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

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.

Wendy's Films of 2010 #108: Shinjuku Incident (2009)

Most Jackie Chan films I've seen have been a bit silly. I never really got a chance to see his previous stuff where you get treated to his awesome martial arts skills, so when this film was suggested I was a little apprehensive, but it ended up being quite good as I remember. (I did watch it back in June, after all.) Chan plays a Chinese man who immigrates to Japan to make money. Unfortunately he loses his Chinese papers and cannot go back home to his love. He begins making it in Japan doing odd jobs and eventually makes it into the underground illegal system. He gets twisted into deeper and darker situations and eventually makes it into the hierarchy of the Yakuza as a manager of the Chinese area of town and its gangs. Of course things go downhill, he finds out his former love had moved to Japan and married one of his foes. You can imagine the action and gunfire now if you please.

Overall I'd say it was a satisfactory film, that I enjoyed and would recommend if someone asked about it. Nothing hugely memorable (I had to look it up before I remembered what it was about), but worth your while if you're in the mood for an action drama with a bit of comedy and some Yakuza action.

Wendy's Films of 2010 #107: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

Just after I turned 6 months old, a film about space travellers coming back home was released. I'm not sure about its significance in terms of my 6 month birth anniversary, but there must be one. Perhaps I'm meant to swim with whales? Or I could fall for a curiously out-of-date space traveller who calls himself James T. Kirk?

I hope not. I didn't mind William Shatner as a Trekkie, but the thought of kissing him makes me puke a little in my mouth.

I actually enjoyed this movie. I thought it was good in a cute, falling in love, save the animals kind of way. In it, they must go back in time and save the future of the humpback whale population, and thus the future of the world!! It's got a sense of humour, which I've always enjoyed in films, I especially enjoyed the outfits they put on when arriving to the earth's past (as seen above). They must deal with Dr. Gillian Taylor, played by Catherine Hicks (the mother from 7th Heaven), and she ends up falling for Kirk. It reminded me of watching "Danger Bay" as a kid, a sappy 1984-89 series about a veterinarian who saves sea life with his kids.

The special thing about this movie is that it was actually directed by Leonard Nemoy who plays Spock in the series (and the film). I thought that was pretty neat anyway. He's one of my favourite characters in the film too. Check it out for a laugh!

Maggie 2010: Banksy Banksy Banksy!

#119. Exit Through the Gift Shop



The last thing one might expect in a film ostensibly about Banksy, the most acclaimed street artist of our time, is the soothing masculine narration of a traditional documentary. And yet amid the madness of a character who swiftly emerges as the film's central agent, a Frenchman who acquired a camera once and thereafter would not put it down, such a traditional gambit becomes, if not imperative*, at least understandable.

Exit Through the Gift Shop orients itself around the story of Thierry Guatta, a French immigrant whose compulsion to film everything first leads him to discover that his cousin is the famed street artist "Invader," who affixes mosaics of Space Invader wherever possible in public spaces. From this discovery Guatta launches into a Gotta Catch'em All quest to videotape street artists in process, but wherever he goes finds himself limited by the most elusive Pokemon artist of them all:

Banksy.

Author of some of the most provocative and daring street art of our time, including work on the West Bank and a Guantanamo Bay mannequin in Disneyland, Banksy is noted for maintaining an extremely low personal profile, so Guatta's tale of falling in with him had to have a point unto itself: specifically, Guatta had to convince his street artist friends he was working on a documentary.

This flimsy conceit, its pathetic follow-through (complete with some amusingly direct commentary from Banksy's obscured profile), and the new quest Guatta claims Banksy ultimately set him upon mark the major turning points in the film--as well as a whole whack-load of questions from reviewers about whether Exit Through the Gift Shop is genuine or another Banksy installation piece.

Regardless of its veracity, the real joy of this film is not its declarative statements: it's the thrill of watching street artists deploy their creations in the heart of the city, day and night alike--on rooftops, under bridges, over billboards, around telephone poles, and throughout the streets.

Moreover, one needn't buy into the suspicion that this story is too wacky to be real** to enjoy the gentle self-effacement that goes hand-in-hand with the semiotics of documentary--specifically, the way the very framing of this subject in serious film argues that street art is high art. Indeed, every time someone in the film talks about the legitimizing benefit of their work being filmed, we cut to a scene of someone falling from a ladder or a rooftop, spilling paint or otherwise making an unfortunate mess of themselves. This, for me, never ceases to be a point of delight.

As for the conspiracy theories about this film being a hoax, I will say this much: Guatta's depicted failures in Exit Through the Gift Shop, both as a documentarian and then as a street artist in his own right, after years spent filming others at work, do not seem at all unrealistic. Quite frankly, the street art Guatta creates is very much what one would expect from someone whose dominant trope has always been the lens--a sort of self-conscious, superficial deconstruction of paparazzi/celebrity culture.

However, if it eventually turns out that this film very much was a hoax/installation piece unto itself, I will be saddened not by that measure of falsity but by the possibility that Guatta's absurd attempt at street art documentary, which Banksy thoroughly dismisses on camera himself, doesn't actually exist somewhere--a moldering P.O.S. just begging to be reclaimed by cultural studies and psych students alike in the decades to come.


*Has Herzog taught us nothing about how to handle bizarre personalities in film?
**Personally, I've seen wackier: and after Dear Zachary, nothing will ever convince me real life isn't invariably stranger than anything a documentarian or street artist can create.

Wendy's Films of 2010 #106: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966)

When this year began I had the high hopes of watching 365 movies I'd never seen before, writing reviews for each one and perhaps even ranking them. It is now the beginning of December, I have written 106 reviews (less than a third of my goal) and have over 60 left to write. I suppose this is what happens when you combine life with 2 month vacations, a dash of procrastination and a sprinkle of "ooo, let's go to the market!" But, I shall do my darndest to write more this month, hopefully I shan't feel as though I've let myself down at the end of it.

At least today I have the great pleasure of relaying my thorough love and adoration of perhaps the greatest movie I've seen this year. I'm a little ashamed that I'd never seen The Good, The Bad and the Ugly before, it had been mentioned to me consistently, long before I'd ever stepped into a Film Studies degree and I only finally watched it this past June.

If you like Westerns this will be a wonderful, sparkling pinnacle of delicious; if not, you may just fall in love with them because of this movie. It's part of the "Dollars Trilogy" all starring Clint Eastwood and directed by Sergio Leone, and though Once Upon a Time in the West is still my favourite Sergio Leone Western, this one certainly ranks as "up there" in my mind.

Eastwood plays the lone hero type, without the typical characteristics of a hero. He's a bit crude, a bit mean, but I love him perhaps because of this, rather than in spite of it. Along with three other men, he is in search of a treasure buried in a man's grave, but the movie is way more than that. It is less about the gold than about everything else that happens in between: the civil war, betrayal, prison, hangings, and the music. Oh the music, and how wonderful it is. The soundtrack was written by Ennio Morricone, a man who has composed the music for so many other films, but is probably most well known for this one.

So, if I have not convinced you, please listen to all the others out there who have claimed on imdb.com that this is the 4th best films ever made. Because even if it's not that high in my opinion, it's definitely a fantastic movie worth your time and perhaps a few dollars for the rental fee.

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

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)

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.