Matty

The creators of this BD production gathered together in one place videos that we would otherwise have to watch on YouTube (and thus probably find the scenes funnier) – I don’t see any other benefit in this predominantly inoffensive and only sometimes blandly stupid compilation.

Nice (romantic comedy), but too much talking. It’s fine that the protagonists have thorough knowledge of the theory of interpersonal relationships, but they fall somewhat short in practice. It’s good to hear their bits of wisdom, since they’re not dumb or untrue, but if I just want to listen, I’ll turn on the radio. However, that would deprive me of the opportunity to see the faces (and bodies) of the famous and mostly good actors (and actresses). He’s Just Not That Into You is reminiscent of Love Actually in terms of its runtime and quantity of characters, but not in any other respect, unfortunately. Because the film is basically a series of loosely connected dialogue scenes on a similar theme, I had to figure out what the given characters felt for each other and with other characters with each new scene. Maybe it didn’t really matter in the end, but I wanted to have a clear idea about how the screenplay overrun with living beings in love wasn’t helping me. Unlike other romantic comedies, I was bothered by this film’s inability to “settle into” the story, the protagonists were likable and the minutes spent with them were pleasant. Besides that, He’s Just Not That Into You isn’t as modern a romantic comedy as it tries to pretend to be (modern technologies, women calling men): only heterosexuals pair off, being alone means being unhappy, and infidelity is punished in the end. 70%

Old and young, sick and healthy, rich and poor, happy and sad meet and part ways, love and hate, rejoice and suffer, live and die in a city of contradictions. In the hands of Cédric Klapisch, the diverse portrait of the amazing and unique Paris shatters into little episodes that are in no way inventively connected. Klapisch wants to show all of the faces of the city on the Seine, but his weird genre mash-up (from carcinogenic art to animated parody) ultimately just maps the local sights that everyone already knows. When this needlessly long film finally came to an end, all I felt was Paris overload. It would have sufficed to concentrate more feeling on one of the many ideas that had been touched on (like Pierre and his creation of fictional stories for non-fictional characters “down there”). Not even the very good cast can make up for the lack of care that should have been given to the one-dimensionally written protagonists – especially the disgustingly “compliant” female characters. Paris is a pointless and shallow film that spends two hours searching for (and not finding) its heart. As with Erasmus, here it is also true that less is sometimes more. 45%

It not necessary to have studied five books on the history of cinema and be familiar with the methods of new film history in order to understand that Cousins’ The Story of Film gets down to the absolute essentials. His extremely flat retelling of history spanning more than a century is based on big names, watershed events and essential works. In each episode, he uses his own grating voice (which will annoy you, but you’ll eventually get used to it; or it will just annoy you) to present several Best Films and Best Directors, some of whom he was able to visit in person and interview for the cost of an expensive trip. I don’t know why it was necessary to travel around every continent and show us the current appearance of the places where one of the recalled films was made X number of years ago. Probably so that the word “Odyssey” in the subtitle would make some kind of sense. Cousins chooses only those films and filmmakers that fit into the framework that he defined for the given episode (e.g. human-interest stories, the shift toward realism, film as a dream) and that help him to create his idealised version of the history of film. This version, in which there is no room for badly made or morally inferior films (only themes are bad) and even controversial directors (Pasolini, Fassbinder, Trier, Lynch) are presented as figures whose merits are not called into question. Cousins always gives preference to finding the most striking connecting line between two events, so the immediately visible surrounding context is either omitted entirely or reduced to a few superficial slogans. This unscholarly approach, which is almost horrifying from the film-studies perspective and unfortunately not in any way acknowledged by Cousins himself (on the contrary, he tries to look like he knows enough to be able to capture what is really important), is balanced by a cinephilia that is infectious, but also reduced to the endless spouting of phrases (film as passion, the story of film as a story of unceasing innovation). A few entertaining gems (Berkeley’s inspiring bathroom, Van Sant’s playing of Tomb Raider) and a few very shaky yet thought-provoking comparisons (dream sequences from The Blood of a Poet and Inception, the long tracking shots from Satantango and Elephant) can’t reverse the prevailing impression of needlessness and a very unwise investment of money (by the producer). 50%

The Confidant sadly tries too hard to portray the normalisation period of Czechoslovak history in more colours other than just black and white. Because of the excess of underused motifs (the refugee in the introduction, compromising photographs) and characters (Goldflam, Stuhr), the film is at best a promising start to a series, not a dramatically cohesive film. It works a lot with coincidences, the characters behave curtly and it often isn’t clear whether they are really so short-sighted or if that is only a consequence of inconsistent distribution of information. The lack of clarity in what is basically a thriller story, which carefully nibbles on The Ear and The Lives of Others and uses elements of dream poetics, Slovak sensualism and Czech humour of the "laughing beasts" variety, is matched by the ambiguity of the human characters, but this does not excuse the fact that it is simply too much for one film. If only the borderline eastern and normalisation comedy (and thus the public and the private) had been combined, this could have been a notable exploration of the so far neglected “border” spaces of Czechoslovak cinema. But instead of different spheres, people’s natures are examined, sometimes very much in the manner of a sitcom, as it is naturally easier to cram the symptoms of normalisation into them (and less likely to upset those who lived through normalisation). The attempt to relativise all decisions and to reveal something ordinarily human (whether good or bad) in each character comes across as somewhat mechanical. As a result, the intended message is also unclear – are the idiots the ones who stayed or the ones who tried to escape? Or are all of us idiots, or rather why wouldn’t we be amused? Despite all of these objections, however, I welcome even such an inconsistent effort to face up to the plague of nostalgia and show that normalisation involved more than just the cheesy pop songs of Michal David and Discostory. 70%

As in other films connected with the Nouveau Roman literary movement (Hiroshima, Mon Amour; Last Year at Marienbad) the important thing isn’t what actually happened, but how we learn (or don’t learn) that something happened. There is no doubt about Boris’s (or perhaps Jan’s) main character flaw. If nothing else, the title of the film gives it away. He lies because he doesn’t know the truth and, in an effort to uncover it, he loses what remains of his certainty. Boris is not the only unreliable narrator; the film is overloaded with others like him and raises the suspicion that the director isn’t being straight with us either. He withholds relevant facts and equivocates with respect to whose version of “reality” we are watching at the given moment. The shots do not follow on from each other either chronologically or logically. The boundary between death and life, between truth and lies is constantly shifted. At the moment of the greatest betrayal, when there is no longer any hope that someone will believe him and thus confirm his dubious and questionable existence, Boris changes into an actor. The film sees actors as incorrigible liars who must repeatedly justify the existence of the fictional worlds that they occupy. As viewers, we are their guinea pigs on which they test various versions of their stories. Director Alain Robbe-Grillet does not deny his inner man of letters. Boris’s manner of storytelling elicits the need to have the film on paper. To be able to thumb through it, to verify what was said earlier, to confront Boris with his own statements. However, clarity would make The Man Who Lies less interesting. We have to get lost, fumble around in the dark, seek truth where there is none. In a film that thematises lying and understands it as a labyrinth from which there is no way out after it has been entered, it couldn’t be otherwise. 90%

 – May I ask? – They’re not playing. A timeless portrait of a young man at a crossroads and a statement on the cyclical world of intergenerational misunderstanding. Forman’s first collaboration with Papoušek (and third with Passer) offers a series of beautifully unforced semi-improvised dialogue scenes (or monologues by the father, the model old-school patriarch). We could criticise Black Peter for its uneven rhythm (which, for example, Menšík took charge of in Loves of a Blonde), but the agony of awkwardness and embarrassed silence, which has no end, fits in with the effort to show youth without idealisation, as it really was (and probably still is) – hesitant, dependent, without ambition. The young protagonists don’t have role models whose example they could follow and they are unable to motivate themselves to do anything, and they don’t have the capacity to make decisions on their own. Petr either can’t or doesn’t want to be a store security guard watching over customers or a hardworking labourer. The only thing he’s interested in is Aša, who isn’t much interested in Petr (unless she needs some pickles from the store). With its dramaturgical laxity (several loosely connected episodes without any significant development of the plot or of the protagonist), the film goes as far as some experiments of the French New Wave (e.g. Breathless). However, the resulting effect is diametrically different – an approximation of reality, not destruction of it. The termination of the cycle of Peter’s minor embarrassing situations leading nowhere and his father's grand moralising speeches with a freeze-frame shot (disrupted by one peculiarly apathetic look), similar to the “freezing” of the characters in Intimate Lighting, is worth a thousand words. 90%

I didn’t believe it was possible to make a basically apolitical film about punk rock. Until I saw DonT Stop. It probably wasn’t easy to go against the “normal” dictated from above during the normalisation period of Czechoslovak history, but this film exerts minimal effort to convince us of that. It lacks an element that is utterly crucial for drama, namely conflict. The narrative is structured as a chain of musical performances connected by dialogue scene that are utterly unimportant as a result (the characters’ decisions are not in any way psychologically motivated – in the end, Miki “awakens” just as suddenly as his girlfriend changes her opinion of him). The almost endlessly playing loud music primarily serves to fill the awful content void and creates the illusory impression that  the members of the band called Émile Buisson are punk rockers who are just as tough as their music. However, we are not shown any evidence that would support this notion. The protagonists’ rebellion against the system happens – if it happens at all – without the presence of the camera. We don’t see any of their internal clashes or the clashes that they provoke with the powers that be. The peak of anarchy in their rendition is a mohawk, pierced ears (one of the film’s “harsher” scenes), disrespect for the elderly (their sole source of income is apparently the money they get from fencing the silver spoons that they steal from a kindly grandmother), destroying other people’s property and shouting “No future!” from a rooftop. I doubt that the group that supposedly served as the model for the filmmakers would have so weakly provoked the establishment and sailed through the reality of normalisation as smoothly. The motivations of the characters are unclear. The soft-hearted punks survive from concert to concert, cursing about the conditions and not doing much to change the situation. Though Miki talks about his wish to snap listeners out of their lethargy with culture shock, there is only one confrontation between the outsiders and the conformists in the whole film, and even that happens rather by accident. Řeřich’s debut is not only apolitical, but also visually appealing. There is no underground aesthetic of ugliness. When the shots are visually shifted away from TV-series grey, it is paradoxically towards the “cool” flashiness of advertising (with which the director has extensive prior experience). If not for archival news footage, you would quickly forget that you are actually watching a story set in the normalisation period. Instead of gradually advancing toward a certain twist, the dramatic break comes suddenly, at the moment when the idea of “a band of punks on tour” is exhausted by the screenwriters (while the real potential of the theme remains almost untapped). The result is a startling halt and a disturbing change of atmosphere from a feel-good musical film into something like a psychological thriller. The filmmakers’ very cynical sense of humour is, unfortunately unintentionally, shown in the deliberate ending, which seems to be thoroughly in line with the statutes of the Socialist Youth Union. Those who still think punk isn’t dead will have to wait for a real Czech punk-rock movie. According to DonT Stop, domestic punk has been lifeless since the eighties. 35%

An ornithological thriller, thanks to which I finally understood why Hitchcock’s birds are angry and why they’re out for revenge.

A comedy built on contrasts of the characters’ respective natures and the setting and which more or less just mulls over the idea of also being a social drama. The film outright plays it safe. The plot is regularly livened up with minor conflicts and the montage sequences prevent it from becoming too slow and boring so as not to repel viewers. The comedic lightening-up of the situation only occasionally gets out of control (the dance scene resembling a music video) and disrupts the pleasant cruising on the surface of harmless images. It’s still unrivalled as a cure for crises of all types. 75%