Month: August 2010

Kick-ass (2010)

gebryan2 Comments

About a year and a half ago, I saw a production still for Kick-ass. It was an action pose of a very young girl wielding a machete as big as she was. Awesome, I thought, America is finally attacking their own version of the ridiculous Japanese action films featuring school girls with crazy powers mowing bloody row after bloody row of bad guys wearing eye patches and black suits. Parents killed, a weaker younger sister to protect, an exiled ex-master as mentor, you know the story. Japan’s has cranked out a truckload of these frenetic samey kinds of movies, all enjoyable, all as trashy as R-rated hentai. A little more research and I found out it was based on a run of comics, so then my expectation turned to the notion of a big American version of an indie comic, like Scott Pilgrim or the hopefully upcoming Preacher. God, I love Preacher the comic and now I’m convinced there’s no way they can’t not fuck that comic. But I’ll see it so Garth Ennis gets some dough. Anyways…



So I saw Kick-ass last weekend. I didn’t dislike it. I didn’t not like it. I’d certainly recommend it to many people, but I’m a victim of my own expectations. I was expecting a different movie. Maybe that’s why on Netflix streaming, I watch so many blind movies, watching films without knowing anything about them. Zero expectations. My expectations are usually greater than what most movies deliver. However, the one exception is horror movies, I expect so many tropes and just accept them, just focusing on the cool, weird stuff.
And Kick-ass had so many comic book tropes. Granted they were all told well, but instead of feeling like an homage to a comic book movie, Kick-ass felt like a roulette wheel of comic book movie plots. The main character lived on Peter Parker’s street and had Peter Parker’s plot line with a slight twist on Peter Parker’s love life. It even ended with a Green Goblin sequel set-up. It did it well, no complaints, but I kept waiting for a subversion of the genre the tone kept suggesting. Even in the Batman plots with the eleven year old girl, if you read enough comics, you saw the twist coming.
But I did love the Batman stuff. Little girls kicking ass is like zombies in a mall, you can’t screw it up. And Nick Cage doing Adam West was awesome and hinted at how the movie could have went balls-out fanboy and been an unqualified success. I hope the the sequel, if there is one, is all Hit Girl all the time, she was fun and badass and campy in every scene. The other part of the movie, with the exception of some of the bad guy stuff, felt like the Superbad kids bought some capes and hit the town.
It was zippily paced and overall very light, but I guess in the end the bad guy was my own expectations.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The City of the Living Dead (1980)

gebryanLeave a comment

Okay, so you’re at a seance. And naturally you go into a deep, deep trance. In this trance, you have a horrible vision of the dead rising out of their graves and the gates of Hell opening up and of the evil, hanged priest lurking behind this whole mess of trouble. The vision is so shocking, so horrifying, you go into convulsions, blow snot and drool out of many orifices…and you die. You die. YOU ARE DEAD!
A few days later, when you wake up from your actual death, you’re trapped in your coffin about to be buried. So, you claw your fingers bloody trying to get out. Lucky for you, some manly retrograde sexist reporter frees you and you tell him the whole weird story–You absolutely must get to Dunwich (what’s up, Lovecraft?) before All Saints Day and rekill the dead priest or the gates of Hell will open, pouring out every horror imaginable. All Saints Day is two days away.
What do you do?
Why, you dawdle around New York for a day and a half and show up literally two hours too late after poking around town and stopping for snacks.
C’mon, doesn’t your OWN DEATH give you a clue that you should hustle it up and stop this oncoming Armageddon?


Last night, Netflix streaming wouldn’t let me watch episode three of The Kingdom, so I opted for some old style ’80’s Italian horror, The City of the Living Deadin high- def. It’s the first of Lucio Fulci’s Gates of Hell trilogy. The second film in the trilogy, The Beyond, is my favorite of these two movies and one of the best non-Argento examples of the genre. I haven’t seen the third one, but I’ll certainly search it out.
I’m a sucker for Italian horror movies and their close brethren, the gallos. I love their style, camera use, seriousness, inventive gore and general visceral feel. Yea, they can seem extremely dated and cheesy at times, but unlike many American horror directors of the time, the Italians try and treat their films as art.
Sometimes a dreamlike quality supersedes narrative and resolution. I seem to have a lot of horror-based dreams in the twilight hours of my sleep cycle. I usually don’t mind, I’m generally not the main character in my own dreams, but an involved secondary character. Weird. My dreams are often in the style and even plot of many Italian horror films of the ’80’s. I should probably see a psychiatrist, but at the end of most dreams, I generally feel like I’ve resolved some intangible problem much like a good horror movie.

Okay, some highlights from TCotD: generous eye bleeding like crying, maggot covered undead with real moving maggots on their faces, in fact the principle cast spent two minutes of the film being pelted with live maggots from head to toe with what must have been and insect filled snow blower, plenty of unnecessary cigar chomping, a woman pukes up HER ENTIRE INTESTINAL TRACK—slowly, three people were killed by the undead squeezing their brains out of the back of their head toothpaste tube style, mucho wood paneling, beer signs and ugly perms, an unnecessary and annoying kid, bad art, an unnecessary pervy janitor type, a temple to temple high-powered drilling, and, oh yeah, they were totally too late to stop the gates of Hell from opening. No boobs (boo), 15 dead bodies, Joe Bob gives it three stars.

Thinking about it, here’s a short list of themes or, if I’m in a bad mood, cliches of many Italian horror films of the 70’s and 80’s:

Plodding, throbbing, hypnotic Prog rock (These movies are the only place Prog rock should ever appear)
Weird unexplained animal noises in the back ground (Monkeys in the city?)
Lots of close up shots of eyes
Nobody blinks in the movie, ever
Eyes are ALWAYS the victim of some horrible impaling, I mean, these movies hate and are obsessed with eyes
Super saturated primary colors and lighting that make the colors both bleed onscreen and pop off the screen
Most of the horror is in the daytime
Hot, Italian women, usually wearing some strange Italian couture
Art galleries integrated into the plot or prominently displayed
One C or D-list American actor slumming it in the second lead role. They almost always die. (TCotD had ’70’s character actor Christopher George)
Pulpy, meaty down and dirty, lingering gore
Redubbed English dialogue. That is, they’re speaking English, but the mouth movements still don’t match.
Solid, fluid camera work that aren’t as dependent on editing as American horror movies
And lastly, a dream-like logic that guides and permeates both the characters and the action. While this sometimes leaves me scratching my head, more often than not it leads to surprises and the WTF moments you look for in a good horror movie.

I can think of a few more cliches, but I want to see the third film of this trilogy and then see how it compares to Dario Argento and Mario Bava’s work.

Also, enough writing for today.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

The Kingdom (1995) and the RPG Heaven and Earth (2004)

gebryan1 Comment

Lars Von Trier can be a real heavy-handed sumnabitch. Movies like Dogville-that bloody anti-Our Town-spend half of it’s running time bludgeoning it’s message at the audience in such a relentless manner that literally every character becomes a martyred symbol by the end. That said, it was an extremely interesting failure. Might as well aim for the bleachers.

So, I’ll generally give a Lars Von Trier movie a chance if I’m in the right mood. I liked his last film Anti-Christ because the dreamy symbolic and dark imagery worked and I’d watch Willem Defoe in just about anything. Yea, the ending was a bit much and lacked subtlety, but, honestly, I give most horror/thriller/dark dramas a pass on ending because I expect to be disappointed. The main selling point in these types of movies is ‘What is the central idea and is it executed well?’

I saw The Kingdom (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108906/) on Netflix streaming and had always wanted to see the mini-series because I’m a sucker for the core set-up: a seemingly normal small town or location that hides dark or supernatural secrets. Blue Velvet, although it doesn’t hold up well, is one of my favorite films. I read Stephen King’s Under the Dome (great idea and 3/4ths of a story with a lame ending, but that’s most of King’s books). There was an American adaptation of The Kingdom with King’s name on it that I saw a little bit of few years ago, but it was a dreary affair. So I was kind of pumped to see the original Danish mini-series. I’ve only seen the first two hours of eight (more later tonight), but I’m liking it and it has me thinking about some other topics I’ll cover in a bit. I love it when a movie I just saw before bed also seeps into my dreams as the tone on last night’s dream could have been an episode of the show.
So, The Kingdom refers to a Danish hospital built on spooky grounds. Much of the show could play as a dark medical comedy about the arrogance and just plain haphazardness of running a modern hospital. The characters already have flaws and mysteries and obsessions that make them at once mildly compelling and empathetic and also deserving of a grizzly end. The main character in the show has to the most arrogant SOB doctor character in the history of the arrogant SOB doctor genre. Love it. (Also learned that the Swedes looks down or at least this guy looks down on the Danes. He would go up to the top of the hospital and loudly scream profanities at his Danish counterparts.) There’s rapid disfunction, a literal crumbling of the institution, secret societies, and even an adorable Down Syndrome duo that serve as a Greek chorus. Of course, there’s some supernatural shenanigans which hopefully will turn down right Cthulhu as the show goes on. On the heavy-handed side, director/writer Lars, himself tuxedoed, would show up at the end in the credits and go on about good and evil and god and the nature of interest in such things. Odd. Anyway, this isn’t really a review as the show got me thinking about a Role Playing Game I ran for seeshells a few years ago.


Heaven and Earth(http://www.abstractnova.com/heavenearth.php) had a real compelling mystery at it’s center that I won’t spoil here, but the tone of the game made me want to run it and adapt it to my own style and write some plots and characters to fill in the mystery. The game centered around my favorite place, a small Kansas college town chock-a-block with weirdness and secrets. Every character had a secret. The RPG book gave some supernatural explanations for most of the secrets, but also supplied realistic reasons for the strangeness. My idea to expand the core book was to actually have some of the secrets be mundane and some supernatural and to be like an onion so that mundane mysteries would lead to other other-worldly secrets and vice-versa. I wrote about 50 NPC’s. Most characters only knew a tiny part of the big mystery and some believed the wrong thing about it or only a part of it, some were skeptical about some of it, but not other parts. Some were oblivious and most concealed something. Heck, some characters were ghosts who were credulous about some explanations. Anyway, I wanted to make a sandbox for the player character to go anywhere, soak it in and find mysteries everywhere. The game failed a bit because it didn’t always present a strong compelling course of action for seeshells’ characters. Basically, there was almost too much to do and I had her create a bunch of different characters to knock around town with. But I would like to use this place to solve on of the mysteries seeshells stumbled upon to show how you can use a character in the weird town genre to open up a wider story. (An aside, I was attracted The Kingdom because it was a mini-series so there was more room for multiple explanations and multi-layered mysteries. The same for the too-short ABC show Happytown which at least resolved it’s central mystery without resorting to cheap left-field supernatural explanations. Maybe it would have it it dragged on a few seasons. BTW, boo to Lost for it’s cheap non-explanation spiritual ending. Ang-ry.)
So, one of seeshells’ characters was staying at a Bed and Breakfast run by the sweet widow of an ex-mayor. The widow had a bulldog she was extremely attached to. Seeshells’ inquisitive character soon deduced that the bulldog was really the spirit or reincarnation of the widow’s husband. That’s pretty simple, mystery solved, right? Well, the widow did believe the dog was her husband, she did the satanic ritual to ensoul the dog in her basement. But why did she do it? What the widow didn’t know was the mayor wasn’t dead, the circumstances around his ‘death’ opened up a new mystery as also the whereabouts of the mayor. But there were people using supernatural forces (or being used by them) to control the dog to get the widow to carry out their bidding for their own strange ends. And down the rabbit hole we go.

I guess what I’m getting at is that most movies are too cut and dry in their telling of supernatural stories. It’s almost always the big bad ghostie pulling all the strings at the end of the day. It’s never ever a natural explanation if the supernatural is hinted at in the beginning. The only place that happens is Scooby Doo and then the reverse is true, wouldn’t you love it if a ghost DID gobble up Shaggy in just one episode? Mini-series offer the hope of the onion.
Man, I hate that recent rash of the skeptical/supernatural movie. (Only can think of Signs, but there’s also that movie with Hillary Swank and some river of blood) You know the plot, a skeptic who used to be a believer but lost faith because of the death of a child or wife now is a full time debunker of supernatural hoo-haw. In the first scene, he does expose a fraud, but then has a case too good to pass up. For half the movie, weirdness and disbelief abound until, something so bizarre happens (usually involving the ghost of a small girl), and the skeptic loses someone close to them. It’s only through coming around to full-on belief and eventual self-sacrifice is the big bad supernatural averted. And of course, no one believes him and everything is reset X-Files style.
Blech.

I hope The Kingdom doesn’t end that way and the douche bag doctor is just eaten by Cthulhu.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) and Mother (2009)

gebryanLeave a comment

These two Korean movies (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0269743 and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1216496/) were written and directed by the same person. And while very different, both films remind me of American movies of the 1970’s. More on that in a bit.

In a week, I hope to turn this blog into a daily review exercise for my to flex and build some writing muscles. I’ve been in constant consume mode for about two years now. Direct TV, Netflix streaming, a bourgeoning board game addiction, some mild anti-depressants, emusic, a not at all challenging job and basically an acceptance of who I am and what I believe have all led to a lessening creative output. And honestly, I’m okay with this. I enjoy consuming other people ideas, sifting through to find the truth and just letting things be. I no longer feel the need to pursue or justify any kind of ideology or agenda. Also, a need to write and create often stem from an obsession and I’ve been pretty obsession-free. General happiness and letting go of the uncontrollable can crush success. So, hoo-ray to my lack of success.

So, after failing to write for obsessive and even negative reasons, I wanted to get back to writing as a method for refinement. This blog is an exercise in refining why I like what I like and all of the semi-related topics the popular and not-so-popular culture are in relation into what makes up an interested or even negative response in my tastes. Huh? Basically, after developing a philosophy, I’m now interested in exploring and defending my likes and dislikes.

I do hope along the way, you’ll find some new interesting movie or game to play or what ever.

Yea, originally, this blog was going to be a game a day blog. A new board game played and reviewed every day. But, seven games played (with Seeshells) and reviewed would become a real grind. Funny thing is, I think we have enough games to go a whole year without repeating a game. Like I said, a board game addiction. I decided to scale that back to three games a week and fill the other four days with movies from Netfix streaming. I do like Netflix streaming, it’s a bargain. I may also do comic and music reviews as well.

This starts in ernest next week, the day after my 44th birthday and hopefully runs a year. (Hint, old man birthday a-comin’) If I like it, I may go another year with just movies. Technically, I received my new iPad for this birthday and each post will be written on my new-ish Apple girlfriend.

So, next week….
For now, a warm-up.

I’ve been watching a lot of Korean movies. The ones I’ve seen, including film The Chaser and the two titular flicks, remind me of ’70’s American movies. After Watergate, movies got darker and institutions started to fail on film. South Korea, as a country on film, seems to be going through much of the same growing pains. The populace is highly suspicious, distrustful, flawed, and uninterested in building community or improving their neighborhoods. It’s strange, all of the locations are crumbling and cramped, but the people themselves seemed to be dressed well to off-set their poverty. Individual over society. And they highly distrust every institution. The social services, police, church, academia and the politicians are either extremely incompetent or blandly corrupt. It’s just the way of life the young assistant professor has to bribe his boss to get a better job. Rumors abound everywhere, but conspiracies don’t exist. I like this because I’ve always thought conspiracies to be a uniquely American obsession and even have a positive side because it implies that the conspirators must be super competent, hard-working and ingenious to pull off their complex Machevellian plans.
That said, in these Korean movies, every one is angling for some personal gain with little regard for laws. They only cross the line at either the abhorrent or extremely, personally unethical. In all three of these movies, a bad guy is the good guy, the protagonist. He or she does some pretty bad things, sometimes not even for the best reasons, but only wins through personal sacrifice. And, in something and American movie wouldn’t do, another no-so-innocent, but unlucky person takes the fall for the protagonist’s crimes. There’s quite a bit of noir and dark absurdist comedy there. The lines aren’t drawn as heavy as they are in American or even western films. That’s not to say there isn’t any fairness doled out to the characters, there is, it’s just of the bittersweet variety.

As you can tell, I haven’t gone into story or even really classified what the two films are. Since I’m recommending them, I don’t want to spoil. And as far as the type of movie each of these films are, I think at once, they could be interpreted as both dark comedy or drama or thriller or farce. Tonally, I was thrown for a loop and I mean that in a good way. I didn’t see the end of Mother coming, but on reflection, man I should have. Tonally, tricks were played and like the best noir, the clues were all there. I should’ve seen it.

And that’s an awesome thing.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone