Season of the Witch (George A. Romero, 1972) Blu-Ray Review...

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“I thought you were intrigued by it when you were so afraid. Being afraid is necessary to believing.” While it came as a commercial disappointment, the second in as many years for George A. Romero (following on from 1971's There's Always Vanilla), his 1972 film Season of the Witch proves to be an intriguing companion piece to its predecessor. Amidst the fervour of social change that was sweeping America at the time (particularly the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment), Season of the Witch peeks behind the white picket fences of suburbia to witness one housewife's attempt to escape her mid-life malaise – through Witchcraft...

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Blade Runner 2049 vs the Offendotrons (and a quick review)...

When Ridley Scott's 1982 detective noir/sci-fi mashup “Blade Runner” first hit theatres it was thrashed by critics and failed to draw an audience, much like John Carpenter's “The Thing”, which was released at the same time. The summer of 1982 belonged to Spielberg's “E.T.”, but in the years since, both Carpenter's gruelling paranoia-infused sci-fi/horror and Scott's cerebral future noir vision of dystopia 2019 have been reassessed and gained the adoration of film fans around the world.

That's worth bearing in mind considering Denis Villeneuve's belated sequel failed to draw much of a cinema-going audience, but did gather a vast array of five star reviews. Some have theorised that the long-winded 163 minute running time is responsible, while others blame a lack of 'broad appeal', but perhaps there are just some movies viewers are more comfortable viewing in their own home? Think about it, how many people will have discovered Scott's original on home video, DVD, or any number of other ancillary markets instead of at the cinema? Indeed, with a trip to the cinema being an increasing pain in the arse (ill-mannered patrons, rude staff, escalating ticket prices, an avalanche of pre-show advertising), it's hardly surprising that BR2049 didn't set the box office alight.

But enough about the film's financial failings over a short period of time in the temporary home of a darkened room, because the true lifespan of Villeneuve's sci-fi epic will be in whichever context the audience will choose to experience it. Personally, that was in the comfort of my own living room with the Blu-Ray that I'd pre-ordered months prior.

Belated sequels represent a treacherous path to walk for many reasons, including the very real risk of taking a large, steaming dump over a beloved original...

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Lessons with Gregory Edition: The Walking Dead 7x09 Memes...

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It's back! Ricky, Margaret, and the whole gang are starting to pull things together ... look out, Negan, the slice capades are in town!

Click each image for FULL SIZE.

Click to Enlarge: Gregory sucks, but Xander Berkeley rocks...

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Almost Human (Umberto Lenzi, 1974) DVD Review...

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Umberto (Cannibal Ferox, Man From Deep River) Lenzi's brash poliziotteschi crime thriller kicks off in grand style, with a botched bank robbery that leads to a frenzied car chase filled with screaming rubber and battered metal – a sequence that best demonstrates Eugenio (The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly) Alabiso's tight editing. Blamed for ruining the score, Giulio Sacchi (Tomas Milian, Syndicate Sadists, full of twitchy energy) is introduced as an unreliable low-level hoodlum on Italy's crime-ridden streets, a man with enough chips on his shoulder to fill-out a fish supper. What's more, he's not above killing a policeman for a mere 600 lira stolen from a cigarette machine, in this film where the usual Italian glamour is replaced by uncompromising grit.

Written by Ernesto Gastaldi's (The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh), we are presented with a vision of Italy exposed as a society ruled by a totally corrupt legal system which fails to enact the basic intentions of law and order. Criminals are routinely let off the hook due to a lack of evidence, and it is with this knowledge that Giulio crafts a scheme to yield him some fat cash: half a billion lira, to be precise.

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Get In There: Marvin E. Quasniki for 2012...

Do you like puppets? Do you like political satire? Would you like to smush those two hands together in a delicious dose of puppet politics? Then step over here and watch the hilariously good videos of Marvin E. Quasniki!

Over the last couple of months - as the long-winded process of America deciding on who's going to run for the next election (just before they begin to focus on figuring out who'll run for the one after that) crawls forth - the Nerdist have been uploading some hilarious campaign spoof videos with Marvin E. Quasniki ... who just so happens to be a puppet.

View Marvin E. Quasniki's videos here.

View his first video below:



He proclaims that there should "be no more bullshit" and uses "How Much Worse Can It Get?" as his campaign slogan. Among his policies are agreeing with everyone no matter what they say, wherever they are - retrieving stuff from the Moon to sell on eBay - and using puppies as aids in settling international disputes.

I'm enjoying the hell out of these videos from the Nerdist channel and The Miskreant Puppets (part of Henson Alternative), and I hope you do too.

Waltz With Bashir...

I'd heard universally good things about this film (in brief), but hadn't paid a great deal of attention to it. Sometimes you just need to let the hubub die down before you investigate, and that's just what I did. Having spotted it on Sky Movies last week I stuck it on a videotape and spent the next few nights watching it in chunks before bed (perhaps not the wisest idea considering the final moments of the film).

It's a beautifully animated documentary film that tells a story your average viewer is going to know little or nothing about. Indeed I pretty much know sod all about the content - the 1982 Lebanon war - so it was an interesting experience to come at it from a completely unbiased and uninformed position. It's rare these days to know so little about a film before you see it, so Waltz With Bashir was really able to speak to me on its own terms. Furthermore it is a stylish film in its visuals, choosing striking images throughout - a pack of dogs running through the streets, young soldiers bathing in the sea at night, firing blindly into the night, to name but three.

I do wish they'd put a grey filter behind the subtitles though, because they sometimes get lost amongst the captivating imagery (it was the same with Inglourious Basterds' yellow subtitles that would sometimes vanish amidst the scene's colours). I'm always a bit annoyed by having to read subtitles - being that they're at the very bottom of the frame - when it's such a visually lush film. Bashir is such a film, and I found myself sometimes getting tripped up by wanting to invest in the visuals - to see this representation of the conflict for myself - and wanting to read the oftentimes fast-paced sub-titles (which didn't have grey shading behind them to improve clarity).

I'm not entirely sure what to say about it all, but it is a fascinating film that we English speaking Westerners will mostly have not seen, and which we don't often see in our territories anyway. The film feels balanced in its view - it doesn't go into politics - but naturally addresses the atrocity of the massacre at the heart of the plot. We view the boredom, chaos, horrors and even fun-among-men of warfare from the viewpoints of a few men on the ground who were barely out of their teenage years when they fought in the war.

It's a conflict that is old, but feels new and tragically raw on screen in the form of film. It's at times hypnotic, sometimes beautiful, sometimes humorous, sometimes hallucinatory, and other times devestating. Indeed, the final moments are a real punch in the gut, and perhaps what its real purpose in existing is, is to make viewers want to find out more about the conflict and what the film is all about - and that's what I'm off to do right now.

Hunger...

A quality slice of 'Brit grit' from a director of focussed vision (Steve McQueen) and a lead actor of dedicated skill (Michael Fassbender - read 'talented actor, and deliberately emaciated). Set during 1981 IRA protests ("blanket" and "no food"), the film is consistently hands-off when it comes to the political issues. This is the best way to go, especially as lesser filmmakers would indulge in Thatcher-bashing and vomiting their political agenda upon the viewer.

Instead, quite rightly, Hunger positions itself smack bang in the middle as a mere observer so that the viewer is allowed to make up their own minds. That said, what one is to think about it all is relentlessly complicated, and not being at all knowledgeable about the situation itself (it was before my time, and school history lessons contain precious little about anything, let alone Britain's own history), I'll steer clear of blogging my own views on the big issues.

So yeah, Hunger is a thankfully withdrawn affair when it comes to the politics, as withdrawn as the camera is itself - our view into this world - which in one stand-out sequence in the middle of the film, watches Fassbender's protesting prisoner converse with a priest over twenty minutes. It's rare for such moments to be tense and involving, but McQueen displays Schwarzenegger-sized directorial muscles. Not to say the rest of the film doesn't contain raw, bold and grit-coated power.

Guards performing cavity searches on the naked prisoners is nothing short of harrowing and brutal, while repulsive scenes of excrement-smeared cell walls and urine-soaked corridors leave the viewer reeling. In the deepest sense of the word, this film has a bucket load of style. It is a vision that is clear and concise, a vision which rarely requires non-diegetic music, or even dialogue (for large chunks of the film). At times the film almost plays out like a silent documentary, the combination of a lack of dialogue or music, and intense objectivity simply takes the viewer by the scruff of the neck and sits them down in a place that makes you feel like a fly on the wall.

The final passages in the film - at which point Fassbender's dedication to his art is displayed in his shockingly emaciated frame. If you were stunned by Christian Bale in The Machinist, you'll just be utterly baffled by how on earth Fassbender was able to survive his extreme slim-down.

Brutally honest, always withdrawn, endlessly committed and simply up-front, Hunger is a superb piece of filmmaking. You're not going to want to give it another view for a very long time no doubt, this is about as far from entertainment as you could possibly get, but for a truly memorable and serious film viewing experience, Hunger is it.

The Siege...

I've had this in my collection for donkey's years, and I've never watched it. Insanely belatedly I got to it ... decent enough, wasn't balled over, not overly fussed. Perhaps it's just odd watching it in a 'post 9/11' world, if I dare be so brand-named about our current climate, especially as the flick is set in New York. At times it does feel like it descends into 'lefty preaching' while making a valid point. It's insanely difficult to make a serious political picture, especially when you're within the time of Islamic Terrorism (although the terrorists are hardly Islamic ... they're simply terrorists). It's just like the slew of Iraq-related political dramas that are over-run with Hollywood afford-to-be-liberals, it just feels forced and finger-waggy. It feels smug, it feels too soon, it feels like concluding the unconcluded. I certainly hope we don't have yet another stupidly premature 'pull out at 98% complete' on our hands, if you start something, you should be up for finishing it (not thinking it'll be done in a month and then party time, which is just a stupid way of thinking and strategising, considering the enemy and style of warfare). Charlie Wilson's War, which focussed on Afghanistan during the late 80s, made a deft point of showing that the government couldn't be arsed to go that last mile, after blasting their way through the previous blood-soaked slog. This of course brings me onto the bleeding heart, lefty chattering class that spread themselves amongst the news media (both printed and televised), pondering over anything and everything from an afford-to-be-liberal stance. You get the impression they'd think otherwise (at least some of them), if they were a struggling plumber with a wife and three kids, for example. Don't mistake me for a Fox News loving righty either, my politics lie in the common sense middle ground (but far from the absolute shit of the current Labour government who've royally shafted the UK for 11 and a half years now, and have introduced legislation/proposals that are far, far more right-winged than the UK's 'right of centre' Conservative Party would ever dare - ID Cards, communications databases, the new preposterously ill-thought-out laws dealing with prostitution, the ghastly mis-use of the terrorism legislation and so-on ... I could go on, but I'd just piss myself right off). Needless to say, I'm not a fan of Brown & Co. Rolling back from my tangent, and returning to The Siege - meh, I guess.

Charlie Wilson's War...

While the content is before my political time, and certainly even (for half of the plot at least) just flat-out before my time full stop, the subject still makes an impact. It's certainly understandable why this film was made, what with the current situation in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

What I found most affecting about the film, was that it showed us how much money and effort was put into fighting the 'Commie Bastard' Russians in Afghanistan ($1 billion) and how 'they' just ditched the battered and bruised people (over half of which were under the age of 14) by not ponying up a comparatively measly sum of cash for education and the like.

It speaks volumes about the current situation, a catch 22 even. Either leave the troops in both territories and lose further lives (on both sides), or pull out too soon yet again after turning two country's population's lives upside down before the bad guys ultimately regain control, therefore making the entire war completely pointless, thus making the lives lost on both sides mean absolutely nothing - nobody would have died for anything. You get the feeling that the US government doesn't have a great deal of patience for anything outside of easy-to-understand 'shoot and kill' that lasts for anything longer than a year ... both from this film, and from the current political climate.

News flash, wars take a long time, they're devastating and horrible things which happen because they seek to put a stop to something else that is devastating and horrible from happening. It's the ultimate catch 22, but it cannot be achieved in six months, and the fighting certainly doesn't stop after the last bullets have been fired.

History is tragically repeating itself, and this is one of the issues that the darkly comic Charlie Wilson's War flags up for our attention.

While I didn't understand certain things regarding the American political system (hell, it's hard enough to understand the absolute garbage being thrown around by the current government here in the UK), just as a subtle black comedy it works, and reminds us that there's not enough Tom Hanks on the big screen these days.

A bit more thought is required for this one, and at times it can become quite dark when signaling up the horrid reality of the Afghan plight, but it can equally be enjoyed as a political farce in some respects, and indeed the two central performances (Hanks & Hoffman) are a joy to watch.

Ultimately it is a refreshing watch, it never decidedly strays into either side of the political spectrum, instead deciding to leave the politics and ethics balanced and open to the viewer's own interpretation. Indeed, the closing statement denoting "...we just fucked up the end game" speaks volumes in itself.