When asked what movies I was looking forward to in 2011, Hobo with a Shotgun consistently topped the list. It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of the current “grindhouse revival”, kicked off in 2006 with the aptly-titled Tarantino/Rodriguez double header, Grindhouse. Since then, we’ve seen modern takes on blackploitation (Black Dynamite), biker flicks (Hell Ride), spaghetti westerns (Sukiyaki Western Django) and whatever the hell Nude Nuns with Big Guns is supposed to be. The great thing about these throwback flicks is they’re made to resemble the way you remember classic exploitation films, not necessarily how they actually were. We often forget how subjective our memory is, and while your 13 year-old self couldn’t help but relish in the mind-blowing awesomeness of movies like The Amazing Mr. No Legs or Bloodsucking Freaks, go ahead and watch them now. The strings show, the plots stop dead for 20 minute chunks, and they just don’t work. They’re little gems of weird cinema and still well worth a watch, but charming ineptitude aside, their audacious punch often doesn’t mitigate our adult scrutiny. These latter day exploitation films play like 90-minute versions of old-school B-movie trailers; “…every shot is a money shot.”, to quote Eli Roth. The other great thing about this new wave of trash films is they’re getting even better as they go, in utter defiance of the law of diminished returns. This is especially true of the official Grindhouse releases, with both Planet Terror and Death Proof proving to be good, not-so-clean fun, Machete reaching near operatic heights of insane bloodshed, and now Hobo with a Shotgun comes along, loaded with so much bad taste and brutal-yet-cartoonish violence that it may be the final word on the sub-genre.
Rutger Hauer stars as the Hobo, riding the rails straight into a shit-hole called Hope Town (making him an actual hobo and not just a homebum as the term is often incorrectly applied). Within mere moments of his arrival, the Hobo becomes acquainted with the crime-ridden nature of the city, witnessing local crime lord Drake (Lexx‘s Brian Downey) and his two sons (Nick Bateman and Gregory Smith) performing a brutal execution in front of a fearful mob. Growing increasingly fed up with Hope Town’s criminal element, the Hobo finally acts, preventing young hooker Abby (Molly Donsworth) from being raped by Drake’s son, Slick, and attempts to turn him in to the local authorities. He finds out very quickly that the cops are on Drake’s payroll, and he’s mutilated for his trouble. Abby finds the Hobo bloodied in a dumpster and takes him in, forming a bond between the two. Finally, after witnessing yet another atrocious crime, the Hobo snaps, grabs a shotgun and begins his crusade, dispensing his own brand of street justice.
I’ve never really had anything bad to say about Zach Snyder in the past. I found his remake of Dawn of the Dead passable (it’s a tall order to stand toe-to-toe with Romero’s classic, so he should take “passable” as a compliment), and his next two films, 300 and Watchmen, were admirable adaptations, yet one suspects they succeeded largely by virtue of their adherence to the source material. Granted, Watchmen did deviate from it’s source in relation to the ending, but I’ll blaspheme and suggest that this improved upon the original, doing away with the cheesier aspects of the “Architects of Fear” climax native to the comic (That’s right, comic; If you wanna be a pretentious asshole and call it a graphic novel because you can’t accept that “funny books” can be art, then you shouldn’t be reading them). I’ve never seen his “sword & sorcery & owls” film, Legend of the Guardians, but I hear surprisingly good things. That, too, was an adaptation. Soon one began to wonder what the director would do if allowed to pen and shoot a film purely of his own design, which brings us to Sucker Punch. Here Snyder was given full reign to do as he wished, complete with upwards of $80 million to do it with. What have we (and likely the higher ups at Warner Bros.) learned from this little experiment? Never do that shit again. Zack Snyder cannot create without a blueprint, or perhaps just won’t, because that’s not really what he’s done here. He’s borrowed from countless previous works of film and literature (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Kill Bill and Moulin Rouge to name a few) and generically regurgitated current genre infatuations (gun porn, steampunk, mecha), then half-assedly duct taped it all together with a plot that simultaneously objectifies and sympathises with the victimization of its female cast and his trademark editing style (slow it down, speed it up, repeat).
The film follows Baby Doll (Emily Browning), who is wrongfully imprisoned in an asylum following the accidental death of her kid sister, the result of Baby’s attempt to stop their stepfather from molesting them. Orderly and part-time rapist Blue (Oscar Issac) agrees to fudge the paperwork so Baby Doll will be lobotomized later that week. At this point, the film shifts to Baby’s perspective, and as her mind crumbles under the weight of her predicament, she re-envisions the asylum as a brothel, with Blue cast as a villainous pimp, while she and the rest of the mental patients (Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung) are seen as cabaret performers and sex workers. Baby and the others hatch a plan to gain their freedom, the major points of which are seen as a series of over-the-top battles that takes the girls from the combating undead Germans in trenches of WW I to slaying dragons in a fantasy-themed universe. Throughout their trials, they are aided by the Wise Man (Scott Glen) in their quest to recover the items needed to make their escape, before the mysterious High Roller (Jon Hamm) comes to take Baby away (in actuality the doctor coming to perform the lobotomy).
Surrounded by controversy by its nature; an artistic film with a legitimate sociopolitical message or exploitative torture-porn trash?
by Adam Rosina
If you’ve ever fooled yourself into believing in the existence of a just and loving god, I present to you A Serbian Film (Srpski Film in its native Serbia) as evidence to the contrary. If the world was truly a good and decent place watched over by a benevolent deity, something like this would simply not exist. It is the most soul shattering and (sadly) accurate cinematic portrayal of human cruelty and capacity for sadism ever made. Nothing even remotely comes close to the sickness of this film. Not Salo. Not August Underground. Nothing.
The film, directed by first-timer Srdan Spasojevic, tells the story Miloš (Srđan “Žika” Todorović), a former porn star with near-superhuman sexual endurance who’s fallen on hard financial times. He gets a job offer through an old fuck-movie colleague to work on an art porn flick (later revealed to be an outright snuff film) for an ungodly amount of money. Wanting to provide for his wife and young son, he reluctantly agrees, and is slowly walked through a series of increasingly bizarre and violent sex scenarios under the direction of the mysterious Vukmir (Sergej Trifunović). Miloš’ grip on reality slips as his sexual appetite and disgust grow, until it’s revealed that he’s been drugged all along with a combination of mind altering substances and bull Viagra (not even making this shit up). He is taken captive by Vukmir and his film crew to be coerced into a series of still more depraved acts of sexual violence. From here on out the film rockets toward a climax so shocking it doesn’t put Oldboy’s twist ending to shame so much as it bends it over the chair and fucking humiliates it several times over.
Just saw Tron Legacy on IMAX 3D! For those who may not know I am a growed-up cyber-girl, a HUGE fan of the original Tron, and pretty obsessed with futuristic/cyberpunk films in general.
Overall I thought the movie was a great sequel and definitely delivered on the visuals. The storytelling and the dialogue specifically were okay, but a movie like this was clearly visually driven and I spent most of my brainpower sucking in as much as I could on that end.
Here are specific thoughts (mostly on styling) in general order of appearance:
I liked the development of Encom from a games software company into OSs as well. Software sharing and downloading I thought was a very timely topic to include in the movie, as was “funny videos of animals”.
There were many scenic references to the original movie and Sam Flynn hacking open the secure door to Encom from his Nokia phone was the first one I caught. In another scene that relied heavily on the original film, I was impressed by how faithfully they recreated Flynn’s arcade and the room overlooking it… even the dusty old sofa and mini-blinds were visually consistent with the original!
The 3D effects were stunning, my favorite probably being the pixelated glass shattering, and there certainly was a lot of that to enjoy.
I have to say, first thing I was disappointed by were the Siren cyber babes. I thought the styling was overly simplistic and went for obvious answers: white hair, ice blue contacts, heavy liner… mega lashes? I mean really, who came up with “let’s just put all their hair in buns”? This would have been a great opportunity for a really sick Pepi’s ‘do, or even just strands of plastic tubing blended in with the natural hair. The all-white cyber character has been done in film many times and I wish that the designers had done more to differentiate themselves from what has been done before.
Seijun Suzuki is Japanese cinema’s original renegade filmmaker. Since the 50′s, Suzuki has been making B-movies, mostly gangster pictures, that increased in originality and insanity as he went on, much to the chagrin of his employers and the indifference of most of the movie-going public. The Nikkatsu Company, Suzuki’s primary employer during the 50′s and 60′s, imposed heavy financial restrictions on his films in an effort to curtail the perceived incomprehensibility of his work. This only pushed him to create films more brilliantly anarchic and bizarre, but, unfortunately, just as unprofitable as his previous output. After the box office failure of Tokyo Drifter (a Yakuza epic shot in a style that emulated the Pop Art movement with elements of the musical, western and comedy genres thrown in for good measure), his budgets were slashed to such a degree that he was forced to shoot in black & white for his next two pictures. In addition, he was warned against using any of the radical techniques and themes he had previously worked into his films. Suzuki essentially took it as a dare. The studio threw him a grade-Z script for yet another Yakuza film, and demanded he rewrite it and begin filming immediately, a decision they’d later regret. The hectic schedule meant that the film was being rewritten as it was shot, the pressure pushing Suzuki to the height of his creativity. This film would come to shatter genre expectations and incorporate film noir, surrealism, absurdist humor and perverse sexuality in ways that Suzuki hadn‘t dared previously. The film that emerged was Branded to Kill, the biggest “FUCK YOU” to the studio system released up to that point (or arguably ever). It’s difficult to imagine the balls it took Suzuki, who had essentially been banished to Japan’s Poverty Row and explicitly told not to fuck around any more, to ignore his employers’ demands and to essentially deliver the cinematic equivalent of Metal Machine Music. But deliver it he did, and was promptly sacked for it.
Suzuki fought Nikkatsu in the courts for wrongful termination, not to mention the smearing of his name in the media and his blacklisting in the Japanese film industry. A great deal of support came from student film clubs, who helped to sway public opinion in Suzuki’s favor. Nikkatsu, nearly in financial ruin by this point, settled with the director (albeit for a pittance compared to what he originally demanded), but the damage to Suzuki’s career was already done. The blacklist persisted, and Suzuki would go ten years before directing another feature film. Jumping ahead to the ‘80s, North American audiences got their first taste of Branded to Kill, both through showings at film festivals and VHS (selected for release in an Asian film VHS series, entitled Dark of the Sun, by none other than Painkiller mastermind John Zorn). A entire generation of future filmmakers, Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino among them, would be influenced by the maverick director to create incredibly idiosyncratic, risk-taking films the likes of which the West had never before seen. Back in Asia, a similar phenomena occurred, and directors such as John Woo, Takeshi Miike and Chan-wook Park would be equally inspired to push the boundaries, both in structure and content, of what was expected of film, genre or otherwise.
For some unknown reason, among both my critical peers and fellow horror movie aficionados, the Saw series of films is one of the most bemoaned of modern horror franchises. I’ve long been puzzled by this phenomena, and can come up with scant few answers for its existence. I suppose for the critics it’s the contrarian in them that enjoys savaging something that’s popular and successful. I myself have been accused of no less on a handful of occasions. For the horror fan, the symptoms are similar, but the causes, I suspect, run much deeper. Before the original Saw was released, there was a huge buzz among gorehounds surrounding the film, and many were laying in wait to claim it as their own. When Saw finally dropped, it was met with unprecedented mainstream success, and each sequel seemed to drive a bigger wedge between the films and the hardcore horror fan base. It’s gotten to the point where you can’t bring up the series in conversation without fanboys shit-talking you into a coma, then closing with a snicker to confirm their superiority. But never is a valid argument brought to bear, just the whining of a subculture that feels infiltrated and betrayed, which is a fucking riot. Most modern “horror buffs” are too young and willfully ignorant to realize that most of the classic slasher and exploitation films that they cherish were not only their own precious playthings but the nightmare fuel and date-night fodder of an entire generation. It’s a shame that the Saw films don’t get their due, because there’s a lot to admire in them.
The original was the debut film by two first time filmmakers, shot on an unbelievably low-budget of $1.2 million (most films spend roughly that on craft services), built around a tight, smart script. It didn’t skimp on the gore, and managed to get spectacular performances out of near-complete unknowns, while giving birth to, or at least popularizing (along with Eli Roth’s Hostel) the new genre of Torture Porn. Each successive film has delivered on the promise of the original, while maintaining a tradition of using practical special effects (a dying art in today’s Hollywood, with the likes of Romero, Rodriguez and Zombie going digital with their gore) and crafting a labyrinthine story arc that has only deepened as the series has gone on. There have been highs (the intertwined finale of Saw III and the healthcare crisis subtext of Saw VI being excellent examples) and lows (the second and fifth films do not engage one the way the rest of the series does), but Saw has emerged as one of the most consistently intriguing and entertaining horror franchises of all time. And perhaps consistency is one of the main reasons the Saw series is so under appreciated. Perhaps, by comparison, other horror film franchises’ blemishes begin to show. Is Jigsaw in the same league as Freddy or Jason in the horror pantheon? Only time will tell. But has the Saw series yielded one sequel as embarrassing or pitiful as either Freddy’s Dead or Jason Takes Manhattan? I think not.
Jonah Hex has always been one of the more entertaining characters in the DC Comics stable. Now I won’t claim I’m the most knowledgeable individual on the subject of Jonah Hex. Most of my exposure to the character comes from his appearance on Bruce Timm’s Batman cartoon, along with the limited series Jonah Hex: Riders of the Worm and Such, but the scarred gunman and his battles with foes both mundane and supernatural were wildly different than the usual super heroics that count as DC’s bread and butter. This distinctive style of comic book storytelling and genre bending endeared the character to me long ago. Also, Hex’s adventures (among earlier stories) served as inspiration for later tales that would eventually come be known as the genre of Weird West fiction, one that I am very much a fan of. I was initially excited when I heard that a Jonah Hex film was in the making, but the old fears whispered in the back of my mind soon enough. This was a comic book adaptation, after all, and not of a household name character. When filmmakers know the audience isn’t terribly familiar with a character, they usually take it as an invitation to screw with the source material in any way they see fit (sometimes, seemingly, just for the hell of it). You may ask if that is what’s happened with Jonah Hex. The short answer is YES. A slightly longer answer is THEY FUCKING BUTCHERED IT.
The plot is a nightmare, thanks in no small part to the piss-poor editing job. Rumors abound that a significant portion of the film was left on the editing room floor in attempt to make the film more action-oriented. This serves to make the film less exciting than disorienting and incomprehensible. Knowledge of the comics isn’t necessary to grasp the plot (if any grasping is to be had), since they throw most of the established mythology out the window and swap it for a Weird West version of The Crow. As it stands, we get Jonah Hex, a disgraced Civil War vet who turned on his commanding officer, Quentin Turnbull, and killed Turnbull’s son (also Hex’s best friend), following of an attack of conscience. Later, after Hex has settled into a quiet family life with his wife and child, Turnbull comes a’ calling, seeking revenge. He kills said wife and kid and scars Hex’s face as payback. This leaves Hex stuck between the land of the living and the dead (don’t ask me how or why, it involves Indians, for some reason), and sees him take up the life of a bounty hunter. Years later, the Army turns up, informing him Turbull is back to his old Union-hating tricks, trying to destabilize the country and incite a new civil war. President Grant himself requests Hex’s assistance in taking down Turnbull and stopping his bat-shit insane plan, which involves causing the breakdown of the Union by attacking the centennial celebration with a super weapon (built by Eli Whittney, no less) that, as far as I can tell, is a gigantic six shooter that seems to be powered by Dragon Balls. I dare you to make more sense of this plot than that. Go ahead, try. I’ll wait. Couldn’t? Didn’t think so.
Kick Ass is my kind of mindless fun. Fun’s about the only way to describe this thing. I can’t remember the last time I’ve sat down in a theater and felt I got every last bang for my entertainment buck. This flick’s slick, funny and unapologetically violent. Directed by Mathew Vaughn (Layer Cake, Stardust), Kick Ass is based on a comic penned by Mark Millar, best known in comic circles for helming much of Marvel’s Ultimate imprint and creating the limited series Wanted (which was butchered on the big screen just two years ago). Kick Ass works on a lot of levels. Its a super hero parody that at once cherishes and lambastes the conventions of the medium. It’s a love letter to John Woo, but it stands quite exceptionally on its own as an ultraviolent action film. It’s got moments of pants-shittingly hilarious comedy, yet filled with some scenes of shocking darkness. Kick Ass wants it every which way, and believe me, it gets what it fucking wants.
The film revolves around an unremarkable teenager, Dave Lizewski, who after elects to become a superhero, despite having no powers and basically being the least well equipped person to do so. After a disastrous first super-heroic outing, Lizewski ends up in the hospital, with his injuries resulting in damaged pain receptors, allowing him to take a beating more severe than your average joe. He decides to give it another go, and is caught on film defending a man from a gang beating, turning his super hero alter ego, Kick Ass, into an internet sensation. As he continues his exploits, he attracts the attention of two other vigilantes, father and daughter team Big Daddy and Hit-Girl, and becomes involved in the war they are raging against local mob boss, Frank D’Amico. (more…)
