There are tons of films that time forgot. But where time forgets, fans remember. A hommage to these fans and their films. [Archive]
This film is not as weird as the trailer, but still: it’s about a boy and a speaking dog only he can understand. They wander the planes of a post-apocalyptic world, scavenging what they can find. Until the boy finds a girl. He follows her through a rabbit hole (a door actually, but Alice is really not far away) to find out she lives in an underground city inhabited by odd people with odd rules and odd make-up. He doesn’t like it there. The film actually has some good moments between the boy and the dog, of which the latter is really just a dog with a voice over. Did I mention the film was a bit odd? It’s pretty good though and not even in a bad way. You should watch it some time. Young Don Johnson has the lead as the boy.
There are tons of films that time forgot. But where time forgets, fans remember. A hommage to these fans and their films. [Archive]
Sean Connery is showing off fancy red underpants, men walk around with bare nipples and women are wearing see through outfits in John Boorman’s Zardoz. This seventies sci-fi flick is set in a world where The Penis is Bad and the Gun is Good. The film has strong seventies vibrations, but not the good ones like in A Clockwork Orange (even though that film was released in 1969). Zardoz is dated beyond seriousness, just the way we like it at Sarcastic Assault (come to think, perhaps Lynch’s Dune is a better comparison). I bet you have never seen James Bond with a porn moustache. And concluding: Beethoven is always good in film, especially the over-used 7th Symphony. Nietzsche would have been proud to see a movie about this futuristic übermensch.
Here it is! The first episode to the revival of Mortal Kombat after a mediocre tv-series and two bad, very bad films. It’s a ten minute clip, high quality video and high quality… testosterone. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before in total, but hey, it has a rusty factory setting with lots of metal sparks, slow motion, explosions and of course hand to hand kombat. And Michael J. White as Jackson Briggs, Jeri Ryan as Sonya Blade and Anthony Dale as a still two eyed Kano. First show down: Jax vs. Kano. Watch it here, watch it quickly: it’s great. Fanboy out.
Episode 2 shows next week. Liu Kang, Durak, Kabal, Kitana, Mileena, and possibly even Shao Khan are rumored to make their appearance!
There are tons of films that time forgot. But where time forgets, fans remember. A hommage to these fans and their films. [Archive]
Today’s trailer you have never seen before has a title that says it all. In a world after the apocalypse men are near extinction and most women have lost their fertility (seriously, why is almost every post-apocalyptic world really, really awesome?). Mankind is on the brink of damnation, the end is nigh, we are all doomed, DOOMED!, that sort of stuff. Rapist, murderer and fertile Sam Hell, played by WWE wrestler ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper, gets recruited to impregnate abducted virgins. One problem: they are held in Frogtown, a wasteland village ruled by mutant frogs. What is there to say? B-flick, cool costumes, lovely one-liners and Roddy Piper’s genitals that get mentioned a bit too much.
The countdown has begun, in just ten days the 27th edition of the Imagine Film Festival (previously known as Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival) will provide hordes of fans with horror, sci-fi, thriller, pulp and cult. No one less than Rutger Hauer shall receive the Career Achievement Award and his latest film Hobo With a Shotgun will open the festival this year. Of course Sarcastic Assault is present at the site in Amsterdam, albeit unofficially. I will be writing daily reports for Filmgids.nl and TheCultCorner.com though, so don’t miss out!
Of course this year too Imagine will feature its Night of Terror again as the greatest tradition of the festival. Four bloody horror films will be screened to a public that traditionally cries out profanities to every actor and actress on the big screen. I will not repeat them here, but I will be shouting them there. Besides that Imagine will offer a special encounter with Bob Murawski, the Oscar winning editor of the Spider-Man films and The Hurt Locker. During a free masterclass he will tell all about what it’s like working together with Sam Raimi and Kathryn Bigelow.
To warm you up a bit, here are some previews to my favourite films of this edition. Leave your festival favourites in the comments!
I have written about Hobo With a Shotgun already, but this is the new and extremely awesome Red Band Trailer:
Rubber is a film you cant miss. My review here and trailer there:
13 Assassins is the newest Takashi Miike. It is a samurai epic (so no absurd gangster movie) and it should be a homage to classic samurai films:
Here is a link to all films, including their trailers, on the website of Imagine Film Festival.
One of the best ways to watch a movie is by disliking it in advance. It is better to get your bad expectations proven wrong than your good ones. So here’s about Paul. I expected a kind of Superbad, but this time with an alien. Superbad was simply bad. Like many of its counterparts (and like almost every female pop singer’s career) it tried to be daring and naughty at first, but it the end it turned out to be moralistic and clichéd.
I had to know that with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as writers and male leads it had to be different this time. Then again, even though I loved Shaun of the Dead I had my doubts with Hot Fuzz, which was a bit stretched out to entertain on the long haul. But after parodying zombie horror and action flicks, this spoof on probably every scifi flick from the last thirty years is very entertaining indeed. Sarcastic Assault Expectations versus Paul: 0-1.
In the story the two British übernerds Graeme (Pegg) and Clive (Frost) visit the Mekka we know as the San Diego Comic Con and after that they complete their dream by venturing into American UFO country. While they are driving from the Nevada desert to New Mexico (that’s right, from Area 51 to Roswell) in their rented RV, an alien quite literally crashes his identified driving object (yes, a car) into their lives. His name is Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen) and he has escaped from a sixty year imprisonment in an American military base nearby.
Only one of the nerds faints and wets his pants. After overcoming the shock they have to drive Paul through the desert while being tailed by the men in black, lead by Jason Bateman in yet another great role. They also kidnap a religious girl by accident. Her father comes chasing them too and if that wasn’t bad enough: Paul seems to be alien in body only, his knowledge of human swear words and his liking towards Reese’s Pieces (remember ET?) make him seem annoyingly human.
The set up of this film leaves no joke untold and while many a director or actor can’t handle a constant output of humour, Pegg and Frost seem to pull it off effortlessly. Sure not every pun is funny but all the more are. All this joking marks for a high pace with little room for morale and cheesy breaks. The few breaks that remain fit perfectly into the greater picture of parody. Obviously the two Brits have seen their share of films and they know how to spoof them.
They especially know Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Close Encounters and ET from inside out as they cite them endlessly, but not tiring. Spielberg even features in the film while Paul is giving him advice for making alien movies from the Raiders of the Lost Ark storage bunker. It is way cooler to spot all the other references yourself than it is for me writing them here and they are not that hard to spot anyway. One last thing: is Sigourney Weaver a reference (to) herself, or is she simply an actress in a supporting role? Try to bend your brain around that one. ‘Both’ is not an option.
Paul could have been a wannabe spoof flick, but because Pegg and Frost know their stuff it isn’t. Their geekiness rubs off. It’s cool to be a geek anyway, right? I have little trouble admitting that I am one (erh, well… sometimes… you know, only when watching films and… shut up, I can be cool if I want to) and even though the core of this film will appeal to nerds mostly it is built to entertain a broader audience for sure. And it’s rated R, f**k yeah!
Have you ever seen a self-reflective and existentialistic film about a car tire on killer tour? No? Well here’s your chance, because Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber is exactly that. Robert, the tire, suddenly becomes aware of itself in the middle of the desert. Why? No reason. Looking for companionship but driven by hatred he decides to simply blow up stuff, animals and people.
Dupieux, also known as the music artist Mr Oizo, could have gone for a simplistic horror-like story about the above, but he chose to do more with the concept. He uses the idea of a tire come to life as a reflection on film itself and on the absurdities that audiences take for granted in filmic storytelling. In Rubber everything really happens without reason, but this premise has an extra layer around it. It is portrayed by a group of spectators with binoculars following the tire killing people as if they were watching a movie, commenting on the logics of its every move. The people in the story of the tire want to get rid of their audience though, so they can be done with the ridiculousness of their situation.
These absurdities are supported by the existentialism of Robert trying to figure out what its purpose in life is and what it (he?) is supposed to be. It should be quite a task to animate a tire in such a way that it becomes a believable character in a film, but Dupieux pulled it off just right. Even though Robert is really nothing more than a round, rubber and grooved object, its contentment after blowing up a bunny rabbit with its telekinetic powers shows as if it were human. Dupieux proves that you don’t need a smile to express happiness. In the end, the protagonist, if it can be described as such, seems to create its own road in life to leave skid marks on.
Dupieux also proves that he is more than a music artist. His directing skills show in the shots where the tire is followed on ground level through the desert landscapes. There is a constant flow of movement while the camera follows Robert rolling over rocks and sandbanks. This movement reaches continuity provided by the editing, which makes use of several jump cuts to mark headway through the planes. Dupieux took on the role of writer, director, cinematographer and editor, so he almost made the film his own from start to end. He gained freedom in shooting by using the lightweight Canon 5D, which required little set up for a particular shot.
Rubber could have been a simple cult and pulp film about the tire blowing up stuff and that would probably have been a lot of fun too. It might even have appealed to a bigger audience, but the film ended up being much more artistic than simplistic horror based on an original idea. Dupieux, inspired by Spielberg’s Duel, shows not only that he understands the cinematographic side of filmmaking, he also expresses knowledge in the art of storytelling. Not by telling a great story per se, but by commenting on the frequent absurdities of it. He himself claims that he just started writing and that the self-reflective nature of his film is mainly unintentional. Who knows, he might even be laughing at all the interpretations made in reviews. Even so, his film is very amusing untill the end.
Imagine a Hawaiian shirt wearing chameleon with an identity crisis that is trying to be a ruthless gunslinger in a dried up desert town on the edge of civilization. Got it? Good, because this is the story of Rango. With Johnny Depp as the voice of the lizard and Gore Verbinski as director the final product should be good. It is. I do admit that I expected something different after seeing the teaser trailer with Hunter S. Thompson in it, but in the end the film left me quite satisfied.
Verbinski is an avid western fan and with this high end animation flick he tries to prove that once and for all (it works out better than his nod towards the genre in Pirates 3). It is actually a spoof on spaghetti westerns and most of the times a good one at that. All the usual elements are present so expect dust, six shooters, stand offs, filthy thugs, more dust and a lonesome hero. Except for the hero bit… Rango does fit the lonesome part, but above all he is a nameless pet chameleon that gets flung out of a car into the desert. He is certainly no hero. After he finds the town Dirt he discovers that its inhabitants (all desert animals) are starving from dehydration. Of course he sets out to find the problem of the draught, even though he is only pretending to be a gunslinger.
That last part makes way for a lot of comedy and sadly not all jokes are that great. They are mainly based on exaggerated understatements and after we learn to whistle its tune they simply stop being funny. Verbinski probably realised that too. Although he had to keep his younger audience satisfied he also reserved time for some dreamlike scenes with considerable lower pacing. These bits are a welcome change in the high output of gags. His references to many a spaghetti western are great as well, with most notably the Klaus Kinski rabbit. Clint Eastwood makes a short appearance too (given voice by Timothy Olyphant) and the title refers to Sergio Corbucci’s Django of course.
So in the end Rango tries a bit too much to be a crowd pleaser, but there is a lot of fun stuff to discover. It might not be the most beautifully animated film today (it was Industrial Light and Magic’s first full animation feature), but the design of the brownish-yellow landscapes inspire awe. The camera swoops through them like a steam engine and Johnny Depp fits perfectly in his role as underdoggish outsider. Saddle up the horses, bring the kids along and have a good ole’ time. It could have been better, but let us not complain too much. I am too young to be grumpy.
With True Grit as the newest ranger in town and with Rango and Cowboys and Aliens already putting on their gun belts, perhaps it is time to look back on what the last three decades had to offer for the American western genre. Admittedly, there is not much to look back on, even though they did come up with some great films and a few box office hits. But what comes to eye, maybe, is that not much really comes to eye. The genre stays a bit dusty, even with high quality standards.
It has been out there for some time, but I couldn’t keep this one from you. Check out this poster for the upcoming action and blood fest Hobo With a Shotgun starring Rutger Hauer as a Hobo With a Shotgun (click for trailer). Posters don’t come much cooler than this. It’s in the style of cheesy Italo action flicks from the eighties and according to the trailer this film is aiming to be that mixed up with some nasty Grindhouse exploitation. Simply compare it to the Italian movie poster for the Dutch film Spetters (also starring Hauer) below, to get an example how low brow films were marketed in Italy during the eighties…
Sarcastic Assault 