In the Lost Lands

Adapted from a very short George RR Martin story, director Paul WS Anderson's In the Lost Lands is a slight piece concerning comeuppance that find itself distended and swollen thanks to the action-packed demands of the medium it is being transposed into. Milla Jovovich's wasteland witch Gray Alys, of course, knows far more than she lets on about the expected outcomes of the magical rites this fallen future's royalty have her perform, but her wry perspective is never allowed to feed back into the finished film. Anderson and his co-screenwriter Constantin Werner jealously guard any debriefs, saving them all up for a conclusion that twists in ways that would be pleasant enough following forty-five minutes of television but end up being too little too late when playing at feature length. Very much a digital backlot film, In the Lost Lands is often handsome but desperately static. Establishing shots are packed with beatific, computer-generated rubble and straining light sources that recall similar apocalypses from video games, Zack Snyder pick-ups or even bubble-era anime but, whenever the film is in (slow) motion, Lost Lands very much fails to match the sublime notes of that latter, elasticated inspiration. Given that this is yet another Anderson and Jovovich team-up, it's hard not to let your mind wander when watching, wondering if the pair intend for this film to function as an unofficial cap on their Resident Evil entries, a series that has long since been handed off to other filmmakers. The evidence is flimsy - Jovovich plays another superhumanly capable woman named Alice who battles against awful men who have allowed greed to so completely sink into them that it has physically mutated their bodies - but it beats giving Lost Lands your full, undivided attention. 

Rosentwig - Neurobloom

Spawn by Max Pinelli

Nas - Made You Look

Endless Withdrawal - Pyre

Replicant

Jean-Claude Van Damme, already no stranger to inhabiting dual roles within his films, gets to play two extremely different takes on the same man in director Ringo Lam's Replicant. Firstly, as a greasy haired serial killer who beats young mothers to death with twirling kicks, before setting them and their homes on fire. Secondly, as a freshly hatched clone of this murderer, cooked up by the American government and suffering through intense flashbacks of outrages that this photostat man did not commit. Michael Rooker is on-hand as the cop investigating these slayings, forgoing his nautical retirement plans to babysit the childlike version of Van Damme. Despite this copy never having harmed anyone (well, a few irritating G-men aside), Rooker's Detective Riley largely treats the film's second Van Damme horribly: handcuffing him to any stray pipes; pushing and prodding this simple-minded man to stand before bulletin boards teeming with charred bodies; and even battering away at him with the flimsiest of provocation. Although their connection does (eventually) skew in an unconvincingly paternal direction, Riley's first instinct is to seize on this opportunity to bully and browbeat a reduced reproduction of his quarry. That the fully-realised Van Damme character, known as The Torch, seems to be choosing victims based on their willingness to be brusque with their children in public seems to mean something but the faulty parenthood framing is a stray note rather than a full-on symphony. Since this is a Van Damme film, entire sequences revolve around his boyish, Airwalk wearing clone winning the heart of a working girl by prematurely ejaculating in his sweats then beating up her pimp. And, since this is also a Ringo Lam film, we are treated to an all-time demolition derby, featuring Rooker and the evil Van Damme squabbling over a seat belt in an out-of-control ambulance that strikes every single stationary car and light fixture in a multi-story car park. 

Smerz - You Got Time and I Got Money

King by BirdHatter

Alfredo Bontempi - City Ruins (Avaron)

Voyage - Mosaic

Chasing Amy

Remembered as the film in which Ben Affleck is so irresistible that he turns a lesbian straight (and hailing from a time period in which distributor Harvey Weinstein was behaving like a rabid animal in hotels all over the world), Chasing Amy is probably best understood now as writer-director Kevin Smith trying to make sense of why a beautiful woman with much more life experience than him might then find his comparative naivety appealing. Joey Lauren Adams is the subject both in front and behind the camera: the actress luminous onscreen as Alyssa and, presumably, at least a little bit bewildered offscreen as the real-life girlfriend who had prompted Smith to so fully excavate his personal inadequacies. Of course, a handsome actor on the verge of superstardom being cast as Smith's avatar likely took a little of the sting out of this public splaying. If nothing else Affleck, who incidentally sounds uncannily like Smith when the pair share audio commentary tracks, is able to wring an endearing lovesickness out of his writer-director's overwritten dialogue. Affleck's performance here flatters Smith and the writer-director knows it. 

Similarly, in terms of aspirational tweaking, it's difficult not to wonder now if the framing of Alyssa as being much more fluid in her affections than the popular memory suggests is actually a misguided attempt at chivalry? If the character had instead only slept with a great many men, would Smith then be expecting his viewers (particularly a mainstream American audience back in 1997) to value her perspective even less? To side with the jealous and venomously bigoted Banky, as played by Jason Lee? Perhaps such a move might even generate disquiet for Adams the actress, since Smith was never shy about sharing his film's autobiographical underpinning? Gayness in this specific context, and this is discussed within the piece itself, is exciting rather than intimidating for Holden, Alyssa's prospective partner. He, foolheartedly, believes that his maleness confers on him some heteronormative advantage that the world's women lack. Sexuality then, especially in terms of promiscuity, is a recurring hang-up in Smith's work. An earlier embodiment of the writer-director, Brian O'Halloran's Dante Hicks from Clerks, blanched at the idea that his current girlfriend had been intimate with dozens of men before he entered the picture. Chasing Amy then reworks this comical overreaction, perhaps attempting to reassure Smith's now growing audience that, actually and under very specific circumstances, it doesn't matter to him if a potential life partner has slept with more people than he has. 

Low Roar - I'll Keep Coming

Doom Slayer by Komispeed

Erika de Casier - Lifetime

M83 - Echoes

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot

Two-thirds of the way through writer-director Kevin Smith's self-stimulated Jay and Silent Bob Reboot the stagnant pair catch up with Ben Affleck's Holden and Joey Lauren Adams' Alyssa from Chasing Amy, the former lovers now co-parenting (along with Alyssa's wife) a child played by Jason Mewes' real life daughter. As expected, Holden looks older. His once buoyant hair has been trimmed short and his goatee is gone. He talks about his failed relationships, specifically an inability to make any lasting romantic connections. Also mentioned is the pain he's suffered in making himself the sole focus of his life and how that level of expectation has crushed him. Then Holden talks about fatherhood: the reassurance that comes with the certainty that somebody really and truly does love him. Smith's dense, motormouth dialogue - genuinely insurmountable for many of his actors - spills out of Affleck with a drilled ease. This extremely brief (but touching) interlude aside, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is an agonising, two-hour pummelling that is premised entirely on the implied goodwill that the filmmakers believe they inherit from a thirty-year deluge of Quick Stop material. As incurious as ever behind the camera, Smith boldly places himself out in front of house for several different roles. His performance as himself, a role lousy with cringing asides about how useless he is as a director, is irritating enough but his Silent Bob, classically portrayed as the taciturn alternative to his jackrabbit partner, has mouldered into an intolerable mime act with Smith's grimacing face twisted up into a series of painful-looking gurns. 

Grant. - 2piece4dilla

Megatron by Missocpus

Earfluvv - Conji

Urusei Yatsura - Plastic Ashtray

Mallrats - Extended Cut

Perhaps test audiences aren't always the unthinking, dim-witted blob they're made out to be? At least in terms of writer-director Kevin Smith's original submission of Mallrats, the terminal impatience of these viewers, who have very likely been tricked into submitting feedback for a movie they don't necessarily even want to see, did yield workable results. In its longer form Smith's second feature opens with Jeremy London's tongue twisted TS accidentally firing a prop musket at New Jersey's sozzled governor, an event that sounds hilarious when you're reading about it on a fan site in the early 2000s but, in practice, has all the vim and vigour of a similar interlude in a latter-day Police Academy sequel. Hazard a listen to this film's cast-and-crew commentary and you'll hear Smith relay the note that his film is dead in the water until TS and Jason Lee's delightfully abrasive Brodie make it to their prized galleria and, a few glimpses of the autumnal American suburbs aside, whichever frustrated audience member made that call is exactly right. 

That this shopping centre must be physically traversed is an immediate boon for Smith and cinematographer David Klein, it makes the agonisingly long, static mediums that the director defaults to a little less likely. Smith, who began his career maxing out credit cards to buy black-and-white Kodak stock for Clerks, clearly isn't then inclined to waste precious celluloid with pick-ups, reverse angles or inserts. For this follow-up Smith largely favours a style of coverage and storytelling that lends itself well to interlaced television or, a little more charitably, the panned-and-scanned home video market. There are a few stray notes of John Hughes in evidence, not least the casting of Renée Humphrey as a sexualised Molly Ringwald stand-in or Ben Affleck as a Buzz McCallister who has grown into a buttfucking bully, but Smith isn't interested in rallying against middle-class malaise or indulging the childlike flights of fancy that Hughes delighted in. Mallrats isn't reflective in that sense, it's a film about twentysomethings made by twentysomethings. Received as an affront on its original release, with American critics behaving as if the second coming of Jim Jarmusch had squandered his talents on a listless Animal House knock-off, and poorly served in this cut by an excruciating prologue, all the good sense and carefully considered criticism in the world melt away when confronted by the pure sunshine that is the late Shannen Doherty smiling and battering talk show drums while a Weezer B-side plays. 

Weezer - Susanne

Capcom vs. SNK by Wallace Pires

VIQ - Sublime