Awliens. Vompyre. This is Radiorama.

The 80s was special. You know this.

You may not know Radiorama. They're Italo-Disco and your new master.




Awliens. Awliens. Whatcha gonna' do? I love the poor man's R2D2 doing a constant 'suck it'.

Simona Zanini's dance has revealed new realms of eroticism inside me, and I know that I can never be the same.

Here's a little tune about Vompyre.


"Like a tiger vampire." That's pretty serious.

They also have a song titled Yeti, so they've really covered a lot of ground with their work. The electronic solos in all of their hot tracks feel like they could be the backdrop to some kind of magic medieval forest adventure. When was the last time you went on one? The forest misses you, you know.


Not seeing this on my blog? Original post can be found here.

HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA: He-Man + Cher = LOL

I wasn't one of the 14 million people who had seen this already. Are you like me?

This is why I love the internet with all my heart:

Chinese Game Of Thrones Season 2 Cover! Featuring Thor. Wow.

For those who haven't seen the gorgeous cover from a now legendary Chinese bootleg of Game of Thrones Season 2, feast your valyrian steel blades on this:

ZOMG it's Ned! Alive and well. How about that, eh? And he's Thor'd the fuck out. Remember that part in book 2 where Mr. Stark shows up and saves the day after having found Mjollnir, Thor's magic hammer? No? Oh right, that was just a Bath Salts hallucination. I'll never go to Bath & Body Works again.

Fun fact: Mjollnir literally means 'The Crusher'

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #98: Stryker (1983)

Leather! Boobs! Bullets!
Unlikable characters
Road Warrior? No.

The holy trinity of my interest is this:

SWORD AND SORCERY/HEAVY METAL/THE POST-APOCALYPTIC

Stryker is of the third. And it pains me to report that it's not very good. But if you're hankering for some Road Warrior-esque post-apocalyptic atmosphere, Stryker  might do right by you. Provided that you can supply beer and comrades.

So in this one you've got lots of leather, chains, ridiculous looking cars augmented with various impractical weaponry, desert marauders, and bow-wielding amazon biker chicks. What you don't have is any character worth giving a shit about. Each one annoys, each one lacks. You have a movie here in which none of the characters are terribly likable. Not because they're bad people or anything, but because they don't say enough or do enough to endear you to them. Every scene in Stryker is so cut and paste, so laughably obvious that almost no part of you is engaged. They're not even characters. There's nothing like a character arc anywhere in this movie. It's wonderful to behold.

Plot-wise, water's the precious thing everyone's fighting over, not gasoline. Road Warrior, the 1981 flick that was totally rad and sparked this whole screen genre was all about gasoline. Gasoline addiction is something we all know well in our modern age. Just the other day I stepped off of my modified Vespa (it has a mustard gas cannon), pushed back my spiked football helmet and slew a man with my combo sawed-off shotgun/steel trident crossbow. Because prices were so high, you know? I didn't even buy gas, I just wanted a cash for life ticket. I didn't win.

Water's a big deal too though, I guess. We'll worry about that someday I reckon. In Stryker it's serious business, and when the bad guy learns that a good guy has a secret mountain spring somewhere, well, look out! You've got a movie on your hands! Desert marauding is thirsty work on both sides, and Stryker, our lone wandering hero caught between them, has canteens to fill. Stryker's pretty aloof. So aloof that his motivations are completely absent. Self-preservation and greed don't even seem to be his modus operandi. He doesn't seem to care about much, but for whatever reason he seems to like these Jawa-like desert people he gives a bit of water to one time after they attack him savagely. Their tiny, shrill, dubbed voices only able to twitter one word at a time over and over until they're understood is certainly one of the most ridiculous and demeaning depictions of little people I've seen in a movie. I should be pc, sorry: they're mutants.

Unlikable as Stryker is, by the time the third act rolls around all of the other non-characters suddenly care about the guy. Our main heroine makes out with him before he deserts them in their time of need, and everybody pats him on the back as he walks away. Okay, sure.


As you'd expect from an exploitation film (this one hails from the Phillipines) it gets a bit rapey. Lone females inevitably get their shirts torn off by grimy raiders and roughed up a bit before the hero steps in. When the amazon biker chicks show up, you'd expect some ass-kicking to commence, but of course, they have to be reduced to being just women. As soon as the menfolk arrive, the fierce amazons mostly just run around helplessly, look for their male interests and, calling out their names, get shot to death in the middle of a firefight.

Yes please.

The movie's soundtrack is noticeably annoying and hilarious for it. It's very, very overplayed. Essentially it's just one lackluster and inappropriate melody, either synthesized or played by soft piano for those really tear-jerky and sensitive moments. As crappy as the movie is, the ending actually caught me off-guard, and I'll have to give it kudos for that. It wasn't a particularly good ending, it just kind of comes out of nowhere, and is bewildering enough to be a point of enjoyment. Okay movie, you just do your thing. I'll watch you.

So: Mostly worth it if you like bad movies. Certainly if you like bad post-apocalyptic movies.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #97: The Raid: Redemption (2011)

Excuse me sir, my face does not need a machete.

Dirty apartments

Hardest points on the body?

Ouch, elbows and knees.

The Raid: Redemption. To be fair, even before going to see it, the movie had already won a point with me. I squeal inwardly when a movie gives me a sub-title. Especially ones like The Redemption. Stick an epic sub-title on your movie and I'll pay good money to see it. Money I earned by putting children to work in diamond mines. You know what I mean, good money. I'd go see Princess Diaries: Dark Reckoning, or A Heartland Christmas: Rain of Blood. These things just sell me.

So it's pretty good. I won't say The Raid is inspired, but I will say it's quite satisfying. It's Indonesian, and it's always a nice change of pace to see a foreign film in a cinema: it reminds you that there's other people on the planet, you know? In their own countries? Speaking in different languages, shooting each other, breaking each other's bones. Just like us.

The movie kind of plays through like a video game. It starts with a mere 5 minutes of exposition, throws some stylish opening credits your way, and gets with the action. Mission laid out: there's an apartment building full of baddies that need stomping, and you, rookie, are going to have to fight your way through them to get to the two mini-bosses you have to face before you get to the big boss. Mission accepted. Mission start.

The fights are well choreographed and don't rely on much shaky-cam, which is a definite plus. When someone gets kneed in the face, I don't want the camera flopping around like an epileptic duck. I want to see a knee hit a face. If you're using a shaky camera style it's probably because your stunt guys suck and you don't want us to notice.

There are some great deaths given to some (relatively) bad people, which always entertains. The gore's either not extreme or I'm too desensitized to judge properly. If it's not that extreme and I still have a healthy brain gauge, I'm glad for it. The gore walks a fair line without getting stupid or showy. Though get ready to see stabbings. Lots of them. The sort where you see the knife go in and out in the same shot. Several times. That doesn't happen in movies terribly often: I believe you can show a knife going into a body, but if you pull it back out it earns you a harsh rating from the ratings board. Ratings be damned, The Raid says, laughing bullets.

So: A dish of satisfyingly meaty and moist martial arts. Best enjoyed with friends.

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

People quite naked,
Long take alienation,
Uncomfortable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
Beyond confusing
Sword and Sorcery green screen
Irredeemable

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chicks wearing little,

Swords, axes, and sorcery

Somehow made boring.

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

Guess what Conan does. Then guess the result.

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

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

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

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

 

Just try and care about me. I dare you.

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

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

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #93: Hugo (2011)

Looking at the screen
Is this really Scorsese?
Invigorating.


There aren't too many movies that actually feel like movies, and I think that's in part because movies try very hard to get you to forget that you're watching a movie. Many movies try to be disposable, forgettable, non-commital. They do very well at it.

For cinema to feel like cinema, for a film to give you some sense of movie-ness, some flavour you only taste when you participate in cinema, I'd say it has to do at least these two things:

1.
It has to remind you you're watching a movie, either by being meta enough to be about movie-making, or to be so steeped in movie tradition, like with a genre film, say, that you can't help but think about all the films that have lead up to this one.

2.
It has to use film language. It's not just talking heads delivering dialogue for the camera to catch. It uses visuals, it uses technique - a certain camera movement, a certain edit – to express something in a uniquely filmy way.

Hugo does all of those things, and there's nothing I love more than cinema that feels like cinema. The movie does a lot with its visuals, and when a time comes where more can be said with silence than talk, it does it with silence. That, my fine filmy friends, is a rare restraint. When the relationships between people in a busy train station are described perfectly and expressively to you by your eyes alone, you're reading with film language, and it's much more intimate than hearing someone say, if not in so many words, "Gee willickers, I'm awful lonely and I really like you but we just can't seem to get together!"

Now, I didn't see the film in ye olde 3D, which is all the rage with the kiddies nowadays (if marketing can be believed, and of course the last thing you can trust is what you see on tv and read in magazines), but from what I've heard from respectable mouths, the 3D usage in Hugo is tasteful and does more to lend magic and depth to the film than pop out shocks and cheesy spectacles would.
Would kids like this movie? I'm not so sure. They could dig it, but it moves slowly and with a building force that might not provide a young kid with the kind of payoff they might hope for. Some of the kids innocent and wistful dialogue struck me as a little out of a place at times, since the sheer gravitas Hugo generates makes you take things almost too seriously until the more magical side of the movie starts to assert itself.

If I hadn't known going into the film that the exalted Martin Scorsese had directed Hugo, I don't think I would have realised it in the watching. Well, assuming I'd have dropped my popcorn and drink all over myself or my significant other or insignificant other sitting close to me and missed the opening credits. It really doesn't feel like a Scorsese movie in any way that I could register. But it's clearly made, once some plot reveals hit you, by a director that knows and cares about cinema.

In Hugo Scorcese has made a kids film for adults, and, much to my delight, a little history lesson for anyone that might never have been exposed to early film history; a history that touches huge swathes of the cultural environment that they live their lives in. A movie, Hugo points out, is a waking dream. Our dreams projected before us. Our own brains thrown onto a screen for us to watch. It's a special and unique kind of magic central to how we receive our culture, and, more interestingly, ourselves. I salute any movie that tries and succeeds to remind us of that.

So: If you like your movies tasting like movies, have a cup.