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.