Realization

while reading The X-Axis: If I have the choice between something with "a real plot" and something with "an attitude", I choose the attitude.

Mad Detective (2007)

Man, I love Johnnie To's movies. This one is no exception. But couldn't somebody have warned me about the (incredibly logical and keeping true to the themes of the film) downer ending to end all downer endings?

People with money!

Help one of the best authors writing today out:

http://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/428785.html

H.P Lovecraft: Ipotesi Di Un Viaggio In Italia

I'm temperamentally inclined to like the idea and fact of fake documentaries more than most people. It always seems to me like one of the better ways to solve one of the main problems in independent or sub-independent film making - the lack of money. Plus the format itself just works for some people (like me) especially well.
This small Italian member of the species follows a fictive journey of HPL in 1926 through the Po delta, obviously, as the film suggests, the source of the main concepts of the Cthulhu Mythos. The film underplays its cards a little. Suggestions of the supernatural are probably a little too ambiguous to interest anyone who is not a Lovecraft fanatic whose kinks contain filling the fringes of the life of real people with the unreal for the film. But I am one of those fans and so can recommend it warmly.

You can watch it in three parts on YouTube:
Part One  Part 2  Part 3

The Last Winter (2006)

Look Ma, it's the end of the world again! This time brought on by Global Warming, which leads to melting permafrost and the release of supernatural forces punishing humanity for its hubris.
The Last Winter could very easily have become preachy and trite, but director Larry Fessenden goes -to my delight- for a subtle, low key and personal approach to his themes. Until the very end most of the things we see can be explained through simple human fallibility and stupidity. Only when the characters have no other choice than to accept the truth, do we as viewers have to do the same. Which is quite elegant.
The only problematic moment is some very bad CGI work very late in the movie.

30 Days of Night (2007)

Very tight, mean and fast adaptation of the small-scale apocalyptic "Vampires in Alaska" comic by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith.
It has the dubious honor of being one of those films that very much get to me. I'm at the same time quite enthusiastic about it and feeling as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to my head.
Yeah, this is a warm recommendation.

Mean Streets (1973)

Usually, I'm not running around blogging my Martin Scorsese love, mostly because there's not much that hasn't been said about his work already, but I still love this fucking movie so much.
And it contains all the proof I'll ever need that hyperstylized cinema feels much more truthful and real than naturalistic/realistic cinema could ever hope for.

The Monster that Challenged the World (1957)

Fifties monster movies, I theoretically love you...but sometimes, you're just not bad enough (or good enough) to deserve my love.

The Good:
This is a movie about Giant Bloodsucking Atomic Snails who -to my surprise- don't even look too shabby on screen, but (and this leads directly to)

The Bad:
there's way too little to see of them or their nefarious world challenging acts of sucking half a dozen Americans dry. Instead, we're treated to long, tedious and earnest hours of long, tedious and earnest search for the monsters' lair, a tedious and earnest love story I don't want to think about too long and some choice bits of unfunny humor.

TmtCtW's problem is a bad case of mediocrity: There is not enough sense of style, drama and creepiness to make it as classic as Them, but also not enough ineptness to lead to the idiotic bliss of something like The Giant Claw. It just kind of sits there and looks at you earnestly, promising Giant Bloodsucking Atomic Snails!

Ginji the Slasher (1995)

Going into it, I expected this movie to be a typical Riki Takeuchi Direct to DVD blood bath: unambitious, but mildly entertaining. I was pleasantly surprised.
To be sure, there is a little bit of ultra violence in the movie, but its emphasis and heart does not lie on or in Takeuchi's exploits as young Ginji, but on and in Isao Natsuyagi's fifty years older, broken Ginji, a walking dead in every but the literal sense.
Most of the time, yakuza vengeance films eschew ambiguity as much as possible, Ginji actually thrives on it, heavily helped by Natsuyagi's impressive portrayal of a survivor, a broken man who's just not broken enough to go through with dying or senseless vengeance. The ambiguity that drives the film also encompasses its use of the fantastic and the uncanny. Some of it externalizes Ginji's inner turmoil and the (not incredibly clear) political metaphors, none of it is explained away (or explained at all, for that matter).
The direction of the film is solid throughout and as competent as one can expect of a film made on a shoestring budget like this. As is to be expected, not every actor here is as nuanced as Natsuyagi or as charismatic as Riki, but I didn't find anyone distractingly bad.
The script is as ambitious and ambiguous as if written directly for me, only some small moments of melodrama late in the movie fall a little flat.

I give the movie 4.5 out 5 depressed moments culminating in violence.

Damn, I love the internets

http://editthis.info/scp_wiki/SCP_Series

Yup, Special Containment Procedures should become the new LOLCats.

Torchwood & Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles or It's a nightmare, it's a nightmare

I'll keep this short. Why waste time on kicking dead pigs.


Sarah Connor Chronicles s01e01+02

So, let's talk about the worst dialogue one can possibly find, full of bad melodrama and the stupid, let's talk about a script that makes the Terminator 3 movie look like a work of writerly genius, let's talk about the least menacing evil android killers I have ever seen, let's talk about wasting Summer Glau again.
Or better, let's don't.

Torchwood s02e01 aka The Last Straw

After the Doctor Who Christmas Special and this, I've come to the following conclusion: Russel T. Davies and Chib Chibnall are consciously competing for the title of worst TV hack writer ever.
There is really no other explanation for this stupefying piece of crap, and it's really really really impossible to think that someone could read the script for this thing and think it even watchable. What surprised me was Chibnall's ability to do the seemingly impossible and write something that is even worse than the worst thing he wrote for the first season.
I could list all the ways in which the episode fails, but, seeing that it does in every way imaginable, I just don't have the heart. My life is just too short to waste more of it to this series.

Getting it right

http://www.aycyas.com/FreddyVsJason.htm

I know I probably shouldn't be

but I'm excited!

If games aren't art, why can they do something like this?

http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com/2008/01/review-stalker-shadow-of-chernobyl.html

Jade Empire

Jade Empire is an archetypical  Bioware RPG, this time in a pseudo-Asian martial arts world, but with the same strengths and the same flaws all Bioware Games share.
The biggest strengths being, as always, a great sense of character to most of the NPCs, even if you have seen some of the types before and really fun (sometimes funny) sidequests, as well as some of the most atmospheric worldbuilding you will find.
Alas, the flaws really are the same as always, too. So much so, in fact, that I am starting to doubt that Bioware actually wants to improve. The flaws are the terribly samey, been-there-done-that-plotting, moving from non-surprise to nice little idea to thing I lived through in every single other game by Bio, the lazy, too-streamlined combat, all culminating in a feeling that Bioware lets by now design parts of their games by automated plotting machines.
I don't mind the moral decision making part of the gameplay that got lots of flak from most reviewers as much. You just have to keep in mind that Bioware is a Canadian company and as such naturally unable to distinguish between rudeness and Evil. No offense.
Though all this may sound very negative, the game still has many moments of great fun, it just too often keeps on the safe side of the line between workmanship and art. I'm just hoping for Bio's designers to take some risks from time to time.

Eye in the Sky (2007)

The film rethinks the well-worn and beloved Hong Kong Cop movie genre for the surveillance age. As the earlier films of the genre were very much about doing things and the consequences of it, Eye in the Sky is about watching and the consequences of not doing.
I found this especially clear in the few action sequences of the film, which are not trying to bring us into the action as a participant, but as an observer.
The usual slickness and good to great acting of current Hong Kong cinema apply here, too.
For the most part, I highly recommend the film, only the excessive use of chance/divine intervention in the last act grates a little. Grates enough, actually, to make an essential film into a very good film.

So, how bad was the Doctor Who Holiday Special?

Ever heard of the Titanic? No? Lucky you. I never wanted to see anything happening on that damn ship ever again, but hey, who wants originality? Russel T. Davies not.
And I'm no longer slightly irritated by, but actively loathing the idea of the Doctor as intergalactic sex-pot whose magnetic rodenty looks let every woman he meets fall in love with him. And who falls deeply in love with every white woman he meets after about five seconds.
What else is there to say about the episode? Oh, yeah, the plot...You know who wrote it, so you know how incredibly sloppy it was. And of course, there has never been any sensible dramatic composition in a Davis-episode. So, until the guy finds himself a writing partner or a story editor, we'll have to live through crap like this.
Although I bet that the new Torchwood season will be even worse.
Where's Paul Cornell when you need him?

How beautifully silly!

http://www.netdisaster.com/go.php?mode=ufo&destruction=massive&sound=on&url=http://houseinrlyeh.livejournal.com

But where are the Great Old Ones?

Portal

Every word you may have read about this relatively short, exceedingly funny and astonishingly perfect game is true. I would never have imagined that my favorite game of the year would be a physics based first person puzzle game, but it's so much more and does everything right from the difficulty curve to the character and feel of its environments and its brilliant antagonist.
Also: When was the last time a game rewarded you for winning with cake and a song (that still keeps me grinning and happily giggling when I think about it)?

Whatever my three readers may celebrate this month, this should fit

Linda Thompson - Versatile Heart

I've never really seen the point of calling a piece of music "timeless". Doesn't this usually stand for some kind of regression into a mythical golden past that never existed? Should artists strive for not talking about the times in which they are living?
But, some albums, like Linda Thompson's brilliant new Versatile Heart, are shooting for another type of timelessness - talking about things that don't change and being sad and angry about the immobility of the world; though also talking about the things that change and shouldn't.
Which of course makes Versatile Heart a very timely record.

Hercules at the Center of the Earth aka Hercules in the Haunted World (1961)

Well, sometimes it seems to be rather pointless to rave about the beauty of Mario Bava's work, when there are people like Tim Lucas around, who can do that so much better (and much more insightful, I fear).













And the suggestion that, if you only want to watch one peplum in your life, it should be this one.

Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)

Surprising as it may seem, the only Friday the 13th movie I've seen before was Freddy vs Jason, not really a way to endear a franchise to me, and the reviews of the series plus my not exactly burning with love for the Slasher sub-genre didn't make the matter of watching more of it pressing.
But sometimes you actually want to see young, stupid people being killed with pointy objects, so it was inevitable that I would some day see another Friday. Luckily, I'm not in a very masochistic mood these days, so I decided to watch what is usually considered the best (sometimes "the only watchable") of the series.
And good Ft13P2 certainly is. The plot is of course more or less non-existent (camp counselors on a camp counseling course in a counseling camp are counseled killed by a wood dwelling psychopath with camp and mother issues), but there is a certain drive and style to the proceedings, even an interest in details. Not only can we actually see the killer transporting one of the corpses, but also some of the hoariest clichés of the genre are actually set up properly. You know that car? We learn early on in the film that it has the tendency to not start even on a normal day, so we're not that annoyed when it doesn't start later on either.
Also, there is the best Final Girl sequence I have ever seen, good enough to recommend the movie even if the rest was as unwatchable as its atrocious last two minutes.

My Dear Killer (1971)

This fine film strides the line between giallo and more conventional mystery, but in a very entertaining way. Highlights: A mustachioed(!) George Hilton playing a cop(!!), a Morricone soundtrack of his usual quality, some really great photography.
Not a work of genius, but an all-around nice piece of genre film.

Ye Gods

http://whalepenis.org/

(Warning: Not safe for any work that I know of!)

Django (1966)

Poor Sergio Corbucci was always standing in the shadow of that other Sergio, who happened to be at his best when making western too. And I can see why. Corbucci's films always looked a lot cheaper, not necessarily in a bad way, but in the kind of way mainstream critics can't cope with: sound stages that look like sound stages, plots that aren't stolen from Kurosawa, instead from the B-western next door, women that are a little more complex than Leone's rape fodder, actual compassion for human beings. And show me an ending more heartbreaking and heartbroken than that of Il Grande Silencio.
I think in Corbucci's greater compassion with his characters lies their higher emotional resonance for me: Where Leone's (and of course he was a great director who made great movies) characters are more or less part of the scenery, Corbucci's are (slightly cardboardy) people. And I never cry for shrubs.

EM aka Embalming (1999)

You possibly know Shinji Aoyama as the director of art house films like Eureka, which won't prepare you for EM in the slightest. It's a kind of unholy union of art house/thriller/mystery film, with a plot containing illegal organ trade, stolen heads, embalming, the possibility of eternal existence, multiple personality disorder, conspiracies, father complexes, weird sects, human experiments, and everything else you could possibly think of, written by a Japanese Ross Macdonald on speed, but directed by Shinji Aoyama (with an unexpected sense of humor) on Valium.
If this sounds confusing, you haven't seen the actual film, which throws at least one mad idea per minute at you, all the while trying to stay ponderous, slow and meditative. Aoyama's way of concentrating his shots on weird, seemingly non-intuitive details doesn't make the plot any clearer, instead producing a unique moodiness.







Darlings of the day:
"We'll be disgraced if we display his body without his head."

"Everyone seems to have been totally brain-fucked!"

Who

are these people who are telling me Umberto Lenzi's gialli are as watchable as his cop movies, and not as crappy as anything else he ever directed?
And why are they lying to me?

Bay of Blood (1971)

If you are a friend of fully sympathetic, heroic characters in your movies, you have come to the right film. Bay of Blood features a cast of sociopathic killers, who mutilate each other with pointy, sharp and blunt objects as easy and unconcerned as I brew myself another cup of tea.
Director Mario Bava never even makes one of the characters the protagonist, instead opting to leave the viewer more than a little disoriented by the tempo in which potential protagonists die or turn out to be amoral murderers (mostly both). This tactic, along with the grotesquely beautiful visuals and the goriest violence of 1971, give the proceedings a strange feeling of abstraction and an nearly overwhelming off-ness.
All this might sound a little off-putting, but I sat in front of the monitor transfixed and a little uncomfortable by the cynicism of the whole thing, not wanting the movie to end as fast as it does.

(And by the way: Bay of Blood looks in part like the most stylish slasher movie ever made, just nearly ten years too early and graced with some of the genre conventions of the giallo.)

Aha

Your Inner European is Dutch!

Open minded and tolerant. You're up for just about anything.

Who's Your Inner European?