JFL

Oh, the difficult lot of poor girls from rich families who in formulaic eighties flicks fall under the spell of popular fads and rebel against their strait-laced parents with daddy’s gold credit card in their pocket. Before the unfortunate Lucinda Dickey had to breakdance her way to happiness in Cannon Films’ Breakin’, Linda Blair skated the exact same trajectory with the obtrusively mugging Jim Bray in the obviously less successful yet arduously annoying Roller Boogie. Hollywood’s attempt to line its pockets on the back of the putative roller disco fad falls apart primarily due to the pair of central characters. Few people can endure 100 minutes of watching a whiney little bitch who is upset that her rich parents went on vacation without her and a simpleton with a ’frowho is convinced that he is the greatest thing on roller skates and an irresistible swinger, so he fawns over the heroine only because she had the nerve to reject him. Director Mark L. Lester, who subsequently made several key entries in the Pantheon of Trash in the 1980s, attempts to give the whole thing a dynamic form here and there, but whenever the roller-skate wheels stop turning and the unbearable characters come to the forefront, the film suddenly transforms from an amusingly goofy bit of kitsch into a burdensome test of tolerance, where the audience’s sympathies shift to the side of the antagonists who want to raze the roller disco to the ground. Actually, faced with the qualities of Roller Boogie, it can be considered that the brief era of roller disco movies was not a misjudgment of the market on the part of Hollywood (as Richard Nowell writes in his study Hollywood Don’t Skate), but rather a targeted intervention that had the purpose of killing off this bizarre subculture by evoking in viewers intense negative feelings toward its adherents.

Something went wrong somewhere, because Thank God It’s Friday should and, mainly, could have been wonderfully entertaining camp and a well-made, trendy film, but it ended up as a sadly lifeless display of futility. Though it was produced by Motown, there is no jive and the film is completely devoid of rhythm. Despite the episodic story with a bunch of characters and putting on display every possible visitor to a famed disco over the course of a single night, there is a hopeless lack of charismatic actors, and when one shows up, he still doesn’t having anything to properly play, which is the case of Jeff Goldblum as an annoying lech.

Happy! is a grandiose symbiosis of the styles of Grant Morrison and Brian Taylor. Taylor’s hypertrophied stylistic excess and pop-cultural meta-genre focus is exactly what Morrison’s comic-book canapé needed not only to rise above its would-be gritty mediocrity, but also to fully reach its potential. From the original fragment of an idea, the series becomes a surprisingly multi-layered spectacle in which Taylor’s cheeky boisterousness meets a deeply felt narrative about both the power and harmfulness of fantasy, the traumas of childhood and cynicism, as well as the hopes associated with Christmas.

Judging from the responses to Domestique, it is the most polarising film of this year’s edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, or rather a film that will surprise due to its unanimous rejection in certain circles. However, if we don’t approach it literally as a story of a single relationship and two particular people, it can come across as a conceptual cinematic expression of self-centredness. The screenplay piles up clues that help to build a baffling narrative and attract the viewers’ gaze to the main male character, while at the same time suggesting through various clues that, outside of the confines of his shell, the world looks different than it seems at first glance. As in the Czech series Semestr, director Adam Sedlák shows that for a man his age, he has surprising insight into social phenomena that, according to ageist prejudices, should not concern him. After the artificiality of the relationships of young people, this time he touches on the career zenith of people in their thirties and the associated personal crises and the subtle slumps ensuing from insufficient (self-)reflection.

Pyun’s masterclass in how to make a feature film with a double-digit budget, or where there is no production design, there will be smoke machines or perhaps some junk or rags will be hung up to suggest a fantastical environment. Unfortunately, Vicious Lips does not live up to the miserably low expectations that they elicit. In practice, it thus serves as a painful reminder of the specific characteristics of direct-to-video productions of the golden era of video rentalshops, when anything that had at least a more or less feature-length runtime and attractive packaging found a place on the shelves. Unfortunately, the content of this film’s premise of a futuristic all-girl glam-rock band that gets shipwrecked on a bizarre planet on the way to an important gig remains merely a hopelessly overstretched load of crap despite Pyun’s avant-garde editing games and the incomprehensible enthusiasm of the performers. With a high degree of leniency, it can be taken at least as one of the cheapest, most bizarre and drawn-out Alien rip-offs (if, instead of Giger’s monster, we settle for a guy in werewolf make-up).

Profile is an absorbing thriller that, thanks to the form of computer desktop recording (see, for example, the Czech series Semestr or the Bekmambetov-produced horror film Unfriended), superbly escalates both the tension and the emotions. Profile is captivating not only as a dramatisation of real events, but also as a deeply felt picture of the emotional turbulence experienced by a journalist who, due to her reporting, establishes contact with an ISIS recruiter through a fake online profile.

This film is an illustrative example of how the theoretical concepts of story and narration differ from each other. Strictly speaking, the film consists of a single billiards duel and the previous performance of its protagonists and organisers. But it is precisely the depiction of this event in the film’s narrative that is stunningly enchanting – if one does not have an aversion to modern musicals. In a minimalistically stark setting, but with all the more colourfully stylised figures, the film sets out a phantasmagorical féerie about the ultimate battle of two generations and their life and (pop-)cultural styles. During the first minutes, the film puts a silly grin on one's face, which does not disappear until the closing credits. At the 2018 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, the Caban brothers presented the film as their carte blanche, noting that they did not remember the film at all and would like to watch it again (which, by the way, is a great approach to a dramaturgical concept that is obstinately taken seriously). Thanks to last year’s screening of their Don Gio at the same festival, some surprising parallels with the Cabans’ debut became apparent when watching the invigorating and hyper-stylish and meagrely minimalist British musical – mainly in the minimalist film set and avant-garde theatricality, which offsets the hyper-expressiveness of the characters, as well as in the masterful camera work.

This festival crowd-pleaser safely adheres to the proven concept of outsider refining melodrama. However, with a detached view and a lot of earthy and, in places, even folksy humour, it examines the subculture of mega-brutal metal. Avowed devotees of metal  who still believe that Beelzebub can be conjured by playing a record backwards will be outraged by the film’s sacrilegious approach, but everyone who rather finds videos with dudes wearing the warpaint of sad clowns to be cute or funny will have a good time. 7/10

Despite everything that Franco says about his project, which is parroted by publicists and talk-show hosts, The Disaster Artist is not a good film. Above all, it lacks not only real drama and heart, but also proper insight into the characters’ inner selves. Unlike Burton’s frequently recalled Ed Wood, The Disaster Artist does not bring forth any new or remotely intense or deeply felt view of Tommy Wiseau and his egocentric creative abortion, The Room. It merely repeats what has already been said many times, literally turning observations, which occur to truly everyone while watching The Room, into film sequences and only points out the inconsistencies and ambiguities in the myth that has grown up around the film and its creator, but without following up on them. The result is only a succession of freakshow vignettes in which Franco makes faces and pretends to give a great acting performance. Paradoxically, however, the closing comparison of the original scenes from The Room and their reconstructions by the Franco brothers and company shows that Franco is only mimicking Wiseau pretty much in the same way that a number of The Room fans did before and after him when talking about the film with friends and “re-enacting” the most bizarre sequences. The main drawback of The Disaster Artist is Franco himself. He is a workaholic with a pathological fear of standing still even for a moment. Because of that, his filmography is astonishing in terms of the number of projects he manages to bring to fruition every year as a producer, director and actor. However, the sad truth remains that Franco is not a multitasking genius but, like the vast majority of us, simply a person with limited capacity. In the field of acting, that can still be masked by fleeting effort and the work of make-up artists and costume designers, but Franco’s directing projects are a prime example of unrealised potential. Franco is incapable of fully focusing on one thing for several months, let alone years, as proper directors do, nor does he have his own distinctive style that would make his projects stand out (such as in the case of craftsmen Takashi Miike and Seijun Suzuki). For Franco, each film is just one of a thousand items on an ever-expanding “to do” list that give him a momentary diversion. Whereas that doesn’t particularly matter in the case of stylish hokum like Future World, The Disaster Artist would deserve to be handled by someone other than a fantasist with ADHD who tries to make himself into a great auteur by diving into the role while communicating with everyone during shooting by parodying Wiseau. The documentary project A Room Full of Spoons, with whose creators Wiseau engaged in litigation, offers hope in this respect, as the filmmakers allowed themselves to do what Franco did not do, which is that they aimed to uncover the major issues surrounding The Room – where Tommy comes from, how old is he and where he get the money for the film.

Theodore Rex is a somewhat less illustrious entry in the “only in the ’90s” category; this simply could not have been made in any other decade. For context, let’s recall that the first half of the 1990s gave cinema such bizarre flicks as Cool as Ice and the phantasmagorical carnivalesque adaptations of the video games Super Mario Bros., Double Dragon and Street Fighter, as well as live-action Ninja Turtles. Theodore Rex has the same lineage of movies with a bizarre mix of colouring-book visuals and uniquely anti-cool coolness. Its genesis unambiguously appears to lie in the head of some producer who had seen Disney’s superb sitcom Dinosaurs and came to the conclusion that animatronic full-body dinosaur costumes were a safe commercial bet, especially when combined with the noirish buddy crime genre for child viewers. Unlike the aforementioned series, however, Theodore Rex does not offer an exaggerated alternative history, but rather a future where dinosaurs are revived by means of genetics so that they co-exist in the world with humans. Thanks to that, we have the pleasure of watching a number of good actors and personalities perform alongside rubber dinosaurs while managing to keep a straight face. However, unlike the films mentioned above, Theodore Rex is surprisingly bland and its potential for camp remains surprisingly unutilised only at the conceptual level, but not in the production itself, which is surprisingly clean in genre terms and without any exaggeration or excessive weirdness.