JFL

Not all superheroes wear capes – some wear bathrobes. When I grow up, I want to be like the Dude. Until them, I will imbibe his wisdom and a White Russian during the regular annual review of the holy scripture of Dudeism on New Year’s Eve at the Aero cinema in Prague.  ——— Otherwise, The Big Lebowski is not only grand entertainment that never loses its appeal, which is thanks to the brilliant casting of an outlandish bunch of likably oddball characters, but it is also the most cunning and most clever neo-noir film that Joel and Ethan Coen have come up with.

“Don't dream it, be it.” Done. Several times already and perhaps many more to come. 

Whereas CGI spectacles have long since lost the ability to amaze us, here a green screen in combination with a group of friends in plush-toy costumes again and again becomes a field of limitless possibilities. The hyperactive genius Ryland Tews and his up-for-anything partner Mike Cheslik revive the tradition of both live-action and animated slapstick by means of RPG narrative formulas, DIY creativity and their own trademark mix of deadpan absurdity and frantic physicality. I tremendously enjoyed the way in which this film’s narrative established individual elements and is built on simple gags that subsequently vary, intensify and multiply with video-game combinatorics. Hundreds of Beavers is a loose, unrestrained work that deliberately avoids compromises in relation to current narrative, style and production norms. It thus also provides tremendous and unflagging pleasure both as a series of gags and as a creative, production and aesthetic challenge in which one enjoys particular madcap ideas and the fact that someone came up with them at all, as well as the way they are rendered using a full range of both sophisticated and primitive techniques (from camera angles and editing, through various forms and combinations of live-action scenes, animation and post-production tricks, to the actual physical placement of the actors). _____ Hundreds of Beavers was a case of love at first sight that grew from intense infatuation into a serious union. It was perhaps inevitable that one day I would lose my mind and fall so madly in love with a film that if my effort to persuade my acquaintances among the established distributors failed, then I would push it into Czech cinemas myself, i.e. with the funds of the Aero cinema in Prague and with the help of many particular people, as well as with the tremendous cooperation of the aforementioned established distributors. I can’t imagine a better film for such an undertaking, because in this case the only windmill at which it was necessary to tilt was the mere conviction of what kind of films work in Czech distribution and how they should be promoted and distributed. Though Hundreds of Beavers is not a film for everyone, it still easily wins the hearts of a large subset of film enthusiasts. Its charm, weirdness and distinctiveness are the strengths on which it was possible to undertake atypical distribution. We intentionally did not do standard promotion and instead relied on word-of-mouth, because this kind of film lives an all the more intense life when viewers are allowed to discover it for themselves and shower it with their enthusiasm. That’s exactly what happened when reports from abroad and the first enthusiastic responses resulted in a sold-out premiere at The Shockproof Film Festival and brought hundreds of viewers to additional screenings at Aero. In the following weeks, viewers’ interest was sustained by exclusive screening at Aero and Bio Oko, whereupon Aerofilms put the film in broad distribution. Then came the second wave with outdoor summer cinemas, at which Beavers became a firm fixture, and interest surged further with Tews’s presence at the Summer Film School festival. This summarisation of the film’s journey to Czech viewers is meant to highlight the fantastic potential and unique quality of Hundreds of Beavers, as well as to pay tribute to its viewers. I want to thank all of you for making this obsessive thought and crazy idea into a great, joyful experience.

It may sound like the grumbling of an old man, but they just don’t make films like this anymore, and that is the key reason for the deserved unanimous enthusiasm that accompanies Fury Road. Against the background of today’s technology, the new Mad Max is a film from an era that has long since passed – in terms of style, it comes across as the essence of 1980s Australian trash flicks laid out in the form of an epic fresco following the example of the peak of Hollywood’s creative era of the 1970s. Fury Road is simply Miller’s Apocalypse Now or Heaven’s Gate. In the promotional campaign, the constantly emphasised appellation “visionary director” was for once not a hollow phrase, but an appropriate statement, in every sense of the word. Miller reveals himself to be not only a filmmaker with a well-though-out vision, from which he builds a portrait of a distinctive post-apocalyptic world thought out to the smallest detail, but also a filmmaker who has yielded completely to his own delirious vision, which is both absorbing and fascinating. Though Fury Road is both a variation on the original trilogy and its continuation, it thus remains fundamentally distinctive and unique. So, even though fans will identify various similarities between the new film and the trilogy, Fury Road never engages in that current pop-culture scourge, quotespotting. There is no recycling, no knowing winks at fans, no references to other films or pop culture, and not even any franchise elements. Fury Road is not exclusive and elitist like contemporary blockbusters, which create enclaves of true believers by flattering different audience segments. Into the artificial and overly sophisticated waters of the contemporary mainstream, Miller has released his own raging monster, which, with the roar of an infernal machine, cuts a path through all of the rules about the habits of the target audience, commercial trends and the producer’s calculations, and it has no regard at all for what a contemporary blockbuster is supposed to look like or what supposedly works in it and why. Like its world, the film is simultaneously disjointed and deranged, yet in spite of that, it is also completely coherent and functional. The archetypal three-act narrative concept is crushed here by a single permanent confrontation and non-stop tension (the first shot, in which the characters are not in motion or in immediate danger and are only talking to each other, seems as if it is from another world). Out of the bowels of the degenerate macho action-movie genre, a matriarchal parable has grown, with the male characters surprisingly relegated to supporting roles. And all of this is set in a pulsating world, which we don’t see from the outside, but are rather thrown into. As the characters carry us along at a frenetic pace, we see, unwittingly and literally at the edge of the field of vision, that world’s practical functioning and, primarily, its complex mystique, which emerged from omnipresent madness and pain. In an interview, Miller said that he liked the feeling he had when, as a child, he walked out of the cinema and felt like he had stepped off a roller coaster and wanted to get right back on it. Whereas the seasonal blockbusters of recent years have merely zipped passed viewers, leaving only a dim memory on the horizon, Fury Road picks up viewers at full speed and, like its protagonist, runs them paralysed and strapped to the hood through the tumult of its creator’s vision. If the post-apocalypse previously infused archetypal heroic stories with new blood and replaced the foul taste of the distant era of westerns and chivalric tales with the intoxicating promise that the age of heroes would come again in the future with the fall of civilisation, then Fury Road likewise revives the validity of the mythological epic in the destruction of the world. Though the film’s narrative has certain similarities to The Iliad and The Odyssey, its matriarchal level refers to even more ancient traditions. Even though it evidently undermines machismo and the patriarchy, it also offers a celebration of heroism and masculinity in accordance with the aforementioned revitalisation of archetypes. The appearance of those traits here, however, is not only classical in nature, but also mythically absolute and post-feministically complex in equal measure. When the roar of the engines subsides and the smoke from the explosions clears, we see the tragic and paradoxical nature of the heroism of not only Max, but primarily of the other main character, who, infatuated with the myth of patriarchy, rushed like a raging dog of war to the gates of Valhalla, but only achieved true heroism when he abandoned the father figure and accepted the role of helper and protector alongside his mother. Fury Road takes a no less complex approach to women, who, in the manner of legendary matriarchal societies, not only personify life and procreative and regenerative power, but also serve as warriors. However, they are not limited to the one-dimensional ideal of badass goddesses of war. Like the male characters, each of them has her own story and motivations, which are alluded to in the narrative, and those are what condition their heroism, which is all the more impressive thanks to its believability and inspirational nature.

The rating relates initially to The Renegade Director’s Cut and later to Slinger: Albert Pyun’s Director’s Cut of Cyborg ------------ Albert Pyun, the philosophising auteur of trash cinema, has numerous gems to his credit, but Cyborg ranks among his most ambitious visions. Equal parts simpleton and avantgarde visionary who always longed to shoot films on wide-angle stock, Pyun combines in his work the most decadent genres with the grandest ideas and genre attractions with distinctive concepts and original worlds. Unfortunately, his vision was always confronted with compromises – either as a director under contract he had a relative abundance of funds, in which case he usually did not have the right to decide on the final cut, or he had the freedom of independent production, but then had to deal with the limitations ensuing from a small budget. Cyborg – or more precisely “Slinger” as the film was originally supposed to have been called – was to be his epic project that, thanks to a new, up-and-coming star, would provide the opportunity to combine his creative ambition with box-office potential. However, when Pyun’s cut did not meet with approval from the representatives of either Cannon Films or Van Damme, the director was removed from the project and the film was recut into the form available today in all official releases. At the beginning of 2011, Pyun got access to copies of his final cuts of several works that had been desecrated by producers, including Cyborg. The Renegade Director's Cut, also known as The Unreleased Director’s Edition, released on DVD by those producers is a unique opportunity to see the vision of the trash Icarus degraded only by the quality of the print (the source material comprised two VHS recordings of an uncorrected telecine transfer). From a pure fan perspective, it is apparent that, after Pyun’s removal, the producers reincorporated the sequence involving pirates plundering a seaside village, which the director had not used, into the film. Conversely, Pyun’s version also contains the sequence in which the protagonist is a witness to the massacre of the family of the young boy to whom he returns a ball taken by drunken pirates at the beginning of the film, and the action sequence with Deborah Richter, who, thanks to them, doesn’t have only the role of a female accessory in a man’s world. Above all, the two versions essentially differ in the impression that they make and in their formalistic execution. Pyun not only intended Cyborg to be a messianic story whose framework remains perceptible also in the official cut, but he also wanted to present users with an entirely pessimistic narrative about the confrontation between the will and ideals of an individual and a merciless world filled with suffering. The main protagonist in Pyun’s version is not invulnerable; on the contrary, he is permanently exposed to inner doubt, depressing horrors of the past and current physical pain. These motifs are brought to the fore in the film through the protagonist’s frequent voiceovers, in which he carries on an internal dialogue with himself or, said more precisely, with his doubtful and weak self, and glimpses into the protagonist’s past. The main villain gets much more space and his numerous pronouncements, which were cut from the official version, put him in the role of the Devil terrifying and tempting the protagonist (after all, Pyun made the pirates direct disciples of Satan). However, the essential difference of Pyun’s version consists in its formalistic execution, specifically in the editing, which was probably the main reason that he was removed from the project. The director shows himself to be a purely avantgarde experimenter and, instead of conventional compositions typical of the mainstream, he primarily uses the principles of Russian montage and experimental filmmakers, while the result can be described as the film equivalent of comic-book panes in manga. He does put individual long shots together with the aim of expressing the linear flow of fights, but cuts the shots that are used in full in the official version into short parts depending on the phase of movement, which he intersperses with counter-shots and shots of parallel action. At the same time, he often works with the speed of the shots, thus creating not a chronological and clear image of the action, but rather a cubist analysis of a particular situation. It is definitely no wonder that Van Damme and the producers fired Pyun after seeing this version. At the same time, it is necessary to mention that it is surprising how they retroactively transformed some passages into classically constructed and functional sequences (primarily the action scene with the destruction of a house in the first third of the film). On the other hand, Pyun with his cut comes across as a misunderstood artist and a bit like Ed Wood – not in the sense of being artless, but in the sense that his creative vision and grand ambition cannot be denied, but fulfilling them in a purely trash framework and with the use of laughably exaggerated clichés seems contradictory at the very least. Nevertheless, the truth remains that, among trash dabblers and acclaimed directors who have a distinctive approach to telling genre stories (Seijun Suzuki, Nicolas Winding Refn, Paul Greengrass and others), we will not find anyone who can measure up to Pyun and his idiosyncratic style. [The Renegade Director's Cut] _______________________ Slinger – Albert Pyun’s Director’s Cut of Cyborg was released on DVD and Blu-ray at the beginning of 2014 under the patronage of the German distribution company Digidreams Studios (available on Amazon.de). Slinger is a composite made by combining HD remastered shots from the cinema version and sequences and partial shots from the above mentioned VHS version with Pyun’s working cut. This version is probably the most complete director’s cut or version, which Pyun, afflicted with Lucas’s eternal improvement syndrome, now considers to be ideal. This one differs from the aforementioned working version of his director’s cut primarily in its more moderate editing and in several small details. The most significant of these is the slightly more conventional narrative, as Pyun abandoned the original concept, where the first two-thirds of the film comprised flashbacks framed by the protagonist’s crucifixion. Following Lucas’s example, however, at the time of completing this version Pyun did not allow himself to bind the film to the just completed project Cyborg Nemesis: The Dark Rift, which was intended to be a prequel to Cyborg, or Slinger, though a shot from it is inserted into the end of the director’s cut and introduced with the title “nine months later” – there is the question of whether this time-space anomaly is the result of information noise from the new project, the director’s lack of reason (or the multiple sclerosis that had afflicted him a year prior and prevented him from shooting more films) or if it can simply be explained by watching the referenced film. Though the German release is labelled as “uncut”, the film lacks all of the gory close-ups seen in The Renegade Director’s Cut – thanks to which, for example, it isn’t entirely clear that the final elimination of the villain involved tearing him in half. It also raises the question of whether Pyun merely wanted to have a final cut devoid of explicit violence or if this was a consequence of the German legislation that places limits on violent sequences, which would indicate that this release is not the definitive version. On the other hand, Cyborg is finally widely available as Slinger and everyone can enjoy this original project in every sense, as the crackpot filmmaker got a relatively generous budget and a rising star, but instead of a generic post-Mad Max B-movie, he set out to make an epic post-apocalyptic gospel. In his godless world fallen to the disciples of Satan, the messiah must grow into his role (which culminates in the sequence when, instead of dying on the cross, he kicks himself off of it), but in the end, he is just as powerless against the sinister intentions of people worshipping technology, an even greater evil than Satan. The composite, where the image jumps from the HD remastered part to VHS quality and back in one shot, strikingly shows Pyun’s formalistic ambition manifested in the preference for longer shots and camera approaches with sophisticated character composition.