Cocoon: From the Girls of Summer

Taken on it own terms, director Toko Ina's Cocoon: From the Girls of Summer is a short, sharp animated look at the Himeyuri students stationed on front-line islands during the Pacific portion of the Second World War. These real-life children, who were told that they were to work in Red Cross hospitals far removed from conflict, were actually bussed directly into battle to build shelters and perform nursing duties for a flagging Imperial army. Ina's piece, a television movie produced for NHK's satellite channel, uses a bright, idyllic colour scheme that suggests a big budget children's fantasy movie. Indeed, Cocoon's animation producer is one Hitomi Tateno, a veteran of massive Studio Ghibli productions like Princess Mononoke or When Marnie Was There (among a great many others). Unfortunately, writer-illustrator Machiko Kyo's serialised manga, on which this film is based, is a poor match for such a luxuriant approach. Comparatively, Kyo's linework is stark and simplistic; a story constructed around tremoring human outlines and their ghostly patients. 

The frail figures on Kyo's pages are washed in blotted grey and black inks, suggesting an oppressive and all-encompassing fog of soot and death. These deliberately naïve illustrations could very well be a sketchbook diary that has been plucked directly out of this horror. Since the film was produced with a very specific audience in mind, there's a conscious dialing back of the palpable bitterness that underpins Kyo's comic. Although these young women try to power through for the sake of their national pride in both mediums, it's underlined for the reader that these girls are being fed into a meat grinder by the various layers of adults who should be looking out for them - from teachers and soldiers, all the way up to their own government. In the animated setting of Ina's film, insinuations dangle without clarification; the children much more tuned into the wider cultural objective of Imperial Japan. This Cocoon, very much like Kihachi Okamoto's Battle of Okinawa, depicts the American invasion of these islands as anonymous and almost spectral; an ever-present flame that licks at the despairing Japanese. The elisions applied to this adaptation - that jettison, amongst others, inked episodes in which trembling teens are directed to dispose of hacked-off, gangrenous limbs - do end up providing one impressive visual flourish in their efforts to conceal bloodshed: rather than animate youngsters riddled with bullets or rotten injuries that seethe with maggots, Cocoon's gunned-down students instead leak flower petals from their pulverised bodies. 

Duro - Boiling Point

Knight Artorias by Shimhaq

Katsuhiro Harada - TEKKEN: A 30-YEAR Journey (Harada's Final Mix)

Wet Leg - Pokemon

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

There are clear points of dissimilarity between The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, largely in how each film tells its portion of the story. Fellowship is hurried and clipped in its telling whereas Two Towers is much more gradual, slowly layering in tension and torrential threat before arriving at a crescendo. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King does not attempt to continue this trend with a brand new phase of storytelling though, what it does instead is marry the disparate voices of its predecessors, arriving at a wavelength that may struggle to be considered in the singular - this is very much a continuation of already extant episodes rather than a piece unto itself - but works wonderfully as a grand summation of this Middle Earth material. Which is a roundabout way of saying that Return of the King is best enjoyed hot on the heels of its prequels; the third-act in a unbroken chain rather than a second sequel. 

As if to underline this marriage of differing narrative objectives - Fellowship had to catch viewers up on thousands of years of imagined history while Two Towers simply has to set up an almighty battle - characters within Return of the King find their finer qualities reconciled before the curtain finally falls. This mediation is best expressed by this third film's approach to Gandalf. In the first instalment this grey wizard was a leaf-smoking, wrinkled adventurer; in the second, a bright angelic presence who foretold the salvation of morning and burned the eyes out of any who gazed upon him. Thankfully, Return of the King allows a little of the first episode's distracted crankiness to creep back into Ian McKellen's performance. Between battles he even gets to fire up his pipe. He's back to being a person who needs to sort through his thoughts then. At the other end of this world, Elijah Wood's Frodo, Sean Astin's Sam, and Andy Serkis' Gollum creep through a boiling, computer-generated inferno towards the summit of their quest. Perhaps it's just that volcanic regions read so well on film but, like Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith a couple of years later, there's a sense in Return of the King that the armies of special effects teams that toil on these films are delivering several steaming levels above their previous, still extremely impressive, work.

On release, Return of the King was mocked for the inelegance of its endings - staggered sequences in which it felt like a clean break was being proposed but then instantly succeeded by yet another just-as-conclusive incident. Although the "The Scouring of the Shire" chapter from Tolkien's book has been omitted here (of all the interquel ideas that have been floated as a way of the following up the enormous success of this series, it's a wonder that a filmic adaptation of this discarded element apparently hasn't ever been considered), writer-director Peter Jackson and co-writers Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens find a wonderfully elegant way to contrast the enormous accomplishment of the Hobbits with the aggressive indifference of the people who have stayed at home, living lives completely removed from the war with Sauron. Young men wreathed in the livery of mighty human kingdoms? These parochial little gnomes are far more impressed by a truly massive pumpkin. As well, given the pervasive warmongering of the period in which this film series was completed and released, it feels not just notable but forward-thinking that Return of the King leaves us with the impression that combat takes more than a physical toll on its victims. It leaves invisible scars on all those that survive, preventing them from reassuming the patterns and rhythms of their previous lives. In this telling, Frodo is broken by his desire for the ring; reduced to a bleeding mess squabbling with another junkie above a crack in hell. There's just no undoing that. Even the overabundance of slow-motion photography in these epilogues, that seize on flicking facial gesture, is appropriate. It is as if the filmmakers themselves cannot bear to let these characters go. 

Howard Shore - Shelob's Lair

Caribou - Waiting So Long

Nucleon Quest Super Convoy by びー (@samhoshi7)

Bohūko - 11:10 PM

Division Street - Washed Away

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Although The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers picks up exactly where The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring left off, the two films have surprisingly distinct visual identities. Fellowship, with its hobbit holes and winding, Escher staircases could - when not hurrying away from such images - present moods premised on these fantastical, often hand-crafted environments. Viewers were able to sink into the crevices. The Two Towers, by comparison, is a much more expansive, horizontal experience; a film about great, galloping journeys and never-ending plains that builds to the siege of an enormous hold chiseled into a mountain. Whereas before characters looked like tourists miserably coping with a destination holiday at the ends of the earth, here the warrior heroes find themselves hurrying between homesteads while the countryside around them boils with brewing conflict. The Two Towers then owing far more than expected to the widescreen vistas of American westerns or the arrow-flecked turbulence of Japanese chanbara. 

Perhaps because we're already well aware of their overarching objectives, the surviving members of The Company of the Ring recede into the background for significant stretches of The Two Towers. Writer-director Peter Jackson - Stephen Sinclair, who previously collaborated with Jackson on Meet the Feebles and Braindead, joining Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens as co-writers - apportions space to two characters who chart paths into and out of damnation: Andy Serkis' motion-captured Gollum and the late Bernard Hill as the enfeebled King Théoden. Gollum, who acts as a guide into hell for Elijah Wood's Frodo and Sean Astin's Sam, struggles with distinct and even warring personalities, each with markedly different outlooks. A rapid-fire back-and-forth between the piteous Sméagol and the more conniving, ring hungry Gollum, as the two aspects weigh up their options, is both impressive and humorous. But, equally, watching this computer-generated body splash along a shallow river after a slippery fish is actually able to evoke a vivid physical trepidation. We are acutely aware that the sallow, vulnerable skin of this creature is dangerously close to some sharp-looking rocks. That injury doesn't occur (or, more accurately, couldn't occur) isn't the point. The shots, despite their falsehood, prickle shivering sense memory in their audience. 

Hill's Théoden awakens out of a crumbling, mummified half-life (shades of The Fisher King from Arthurian legend or King Arthur himself, as depicted in the latter half of John Boorman's Excalibur) and is instantly thrown into the tragedy of having lost his child. Hill's performance isn't showy, he doesn't rage or even really demand attention in successive scenes where his character must make the most of a truly dire lot. What the actor offers instead is a quiet, resurgent dignity steeped in age and doubt. Viggo Mortensen's otherworldly Aragorn may be pegged for greatness but it is Hill's Théoden who, despite the enormous responsibility this older man has woken up into, is able to consistently transmit a seasoned, kingly temperament. Which is to say that as the situation worsens, as greater armies of mutant Orcs bear down on this harried community, Hill's Théoden isn't seen to buckle. Instead he seems to grow bigger and bigger in his role as a front-line commander, defying the patriarchal standards of his time to place faith in his niece, Miranda Otto's Éowyn, and fighting side-by-side with his knights - knowing that are all likely doomed - as they blockade creaking fortifications. This rain-lashed Battle of Helm's Deep still staggers, thanks largely to the sheer amount of onscreen bodies, both living and computer-generated, who crash upon this fortress. Director Jackson demonstrating an ability to build entire acts out of concluding action that account for scope, subtlety, and character. A shot that simulates a camera arm, fixed to a vehicle, rolling as it follows behind mounted riders as they batter through waves of armoured ogres has a genuine note of delirium about it. 

The Strokes - Hard to Explain

Strider by Dillon Snook

Howard Shore - The Caverns of Isengard

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Revisited in its theatrical cut, director Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is still an impressive achievement in compressed storytelling, an approach that makes the film's three hour runtime feel positively breakneck. In adapting JRR Tolkien's first volume of The Lord of the Rings Jackson, along with co-writers Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens, have jettisoned characters and situations, as well as borrowed events from later books, to arrive at a piece that is largely built around two characters - Elijah Wood's Frodo and Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn - both of whom are slowly being crushed by expectation. For Frodo it's a pressure that he has, to some degree, chosen to take on himself. Although, as Ian McKellen's Gandalf pontificates, Frodo is uniquely suited to meet this call to adventure, it is this young hobbit who stands amongst squabbling giants at Rivendell and volunteers himself to transport a ring of incredible, corrupting power across the world to be dropped into a volcano. 

Frodo, and the rest of the halfling members of this expedition for that matter, are positioned as cheery innocents who, in attempting to repeat the storied quests of their forebears, find themselves journeying deeper and deeper into an all-encompassing horror. It isn't difficult then to draw parallels between the residents of the green and pleasant Hobbiton and the British Tommies who left their homes to be gobbled up by a new kind of warfare on French fields during the Great War. Both are, popularly, framed as guileless and therefore massively unprepared for what awaits them abroad. Tolkien, presumably, twisting his own flea-bitten experience of pulverising modernity at the Somme to ask what conflict could possibly be worth all this bloodshed and destruction? Threat in this first installment then is organised in terms of the technological, specifically generated by a vassal state transforming itself into an industrial hub. Christopher Lee's fallen wizard Saruman, who believes it politically expedient to align himself with a returning spectre, orders his underlings to overturn ancient trees and churn up the earth beneath them until this sorcerer's  domain is cast in mud and smoke; an enormous warren of intersecting tunnels where roughly hewn armour and mutant hordes each tumble off a production line. 

In a wider realm spotted with the crumbled remains of advanced civilisations, Saruman's excavation registers as obscene - the willful destruction of a formerly picturesque, fantasy landscape for selfish or even cowardly ends. This is war as a seismic disturbance. A blot that threatens to, should the ghostly Sauron regain his full strength, engulf everything. Whereas Frodo's suitability to smuggle this crucial ring is largely illustrated through comparison - several much more obviously powerful men shudder to even touch the thing - rather than stated exposition, Aragorn's royal lineage, and the weight that carries, is directly spoken to us on several occasions. Perhaps, given his cool nickname and proficiency in a fight, the screenwriters worried that an audience unfamiliar with the original text (or overfamiliar with the Neanderthal seen in Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings) might assume that the character is a heavy and nothing more? Certainly Mortensen's performance consistently works against any such dismissal, tempering whirlwind sword skills with a tender, fatherly nature that suggests a greatness on the cusp of being assumed. This insistence that we know Aragorn is descended from fickle human kings introduces a note of doubt about his motives as well. Will he be able to overcome the innate, reflexive treachery of man and be a true ally to Frodo? 

More than anything though, what remains specifically appealing about Jackson's approach to Fellowship is that this piece arrived before green screen and computer generated effects became a ubiquitous answer to filmmaking problems. Jackson, who made his bones on low budget horror (if not splatter) films threads this first instalment with similarly inventive compositional solutions. Since this is a world that demands people and objects of varying sizes are interacting with each other, there is a constant need to find fresh viewpoints as a way of concealing the scaffolding beneath them. So although CG is frequently deployed it sits alongside detailed and expansive sets, life-sized puppetry, forced perspectives, and (reportedly maximal) miniature environments. Regardless of whether or not it should be the case, these physical - touchable - effects are better suited to stressing an idea of human craftsmanship and ingenuity than purely digital compositions. If big budget blockbuster entertainment is a series of magic tricks deployed in service to a hair-raising story, then a variety and depth in the execution of these deceptions is best suited to the task of consistently delighting an audience. None of this is to say that Fellowship is perfect - at least in this edit the truncated shape of the central journey, one told primarily in gigantic establishing shots, begins to feel less like a grueling odyssey and more like a succession of bullet points, as if favoured locales are being ticked off - but Jackson's opening salvo cannot help but register as a laudable example of large-scale filmmaking that foregrounds the kaleidoscopic disciplines that underpin such massive endeavours. 

Khruangbin - People Everywhere ii

X-Men of Apocalypse #1 by Daniel Warren Johnson

Harachan - Paradise

Predator: Badlands

In Predator: Badlands find a kind of sangam for a great many of the former 20th Century Fox's science fiction and fantasy properties. Of course there's everybody's favourite invisible hunters with an added army of disposable synthetics, on loan from the corporate wing of the Alien franchise, not far behind. Such intermingling isn't new but the cross-pollination doesn't end there. Hanging on a trophy room wall in a derelict space craft there's a skull from one of Independence Day's locust-like Harvesters and, in creating a extraterrestrial environment seemingly dedicated to stripping outsiders to the bone in record time, there's more than a little of Avatar's Pandora in the mix for these bad lands. The film's approach to storytelling differs from previous Predator installments as well, harkening to the armoured, near-mute leads seen in Star Wars television spin-offs. The Volume VFX of The Mandalorian is obvious but, as well, there's something of Genndy Tartakovsky's Star Wars: Clone Wars at play, certainly in terms of the deft touch for character-based action that director Dan Trachtenberg demonstrates here. The centering of an uncommunicative, vengeful berserker as he traverses an unmapped environment isn't a million miles away from Conan the Barbarian either. Sadly, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi's Dek, the outcast Predator of Badlands, never quite gets enough space to voice the bitter introspection afforded to Schwarzenegger's orphaned reaver. Really, all that's missing is a good, hard nod towards the Planet of the Apes. Although, having said that, there's something a little stark in play with Weyland Yutani's busy little mechanoids. Several layers of artificial hierarchy plot and probe without any clear input from a flesh and bone master. For all we know, Elle Fanning's crumbling androids toil in a far future were the post-human dreams of David (from Prometheus and Alien: Covenant) have been fully realised. 

Clipse (featuring Pusha T, Malice, and Stove God Cooks) - FICO

Robyn - Dopamine

Blanka by Ian Higginbotham

Khruangbin - White Gloves ii

The Lord of the Rings

Surprisingly, many of the more striking images in director Ralph Bakshi's truncated animated adaptation of JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings revolve around horseback riding, be that our fellowship heroes galloping up an incline while a street artist's spray painted depiction of space swirls in the background or the Ringwraiths cantering in a turbulent, crackling void. In both described instances it's really the backgrounds that sing; tableaux that pulse with cosmic energies that contrast rather alarmingly with the simplicity applied to the majority of the film's characters. In the main, our mix of wizards and warriors are pointedly plain in their rendering, their figures lacking any of the detail you might expect from a piece striving to establish a lived-in setting. At least initially, this cartoonish plasticity works somewhat well in contrast to the enemies our heroes face, who are much more obviously only lightly dressed live action elements. Whereas the movements of Frodo and his friends are the product of the kind of frame-by-frame tracing that Disney's animators employed when arranging their dancing princesses, the massing Orcs seen here are only partially sketched over. This key difference in conceptual execution suggestive of a kind of hierarchical approach to character design, with good guys given the full painted treatment while their slathering opponents are, very obviously, presented as (literal) intruders in this land. Sadly this spell does not last. Once the scale of human movement increases to include armies on horseback the techniques used to illustrate Mordor's massing forces are again employed, regardless of the change in alignment. An approach that belies any creative intent more serious or complicated than simple budget management. 

Charli XCX - House (feat. John Cale)

Maca - Plumeria (with Fakename)

Angel Dust

Languishing as a 480p rip posted to YouTube, writer-director Gakuryuu Ishii's Angel Dust ends up being well-served by this kind of blotchy reproduction. The striking images within the film strain to resolve their detail while intense, onscreen colours bleed and overlap their boundaries; an unintended effect that amplifies the principle character's precarious grip on not just the unfolding mystery but reality itself. Ishii, who made his name with dystopian punk rock pieces like Crazy Thunder Road and Burst City (a setting the director returned to in 2001 with Electric Dragon 80.000 V) applies this deep-seated skepticism to the urban crime procedural, arriving at packed train carriages in which young women gasp in the rush hour crush then silently expire. Kaho Minami plays Dr Setsuko Suma, a forensic psychiatrist working alongside the police to solve these anonymous and seemingly motiveless attacks. Something of a psychic, Setsuko is able to tune herself to unseen wavelengths emanating from the killer's refrigerated victims. An ability that threatens to blot out her own identity. Ishii and cinematographer Norimichi Kasamatsu frame Setsuko as very much a woman in a man's world, the slight actress often packed into frames where she appears either small and vulnerable or observed at an unnerving remove. Told in an unhurried fashion, Ishii packs his film with strobing crime scene imagery, the clacking of mechanical gadgets, and several awed glances at Mount Fuji that seem to suggest that malignant energies are seeping out of this enormous black mountain. 

Magdalena Bay - Black-Eyed Susan Climb

Missing Link Optimus by Zandercom

Hannah Frances - Steady in the Hand

lofikay. - Kiss of Apathy

Dawn of the Dead

Viewed today, one of the more startling aspects of writer-director George A Romero's Dawn of the Dead (at least when judged against modern, more blood-thirsty fare) is the notion that dealing with the reanimated bodies of dead human beings is inherently traumatic. When Ken Foree's Peter and Scott Reiniger's Roger - two Philadelphia SWAT officers tasked with clearing residents out of low income housing for the crime of defying martial law - come across a makeshift morgue in the basement of one building they discover bound and writhing bodies chewing on bones. A revolted Peter takes the lead, unholstering a sidearm to begin the process of exterminating these ghouls. What is absent in this sequence is any sense that this is the correct response to these pitiful creatures. The slow, precise headshots delivered by Peter take an obvious toll on the policeman, who seems to immediately slip into a depressive dither. 

Although merrily munching on human remains, these former people are not an immediate threat. So consumed are they with their feasting that they barely react to the bullets hammering into their rotted brains. Again and again the film reiterates, through dialogue and montage, that these zombies are not as distinct from us as we'd like them to be and are, in truth, a kind of arrested form of humanity. One that is trapped in a fruitless, consumptive routine. While Roger, Gaylen Ross' Fran and David Emge's Stephen dial into the abundance and excess offered by the kitsch kingdom they claim from the living dead, Roger remains thoughtful. The policeman attempting to make sense of why people are returning to life with a ravenous appetite and a deoxygenated hue. In the decades since, as the zombie genre has taken on aspects of action filmmaking and the strange, survivalist mentalities of American disaster preppers, these pleas for dignity have been deemed extraneous. 

The big (and little) screen undead have evolved in the years since Dawn's release into unthinking human targets who can be gleefully mulched for our entertainment. These newer zombies propose only violence and must be vanquished on sight. Romero though cannot help arranging his deflated figures in ways that deliberately straddle the line between the tragic and comic. He portrays a real sadness in their diminished state - cinematographer Michael Gornick's camera lingering on clumsy bodies that are trapped in an endless pantomime fired by flickering memory. This strange, hypnotic state emanates out into the rest of Dawn of the Dead, eventually infecting the principle characters to varying degrees. Roger and Stephen are bitten and succumb to their injuries - Emge delivering a fantastic physical performance as a body trying to power its way through the onset of rigor mortis - but Roger and Fran both end up entertaining suicide, by way of massive head trauma, as a solution to dealing with the sunken world they now inhabit. By Dawn's conclusion it is clear we have reached a point in time where nothing will ever be new again. This blaring mall stands as a museum piece, trumpeting an epoch that has ended and is now decaying. From this day forward what remains of mankind, living or dead, is doomed to shuffle in increasingly shambolic circles. 

Dry Cleaning - Hit My Head All Day (Edit)

evrgrn. - Home

Gamera vs Gyaos by Jack Teagle

Pavement - Range Life

Gamera vs Gyaos

What to do when a modest but genuinely excellent creature feature like Gamera vs Barugon underperforms at the box office? Well, you aim the follow-up squarely at youngsters and hope they end up dragging along the rest of their family for the show. Thankfully, despite this inauspicious conceptual detour, director Noriaki Yuasa's Gamera vs Gyaos has, in Naoyuki Abe's Eiichi Kanamura, a central child performance that registers as delightfully chaotic rather than prim or pandering. Eiichi, usually seen combing through phone registry-sized comics or firing cap guns at his toy police car, is only lightly threaded into a human-level intrigue that takes in a village full of ageing farmers who are trying to wring the maximum amount of money out of a nearby road development that has, naturally, disturbed the more predatory of the title monsters. Since it's extremely difficult to care about greedy adults too timid to actually commit any exciting crimes, Yuasa's film depends on the stout, indefatigable Eiichi to stumble upon the people chomping bats that menace this parochial prefecture. 

Snatched up by a ravenous monster then rescued by everybody's favourite rocket-powered turtle, Eiichi takes all of these developments in his stride; quickly returning to his bedroom to depict his blazing hero in a lurid crayon etching. In this sense Eiichi's adventures prefigure Ishiro Honda's undervalued All Monsters Attack, the Godzilla franchise's belated attempt at catering directly to the younger audience it had cultivated. Unlike All Monsters though, Gamera vs Gyaos isn't hobbled by recycling footage culled from earlier instalments. Instead Yuasa, who also helmed this film's special effects photography, stages a series of impressively barbarous encounters between these warring behemoths that sees flippers lasered to the flapping bone, toes chewed off then regrown, and an injured Gamera raging underneath an emerald mask of his own blood. A special mention then for Gyaos, a pointedly malevolent animal who looks and even behaves like a cute capsule toy in chuckling close-up but, when fully revealed, also manages to transmit the terrifying uncanniness of a man's body adorned with massive, leathery wings. Unlike its benevolent, reptilian opponent - who suffers slathering injury to protect a child - Gyaos is pure consumptive glee, never happier than when it's able to scoop up screaming bystanders and feast on them like a skyscraper-sized vampire. 

The Fly by Mizmaru Kawahara

Tonebox & Lucy in Disguise - Against the Odds

Magdalena Bay - Paint Me a Picture // Human Happens

Nosferatu

This latest Nosferatu is clearly the work of, in writer-director Robert Eggers, someone re-examining a piece that wields a massive, totemic power in their imagination. Although a basic beat-for-beat structure remains in place from FW Murnau's silent shocker, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (and, of course Bram Stoker's Dracula, the novel it plagarised), the specific detailing or connective tissue are being reconfigured to please the current custodian. There's a fluency on display here, a piece stewarded by someone who has very clearly turned these ideas and images over in their mind until they have become innately enormous and striking. Like Peter Jackson's embellishment of King Kong, Nosferatu's emotional volume is cranked way up in this telling, attempting to simulate the pulverising electrical currents that were sent through Eggers when he was himself a young, receptive viewer. The clearest indication of this specific kind of scrutiny is that although each of the film's characters remain functionally identical, their level of agency - or how they express the power that is innate to them - is completely different. 

Lily Rose-Depp follows Greta Schröder as Ellen Hutter but, unlike her big screen ancestor, Rose-Depp's Ellen isn't a model of Victorian propriety. She argues back, standing up to men who would have her be seen but not heard. She's in command of her sexuality too, able to make demands of her husband, Nicholas Hoult's Thomas Hutter, that surprise and even startle him. Unlike the lovemaking experienced by her dearest friend Anna, played by Emma Corrin, this sex is premised specifically on pleasure rather than dutiful procreation. Comparatively, the 1922 version of the Ellen character was positioned as being antithetical to Max Schreck's wretched, lustful Count: a virginal and uncomplicated woman that is so pure that when Orlok dares to drink her blood he lingers far too long in his feasting, allowing daybreak to touch his flesh then wipe him away, leaving a smoking mess on the rug. In this way 1922's Ellen facilitated an outcome but had very little to do otherwise but fret for her imperiled husband. In Eggers' revision Ellen is something of a psychic, an ability stoked in her by an unusually lonely early life. 

Where Schröder's Ellen suggested a stable, motherly sort of affection (and therefore the basis for a loving family), Rose-Depp's version is intertwined with her ghoul, their union rooted in some strange supernatural connection established years before she met her husband, presumably during her childhood. Bill Skarsgård's Count Orlok is something of a lingering or even vengeful ex then, Eggers rearranging the pieces of Dracula so that the vampire's forlorn affections have purchase within this story beyond the idea that there is an immortal cad who labours under the belief that the wife he knew in his human life has been resurrected then returned to him. Although not as creeping as Max Schreck's verminous, almost pitiful Orlok, neither is Skarsgård's take as resplendently romantic as the Dracula that Gary Oldman played in Francis Ford Coppola's sumptuous adaptation. This Count is decayed and wheezing; his manner obnoxious and impatient. In conversation he wields the demeaning impertinence of those who have lived far beyond any tolerance for self-restraint. Although we are never given opportunity to forget that this mouldering, freshly exhumed hussar is an incredibly old body being animated far beyond its limits, this undying state does not speak to Orlok's power of rejuvenation but to a reluctance within Ellen to let this creature completely fade away. It is the rotten Orlok who is under Ellen's spell then. 

Dedisart - COMPLEX

Kamen Rider Black by Shinji Chibana

Hayley Williams - True Believer

Steely Dan - Dirty Work

One Battle After Another

Over the course of a hurried two hours and forty minutes, One Battle After Another, from writer-director-producer Paul Thomas Anderson, interrogates ideas of infatuation and how, in the long-term, these fizzier or even irrational feelings pale in comparison to the enduring, undefeatable love experienced by a parent who demands to be present in their child's life. We experience both of these clashing wavelengths through Pat Calhoun, a washed-up anti-fascist activist played by Leonardo DiCaprio who, latterly, goes by the name of Bob Ferguson. In his younger years Pat was the explosives guy for an insurrectionist movement who tasked themselves with liberating shivering families from the ICE detention centres dotted around California. Although clearly willing to place himself in incredibly dangerous situations as a way of expressing his personal ideals, Pat's stake in the French 75 revolutionary group does seem to hinge on the participation of Teyana Taylor's Perfidia, a short-lived but beguiling presence in One Battle whose influence extends far beyond her screentime. 

Compared to the rest of her French 75 allies, who all dabble with concealment and disguise, Perfidia is brasher, preferring to operate openly and even outlandishly. While teammates pick at masks, covering their mouths and lower faces, Perfidia delights in revealing herself, demanding to be noted, even admired. She's a whirlwind, whipping up everything she touches and behaving like the centrepiece in a Hype Williams music video. We are shown that her violent, unapologetic approach to activism is intertwined with her sexuality; she practically begs Bob to fuck her when a bomb they have just planted is seconds away from detonating. While Bob is keen to organise their pairing into the stability of a relationship, and everything that comes with that, Perfidia is playing away. Finding herself locked into a dom-sub dynamic with a prissy jack-booter, played by Sean Penn, who she previously attempted to victimise while on an assignment. Turns out that Penn's Colonel Lockjaw gets off on being dominated, specifically, by a black woman and Perfidia is at least somewhat agreeable to serving that kink if it keeps her out of jail, using violent abashment to physically put this authoritarian in his place.

With a child now in the picture - whose onscreen conception can either be attributed to Bob and Perfidia tearing at each other's clothes in a getaway car while a pylon implodes or Perfidia inserting a firearm into Lockjaw's rectum - this new mother retreats from domesticity, sinking into a particularly destructive kind of postpartum depression. While Perfidia pursues an agenda based on a ruthless self-interest, betraying her comrades in the process, Bob flees across the country with their child, settling into paranoid rhythms embellished by substance abuse. Their daughter though flourishes under the tutelage of Benicio del Toro's hilariously calm karate master-cum-community leader, sensei Sergio. Lockjaw, seemingly issued with a blank cheque to rough up and intimidate high-schoolers in a particularly sunken America, is (eventually) hot on their trail, filled with tearful aspirations to impress a ghoulish cabal of white supremacists. To his credit DiCaprio, one of the few remaining film stars able to get non-franchise projects bankrolled based purely on his interest (a trick the actor looks set to repeat in the near future with Michael Mann's Heat sequel), is happy throughout One Battle to take a backseat to his many co-stars. 

Although it's Bob at the forefront of the film's absurdist ad campaign, his character is more of a subordinate presence to both Perfidia and later their daughter, Chase Infiniti's Willa. Bob, armed with a dressing gown and a pair of absolutely gigantic sunglasses, must fight through the depressive fog he has generated in the decade and a half since the mother of his child absconded. Quite unable to focus, Bob is buoyed by sympathetic parties, like Sergio, who guide him step-by-step through these events. Although clearly past his prime, Bob's former life does still inspire respect, with Willa's big cat fixated sensei even referring to him, in conversation with the skate crew about to guide him across burning roofs, as a 'Gringo Zapata'. Throughout the film's many, intersecting predator-and-prey chases then - Anderson thoroughly delivering on the promise of that infamous anecdote about him dropping out of NYU because his screenwriting lecturer denigrated anyone who would aspire to repeat Terminator 2: Judgment Day - Bob is stuck trailing far behind his targets. The beleaguered father never quite arriving on-time to rescue his loved ones, often only able to offer a fleeting distraction or sobbing commiseration. What's important though is that, like Wile E Coyote before him, Bob really does work his hardest to keep up with those who repeatedly exceed his grasp. 

Jackson 5 - Ready or Not (Here I Come)

The Jesus and Mary Chain - Head On

Planet of the Apes by Tony Stella

Magdalena Bay - Second Sleep

Nemesis

If nothing else, director Albert Pyun's Nemesis perfectly simulates the experience of watching bubble-era anime, the type of self-contained shocker sold on video cassettes, after they've been chopped-up and dubbed with an English language track that just so happens to be packed with swear words. No-one seems to be speaking with their own voice; unusual accents and strange cadences are ascribed to recognisable supporting players like Brion James, who otherwise do very little to arrest attention. Plotting is similarly threadbare, Rebecca Charles' screenplay a convoluted back-and-forth between interchangeable factions of treacherous cyborgs as they muddle towards some objective or other. Olivier Gruner, a kickboxing silver medallist and a former Commados Marine in the French Navy, brings a steely detachment to his Alex Rain, a mostly human bounty hunter who jets around the world under the auspices of an unusually hegemonic LAPD. 

Gruner gets to wear his hair at a variety of lengths in Nemesis, from a messianic bob when imprisoned in a seafarer's stockade to a tousled corporate cut when he's on the job. The best of these snips being a close crop that Rain pairs with rounded sunglasses, prickling memories of RanXerox from Heavy Metal, while cooking on a stakeout in Baja. Incomprehensible in repose, Pyun's film bolts upright whenever a firearm is in play. Seemingly every shot in Nemesis' shoot-outs, no matter how fleeting the coverage, has the featured actor holding their finger down like their lives depended on it. Dilapidated buildings, where most of the film's action takes place, are completely shredded by this incessant gunfire. Pyun finding a frequency somewhere between the comedic excess of a Merrie Melodies cartoon and the histrionics of Hong Kong's heroic bloodshed movies. Henchmen load up on the kind of weaponry found adorning a Boeing Superfortress then march forwards, through walls, firing as they go. A cornered Rain is similarly struck by the malleability of surroundings, using his MP5K and a bottomless cache of ammo to blast several successive floors of his flophouse hideout to splinters. 

Alien by Manabu Yashiro

Tame Impala - Dracula

Electronic Visions - Tree Talk

Hard Eight

Like many of the films that the writer-director has made since, Paul Thomas Anderson's debut feature, Hard Eight, is built around human connections that are dramatically premised, at least in part, on clashing emotional or intellectual bandwidths. Anderson using the easily understood language of mentor-mentee relationships here to pick away at his characters, slowly revealing the private motivations that they otherwise keep hidden from each other. John C. Reilly plays John Finnegan, a penniless and presumably homeless gambler, first seen wrapped up in layers of polo shirts and flimsy jackets, spinning yarns about wanting to raise enough money to pay for his mother's funeral. He is approached and treated to cigarettes and a warm cup of coffee by Philip Baker Hall's Sydney, a supernaturally relaxed old timer who takes pity on John, teaching him how to manipulate casino staff into believing you are spending much more money with them than you actually are in order to leverage freebies like comped drinks or an overnight hotel stay. 

We then pick up the story years later with Finnegan firmly ensconced in Sydney's rootless racket, living comfortably and attempting to build a connection with Clementine, a flaky cocktail waitress played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Although cold, hard facts are revealed by the film's conclusion, throughout much of Hard Eight the audience is left to wonder about Sydney's motivations regarding this hopeless pair. Both John and Clementine initially suspect their benefactor of harbouring some sexual desire for them, these speculations clearly informed by grim experience, but Sydney dismisses John's harsh invective and Clementine's frozen, nails-in-thigh shock. An aside about Sydney having a daughter and son somewhere, who he clearly is no longer on speaking terms with, seems to be a more accurate insight into this man's intentions and why he spends a significant amount of time orchestrating, for an infantilised, impulsive protégé, situations and outcomes that do not particularly benefit the older man. Quite the contrary, in fact. On release, back in the mid '90s, the obvious disparities in not just presentation but intelligence between John and Sydney likely raised a few irony poisoned chuckles but, with the benefit of Anderson's wider catalogue now in play, this writer-director's inquiries into these mismatched relationships read as sincere, even tragic. 

The Killer by Michael DeForge

HulkHodn - Now

The Naked Gun

At eighty five minutes, with credits, director Akiva Schaffer's belated addition to The Naked Gun series absolutely breezes by. Liam Neeson squeezes in amongst rapid-fire gags as Frank Drebin Jr, the weepy, equally accident-prone son of Leslie Nielsen's sadly departed Police Squad cop. Neeson, an actor largely known for arthritic action films, is a physically gruffer presence than the oblivious, even childlike Nielsen. Neeson bringing a different sort of energy to this piece then, a slower much more agitated kind of torpor. While Nielsen's Drebin was a straight man tumbling through farcical situations, Neeson's take is closer to a tweak on the sinkhole attention deployed in heavily delayed action movie sequels. He's the ageing but invincible pensioner who is still able to muddle through all sorts of sticky situations. If anything this absurdist take is a lot more honest about the flagrant sort of wish-fulfilment taking place in a movement of films where rickety elder bodies are able to physically crush and pulverise far younger, better maintained physiques. Aside from a spot of thermal voyeurism and some wonderful mime incredulity from Neeson, when asked to consider a glass of fizzing water, much of what lingers about this Naked Gun belongs to Pamela Anderson. The actress not only nailing the tone of her bumbling femme fatale but providing an otherwise flat and photographically unremarkable film with a face that cinematographer Brandon Trost can really pore over. 

Robert Palmer - You Are in My System (12" Mix)

Endless Withdrawal - A Garden Grows Between Us

Revolution+1

Revolution+1, from writer-director Masao Adachi (co-written with Junichi Inoue), takes an appropriately raw approach when recounting the motivations behind the assassination of former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe. Soran Tamoto stars as Tatsuya Kawakami, a fictionalised, feedback-haunted version of real-life suspect Tatsuya Yamagami, a middle-aged loner brimming with grievance. You see, Kawakami's father committed suicide and left a successful construction business to his wife and young family, the former of which squandered this nest egg on donations to the Unification Church, a South Korean religious movement that, Kawakami repeatedly reminds us, demands its Japanese adherents live in poverty. This ascetic lifestyle intended as punishment and reparation for the atrocities committed by their home country during the Second World War. In Adachi's film - the director a veteran of experimental documentary filmmaking, softcore pornography, and a former member of the Japanese Red Army based out of Lebanon - Tatsuya Kawakami is presented as an unloved middle child, desperate but apparently unable to make a real, emotional connection with an indifferent mother, played by Satoko Iwasaki. 

Kawakami's mother, who is viewed entirely from the lead subject's aggrieved and icy perspective, is an equally cold even robotic woman, entirely focused on creating a life lived in gruelling penance. This self-mortification extends beyond herself, thwarting Tetsuya's academic aspirations and denying his older, deeply unhappy brother the lymphoma treatment he so desperately needed. As the film begins winding down, with Kawakami readying himself to blast Abe with a homemade shotgun that (disappointingly) this file-shared film does very little to explain the practicalities of, the soon-to-be assassin rents a pleasant car with the last of his life savings and drives to meet his mother. Although it isn't immediately revealed as such, Kawakami imagines a brief interlude in which he is able to approach and even impress his mother with this shiny new purchase. In Tatsuya's fantasies the two enjoy a rapport, his remaining parent eager to dispense with her mindless manual labour and spend the rest of the afternoon with her child. No sooner are things looking up for Kawakami than we are rudely ejected back to reality: Tatsuya sat in his car ignored and alone; watching his frail mother toil from an abashed distance. Adachi's film ruling then that for all of Kawakami's talk of Japanese nationalism or the hypocrisy of highly visible state actors who drum up business for parasitic churches, perhaps what this gunman really (dearly) hoped for was an ability to stake some claim on his mother's attention.

Prince - I Feel for You

Phases - Sunday Loop

Honda by Kosuke Miyagi

nalim. x elevenparis - Track08 [Salem Tape]

CoryaYo - Being

Captain America - Albert Pyun's Director's Cut

If nothing else, this posthumously released Director's Cut of Albert Pyun's famously disappointing, straight-to-video Captain America demonstrates that a conceptual boldness, when assembling lower budget material, can paper over many of the more obvious cracks in the overall piece. This isn't the first release of Pyun's film to present itself as the director's preferred edit though. During the 2010s Pyun himself sold DVDs and Blu-Rays through his website of an 'Unreleased Director's Edition' that took the theatrical (or, maybe more accurately, rental tape) cut and embellished it with dupe-level reproductions of one or two of the elided sequences seen here. This newly released assembly though - recently unearthed by his wife Cynthia Curnan and the Yippee Ki-Yay Mother Video label - was scanned directly from a celluloid print that Pyun owned but did not have the facilities to review and represents a massive reorganisation of the material that the director was able to get away with before the film's financial backers stepped in and locked him out of the production. 

When compiling their preferred version of the film, producer Menahem Golan's 21st Century Film Corporation opted for a literal, chronological procession of filmed events, beginning their release with scenes set during the Second World War before the viewer and Steve Rogers are catapulted into the modern day for some clipped, low-cost soul-searching. Pyun's approach is wildly different in both tone and execution, deliberately withholding the comparatively expensive, period-bound setpieces that detail the origin of Scott Paulin's Italian Red Skull or the rocket-bound adventures of Matt Salinger's Captain America. These moments, bold as they are, are hampered by the kind of obvious corner cutting deployed when struggling to impart scale in cash strapped productions. Massive environments that are intended to read as frightening or impressive are instead airy and poorly dressed; performances are hampered by a harried flatness or some other, unconvincing tonal note born of expedience. Plainly, when viewed in their video tape entirety, there just isn't enough of the kind of impressive, propulsive coverage required to cleanly navigate scenes designed (and failing) to be exciting. Pyun's Director's Cut solution is to break these moments up into arresting blips of information that are then deployed throughout a much more somber, downbeat film. 

We explore the simmering interior landscapes of the film's principle characters as they pick apart the lives that have trapped them in their current predicaments. Both Salinger's Steve Rogers and Paulin's Red Skull are fixated upon ideas of childhood or an innocence that they have subsequently lost. A heartbroken Rogers maintains an upbeat, gee-whizz facade but fails to reconnect with his former allies and worries incessantly about how he has contributed to the fallen world he now inhabits. This Red Skull, rather than the fanatical adherent of Adolf Hitler seen in the comics of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, is explicitly a kidnapped child. One who was mutated into a violent criminal to work in service of a power hungry, fascist state (in the modern era he counts American generals amongst his clients). Skull yearns to return to a parlour room within his childhood home, to play an uninterrupted arpeggio for his murdered family. Similarly, the rearranged sequences that turn over in the minds of super-soldiers are, fittingly, built with the storytelling language of serial cinema. Binary morals and motivation - not to mention super-powered rockets - are able to, momentarily, intrude upon a particularly downbeat interpretation of a 1980s struggling to free itself from an insidious and all-encompassing take on the military-industrial complex. Previously, viewers were asked to endure several minutes spent in a glaringly lit concrete bunker, complete with gleaming swastika, as resource poor filmmaking visibly strained to wring out something, anything, entertaining. Now we experience the same alarming iconography as the haunting, eidetic memory of an unnaturally strong man who believes himself to be a complete failure. 

Mai Yamane - (You and Me Still Keep On) Fall in Love

Gouki by Matías Bergara

Yuzo Koshiro - A Theme for All About Micom Basic Magazine III

nalim. - 97[EL]

Save the Green Planet!

Informed by a life filled with misery and brutal hardship, Shin Ha-kyun's Lee Byeong-gu has come to the inescapable conclusion that the Earth simply must have been covertly colonised by alien beings from the Andromeda Galaxy. So, how does Byeong-gu - an unhinged, one-man resistance - go about battling back against the oppressive forces orchestrating human tragedy? Kidnapping and torture, naturally. Writer-director Jang Joon-hwan's Save the Green Planet! begins with Byeong-gu stalking his latest victim, a stingy pharmaceutical executive who, Byeong-gu believes, is an extraterrestrial capable of contacting his planet's poised invasion forces. Whether or not these fanciful deductions have any actual purchase within the piece Byeong-gu has, unmistakable, hit on something regarding the ways in which sadistic aspects of the establishment - specifically those who crave and cultivate power - treat those they deem to be inferior. Towards the end of Jang's film this idea is repeatedly underlined by a series of disconnected montages that vividly detail the kind of cruel impassivity that informs these revelations. 

First, there's a secret history of planet Earth as told by Baek Yoon-sik's shaved and scorched executive that either reveals the meddling hand of Andromedan invaders or, in the style of The Usual Suspects, confidently draws from the dogeared, conspiracy flavoured ephemera scattered about Byeong-gu's sunken, sweaty lair. Here mankind is described as a rolling mistake, incapable of overcoming their innate thirst for self-destructive violence. We see a vision of the biblical Adam, this hirsute hominid tethered via an umbilical cord to one of Stanley Kubrick's monoliths, and the creation of Eve via some genetic splicing. This Adam's instant reaction to the helpless, naked woman presented to him is to attack her with a cudgel then rape her. A second, less esoteric compilation flicks through the defining events of Byeong-gu's life: seeing his father's arm blasted away from his trunk in a mining accident; the ridicule and beatings he endured, from teachers, for his diminished station in life; and the violent death, at the hands of policemen, of a young woman he was fixated upon. In all of these moments the stunted and childlike Byeong-gu was an impotent observer, able only to endure what was happening to and around him. Although their subject matter varies wildly, both sequences hum with the same depressing note: a great many people are destined to suffer terribly in their lives, for no other reason than it provides amusement for those who hold authority over them. 

mej. - Cherished

Seb Gardner - Autumn Skies

Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century

Daffy Duck (Mel Blanc) stars in director Chuck Jones' Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, a delightful vision of the far future in which shaving cream has become a scarce resource and every skewed surface is plugged into the grid, replete with curling wires that hum with incredible electrical energies. In Duck Dodgers all technology is both farcically convenient and fantastically violent. The benefits of the Atomic Age scaled up in such a way as to express a ubiquitous but explosive sense of expedience. So, rather than detonate at the slightest launchpad inconvenience, the rockets in this time are completely invincible. Able to be started in reverse and burrow deep into the ground, without harm, before their gears are correctly aligned to blast off towards uncharted star systems. The Dodgers persona, modelled after the derring-do of serial heroes and (much) later the subject of a short-lived television series, is perfect for a Daffy Duck who has, by 1953, evolved from a screwball foil for dopey hunters into an absurdist leading man. There's enough of a task in place to demand that Daffy continuously try his luck, battling the scuttling Martian competing for ownership of the barren Planet X, but not so much that you feel like any real importance has been attached to the assignment that powers this self-important lunatic. 

Clipse - By the Grace of God (feat. Pharrell Williams)

The Transformers by メカニカルボッツ

The Go-Go's - Vacation

Smuv - Stranded

Lupin the IIIrd: Zenigata and the Two Lupins

A streaming-only prelude to a forthcoming feature (and itself structured like two episodes of a television series roughly glued together), director Takeshi Koike's Lupin the IIIrd: Zenigata and the Two Lupins sees the gentleman thief framed for a terror attack on a seventies-presenting glimpse of the Soviet Union. Naturally, this detonation occurs on the eve of peace talks with this story's United States analogue. Given the expressive, inky property and the presence of an elasticity specialist like Redline (not to mention several wonderfully springy shorts screened during concerts for the boy band SMAP) director Koike, you'd be forgiven for expecting this net animation to explode into a riot of clashing colours and improbable physical dexterity. In the main though, Zenigata and the Two Lupins is, like its snowed-in setting, a chilly affair; far more excited about replicating the halting rhythms of pre-Glasnost espionage thrillers than cartoonish derring-do. There are a few dangling insinuations about secret islands where the rich and powerful are able to retreat from public life to indulge themselves - seemingly as much a reference to 1978's Lupin movie The Mystery of Mamo as it is the real-life practices of untouchable elites - but, largely, Zenigata and the Two Lupins focuses on stuffy police procedure and playacting politicians. This is not to say that Koike's piece completely fails to acknowledge the more lively, caddish aspects of Monkey Punch's original manga. The scarred double who sullies Lupin's good name is allowed to luxuriate in the kind of violent, sex-pest behaviour that was ironed-out of the character when the series made the jump from early issues of Weekly Manga Action to much more heroic adventures on the big and small screen.