Double Bill Mini Reviews: Under Your Radar Edition...

Anomalisa:
What's it about?
A middle-aged family man arrives in another identikit hotel in advance of giving another motivational speech on yet another whistle-stop tour. Feeling lost and alone in his life, so much so that everyone but him in this world has the same face and the same voice, he's doomed to misery - until Lisa enters his life.
Who would I recognise in it?
David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan (all voices).
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
Sometimes the format in which you tell a story can make all the difference, or put an intriguing spin on the material. With "Anomalisa", writer/director Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) teams up with director Duke Johnson to present this very grown up tale of middle-age melancholy in the form of stop-motion animation...

Click "READ MORE" below for the verdict on this flick as well as Kevin Smith's weirdest movie to date...

Double Bill Mini Musings: Smith's Weird Whimsy, and Near-Future Chaos...

Tusk:
What's it about?
A snarky podcaster heads to Canada to interview a viral video sensation, only to end up in the home of one Mr Howard How - a curious old man, confined to a wheelchair and a solitary life - who has many interesting stories to tell. However, the old man's fixation on the mighty walrus takes a sinister and creepy turn.
Who would I recognise in it?
Justin Long, Michael Parks, Haley Joel Osment, Genesis Rodriguez, Johnny Depp.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
Birthed from an episode of Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier's "SModcast" podcast, in which they extrapolated a bizarre Gumtree advert into a horror film idea, Tusk is very much the product of Smith's new found invigoration for filmmaking. The idea went from a detailed and marijuana-induced giggle to a full-blown film in a matter of months, which affords this strange outing from the writer/director of Clerks et al a sense of immediacy. Low budget and high concept - a maniac seeks to turn his latest victim into the perfect walrus - it's an out-there experience that's as disturbing as it is bewildering.

Crammed-full with in-jokes that attentive SModcast network fans will appreciate, Tusk's immediacy also presents some problems. There are some structural issues that might have benefited from a little extra work - the Guy LaPointe scenes are heartily entertaining, but necessitate a sudden change of gear and shift in focus - but might more time for script tweaks have robbed the film of some of it's vim and vigour? The cast all seem to be having an absolute blast, and undoubtedly stealing the whole show - similar to the case of Smith's previous film Red State - is Michael Parks, who explores the various recesses of his deeply disturbed Mr How. Featuring some wacky - and quease-inducing - practical effects work from Robert Kurtzman, Kevin Smith's latest piece of whimsy is a curious beast. It is a film that has divided its audience, and will continue to do so, but - much like Justin Long's game performance - will haunt your thoughts for a long while. Good.

Click "READ MORE" below for The Purge: Anarchy...

Askewniverse Edition: The Walking Dead 3x09 Memes...

Find more Walking Dead memes here.

Hooray - TWD is back! Having watched the 2013 Baftas last night (where Argo did quite well), a certain line from Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back got stuck in my head. Indeed, Michael Rooker was in Mallrats.

Aww hell naw ... achievement rescinded.

N.B. Click each image for FULL SIZE.

Click "READ MORE" below for the Askewniverse references...

Flavours of the Month: January 2012...

LOOKS:

The Angelos Neil Epithemou Show - seemingly just a pilot at this stage (along with Milton Jones' "House of Rooms"), but being a huge fan of his character as-seen on the now cancelled Shooting Stars, I loved it. Hopefully Channel 4 pick it up for a full series.

Apocalypse Now (Blu-Ray) - Franis Ford Coppola's Vietnam war epic just got even more vast - on 3-disc collector's edition Blu-Ray. It's crammed with extras too.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Blu-Ray) - Jason Siegel wrote a killer script and gave a brilliant comedic performance. I loved it when I saw it in the cinema, and I figured it was about time to give it another spin.

The Golden Globes 2012 - last year Sky Movies broadcast them in the UK. This year it was E! Entertainment - and boy did they make a pig's ear of it. The feed was all over the place in the first 30 minutes, missing half of Gervais' intro speech, an entire category, half of a winner's speech, and it kept cutting away to the same glitchy package of adverts that just seemed to keep coming back like a friggin' zombie. Add in the incessant, wimpy bleeping out of every punchline (and even entire sentences!), and it was just a weak sauce showing all round.

Shameless Slasher Nasties Box Set DVD - as you'll have seen already, this month I've been reviewing this excellent 3-disc box set of 1970s Italian genre flicks. Killer Nun, Torso, and Night Train Murders.

Kevin Smith - Too Fat For 40 (his latest stand-up Q&A DVD) finally makes an appearance more than a year after it happened, but in an unexpurgated form. Hilarity ensues as he once again manages to capture my imagination with well told yarns from his personal life (the main feature is 3 hours and 20 minutes long!) Plus at long last, a full year-to-the-day after it's Sundance Premiere, Smith's deeply twisted realist horror movie Red State comes to a wide UK release on DVD and Blu-Ray - it has some flaws, but I really dug it. Finally, another viewing of Clerks: The Animated Series.

YouTube hopping - my love for The Big Bang Theory has excelled thanks to it being on constant repeat on E4 nowadays (since they let Friends go to the Paramount Comedy Channel), and I've found myself skimming around YouTube watching numerous gag reels, interviews and Comic-Con panels to do with the show. What's more I've also got into watching various small clips from season five of Robot Chicken - a season that, at this time anyway, has no release date on DVD (even though it's been out in America for ages - before it's even finished airing on Adult Swim).


SOUNDS:

Chase Status ft. Liam Bailey "Blind Faith" - as heard in Dirt 3.

The Walker Brothers "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore" & Wye Oak "Civilian" - the time is nearing for the second half of season two of The Walking Dead (the best show currently on TV in my view), so I've been psyching myself up with these tracks which appeared on the full trailers for seasons 1 and 2.

Red Dead Redemption OST

Ringo Deathstarr "Colour Trip"

Alessandro Alessandroni "Suor Omicidi" - otherwise known as "Killer Nun". Like so many stand-out pieces from the soundtracks of Italian genre flicks, this one gets pleasingly lodged in your head.

Stelvio Cipriani "La Polizia Sta A Guardare" - as heard in the flick "What Have They Done To Your Daughters" (and briefly heard in "Death Proof").

M83 "Hurry Up, We're Dreaming"

Drive OST - Kavinsky ft. Lovefoxxx "Nightcall", Desire "Under Your Spell", College ft. Electric Youth "A Real Hero", Riz Ortolani "Oh My Love", and The Chromatics "Tick of the Clock"

Kavinsky "Pacific Coast Highway"


VIBES & FLAVOURS:

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 - a nice rounding off of a trilogy arc. The third act isn't quite as thrilling or epic as the first two acts, but as a fan of the franchise I really enjoyed myself. The additional "Special Ops" content has also been tweaked for the better (although I do find it strange that "Recruit" mode isn't included for the Spec-Op missions).

Dirt 3 - the 'mini pyramids' felt a bit like a chore after a lengthy career mode, but then on the other hand you aren't left wanting for content. It's still been a spiffing racer to play, mind you.

The Walking Dead: Volume 9 & 10 - slowly but surely I'm catching up on Kirkman's excellent comic series. Still another five to go, however.

Damned by Chuck Palahniuk - the author's latest book, and it's his most inventive outing since Rant. The central character is a 13 year old daughter of a celebrity couple, who is damned to hell after suffering an apparent 'marijuana overdose' and bands together with a veritable 'Breakfast Club' cast of teenage stereotypes to plead her case to the authorities of Hell itself. I enjoyed it immensely - if you're a fan of Palahniuk's work, you definitely need to check this title out.

The Top 50 List - it was an exhaustive process re-jigging the list (less-so than creating the list from scratch back in 2009, mind you) but I had been meaning to do it for ages. Well - I've compiled my own Top 50 list of personal most favourite-favourites ... but even still a beloved title or two is going to slip your mind (such as the utterly arresting The Shawshank Redemption, or the endearingly laid back and meandering The Big Lebowski).

Double Bill Mini Musings: Catching Up on 2011...

Red State:
I've been hearing about this movie for absolutely sodding ages - particularly as I'm a frequent and consistent listener to numerous podcasts featured on Kevin Smith's "SModcast Network" (and as such I was subject to a few spoilers over the last year-or-more). Indeed, I had got to the point that I was utterly sick of listening to yet another all-too-familiar 45 minute rant about the state of modern movie advertising, that I'd just switch off entirely ... needless to say I was damned ready to see the movie already.

I've also heard very mixed things about the flick - some love it, some hate it, and some whinge specifically about the ending for not 'going the whole Dogma hog' - but considering Red State is a realist horror film, such flights of fantasy wouldn't fit in too well with the overall tone, which feels terrifyingly close to reality at times.

Another thing that some haters of the flick didn't like was the constant shifting of tone, genre, and focus - which was very much intended by Smith - and I can understand how it could wrong-foot some, and how it can mean that some characters remain a bit underdeveloped over the extremely efficient 85 minute running time ... but nevertheless I really dug it.

I dug it so much in fact that I wanted to watch it again straight away - surely a very good sign (I had the same reaction to Clerks II, come to think of it) - although I'm specifically starving myself of it for a little while before I re-view it.

Ranging from teen sex comedy one minute, to Wrath-of-God preaching the next, to Waco-esque shoot-out after that, pretty much nobody in the cast is safe ... and boy, do some of them go in extremely chilling ways. Indeed, the fear is so palpable on many of the victim's faces that a chill genuinely tears up your spine and dances across the base of your neck; seeing one smut-talking teen reduced to a dribbling wreck pleading that he just wants his mother packed a surprising punch. The film's 'Five Point Chuch' - led by a Phelps-to-the-most-extreme patriarch - preach such seething hatred that it makes you sit most uncomfortably in your chair, all-the-more-so because Michael Parks' performance is simultaneously disarming and utterly enrapturing. Suffice to say the man owns the entire film, with a fantastic performance that turns what could have easily become a pantomime villain, into a remarkably fearsome fun-time fanatic. As he beams with joy at the Popeye impression of one his youngest followers, you can't help but grin from ear-to-ear, and therein lies the excellence of Parks' performance: he constantly disturbs your balance.

Moving on, this is most definitely unlike any other Kevin Smith film to date - returning to his Indie roots for the production and distribution (albeit with the connections and sway of a long-time player with a loyal, long-established fan base), Smith's film displays a sense of vibrant flair which he hadn't previously explored. Using the Red Camera system, the film takes on a rampaging sense of immediacy, while looking utterly gorgeous and endlessly crisp on Blu-Ray.

One problem though - and it's the extra features on the Blu-Ray - whoever encoded them did a piss poor job. Every single one of them is in letterbox (so the image is surrounded on all sides by black on a widescreen TV), and whatever settings were used for encoding have rendered the extras subject to an annoying amount of interlacing and even strange image ghosting at times. They're not unwatchable by any means, but considering the sheer high quality of the main feature's presentation, it's unfortunate that the extras haven't been given the same care when being ported over to the disc. I'm not sure if this is only a problem with the Region B disc or not.

Despite receiving a few spoilers along the way from numerous podcasts on Smith's network, there were still a few good shocks left in it for me. Furthermore, good lord, there are countless fantastic performances throughout. Great character actors of various levels of repute populate the cast so that it's fit-to-bursting - there's always somebody new to see, and another dark twist to be taken in the ever-changing plot. While there are occasional pacing issues (which could conceivably worsen if you're one who disagrees with the ever-shifting focus of the script), I really enjoyed the flick - it's ruddy good to finally see it, but in my view it's also Smith's most interesting film since Dogma and his most enjoyable since Clerks II.


Drive:
Nicolas Winding Refn (who has previously given us the stonkingly stylish Bronson) gives us the most stylish and achingly cool movie of 2011. Some didn't like it - no doubt because the title could prove a bit misleading (and the marketing sold it the wrong way) - it's not so much about driving, as it is the existentialism surrounding Ryan Gosling's grippingly-performed stuntman ... but I absolutely loved it.

The opening getaway car sequence (seen entirely from the passenger seat) is nail-bitingly, hold-your-breath tense, exhibiting the sort of patience, skill, and shark-like determination that sums up the character of Gosling's 'Driver'. A man who spends most of the movie not saying an awful lot - indeed, as was the aim of the filmmakers, he is akin to the lone wolf American hero who uses stoicism and skilled use of extreme violence to preserve innocence. Speaking of innocence, the focus of that is Carey Mulligan's mother Irene (whose jailbird husband gets the Driver into an awful lot of trouble with some gangsters and a bag full of money). The relationship between Gosling and Mulligan's characters is sweet and chaste - it truly is an examination of love as an innocent and precious thing, where entwined fingers on a gear stick, and one kiss before an eruption of shocking violence prove to be far more potent than getting your kit off and going all the way.

Speaking of violence, it's no Rambo, but on the other hand it does feature moments of stunningly graphic violence - no doubt because the beauty of the build-up is so involving. Finally, on the issue of style - this film has it in spades. From the titles in pink cursive, to the lush and twinkling neon of the streets at night (a highlight of the superbly composed cinematography), and to the exceedingly cool 1980s soundtrack, it's nothing short of breathtakingly beautiful. One part B-Movie with an A-Movie look, one part masterclass in cool, and one part thrill ride; if I had seen this in 2011 it would have most definitely been on my Top Ten list of that year.