Cinema Suicide

My review of Ong Bak 2 is about as wishy washy as they come. Tony Jaa set out to improve the mythology of his Ong Bak series by setting it in a feudal period of Thailand and broadenning the scope out to Peter Jacksonian proportions but he bit off more than he could chew. The resulting nonsense cost Sahamongkol a lot of money and practically ran Jaa right out of Thailand. Were it not for his mentor, Panna Rittikrai, the whole thing would have gone down the toilets and we would have been left with nothing. Ultimately, Ong Bak 2 was as shallow as its contemporaries, but hot damn! did that movie have some great fighting and stunts! So here we are again, picking up where 2 left off. Jaa has been taken captive and beaten down. Want to bet that he somehow finds a way to turn the tables on his captors and kill everyone with raw Muay Thai fury?

I’m not sure what the actual release date is but word has it that we can expect Ong Bak 3 to hit DVD later this year.

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This is actually really old news, but no one, apart from a Guardian film article from November of last year has reported on this. As disappointing as it is, given a seriously mind bending premise and some unbelievably sweet concept art that emerged from preproduction meetings, it’s not entirely surprising. Since The Rainbow Thief, Jodorowsky has had difficulty get any film off the ground and even prior to that, his involvement in the production of an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune is a sort of legendary cautionary tale for filmmakers flying too close to the sun.

Fundamentally, Alejandro Jodorowsky is box office poison but the difference between his features and some late era David Lynch shit like Inland Empire, is budget. Inland Empire may have, indeed, been three hours of nonsense but it was a cheap three hours of nonsense. Jodorowsky’s movies are always wild and genre oriented. They involved large sets and huge scope. Getting away with that kind of shit in the 70’s is the benefit of a permissive age of filmmaking and a wild art film that sparked the entire notion of midnight movies. However, today, the people making waves in Hollywood back then are now writing the checks and are only interested in explosions and robots that turn into trucks. If you want to produce an art film independently, you have to keep the budget small and scale  back any aspirations of making some kind of acid saga like Jodorowsky tends to do.

You can’t seem to keep this man down, however, and at 80 years old and looking extremely healthy thanks to a shocking abstinence from drugs, booze and smokes (not to mention a healthy lifestyle involving yoga), Jodorowsky plans to sequelize his signature picture, El Topo, by shooting Son Of El Topo and basing it on the intense hatred and ultimate redemptive experience he shared with producer, Allen Klein, who has more or less stymied Jodorowsky’s career since he refused to direct a picture adapted from the kinky classic novel, The Story Of O. On Klein’s deathbed, the two bitter enemies made peace with one another and Jodorowsky was left inspired to tell the story of two brothers whose hatred is earth shattering but in the end they unite to become one being. It sounds perfectly Jodorowskian.

I wouldn’t get my hopes up, though. Nothing about his latest project suggests that he’ll get that one off the ground, either. If you just have to have your crazy ass Jodorowosky fantasy, though, I strongly suggest that you look into his warped series of comic books, Metabarons.

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To call Dead Rising a shallow experiment in videogaming is a gross understatement of the facts. Though I never got tired of staving off a mob of flesh eating ghouls with a Flying V guitar or blinding zombies with hilariously oversized masks, there just wasn’t too much to the game. It did keep me coming back for more, though. There was so much to do, so many hilarious stunts to be pulled off at the expense of an endless supply of zombies and so much unlockable shit that by the time I traded the game in on whatever I happened to be buying next, I still don’t think I had seen even so much as 75% of the entire game. It was fun, it was interesting but if there’s one game in the world that doesn’t really need a feature film adaptation, it’s Dead Rising.

However, Capcom, Dead Rising’s publisher, respectfully disagrees and had commissioned a feature to be made. The end result, evident in this 90 second trailer, is not terribly exciting and looks like just about every other low budget shot-on-video zombie feature to come out of Japan in the last ten years or so. I don’t speak the language, so I can’t say what’s going on here but it looks nothing like the original game and may have more in common with the still unreleased Dead Rising 2. What more do you need to know, though? Zombies start eating people. Survivors clamor for shelter in a mall or a warehouse. Inevitably, they are forced to stave off waves of zombies. Herein, a wheelchair is outfitted with weapons, including a chainsaw. People are bitten. Zombies are mutilated. In the trailer, the letters FPS can be seen and some footage is first person perspective shots of navigating a warehouse, so one can only assume that there’s some kind of clever video game to film translation happening there. Dead Rising, the movie, may wind up being a lot of fun as it seems to share some common elements with the Hong Kong feature, Bio-Zombie, itself an homage to video games, but beyond that, it’s not much to look at.

I have no idea when this is being released but word has it that it’s going straight to video, will be released on the web and Xbox 360 owners will have the chance to download it, no doubt only if they’re in Japan, so set up a Japanese Live account if you absolutely need to see it.

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One of the first movies that was identified to me as cult was Repo Man. The entire notion of a movie that was dearly loved by few and dismissed by most was something that, at a young age, fascinated me and it would turn out a few years later when I started to show a preference for the crap on UHF 8 o’clock movies over the big theatrical releases that I was one of the few wired to find the silver linings in the movies that most people thought were crap. Among the first of these titles was Repo Man. It was grimy and subversive and had a sensibility that seemed to be informed by cocaine and The Circle Jerks. I didn’t exactly get it but enough of it made sense to me to keep me coming back. I also loved the soundtrack.

In this trailer for Alex Cox’s follow up to his original punk rock sci-fi weirdo flick (that my parents saw, no less) I can see hints of the original film’s motifs coming back, repurposed and adjusted for a whole new America and set in a whole new Los Angeles unfortunately, the green-screen approach that speaks to Repo Chick’s aesthetic is about the most distracting element of the trailer and I’m not getting over it any time soon.  Everything seems to be in place, too. There’s a snotty satire of contemporary culture, an examination of the current financial situation in the states but that god damn green screen has got to go! I can only hope that the footage that makes up this trailer is some kind of pre-FX reel but I’m told the movie has already screened at the Venice Film Festival and that it’s pretty much all in the can.

Look, I believe that strong writing and good ideas can trump shoddy filmmaking any day. I’m hardly writing off Repo Chick based solely on its cheap looking virtual set treatment. It’s still going to get a fair shake from me. I hardly expect Sin City from these low budget indies working strictly within the confines of a single lime green colored sound stage, but I do wish some of these folks would wait for the technology to catch up and become more affordable before they started going all digital in the interest of keeping costs down. In a couple of years it’ll cost next to nothing to kick out a nice looking movie that was shot entirely in your garage but right now, evident in pictures like Repo Chick and the upcoming Albert Pyun Streets of Fire sequel, Road To Hell, all green screen and no money amounts to an exceptionally crappy looking feature that could have easily been shot on practical sets and locations.

Then again, the presentation may be as much a part of the total package as the barbed commentary about bratty rich girls showing an exceptional talent for taking property away from people who default on their loans. I’ll tell you what, you never can tell when it comes to Alex Cox.

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Face it. If you’re a LOST fan then somewhere in the middle of season 2 you started trying to sort out the pieces as soon as it became clear that something really big was going on. Maybe you even went apeshit and played along with the ARGs that accompanied each season and if you were genuinely die hard, then you probably also watched the webisodes to fill in the gaps. Office chatter around these parts became ceaseless collaborations as members of the art department presented harebrained theories to the web developers about the significance of the numbers, the heiroglyphics, the age of Richard Alpert, etc. I was even guilty of this sin as I took it a step further and started tying my own ideas, culled from the pages of The Stand and reinforced with hardly understood concepts from The Elegant Universe, into existing theories of just what the fuck is going on.

Unfortunately, somewhere around the end of season 4 it occurred to me that these guys were probably just making up wild shit as they went along, cherrypicking ideas from really awesome fantasy and sci-fi novels and that there probably has been no grand operating system behind the vast mysteries of LOST. The fan base persists, though, and even though I’m feeling a bit suspicious of the LOST writers, I just can’t help myself. I love putting their wild riddles through the paces and try to make sense of them all. Season 6, the grand finale begins on Tuesday, February 2nd and I couldn’t be more excited about it. The final chapter of one of TV’s greatest shows is coming to a conclusion and I’ll be trying to figure it out all the way to the series finale. Thankfully, showrunners Lindelof and Cuse promise that to all my friends and colleagues, this last season is going to make me more annoying than ever as I pass my crazy-ass theorize before everyone I meet.

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I haven’t seen a Wong Jing movie in a really long time. He’s a director with a reputation for some of the strangest action movies to come out of Hong Kong and I was never sure how I was supposed to approach them. Are they comedies? Intentionally? God of Gamblers’ Return comes off like an two-gun action movie on acid. It begins as most heroic bloodshed pictures tend to do, turns into a romance, a budddy picture and then ends on this insane note as people fly around a casino flinging playing cards and roulette balls at one another like they just stepped out of the 36th chamber. There’s also the matter of the Jet Li picture, High Risk, released here as Meltdown. On the surface it looks like a Die Hard ripoff but it also features an extended close up scene of a man’s penis while he takes a leak and also Jackie Cheung has his pants torn off by a dead man with rigor mortis. He has directed dozens of movies and just about all of them are fucked up exercises in martial arts and gunplay with this moronic comedic edge that doesn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense.  He’s the kind of director who would build a tense rivalry between protagonist and antagonist, have them square off in the third act and then resolve the conflict before the fight even starts by dropping an anvil on the bad guy’s head without anything approaching an explanation.

So this is what it looks like when Wong Jing gets a special effects budget and Andy Lau for his latest picture. I should know better. My expectations are set accordingly but I can’t help it. This trailer looks totally awesome.

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UPDATE! 01/14/10: In a classier than expected move, Bloody Disgusting’s Mr. Disgusting posted an article that more or less says “thanks but we’re not really a blog” and then goes on to highlight Day of the Woman and The Vault of Horror and asks for other nominees. This was completely unexpected and restores a little faith in Bloody D. Get over there now and talk up your faves and your own. http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/18704

There has been a minor uproar among horror bloggers recently when a certain Total Film vote competition came into our collected consciousness. Total Film, the online component of the big-ass movie magazine is running a best blog competition and among their nominations for Best Horror Blog is only one actual horror blog (Obscure Hollow, I encourage you to vote for them). Your other options are the titans of horror movie reportage. Among such towering “horror blogging” giants are Dread Central, Bloody Disgusting, Upcoming Horror Movies and Shock Til You Drop. I don’t intend to shit on those guys, it’s not their fault but I have seen some of them campaigning to win this award via Twitter and Facebook and it’s rather disappointing since those of us running, you know, horror blogs could have really used the exposure and the recognition and by that I don’t necessarily mean me. All Total Film had to do was google “horror blog” and they would have turned up three perfectly reasonable nominees on the first page of results (Zombos Closet of Horror, Final Girl and Groovy Age of Horror).

It’s not all bad. Over at their Best Cult Blog is a list of actual cult movie blogs and last I knew, Steve Jencks’ fabulous Lost Highway was a lock to win that bitch. So good on ya, Steve. I’m going to go out on a limb here and call a spade a spade, though. This is bullshit and Total Film, who at the moment look like a bunch of out of touch jackasses, only needed to do the smallest amount of work to find out what constitutes a blog and who among them are worthy of awards and praise. Instead, they took the low road and got lazy. Pick any of the sites from the roster of The League of Tana Tea Drinkers or the many horror blogs that are unaffiliated and well worthy of praise and we would have been ecstatic to have received a nod of recognition from the mainstream press. As much as I love doing this, it often feels pointless when the vast majority of the horror reading public, the unwashed masses, are directing their attention to sites that make you first click through full page overlays of advertisements before you can read their content, so a little encouragement from the pros goes a long way.

So there you go, Total Film, an actual blog article littered with links to actual horror blogs. You dropped the ball big time with this and you are hereby cordially invited to suck it.

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I know you’re a lot like me. The sexy soap opera antics of Vampire Bill and Sookie thrill and titillate you more than you’d like to admit and the close of the triumphant season 2 had you immediately starving for more. Rest easy. Season 3 went into production back on December 3 and to get you excited, HBO has put together this clever promo.

True Blood is quite the phenomenon and just so you know, Alan Ball is pretty sure the show is locked for a fourth season. Season 3 is set to return in June.

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