Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #96: Shame (2011)

People quite naked,
Long take alienation,
Uncomfortable

Director Steve McQueen garnered deserved praise for Hunger back in 2008, a film in which Michael Fassbinder plays a jailed Irish republican who leads his entire prison into a hunger strike. A visceral drama of human politics and the human body, Hunger was an impressive debut for McQueen. When I learned both him and Fassbinder were teaming up for a movie about a cold sex-addict, I had some faith. Shame didn't betray, and I think I liked it, but the experience left me as listless and blank as its protagonist. Guess that's the point. Fun to mull over after having seen it, but the seeing part is less than arresting. What we have here is the kind of movie that serves as excellent essay fodder.

Now I love me a long take - the longer a shot is, the more you invest in it. There's more tension, a more natural and organic feel; that's some of what you get when you go the long take route, stylistically. You can also get bored, though.

It's tough for me not to like a long take, but in Shame I found myself in a couple of instances where I really didn't care about what I was seeing. Might be that's the desired effect: during a sequence where Fassbinder is struggling with some kind of human reaction, he goes for a sudden jog through the streets of New York. It's long, it's detached, it dislocates you from what came before. It's a bit tedious as well,  like in an earlier scene where Carey Mulligan is singing in a swanky lounge. We don't get to see very much of Fassbinder's reactions, though we do see his stony face shed a tear. We mostly get Mulligan's face, singing a pretty long tune from start to finish. Visually, you aren't given much to keep you going. There's another sequence where a really awkward waiter keeps interrupting a date between Fassbinder and a co-worker over and over. It was there that it suddenly started to make sense for me: as viewers we were being pushed away! McQueen you bastard! You cad! We were being denied any kind of easy connection with our sex-mad hero because he just can't bring himself to connect at all.

Seeing that in the movie I'd normally shout ZOMG BRILLIANT! and say the film was great, but there were quite a few moments in the latter half of the film where its points about alienation and the erosion of human empathy were so heavy-handed that I had to turn to the person next to me and chuckle a bit. It busts out a few cliches - running out onto a rainy peer and collapsing into a disparaging cry, some emo wrist-cutting, some serious overscoring, and at three points I thought the movie was gearing up to cut to black and end. But somehow there was more.

Alright, now the sexy sex bit of the review. As you'd expect from a film about a sex addict, there's a lot of sex. The sex is fairly explicit, but I think they show you less than you come away thinking you saw. There's full frontal, but it never shows the penetrational pomp that porno promises. There's much humping, much undulation, and much face in the throws of orgasm - enough of all that to make you feel embarrassed and as exposed sitting in a dark theatre as the naked actors are on screen. All part of McQueen's Brechtian alienation tactics, I suspect.

So: Not terrible. Solid acting, obvious with its theme, tedious at times. Stuck in my brain for awhile though, which could count for something.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #95: Tales of an Ancient Empire (2010)

 Hi there. I'm a drooling man. I was featured prominently on the DVD cover. I'm in the movie for 5 minutes.

 
Beyond confusing
Sword and Sorcery green screen
Irredeemable

Albert Pyun made a film in 1982 that was named after the genre it was exploiting. It was The Sword and the Sorcerer. It had swords, it had sorcery. It was a sword and sorcery film.

It was released the same year as Conan the Barbarian, the film that kickstarted an 80s SnS craze that would reach into the B-movie production pits of Argentina and Italy and beyond. It was one of the very first of the Conan copy-cats, if not the first. It was certainly one of the highest budgeted. Many have been made, but few have been chosen by fans as a worthwhile blip on the heart rate monitor of the genre. The Sword and the Sorcerer has been chosen, because one cannot say no to a three-bladed missile sword. It fires its blades.


20 years later we get Tales of an Ancient Empire, promised originally to be a sequel to Sword and Sorcerer, it quickly changed. The only link it has to the first film is a brief cameo by the Sorcerer's star, Lee Horsley, who is falsely credited on IMDB.com as Talon. He didn't cameo as Talon, his old character. He was some other adventurer. That doesn't bother me all that much.

I'm bothered by the fact that it is, without a doubt, one of the most unwatchable films I have ever seen. That's no small statement for me. It'd be a good bet that it's in the five worst films I've ever seen list, among the likes of Night Train to Mundo Fine and Zombie Nation, utterly baffling films that aren't even enjoyable for being terrible.

Tales of an Ancient Empire is expertly convoluted. Each scene seems so unrelated to the previous one, so poorly paced, so disjointed, that I could swear I was watching a bad TV series boiled down into an 85 minute movie. An entire season of awful acting, terrible green-screenery, and embarassing dialogue. So, the green-screening. Most of the film is shot, judging by the special features, in a garage studio in front of a green screen. Most of the film consists of shots of characters standing in one place with some silly backdrop filled in. Like in the opening prologue - a prologue that lasts a good 10-15 minutes. It's effectively a feature film unto itself, and is the only section of the entire movie that's coherent because an annoying narrator tells you what's happening. Well, what should be happening. What you actually see is some guys in painfully obvious wigs playing at being samurai and swinging swords over a scroll-like backdrop, attacking nothing. FOR TEN FUCKING MINUTES. That's the equivalent to a text prologue by Robert Jordan (heron-mark swords rest his soul).

This prologue drudgery will in fact be better than the rest of the movie.

Most of the action is implied, and not in a way that lets you use your imagination. In a way that looks stupid. Like a picture of Kevin Sorbo sliding against a picture of a vampire. Or having a sword strike out slowly at the camera, as though the actor was afraid to hit filming equipment. Oh right, I keep forgetting Kevin Sorbo is in this. Likely because he isn't the main character. There doesn't seem to be one really. I guess the Melissa Ordway character is supposed to be, but her story is obscure despite being cliché, and whatever revenge resolution she was aiming for gets lost when the movie derails into epilogue. The narrator (and if you read my Conan review, you know I hate narrators) turns out to be an evil vamp by the end, and we get filled in on what the ending of the movie was to be. Sorbo somehow killed the vampire sorcerer but she came back to life in a desert and the vamps have taken over everything.

Vampires kind of usurp the movie. So much of the movie really is, without exaggeration, the entrance of some vampire character we've never seen before picking someone else we've never seen before and draining their blood. Sometimes turning them into a vampire. Rinse, repeat. Green-screen it, onto the next shot. It's like there's a vampire movie fighting for control of the sword and sorcery movie fighting for control with a California garage studio. Can't wait for the fucking sequel.

So: It takes a lot for a movie to defeat me. I am vanquished.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #94: Conan The Barbarian (2011)

 That's right. We've got Morgan Freeman's voice. And we're not giving it back.

Chicks wearing little,

Swords, axes, and sorcery

Somehow made boring.

Here's a little tip: if you go to see a movie and it starts off with voice-over narration, even if it's Morgan Freeman, it's probably going to suck. Hard.

Guess what Conan does. Then guess the result.

Narration's bad because going that route typically breaks that always important 'show don't tell' rule. Fantasy films just love to feel like story books and open with a prologue that clearly establishes you're about to enter into a magic realm full of dancing wizards and burrowing unicorns. But it doesn't ever need to because when you go to see a fantasy film it's a pretty safe assumption that you're going to see some fucking fantasy. That's the point. And if informing you that you're in for a wizardy time isn't their mission, then the voice-over will be there to fill you in on some legend or similar crap that will be of importance to the characters and to the movie's overall aim to be cliché. This they don't have to do either, because all that backstory stuff can be revealed as you actually watch the movie. We can figure it out. All it would require is a bit of careful writing, which is, of course, unfair to the diseased monkeys the producers of Conan chained to a typewriter in a Swedish dungeon.

What was worthwhile in Conan? Not much. You'd think scantily clan woman and swords would be enough, but it really isn't. I'd say only the appearance of Ron Perlman is worth watching, but after he departs the film never manages to reach that dizzying height again. The 3d sucked. Not just because the pop-outs were cheap, but the effects mostly looked like paper cut-outs walking over paper cut-out backgrounds. It's way over-scored, meaning that the soundtrack plays way too much and is overly epic at points that don't call for it. There's a pointless sex scene with an even more pointless romance that just wastes time and patience. The female character involved is token at the best of times, which I guess I was expecting, but part of me hoped for more. I probably shouldn't have hoped for any kind of sophistication once I heard some of the dialogue. Some key lines were, and I quote, "Barbarian, I don't like you anymore" and "Barbarian! I'm going to kill you with your father's blade!" And Conan just shouting "Die!!" as he kicks someone. It was like a grade 7 writing exercise.

You know how movies that think they're being clever will often have a line uttered early on in the film by the bad guy and then later on the good guy will use the same line once the tables have turned? And you can twitch in your seat and pee in your pants and whimper something like 'omg thatz wut he said b4.' That line repetition is meant to be witty or ironic, but in Conan it felt like it was done just to strike that movie cliché off the list.

There was just a hell of a lot of shoddy thinking. More than could be excused. Like enemies that were clearly just Pict-esque human dudes in warpaints snarling like they were supposed to be orcs or werewolves or something. They actually used animal sound effects for them. And there's a scene where a ship is being boarded in the secret hours of the night, but within moments the intruders are discovered and a fight breaks out onto the deck – and it's broad daylight. The movie pays so little attention to itself that it fails even to get the most basic thing about Conan right – that he's a badass. Conan's not really supposed to be a good guy. He's actually a pretty huge dick. But this incarnation made him out to be a noble savage fighting the good fight, saving the girl, overthrowing the evil overlord etc. etc. The actions and motivations of the characters in general seemed arbitrary and stripped of import or gravity. Fairly early on in the film I came to the realisation that I didn't care about what was happening on the screen, and was far more interested in the backs of the heads of people I didn't know sitting in front of me. That one's balding. That person left her hat on. Isn't she overly warm? What does she do for a living? That was me hungry for character.

 

Just try and care about me. I dare you.

I was somewhat happy to see a two-bladed sword in the movie. Not a blade for each end of the stick mind you, a sword with two blades running parallel to each other. Hadn't seen anything that silly since Sword and the Sorceror's three-bladed canon-sword.

So: Has potentially destroyed an already shakey market for sword and sorcery films that aren't The Hobbit.