Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #61: Pusher (1996)

After seeing and loving Valhalla Rising (review on the way), I decided to check out Nicolas Winding Refn's other films. His first was Pusher, number one in a trilogy of Pusher films. I was not disappointed.

It follows the life of a Danish drug dealer as he drifts from club to club and home to home, working coke deals and violently collecting money when force is called for. He has a strange relationship with a high-price callgirl and can barely manage a human or personal life with her or his friends. He is living blankly, and he gets in way over his head.

Judging by Valhalla Rising, I suspected that Refn is really good at creating atmosphere, and Pusher certainly confirmed it. The film is well shot and looks great for its low budget - the lower-end camera very much suits the seediness of the locales, the characters, and the subject matter, and is an instance where a filmmaking setback becomes a subtle boon. The acting is tight and with talent, as the dialogue is incredibly believable (so much so that it's probably improvised) and the gangsters are entirely lived in. You really get the sense that you're looking into a very real and not-so-underground world.

So: Great stuff, I can't wait to watch the next two Pusher films.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #60: The Dungeon Masters (2008)

Hat is on, prepare to bleed.

Geek-sense...tingling! The independent media has been giving increasing attention to geekdom over the years, and subcultures of nerdery are beginning to take centre stage as the geeks that were swept up by the sword and sorcery of the 80s grow older and infiltrate the media engine. Since hearing about The Dungeon Masters I'd been eager to see how it had been handled. It's a documentary that follows the lives of three Dungeons and Dragons players, or, more specifically and clearly implied by the title, DUNGEON MASTERS. I hope you're picturing hulking monstrosities in black armour cracking whips over lava pits, because you're not going to be seeing that at all.

You will instead be seeing three social misfits trying to create a social dynamic with rules they can understand. For anyone not in the know about this type of nerdery, the dungeon master, or DM, is the guy or gal that leads the group of Dungeons and Dragons players. They make up the stories, narrate for the characters and creatures the players encounter, and oversee the mechanics of the game.

The three DMs are:

1. A guy going through the emotional perils of writing a fantasy novel and dealing with an agent.

2. A woman dressed as a dark elf traumatised by hurricane Katrina and searching for love.

3. An army-reservist alienating his group of players with his extremely controlling and adversarial DMing.

These three DM to create control and comfort in their lives when the outside world is unsympathetic, or they can't quite match dance steps with the rest of life. As a DnD player it was interesting to find points of connection with the DMs and players; the central drives to why we play, or how we got into the fantasy genre in the first place, are mostly identical. The DMs talk about the kinds of characters they find themselves playing and you can draw some conclusions as to why they favour them.

So: A cool look into the private lives of dungeon masters and DnD players. A little bit more clear insight would have been nice, but you can draw your own conclusions.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #59: Haibane Renmei (2002)

One of my favourite anime series, this short thirteen episode drama tells the story of a girl that wakes up in a strange town with no memory of how she got there. And she seems to have wings and a halo. The answer seems obvious, but there are only a handful of other girls like her. They look after each other in a simple boarding house and try to maintain an uneasy relationship with all of the normal townsfolk that populate the area. Their town is completely walled off with stone, and no one is allowed to leave. The town's mystery, and the nature of the girls, starts to unravel when our main heroine arrives and rocks the boat in her well-meaning way.

There's a gentleness to this series that reminds me very much of Miyazaki's amazing works - there's a real sense of air and flora in Haibane Renmei, and it's a treat to take its world in. Also like Miyazaki, there's a lining of darkness and unease to the idyllic bliss of the town and its inhabitants. Something is not quite right with the world, and as the characters come into contact with the heroine, she comes to find a complexity of private suffering and inner torments that keep them locked in place and without hope.

It's beautifully animated and it's without the kind of sex and violence that characterises the bulk of the Japanese animation industry.

So: Fantastic. Give it a shot, even if you're not normally into anime.

Brutal Knights, Dead Wife, and Mighty Atom Show This Saturday!

Some kingly Canadian punk bands are hitting Mom's Tattoo in Uptown Waterloo tomorrow night, Saturday the 25th, and it's going to be amazing. I'd heard the Mighty Atom was playing and made a mental note to check it out and blog about it, only to find that one of the best punk bands to come out of Toronto in recent years is headlining: The Brutal Knights - hilarious and wildly entertaining, beautiful and terrible as the dawn. Entry looks like 10 smackers.

Be there at 7:30! Here's the Mom's Tattoo myspace write up.

Your friendly neighborhood Wizaard will be there to greet you if you greet him first since he doesn't know who the hell you are.

Here's some tunes for your perusal:

Mighty Atom

Brutal Knights

Dead Wife

Gandalf my old friend, this....will be a night....to remembuhhhh.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #58: The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

I should be doing comedy, Morgan.

Shawshank is one of those movies I swore by as a younger lad. I had found it moving, captivating and, especially, inspiring. I shouldn't have re-watched it.

I'm sure it's a film you've all seen already. While it's not a bad film, since it certainly has its inspiring moments and lines of dialogue that stick to my brain and peel out in times of emotional trouble, it is at its heart an overly romantic film. It's sappy. It's real sappy. To the point where I couldn't help but feel like the not-so-nice elements in the film were being medicated, because when something bad happens you're given comfort soon after. Despite the subject matter, it's an easy film; it leads you along by the hand and doesn't rattle you too much. When it does, it tells you its sorry and promises that things will be fine by the end. And they pretty much are.

The performances are good, but Tim Robbins is just Tim Robbins. The score is swelling and with the camera, drifting in operatic Frank Darabont style, tells you exactly when something grand and important is being said. There's little room for subtlety or mistake. I don't think a film should be without risk of mistake. It should never be so precise as to leave you without room.

So: A medicating, specifically bromantic comfort movie for those in need of life-change. I could just tell you: Get busy living or get busy dying.

Calling All Zombies! Film Shoot on the 23rd and 24th!

CAFKA, Kitchener Waterloo's contemporary arts forum, is spearheading the work of artist Jillian McDonald, who deals primarily in, oddly and wonderfully enough, ZOMBIES. She's shooting a performance piece on film, where she needs as many zombies as she can get attacking the Steel Rail train in Waterloo. That's the one that runs to St. Jacobs.

People who show up with their own zombie makeup on will be an asset, but there will also be makeup people on hand to touch up or help you. Here's the write up on the facebook event titled Zombie Film Shoot at the Waterloo Train Station:

So, CAFKA is doing an art project to coincide with the Steel Rail train party on Friday September 24th. They need zombies to show up on Thursday and Friday to participate in a filmed and live event. This is a 2 day commitment.

Here are the details:

They need about 15 zombies for Thursday at 1:00 pm at the Train Station. These people need to commit to showing up Friday night for the live attack as well. You can do your own make up ...ahead of time but they will also have make up artists there to zombify you or touch things up.

They need more zombies to show up at 6:00 pm for the second stage of shooting. As many zombies as possible would be great. If you can commit to being there again on Friday night that would be even better.

The schedule of events is:

1 p.m. Thursday, September 23:
Make-up

2 p.m. Thursday, September 23:
Shooting while the train is moving: 15 zombies required.

6 p.m. Thursday, September 23:
Make-up

8 p.m. Thursday, September 23:
Shooting of zombies swarming train at Waterloo Station.

10 p.m. Friday, September 24:
Zombies to participate in a live event.

If you show up Thursday, you will be told when you need to be at the train station for make-up on Friday night. It all has to be timed right.

This is a great opportunity for local zombies to take part in a film/art project/live theatre event. It sounds amazing. Sadly, your Zombiemaster is out of town and cannot participate but I'm sure you will all do me proud out there.

The artist involved is Jillian McDonald and the co-ordinater is Gordon Hatt. Track them down if you need more info or want to help.

- Zombiemaster Mike

Here's a bit from Gordon Hatt:

CAFKA is really excited to to see the great response to our zombie shooting on Thursday September 23 and the performance on Friday, September 24. Basically, we need about 15 hard core zombies for Thursday afternoon to be ready by the 2 p.m. train departure and shooting. More zombies are need at 8 when s...hoot a swarming of the train. On Friday night at 10, we will do it again with as many zombies as we can muster. We are going to be doing basic make-up and costume at the train station before shooting and performing, but if you want to develop a more elaborate make-up and costume at home, by all means.

Jillian Mcdonald has done a number of zombie performances and shootings in Canada, the United States and in Europe. She is really great to work with. Please call me at the CAFKA office (519.744.5123) email me (gwhatt@cafka.org) or contact me on FB for more details.

Be sure to keep an eye on the CAFKA website for the comings and goings of our regions local artists, and as a great bonus, national and international ones too.

Waterloo Royal Medieval Faire This Saturday!

It is upon us! The Royal Medieval Faire is this Saturday in Waterloo Park, and there you can find some mirth, merriment, and a bunch of people dressed up like they're not from around here. It's almost...almost like they're from.....another time!!1

Indeed, the faire is very clearly a temporal rift that opens up around the same time every year, in the ides of september it seems. I have been monitoring them for quite some time, and I am seeking a way to restore them permanently to their proper time. Or maybe I'll find a way to seal them here forever so I can dance a foppish jig with the knights and ladies every weekend. Whichever solution presents itself first.

Bring the family and friends and maybe...just maybe...you will meet me in my true form - as THE WIZAARD, GUARDIAN WIZARD OF WATERLOO (the loser in the cheap wizard hat).

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #57: LOL (2006)

Technology, what have you done to me?

I decided to check this out after a friend recommended it to me for its music. LOL is part of an indie film movement lovingly called Mumblecore, which is characterised by being indie and ultra-low budge with a reliance on lower end digital cameras, improvised scripts, and centered on young twenty-somethings dealing with each other in alienation-infused matters of love and friendship. It's pretty much hipster filmmaking, which would normally really irritate me, but I suspect that its internet-junkie sensibility spoke to me.

LOL didn't irritate me much as I had expected. I actually thought it was pretty brilliant, if a little boring. The characters are all engaged in relationships governed and disrupted by an insistence on technology, and as such, this flick makes for good essay fodder. Someone is always using a cellphone or a computer in the film and trying to communicate or mediate their lives. They come to mediate our own experience of the characters lives as well, like where the photographs taken by someone's cellphone flash across the screen, once that cellphone has been introduced into a scene. The images on the phone might contradict something someone's said and proven them to be a liar. Or it might reflect on their personality of desires.

Now, the style, with disconnected and improvised scenes and dialogue, does a lot to draw you in but sometimes too little to keep you there. I occasionally found myself waiting for something to happen, and I was saved often by the film's music segments. LOL's crux is probably in the music, actually, where musician/actor Kevin Bewersdorf stitches music together using the recorded footage of people making random noises with their mouths. An emotive language pieced together through electronics, where completely separate people are brought together to make a song and yet remain separate and isolated in their own lives. Odin's beard! I bet it's a metaphor!

I particularly liked it when a song composed using two lovers appear on screen shortly after they've ostensibly broken up, thanks to the sexual politics they come across because of their long distance, cellphone-mediated relationship. There's also this clever scene where someone named Tim is having a text chat online with a dude named Mike sitting on the same couch he's sitting on, talking about his problematic relationship while Tim's girlfriend watches TV. Their text dialogue flashes on the screen as the TV blares out a conversation between a guy named Mike and his girlfriend, where the girlfriend confronts TV Mike for failing the relationship. It takes a few seconds to sort it out. Media wrapped on media wrapped on media.

So: Good for an essay. Maybe not good for a casual evening.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #56: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)

Why aren't we in a video game?

I remember seeing this with friends when it came out, way back at the start of the new millennium. Among my friends (and we're all video game nerds) it was an event movie, and we were excited about it. Not only was it linked to one of our favourite video game series, it was also, it's been said, the first time a feature length CGI movie attempted to create realistic looking human beings. I think that for the latter reason it was somewhat of an event movie for the non-nerdy general public, but I can't quite remember. At any rate, it bombed horribly, and Squaresoft swore that they would never make another film. I remember walking out of the theatre thinking that it was visually impressive but fairly weightless. Nearly a decade later I decided to give it another shot, since I was feeling old and nostalgic enough. That might have coloured my vision, but on my recent viewing I found that it's really not that bad.

There is a fair amount of badness to it. Spirits Within plays out a like a Squaresoft video game. That's to say that it's sappy, mostly obvious, and that the dialogue is pretty ridiculous. Characters will not only give bad dialogue, but dialogue that doesn't quite follow the train of thought. It comes to feel like a bad translation, even though it was written in English by English people. Supporting characters deliver lines at each other rather than interact with each other, which is pretty much, well, like Final Fantasy games. Also, the male lead, though voiced by Alec Baldwin, looks unmistakably like Ben Affleck. Which couldn't be more irritating.

Facial expressions are mostly blank. All the characters look like they're trying to hold back fits of laughter, since there's a motionlessness to the lips that looks like restraint when coupled with their calmed eyes. Since we're on the CGI effects, it's clearly a movie heavily laden with the pressure to wow you with the best CGI they could muster. It suffers from that, but, surprisingly, after the initial need to wow you has been satiated, starts to pick up about half way through the film. At that same time, the lame dialogue starts to get replaced with plot and sci-fi action. Much of the CGI is actually very good - the ghostly x-ray aliens look fantastic, as do the environments. The lighting is great, and there's an atmosphere to this movie that I found I really liked - which explains why by the ending I realised I was actually pretty entertained and it was better than I remembered. Atmosphere is the most important thing for me when I watch movies; all else can suffer, but if a good atmo can be maintained, I'm engrossed.

As a plus, the bonus feature disc is actually pretty interesting, since you get a documentary making-of that allows you to hit enter on your remote and watch little side-documentaries if you come across a certain aspect of the filmmaking that you'd like to hear a bit more about. It's much more interactive than I'm used to. There's also a section of the disc where you can choose the order of the shots in a certain scene and play at being an editor.

So: Feels like Final Fantasy - a guilty pleasure. More atmosphere and heart than I anticipated.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #55: Fidel Castro (2005)

Fidel Castro looks like Liam Neeson.

While continuing my brush-up on Cuban history, which started with Che: Part One, I realised that I knew next to nothing about Fidel Castro. Figured I should learn a bit about a man, the leader of a small third world country, who has, incredibly, put in his bid to direct the way the world spins. Turns out there's two documentaries on the bearded wonder, Fidel and Fidel Castro, the latter of which is a PBS production and part of The American Experience series. The first is a well-narrated and comprehensive rundown of Cuba's history that plays out like an A&E biography with still photographs and steady pacing, where the second is comprised mainly of more intimate footage of the man. My favourite parts, and perhaps the most telling, were the moments where you're given a stretch of footage, without any commentary, and you're forced to draw your own conclusions as to whether or not Castro is a just man, a tyrant, or just a man. The two work together well in painting a portrait of Castro, but the second adds a much more human face to the Cuban revolution and the military leader.

So: If you're looking to brush up on your Cuban history and can't be bothered to read because you're a busy bee and/or an illiterate drone, I can think of no better way.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #54: Samurai Assassin (1965)

Samurai Assassin is a samurai period piece, a jidaigeki, loosely based on the historic assassination of Ii Naosuke at the Sakurada Gate, an assassination that started the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the famous military dynasty that ruled Japan for 300 years. This one stars Toshiro Mifune, which had me excited.

As other staff members have undoubtedly written, Toshiro Mifune is awesome. His performances have a force to them that's hard to deny, and he's typically a treat to watch. In Samurai Assassin I felt like the Mifune factor wasn't at full capacity, and probably not through any fault of his own. In Assassin he plays Niiro, a disgraced ronin (a masterless samurai) down on his luck and full of bile, which is typically great Mifune fodder. But its only in the last half of the film that he starts to show some real character force.

During the first half to two thirds of the flick, there isn't too much to praise. The camerawork is stylish here and there, and the film would have benefited with a bit more of what it was serving on that front, but the film is frustratingly dialogue heavy, and most of it exposition about things that have happened off screen. Or lengthy speeches about a character's history. Since you actually don't see much of what's being talked about it's hard to stay on track with the plot, and as a result you can't quite invest yourself in any worthwhile way. The same thought will get reiterated over and over, and characters are perpetually trying to convince each other of things the audience knows as fact. It's meant to be dramatic tension, but it's too much and it gets boring. There's also a really strange romance between Niiro and the owner of an inn. It doesn't make much sense and progresses only so an idyllic and lamenting conversation can happen before the film's climax.

The last third of the film picks up really well, but by then, it's probably too late for most viewers given the two hour runtime. At this point the information slows down and some pathos slaps our collective audience face when we get to see some hard to watch betrayal go down. Things get worse and worse for Niiro, and the ending is a tooth and nail fight in the snow. The last shot is haunting.

So: Would be worth the watch with just a pinch more reward. Great ending, but comes too late.