MOSTLYFILM: Bipolar
If things go according to plan - bearing in mind, of course, that we currently live on a planet where the concept of 'things going according to plan' appears to have been completely abandoned - then during February, you should see three new posts on here covering the cities we visited on our Christmas holiday: Berlin, Warsaw and Krakow. Lots of sights were seen and lots of beer was drunk, so there'll be plenty to talk about there.
It was the first time ever in Poland for both The Belated Birthday Girl and myself, so that was a whole new set of experiences to process in itself: and, inevitably, one of those new experiences was seeing Polish movies without subtitles at the cinema. It didn't work out quite as successfully as I'd hoped, but the results are now documented in the traditional way, in an article on MostlyFilm entitled Monoglot Movie Club: Bipolar.
To spoil the article a little for those of you who haven't read it yet, we (eventually) watched the latest two episodes in a crime drama franchise called Pitbull. It's a series that's had a long and complex history, as I explain in the review: and you can experience that history right here, right now in this Bonus Content for the review, as I present a series of videos showing how Pitbull has evolved over the last twelve years. Caution: scenes of violence, sex and mucky Polish language will follow.
Later that same year, Vega expanded the concept into a TV show that ran for three seasons. Instead of a trailer, here's the whole of the first episode.
The last episode of Pitbull aired on Polish TV in 2008, and you'd assume that would be the end of that. Except in 2016, Vega directed a pair of new movies to reboot the franchise, keeping a couple of old characters but mainly introducing new ones. The first film - Pitbull: Nowe Porządki - is the point where UK distribution company Phoenix got involved, giving the movie a release over here around the same time as it came out in Poland. Hence the appearance of English subtitles on this trailer, which means that I finally get to find out what the film was about. It doesn't look like it'll be getting a home video release over here, but the Polish DVD (complete with optional English subs) is easy enough to get hold of via Amazon, and that's what I did for review purposes.
A ridiculously small number of months later, a followup was released - Pitbull: Niebezpieczne Kobiety - which again got a theatrical outing in the UK. (I saw it at the Warsaw Kinoteka, a bog-standard multiplex installed in the middle of a ludicrously ornate Soviet-era building.)
Last but not least: as the Pitbull movies are big commercial affairs, they're not above going for a pop music tie-in. Here's the end title theme from Pitbull: Niebezpieczne Kobiety, a song by a group called Virgin - who, like the franchise, also appear to have just come back after a long absence - entitled Niebezpieczna Kobieta. (I haven't checked, but I assume that's the singular form of the film's title.) For a pop video plugging a movie, it does seem to have a huge amount of sex and violence in it (most of the latter coming from Pitbull clips, most of the former coming from band vocalist Dorota Rabczewska), so be careful. Also, spot the cameo from one of the stars of the movie!
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