JFL

The creators of The Butterfly Room apparently wanted to make a tribute to good old horror movies and shockers of the kind that Hitchcock gave to viewers, particularly in the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Like those classic, the premise of this film has only one ace up its sleeve in the form of a revelation that the whole narrative builds toward, while the attraction consists in the fact that viewers have an idea of what’s going on, but they are kept in suspense until they finally see it. Unfortunately for both the film and its viewers, Jonathan Zarantonello, adapting his own novel, is very far from being a master storyteller and alchemist of suspense in the mould of Hitchcock. It’s easy to imagine that someone better could make a functional whole out of the implausible premise, which requires from the viewer a great deal of willingness to cooperate. But the director/screenwriter/author evidently doesn’t know what he actually wants. Instead of living up to his unacknowledged inspirations with a correspondingly unimaginative form, he tries desperately to score points with the audience with hyper-flashy visuals with a lot of annoyingly gratuitous post-production effects and a chronologically muddled narrative that serves solely for incorporating twists at regular intervals during the runtime instead of building tension. Though the cast will please connoisseurs, it is impossible to shake off the feeling that Zarantonello is just a more skilful version of Tomáš Magnusek, for whom films are also an opportunity to expand his collection of autographs and build himself up with the feeling that he has given an opportunity to old acting greats who otherwise no one cares about one anymore.

The core of all post-apocalyptic trash flicks is the concept in which the desolate setting makes it possible to revive classic myths and archetypal stories that have been discredited because their naïveté, whether that involves the western (Mad Max 2 and its imitators) or messianic stories (Cyborg). Whereas the old genres turn to the past and thus evoke bittersweet melancholy over the impossibility of returning to the old times, the post-apocalypse provides the romantic illusion that the days of great heroes and traditional values will come again (soon, it is often said). The Salute of the Jugger is a unique contribution to the genre in terms of the type of myth that it updates. The subject of post-apocalyptic revival here is not a film genre or a heroic archetype, but the phenomenon of widely watched sporting events. In teams of five, the wandering juggers play a brutal variation on American football, which has its own bloody regional matches as well as an extreme and often deadly major league. The film literally fulfils the wishes of fans of the most popular American contact sports – American football and wrestling – when it offers an amped-up gladiatorial spectacle instead of pre-arranged victories and divers in pads. Paradoxically, the sport depicted in the film became a real pastime, primarily in Germany, Ireland and Australia, where local leagues compete and sometimes international jugging matches are held. However, it is necessary to add that, as is typical of the purely illusory bravado of viewers who project themselves onto their post-apocalyptic heroes, real juggers are as from being the fictional prototypes as loggers are from being medieval knights. In their version, the game is reminiscent of a variation on dodge ball and lacrosse with wooden weapons wrapped in foam rubber. But getting back to the film itself, it captivates with its distinctive vision and precisely constructed screenplay by first-time director David Peoples, whose name is otherwise associated with films such as Blade Runner, Unforgiven and 12 Monkeys. The fact that The Salute of the Jugger was an ambitious project in its time is confirmed by the cast featuring Rutger Hauer, Joan Chen, Delroy Lindo and Vincent D'Onofrio. It is necessary to understand that back then these were not names found only in the domain of B-movies, as they ranked among the top acting talents of the time (Hauer had appeared in Blade Runner and D'Onofrio in Full Metal Jacket, Chen had worked with Bertolucci and Lindo was a respected Shakespearean actor). Unfortunately, the film tragically failed and left a stain on the careers of everyone involved, some of whom never again rose from the category for Z-list stars.

Ang Lee didn’t make a controversial film about delicate themes, but a complex work that functions simultaneously as a gripping drama and a subtle, multi-layered study of the power of the illusions that people create for themselves because they do not perceive things, but project their own ideas into them. Whereas the media hype around Brokeback Mountain was senseless, here it paradoxically proves the power of the film and the timeless topicality of its subject.

“Oh God, it tastes like boobies.” What a fitting quote from a film that is essentially something entirely ordinary, yet offers so much pleasure. The reason this title stands out from dozens of other spectacularly trashy Z-movies consists in its comic-book source material, which combines a rewarding post-apocalyptic setting with absurd exaggeration. The narrative is built on the premise of a world in which all-powerful corporations have caused a global collapse, after which bounties are issued for the big bosses, bringing out headhunters-turned-celebrities, who care as much about the expressiveness of their arsenals as they do about their image. In practice, this means that a group of guys with yellow ties in cubicles get their asses kicked by heroes who are actually cosplaying as various characters from pop culture (from allusions to fetishistic nurse uniforms, westerns, Mad Max and southern rednecks to burlesque and punk). Besides the stylisation of the characters, the source work saves the film by offering a colourful world full of exaggerated details, which the filmmakers faithfully adapt without shying away from even the craziest ones, such as motorcycles serving the purpose of a team of horses. Thanks to the fact that some completely new aspect of the film’s universe is introduced with practically every sequence, Bounty Killer never gets in a rut like other cheap trash flicks with a gallery of worn-out pseudo-stars pointing fake guns at each other, onto which flashes of the leads are grafted in post-production.

In Malaysia, they apparently don’t know what to do with their money, as they literally throw it into projects like this by the truckload. War of the Worlds: Goliath is a desperate jumble of everything imaginable, but in the end it raises only one question: who is this actually for? The idea of making a loose sequel to Wells’s War of the Worlds as an internationally appealing animated action movie (with English dubbing) seems just a bit too ambitious. However, the result exceeds all negative expectations. It’s not just that the animation style is reminiscent of cheaply made American series from the 1990s, but also that someone had the idea to put the whole thing in 3D, which is a very profligate decision in the case of a “flat” 2D film. We can add to this the design of the characters taken from the “Gears of War” video games – all of the guys are invariably mega-jacked and the women are models. Then there is – to put it politely – the half-baked choreography of the fight sequences and the topography of the world, as well as the uncertainty as to whether or not this is supposed to be steampunk. Similarly unclear is the whole world of the film, which doesn’t know if it wants to be steampunk or just an alternate history, and even though it deals with the radical progress of humanity resulting from a conflict with aliens, it’s still supposed to lead to the First World War. However, the main failure consists in the narrative, in which naïve pathos intended for ten-year-old boys is mixed with long dialogue scenes about global politics before the First World War, which children will find boring, and a handful of sequences with close-up shots of soldiers being torn apart by alien ray guns. The many nonsensical would-be impressive effects (whenever a cover or door opens or closes, it hisses steam) are simply ridiculous.

A Chinese Jesus and his disciples versus a hypocritical emperor and his rapid response unit with flying guillotines, which is to say that everything is wrong with this. The makers of this hopeless would-be epic perhaps wanted to create a lavish clone of Jason Bourne and Zhang Yimou’s Hero, but not even the film’s extravagant budget can cover up the imbecility and misguidedness of the project. What most hinders The Guillotines is how the film’s comic-bookishly exaggerated premise develops into an absurdly overwrought and overly serious narrative that says nothing and only attacks viewers with feverish pathos and faltering fatefulness. Though all of the conflicts and twists are transparent from the beginning of the film, the narrative tries to disguise them with an incredibly complicated exposition. On top of that, the film lacks any spatial or logical causality, instead giving priority to superficial spectacle. The climax is a matter of phantasmagorically unhinged internal anti-logic, which comes across as almost caustic (at least from a European perspective that gives preference to individuality). Let’s just say that thousands of people die in the film only so that a handful of tough guys can realise that they are on the wrong side, after which thousands more people, including those tough guys, die so that someone else can realise their error. And while all of this is going on, the killing of one character by another is postponed only so the target in question voluntarily gets killed simply as a gesture of pathos after the mounds of corpses have been levelled. And that’s not to mention the absolutely needless 3D, which doesn’t come through in the film at all and is thus just an artificial means of attracting viewers to the cinema and forcing them to pay more. In the film’s extremely short and usually close-up shots with the camera movement, there is no space left to accentuate the 3D effect.

Everything indicated that this would be yet another in a series of would-be gritty direct-to-video productions procured by some third-rate distribution company and featuring unknown actors under the baton of an even lesser-known director. But lo and behold, though everything mentioned so far regarding the filmmakers and distributors is true, what we have here is a tremendously polished, intimate thriller with a tried-and-true concept that has been maximally intensified. Set on a single floor of a hospital, a tense game of cat and mouse is played between an ordinary policewoman, a detained diamond thief, and his accomplices, who have come to settle accounts with him. If viewers accept the premise, they are in for a phenomenally well-constructed genre movie that offsets the lack of funding with a precisely crafted screenplay and ingeniously presented characters. These are essentially formulaic thriller characters taken to the extreme, which is particularly true of the fiercely scrupulous cop and the cunning criminal. Their superbly crafted dialogue as they size each other up at the beginning sets up an unstable relationship based on attraction, animosity and unacknowledged concurrence of opinion, but it mainly reveals that the lead actors, Ryan Robbins and the uniquely charismatic Zoie Palmer, have tremendous talent, which had previously been wasted on mediocre roles. Director and screenwriter Jason Lapeyre is slowly pushing his way out of the remote corners of cheap video production as one of the great hopes in the area of original and cleverly written genre-based films. In the euphoria of a publicist, one may be inclined to make comparisons to Tarantino, but it would be much more appropriate to draw a parallel with Eric Red, a pioneer of innovative and dramatically tense genre movies (but let’s hope that parallel doesn’t in any way pertain to Lapeyre’s career trajectory). 9/10

Lu Chuan confirmed his status as a filmmaker who doesn’t have a specific distinctive style or his own central theme, but whose qualities consist in the ability to get to the core of popular genres and present them in a previously unseen and maximally impressive form. After the phenomenal and devastating psychological war drama Nanking! Nanking!, he latched onto the format of narrative historical dramas about intrigues in the court of powerful rulers. In his rendering, this involves more than just a superficial exhibition of sets and costumes. Lu avoids the overwrought ornamentation and the Shakespearean scope previously seen in the genre, and to which Zhang Yimou resorted in Curse of the Golden Flower. He focuses on the subject of power, which consumes those who hold it, and yet they fight to keep it. Lu presents the palace purges at the end of the reign of a ruler who fought his way to the throne from the position of an ordinary peasant as a non-chronological narrative that constantly returns to the past and includes a handful of impressively dreamlike sequences. The central character, consumed by the power that he fears losing, is indirectly depicted through reminiscences motivated by his closest comrades-in-arms, whom he is now eliminating. The film places emphasis on the emotionally tense presentation of the personal tragedies of the individual victims, on the barricade of lives, as well as on their ideals. The climax is utterly gripping, as it imaginatively thematises the rewriting of history in relation to how an individual loses control over his own fate. The Last Supper is the absolute pinnacle of its genre, to which it is a very distinctively rendered contribution, though its vast number of characters and very slowly crystallising conflicts will disqualify it for some viewers.

Last year, the Chinese audience showed how absolutely unpredictable and indecipherable it is when it made Lost In Thailand the most successful film of all time in terms of attendance. On the one hand, the film doesn’t fit into any of the usual categories for which success is automatically a given – it isn’t in 3D, it’s not a spectacular blockbuster, it wasn’t made by Feng Xiaogang, it doesn’t feature any mega-stars like Shu Qui or Jiang Wen, and it’s not even a heavily computer-enhanced popular farce. What’s most surprising however, is the fact that the film is an extremely bland road movie that just endlessly draws out its nonsensical premise, repeats more or less identical scenes multiple time (I don’t even know how many times the protagonist snapped at his sidekick, after which they either go their separate ways or get into a fight). Perhaps the key to the success of this monotonously unentertaining film consists in its message, as the protagonists get joy from ordinary things such as family and friends instead of the egocentric pursuit of careers and money. Career stress and the loss of togetherness are apparently very familiar phenomena for people living in China’s highly performance-based economy and manically consumerist society. In such a situation, a farcical holiday in Thailand can be a welcome balm, or even a return to one’s roots.

There are dozens or perhaps even hundreds of second-rate horror movies and formalistic exhibitions in the mould of End of Watch that have stripped the found-footage concept (or, generally speaking, the illusion of an immediate recording of events) of any believability. The camera, seemingly in the immediate presence of events, has been degraded to merely a means of superficial ornamentation and spectacular presentation of attractions. In this context, Europa Report is an unexpected revelation. Its makers abandoned the limiting and dramatically retarded concept of a single camera continuously following the action and instead present viewers with footage from dozens of cameras monitoring a space expedition heading to one of Jupiter’s moons. The narrative is conceived as a report composed of footage from cameras aboard the ship and on spacesuits, promotional videos prior to lift-off and commentary assessing the depicted events after the fact. An essential aspect is that the reportage concept makes it possible to not present the events chronologically, but to instead piece them together dramaturgically for dramatic effect. The narrative works brilliantly with viewer expectations and ingeniously doles out and conceals information. Thanks to all of this, the illusion of camera footage in Europa Report returns to its original role as a narrative device rather than as a formalistic means of expression (as in Gareth Evans’ similarly conceived segment from V/H/S/2). Though it looks like the more expensive Apollo 18 in the first teaser, Europa Report ultimately proves to be a brilliant sci-fi movie from the ranks of humanistic stories about the fragility and smallness of man transported from his home planet into the captivating and dangerous endlessness of space.