King Kong

A deathless, special effects extravaganza that lulls its audience into a false sense of security by packing its first forty minutes with repetition, directionless exposition and a photography model that renders every environment, no matter how exciting, flat and false. Robert Armstrong plays Carl Denham, a fast-talking movie director who anticipates the post-modernism movement by talking directly to his viewers about the film they are about to watch. Denham sings like a canary, describing how his animal feature will likely have to crowbar in a romantic angle to allow for better box office (a genuine concern for King Kong's producer-directors Merian C Cooper and Ernest B Schoedsack in 1933) as well as detailed conceptual readings of the titular ape and his tragic arc. 

Once Denham and his crew of expendable bodies have settled on the uncharted Skull Island, the film transforms completely, scaling up to the level of the monarch monster. Human figures are insects here, vulnerable entities scurrying around beautifully appointed, bracken environments. They shrink into the corners of the frame, overwhelmed by Willis O'Brien's enormous stop-motion projections frothing and grappling above them. Action in King Kong is savage and pitiless; hardy sailors are chased through swamps by ancient herbivores before being chewed up or trampled underfoot. Kong himself is violent but curious, an ever-moving muscle constantly under attack. All challengers are vanquished on Skull Island, Kong ruling as an armature God whose presence is so mighty that he has stunted the humans who share his space into an awed, but fearful, compliance. 

Juspion 3D: Transformation of Daileon / Mad Gallant - Definitive Preview by Rafael Segnini

Rafael Segnini's gorgeous Juspion 3D: Transformation of Daileon / Mad Gallant - Definitive Preview does for classic tokusatsu series Space Wolf Juspion what Rogue One: A Star Wars Story did for George Lucas' original space opera trilogy, namely a meticulous, elegantly arranged, digital recreation of analogue special effects photography. 

Le Caire - Vanilla

Redman by Dyemooch

Saint Pepsi - Myself When I'm Real

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn describes peril as a constant force acting upon its characters; a manufactured propulsion unencumbered by physics or the genuine danger of having to actually perform these ludicrous stunts. Jamie Bell's motion-captured reporter is allowed precious little inactivity in Secret of the Unicorn, the film's expansive, computer-generated stages allowing for long, unbroken takes of hair-raising motion. Even basic camera set-ups take full advantage of the absence of cumbersome photographical equipment, often beginning at impossible vantage points before pressing deep into their image, arriving at an always in-focus face, chattering away.

Purely in terms of the character's likeness, this Tintin isn't the greatest looking interpretation of Hergé's creation. The Belgian cartoonists simple but expressive brushwork is nixed to push at a plastic action figure that seems designed to cater to the emerging strengths of digital performance recording. Instead of a faithful render we have a mannequin, trapped between Georges Prosper Remi's figure and the data culled from Bell's time in a mocap suit. Takashi Yamazaki's recent Lupin III: the First, although positively arthritic by comparison, did a much better job of transcribing Monkey Punch's linework into solid shapes, then transposing them onto beautifully rigged CG environments.

As convincing as his production was, Yamazaki does not possess anything like Spielberg's flair for action, The Secret of the Unicorn gifting the American director a digital chemistry set that allows him to explore his more cartoonish instincts. Weightless, swirling camerawork is immediately provided a lenient context by the film's baked-in unreality. 3D animation then proving the ideal venue for the elastication that marred the latter half of Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Here the possibilities seem both endless and, crucially, natural, motivated by storytelling solutions rather than a simple desire to show off. Why wouldn't desert mirages become incredible sea battles to Andy Serkis' sobering Captain Haddock? The sozzled sea captain broadcasts visions of enormous warships falling on, then colliding with, each other. Masts ensnare, transforming the battling vessels into an impromptu pendulum ride for opposing armies of swashbuckling pirates. A cartoon dreaming in cartoon.

Rosentwig - Wallflower

Thor by Tom Scioli

Happy Diving - Sad Planet

The Doorman

A surprisingly tame - despite the presence of a homemade nail bomb - action thriller from Versus director Ryuhei Kitamura. The Doorman is a cheap, tension free rehash of Die Hard that fails to locate either the harried action or chromed beauty of John McTiernan's film. It's an extremely tall order, obviously, but it's Kitamura who repeatedly invites the comparison, even staging our hero's first kill in a half-completed room filled with plastic sheeting. Ruby Rose plays Ali, a shell-shocked former bodyguard who gets mixed up in an extremely slow-moving art heist. Despite a bloviating Jean Reno as the brains of the criminal outfit, Doorman numbs its audience by repeatedly eschewing pounding hyper-violence to return to a sitting room talking-heads that fails to muster any genuine threat.

Ali is a slasher killer in search of a much grimmer home video rating. The polythene wall fight briefly positions her as a phantom, invisible until she intrudes into the frame, harassing her beleaguered prey. The script harps on about secret doors and snaking passages but Kitamura's film proves largely unwilling to stage the kind of ambush kills that could really milk this conceit. The aggressive, coked-out energy the director brought to the best of his Japanese work proves largely absent here, tamed even. Like Die Hard, Doorman's best moment arrives when our hero is at a low ebb. An exhausted Ali zones out, returning to a moment in which she failed, spectacularly, to protect a child. A burning car barrels towards her, the movement built out of a repeating, tightened coverage that registers as impossible rather than impoverished. Ali's bloody face is held in almost religious awe, apparently willing the tumbling machine to collide with her and end the suffering.

Zane Alexander - Air

snaer. - youuu

20181205 by Shinku Kim

Ultra Q: The Movie - Legend of the Stars

Akio Jissoji's Ultra Q: The Movie - Legend of the Stars is a dirge, an unhurried examination of the ways in which mankind makes itself incompatible with the utopian ideals of 1960s science fiction and the harmonious futures they foretold. The film adopts the perspective of a disconnected observer, Mio Takaki's Wadatuzin, very much the beautiful, heavenly princess seen in umpteen tokusatsu productions. This archetype, typically depicted as the peaceful emissary of an intergalactic co-op, is a frustrated figure in Legend of the Stars. Instead of a brief, mostly positive, experience with humanity (usually massaged with a romance with some guileless young stud), this alien woman is embittered, having perhaps hundreds of years of experience with a people that have repeatedly betrayed rather than exalted her.

Wadatuzin's connection is contextualised in the film by allusions to folklore, stories like Princess Kaguya or The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter and a less family friendly episode in which a visitor from the sky is aggressively duped. That celestial woman's means of transportation, her cloak, is stolen and hidden by an elderly couple. The adventurer is then trapped on Earth, reduced to making alcoholic elixirs until the toothless thieves decide to kill her. These in-text tales, in which the mundane brushes up against something wonderful then attempts to take possession of it, informs the shape of Jissoji and screenwriter Mamoru Sasaki's film. Legend of the Stars is beautiful but glacial then, much more interested in establishing the accusatory mood of the forest waiting to be levelled than the pace of an action-packed blockbuster. Legend of the Stars is far dreamier, a film told like a mass hallucination that draws on fairy tales and special effects television to damn mankind. In Legend of the Stars it is our greed that holds us back. Our society has curdled. Designed, not to ascend, but to mass produce the beach clogging beer cans that swirl in Wadatuzin's wake.

Haim - The Steps

Blondie - Once I Had A Love (AKA The Disco Song)

The Thing by Tom Scioli

lojii - Lo & Behold (feat. Swarvy)

You Cannot Kill David Arquette

For many fans, David Arquette's brief, but notable, intrusion into World Championship Wrestling represents the lowest point for the long-dead company, the moment a promotion that had set trends cashed-in their self-respect to hang their Heavyweight Championship belt off Courteney Cox's (then) better half. Hunched and weaselly, Arquette was a world away from the supplemented monsters that thrived in WCW. His run with the title, such as it was, popped the bubble - the illusory battles of pro wrestling, and the storytelling that surrounds them, very obviously falling afoul of a cynical attempt to sell a film, in this instance 2000's buddy comedy Ready to Rumble. The move did Arquette no favours either, trapping the star between two incompatible strata of showbiz.

David Darg and Price James' You Cannot Kill David Arquette is an apology tour then, a pseudo-documentary told with the same precious, insider myth-making as the sport Arquette was seen to muscle in on. We are told Arquette's acting career has stalled; directed to take note of how degraded and age-worn his body and mental faculties have become. This underdog wants another shot though, to put some much delayed respect on his name by grappling anywhere that will have him. When Arquette is outlining this plan we see him mixing with WCW luminaries like Eric Bischoff, the former company president assaying his former co-conspirator with a mix of fatherly concern and unconcealed alarm.

You Cannot Kill presents a fiction in which the genuinely likeable Arquette goes out of his way to demonstrate respect for wrestling as a performing art, transforming his body from stout to trim by, in part, repeatedly falling on rock hard Mexican mats. Despite this intimate access, the reality of what is unfolding is strictly guarded. So, when blood starts gushing from Arquette's neck during a Death Match with glass tube aficionado Nick Gage, we are never asked to consider the bout as a predetermined dance that has ran afoul but as a fight that has gotten completely out of control. Although, at this stage, the mockumentary concept was likely too ingrained to adjust the tale at a mechanical level, it feels like a missed opportunity to not get a full, detailed, debrief of Arquette's thought process when, after hopping out of the ring to take stock of his pissing injury, he climbed back into the squared circle to finish his match with Gage. To his credit then, even with blood seeping from his throat, Arquette sought to protect the business.

Gorillaz - The Pink Phantom ft. Elton John & 6LACK