The Quest For A Quest

Re-cycled paintings at Cafe Pyrus!

2011-09-12T01:35:00.001-04:00

Splendiferous local artist Kate Cox will be showing works from her series of found and modified paintings in Cafe Pyrus (just across the street from the bus station) starting on Tuesday the 13th.

Stop by, grab a drink, and check out some of her seriously cool pieces. It'll be on display until October, and if you miss it, a terrible fate will befall you and your family.

Horses chased by flying saucers! Dragons perched atop lighthouses! Environment-suited children playing ice hockey at your grand-dad's cabin! Wonders and horrors await you!

Check out Kate's blog for more information on her ongoing project!

Holst's The Planets at the KW Symphony - Tonight and Tomorrow!

2011-05-27T15:39:00.001-04:00

The Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra will be performing Debussy's Nocturnes and finishing off with Holst's great cosmic work tonight, Friday the 27th, and Saturday the 28th at 8pm. At Centre in the Square. Tickets range from $19 to $75, so if you've got some cash to throw down you better do so.

To anyone reading this, should I die in battle or of a broken heart, I would like Holst's Mars, Bringer of War to be played at my funeral. Timed well, so that when my pyre is shoveled onto a catapult and fired onto a fierce ship I can sail burning and gloriously out to sea:

Oh, the pre-concert talk begins at 7 if you'd like some background info on the pieces being performed.

Videos posted won't show on facebook. Originally posted on my blog, qfaq.blogspot.com.

The Mana Bar - And I'm Effing Jealous

2011-05-13T17:58:00.002-04:00

I miss arcades.

I miss playing video games in a vibrant, sociable setting. Outside of house. Something downtown, something plugged in, so to speak.

What I don't miss are the obnoxious children. I was one of them. I don't imagine they miss me either.

Well in Brisbane, Australia, truly now a land of wonder, you can go to a nifty bar, buy a beer with ageable people, and sit down to some good ol' vidya game. Either with friends or with random 8-bit bretheren you didn't know you had.

I like video gamey in-jokes, so a place called "The Mana Bar" pretty much makes my eyes sweat, my knees palpitate, and my thumbs hiccup with the promise of point-related ecstasy.

And Yahtzee, famed video game reviewer, hangs out there. Jeez. Check out the opening day vid:

If any wealthy-savvy-foolish-business-types from Waterloo Region are reading this, please blow all of your money on a venture like this so I can go to it for a month or two. Which is the time it'll take to regret your choice and realise you're broke because we don't really have the population base to make a Mana Bar work here.

Videos posted won't show on facebook. Originally posted on my blog, qfaq.blogspot.com.

Under The Influence: Masters of the Universe Tribute Art Show

2011-04-05T14:18:00.002-04:00

In my online travels today I came across this wicked 2010 gallery show filled with artwork inspired by the inimitable He-Man. There's a long post filled with some great imagery to be found at this link. There's something I find really compelling about artwork made through the regurgitation of cartoon imagery, especially from a terrible cartoon. He-Man was sold to us, most of us bought it, and now we seem to be trying to give it some kind importance. Judging by the gallery show, that manifests sometimes as the attachment of dignity through some kind of poetic understanding, the stripping of dignity like the above piece, or simply the urge to see these oddly beloved characters actually drawn well for a change. The animators of the original show certainly didn't give a shit.

The show included an amazing piece from one of my fave artists: Skinner. You might recall my admiration from one of my first blogposts. Behold!

Skinner's 'He Who Walks The Path Of Titans, Knows Not What Faith Will Bring'

Originally posted on my blog, qfaq.blogspot.com.

Funkadelic vs. Infected Mushroom

2011-03-23T12:25:00.006-04:00

Want to do some simple youtube DJing?

Came across these instructions when I listened to Funkadelic's Maggot Brain on youtube. You can do an interesting overlay by playing Infected Mushroom's Heavyweight at the same time. By all means listen to both tracks individually first if you've got some minutes to spend.

Here's what you do with the following two youtube vids:

1 - Put Heavyweight at 25% volume and leave Maggot Brain at 100% volume. Maggot Brain's the first vid.
2 - Start Heavyweight. When the first noise sounds (about 1 second into it), hit play on Maggot Brain.
3 - Trip out in some rave-like fashion.

If you're reading this on bookface, the vids won't show up. Here's the link to the original blog post.

Christopher Lee Makes a Metal Album

2011-03-22T13:23:00.002-04:00

Then you have elected the way....of metal!

Sir Christopher Lee, who seems to have traced his family tree back to Charlemagne, has decided to make a metal record based on the life of his ancient ancestor. It'll be a rock opera, and he'll be singing the part of Charlemagne. He's currently 88.

Lee's actually done a bit of metal work before, lending his resonant voice to the songs of power metal colossuses like Manowar and Rhapsody. In a vlog he posted, he describes his surprise over his burgeoning interest in metal of the symphonic variety, which is a breed of metal in which you 'can actually hear what's being said,' he puts it with a slight scowl. Symphonic metal, which is basically power metal drowned in orchestral bombasticism and melodrama, is about as cheesy as music can get.

Here's a sample:

Did you hear his fell voice on the wind? Gandalf my old friend, this should be an album to remember.

IT'S SARUUMAAAAAAANNNNN *avalanche*

If you're reading this on bookface, the vids won't show up. Here's the link to the original blog post.

Indian Superman and Spidergirl

2011-03-09T15:24:00.002-05:00

Just in case you haven't already seen this particular bollywood wonder, here's a video with superman and spidergirl, in love and dancing through the sky.

Originally posted on my blog hereabouts.

Solar Deathray

2011-02-23T12:00:00.004-05:00

Some clever young evil scientist built himself a solar deathray that ups the solar heat we receive on earth 5000 times onto a single spot. Yep. Check out the vid:

The best part is knowing that the ray device was lost in a building fire.

Originally posted on my blog hereabouts.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #92: Bram Stoker's To Die For (1988)

2011-02-22T12:00:00.009-05:00

At last, vampires I can understand and relate to.

This movie has a fair bit of charm. Also, it's awful. But it seems to believe in itself, which leads me to enjoyment. I wish Rifftrax would cover it.

This is a film that's from the 80s and doesn't let you forget that at any point during its runtime. Pluses include a decent amount of rubbery monster gore and unexpectedly violent murders. Minuses mostly being lukewarm sex scenes you wish would go somewhere, and characters you don't care about. And there's quite a few more characters than there really needs to be. You can't shake the feeling that you're watching a TV pilot. I couldn't get Forever Knight out of my head.

Character rundown is as follows: Vlad Tepes with a British accent, a real estate agent named Kate, her asshole friend who thinks she's his girlfriend, another friend, that friend's aloof boyfriend, and then a monster vampire with a mullet. Oh and two cops that come and go just so someone can say something like 'Wow, who could have done this?'

Kate's friend who thinks he's her boyfriend is especially entertaining for being so utterly unlikable and getting rewarded for it. He's a total dickhead of a shallow and controlling jerk who, sadly, pretty much becomes the hero of the film by figuring out who VLAD TEPES is once he finds a book on VLAD TEPES' shelf called VLAD TEPES, and it's about the history of VLAD FUCKING TEPES. He promptly reads Bram Stoker's Dracula to learn how to kill vampires, of course. This is why To Die For is Bram Stoker's To Die For.

Mullet vampire is pretty awesome. His curly mulleted hair, his superbly 80s outfit, his lame shades, and his penchant for smoking makes him so. My favourite moment comes when mullet vampire dramatically tosses away a cigarette to pursue a murder victim, and by the time he enters the room she's walked into maybe 20 seconds later, he's apparently lit up another one because he's just so cool. I guess if you're immortal, addiction can get pretty bad.

Have a sultry trailer!

As the film went on I realised that I wasn't at all interested in the main characters. I wanted more of the cops. Every time they came on, I hoped beyond hope that they'd stay on the screen. I don't care about British Vlad Tepes. I wanted the adventures of Grizzled Veteran Black Cop and White Trash Rocker Cop! Kicking ass. Taking names. Getting shit done. Lt. Williams and Detective Bocco, writing your tombstone.

It's sad that I fixated on the barest, most non-character characters in the film because it was more interesting than vampires.

So: Certainly one of the most 80s films I've ever seen. After seeing it, I had the weird, atavistic urge to write a screenplay around the two cops, who, having seen the darkness lurking in the black of the shadows in the night time, have pledged themselves to the solving of paranormal crimes.

Also, here's a music video someone made with clips from the movie. This is someone's favourite film. She ignored the cops:

Original post can be found on my blog hereabouts.

Donald Duck Did It First

2011-02-21T21:32:00.004-05:00

Inception? McScrooge? No, I do not believe this!

Thought I'd pass this Cracked.com link on. A friend posted it upon bookface and it was of the amusement. In it, it describes how farseeing Donald Duck is. You will not believe the wonders within.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #91: Six-String Samurai (1998)

2011-01-27T11:00:00.001-05:00

Post-apocalyptic wasteland U.S.A, taken over by the Russians! Vegas is one of the only cities left standing, and if you want to make it anywhere, it'll have to be there. But it's tough to get in. Tougher to survive the walk. Our stoic hero is a rockabilly guitar-picker who's decided to make for his fame and fortune.

Packing little beyond his guitar, a torn umbrella to shield himself from the hot desert sun, and a fucking samurai sword to defend himself against Russian raiders, he sets out across the arid land. Oh, and Death is literally after him. Death and a bunch of his evil henchmen. This is a winning concept, but the ultimate result is a little on the underwhelming side. I found myself bored more than once, which usually means that I need a gang to watch the movie with, and some sake.

If you can set up that kind of situation, also be prepared for wretched acting, camp dialogue, breakout gypsy-punk sequences, and sword duels that sometimes manage to be pretty stylish.

So: Could have been the best movie ever, but doesn't get too far along that track.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #90: Tron: Legacy

2011-01-26T10:50:00.001-05:00

Called Legacy to force some kind of dignity onto the project, Disney honestly will not give up on this franchise until people accept it and acknowledge that Disney was right all along, and that Tron is actually really cool.

If I can be outrageously generalising for this one, critics almost unanimously write that Tron: Legacy is pointlessly thin. Thin on plot, thin on character, thin on cultural significance. And half of them end off their reviews by saying that they thought it was pretty cool.

That's pretty much what we've got on our hands with this one - a movie that doesn't go very far to inspire or engage or even give you any thrills you haven't seen before in some shape or form, but is pretty cool, dude. It has its moments of "that technology is absolutely impossible" ridiculousness, and dramatic scenes that try too hard and mostly fall flat, but the overwhelming buzzy neon electro-music-video vibe, when combined with the full might of Daft Punk's original soundtrack, cannot be stopped.

Olivia Wilde is good, and her character is certainly the most fun to root for and watch at work. And I don't mean to say that it's because of eye-candy; her costume is strangely modest, given the norm in this sort of flick. I was very surprised to find that her role was refreshingly unsexualised. There's a shade of sexual tension, but her tender fascination with the boring lead male is understandable, given that he's the son of the dude that created her people's universe, and indeed just arrived from beyond it.

They've made Jeff Bridges look 20 years younger for some scenes through the magic of our favourite strategy: CGI. While awkward at points, it can be overlooked once everybody's in the electro-world. In the digital environment, a slightly rubbery face kind of suits Jeff Bridges.

The 3d effects, surprisingly, don't try to slap you in the face with cheap pop-outs, but stays pretty low key and keeps to background atmosphere. The decision to keep most of 3d stuff for the 'in the computer' environment is a smart one, and works to make the 3d tech an aesthetic choice rather than just a barefaced gimmick.

So: One of the coolest Daft Punk videos I've seen.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #89: Forbidden World (1982)

2010-12-23T16:00:00.000-05:00

Hello Space Marine. Care to have space sex?

The innuendo
drips like the slime from
black meta-mutants

Another Roger Corman alien-ripoff oh shit we're stuck in a space lab movie! When will it end? Hopefully never, because it's like a beautiful dream.

I was smitten with Forbidden World from the start because it gives you this trippy opening montage where a robot wakes a guy out of cryogenic stasis with some Beethoven. While the ship is being attacked by raiders. That's how I'd do it.

This one's actually pretty cool. I'm pleased to say that there's an attempt to keep the camera interesting throughout most of the movie, since we get a pretty wide variety of shots of things from places you wouldn't expect, but not so many that it starts to look like an overenthusiastic student film wank. You will get gratuitous ass shots of women walking in high heels, though. Quite a few. They're made to walk up and down the corridors in what must be standard space lab attire: skin-tight silvery jump suits with low cut chests and high heels. There are nighties too, and many situations where the female characters feel the need to be topless. Babes will literally bump into the protagonist and introduce themselves by batting their eyes. As one scientist puts it, the women there are apparently starved for new faces.

I absolutely love how often people will stop to have sex when there's a killer mutant loose in their science facility. It's got to be a space fetish of some kind. There's this ridiculous and great sequence where a security guard, who is watching for the goddamned deadly mutant, watches the blonde scientist get it on with the dopey space marine protagonist instead. It's an amazingly creepy violation of security camera protocol. As he watches, he pulls at some kind of light up space yo-yo and sweats profusely. This is the greatest form of space sex innuendo possible.

The scene is extra funny because the security guard looks exactly like Tim Roth. We get some fantastic space porno music evidently coming from a token black guy playing a screechy clear plastic space saxophone. This all goes on for a full two minutes, and the song actually gets pretty darn catchy by the time they hit orgasm. Forbidden Planet has a genuinely cool soundtrack by the way, a very Goblin one.

So while watching, the guard catches a glitch on a sensor and decides to investigate. That, of course, is serious trouble. What I love about his cautious search for the alien is that every 25 seconds or so we get a split second of the scientist and space marine having sex in their room. At first I was confused - is this guy afraid he's about to die and is reliving the happiest moment of his life? The one a minute ago when he was watching space marine fuck that girl he probably wants so badly? Then I thought: no, wait, the monster is using psychic projections of her getting it on to lure him in, because every time he hears something or looks over, it cuts to a few frames of sex. By the time the monster hits it's clear that they were going for a sex and murder montage that actually turns out to be fairly effective. An orgy of blood! An orgy of love! Everything the viewer might want in a scene! We get a shot of a different scientist smoking a cigarette afterwards, and I feel in my heart that it was Roger Corman in spirit.

The lab facility has a space sauna, and in the morning the space marine gets it on with girl number two there. The actor's attempt to look seductive just looks really weird - this doofy smirk and wide eyed "Heh heh, eh baby?" expression that makes the guy wholly unlikable. This look of course works within seconds on girl two, who's boyfriend was killed by the monster the previous day. Incredible. Space marine walks in and 'EEEK GET OUT! LEAVE NOW LEAVE NOW!' and after that pervy look, switches to (and this is a quote) "Fair's fair, get naked."

After the mutant attacks them both, some guy actually bulldozes over the fact that there's a killer creature on the loose by asking "Hey you know what I wanna know? I wanna know what you and Tracy were doing in there dressed like that." Just so girl number one can add a catty comment. Clearly, what they were doing in the sauna is much more important than the fact that they were nearly transformed into a digestible food tissue by a vicious mutant, and somebody better damn well take care of it. Nobody seems to give a shit about the mutant until it's attacking someone.

Hmm...maybe we should do something about this soon?

Now, you might have read my review of 1991's Dead Space. Turns out that Dead Space was in fact Roger Corman's remake of Forbidden World. Same plot. Same characters. Different names. At least three lines of dialogue that I noticed in Forbidden World found their way into Dead Space. The opening space battle in DS is lifted from the opening of FW, and I'm guessing that FW probably takes it from some even earlier Roger Corman film. Probably Battle Beyond the Stars, though it's been a while since I've seen that one.

So: You really have to watch any movie where characters hit computer keys with glowsticks. Standard, ordinary dollar-store glowsticks. Because fingers just aren't good enough.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #88: Valhalla Rising (2009)

2010-12-22T16:48:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to write a review for Valhalla Rising for quite some time. I've name-dropped it in other reviews, promising that I'd one day say a bit more about it. That day is upon you.

If you read any of the reviews I posted about The Pusher Trilogy, you probably noticed that I have nothing but high praise for Danish writer/director Nicolas Winding Refn. I haven't seen anything he's touched that I haven't liked. His images are stirring and organic, and he knows how to pull interesting performances out of his actors. He seems to be able to work special magic when he's working with Valhalla Rising lead Mads Mikkelson, a guy who could very easily turn into a misused Hollywood action chump (like in the awful Clash of the Titans remake). But he's chosen some very interesting, and in the case of Valhalla, daring films to be part of. In Valhalla Rising he doesn't say a single word.

Mads is 'One Eye', a completely silent one-eyed Viking slave/prize-fighter who eventually finds himself on a ship filled with Scotsman bound for the Crusades. There's really not too much more to say about the plot.

I'd wager that anyone passing by the DVD case would be immediately mislead. It's image of a grim Viking warrior standing alone with an axe in hand might make you expect a film filled with spectacle-driven violence. It isn't. There's in fact very little violence, but what violence there is some of the grittiest, ugliest violence I've seen on a screen. Mads' screen presence is great, and though silent (not to be confused with mute), manages to present you with a startling enigma you constantly struggle to decipher in terms of emotion and motive. This movie is minimalist in its strategy in almost every way and works essentially as a thought-provoking, poetic, and captivating existential mood piece. And it's about a fucking Viking. Who knew.

So: My pick for best movie of the year (it was released in North America only recently). Might not be your cup of tea, but if anything I said tickled your fancy, watch it.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #87: Dead Space (1991)

2010-12-09T21:32:00.000-05:00

Think about your hungry children, Bryan.

Another Roger Corman Alien rip-off with people and monster trapped in an inescapable lab!

Beastmaster dude Marc Singer plays a han solo-ish space marine, and he's alright. His mildly sarcastic robot sidekick is pretty cool. That's about all of interest in this movie.

The lead actress is absolutely terrible, and every line she delivers falls completely to the floor and shatters into pieces of "Why the fuck am I watching this?" I'd guess that she got the lead role because she was the only one to agree to get topless during the space-sex scene. Any of the relatively much more talented actresses in the cast would have been a better choice, and would have made Dead Space an easier pill to swallow. Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston makes a solid appearance as one of the main scientists at the facility though, and while nearly as boring as the other characters, it's clear from the get go that as an actor he's doing his absolute best with the gig.

The fight scenes are hilariously bad. I know I usually use words like "hilarious" in my reviews of terrible films, but this time I really really mean it. I actually laughed out loud during a few sequences, and had to pause the movie so my brain could do a reality check and confirm that I was actually seeing what I was seeing. Dead Space probably has the worst fight sequences I have ever seen, and I've seen my fair share of shitty violence. Characters just run around, back and forth, aimlessly diving and rolling. From one side of the room and then back again. To clutch at someone they don't think can hold their own and then topple over in fear. And normally, when you have a monster in a movie, you don't just have your characters start shouting and shooting and then show the monster lurking by the fog machine, you give a hint that the creature is there by the fog machine, all misty and atmospheric-like, and then you can have the heroes react. But this movie is riddled with instances where the characters are reacting to a monster we haven't been shown yet - not because we don't know what it looks like, we do already. But solely as an editing choice. The monster shots come last, come separately, and in some cases, have been shot in totally different locations and then edited together. It's pretty clear that most of the special effects shots were done late in the game, and that's normally a relatively fine stratagem if the editing supports it. The movie seems not to care overly much though.

The carelessness of the movie manifests in other numerous, joyously funny ways. Characters will sometimes enter a fight scene as though they were already battling for hours and are ready to pass out, just to match the forced intensity of the movie's scuffles. A particularly lame and cowardly character enters a room with an enormous alien creature he's terrified of and actually takes noticeable time to just walk up to it (in perfectly sound mind) just to get close enough so he could get killed for us. All the while he's being shouted at: "What are you doing? Where are you going?? What are you doing!?" At points it almost seems like a character takes on the consciousness of the movie and expresses its confusion over why it's doing what it's doing. The aforementioned lame character filled that role earlier by asking questions like "Why is he going up there??" and "What is he doing? He's stupid." Those were valid meta-questions, though within the film he was just being a dick.

The space marine walks into a room and somehow doesn't see the same huge alien creature that couldn't have possibly been hiding anywhere. He doesn't notice it until a claw peeks into the frame and attacks. The best response of course is to push the person he's trying to protect, his new girlfriend, onto the floor in front of the creature. He then backs up and starts shooting bullets that have never once injured the creature during the course of the film. If a bear ever came at my girlfriend and I during a secluded camping trip, I know I'd toss her down in front of the bear and start hurling small stones. I guess there's not too much threat with the monster though, it kind of just stands around and waves it's arms.

Of final note, this movie has an awful synthesized orchestral soundtrack that sounds like the jaunty background music to some old medieval strategy game.

So: I barely got through it, but I'm eternally grateful that this movie exists.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #86: The Terror Within (1989)

2010-12-05T13:00:00.000-05:00

I've been watching more Roger Corman ripoffs of Alien. Galaxy of Terror wasn't enough. Corman seems to be following a set up he likes for its relative simplicity: people are stuck in an isolated and inescapable lab facility with a monster that ripped out of someone's body. The monster picks everyone off one by one by working its way through the air vents.

The Terror Within takes that formula and places it within a post-apocalyptic setting where women give birth to mutants called Gargoyles. Where Galaxy of Terror had a maggot rape sequence, this time we get a Gargoyle rape sequence! Not nearly as graphic as its predecessor but just as ridiculous.

There's not much to say about this one, apart from the fact that it's deliciously terrible and manages to satisfy my craving for post-apocalyptic movies, for the odd moment anyway. You'll get awful acting, macho heroes and pseudo-feminist "I want to fight too!" heroines, a guy in a rubbery mutant suit, and an ending with an explosive final move that doesn't make sense because it isn't necessary. It also ruins chances of future survival in case their rescue doesn't actually pan out.

That isn't a spoiler because the heroes don't actually use it save their butts. They do it because they seem fixated on blowing up their lab for some reason, and so that the lead male could say "Adios motherfuckers" when some Gargoyles, on cue, start to crowd around their dilapidated shack/secret entrance. This is of course for the sake of having an explosion in a movie that up until that point had none, and been relatively ok for it. I kind of like how afterwards, however, the two survivors just sort of wander off into the Gargoyle-infested desert with their dog, supposedly making for some other lab in just as bad shape, and the credits roll to haunting music. Chances that they'll make it? SLIM.

So: Chances that you need to watch this? SLIMMER. Unless you've got bad taste like myself.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #85: Four Lions (2010)

2010-12-04T13:37:00.000-05:00

Chris Morris, a notoriously shy, reclusive BBC comedian and so-called "media terrorist" has directed his first feature film. And fittingly, it's about terrorism. Yippee! He's directed for and starred in various BBC television projects in the past, and his stuff is typically hilarious and full of biting commentary. Seeing his name on the DVD case certainly grabbed my interest, since it promised something aggressively satirical.

Four Lions centres on four British jihadists trying to take their ideals to a violent end and blow themselves up in the name of the great struggle against MacDonald's and Jews and all that jazz. One of the characters is so comfortable with blowing up that his own family encourages him lovingly towards his goal as though he were simply going for a raise at his security job. He's the one with the most relative sense, and the other guys are mostly hapless, confused, and belligerent. Some of them aren't exactly sure they want to blow up, but the peer pressure is too great for them. One goes so far as to try to train cute, friendly crows strapped with bombs to fly into sex toy shops and jihad themselves up to heaven. It doesn't go too well.

While the characters are clearly huge idiots, they also seem very human. The stupidity that it takes to blow yourself up and kill people doesn't precisely come from a fanatically religious place in Four Lions. Rather, it seems to have more to do with human insecurities and vulnerabilities. This makes the characters mostly sympathetic idiots rather than easily dismissed and disliked religious lunatics. You get the constant impression that these people are missing something and getting in way over their heads. The key phrase at a pivotal moment in the narrative is "I'm sorry. I don't really know what I'm doing."

So: Some interesting and endearing satire. Worth a look.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #84: Galaxy of Terror (1981)

2010-12-03T03:20:00.000-05:00

Hi kids. Captain Spaulding here, this time with CRYSTAL NINJA STARS.

This wonderful Gigeresque Alien ripoff is full of familiar faces. I was amazed to see Robert Englund, Ray Walston, someone from Happy Days but not who you're thinking, and Sid Haig, all milling about in a space ship together in a movie that looks and plays out like an issue of Heavy Metal. Here's why:

After a generic scene where a dude somewhere is running away from something scary and dies, the movie proper opens in a way I wasn't expecting. The movie decides to trip the hell out. We get a guy playing some kind of lasery table game with an old witch. He's called The Master, and he has a glowing plasma flame for a head. No face.

The Master, getting it done.

Him and The Oracle are apparently deciding the fate of the planet, and The Master orders a rescue mission, one that apparently needs to happen for reasons of Destiny, to a planet where something awful happened years ago. The dialogue in that scene is grandiose and striking, and I eat that crazy space opera/space fantasy stuff up like alphacentaurigetti.

Though it's mostly rushed thanks to its hour and twenty runtime, the movie works pretty hard to give each character some kind of bizarre distinctness, most fun of which, and most out of the blue, is Sid Haig's character Quuhod. He's an understanding and empathic warrior-type who "lives and dies by the crystal," meaning that as a master of these cool crystal throwing blades he can touch no other weapon. Sid Haig apparently, on reading the script, insisted that Quuhod be played entirely mute. He thought the lines were terrible and didn't suit the character at all, and given most of the dialogue in the film, was probably right. Famed producer Roger Corman heard his pleas and agreed. Quuhod's muteness, coupled with the movie's tendency to give you hints of back story and lore without actually telling you what any of it is, adds a wonderful mystique to the narrative that the movie really needed. I kind of want a movie just with Quuhod, hiking across the galaxy like the man with no name and dealing in blade wounds instead of gunshots. But this is a universe where dreams are shattered. This is a galaxy....of terror! Though it might be a Battle Beyond the Stars, since it uses enough stock footage from that previous Corman sci-fi.

I found myself liking this flick not just for its Corman-infused silliness, but its streaks of seriousness. As I mentioned before, much of the stuff you see seems like it could have come right off the pages of Heavy Metal Magazine. The movie possesses the same kind of weird, dark, and at times sexual space opera that I can't get enough of, though almost did when it came to the maggot rape sequence. Yep.

I wish I could say a maggot was raped when I write "maggot rape sequence," but I'm afraid an enormous maggot rapes a busty blonde in Galaxy of Terror, and that the scene was a big part of the movie's relative success. I'd forgotten up until that point that I was watching a Roger Corman flick. It will only make sense once you find out what an evil pyramid in the movie is all about, but not much sense.

Also, James Cameron was apparently second unit director and production designer. In the special features there's a handful of really interesting anecdotes about a smug and combative Cameron berating people for various silly reasons. The prosthetics department supposedly made a monster partially in the likeness of Cameron, though I couldn't see any similarities apart from the claws and slime. The special features on the disc are great, and Roger Corman's interviews always offer illuminating insight into the filmmaking business and its trends and turns.

So: Fair amounts of gore, a Heavy Metal magazine vibe, and a haunting ending I wasn't expecting. Cool stuff.

Gaming on Facebook - Gaming's Ugliest Manifestation!

2010-12-01T11:01:00.004-05:00

Came across an interesting article on Gamespot about the nature of Facebook gaming, and the way it's probably affecting the game industry. It goes so far as to say that Facebook games, designed specifically to be addictive cash grabs, are in fact morally reprehensible. THE WIZAARD AGREES.

Here's the link.

And here's a lil' blurb! Off you go then, lil' blurb:

"My worry is from the player's standpoint. If the research carries over to gameplay as it does in other [fields], it will actually turn people off games in the long run. It emphasizes the shallow, dumb, non-interesting tasks, and it decreases motivation for interesting tasks that might be intrinsically motivated."

Hecker said his hope for games is that they become the preeminent art form of the 21st century in the same way film was for the 20th century. His concern is that the industry is engaging in trends now that will hold it back from achieving that goal in the future.

"The way you become the 'preeminent art form of the 21st century' is not by giving people more achievements and stuff," Hecker said. "It's by making deeper and more compelling games."

Much of the article denounces the popular 'microtransaction model', where you pay real money here and there for in-game benefits that ultimately just help you play the game more effectively until you need to purchase the next benefit. But one enthused developer suggested that it's a more honest way to sell games - thousands of dollars are spent on marketing campaigns designed to sell you a game that you might not like. So the alternative is to give you a free game, and if you like it, you can invest in it yourself. That makes some sense, but the model leads to a troubling gaming experience that is necessarily dependent on fostering an urge to keep you buying, and where the indulgence in that urge is the sole reward for playing. Any compelling or engaging gaming experiences, which I'll argue are dreadfully important in our current culture, are going to take backseat to our ugly consumer drives. Which is decidedly not what we need more of. It's gaming at it's most barefaced business-like, without passion and without enrichment. It's just a casino.

Some say it's training a new generation of gamers that normally would never have touched a video game, since console controllers, even those of the Wii, are scary. But what are these gamers being taught to respond to? At the risk of sounding alarmist, I worry, and suspect that while these gamers can certainly evolve past their Facebook training wheels, the majority will come to find enjoyment only in games that are easily thrown away. The perceived threat is in the model becoming so popular and lucrative that we see a decline in games that actually matter. And yes, some of them do.

Facebook gaming certainly won't demolish the video game industry, but it has created an embarrassing and exploitative trend. It's also succeeded in creating a class of gamer that the rest will mutter and moan about for years to come.

Oh, and it looks like Sid Meier of Civilization fame is developing a Facebook version of Civ. I guess once that hits, you'll never see your friends again, but for messages like "Lame McCrappersmith has built the Parthenon! Join and beat him to the Panama Canal for $4.99!"

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #83: The Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954)

2010-11-27T12:06:00.000-05:00

Still insatiable
hungry for monster movies
I watch Black Lagoon

There are embarrassingly huge gaps in my cinema history, and The Creature From The Black Lagoon has been on my 'to watch' list for years and on my mind for the past few months. Finally saw it, and was surprised by how much I liked it. Great atmosphere, great monster, and an environmental subtext I hadn't been expecting. There's a shot where the leading lady tosses an unwanted cigarette into the creature's lagoon, and the camera moves below the surface to the face of the creature, who watches silently. Thanks to how it's shot the cigarette becomes invasive, and, more importantly, insulting. This is some of the earliest environmental awareness I've seen in a Hollywood film, sci-fi fear of toxic waste and nuclear war aside. There's a scene where poison is dumped into the lagoon to force the creature out of hiding, and the comatose fish that litter the water's surface highlights the disregard for the natural world that the scientists, behaving more like hunters, are exhibiting.

The creature itself looks awesome, and the amount of understanding and sympathy we find in him makes for great monster cinema.

So: A thoroughly satisfying classic.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #82: Pig Hunt (2008)

2010-11-26T16:04:00.000-05:00

Fangoria Magazine's foray into horror film production is a welcome experiment. Of the handful of films they've produced so far, I've only managed to see Pig Hunt because I was drawn to the dark and epic boar on the cover.

I'd heard it said that with Pig Hunt, the filmmakers realised that having a giant boar as a nemesis makes for demanding special effects, so they decided to throw a bunch of other dangerous obstacles in their way. Rednecks. Dangerous hippies. Lesser boars. This is for the most part effective, but in the end I found myself wanting Moby Dick in the forest far too much to reach any full appreciation.

The soundtrack is pretty nifty thanks to it having been partially composed by slap-bass demi-god Les Claypool, of Primus fame. He's also in the movie, as a violent redneck priest. The only kind of redneck priest, I suppose.

The giant pig, once it hits, is puppetous and satisfying for it. In general, if you've got the choice between low-budge CGI or low-budge practical effects, you'd better pick the latter. At the very least, your actors have something physical to contend with. Who doesn't want to watch a giant and slimy pig puppet crunch into a human being?

So: Has its moments, but the characters are mostly boring. This one's a maybe.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #81: Blue Planet (2001)

2010-11-25T12:00:00.001-05:00

This BBC series apparently five years in the making is narrated by none other than the nature doc legend himself, David Attenborough. His wisened voice has lent itself well to the nature documentary for some time, and does no disservice to the sea. If you haven't treated yourself to a lengthy and thoroughly entertaining series like this yet, you better get on that while there are still animals in the ocean to appreciate.

As you'd expect, you'll be given stunning footage of the intricacies of undersea life, running through the various kinds of sea environments that the world has to offer. You'll be given footage and information that might even turn off the squeamish - nature, children's stories tell us, isn't exactly nice, or unfalteringly pretty. Easy to forget, but the series will offer up some firm reminders that majesty is a thing of power, and power is very often a thing of violence. When you're not seeing amazing beauty, you might be seeing killer whales play tennis with a baby seal, or the eggy, undulating jangly bits of lobsters ready to give birth.

So: Awesome. An emotional roller coaster at times, but in the healthiest way.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #80: Until The Light Takes Us (2008)

2010-11-24T16:30:00.000-05:00

I'd heard about a handful of documentaries that have popped up over the past two or three years tackling Norwegian black metal and its turbulent history as their subject. When one actually appeared in front of me after I drew a pentagram in ketchup on the floor and lit some scented candles, I decided to give it a watch. Being big on Norwegian black metal myself, I was wary of being sold a cheap hunk of fan-service meant to do little more than nod in my direction for an hour and 20.

Opening up the DVD package I found a pretentious little booklet with a glowing review, an essay by the directors telling you what theoretical approach to use while watching, and a Fredric Jameson quote. Huh. Unexpected. But I should have expected this - with black metal having become a satanic farce, there's been a real push among aficionados to re-contextualise the subgenre and understand it as a clear instance of youth culture. And, moreover, as punk did before it, be recognised as a viable movement with an ethos of its own.

I'm happy to report that Until The Light Takes Us doesn't hammer that notion down into your skull as fiercely as the booklet does. Instead it follows the daily lives of four or five key figures in black metal history - of special note, Fenriz of Darkthrone and Varg Vikernes of Burzum, the latter of which was, at the time of filming, still in jail for murder and the arson of historic church sites. Other figures from the metal scene of the period pop in and out of the film, but the most engrossing portraits are found in those main two. They are old friends and they haven't spoken to each other in years. They don't come together in the film, as there is a palpable sadness that forces them to leave it all to time. It culminates during a scene where Fenriz is shown footage, shown earlier, of Varg speaking well of him and his music, but Varg, as always, is possessed by a persecution complex, and you can hear the accusation of abandonment in his voice. Fenriz actually holds back tears and laments over the past with little word.

There's a lot of psychoses on display in the film. His obsession with persecution aside, Varg hints at anti-semitism, Hellhammer explicitly approves of the killing of homosexuals, Fenriz tries to figure out where it all went sour, and a younger black metaller takes part in an ultra grim performance art piece proposed by a local painter. All reflect on what the genre is supposed to be about, and their points slowly converge. When all is said and done, we've been given a look at the really interesting and sympathetic people that invented a new mode of metallic expression, and the really interesting and awful ones that are an inseparable part of it too.

For black metal fans, you'll get the bonus of seeing intimate interviews with people you've probably mostly read about, and rare rehearsal footage you might have never seen before.

So: Surprisingly good. Worth a watch for fans and non-fans alike.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #79: Mystery Science Theater 3000: Santa Claus (1959, MST3K Version in 1993)

2010-11-23T12:00:00.000-05:00

Forever at war.

Not sure what MST3k is? Read this first!

Apparently Santa was not in high standing in Mexico in '59. El Santo certainly was, but Santa and Christmas were, it was felt, a distinctly American tradition that had little place in the imaginations of Mexican children. How best to sell the Santa meme to Mexico? Why, the only way to properly bridge the gap is to put Santa in the service of god! You know, make him lock horns with satan and his minions! Kid movie stuff. The MST crew have a field day.

Santa lives in a cloud fortress made of crystal and filled with surreal anthropomorphic contraptions that monitor Earth. These contraptions were made by none other than fucking Merlin. Merlin lives in the fortress with Santa. Oh, and an army of 6 year old toy-making workers from every nation on the planet. These must be the purest child-souls to be found on Earth, to be working for god's newest general in a magic cloud city. The elves are nowhere to be found, and this will be a strange movie indeed. I can only assume that they, like the angels before them, grew jealous and rebelled and were cast down amidst the fire.

Soon enough we get a bizarre sequence with Santa playing organ and singing along with each nation's representatives in turn, and let me tell you, it is a badly dubbed buffet of racial stereotyping.

I'd have to say this episode possesses one of my favourite MST3K moments to date, a moment where the clockwork reindeer, having just been awakened from their year-long slumber, begin to laugh along with a merry Santa. Now, the reindeer's jaws open and shut in a jerking, string-pulled fashion and they can never blink. Their laugh grows into what I'm sure is an unintentionally disturbing cackle, a cackle the guys of course are compelled, in the evil spirit of Christmas, to join in on. It then becomes an unholy chorus of laughter akin to the scene in Evil Dead where Ash has his first true mental breakdown.

It's possibly the most offensive MST I've seen, and certainly one of the darkest. Given the subject matter of the film in front of them, the boys aren't afraid to make fun of every national culture they can think of in the name of fairness and in step with the flick, and poke fun at the rammed down your throat religiosity and fear of hell that this film tries to install into children.

So: Pretty damn awesome. Still with a bit a Hallowe'en in the brain yet ready for Christmas, this might be perfect for you sinners.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #78: The Mummy's Hand (1940)

2010-11-22T16:27:00.000-05:00

Continuing my march into monster movie mania, The Mummy's Hand!

A lot of light comedy and not as much hammy horror as I had hoped. You do get a bit of it though - the sort where there's a slow-moving monster creeping closer and closer to a half-asleep love interest and EEEEEEEEK other love interest bursts in and BLAM BLAM but too late! Her dad is maybe dead but no he's just knocked out cold and she's gone! Oh noes! If only it had more of that and the lurchy dusty mummy responsible for the whole mess it might have been worth sitting through. We've seen the mummy before, we don't really need him saved up for a big reveal or final act. Turn it loose. Let the new Egyptian empire begin its ancient reign of terror anew! Bricka bracka firecracka' siss boom bah! Go Mummy Go, Amun-Ra-Ra-Ra!

Instead you'll have some dull character set-up that ends up accomplishing little by the time the curse hits home. A good chunk of the movie is spent on a magician character's various parlour tricks, or rather, the edits that make them work. A buffoony support character practices one of tricks throughout the first half of the movie so he could, I thought, use it at an opportune moment and save the day later. Turns out it was just filler. Like the stock footage they used from the first movie with Boris Karloff edited out.

So: Not terribly worth it.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #77: Frankenstein (1931)

2010-11-16T14:00:00.000-05:00

So much is different from the original story that comparing the two is a pretty good waste of time. This film exists as its own entity and really has a life of its own. Of the classic monster movies I've seen to date on my Hallowe'en trek, this one is by far the best. I daresay it's a masterpiece. At its heart it contains a 'who is really the monster' dynamic that has since become awfully trite, but in its original form still potent.

As if the hints of German Expressionism wasn't enough to catch my interest, much of the acting is actually pretty good, which, given the other classic Universal horror films I've watched, was a total surprise. Boris Karloff is fantastic as the monster, and it's easy to see how, I think after this film, he became a household name. His monster is incredibly sympathetic. After a sheltered and grim life filled with torture, the monster frees himself and escapes into the woods. There's an amazing scene where he finds a little girl. The little girl hands him a flower, and they sit down by a pond. She shows him how you can throw a flower into the water and watch it float gently along. The monster is so overjoyed to find something kind and delicate and beautiful in the world that it is genuinely tear-pulling when something goes wrong. He gets up, trying his best at laughter, and throws the little girl into the water because she's like a flower too. She drowns, and it's genuinely disturbing to see the monster's panicked reaction when he doesn't understand what's happened. I hadn't felt that stirred by a movie in a long time. I was really bothered by the moment.

Made before the motion picture code was actively enforced, you get some cinema that's not afraid to upset you. While the edges will sometimes show, the violence is shocking when it wants to be, and I found myself continuously surprised by what the film was prepared to do. The film bubbles with potential violence, and by the time the mob lights their torches, the loss of control that you didn't realise was creeping into your brain reaches its apex. People shout through the streets, dogs yelp, women and children cower on the sidelines, and the beast has been loosed on the monster. It was a torch that was initially used to torture the monster, and it's unsettlingly fitting that an army of them tries to flush him out of hiding, trap him, and set him ablaze. Karloff's thrashing screams while the flames rise about him will stick with me for awhile.

Also surprising, I'm noticing that the female characters in these early monster movies aren't as helpless as I expect them to be, and I wonder if that had anything to do with the code as well. They're not neutered characters, and rigid gender roles don't seem to have been installed as safety mechanisms yet. The women in these films are just as sensible as the men, and they aren't afraid to speak their mind. In the years to come, that wouldn't be the case for quite a while. Hell, it's mostly not the case in films today.

Despite all of the injustice in the film, it's hard to really hate anyone in it save for an annoying comic relief character I'll just ignore. The monster is understandable, Dr. Frankenstein is understandable, the angry torch-wielding village folk are understandable, and even the abusive Fritz is understandable. He's a deformed hunchback that Dr. Frankenstein treated like shit. Of course he was going to whip the monster and burn him when Frankenstein wasn't looking. Nobody's really to blame in this film, which makes it so remarkable. It ends off remarkably too, with an an ironic ending that presses home the severe tragedy at the centre of the film.

So: Fantastic. I expected an iconic cheese-fest and got a dramatic masterpiece that probably made it to my list of favourite films.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #76: The Mummy (1932)

2010-11-16T02:18:00.001-05:00

Still going on my Hallowe'en kick and finally getting around to seeing the great monster classics of film history. I had decided a few weeks back that I was going to go for a classic costume this year, and I settled on the one that (I won't call the Invisible Man a monster, he was just a big jerk) is probably talked about the least: the Mummy!

You're probably familiar with the Brendan Fraser Mummy from 1999. I'll pause to shudder for a sec. It lifted some elements from the original Mummy, namely the fact that there's a guy named Imhotep that fell in love with the Pharaoh's daughter. She died. Then his love drove him to seek out forbidden rituals and raise her from the dead, but he was caught, and soon sentenced to be buried alive and partially mummified. A terrible curse was laid down upon his tomb.

Made a year after the success of Dracula and featuring much of the same cast and crew, The Mummy doesn't possess the same magic but manages to be a pretty cool flick for a number of reasons. I guess I'll tell you what those might be, since this is a review and I only get fed my fish heads if I write a review. I also might get my beloved red bouncy ball back.

For starters, I saw this film before I watched the historic Frankenstein, and this was my first run in with the real Boris Karloff. I find that I love Boris Karloff. He's starring as Imhotep, and his rigid creepiness, sullen voice, and gaunt face have all been parodied so often that I felt immediately familiar with him. It was a treat to finally see the icon at work.

Secondly, like with Dracula, I was surprised to find an interesting female character, this time one both alluring, evasively clever, and amazingly unafraid to refer, just once, to sex. She's played by Broadway actress Zita Johann, who was actually seriously interested in the spiritualism of the occult and took her role perhaps a little too seriously. There's a famous scene in the movie where she dies in a past life. She reportedly fainted for real in that scene, after a strenuous day of filming without much food or water thanks to the director's cruel and ridiculous feud with her.

Now, the plot is almost identical to the plot of Dracula. We get the dude who played Van Helsing playing Doctor Muller, who is, like Van Helsing, a master of occult lore and adept at fighting the supernatural. He helps everybody out when shit hits the fan. Like Dracula, the Mummy seems to be after a young woman in Muller/Van Helsing's care. Imhotep also seems to be able to control people's minds, like Dracula could, by staring hard at them. What makes him different, though, is motive. The man isn't entirely evil, he's just obsessed with a love he couldn't attain. That's all. Leave him alone, you guys.

I was hoping, especially for my costume research, to get some serious dusty cloth-wrapped mummy action. Sadly there is virtually none in the first Mummy. Instead you get a slightly wrinkly Boris Karloff, who has inexplicably been restored to much of his living health. There's no lurching violence, but there are a few ancient Egyptian spells used to wreak some havoc.

So: A cool piece of monster history, if not as great as other first monster appearances. Certainly better than most Monster Movie sequels to come. The Mummy manages to hold his own. Also, look at this:

Black Metal Meets Surf Rock!

2010-11-09T12:42:00.013-05:00

On a whim yesterday I googled "black surf rock," hoping that someone, somewhere, had also thought that a fusion of Norwegian black metal and surf rock would be a music to end all musics. Though I hoped, I expected little. I didn't think anyone would have actually bothered.

I'm sorry I doubted you, internet.

Some geniuses (perhaps the same one) have put up a handful of surf rock covers of black metal essentials, by the likes of Burzum, Emperor, and Darkthrone. I present to you, then, The Burzums! The Emperors! And The Darkthrones!

(Just a heads up on the first vid - it starts with a few seconds of footage featuring a bird getting swatted from the air by a desert wind turbine, in grim California style)

These are all done by MrMeddled, and there's more cool stuff on his youtube channel. Do check out his write ups for each video, since they're wildly entertaining reads. Here's a sample:

The Burzums was the musical project by Varg "Charlie" Vikernes. It began during 1961 in Bergen, California and quickly became prominent within the early Californian surf scene. During 1962 and 1963, The Burzums recorded four albums; however, in 1964 Vikernes was convicted and imprisoned for stealing a box of matches, stealing a box of matches on a Sunday, siphoning fuel from a parked Studbaker, posessing a guitar amp rated above 10 Watts (the upper threshold of human hearing in 1964) and protesting loudly about how much of his hard earned money was creamed off and wasted on that joke of an airplane known as the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. While imprisoned, Vikernes recorded two offensively bad albums in the dark ambient surf style.

Hilarious, given that Varg "Count Grishnack" Vikernes was in fact the guy that unwittingly put black metal on the map by burning churches and getting convicted of murder back in the early 90s.

And on a side note, a little band called Hurtigruten. Their track 'The Black Surfers' is another cover of Emperor's 'I Am The Black Wizards,' a title I never get tired of saying aloud.

Black metal riffs lend themselves surprisingly well to surf guitar, given both genres insistance on tremolo picking. In some cases it sounds like you could pretty much just slow down a black metal riff and take out the distortion for instant and eerie surf rock.

How I wish these were real bands, and their tracks available in album form. I would pay good gold for these items. What a grim black metal beach party I would dance in.

If you don't see the vids, they'll be on my original blog post here.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #75: Mystery Science Theater 3000: Night of the Blood Beast (1958, MST3K Version in 1995)

2010-11-08T12:00:00.000-05:00

I've probably made reference to MST3k in other reviews and explained its basic concept, but now that I finally come to review one of their many, many episodes I'll give your lovely heart a refresher.

Dr. Forrester is an evil crazy-go-mad scientist who has decided that he wants to rule the world. But to do that, he is certain that he must break the will of earth's populace. The most obvious way to do this is to force them to watch the most incompetent, most embarrassing, most boring films ever made by their own feeble human hands. Naturally, this procedure should be tested first in a controlled environment. So Dr. Forrester kidnaps his laboratory janitor, Joel, and jettisons him into the seclusion of his secret space station, the Satellite of Love. He sends Joel awful movies and monitors the man's brain - but what's this? He manages to stay sane somehow! The key to Joel's survival is that he makes fun of the cinematic shit he's sent with the help of two robot friends he constructed from satellite parts. In the series, you get to watch the awful films Dr. Forrester sends with Joel and the bots riffing and cracking jokes all the while. Its like watching a terrible movie with some hilarious friends, the sort that makes any movie experience ten times better.

There's tons of episodes, and each one is an entire film minus the 15 or 20 minutes trimmed for the sake of the MST3k sketches that pepper the show. Some episodes are a great success, some are not, since some films just are so terrible that the MST crew can't win. Night of the Blood Beast, though, is fantastic. It comes from season 7 of the series and is probably one of the best episodes I've seen. Night of the Blood Beast is a Roger Corman wonder, filled with lots of dull walking scenes, awful dialogue, sci fi pontification, and rubbery alien monsters. The boys are in great riffing form, and I ended up laughing out loud, or LOLing if you will, more than once. I tend not to LOL when watching comedies, and usually just smirk and chuckle ever so slightly. This is due to the terrible burden I carry, the alien shrimps gestating within me. I identified with the astronaut in Night of the Blood Beast completely.

So: Wicked-awesome. This one features Mike instead of Joel, who is, I think, my favourite of the two Forrester victims.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #74: Babylon 5 - Season 1 (1994)

2010-11-07T14:48:00.001-05:00

I'm sure some of you know this series well. It's a TV series that's held in pretty high esteem by a great many, myself included.

This review will be for two sorts of people. One is the sort that has seen some of the first season and said to themselves "this is a piece of shit and I hate your guts J. Michael Straczynski" and stopped watching. The other is the sort that say to themselves, every year or so, "I should probably get around to watching that crazy Babylonia 18 show that my nerd friends talk about too often."

The concept is this: Babylon 5 is earth's greatest achievement - a massive space station in distant and neutral space built to function as a centre of commerce and diplomacy between the various alien races of the galaxy. Lots of politics, fantastic character drama, and, about 2 seasons in, grand and poetic space opera of the best kind. Probably 70 percent of the series was written all at once as what creator Straczynski calls a telenovel, and benefits greatly from having had a start and finish already intricately planned by the time the pilot hit the airwaves.

Babylon 5 tries very hard not to be Star Trek, and does pretty damn well in its goal. B5 isn't afraid to give you alien races that are much more alien than your average Trek alien. Communication between alien cultures is often very strained. There's a large mantis-like insect that's top gangster in the shady areas of the station, and a tentacle-faced Cthulu-type alien that only eats decaying food because they evolved from a scavenging animal. In general, the skull shapes and faces of the alien races are a bit more varied than you're used to in other shows.

This doesn't always make for a good first impression however. You have to get over your initial knee-jerk this-is-not-like-startrek reaction and adapt to the different flavour. Star Trek has had a monopoly on sci fi television for so long that any series that isn't Star Trek wears its invisible shackles. If you had caught any episodes of the series during its run in the 90s, you probably saw a dude with hair like a paper fan and changed the channel. On its surface, and because of season 1's terrible budget, the show can look pretty silly at times. The CGI stuff didn't look good, and the sets looked dreadfully cheap. Michael O'Hare's lead act as Captain Sinclair is embarrassing, and he manages to ruin almost every scene that reaches for emotional force. Once he leaves in season 2, the series takes a serious upturn. So season 1 is pretty terrible, but there's enough important information and character set-up that unfortunately makes it necessary to watch. Now and again you'll get a winning episode, one that hints at the bigger picture to come in later seasons, but for the most part season 1 is comprised of forgettable little one-offs.

So: Placing the 'recommended' tag on this review was a strange decision, but for the awesomeness of what is to come, it must be so written. And the fan hair will grow on you once you realise how fucking awesome Londo Mollari is.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #73: Amazons (1986)

2010-11-06T12:00:00.000-04:00

High adventure in progress.

This wildly entertaining sword and sorcery flick, like most of them, comes to us from the dark and time-fogged forests of the 1980s. Under the supreme command of dread mogul Roger Corman, a screenplay was commissioned to Charles Saunders, who based his script off a short story he wrote for an anthology called, coincidentally, Amazons!. So that Amazons! was apparently the first significant anthology of fantasy works using female protagonists and written by a mostly female cast of authors. You'd expect, then, that the Amazons under review is an interesting feministical text where warrior women fight for equality and independence in a harsh and largely masculine world, right? Well yeah you get that. Only with boobs. Lots of boobs. This is a film, after all, and it is common knowledge that only films with boobs do well. I remind you of Titanic.

If you've seen as many 80s sword and sorcery movies as I have, you might recognise these common links:

There will be a scene where a woman takes off her top.
There will be a scene where women are swimming naked in a river and are being watched by drooling pervs.
There will be a scene with sex in it.
It is made in Argentina.

We will not be given armour or be clothed against the elements.

Amazons is of course about a tribe of warrior women. They are under the command of a queen who rules over a kingdom currently under siege by an evil wizard named Kalungo. When I hear the name Kalungo I can't help but imagine a cute baby elephant, a born in captivity type that's maybe the result of a worrying but in the end rewarding pairing. Not so much a demon-enslaved lightning-throwing sorcerer. After doing some quick online digging, however, I find to my shame that a kalunga, or calunga, is a Brazilian descendant of runaway slaves. The word can mean many things, and is oddly enough used both as a derogatory racial label and as a byword for someone who is famous or important. Go figure. Charles Saunders is African-American, and I wonder if the link here is merely coincidence or some interesting subtext.

Oh, right, the movie. So anyway the amazons need to quite obviously find a magic sword since it's the only thing that can stand up to Kalungo's evil magic. Two amazon babes are sent on the quest, and it's hilariously wonderful. It's great fun to watch people use prop weapons they've never handled before. Especially when they haven't been given much supplementary training. You're basically given a bunch of calendar models who drill practice their spear maneuvers with 'What if I really hurt someone?' hesitance. A real winner's attitude on the mock-battlefield. Sword duels can sometimes look half-decent, but largely possess a 'What am I doing?' grace that lends the whole production metric ass-loads of charm.

So: A fantastic watch with friends. Can't get enough of this stuff.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #72: Dracula (1931)

2010-11-05T12:00:00.000-04:00

Since it's the season for witchery and other assorted evil delights, I decided to check out the Dracula Legacy Collection, which collects the classic Dracula films done by Universal Studios, the set of films that laid out the iconography of the vampire. Empty castles, long candles, winding staircases, cobwebs, capes, heavy accents. All the campy Count Dracula signifiers we now pick up from saturday morning cartoons came from that first Bela Lugosi hit.

And it's cool. It has some really memorable moments - great lines, great visuals, and some pretty engrossing scenes; my favourite being a scene where an aged Dr. Vanhelsing is visited by Dracula and told to leave. Their battle of wills is timeless, and most of it comes through in their almost archetypal posturing, a posturing that has the ring of the silent film era.

Since Hollywood really started flexing their sound film muscle in 1927 (The Jazz Singer being among a host of big '27 releases), in 1931 'talkies' were still a new art. Dracula director Tod Browning, also of Freaks fame, was pretty uneasy with sound and was one of those silent directors that kind of petered out after sound came into the picture. He had thrown in the towel by 1936.

His Dracula seems to forget that it's a sound film at times. I say his, but allegedly Browning's set presence was at near zero and most of the directing was done by the cinematographer, which might also account for the persistence of silent image over sound in the film. There are long stretches of dialogueless silence, and an insistence on capturing strong facial expression and holding the shot for emphasis. The make-up work is pure silent film, with its heavy whites and dark lips. Also, apart from the brief and orchestral 'come out to the movies' style opening credits sequence, there's no soundtrack. Not one shred, not a hot lick of music to be found in this film. While it gives the film the sensation I imagine the fish that chokingly set a first flipper on land had, it's a strangeness that works. It creates pools of tension and atmosphere that might have been ruined otherwise with unnecessary dialogue or the emotional imposition that music carries.

So: A classic treat and a fascinating look at a silent film probing into the world of sound.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #71: Che: Part Two

2010-11-04T12:34:00.001-04:00

I resume my journey into the biopic'd life of El Che!

Che: Part Two has a different flavour than Part One. Where Part One uses broken narrative, Part Two is linear and straight-forward. Since Che's character has been established already, it pulls few obvious cinematic punches and focuses simply, and still satisfyingly, on Che and his comrades' struggles against a hostile Bolivian government and its impossibly isolated and un-revolutionary populace.

While I detected a Soderberghian flatness in the first part, Part Two feels a bit more intimate now that the frenetic narrative style has calmed down. It's just as well shot, though there is admittedly less in terms of captivating imagery, thanks to the constantly dense, dry bracken of the Bolivian forests. It is, like Part One, engrossing and unique in its tone and sensibility. Despite knowing my history enough to know what would happen by the end of the film, the finish is perfect, and I suspect that it will stay with me for a long time.

So: It's a moving look at the way ideals don't always work out, and the very man that has come to represent that problem.

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

2010-10-30T13:00:00.000-04:00

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)

2010-10-29T14:35:00.001-04:00

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!

2010-10-28T00:30:00.004-04:00

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)

2010-10-22T11:00:00.000-04:00

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)

2010-10-21T17:03:00.000-04:00

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

2010-10-17T09:30:00.000-04:00

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!

2010-10-16T20:00:00.000-04:00

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)

2010-10-16T13:44:00.000-04:00

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)

2010-10-15T10:16:00.000-04:00

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:

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.
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.
When planets align they will appear bigger and closer to us than Earth's own moon.
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.
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.
When a woman enters the Source her clothing changes and her hair is braided.
Three Immortals with thousands of years of battle-honed experience cannot see or hear cannibals tromping through a sparse forest until they are surrounded.
‘Lawlessness’ means the cops show up just in time to witness a stabbing and begin pursuit.
Although they have firearms and motorcycles, cannibals prefer to chase people around on foot and horseback with wrenches and knives. It is more satisfying.
Queen doesn't sound good when ‘updated’ as generic hard rock.

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

2010-10-14T10:14:00.000-04:00

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

2010-10-10T21:36:00.003-04:00

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!

2010-10-08T14:14:00.003-04:00

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)

2010-10-08T08:00:00.000-04:00

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)

2010-10-07T16:54:00.001-04:00

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.

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

2010-09-27T20:21:00.000-04:00

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)

2010-09-26T19:49:00.000-04:00

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)

2010-09-25T19:47:00.000-04:00

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!

2010-09-24T14:06:00.004-04:00

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)

2010-09-17T03:20:00.001-04:00

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!

2010-09-16T14:54:00.005-04:00

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!

2010-09-16T00:32:00.002-04:00

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)

2010-09-08T13:00:00.000-04:00

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)

2010-09-07T17:53:00.000-04:00

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)

2010-09-04T14:00:00.000-04:00

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)

2010-09-03T14:31:00.001-04:00

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.

The Poetics of IMDB: Piranha 3D

2010-08-30T18:19:00.007-04:00

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!

2010-08-26T13:09:00.004-04:00

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)

2010-08-22T12:00:00.000-04:00

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)

2010-08-21T15:00:00.000-04:00

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)

2010-08-20T03:43:00.000-04:00

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)

2010-08-18T14:00:00.000-04:00

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)

2010-08-17T14:00:00.000-04:00

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!

2010-08-16T13:54:00.006-04:00

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)

2010-08-14T15:13:00.001-04:00

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)

2010-08-13T12:00:00.000-04:00

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!

2010-08-12T15:15:00.003-04:00

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)

2010-08-12T15:09:00.000-04:00

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)

2010-08-10T13:53:00.000-04:00

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)

2010-08-09T14:00:00.000-04:00

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)

2010-08-07T13:48:00.000-04:00

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)

2010-08-06T13:45:00.000-04:00

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.

Louis Armstrong, Death Metalled At Last

2010-07-30T14:59:00.002-04:00

A death metal version of a What A Wonderful World!

Armstong's expressions work awfully well for the metal growl. He was a pretty growly singer after all, but I hadn't expected the quietly disdainful sideglances he gives his audience in this vid. :3

Link here if you don't see the video!

Cherry Festival! Non-Violence Festival! Saturday the 10th!

2010-07-09T14:27:00.006-04:00

Heard about it? It's taking place on Victoria Park island in Kitchener from noon till 9 pm.

"The 6th annual Nonviolence Festival Day in the Park brings together local community groups, vendors, artists and the public for a day of music, food, meditation, crafts and games under the banner of nonviolence.

Admission is free, and the day is made possible by volunteers."

If you be a violent man or woman with an affinity for cherries, the Cherry Festival might be more to your liking. That's going on from 11am to 6pm at Cherry Park, Kitchener which is at the corner of Strange St. and Waverly Rd. Cherry related foods should abound. Here's the link!

A Pokémon Commentary

2010-07-09T13:59:00.004-04:00

This video filled me with the utmost joy. Two guys shouting at a Pokémon movie.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Link here.

I too feel that Snorlax is supreme.

It reminded me of this quick video that had me laughing in hysterical fits, which probably seems strange to anyone that isn't much for Pokémon:

Link here.

I like that the guy's already angry when he starts to guess.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #41: The Crazies (1973)

2010-07-09T12:00:00.000-04:00

Get this hippy restrained!

Before checking out the remake I thought I'd give the George Romero original a shot.

Ugh.

It's annoyingly edited, and operates at a break-neck and confusing pace. Shots seem to be made up mostly of close-ups. You might see a cut to a close-up of a guy talking to someone, which then cuts to a close-up of a guy shouting at him from somewhere, which then cuts to a close-up of an arm picking up a gun, followed by a close-up of somebody running, or a car parking, or whatever. You don't see the motion that connects the images, which leaves you really disoriented.

The dialogue is delivered at ridiculous speeds as well - the moment one line ends someone else pipes up with another. And everybody's yelling at each other all the time. Conversation quickly ramps up into panic and anger, which makes the movie feel really emotionally forced and especially unjustified, since very little of the viral outbreak is actually seen for the first half of the film. It's pretty much just people yelling at each other in offices about what to do. No, wait, not what to do. It's not really conversation. It's more yelling out unreasonable reactions. Usually in the form of exposition.

I guess you could argue that the camera work and editing is meant to...well, make you feel as crazy and disoriented as the characters succumbing to the virus that drives them into delirium, but if that's the case, the techniques are used where they shouldn't be, and not used where they'd do good work. And the film actually abandons its style and slows down during the last third of the film, which just makes it all seem like bad audience emotion management.

Now Dawn of the Dead is one of my all-time favourite films, and I'm very fond of Romero. But he tends to be pretty hamfisted with his social criticisms, and this movie is no exception. The Crazies is a pretty barefaced hate-on for the Vietnam-era military, and ends up as a mostly hokey and cheap-looking anti-government piece. It works to depict a military and governmental disregard for the rights of civilians so complete that it's hard to take the plot seriously until you remember that Vietnam was a horrific and rights-shattering embarrassment.

I will say this in the movie's defense: it sports a very rare protagonist - a man who wears a mighty unibrow without shame. I've always been wowed by 70s films that weren't afraid to cast unattractive or strange-looking actors into their male roles. Unibrow's comrade has warts all over his boney face. It's incredibly refreshing.

So: Can't say it's worth the watch, but if you're curious about Vietnam-response films don't look this one over.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #40: Thrashin' (1986)

2010-07-08T14:53:00.000-04:00

Him: Thrashing man - it's just an aggressive style of skatin'. We thrash.

Her: What do you thrash?"

Him: ....What do you got?

= ATTITUDE

This movie is one of the most 80s films I've ever seen. It made me feel so strange.

It also sports a really young Josh Brolin in his second film role - just after the Goonies. Like Goonies, he's a thoroughly unlikable slab of beefcake. Thrashin' basically gives him the same character, but is centered on the California skateboard culture that was, at that time, just starting to pick up mainstream attention. It's filled with girls in bikinis, punks in denim vests, and brightly coloured valley-boy neon t-shirts. It's a skater romance, like West Side Story with boards and without singing, and oddly enough, is directed by David Winters - who worked as a dancer on West Side Story.

According to the film, in L.A. everybody boards. This movie is 40% skate tricks, and Dogtown is a skate park. When you go to a club, say, you bring your board and dance with it. You'll dance with other boarders and do tricks on the dance floor to a mostly not-very-risque New Wave soundtrack. DEVO, thankfully, is on there. At the club you might chance to see a performance by a new band called the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which was the scene in the movie that apparently scored the least with preview audiences. It's really very surreal.

I love 80s films where everyone looks really edgy and metal, but is presented with the glossiest camera work alongside the tamest audience friendly music they could find. It's really dorky and funny. It's forky. So forky that the film eventually steps out of silly land and into absolutely ridiculous territory when Brolin has to 'joust', which means he has to face his enemies on skate boards and swing padded flails at each other. The padded flails are shaped like hearts. Which is about the gentlest and most impractical way you could try to harm someone:

1: It's padded enough not to hurt that much.
2: It wouldn't really knock you off your skateboard.
3: It just degenerates into a fist fight anyway.

So: I love time capsule movies. This one's a wonderfully bad 80s romp. Best part: Brolin brought through a skateboard factory and shown advanced board designs, built to withstand nuclear attack.

8-Bit Star Craft

2010-07-06T14:05:00.007-04:00

A lovely animated 8-bit rendition of what Star Craft on the Commodore 64 could have been. Star Craft at its most adorable.

Star Wars Old Republic E3 Trailer

2010-06-29T13:18:00.002-04:00

Seen this? Pretty damn epic.

Oglaf - Perverse Fantasy Comix

2010-06-25T15:16:00.001-04:00

Check out this wonderfully perverse fantasy webcomic at Oglaf.com.

Heard from a friend that the cartoonist had originally intended to create a porn site, but ended up with a webcomic similar to the historic Sexy Losers series. Oglaf is graphic, taboo shattering, and really very clever. Playing with fantasy tropes is a good way to get on my good side. Example: the super-charged machismo of Conan. Oglaf gives us Kronar.

And if the raunchy stuff doesn't typically impress you, it isn't always the crux of the joke:

Miyazaki Has Made a PS3 Game!

2010-06-25T14:22:00.005-04:00

Legendary master of animation Hayao Miyazaki, creator of Princess Mononoke and other fantastic films, has decided to make an RPG. That news fills my heart with joy.

Looks pretty wonderful, like all Miyazaki projects. So far it seems like it's just in Japanese, and there's no telling whether or not we'll see an English release in North America. But fingers crossed! And please buy me a gaming console.

Here's a vid!

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #39: Red Dwarf: Back to Earth (2009)

2010-06-24T15:00:00.000-04:00

It was a long wait for Red Dwarf fans. Series VIII ended in 1999. Over the ten year gap Dwarfers grew jaded (if they had not already been so) and milled about in great and murderous street gangs, causing mischief and violence wherever they went. Hanging out in vindaloo joints. Drinking lager. Smoking kippers. Petting cats. Vacuuming. You know, British things. When they heard that a new installment of their beloved Red Dwarf was on the way, they returned to their old homes and waited. When it came, they seemed mostly disappointed. But while many of my kin thought Back To Earth was crap, I actually thought it was pretty good. Maybe they liked the old days with the laugh track best.

The show has always had a dramatic leaning, and has preferred to construct characters with some real pathos. Their dynamics and psychologies have been the crux of the show to satisfying and impressive effect. Back To Earth decided to get a bit heavier on that element and present Dwarf fans with a little less comedy and a lot more emotional closure, in case this would end up being the very last of the Red Dwarf crew's adventures. As I've heard it, there's more on the way, and I'm glad for it.

Back To Earth's plot leads from an old and favourite episode from an earlier season, which might be awkward fan service to some, but comes to serve more as a useful and somewhat eerie contrast between the vibe of the earlier series and its current incarnation. This episode's filled with Blade Runner references, and the set work and scene recreations are fun to pick out and ponder in terms of their relationship to the characters. Oh, they visit the Coronation Street pub as well. It all gets pretty meta, which is of course often very trite in television, but in this case, works reasonably well.

So: If you like Red Dwarf and its characters, you really should give it a shot. If you've never seen any Red Dwarf and like sci-fi and laughter, you've got a lot of joy heading your way.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #38: Super Vixens (1975)

2010-06-23T15:26:00.000-04:00

Here's how Russ Meyer claims he lost his virginity:

During WWII, Meyer found himself in a French brothel. There he met Ernest Hemingway. When Hemingway learned that Meyer was a virgin, he told the boy he could have any prostitute he liked, and that he'd pick up the tab. Meyer picked the one with the most ample bosom. Later he made films.

And his movies can be pretty surreal at times. If you're unfamiliar with Meyer's brilliant sexploitation work, I'll sum up the basics: incredibly voluptuous women, usually stuck somewhere in arid Arizona, entrenched in hyper-campy battles of the sexes. His films seem to be some kind of reaction to second-wave feminism, and it's debatable as to whether or not his films bash women's liberation or support feminist critique by satirizing sexual politics. For my vote, I find that feminist readings work really well with Russ Meyer films, since men and women are caricatured so completely and intelligently that there's more to it than skin. Women are presented as manipulative psychopaths and sexual enslavers, and men as violent psychopaths and sexual slaves. The flip can be true in other Meyer films, but both genders are always ruled by the power of sex, and the exchange of that power is often disturbing if its not busy with being humourous. Russ Meyer films are a special kind of wonderful bizarre.

Super Vixens is a great example. An evil babe, an asshole boyfriend, a psychotic sheriff, a death, a resurrection, a not-evil babe, a nice boyfriend, Shakespearean vengeance. Of the films I've seen to date, it's Meyer at his most surreal, and possesses Meyer's usual charm in pretty large quantities.

So: If you're going to see any Russ Meyer films, this and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! would be the way to go.

Earthquake Hits Waterloo Ontario - My Fault

2010-06-23T14:20:00.013-04:00

Sorry guys, it was my fault. Pun intended.

Earthquake, thunderclouds?

Best case scenario: A Minor Wurm got bored.
Worst case scenario: It's fucking Ragnarok.

Since the burning of Mel's Diner I'd suspected that a Big Terrible Old One had awoken and razed it to the ground. A dragon was the obvious answer, and I had apologised for not acting on its presence sooner. I still miss the milkshakes.

For weeks I've been searching for clues as to the whereabouts of this mystery beast in the vast network of tunnels and caves that make up the Waterloo Downbelow, which is a place I do not recommend you visit without serious preparation and accoutrement - most important being your travel papers and a magical axe. Maybe bring this guy, to keep the bone-crunching trolls satisfied while you run away stealthily into the shadows of cowardice:

Not that I'd do that to him, he was a good man. Is a good man. If he were to disappear without a trace, I'm sure his friends and family would, out of reason and well-balanced emotion, reach the conclusion that he ran away from home because he hates everybody.

So after battling with some trolls and thumbwrestling some goblins I managed to glean some choice rumours about a big something lurking in the Downbelow. My money, I said to the gnome, is on this being the dragon. I lit up one of my wizard pipes, the one that protects me from thought control, and struck into deepest depths of Waterloo.

It was there I found it - A Great Old Wurm, dripping its malice onto an annoying Happy Bunny dayplanner. "INCINERATE WATERLOO, PICK UP THE KIDS" was written there. Right. Well. I knew what I had to do.

For the next two days I battled that thing deep below, and it was very hard I'll tell you. Whenever my anti-thought-control pipe went out the beast made me do the truffle-shuffle until I could struggle out a match. Anyway, it finally went down around 1:45 pm today, which is what you guys in Waterloo and across Ontario felt.

And what thanks might I get for my labour? None of course. A wizard needs not these things. But when I kick a Great Wurm's ass and the only loot it drops is a Happy fucking Bunny dayplanner, I start to suspect that I've picked the wrong career.

Ooh! Acid Drop to play at the Chainsaw!

2010-06-22T15:10:00.004-04:00

Looks like local Kitchener thrash-punk crossover band Acid Drop are going to be hitting the Chainsaw (formerly The Spur, at the corner of King and Dupont) with some bands I have yet to sample in uptown Waterloo this Saturday, the 26th. Be there or be square!

Here's their video for Banana Cream Pie. :3

Banana cream pie

Acid Drop | MySpace Music Videos

Waterloo Airport Airshow Tomorrow!

2010-06-18T14:34:00.006-04:00

The Snowbirds: Defending you from the Alien Menace since 1942

Just a heads up on the Waterloo Airport's Aviation Expo in Breslau! It's happening on the 19th and the 20th, just in time for father's day.

The legendary Snowbirds (whom I believe to secretly be a special force of extra-terrestrial counter-measure pilots) will be performing. If planes are your thing, check it out! I went with my pappy to see the pre-show earlier today and was reminded that planes go pretty fucking fast. I was also caught off-guard as to how maneuverable the smaller planes can really be - I'm a big fan of old-school bi-planes, and they were a treat to see.

You can read the airport's write up hereabouts. I think tickets are $15, and $7 for children and seniors.

Objectum Sexuality - Holy Fuck.

2010-06-17T14:26:00.003-04:00

Heard of OS before?

It's when people don't form emotionally and physically intimate relationships with other people, but instead find themselves attracted to objects. Like amusement park rides, fences, the Berlin Wall, the Eiffel Tower, an archery bow. They anthropomorphize and animate objects to the point where they can fall in love with them. This just blows my feeble human mind.

Read this article and/or watch a part of this documentary here.

What would I love if I had this sexual preference? Probably this.

Dragon Age Anime Announced

2010-06-16T14:08:00.002-04:00

Game giant BioWare and anime giant FUNimation have teamed up to produce a direct to DVD anime film that will expand on the Dragon Age universe, and is slated for release sometime next year, likely to coincide with the release of the next Dragon Age title. BioWare has mentioned that they're aiming for a classic style of anime, which, I hope, means something akin to anime greats like Akira and Ninja Scroll.

The world waits....

Lifeforce is Playing at the Princess!

2010-06-15T16:00:00.002-04:00

Heads up! Lifeforce will be screening at the original Princess Cinema on two nights - Sunday the 20th and Tuesday the 22nd!

Lifeforce feels like what would result if a b-movie producer was suddenly given a hollywood budget to do whatever he or she wanted. "So it needs vampires! And zombies! Naked babes too. And they better be in space at some point! Scientists, laboratories, detectives. And we better take this one seriously you guys! Get to it." It's a really bizarre and wonderful genre mishmash of a film. And decidedly British.

You can read the Princess write up here and/or watch the trailer below.

I'll likely be going on the Tuesday. :3

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #36: The Room (2003)

2010-06-12T13:49:00.001-04:00

This image, this face, was on a lone billboard for years with the tagline "Can you really trust anyone?" Audiences were not disappointed.

Here's how I heard about The Room:

A friend of mine says "Hey, I need you to track down a movie for me. Have you heard about this movie called The Room?"

I said no.

He says "It's supposed to be the worst movie ever made."

I was interested.

"Apparently Alec Baldwin was walking past a huge line-up filled with twenty-somethings and paused long to enough to ask what was going on. A guy told him 'It's The Room, it's the worst movie I've ever seen. I've seen it four times.' Then Alec Baldwin got in line."

I was very interested.

The greatest Baldwin had this to say: “It’s like ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’ without the wit or charm.” I don't think that's terribly accurate, since I've always considered Rocky Horror clever, competent, and actually pretty artsy in an elemental and carnival way. The Room is more like a late night blue-movie without the wit or charm. Sorry, with less wit and charm. It is, however, wildly entertaining for it.

It's essentially one Tommy Wiseau's earnest attempt to make a film about human passion and foible utterly ruined by his passion and foible. Wiseau's not a good writer, he's not a good director, and he's an even worse actor. What he does have is the money to produce a motion picture, though, and The Room is a motion picture. I can't really praise it unironically beyond that. I can say that it's been awhile since I've seen a movie this hilariously terrible, Birdemic: Shock and Terror at the Bloor Cinema aside. This'll be a great party movie for sure, and for extra flavour, try downloading the Rifftrax for a couple bucks - Rifftrax being downloadable comedic commentaries produced by some of the old Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew.

So: Beautiful and terrible as the dawn. And Wiseau looks and sounds like he should be fronting a European power metal band. We'll say it's called Owl King.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #37: The Wild Hunt (2009)

2010-06-11T17:00:00.000-04:00

All you need is LARP.

I'm really glad that this didn't suck. I'd been waiting for this one to hit the Princess pretty eagerly, since hearing of it and its concept. I dared hope that I could look forward to a Canadian film I could actually endorse with honesty. It's not perfect, but it's good, and left me with the kind of reflective aftertaste that films like Apocalypse Now and Deliverance left me with - that is, a strong brooding on the lizard-brain, violent animal nature in humanity, lurking on the periphery of consciousness and waiting for a chance to assert itself. Powerful film titles to evoke, I know, but the first that came to mind. Wild Hunt doesn't approach their mastery, but is certainly effective in its conceits and is able to work within its own logic.

Wild Hunt follows Erik, a young guy who's girlfriend, Evelyn, has been seeming disaffected towards him and her life. She decides to leave him, and he finds out that she's been immersing herself more and more heavily in the secluded LARP camp that she frequents. Catching some looks from the LARP boys in the car she jumps into, Erik suddenly starts to think that Evelyn has been dishonest in her motivations for leaving and that she's left him for another man. He decides to track her down and speak to her, in a bid to win her back. Things get bad for him. Indeed, the film was much rougher than I had expected, and gave me some sequences I had to work not to flinch from. And not for any gratuitousness.

For those unfamiliar with LARP (Live Action Role-Playing), it's basically Dungeons and Dragons ramped up to its logical conclusion - people in detailed costumes, pretending to be historical or fantastical characters of their own creation in an immersive role-play driven environment. Their conflicts and interactions are governed by Dungeons and Dragons-like game rules, and typically, these activities take the form of large camping events in specialised camp grounds lasting days at a time.

Oddly enough, I actually hadn't expected Wild Hunt to play up the nerdiness of the characters to the degree of comedic effect it went for, and whenever it did it felt pretty hokey and reminded me that I was watching a movie, likely in a theatre with a handful of actual LARPers. I wondered how they were reacting to their representations on the screen. At any rate, it was a bit of fan-service that could probably have been put aside for the much weightier and more interesting characters through which the film does its best work. There are tender and profound moments to be seen, and an ending I absolutely loved.

So: Check it out if you get another chance and support some Canadian filmmaking worthy of your loonies.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #35: The Calamari Wrestler (2004)

2010-06-11T13:48:00.000-04:00

Livin', lovin' - he's just a blue squid.

Do you like seafood? You might not. But I bet you would give seafood a second chance were you watching different sea creatures fighting each other for glory and supremacy. Let's give this some dignity: fighting each other in a wrestling ring.

Calamari Wrestler is pretty much what it sounds like, and I'm fairly glad for it. It might be described as some weird and forbidden love-child between Mexico and Japan – that is to say, Mexican wrestling culture with its Santo films and the large monsters of Japanese kaiju cinema. It ends up being a strange, sappy, and hilarious mixture.

So just when the public is losing interest in the Japanese wrestling circuit, a brave challenger comes. A saviour. No mere human wrestler, but a fucking man-sized blue squid. This squid goes on to capture the public imagination and inspire all of Japan with its show of courage and determination. He rises in wrestling stardom, dominating his opponents until some strange new challenger appears – holy moly! A boxing-glove wearing shrimp with super speed! As if that onslaught weren't enough, an even more pressing antagonist emerges from the dark recesses of the world's oceans: a big red octopus. The Calamari Wrestler must overcome these great foes, find love, and reconcile his mysterious and turbulent past.

So: This could only have come from Japan. Watch with friends and sushi.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #34: The Lovely Bones (2009)

2010-06-06T13:45:00.000-04:00

Mark 'One Face' Wahlberg!

I miss Peter Jackson. The Peter Jackson I once knew.

A man who could make a movie with a kung-fu-fighting catholic priest. A man who thought it best to use a lawnmower to destroy zombies. A man who would make a character take a sip from a bowl of puke so that the aliens wouldn't think he was a spy. The guy who took a decent crack at the Lord of the Rings.

But something changed. Something happened to him in Mordor that I will not utter here. And then he forgot how to make his movies interesting.

Peter Jackson's filmmaking has become, I think, pretty boring and pretty manipulative. The emotions he strikes with are overzealous, the tactics used to deploy them typical, the end concoction powerfully mediocre. He's become pedestrian.

The Lovely Bones suffers from some kind of bipolar disorder. A depressing or heartbreaking scene will be followed by a jaunty one meant to make you laugh and relieve the thin gravity of the previous scene, only to plunge back into the sombre and then soar up towards visual magic and wonder. The movie seems to think that emotions are simple, clear, and can be called upon at the drop of a hat, or often in this case, at the turn of a soundtrack. The movie is pretty over-scored, and when coupled with the frequent moments of pseudo-poetic and voice-over-delivered reflection, Lovely feels like it's constantly ending. And at a two and a half hour runtime, this gets pretty maddening. As the moments go by you might realize that you care less and less about what's happening on the screen, which seems strange when you consider that the movie is about a murdered little girl stuck in a visually fantastic purgatory. Which, by the way, points to the central drive of the flick - the spectacle of WETA workshop's digital effects, hammering all else to the side.

So: Peter Jackson still trying to impress a post LOTR crowd by adapting a moderately risque book. His talents lie elsewhere.

Laddergoat

2010-06-05T23:30:00.001-04:00

Video games can get pretty surreal. Sometimes, if you're very lucky and have a pure soul, like the guy playing Call of Juarez 2: Bound in Blood in the laddergoat video, a game will do something really unnatural. In those moments, a seemingly mundane NPC or object can be vaulted into transcendental greatness. Something might refuse to be bound by its limitations. A humble goat might become laddergoat.

Keep the volume reasonably low. He laughs piercingly and uncontrollably for 2 or 3 minutes. After he gives up on the goat, you can move back onto whatever it is you were doing. Godspeed you.

The Wild Hunt hits Waterloo, June 4th-9th!

2010-06-04T13:12:00.003-04:00

I've been waiting for this one. This Canadian film about LARPers turning savage is getting some buzz. There isn't much opportunity to catch a Canadian film in our current cinematic climate, so have yourself a rare experience. You can read the full write up on the film at the Princess page hereabouts. The screenings are part of the Canada Film Days festival, which should be worth following!

It's screening at the original princess from today onwards to the 9th. The directors themselves will be at tonight's screening to chat and answer questions.

LARP + Viking = Liking!

Axe Cop

2010-05-29T13:08:00.003-04:00

This makes me happy beyond belief. Here's an absolutely charming comic written by five year old Malachai Nicolle, clearly a genius, and drawn by his brother Ethan, who had the incredible talent and sense to bring his little brother's creation to the internet hordes. I was immediately hooked by this animatic of episode 1. Watch it and marvel.

You can find all the comix at Axecop.com.

Also check out the 'Ask Axe Cop' section of the site - a few of them have also been turned into an animatic. :3

Ryan Watches a Motion Picture #33: Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire - Season 1 (2009)

2010-05-29T13:00:00.000-04:00

For a fantasy junkie such as myself, the prospect of a heroic fantasy-inspired TV comedy is very, very enticing. So enticing that I've been working on my own web series for about two years. Here's a shameless plug. I thought I might have been the first to offer such a thing to people, but it turns out that at the exact same time, in some dank Comedy Central dungeon, a show entitled Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire was being produced, which, jealousy aside, only manages, sadly, to hit the 'OK' mark.

While there are some good and clever gags, the show's humour relies far too much on penis jokes and homophobia. Sometimes both hitting you at once for a dual-tech of stupid. There's also a lot of the show's sole female character showing skin and having frequent sex. The show is very clearly written by men, and, more importantly, men into the kind of male wish fulfillment you can find in the most boring fantasy writing. The characters on a whole aren't terribly likable, save for the bad guys. Indeed, the most entertaining stuff is found when you can watch the fickle and evil Chancellor Dongalor (chancellor's always seem to be evil) and his painfully more competent and wonderfully polite attendant Barnabus. They're a real treat, and in Dongalor the series eventually comes to present a character that calls for some genuine emotional investment. So kudos to the writing there.

So: I suspect that as the series goes on and the writers abandon their more basic strategies for the stuff that really works best it'll really become something worth watching.

Ryan Watches a Motion Picture #32: Muriel's Wedding (1994)

2010-05-28T04:40:00.000-04:00

This one's an Australian film directed by Paul Hogan. Sorry, it's not the Paul Hogan, it's a different and perhaps lesser man. For the rest of this review, right up until the end, I will imagine that Crocodile Dundee directed Muriel's Wedding, not a guy who isn't Crocodile Dundee. There's nothing you can do to stop me.

Boy, was I in shock when Paul Hogan's name hit the screen! Mick Dundee himself, stepping up to the plate and producing a really enjoyable film like Muriel's Wedding. I didn't know he had it in him! But now that I know it seems only logical. Have you seen his movies, where he's Crocodile Dundee? What a hoot they are!

Anyway, Muriel's Wedding is one of those films like American Beauty, where someone stuck in a blase life, ruled by the status quo and by the expectations of bad friends and bad family, transforms through a series of hard-won epiphanies. The humour is good, the turns in fortune heartbreaking and/or triumphant, and the commentary is sobering. I will say, though, that it suffers a bit from a lengthy runtime. There are a handful of sequences where the effect is quickly communicated, but the movie is indulging too much to cut away. Or a scene following another scene is too emotionally similar to its fellow. This leads to some pacing trouble.

So: A cool Aussie film with a large amount of charm, though not directed by Dundee. If you're by any chance reading this, P. J Hogan, no hard feelings.