Badland Hunters

Dramatically, Badland Hunters never raises above the level of a streaming pilot. Director Heo Myeong-haeng's film presents itself as a sort of orphan project that introduces a few too many characters then doesn't really make a tremendous amount of effort to wring their post-apocalyptic wants dry. Anyway, there's an apartment complex, the only one still standing in a city otherwise reduced to rubble; a mad scientist who runs the building, attracting dilatory survivors with promises of clean water and cushy condominiums; and a standing garrison of reptilian grunts who cannot wait to charge at incoming gunfire. Of course, none of that dressing matters when you have the swaggering brawn of Ma Dong-seok to hand. Indeed the pained attempts at character investment that clog up the film's first hour melt away the instant that Nam, Ma's wasteland butcher, finds his way to this concrete experiment camp and starts hurling haymakers. Previously the best thing in Train to Busan and The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil (not to mention, thoroughly wasted in Marvel's excretable Eternals), Ma is a sensational action proposition: the guy is enormous; a sardonic strong-man able to weave and strike like a heavyweight boxer. Director Heo (whose previous credits include martial arts co-ordinator on Kim Ji-woon's The Good, The Bad, The Weird) cues up several corridors filled with human garbage just begging to be mulched by Nam's fists, pump-action shotgun and the saw-toothed machete that hangs (just out of reach) across his enormous shoulders. Heo isn't a one-trick pony either, tailoring several sprier, but no less exhilarating, action encounters around Ahn Ji-hye's Lee Eun-ho, a knife-happy ex-special forces sergeant with a high rise-sized grudge. 

Hello Meteor - Gravity Yellow

Hibiki Takane by Nobita

MGMT - Nothing to Declare

Weyes Blood - A Given Thing

The Bricklayer

Quite something, in January 2024, to watch a meat and potatoes action film that is premised on the idea that a country, in this instance the United States, could see itself frozen out of the international community for the crime of murdering journalists. Right this second, Uncle Sam's biggest ally in the middle-east is exterminating not just news reporters but their families too; munitions happily handed over by a (notionally) centre-left incumbent soon to be seeking re-election against a bloviating fascist who is promising a dictatorship on day one. As well, rather than condemn Israel, it feels like the entire machinery of the real life western media is geared to finding ways in which they can excuse this abhorrent behaviour. In fairness to Renny Harlin's otherwise workmanlike The Bricklayer, Hanna Weg and Matt Johnson's screenplay dates back to 2011 (2010, if you count the Paul Lindsay book that the script is adapted from) when Harlin first signed on to the project, with the expectation that Gerard Butler would be his lead bruiser. Replacing Butler as the titular brickmason is Aaron Eckhart, an actor who brings a pleasantly paternal sort of energy to his interactions with Nina Dobrev's much younger CIA analyst. Given that in basically any other action thriller of this stripe you could expect some sort of fireworks between the two, it's nice that Eckhart's button man-turned-manual labourer keeps his comments and behaviour strictly instructional. That's it really. Although cinematographer Matti Eerikäinen breaks out the gels, there's nothing in this underwritten wheel-spinner that comes close to touching Harlin's heyday: Bruce Willis and Robert Patrick locking eyes, and trading pistol fire, across Die Hard 2's Annex Skywalk. 

Miles Davis - Blues No. 2

Leona by Hachii

Nirvana - Endless, Nameless (Live)

Silent Night

Really speaking Silent Night, actor Joel Kinnaman's straight-to-streaming action thriller, has two gimmicks. The first is that the film has almost no dialogue. This decision results in a story that is told in either the broadest possible strokes or ways that feel indirect and cumulative rather than momentary or incisive. We watch as a marriage dissolves slowly and with hardly a word spoken between the two parents, both trapped together and grieving a child that was killed in the crossfire of a gang war. Kinnaman's character, Brian - himself struck dumb by a more deliberately aimed bullet - sinks deeper and deeper into the isolated rhythms of vigilantism; one that combines the strongman prowling of Michael Winner's 70s pistol films with the urban estrangement evident in the films made about Los Angeles back in the 1990s. All of this meandering repulsion would likely fall completely flat where it not for Silent Night's second (and more powerful) gimmick: it's directed by John Woo. 

Now, while Woo could hardly be said to be at the top of his game when conducting the film's action - rather than the beatific destruction you might expect, Silent Night is a little more interested in digital knitting solutions that allow carefully arranged shoot-outs to become supernaturally prolonged - the filmmaker is, as ever, unwavering in his earnestness. Silent Night's description of fatherhood isn't one that seeks to right a wrong committed by a parent before their child was taken from them. Brian was neither absent or distracted in his home life, he was present and demonstrative. He loved his son and repeatedly expressed that to the youngster. In some ways, the unabashed emotional sincerity of Silent Night recalls the strange, immigrant interlude in Woo's misbegotten A Better Tomorrow II. Both films are premised on the concept of a decent person who is morally and linguistically alienated and therefore only able to respond to their circumstances through the universal language of American action cinema: screeching cars and smoking firearms. 

Endless Withdrawal - Disintegrate

Reina by Quasimodox

Faye Webster - Lego Ring (feat. Lil Yachty)

Madara - ilikeuglysnares

Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part One

Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part One concludes, after the credits have staggered their way up-screen, with a dedication to George Pérez, the penciller for the 1980s comic book series that this animated feature is based on. The solemnity of the gesture is rather undercut though by the decision to have this particular inscription break up into the same flaking ash that marks the destruction of this film's doomed, two-dimensional heroes. Quite apparently even the briefest of obituaries, for those whose work is being ruthlessly mined, pales in comparison to the sanctity of the cliff-hanger. The dignity usually extended to those who have passed a mere trifle when judged against the maintenance of a mood calculated to pack people back in for Part Two. Other than this worryingly ill-judged addendum, Crisis Part One is everything we've come to expect from these stale, direct-to-video adventures: a neat central concept that is obscured by circuitous writing and a staging so flat and lifeless that no-one can be left in any doubt that the talent that buoyed DC animation through its golden age has long since migrated elsewhere. As if to underline this point, Part One spends a significant amount of its time centred around The Flash's dealings with Amazo, the power-leeching adversary who previously dismantled television's Justice League in 2003's Tabula Rasa two-parter. The strange elegance of an android shaped like an awards statuette, who fought his opponents by physically reproducing their own powers, is replicated here as a busy-looking robot full of accessory chambers who simply holds out his hand, numbing his already static enemies into a state of sleepy repose. 

Radiohead - Fake Plastic Trees (Acoustic Version)

Cammy by Daigo Ikeno

Super Tight Woody - 2K24

Tom Holkenborg - Prologue Antiphony // Scar Tissue

Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire

Zack Snyder's latest, a holiday season blockbuster for Netflix, resuscitates an unsuccessful Star Wars pitch that the writer-director made back when Disney and Lucasfilm were looking for ways to expand their (surprisingly parochial) space saga. Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire does then, at least in conceptual terms, betray a slightly deeper understanding of this disconnected predecessor. The film isn't satisfied to mindlessly wield the used-up aesthetic or revolutionary warfare of George Lucas' space opera, Snyder knows to poke around in the bones of that piece, recognising the debt to Ray Harryhausen's Dynamation monster films or Akira Kurosawa's rain-lashed chanbara. Snyder and his team are obviously fluent in the works that followed in Star Wars' wake too - the fantasy epics; the lead figure tabletop games; the science-fiction comics, like Heavy Metal or 2000 AD, that stripped the religious aspiration out of an American cultural phenomenon, replacing it with human avarice and body-shredding violence. Unfortunately this pop culture fluency is communicated by a film experiencing a severe, structural lurch. 

Although Rebel Moon's first act shows promise, teasing out the familiar tale of impoverished farmers forced to hire warriors to battle the invaders who would drive them to famine, once Sofia Boutella's ex-imperialist Kora starts putting the gang together Snyder's film begins to run aground. Seven Samurai (and to lesser degrees, The Magnificent Seven and Battle Beyond the Stars) built scenes around the emerging camaraderie experienced by a growing gang of misfits. The small connections that their similar backgrounds reveal or their collective responses to attempts at trickery. There was a class dimension too, one that doesn't quite scan here thanks to Kora's backstory. She may live as a farmer now but she wasn't born one; she wasn't raised as one. When interacting with the people she recruits, Kora does so as an equal rather than somebody who is scared and suspicious, who perhaps even considers themselves to be somehow socially inferior. Rebel Moon doesn't just skip over successful or misfiring fellowship though (drawing together a line-up that barely interacts), the film eventually abandons the basic, consumptive stakes outlined when a battleship landed on a wheat field. As the canvas swells to include a star system's worth of planets, seemingly instantaneous space travel (and therefore retaliation), and the genocidal glassing of a pacifist planet, the basic thread of hopelessly outgunned mercenaries repelling a technologically superior force slips away completely. 

It's the Year of the Dragon by Makoto Ono

FRM - Gaussian Goodbye