it is bastardised and vulgar and disregards Tinto Brass’s putative creative intent in favour of the unhinged irrationality of Penthouse founder Bob Guccione, who served as the film’s producer. But that is exactly what Caligula is supposed to be, an ostentatious megalomaniacal vision of ostentatious megalomania, the corrosion of judgment in a position of absolute power and unquestioned authority. One could just as well be amazed at the delirious blending of the aesthetics of modern opera with Brass’s promiscuity and Penthouse’s boudoir pseudo-eroticism. The sets combine cheap spectacle with design exuberance, where living statues of penetrating performers become part of the scenery, with acting greats pompously declaiming around them. Caligula is simply a manifestation of the impertinence of Guccione’s ambition to make an epic adult film, for which he fittingly chose the equally pompous swine Vidal and Brass. But despite the arrogant declarations of these two men, the film remains Guccione’s project, thanks to which it comes across as so uniquely unhinged. ___ It’s cute that Thomas Negovan, as an obstinate fan, peculiarly convinced of the correctness of his view, embarked on Caligula – The Ultimate Cut (formerly also Caligula: Orgy of Power). Emboldened by the idea that he would elevate the ridiculed and maligned work, he set out to improve the sets by means of computer tricks, throw out explicit shots and to mine previously unused material for performances that seem less absurd. He swore that his version would be a Brassian director’s cut based on the last version of the screenplay. Brass was dismissive of the whole project and brought a lawsuit against it. That ultimately means that in this case it isn’t a contribution to the adored category of director’s versions, but we rather find ourselves exclusively in the realm of modding or fan editing, where only die-hard fans refuse to accept a work as it is presented to them. In other words, a fine curiosity, but there forever remains only one Caligula – bastardised, phantasmagorical and irrational, but also fascinating because of that.

A solid screensaver in the form of an artsy Brazilian version of Wild Prague.

Ideologically old-world but formalistically progressive, The Train can be seen as bridge between the era of epic war movies of previous years and the action-adventure flicks in a war setting that came in later years. From the former category, The Train takes a stellar ensemble cast, as well as a sombre ethos and grand moral questions, which form the film’s backbone. From the latter category, it can be said that emphasis is placed on the action scenes and spectacle. But none of the films that came later (whether we take the Clint Eastwood movies or a bunch of Italian genre flicks as examples) can match The Train in this respect. Frankenheimer stages captivating sequences in which he uses precise compositions with multiple planes where he constantly makes the presence of the characters felt within that grand action. The most important thing here is the breathtaking moments when the actors are present at or directly involved in dangerous feats in close proximity to passing trains, crashing locomotives and exploding railway stations. As pointed out by Christopher McQuarrie, who holds the film up as a reference work for the new Mission: Impossible, in a number of scenes it is amazing how they managed to do this in an era before digital effects and how many sequences give the viewer the feeling of being close to the action, because everything is simply captured in the camera as it happens instead of using optical effects and rear projections. Also, in many of the suspenseful passages, the filmmakers take care to set the action in what are clearly actual places, which are used thoroughly to dramatic effect in the given sequences. As a result, the one or two scenes shot in a studio or in modified interiors inevitably seem out of place.

The Pope of Greenwich Village comes across as an attempt to bring into the extravagantly big-haired 1980s the type of early Scorsese films from the ’60s and ’70s about flawed heroes who are confronted with moral questions about their relationships with others while operating on the edge of the law. The result is an ostentatiously self-important film in which every actor and actress mentioned in the opening credits has at least one scene comprising an acting showcase reserved just for them. Naturally, Rourke and Roberts are in full-on thespian mode the whole time. But in their case and that of all the others – whether hopeless (Hannah) or outstanding (Page, Young) – it comes across as terribly forced, theatrical and ridiculous. Not to mention that the film’s episodic characters thoroughly outshine the leads, which is primarily due to the fact that, unlike the protagonists, they are not macho assholes who let their own pomposity get them into shit because they dumbly fulfil nonsensical masculine roles and are then terribly surprised by the outcome. The screenplay has a lot of potential when it sets aside the mobsters and cops and focuses on the two loser protagonists, who infuse everything with their bullshit. If it had contained a critical element, the film could have been a biting treatise on the myth of the American Dream. However, there is no such detached view and (unlike in the works of Scorsese, among others) we have here just more adoration of self-centred boors without a shred of self-reflection or any effort to problematise them. ___ P.S.: Okay, I’m raising my rating of this film because I have to admit that Roberts’s acting showcase, where he blathers on a street bench about the “artificial inspiration” of horses while making an enormous sandwich, on which he then proceeds to gorge himself, is such a goofily random and gratuitous performance that it is simply unforgettable. It definitely puts him in the hall of fame of distinctive gastronomic character profiling and culinary inspirations for viewers alongside the egg cheese sandwich in Birds of Prey and all of the dishes in Cartoon Network’s top series, from bacon pancakes in Adventure Time to the pizza in Gumball.

To say Mars Express is the French Ghost in the Shell means placing inordinate expectations on the new film, as well as needlessly placing emphasis on the parallels between the two works. Though it obviously paraphrases Ghost and other genre classics, the feature-length project from the creator of the excellent series Lastman has its own original premise, imaginative sci-fi concepts and great worldbuilding associated with them. The resulting form further relies on cool visuals and a gripping mix of action, thriller and sci-fi derived from well-spaced motifs of identity in an era when consciousness and memories are transferable to robotic bodies. As cyberpunk consciously based on the themes and visuals of previous genre milestones, Mars Express isn’t captivating as a unique work, but it is likable simply due to the fact that not many new contributions to the category are being made and definitely none that are this good.

In 2001, DreamWorks released Shrek, whose box-office success had fatal consequences for mainstream animation. Whereas Pixar promised to advance the technological and expressive means of computer animation with every new project and to come up with new worlds and stories, Shrek demonstrated that it sufficed to have a broadly funny screenplay with smart-ass pop-culture references and viewers wouldn’t really give a damn about the quality of the animation. Sony Pictures Animation changed the game in 2018 with its animated Spider-Man and even the complacent bosses at DreamWorks understood that viewers would henceforth no longer be satisfied only with bubble-gum cartoon characters illustrating verbal jokes. Alongside The Bad Guys, the new Puss in Boots boasts a visual refresh that greatly benefited from the stylistic facelift. Though the screenplay rather exhibits the characteristics of direct-to-video sequels (few characters and settings, a straightforward narrative that vaguely benefits from the world previously presented, a repeat of the structure and concept of the previous instalment of the franchise), the animation elevates everything to the level of a grandiose spectacle. For one thing, instead of the long-utilised pseudo-realism, where every single hair on an animal’s coat and photorealistic reflections and shadows played first fiddle, the overall visual concept takes on the stylisation of tempera paintings, though not on a large scale, but rather in micro dimensions. Thanks to this, small details and surface textures can still stand out, but the overall impression is miles away from the toy-like artificiality of classic computer animation. The action scenes formalistically take on the expressive vocabulary of anime, with spectacular poses, rapid cuts and the contrast of slow-motion and, conversely, accelerated movement suggested by quick jumps between key images and individual poses. Though the animation here does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to attracting the viewer’s attention, it is not divorced from the whole, as it remains firmly symbiotic with the screenplay, the foley effects and – in the case of international releases – the dubbing. This cohesion is most evident in the imposing character of the antagonist wolf, which is a magnificent audio-visual feat in and of itself.