JFL

Hell on the Battleground is a pure distillation of David A. Prior. It is evidently a film that he had always wanted to make and, following the success of Deadly Prey, finally got the funding for it. For the first and, peculiarly, last time, he came up with his own story uncontaminated by genre rather than a mere paraphrase of recent hits and bizarre pastiches. This time, he presents a story straight from his own crazy green heart about the fact that war is hell, though it also makes heroes out of men and gives their lives meaning. With the characteristically intended seriousness and impassioned tone of the project, Prior sets aside the overall framework borrowed from Buster Keaton, which he brilliantly utilised in Deadly Prey, and rather conceives the narrative with often Bresson-like purity. He transforms his ensemble of trashy non-actors led by the Holy Trinity of Fritz Matthews, Ted Prior and David Campbell, into archetypes of war epics. By limiting the expressions of his “models”, which he allows to be heard in long shots of non-verbal reactions, always by all members of the unit in succession, he emphasises the automatism of the difficulties of war, which he further thematises with numerous sequences of random mechanical gunfire. Like the French classic, the patron of trash also intersperses his most significant work with sacral motifs – from the colonel’s prophetic monologue to the symbol of the cross as a representation of hope and protection, as well as redemption. Hell on the Battleground is not a run-of-the-mill variation on Platoon; instead of that film’s literalism and emotional appeal, it is a film that should be felt, not understood. Following the iconoclastic anti-war cri de coeur by angry veteran Oliver Stone, the Republican military fan Prior brought pathos and heroism back to war with his film.

This magnificent sweding of the action genre by enthusiastic whizzes from Uganda brings forth a dramatic story, where the best cake recipe is a McGuffin in a battle between several hostile groups. It is necessary to give a tip of the hat to the enthusiasm and, especially, free-thinking nature of the film’s creators, who, liberated from the cynicism of sophistication and binding matter-of-factness of Western cinema, follow in the footsteps of the unfortunately deceased Peter Pan of Trash, David A. Prior, who in his time also picked up a video camera and began shooting variations of his favourite films with his friends, regardless of the production limitations and his non-existent knowledge of the language of film. This film’s combination of serious ambitions, DIY approach and Monty Python-esque meta pursuit on location and in post-production is breathtaking and enchanting in equal measure. PS: Viewed without subtitles in the boisterous atmosphere of Brakfest 2015, where a new narrative overlapping with the delirious original and the frenetic cries of the Ugandan video-banshee spontaneously arose in the screening room.

Ridley Scott is paradoxically considered a great auteur and a guarantee of quality (this cult is clearly connected with the overabundance of director’s cuts in his filmography), but at the same time he simply personifies what every director should be, i.e. a person who squeezes all of the potential out of every bit of material and ensures its effective transfer to the screen. After a number of futile screenplays and pointless projects, he finally got his hands on something proper and the result is outstanding.

Let’s not be fooled by the clever promotional campaign parroted in most reviews and responses to the film – the new Star Wars is not a project by fans for fans. Abrams has not created an elitist fan film. Instead, based on the principles of fan fiction, he has taken the previous world, characters and moments familiar to fans and placed them in a new narrative with different rules that builds on the unexploited potential of the original and can appeal to a segment of the audience that has not been affected or has been overlooked by the original cult. Paradoxically, this segment comprises the majority of viewers standing apart from the obsessive adoration of Star Wars and the ceaseless criticism of Lucas, as well as the massive toy-industry lobby. Together with Lawrence Kasdan, Abrams awakened the Force, cleansing the series of all of the ballast piled on it not only by Lucas, but by all of pop culture. It’s not appropriate to reproach the film for lacking courage or playing it safe. On the contrary, it would be difficult to find a more progressive and daring concept within the major Hollywood studios than the plan to create a blockbuster based on nerdy archetypes, with a girl, a black man and a couple of pensioners as the main highly developed characters. The path to reviving the franchise has not led through a reverential copying of pre-digital Lucas; instead, Abrams is (at least notionally) taking up George Miller’s torch. The new Star Wars, together with the latest Mission Impossible, thus proudly follows in the wake of Fury Road as an emancipated blockbuster and new-age action flick in which CGI is finally given its place as a post-production tool and honest on-set work comes to the fore.

“That’s how we were.” Vít Olmer returned to Czexploitation almost two decades later and created another time capsule containing the filth and bizarreness that contemporary Czech society is mired in. Expendable Czech cinema with a generous helping of fan service for older and advanced viewers and serving up a thick distillate of cynical decadence and the outraged hysteria of plebeian internet discussions.

It is difficult to judge, because this French porn flick, which was very successful in its day, is now available only in an edited-down version on an Alpha France DVD, where a lot of material apparently wound up on the cutting-room floor and the continuity of the sequences is severely disrupted. In its current form, the film comes across as a typical example of productions from the late 1980s and early 1990s. The shaky screenplay, which is causally underdeveloped and lets a number of essential elements fizzle out unnoticed, serves only to flimsily string together sex scenes characterised by laughable perversity. The film’s naughty title character attempts to drive her parents to divorce so that she can take over the family home and enjoy herself there with her lover (the film futilely tries to give the impression that she has a boyfriend, but it’s evident from the first shot that the character in biker gear is a woman). But instead of focusing the narrative on the paradox that her effort to drive her parents to infidelity are congruent with their free and debauched approach to sex, it just mechanically jumps from one sex act to the next. As mentioned previously, however, it’s impossible to say if the film was completely different in its original form – it wouldn’t be the first time that an insensitive Alpha France cut for a DVD release led to a radically new narrative. But even in its current form, Charlotte mouille sa culotte (or Charlotte, Wet Your Panties) can be appreciated for the playful perversity of the premise of the individual acts, or at least their absurd staging. On the other hand, the first sequence, in which Charlotte entices her mother’s lover into the marital bedroom, where her father is sleeping with her mother, cannot be surpassed by anything in the whole film in terms of the degree of laughable points, partial “twists” and sticky sexuality.

Three factors elevate this French porn flick above the average of the time and give it a certain chance to be memorable. The first is the rather the curious fact that, alongside French stars Brigitte Lahaie and Karine Gambier, American star Desiree Cousteau also appears in the film, which further illustrates the lively movement of actors and filmmakers between Europe and America in the context of porn productions. The second factor is the scriptwriting assistance of one of the few truly great auteurs of world pornography, Claude Mulot. His input is evident both in the opening sequence in the park in front of the Eiffel Tower and in the stylisation of the main protagonist, a reporter seeking material for a story on the life of call girls. In the plot-oriented scenes (of which the film contains a maximum), he becomes a typically Mulot-style caricature of macho stereotypes, inhabiting a space somewhere between an overgrown boy and a macho clown, whose level-headedness always gets him into trouble. Unlike Mulot’s own films, however, there is no conceptual satire to speak of here, but merely jokes at the expense of the cliché of the outsized porn hero. Whereas Claude Mulot’s original projects were memorable due to their sophisticated screenplays and as sophisticated commentaries on the issues of gender and sexuality in society, this film directed by Gérard Kikoïn is a more typical title of the late 1970s and early 1980s. French production was drastically declining in quality at that time and individual titles competed with each other not by trying to appeal to a broader audience, but rather by trying to one-up each other in bizarre and absurd perversions. It is in this area that Enquêtes (or Call Girls de Luxe) gains the last little advantage. The individual sex scenes are characterised by an escalating humorous eccentricity of premise and execution, culminating in a truly praiseworthy sequence of Brigitte Lahaie having sex with a mime who is pretending to be a robot, holding the appropriate facial expressions and movements without even blinking, which further escalates the bizarreness of the whole scene.

Very solid, but also very standard – Big Hero 6 is a precisely rendered product where nothing is left to chance. Action, humour and emotion alternate with mechanical precision, the dramaturgy follows a checklist and the ideas stay within the boundaries of being refreshing but never cross over into an area where it could have a sense of originality or even distinctiveness. It is simply Disney’s subordination of brand image, tellingly stated in the internal FIFO directive, which in this case doesn’t mean "first in, first out" but "fit in or fuck off" (that’s not a fabrication, but an eyewitness account). On the other hand, creativity certainly could not be expected from the result of the merger of Marvel and Disney. After the brilliant Frozen, Walt Disney Animation Studios’ latest production is a step away from the murky waters of ambition into the tried-and-true confines of comic-book adaptations. In the end, we can still be glad that this time the annoying pandering to fans was mostly limited to the post-credit sequence. Big Hero 6 heralds the standardised production from the Disney media conglomerate, which has set a course for world domination and, after the acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel Entertainment and Lucasarts, there is nothing standing in its way.

Whereas the excellent documentary Rewind This approaches the VHS phenomenon in its full breadth, Adjust Your Tracking provides only a portrait of the community of VHS collectors. Rather than video-tape milestones, it thus maps key moments in fandom and the community’s leading figures. Since the filmmakers are evidently part of that community themselves, everything is marked by enthusiastic affirmation and reinforcement of the collectors’ lifestyle.

Defiance is an ordinary, honestly made genre movie from the ranks of modern urban variations on the classic western about a man who brings law and order to a city dominated by crime. In comparison with other films in this category, Defiance is more sedate and tries to take a more realistic and less delirious approach. However, it firmly adheres to the formulas and simply pushes its blandly drawn characters smoothly through typical situations to the expected climax. Defiance is noteworthy only as an obvious, modest prototype of Bronson’s Death Wish 3, which translates the characters and peripeties found here into an aggressive, irrationally agit-prop, ultra-conservative fantasy.