Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #70: Pusher III: I'm The Angel of Death (2005)

The final film in the Pusher trilogy. This time we focus on Milo, the Copenhagen drug lord from the first two films. Milo, a Croatian immigrant, was seen up until now only as a looming power - friendly at first, fond of cooking and prone to culinary disasters, and vicious when crossed. By Pusher III, he is older, addicted to what he pushes, and is losing dealing ground to a new generation of would-be drug runners.

In Pusher III we get the greatest sense of desperation and waste. The amount of care you might find you have for Milo is surprising. You really want his addicts anonymous meetings to go well for him. You really want his daughter to appreciate him. You really want him to work himself out, and, most surprisingly, you really want him to kill his enemies. All this for a man that does some awful things, and makes his living on the suffering of others. That takes some pretty tactful filmmaking.

Issues of race and nationality are raised in this film much more than in the previous two films. We're given a host of immigrants trying to carve a tenuous life in the underworld of Copenhagen. Unfortunately for Milo, that means his turf. The new generation of pushers are all racially divided expats, the most threatening being a young Arab, and a rival Serbian group that attempts a passive aggressive (for the most part) takeover in a moment of weakness. Milo, being Croatian, doesn't handle this well. Or perhaps he does.

So: Same great character, dialogue, and cinematography. A great finish to a great trilogy.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #69: Pusher II: With Blood On My Hands (2004)

After loving Refn's first Pusher film, I was eager to continue. Pusher II did not disappoint, and if I had to make the hard choice, is probably the strongest film in the trilogy.

Mads Mikkelsen gets his chance to shine. I had first encountered him in that awful Clash of the Titans remake with Avatar-face McSoldierstein, and was greatly afraid that he sucked. I knew I was soon to see Mads in the unbeknownst-to-me-amazing Valhalla Rising, and feared the worst. So crappy move down, awesome movie up, I wondered what Pusher II would be like with him at centre stage. The answer to that is: Mads Mikkelsen is now an actor I will follow. I am enamoured by his screen presence and hope for some great films to come.

Pusher II is much like the first film in terms of its visual sense, pacing, and dialogue, but is certainly tighter in all fields. The budget is higher, the scope larger, the characters more complex. As with each film save the first, you really can't help but invest affection in the gangster characters. They are by no means nice people, but they are more human than one would expect, and they are beset by environments of poverty, violence, and abusive family dynamics, and every second is emotionally riveting.

So: If you see any of the Pusher films, see this one.

Princess St. Haunted House!

It's your last weekend for some classic Hallowe'en fun. There's a Haunted House set up over at the Kitchener Waterloo Little Theatre on 9 Princess st E.

Tonight, and Friday you'll be able to check out the 7-9 pm kid friendly house, and the 9-11 pm not-so-kid friendly house. WHICH WILL YOU CHOOSE?

Admission is free, but donations are appreciated and benefit the St. Vincent de Paul Society, which is a guild of deadly assassins.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #68: The Color of Magic (2008)

This mini-series, comprised of two films, is based off of the incredibly charming work of Terry Pratchett, a British writer of glib, comical fantasy novels. I had seen the Hogfather about a year ago without realizing that it was a Terry Pratchett piece, and was amazed to find that I was watching a fantasy film that wasn't shit. In fact, it was probably one of the best fantasy films I'd ever seen.

The Color of Magic doesn't achieve the same kind of gravitas that the Hogfather reaches, but offers enough to endear me to Terry Pratchett's world, and more importantly, his characters. Color follows a lovable, aged, and underachieving wizard by the name of Rincewind who's studied magic for 40 years only to find that he can't really do anything particularly magical. There's grand adventure and whatnot, as is typical of the genre. But Color will poke fun at that.

The acting is half-way decent and the comic deliveries tend to be pretty entertaining. And ladies, start your swooning, because Color stars none other than "Mr. Samwise Gamgee I was in Lord of the Rings!" Sean Astin himself! You've shit your pants with amazement, since I can smell the sickly sweet excitement from here. Technically, more starring than Sean Astin is David Jason as Rincewind. He's the voice of Count Duckula! Remember him? And Mr. Toad from the Wind in the Willows! David Jason is terribly charming despite having a first name for a last name. Oh, and you get to watch Tim Curry get his evil wizard on. Damn right.

You'll also get a fascinating world to learn about, one that's flat like a disc and sitting atop four huge celestial elephants that are in turn sitting atop a huge space turtle. The whole world is strung together by oddity and humour.

I was surprised to find some fitting and strange film homages as well. Like a scene spoofing the famous "What is best in life?" scene from Conan the Barbarian, and references to Monty Python's Holy Grail and Star Wars. The strange one comes as a visual homage to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as the heroes dash out from a hiding place in slow motion, slinging spells like pistols in a last-ditch effort while under heavy spell-fire themselves. Where the hell did that come from? I mean I like it, but WTF, as the French say.

So: The jokes are sometimes over explained, but since it's so wildly imaginative, it never ceases to be interesting.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #67: Aeon Flux (Peter Chung, 1991)

Peter Chung’s cerebral and post-modern animated series, not that other thing from 2005 that you and I should never speak of. That which cannot be named.

The good Aeon Flux, the animated Aeon Flux, happens to feature my favourite femme fatale: the fearless, sexy, elite assassin - you guessed it - Aeon Flux. She’s deadly, anarchic, and downright impenetrable. You’re never quite sure what she’ll do, or, once she’s done something, exactly why she’s done it. She’s a stylish renegade of abstract proportions, without border or precise definition, and fiercely individual. And that’s the nature of the series on a whole. When you add a spastic, gritty and idiosyncratic animation style to the mix, you have a pretty surreal and engrossing experience on your hands.

It’s refreshing now and again to immerse yourself in an anti-story, an anti-TV series, where you’re not so much watching a story unfold as you are watching a story deconstruct and re-apply itself in liberating ways. I get the impression that like the heroine of the series, Peter Chung lives to shake things up. I thank him.

So: A wicked piece of animation, style, and paradox. Don't try to put it all together as you watch it - you're not supposed to.

New Conan Stills

Haven't seen any of the stills released for the new Conan flick? NOW YOU CAN IF YOU ARE STRONG AND FREE FROM THE YOKE OF MORALITY LIKE CONAN

Word is that the film will be released next year. And Rose Mcgowan is supposed to be in it. Not much detail beyond that. She was supposed to star in Robert Rodriguez' Red Sonja until their romance went badly. Could she be Red Sonja in Conan? Could it possibly be...a Robert E. Howard crossover!? Mcgowan is, of course, allowed to say very little about the topic, though the first picture you'll see after clicking the link supposedly features her, I wonder if it's just a dirty trick. The secrecy seems strange.

The Latest From Tommy Wiseau, Director of The Room!

THE HOUSE THAT DRIPS BLOOD ON ALEX. A short 12 minute film and a not-so-chilling tale about a guy that buys a house from a shifty evil guy.

If you've seen the historic The Room by Tommy Wiseau, you'll know what to expect. Tommy failed embarrassingly to craft a serious drama in The Room, and ended up creating instead what has been hailed by many as the worst movie ever made. To save face and spin his failure into a money-making success, he decided to call his film a piece of irony. Now he's making comedy and claims that comedy was his goal all along.

Now that he's purposely trying to make his films terrible, will he lose his charm? You be the judge!

I can say this: he seems fixated on rooms and houses. Oh Crom. This man might be an auteur. Can you be an auteur unintentionally? Why I am I shrivelling inside?

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #66: Krull (1983)

Read it and weep, boys.

I’d first like to thank Krull for giving the Glaive to the world. Once I find it, locked away in some (no doubt) nearby mountain, life’s going to be a whole lot more interesting. I can’t think of one life-situation where a glaive couldn’t be applied to achieve great success.

If you don’t know what the Glaive is I’d imagine you’ve never seen Krull, and I would think, furthermore, that you’d better get on that before the Slayers arrive. They’re evil and blackly armoured juggernauts that take people’s planets from them. Then they give the enslaved worlds over to their boss, who is the Beast. I don’t think you want that. If you do, you are what’s called a bad person.

The Beast will likely kidnap a princess and try to wed her, and if you, dear reader, are a prince, I’m afraid you’re going to have to do something. You’re going to have to find some British actors, band together, and find The Beast’s wonderfully surrealist fortress. Getting in and saving the day is going to be dangerous.

But at least there’s the goddamned Glaive, which is shaped like a big starfish and has retractable blades and you can throw it around and control it with your mind. And guess what! The Beast fucking HATES it.

All in all Krull is a glittering and melodramatic science-fantasy done well, which makes it a lot of fun. It might feel a bit long, but the amazing James Horner score should make up for it. And the Beast looks like the creature from the black lagoon after his black lagoon became a toxic nightmare.

So: Give Krull a try so you’ll know what to do when the Slayers come.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #65: Highlander: The Source (2007)

No. Just no.

Now, I love Highlander. I love the concept. I love swords, I love immortals. What I don’t love are films that are made with an ethos something like HEY MAN REMEMBER THAT MOVIE WE LOVED WHEN WE WERE YOUNG LET’S DO ANOTHER ONE BUT MAKE SURE THAT EVERYBODY ON THE PROJECT IS A HACK AND A DUKE OF MEDIOCRITY.

I’m sorry fans, but it shines from every facet with a stupefying lack of talent. And most glaring is the writing.

So: the world has ended for some unexplained reason. Civilisation has crumbled and there’s this thing called The Source. Duncan Macleod and his pals decide to look for it after all the planets in our milky-way galaxy suddenly align. But there’s a problem – The Source is guarded by a fucking Looney-tunes character.

It turns out that the “Guardian” of the nexus of the galaxy is a goof in S&M gear. He gets his fun by killing and by shouting hello really loudly after he sneaks up on someone, or sometimes when he just sees someone. Like when Joe smacks into him with a truck. As the Guardian flies backwards through the air, the writers thought it best to have him shout HELLO JOE! like a fucking clown, arms and legs held out like he was doing a jumping-jack.

That’s cute. He’s the Guardian of the nexus of the galaxy.

I'm going to spoil it for you, so stop reading if you actually want to see this movie with friends, piss yourself laughing, and get surprised (or not surprised) by the Guardian's defeat. Here’s how Unkie Dunk beats him: Duncan Macleod of the clan Macleod runs so quickly around the Guardian that he is actually drilled into the ground and is trapped. Before he explodes for some reason, he screams NOOO! I’M GONE FOREVER.

I’m not kidding.

But that’s not really the ending. There isn’t one, I’m afraid. And I don’t mean that in a great No Country For Old Men way. I mean that instead of actually showing the audience much of what occurs after Macleod makes his “I’m done with this immortal life of killing” choice, the film fades. And the unthinkable happens. They recap the film for about three minutes. All the major, ultra boring plot points that you don’t need or want to see ever again. A recap just for fun, as though you hadn’t been paying attention, which, in all fairness, could well be true. When that’s done, instead of seeing much of what happens we get a voiceover telling us what happens: The Source is won and now Duncan and his love have a child, since she can suddenly feel her new pregnant-ness. The Source is god and he gives people babies. We see a quick shot of Macleod and Mrs. Macleod floating naked.

So: This is the way the franchise ends, not with a bang but a recap.

Here are some things IMDB forum folk learned from Highlander: The Source:

1. In a decimated post-war Eastern Europe you can easily gain access to sophisticated ultra-modern communications equipment since it's protected by one security guard.

2. Being a 5000 year old immortal that has traveled the length and breadth of the world does not mean you can pull off wearing a leather jacket with tassels.

3. When planets align they will appear bigger and closer to us than Earth's own moon.

4. If you want a big explosion in your movie, have a guy decide to drive a post-apocalyptically valuable gas truck through a brawl and crash it.

5. If you want to move characters quickly onto an island, have one of them say "We need a boat," followed by a shot of them on a boat. Then show them at a pier, watching the boat move away. All this can be done in two minutes.

6. When a woman enters the Source her clothing changes and her hair is braided.

7. Three Immortals with thousands of years of battle-honed experience cannot see or hear cannibals tromping through a sparse forest until they are surrounded.

8. ‘Lawlessness’ means the cops show up just in time to witness a stabbing and begin pursuit.

9. Although they have firearms and motorcycles, cannibals prefer to chase people around on foot and horseback with wrenches and knives. It is more satisfying.

10. Queen doesn't sound good when ‘updated’ as generic hard rock.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #64: Survival of the Dead (2009)

Oh! Who put this neck here?

The original Dawn of the Dead is one of my favourite films of all time. I've got a lot of respect for Romero as a filmmaker. But I can't follow him into his newer works.

The problem with Romero films (and they get progressively worse for this as he gets older) is that they don't seem to be terribly well-reasoned. As time as peeled away, he seems less and less interested in making sense and more and more interested in being unfunny. He likes to throw things away so he can have a silly scene now and again, things like logic, physics, reasonable human behaviour, consistent character. You kind of need these for movies to be somewhat believable and worth investing in. Not always, but usually. Normally this tendency is forgivable in a comedy, but that is dependent on your comedy not SUCKING. Unfortunately, as GenXMike pointed out to me, Romero has the sense of humour of a 70 year old man. Probably because he's 70. Somehow, this works to give him the comedic sensibility of a 10 year old boy.

I can never quite accept just how often people refuse to shoot someone they know, either friend or family, that is clearly a zombie. Now, I know that I can't quite say just how a person would react in a horrific and zombie related crisis, but to my mind, if people were faced with a 100 percent lethal and highly contagious plague that caused the infected to attack and kill the uninfected with abandon, they would have little trouble pulling a trigger. Society has collapsed. You can't let an infected person to touch you or your loved ones. You also don't want one of your loved ones to devour another one of your loved ones. Everyone in this film has seen what a zombie will do. You'll pull the trigger.

But we get an island community that's torn down the middle and fighting amongst themselves as to whether or it's kosher to put down the zombies that are clearly trying to eat them. It's the reasonable "We should make sure they don't kill us." people vs. the crazy "They're human beings even if they're dead!" people. The big ethical question is whether or not we should kill all the zombies or teach them to eat something that isn't us. Again, it's a no-brainer. Put down dangerous infected corpses or spend all of our time keeping them penned up and fed with fresh animals. Sarcasm will here be shown in bold. Gee! We best do the latter! I just can't bear to see these lovable shambling horrors killed!

Oi. Onto the characters. They're pretty annoying. Particularly the tech-obsessed emo teenager wearing his headphones around his neck (in a zombie apocalypse) and surfing the web on his iPhone. I guess society hasn't entirely collapsed. The kid seems to be a crack shot with a pistol for some reason. Then there's the embarrassingly horny lesbian soldier that can't keep her hand out of her pants.

The film wastes most of its time on a ridiculous feud between two Irish families, and all drama is weightless and forced. There is also, sadly, a serious lack of zombie action. When the zombies are there, they're actually pretty non-threatening. Now, I tend to prefer slow moving zombies to the modern fast type, so it's not that. It's the fact that you can apparently just push a zombie around and kill them gingerly. When a zombie does get someone, it's played up for its comedy so lamely that Romero is effectively de-horrorising his own genre. He's making zombies a joke, and I can only assume it's out of some kind of spite. Spite not for fans, but for something I can't quite place. Spite for the film industry? I have the sneaking suspicion that he has spite for filmmaking in general. That he hates the money and the teeth-pulling, so he goofs around on screen. Or madness over the fact that there are a great many 'of the dead' films and he owns very few of them. In the special features he seems absolutely exasperated about filmmaking, and laments about what a slog through horrible conditions his film productions tend to be.

So: Poorly reasoned. Not funny. Excruciatingly boring. Reeks of Canadian mediocrity.

Poetry Night at the Starlight Lounge

It pleases me to report that the Starlight Lounge, located at 47 King st. N in Uptown Waterloo is going to be hosting a night of indie fiction and poetry on Monday, October the the 18th.

Oh yeah, and it's effing FREE.

Doors at 7.

Here's the line up:

Gary Barwin - The Porcupinity of the Stars

Natalee Caple - The Semiconducting Dictionary

Evie Christie - The Bourgeois Empire

Sheila Heti - How Should a Person Be?

George Murray - Glimpse: Selected Aphorisms

Dorothy Ellen Palmer - When Fenelon Falls

Do what thou wilt!

Local I, Scream Horrorfest Starts today!

The local I, Scream Horrorfest begins today, located at The GIG Theatre on 137 Ontario st. in Kitchener, and lasts through to saturday and sunday! Go here for the schedule. If there's anything you'd like to see, you can bring 5 canned goods or non-perishable items for the food bank and ticket prices are halved. Like magic!

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #63: Metalocalypse Season 1 (2006)

So the end times really must be near, since never in my wildest imaginings would I have expected this show to grace the screens. Not even via the twisted hearts working within Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. Metalocalypse is clearly the cartoon comedy I hadn't realised I wanted.

Here's the deal: Dethklok, a death metal band, has become the most popular musical force on the planet. An album’s delay will result in world-wide rioting. Their home-base and recording studio is the size of a small country; their staff a standing army, darkly hooded and fitted with medieval weaponry. The band’s mission is to make all things metal. Clowns, sea-life, coffee, doorknobs, everything. It is the Metalocalypse, and each episode a secret society comprised of religious figures, military generals, and specialists (voiced by various heavy metal legends) try to stop it from coming to pass. It’s a wicked engine of hilarity and heavy metal hooplah, filled with absurd violence, satire, fantasy, nods to subculture, and genuinely well-crafted death metal. A live incarnation of Dethklok tours now and again (I managed to see them in concert last year with Mastodon), lead by series co-creator Brendon Small of Home Movies fame. Small is apparently music grad and evidently a master shredder. 'The Dethalbum' features the amazing songs from the show and belongs in any honest metal collection.

It’s all absolutely wonderful. You’ve guessed, I’m sure, that this is pretty much a dish served for metal heads and geeks, and that if you’re neither of the two, there won’t be much for you to appreciate. But that might not be entirely true – if you’ve seen and liked any Adult Swim cartoons, I dare say you might like this. The humour is in the same vein, chiefly delivered through bizarre, meandering conversations and random occurrences. But, this time, with a heavy touch of heavy metal.

So: Can't recommend this show enough. One of my favourite shows of all time.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #62: The Film Crew: Hollywood After Dark (2007)

Lovers of Mystery Science Theater 3000 rejoice. Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy graced our screens for a handful of films under the alias of 'The Film Crew.' And they certainly haven't lost their utterly unique charm. For those unfamiliar with MST3K, the concept is this: three friends watch a terrible movie together and poke fun at it as you watch along with them. I find few things in life more entertaining than this indestructible arrangement. So sticking pretty close to the MST3K formula, they give you a comically scrutinised and ridiculed B-film, peppered here and there with short asides where the guys gather together for lunch and tomfoolery.

Hollywood After Dark (1964) is their film under review this time, and stars the late Rue McClanahan (Blanche from Golden Girls). The Film Crew doesn’t let you forget that. The film itself is a warning to young would-be actors thinking they’ll find success in that dismal place second only to dread Mordor: HOLLYWOOD. Well, the two may in fact be the same place, since it’s dirty and people will betray you and do evil things. And the bigwigs have taken to dressing in black robes and riding matching black dragons.

There are a few others in the Film Crew series, and they’re all worth checking out. On top of that, you can visit www.rifftrax.com to see their latest project – downloadable commentary tracks to watch along with new DVD releases! Highly recommended.

So: Can't think of a better 'night with friends' kind of plan.