The Poetics of IMDB: Piranha 3D

IMDB forum users are second only to Youtube when it comes to unintentionally ridiculous user posts that seem to defy all written tradition and push language, one bizarre sentence at a time, towards typographical poop-flinging.

If you haven't seen Piranha 3D yet, you damn well better make plans for it. I made up my mind to see it after I was shown this IMDB gem at work a week ago. It was being edited by other users as I we read it, so I thought to record it for the good of humanity. This is supposed to be the IMDB ratings guide for Piranha 3D, but it is clearly and accidentally poetry. Note the use of spelling, quotation marks, parenthesis and over-punctuation to guide your eyes into confusion. 'Violence & Gore' is haunting free-verse. 'Profanity' looks a bit like haiku.


Piranha 3D (2010)

Sex & Nudity

{Not a movie for children or teenagers younger than 18 because there's a lot of ("Graphic" Full Frontal female Nudity) all throught this film by many women including (Porn Stars) such as: Riley Steele (Porn Star)}.

A man's penis is bitten off and spit at the screen, not discernable though.

Women Nude including: (Breasts, nipples, vaginas, and butts).
Graphic sexual dialogue and references!!


Violence & Gore

Skin is ripped from the bones, baring them

Gallons of blood fill the lake of the party goers

People are pulled into inner-tubes and torn to pieces
A girl has her hands and face skinned by the piranhas

A man is eaten alive

Party goes are torn to bits, some in the nude

The film is full of ridiculous amounts of blood and gore

Piranhas explode; Their eyes burst from the bodies
A servered eye floats in the water

A mans hand is skinned


Profanity

This movies contains quite a few swear words through out the film.
Alcohol/Drugs/Smoking

Lots of teenage drinking
Frightening/Intense Scenes


The movies "feel" changes from happy and party like to gory and distrubing. Children may be frightend by the piranhas, and the death scenes in the film. The movie is over-the-top gore and blood.
Page last updated by daugherty91, 27 minutes ago
Top 5 Contributors: Skeptic-Fool, iAspie, mfama_2081, Rowi111, t-burke5


Kind of reads at points like e.e. cummings, no? I guess daugherty91 is the likely author, but I like to think that iAspie was mostly responsible for this, so that I can imagine some basement genius crippled by Aspergers sweating over a PC.

This picture is unrelated.

The ratings guide has since been changed to this, a long and wordy account of all the wonderful sex and violence that, still, sounds pretty surreal through the telling. Just how many remarkable things are replaced on internet forums every hour without anyone ever catching it? It makes me weep tears of bitter longing.

Posted from The Quest for a Quest.

Survival of the Dead Screening at Princess Tonight!

The latest George A. Romero zombie installment, Survival of the Dead, is getting a screening care of Gen X Video tonight at the original Princess Cinema in uptown Waterloo. It's a zombie dress-up, so go in costume for 8:30 and pick up some prizes if you're worthy.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #53: Idiocracy (2006)

Fox News, giving you its best.

Mike Judge of Beavis and Butthead and Office Space fame came up with a movie that was little advertised and little seen during its limited theatrical release. Higher-ups clearly washed their hands of this one for some reason. It's a shame, since it's really not that bad. Not a great achievement by any filmmaking stretch, but certainly not bad.

Set in 2505 and taking a page from Woody Allen's 1973 film Sleeper, Idiocracy features an average joe waking up to find himself in a future that doesn't make any sense. Because statistically the more educated you are the less children you have, humanity has grown dumber with each generation and can no longer look after itself. It's a world of couches, lame television, belligerence, and crudity and....well, it's pretty much like our world I guess, which is the point.

The film makes some frightening sense in some places, and it's clear commentary on human nature and the more embarrassing aspects of this society we've constructed for ourselves. On that front the film could have had a lot more fun than it did, but there wasn't so little that the film was vapid for it, which made me very glad.

The acting is only at par here though, as nobody in the film, save maybe for Luke Wilson's lawyer, goes out of their way to really make a scene work perfectly in terms of delivery and timing. The visual effects are colourful and fun and never get to the point where the setting overpowers the plot or humour. That's probably due more to budget concerns than directorial restraint, but I'll give Judge the benefit of the doubt on this one.

So: Pretty much as people have told me - cool stuff, fantastic concept and worth the watch. But it's a damn shame more wasn't done with the concept.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #52: Che: Part One (2008)

Having just visited Cuba, I suddenly felt the need to learn more about the history of its world-changing revolution. After some reading and some documentary viewing, I gave Soderbergh's big Che biopic a look. It's a double whammy since there's a lot of ground to cover, and was released in two honkin' parts.

Che: Part One is partially told as a broken narrative - while disorienting at first, once you get a sense of the three or four timelines explored in Che's life, it doesn't jerk you around too harshly. Shot in a documentary style, it lets the viewer make sense of the film's personalities and narrative on their own with little exposition or clear judgement, for the most part. The only place where it clearly takes a stance, as far as I can tell, is with Che himself. Che has, as you very likely know, become a legend. An icon. As a result, moreso even than Fidel Castro, it's pretty hard to tell where the real story is and where the myth and romanticism has been added. Soderbergh's film, at least in part one, presents a Che that's idealistic, intellectual, and pure of intention. That's certainly how he's been remembered, but I was hoping to see something in terms of flaws. I suppose any he might have had have been lost to history, and anything added would be a wild guess that'd serve little purpose in the end.

So: Che: Part One suffers from a flatness typical of newer Soderbergh films, but managed to keep me interested. I like Benicio Del Toro a lot, despite The Wolfman.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #51: Morvern Callar (2002)

I'm a sucker for minimalist filmmaking; the sort filled with dreamy, quiet, aimless experiences filled with impenetrable characters embarking on strange and disconnected existential journeys. Morvern Callar is perfectly realised in that regard, and presents you with the sort of film that looks more real than life is.

It's about Morvern Callar, a young woman who finds herself in a profoundly grim but strangely advantageous position, one where a blank and arbitrary universe might be providing her with a way to exist as blankly (or perhaps just a little less so) as it seems to. Morvern is an ambiguous character and hard to read, but as the film progresses one can catch the glimmer of decisions being made if not their reasons, and Morvern takes charge of her life if perhaps to ensure that she doesn't have to.

So: Poetic imagery, great atmosphere, soundtrack, strong acting from Samantha Morton, and existential awesomeness. I dig.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #50: Collapse (2009)

This political and environmental documentary follows the life's work of Michael Ruppert, a law enforcement whistle blower who was first approached by the documentarians to talk about what he had seen in regards to the cocaine the CIA seems to be smuggling into the United States (Ruppert was approached to take part in their operations, and he turned them down. His fiancé, who worked for the CIA, left him shortly afterwards. He thought that was fishy). Turns out he wanted to talk about something else. He apparently called the global economic crisis back in 2006 through his newsletter From The Wilderness, and during that year had been on tour urging people to get into gold, reduce their debt as much as possible, and take a hard look at their mortgages. He was warning people about a coming collapse.

In the doc we basically watch this guy run through a list of topics, providing viewers with his guesses at how things are going and why they are the way they are. It pretty much tells us what we already know: peak oil exists, ethanol is a joke, and we can't maintain our current lifestyle forever. If you've seen The End of Suburbia, it's much the same insight - that peak oil will become no oil, and since everything is oil-based we've got to prepare for a world where everything will stop until we can figure out a new way of living. That the world we've built, that our lifestyles under the resource of oil will have to evolve into something else. We can't get a job in another city. We can't eat oranges from California. To survive we'll have to move locally and grow food locally. Essentially, Ruppert says, the industrial age will end.

Our political ideals will end as well, and will have to be re-written within a new paradigm. One more in step with a world of finite resources and not, as it is today, one dependent on the presumption that growth is infinite - growth of wealth, of standard of living, etc. That we must realise that we have to live within the limitations of the planet. That's the crux of Michael Ruppert.

The guy has 30 years of investigative journalism as his main credential, and his work has become a personal obsession for him. It's frightening to see just how consumed he is, and it adds a bitter desperation to the connections he finds in the news clippings he collects. He's angry, and he's resentful and he admits as much. You get the impression though, sometimes, that he's placing personal links that might not be there, like when he says that there's no doubt in his mind that Rumsfeld and Cheney took personal interest in his actions and the things he was publishing in his newsletter. This is of course unverifiable, and it's apparent that much of the links he sees are investigative inferences without much hope of verification. But what else is someone to do? Leave it all to the higher-ups? Not watch? Not make guesses? Not get angry? Worst case scenario, he's wrong and we pay attention to something that's worth paying attention to.

The director has a voice in the documentary since it's arrayed like an interview, and three or four times in the film addresses Ruppert with some critical questions. One of the last is the concern that it's possible to pick through articles until you can find enough that support the world you're expecting to see. Evidence for the links that you want to make. Ruppert's answer is that he doesn't get into debates anymore. That there is, in fact, no debate. That he doesn't need to, because the things that he and his colleagues have saying will happen once we've hit peak oil has actually been happening. That it's there now, plain to see and beyond question.

The documentary provides no solutions. Only general directives. I learned in the special features that the book supposedly gets more specific.

So: Not sure where I stand on everything he says, but this is certainly the clearest outline of the reasoning behind the sustainability movement that I've seen so far.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #49: Tarkan Vs. The Vikings (1971)

I am going to talk about Turkey.

Turkey’s typically drab and melodramatic cinematic output was slim to nil until the late 1960s hit the country like Attila the Hun. Turkey’s film industry exploded in the blink of an eye, and what once was the meagre production of a handful of films a year became approximately three hundred, at its apex. This explosion resulted in the creation of a mad host of exploitation films, filled with all the violence, sadism, sex, and senseless nudity that defined the genre. Drawing much inspiration from 1930s and 1940s American serials (the likes of Zorro, Flash Gordon, and Tarzan), the Turkish pop cinema often showcased the ultra-cliché: testosterone-powered soldiers, masked superheroes, and indomitable barbarian sword-slingers. These films shamelessly ripped material from popular Hollywood films, stealing soundtracks and even going so far as to insert whole film sequences. Of the most famous is the notorious ‘The Man Who Saves the World’ (1982), or ‘Turkish Star Wars’ as its affectionately called. Check it out on youtube.com, it’s all there.

As TV took hold in the 70s, the Turkish cinema began to flounder. Distributors began to insist on racier sex scenes in an attempt to draw people back into the theatres. It worked, and for a time the theatres were packed tighter than ever before. According to Aytekin Akkaya (of Turkish Star Wars fame), the cultural climate was all but sexually free, and the soft-core sex scenes that the films contained (mostly little more than topless women, in truth) were a necessary release.

By the time the 80s rolled around, the Turkish cinema had just about exhausted itself, and American cinema had taken its place upon Turkish screens. Sadly, the bulk of the films produced during this period of boom are lost – many films were actually destroyed for the silver contained in the negatives.

BUT TARKAN VS. THE VIKINGS REMAINS. And you must see it. Based off a popular Turkish comic book, Tarkan features a patriotic Turkish barbarian, upholding Turkish ideals, fighting Vikings and giant octopi, and laying with Valkyries and exotic oriental assassins. For your trouble you’ll get to see another film on the dvd, one titled The Deathless Devil (1973). This one’s a superhero film, and while perhaps not as grand, it is well worth the watch if you’ve some friends handy. You’ll even get to see the featurette from which, in the spirit of Turkey, I have stolen the material for this article.

So: I can't express how much I love this movie.

The Princess Bride and 8 1/2 at the Original Princess!

Legendary 'romantic fantasy motion picture' The Princess Bride scheduled to play the Original Princess Cinema tomorrow, Tuesday the 17th, at 7pm. If you like pictures moving in front of you, and romance and fantasy and Andre the fucking Giant, go and see it!





Also, the following Wednesday, also at 7pm, Fellini's even more legendary 8 1/2 is being screened. Autobiographical and lush, this one's an 'Italian arthouse dark sunglasses black and white motion picture.' If you've never seen an artsy foreign film before, or just feel like tasting a splash of Italy, give it a shot.



This is a double whammy of wicked film. Check out the Princess schedule for a full outline.

Protip: The Original Princess only takes cash.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #48: Secrets of a Co-Ed (1942)

I must hide my secrets away.

An earlier work of Gun Crazy (1950) director Joseph H. Lewis. The film is a warning to all the young women restless with the salty sweat burn of young lust. As a gangster puts it in the film: “Awwww, women! They’re the cause of everything!”

A young woman named Brenda secretly desires a life free from restraints and obedience. She’s infantilised by a patriarchal world of crooked lawyers and nonchalantly violent gangsters afflicted by the beauties of women. Brenda passes up on a well-to-do life with a young lawyer-to-be for a hood named Nick who likes to shoot people. Brenda meanwhile writes about all her woes in a diary. Her “secrets,” she calls them, and the diary gets referred to unnecessarily as “the secrets of a co-ed.” Twice.

Once Brenda and Nick run away together, Nick mentions that a “crazy fortune teller” once told him about famous couples like Romeo and Juliet, Mark Antony and Cleo, people who lived crazy for each other no matter what. Apparently, the fortune teller was a huge jerk, since he/she left out the bits about PAINFUL DEATH. Spoiler: Nick dies. And because she finds Nick’s body, Brenda’s pegged as the killer. Makes sense to me. She who smelt it dealt it.

There are two shots sort-a-maybe-kinda worth seeing. One consists of a zoom on a possibly phallic cigar, moodily crushed in hand by Brenda’s angry father after he orders Nick dead for dating his daughter. The other is during the final minute. Brenda is seen through a fireplace fire, sitting, rising, and tossing her diary into the flames. She metaphorically avoids the flames of hell and walks away with the good boy she was getting bored with at the start of the film. Her secrets are probably lost for all time.

So: Currently I am waiting for an inter-dimensional spaceman to channel the contents of that diary directly into my brain. When that day comes, woe unto thee, for my arrows will blot out the sun.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #47: Cartoon Noir (1999)

Feel like some short film? Animated short film perhaps? Something that isn't terribly funny? Consider Cartoon Noir.

Noir presents you with six short films plucked from the murky skulls of an array of animators, hailing from such cultural planetary zones as Portugal, Poland, the USA, The UK, and the Czech Republic. Animation styles vary from film to film, moving, for example, from chiaroscuro to stop-motion to detailed and colourful paintwork, each mode affecting tone and subject matter like wet black birds on a wire - unsettling and proportionate and balanced and with voltage. In regards to tone or atmosphere or whatever you’d like to call it, the films should give you a taste of the romantic, the morose, the bizarre, the eerie, the bleak, and even, finally, the life-affirming. Each tale contains a dark sensibility, whether it be a brooding Dostoevsky-inspired murder story or an endearing fable about a cat caught in the night and in love. Forgotten mannequins in a warehouse or (my personal favourite) a suicide witnessed by a horrified and concerned Mickey Mouse parody. Even a poem about a baked monkey. Everybody loves monkeys.

So: Highly recommended.

Deathproof Wrestling to hit the Polish Legion on Saturday!

More hardcore wrestling this Saturday at the Polish Legion (601 Wellington St N, Kitchener)! Be there or be square! Click on the poster for Deathproof's website and deets.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #46: Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)

Miyazaki always shows such remarkable ability to give you a bright and sunny world filled with colour and cool breezes, and it keeps me coming back to his films time and time again. He also clearly loves flying machines, as his films tend be full of them, and the sense of hugeness and warm open air he always achieves tickles my need for atmosphere pretty damn well. I was happy to find that Kiki delivers on both of those Miyazaki fronts.

Like Ponyo, this one is geared a little more towards children, and operates on a much lighter scale than some of his more intense works. While light, friendly, and warm it still presents you with the complexity that I think Ponyo didn't possess (and wasn't intended to, no doubt). This made Kiki a little more satisfying for me, since it speaks to an intelligence that moves into the inspirational.

So: Might just give you the recharge of spirit you may or may not need!

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #45 (I skipped 43!): Capitaine Alatriste (2006)

This one's a 17th century period piece chronicling the Spanish golden age through the eyes of a Spanish mercenary (Viggo Mortensen) known as Captain Alatriste. The 'Captain' title is merely an affectation, since the man holds no rank and is dirt poor. But he can swing a sword with the best of them.

In general, Alatriste feels a bit too much like TV and not enough like a film. It struck me as the Spanish answer to the Tudors, and even looks to me to be lit like television. It's apparently based on a series of novels, which explains why it feels much too crammed with plot points and characters that never seem to add up with the correct weight. Each scene pushes for too much drama between too many characters that have the pretense of being established, but haven't been given the time to be so. It ends up feeling mostly contrived, presenting the audience with contrived characters engaging in contrived love affairs. Not much has weight in Alatriste. Even the political intrigue of the Spanish court gets delivered by random characters just walking up to secondary characters and whispering what they know, and the information just doesn't feel earned.

Scenes bounce along fairly quickly without much time to invest in what you're seeing, and start to feel like they've been clipped just a bit too much. The acting is mostly not very good, and you might find that there's little facial expression in favour of a Spanish stoicism.

I was interested enough to watch most of the whole thing for a handful of reasons. Firstly, the period. The Spanish golden age is not often looked at outside of 'New World Discovery' movies that make vague mention of a powerful court. Here you actually see that powerful court on its home turf. Secondly, like in the Tudors, the costumes enthrall me. If I could get away with wearing a fancy doublet, I'd probably do it. I'll take a shower to wash the shame off after the review. Lastly, I like that Alatriste, as a soldier, is not an invincible pro. He can get hurt in his fights, and sometimes does. Pretty badly too.

So: If you like the Tudors and wish it had more swordplay, check Alatriste out. If not, there's plenty of other movies more worthy of your time.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #45: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

I realise that this is probably nonsense to many a movie-goer, but Robert Downey jr. consistently annoys the living tapeworms out of me. I just can't digest his line deliveries very well, and neither can the tapeworms. The flippant and breakneck banter I've come to link to Downey pretty much ruined the Iron Man flicks for me, as in those movies - more pronouncedly in the second - the banter reaches a level something like 'extreme biohazard'. This review is starting off with a real tilt towards the biological, and I'm not entirely sure why. Hm. Oh well.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is infectious. The dialogue comes very close to annoying Downey syndrome, but manages to reel back just enough to strike me mostly as charming. It's written by Shane Black, who apparently wrote the first Lethal Weapon movie. And Last Action Hero. Yep. (Holy shit - that's the creeping familiarity that's been lurking in my unconscious since watching this movie. That's why Downey bothers me. I think he reminds me of Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, and I've never been keen on the Lethal Weapon series. Downey gets characters with the same flippant attitude, the same borderline madness. Here I'd like to apologise to Mr. Downey Jr. for comparing him to Mel Gib-racist-sexist-son.) The drama unfolds in an archetypal but satisfying way, and features a man who isn't what he thought he'd be when he grew up and a woman in the same boat. She's also 'the one that got away' and he hasn't quite given up. All the clever banter that moves between them gets interrupted now and again by ugly moments made all the more ugly for being couched in what is seemingly a comedy.

Anywho, I must talk about Tarantino factor now because Kiss Kiss has a definite post-Tarantino vibe to it. That might be good or bad depending on your feelings toward the big T, but the echoes of his post-modern style are of course here to stay in cinema, and he's oft emulated and never matched. Kiss Kiss manages to do better than most on that front, which is surprising given that it goes further where Tarantino tends to wisely stop: while T-man's movies are culturally referential and draw attention to cinema as being deliberate representations or constructions, his movies never quite become aware of themselves. With the exception, I think, of Kill Bill, they don't stop and say "Hey, I'm a movie." Kiss Kiss is aware of itself. Downey works as a cheeky narrator who openly acknowledges that you're watching a film. Characters namedrop their favourite movies from time to time, letting you know that it was written by someone who considers themselves pretty fairly steeped in movie-culture. While this can easily become trite, it manages here to add something wistful and idealistic. Something that speaks about our desires and where we place them.

Lastly, I always get a kick out of Val Kilmer, and his role as Gay Perry, a tough and unrelentingly acerbic counterpart to Downey is a treat to watch. I kind of want a movie about Gay Perry.

So: A meta, stylish, and funny bit of wish-fulfillment. Val Kilmer rules.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #44: Body Snatchers (1993)

Ugh. You can't hear it, but there's a terrifying wail coming out of that inhuman face.

I'm a fan of the classic communist-fearing Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and I was moved to tears and fits of hysterical shouting when I discovered that this 90s update is really very good as well.

Director Abel Ferrara isn't afraid to move his camera in interesting ways, and the movie really thrives for it. A held shot, for example, on a sleeping woman can suddenly turn very sinister with a seemingly simple and slow tilt of the camera and a slight colour change. In general, the special effects in the film are genuinely horrifying: people are invaded by disgusting, worming, creeping tendrils that hook into you like alien veins because that's what they fucking well are supposed to be. Family members crumble to dust, half-grown duplicates writhe and crack with blood, and pod people gestate in their disgusting pods before our eyes.

Body Snatchers feels relentless and tense, and its most horrifying aspect is the constant sense that the characters in the film are too late. Too late to survive, too late to save the day.

So: Really very creepy. Something moved in my bed that night and I had to sit up and stare for a few seconds.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #42: Shutter Island (2010)

It had been years since I'd seen a Scorsese film and I was really excited to learn - I had it from a good amount of people - that Shutter Island was worth the watch. I'd also had it from some that it was an unsatisfying experience due to the movie's twist, a twist so large it could be seen from a mile away. Or, in this case, thirty or forty minutes into the movie.

Well, on watching Shutter it's certainly true that the twist is obvious, but I didn't find the movie diminished for it. I don't think the movie ever tries overly hard to hide its plot secrets, and instead wants you to figure out what's going on early enough to follow the psychological movements of the protagonist with an extra insight. The crux of the film isn't the plot reveal, it's the haunting choice that's made during the movie's final minute. The plot itself is pretty much a MacGuffin.

So: Great amosphere, great visuals, and an ending I really liked.