Three Films Make A Post: FILMED WITH THE NAKED FURY OF FACT!

Warning: this trilogy of crap movies isn’t for the faint of heart!

Dracula 3000 (2004): Not to come over as excessively negative, but this German/South African co-production directed (in a rather generous interpretation of the term) by one Darrell Roodt must be one of the most joylessly bad films ever made. At the very least, it’s one of the most joylessly bad films I have seen in a long career of trying to find the entertainment value in things of generally dubious quality. There’s a theoretically okay enough cheapo cast including Casper van Dien, Tiny Lister and at least two minutes of Udo Kier, but the combination of Roodt’s clueless yet boring direction, the industrial building this was shot in nobody even tried to dress up as space ship interiors, and a script that includes lines like “I wanna watch my anaconda spit all over your snow white ass” and deems them funny come together to produce the perfect piece of shit.

To be avoided at all cost.

L’immortel aka 22 Bullets (2010): I’m more often than not criticizing the films that Luc Besson’s Europacorp crap out for their blatant stupidity but at least, they don’t have pretensions of artistic class and do their best to entertain their audience, quite unlike this particular Europacorp film. Richard Berry’s L’immortel plays out as a painful attempt at cramming as many gangster movie clichés into nearly two hours of running time as possible, filming them in an overbearing way that’s so pseudo-artistic it becomes tackier than anything Olivier Megaton has ever done, and hoping the audience hasn’t seen the dozens of better movies using these clichés to much better effect. Poor Jean Reno does his best as our honourable hero gangster boss (he’s against drugs, saves prostitutes etc) but not even he can save this particular film.

Repo Men (2010): And yet, the Berry film is still more watchable than Miguel Sapochnik’s dystopian SF action comedy monstrosity that takes a perfectly serviceable anti-capitalist idea and turns it into a series of scenes that are by turns unfunny, puzzling in their use for the film, would-be transgressive, or painfully generic. As is the custom for films like it, it also features way too many scenes where it winks into the camera while clapping itself on the shoulder for how clever and subversive it is, never actually finding the time to be clever or subversive.

As an action film, it also suffers more than a little from the fact its hero is the kind of asshole who has no problems with murdering people for money until his head is on the table, and never demonstrates anything even vaguely resembling a change of heart. Which is of course unavoidable in a film whose characters never resemble actual human beings, either.

Three Films Make A Post: They were created to save mankind. Something went wrong.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004): It’s taken me a good decade to learn to appreciate Kerry Conran’s only feature film. And now I’m thinking “what the hell is wrong with me and why has it been taking me so long”? Of course, in that decade, I consumed a very fair share of the pulps, serials, and comics this is an updated homage to, and gained a bit more knowledge about the people who built the wall this particular ball is bounced off of. Though, honestly, even before that, I should have appreciated the detail-rich production design and costuming, the love and care taken with a peculiar yet effective visual aesthetic, the sure-handed way Conran handles his one-note (but the right one) characters, the fact that – unlike in many a film of this type – Gwyneth Paltrow’s reporter character Polly Perkins actually gets to do stuff beyond looking pretty and being a love interest (although she handles that part rather excellently too), the expert pacing of the one damn and awesome thing after another plot, and so on, and so forth. Seriously, what is wrong with me?

The Nightmare (2015): If you’re looking for an actual documentary about sleep paralysis and the people suffering from it, Rodney Ascher’s documentary won’t be for you, because it basically handwaves away the actual science, concentrates on its mostly cheesy re-enactments of the sufferers’ hallucinations, and ends up with a lot of rambling about Jesus, aliens, and demons, and never makes even the tiniest sceptical or critical gesture towards even the greatest bullshit story. Perhaps, if one doesn’t get quite as annoyed by the film and its approach, one might be mildly creeped out by the archetypal nightmare imagery, but honestly, there are quite a few films admitting they are fiction that are much better at that,

Hangar 10 (2014): I found myself positively surprised by Daniel Simpson’s POV horror film of the UFO persuasion, which makes use of the UK’s favourite UFO incident. It even makes good use of it, actually hinting at various bits of the mythology concerned during the course of the film instead of just waving its hands and screaming UFOs. Like with a lot of POV horror films, there are some moments of mild tedium around the end of the first act but the film actually escalates things from there nicely, going through various POV horror greatest hits but avoiding the most annoying ones and ending in a handful of effectively creepy scenes quite its own.

There’s an actual visual pay-off in this one, too. Add to that Simpson’s ability to frame atmospheric and effective shots while keeping in hand-held consumer camera mode, a decent cast, effectively creepy sound design and subtract the sort of automatic hatred many people have evolved towards the POV form, and you actually have a clever and effective little piece of low budget horror.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,british movies,adventure,sf,pulp,documentary,woo woo,horror,kerry conran,jude law,gwyneth paltrow,rodney ascher,daniel simpson

Three Films Make A Post: Featuring the Longest Kiss in Cinema History!

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011): Guy Ritchie's second movie about the adventures of a very pulp hero Sherlock Holmes played by Robert Downey Jr. and his especially long-suffering Watson Jude Law shares all the virtues of the first movie, and is therefore pretty much as good as mainstream adventure cinema gets. It's fun, it's silly, it's playful, and so totally divorced from Victorian reality or the self-image of Victorians as evidenced in Doyle's work, it develops something of a subversive edge simply by treating both with as little respect as they deserve yet also with as much - probably more - love as they do.

Bonus points for a Moriarty who doesn't act like a hyperactive twelve-year-old, Noomi Rapace (who would make a pretty great pulp Holmes too, I think) and the most off-handed Reichenbach Falls ever.

The Life of the World to Come (2010): For some reason, this film doesn't appear on Rian Johnson's IMDB page, but this was made by the director of Brick and The Brothers Bloom anyway. It's a one take/long take concert film without an audience of The Mountain Goats (in this case in the form of John and Rachel) performing the whole of "The Life of the World to Come", the (not exactly religious) album on which all songs are titled with bible verses - which honestly is much better in practice than it may sound in theory; a description that fits The Mountain Goats in general.

For the most part, the film consists of the camera shifting position around Darnielle while he plays on the piano or the guitar, providing the film with an aesthetic that is minimalist and - thanks to the long take business - just a bit awkward at times, which again fits The Mountain Goats nicely, for this is the music of a guy who has always been willing to accept and own moments of awkwardness instead of excising them.

I'm too much of a fan of Darnielle (whose music, together with that of the Go-Betweens, Lucinda Williams, Epic Soundtracks, and the Fellow Travellers may very well have kept me sane at one point in my life) to say much about the quality of the music or the performance, except that the film made me cry just a little.

Finalmente… le mille e una notte aka 1001 Nights of Pleasure (1972): As a genre, the Italian sex comedy, even in its (in theory) more classy aspect, never did much for me, despite sharing at least the female half of its casts with those Italian genres of the same eras I do love. Their ideas about what's funny and mine just disagree a bit too much with each other.

So I found myself rather surprised when (house favourite) Antonio Margheriti's provoked quite a few smiles and even two or three guffaws from me here. The film's combination of low-brow comedy, nudity graciously provided by actresses like Barbara Bouchet and Femi Benussi (and, if that floats your boat, to a lesser degree actors like Gino Milli and, well, whoever plays the other semi-nude guys), and pretty nice to look at production design doesn't exactly add up to something everyone should see, but the film is a fine enough piece of exploitation for those evenings when something deeper, cleverer or less friendly would be too much. This is also another film that supports my theory of Margheriti being - generally (let's pretend we don't know his war movies) - one of the most good-natured of all Italian genre directors, for there's really nothing nasty about the film, even when the joke's by all rights should feel nasty. I imagine Margheriti as a happy man.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,italian movies,adventure,action,music,comedy,exploitation,robert downey jr,jude law,guy ritchie,rian johnson,the mountain goats,antonio margheriti,barbara bouchet,femi benussi