Bruce Willis is not a robot, Aliens are not African people, and Jews are not happy.

The Surrogates

Sci-Fi thriller starring Bruce Willis, adapted from the graphic novel. In the near future, people have created android bodies so lifelike, that - with the help of a neural uplink - they now use them to get around instead of their own bodies. Basically, taking the avatar concept to it's logical endpoint - literally be whoever you want to be. Fun concept, though the avatar metaphor isn't really explored in much depth. There's a mystery plot, which brings no surprises, and characters which fail to engage over-much. I guess there wasn't anything really awful about The Surrogates, but I'm hard pressed to really recommended it. Watch it, and then perhaps use it as a platform to launch into a conversation about the fronts people use online, and what it all really means for humanity. You'll probably come to more interesting conclusions than the film itself did.

Was it entertaining? Had a couple of moments. There's a chase scene with Bruce Willis being very Terminator which was kind of cool.

Is it worth watching? Couldn't hurt, I suppose.


District 9

Sci-fi action/mockumentary starring.... some South African dudes. Now this I enjoyed. The first third of the film is shot in pure documentary style, giving us a look at an alien reserve in Johannesburg, started when a starship came in earth in 1982. So, naturally, Apartheid references abound, and for the most part, it works really well. Just about the entire film is shot in an actual Johannesburg slum, which makes for a suitably messy, depressing setting. As the film goes along, a plot does begin to emerge, as we follow a bureaucrat as he wonders around the titular District 9, giving eviction notices to the Aliens (as they are being moved out of their current homes to another preserve, which, notably, is far away from the city). During the course of his wacky adventures in evil banality, he comes into contact with an alien substance. Things get worse for him, but much better for the audience, as the film takes a turn first from scene-setting mockumentary to body horror, and then from body horror to wacky 80's style action-fest. I've read reports of people finding this shift jarring, as though they expected the whole thing to be in the doco style, but personally, given the sheer amount of horrible things that happen to the protagonist, and the complete and utter bastardy of a lot of the characters, when our dude gets his hands on a giant alien lightening gun which pops people like balloons, it is THE MOST GRATIFYING THING EVER. It's be like if you were watching the Wire, and everything was totally serious business, except that McNalty finds a giant cannon and kills EVERYONE YOU HATED. HORRIBLY. Now, one could make a case that this style shift betrays the premise of the film but turning it into a cartoon shoot out, but if you approach the film as an action sci-fi instead of a complete straight up satire, the documentary style is an excellent mechanism for drawing you into the world, setting up the characters and the situation, and building a sense of contempt and discomfort everything and everyone we are exposed to (with the notable exception of a single Alien character. And his son). Thus, having pulled us in, the action pay-off carries real emotional weight, releases this tension, and cathartic-ally indulges our contempt for the villainous characters. Ultimately, while this film offers some commentary on humanities inhumanity to man (via insect-like alien proxies), and presents in all in an intriguing documentary style, it is, at it's heart, and action film, and should be approached as such if you really want to enjoy it. Which isn't to say that there's no depth at all, but just that as an action vehicle, it's set-up and pay-off is such a high that it's not to be missed. It also has a giant robot sequence which is far more entertaining than both Transformers movies put together. Not that that would be all that difficult...

Is it entertaining? Oh, most definately. Though the first half is really quite harrowing, the last half-an-hour or so is a total riot.

Is it worth watching? Totally.



Inglorious Basterds

Hey, Tarantino, my old friend. You know what I liked about your films? It wasn't the feet, and it wasn't the copious film references, nor was it the sudden, high impact violence. It was the way you told stories through dialogue. So, by that rationale, I must have really loved Deathproof, seeing as about 60% dialogue, right? Well, no, I'm afraid not. I think what was missing mostly from Deathproof was that, drowning in vapid dialogue from vapid characters, there is practically no plot. No tension, no story. Just chicks in a bar/chicks in a diner. Well, good news, Quent old sport, because Basterds is a real return to form, showcasing everything I liked about your earlier films, with only a few of the annoying elements of your later stuff. Are there gratuitous pop culture references? Well, yes, but I didn't even notice most of them, and a lot of them are more about German cinema of the 1940's, which, given the context, is somewhat relevant. Is there sudden impact violence? Oh my yes, and it offers a marked anti-climax to the build up preceding it... kind of like a Sergio Leone Western, really. Are there feet? ...yes. There are feet. But no, forget all that, because what this film has, and what no Tarantino film has really excelled at since Pulp Fiction, are long, drawn out and painfully tense conversations. What makes them so tense? Because whilst a vast amount of time is spent observing the surface tensions, with every single scene there is an additional piece of information that takes every line being said and adds about 30 layers of menace to it. Breezy talk about Milk with a SS officer? There are Jews hiding under the floor boards. That celebrity guessing game where you stick the name of a famous person to your forehead? The participants are a mix of Allied spies and suspicious German officers. Dinner with a refined gentlemen in a Parisian restaurant? You're a Jewish woman sitting across from the man who had your family killed. Scenes like this are so laden with menacing subtext, that every single word and action by every single character carries with it a resonance that reaches far beyond whatever simple word or action has occurred. These scenes are brilliant.
There are annoying parts - I'm not fond of the way Tarantino's gotten into the habit of editing the music against his scenes. But the way it's shot, and the way the story is told, is also interesting, and not just from an aesthetic standpoint (although, just about every set looks wonderful, and the camera's milking every last scene for all their worth). Despite it's setting, this film is shot like a Western. No where is this more prevalent than in the opening scene. A farmer, his daughters, a sweeping vista, trouble approaches from the horizon - 2 black riders heralding a black carriage. The whole thing is so timelessly Western that it informs the rest of the story, even though the plot doesn't quite fit the style - Once Upon a Time in Mexico is possibly the closest parallel I can think of off hand, simply for the way we follow multiple protagonist through parallel and somewhat interconnecting plot-lines - though they never really meet. There's probably a wealth of subtext to delve through here, but as a piece of spectacle, it's quite enjoyable on it's own. Recommended, if you can forgive the travesty that was Death Proof and the snooze-fest that was Kill Bill vol 2.

Is it entertaing? Swings right from entertining to tense to outright distubring.

Is it worth watching? I certainly enjoyed myself, so I think I can reccommend this to any fans of Taratino's, especially his earlier films, and of dialogue-driven thrillers.

Man Bites God! Matthew Stover's Blade of Tyshalle

I'm somewhat of a fan of Stover's for his Star Wars books, if nothing else- he seems to be one of the few authors who take writing for the franchise seriously, employing all his considerable skills to write adventures stories that are a little deeper than the standard fantasy fare. Yes, this book contains a lot of the standard epic fantasy trappings, especially in regards to the setting, but at the end of the day, apart from the escapist metaphor, the setting is mostly there for backdrop and plot purposes. This book is not about taking you away on a magical journey with amazing short people who speak like middle-class gentry. It is, rather, a novel constructed around a series of specific philosophical points, connected with a series of monologues, dialogues, and pretty awesome action sequences. This novel, more than any of his others, is probably the most idiosyncratic Stover book, containing many elements and ideas seen in his other novels, collected in one place, turned up to eleven, set on fire and catapulted to the moon. This is Matthew Stover: OFF THE FUCKING CHAIN. That one that he was on. Before. The chain of not-being-as-Stover-y-as-he-could-be.

So, for anyone who's read this man's other books, we should know what that means. Lots of one-liners, gruesome and violent hardcore action scenes with more splatter than an Dario Argento film, author tracts discussing the virtues of independence, self-analysis and deconstruction, myth making, myth breaking, the relationship between illusion and reality, and how they each influence the other, self-image, self-definition, self-centredness, self-pie*, a colossal, apocalyptic finale, and some rather disturbing descriptions of cannibalism. It's fun for all concerned.

I'll quickly detail the plot, because I hate this part – Hari Michaelson/Caine, former superstar 'actor' (actor in this instance being a sort of combination of stage actor and gladiator, who is sent to an alternative world to have crazy adventures, with much of the population back on Earth watching events through a neural uplink in his head. It's like the ultimate in Reality Tv mixed with fantastic escapism – actually be someone else for a little while, someone whos' life is much more exciting, without any personal threat to the audience. The actor, of course, is under personal threat all the time), has assumed managerial control of the broadcast corporation responsible for the creation and distribution of the actor's 'adventures'. When he discovers a virus has been released on the alternative world, he must overcome his greatest obstacles to save the population of Overworld, as well as his family. Stuff happens.

This is actually the sequel to one of Stover's previous novels, Heroes Die, which allows the story to make one of it's larger thematic points: what happens to the hero after he kills the baddies, gets the girl, saves the day and rides off into the sunset? The answer is, naturally, he becomes very bored, depressed, and is also a paraplegic. This is, by and large, not a happy book, and it quickly moves from every-day sort of ennui to full blown horrific tragedy. Structurally, the plot is simply about taking an unhappy, yet somewhat comfortable man, stripping away everything he loves, and seeing if there's anything left. This being a Stover novel, it turns out that what is left is a force of ass-kicking nature, as stripping away a man's comforts is paramount to stripping away his personal delusions, and also freeing him of the fear of consequence. Our protagonist, Caine, was always a bit of a tough cookie, but book makes a point of the fact that at the end of the day, all that separates Caine from any other person is sheer force of will. What stops the novel from being one great Ubermensch tract is the fact that Caine pays and pays and pays for being who he is. There is no real great physical or spiritual reward for such a character being absolutely who he is. All he really has, in the end, is himself. The pros and cons of such an outlook are pretty clearly layed out in the novel, and I don't really think one can consider Caine to be a role model – he is, however, a wholly compelling, flawed character – and a great excuse for some people to get decapitated.

Prose is florid, but sparse – this is not a book for incredibly detailed descriptions of locations or people. It instead strives for a more physical and psychological realism – what is of real interest to the reader in a book like this should be who these people are, why they are who they are, how this informs their actions, and the actions themselves. Locations' physical appearence is less important their the impressions they leave. I, for one, am perfectly content with this, as I often find some writer's obsession with environmental description tedious in the extreme, so while this novel is not utterly bereft of poetic description and detail, neither is it generally all that concerned with it. The writing is crisp, clear, and mostly focussed either on inner-monologues or conversation, giving the proceedings an air of subjectivity – though the perspective moves between first and third person regularly. It ends up creating the effect of a near-epistolary novel, which, given the framing device, makes a lot of sense.

In short, this is a great book for lovers of solid action with a philosophical bent. It's got some clear points to make, and constructs the story and characters around those anchors, giving its points some real impact. It's fun, but it's smart, intense and occasionally heartbreaking fun, and that's probably the best kind.

*There is no self-pie. Please do not attempt auto-cannibalism.

Is it entertaining? Well, I certainly think so. Its most compelling feature is its characters, and given how much they drive the story, that is a very good thing.

Is it worth reading? I would say so, if you're up for something that's clearly devoted to the principles of awesome, but carries a little more bite.

Danny Glover battles an intergalatic tribal redneck, a college initiation turns into an incomprehensible scream-fest, and The Blob.... blobs...

Movies were rented. Thoughts were had. HERE THEY ARE.

Predator 2
Featuring Danny "I'm too old for this shit" Glover, Bill "Game over man!" Paxton, and Gary 'Holy fucking hell I'm awesome!" Busey.

If you could somehow distil the essence of an 80's action/cop film into 40 minute interval, then the opening half an hour of Predator 2 would pretty much fit the bill. Over-the-top shoot outs with the sleaziest of gangsters, constant foul language, Bill Paxton playing a giant douche, tough-as-nails Latina cop, protagonist constantly in trouble with his superiors, Feds and Government agents getting in the way of the investigation, more blood than is probably contained in the entire population of Malaysia, and a thick layer of grease, sweat and hair-gel over every single character. This makes for a fun, if familiar, ride, but things shift when the film is gatecrashed by everyone's favourite space-rasta, the Predator. And he quickly does exactly what he needs to do: fuck shit up in awesome, gruesome ways.

Seriously, the Predator really needs to be the protagonist of a Cops-style show, where we just follow him around while he tears up the foulest dens of completely ethnic street gangs. And it's hard not to agree any given domestic dispute is going to end pretty quickly once the dead-beat husband gets his head blown off and the feral kids are nailed to the walls with spear guns. Just sayin'.

With Ahrnuld absent this time around, the target of the Predator's near-erotic fixation is Danny Glover, who's main shtick in this film is to affix sights onto every firearm imaginable, get frightened of birds and heights, kill Colombians and actually manage to pull off several feats of bad-assery to the end, especially in the three-part extended climactic battle that runs from the interior of a frozen meat-works (where Garey Busey mugs for every inch of screen-time he can, God bless him, before getting bisected by the world's coolest Frisbee), across the rooftops of New York (where we learn that neither loss-of-limb, nor broom-armed-biddy's can stop a sufficiently angry Predator), to the interior of the Predator's ship (where we learn that xenomorphs do, in fact, have skulls). The last half hour or so of this is awesome enough to overshadow the cop-stylings of the opening act.

The film is even more action focused than it's predecessor, jettisoning the suspense elements for out and out action, which to be honest, is probably a wise move given that the audience is well aware as to what a Predator is. It doesn't have the same sort of impact and tension that the first carried, and the one-liner's aren't as good, but over-all Predator 2 is a fun action sci-fi romp, as well as a veritable 80's time capsule.

Is it entertaining? Yep, in an over the top, actiony sort of way.

Is it worth watching? Well, it depends if you're a fan of 80's action or not, I suppose. If you are, it's a complete riot. If you're not than... I dunno. Become one. You'll be a better person for it. You'll have nuns giving you gift baskets, and pretty girls will drop their knickers without the slightest hesitation. Believe it.


Death Tunnel

Featuring a bunch of chicks I think I might have seen in a porn film at some point, two dudes that die, one dude that doesn't, and a guy who looks like Bill Nighy with a face-lift.

Sometimes the road less-travelled is not a place of excitement and wonder that makes you love the world a little more, as it's filled with snakes, bear traps, and carnivorous unicorns. Sometimes, the ramshackle old house needs to be fire-bombed, lest during your renovation attempts it collapses upon you. Sometimes, you really should leave that lonely puppy at the pound, as it turns out it's possessed by Mammon and will devour your face when you are looking. And sometimes, the little low-budget horror film really should be left on the shelf, as it'll make you weep with embarrassment for ever having considered giving it a go in the first place. Death Tunnel, then, is one of these films - though it would have been amusing to subvert my excessive build up. Well, I might have found it amusing. Maybe.

Anyway, what we have here is Session 9 for dummies. I think there was plenty of potential to make a half-decent horror film, here, and that mainly comes from filming on-site at the Waverly Hills Sanatorium, seeing as it's an old, abandoned place where many people died. So, given that it looks the part, and also given the weight of the trauma and the urban legends surrounding it, it should be child's play to take advantage of such a setting to create a mood that drips with tension and tragedy, right?

Or instead you could, you know, throw in a bunch of chick in their nighties and edit the fuck out of every single shot whether it needs it or not.

I know this is horror, and some conventions must be follow, but Jesus fucking Christ. Bad-acting, terrible script, nonsensical storyline... these are givens. You really have to go the extra mile to make your movie stand feet and ankles below the rest. This one managed it because the developers never knew when to leave the fucking film alone. Just about every shot has layered effects added to it, and the camera is constantly cutting away to flash backs and shots of incidental background details, just to remind us that HEY GUYS THERE WERE BAD THINGS THAT HAPPENED HERE THAT'S SCARY RIGHT GUYS HEY. It utterly ruins every single shot, making it look horrendously cheap. And really, with the film trying so very hard to tell you that it's scary, it almost makes me feel bad to trash it. I mean, it's like a mentally handicapped chimpanzee trying desperately to compose a symphony. You know that any criticism you might have would be completely wasted, as the poor creature demonstrates repeatedly that it doesn't have - and never will have - the ability to comprehend what it's doing wrong.

Is it entertaining? ...I suppose there's a certain level of fascination inherent when viewing something this bad, but it can't really be called entertaining in any traditional sense.

Is it worth watching? I can't think of any circumstance where this film would be recommended viewing, except maybe as an example of how not to shoot a horror movie.

The Blob (1988 remake)

Featuring Half Life 2's Eli Vance in an early appearance, that chick from Becker, and an evil tub of yoghurt.

Now THIS was a pleasant surprise. After the terrifying descent into craptitude that was Death Tunnel, this was a veritable breath of fresh, gelatinous air. Having never seen the original, I had no particular preconceptions about the film, so how happy was I when the Blob Blobbed the decoy protagonist in the first 30 minutes? Very happy, that's how happy. Happy as a Blob in more Blob. This is a fun, silly, gory horror flick, that's not scary in the least, but IS horrifically grotesque and absolutely ruthless - characters are dispatched with little to no fanfare, and though they aren't the most well-drawn characters you could think of, it's still a shock to see some of them bite the bullet if your looking for genre conventions, particularly when the death involved is an unusually gruesome one.

Make no mistake, the effects in this film crap all over just about any use of cgi in a horror film I can think if, and they look truly horrific. People are dissolved and absorbed into the gelatinous mass in nasty ways, but despite the gore the film never stops being fun. It's not a serious affair by any means, though it's certainly no parody. It's simply a fun, light hearted romp through a town being slowly eaten by a big blobby monster, which blobs its way through most of the named cast and many extras until you don't know who shall be blobbed and who shall remained happily unblobbed. Suffice to say, blobbing really is the focus of the movie, and the main reason to watch. That and the bit where the Blob tentacles the guy with the flame-thrower. That was totally sweet.

Is it entertaining? Boy howdy yes. Best fun I've had with a film in ages.

Is is worth watching? Most def. This would be a great film to have a few brews and watch with mates. Gore-hounds, and people with an interest in old school special effects should definitely take a look, too. Blobs should get some enjoyment. Blob blob blob. Blooooooooob.