Wednesday, 30 August 2017
Friday, 25 August 2017
Blue Steel
Blue Steel gives Kathryn Bigelow and Jamie Lee Curtis the opportunity to deliver a fresh take on the kind of wild card policing popular in the big deal action films of the 1980s. Instead of exploring something typical, like how a well-trained killing machine might fit into day-to-day law enforcement, Bigelow and co-writer Eric Red use gender identity to power their conflict. Curtis plays Megan Turner, a rookie cop surrounded by men who make repeated, verbal objections to her mere existence.
This conflict is an ever-present stress on Turner. At home, Turner's oafish father beats her peacemaker mother whenever his daughter isn't around. When she drops by he swills cheap beer and rants about the shame her career has brought on the family. At work even would-be allies, like Clancy Brown's Detective Nick Mann, make it their business to comment on her attractiveness and spin ribald tales about severed manhoods. Bigelow frames these situations in terms of territorial markers; established men communicating their indifference to Turner's presence, and any attendant (or expected) social niceties, by being deliberately vulgar. There will be no concessions for Turner based on her sex, she is treated as an interloper who must do all the adjusting in this new, hostile environment.
After gunning down Tom Sizemore's wild-eyed armed robber, Turner is unable to locate the criminal's pistol. It's been pocketed by Eugene Hunt, a gibbering commodities trader played by Ron Silver. Hunt becomes obsessed with Turner, he talks about her and her act of violence in terms of revelation. She has, quite accidentally, revealed something mind-blowing to this maniac. He attempts to court her as a civilian, taking her to expensive restaurants and charting impromptu helicopter rides, then emulates her in private by blasting holes through the hapless citizens of New York City. Blue Steel staggers a number of conclusions, each detailing how Turner copes with the bizarre responsibilities that have been thrust upon her.
Hunt looms large come the finale but Turner also finds time and space to resolve the situation at home. After another bruise appears on her mother's arm, Turner beats her father prone then threatens to turn him in. He repents and communicates his failings - he feels weak sometimes. Although she has overpowered her father physically Turner is still able to listen to and understand his flawed emotional needs. Unlike similar scenes in umpteen other, male dominated, action films the act of intervention is soothing and corrective rather than just nakedly assertive. Bigelow and Red are able to breath new life into a stale genre by using their female lead as a perspective (rather than a cheap device) that informs then reconfigures every aspect of their plotting.
Monday, 7 August 2017
UFO 50 - FANCY COMPUTER
Does the idea of laying your hands on dozens of 8-bit video games quicken your pulse? Would you like to simulate the experience of owning a NES Classic beamed in from an alternative dimension where Mario and pals never really took off? Derek Yu, Eirik Suhrke, Jon Perry, Paul Hubans and Ojiro Fumoto have got you covered! UFO 50 is an instant library of flickering, game jammed gems, courtesy of the developers and musicians behind Spelunky, Downwell, The Indie Game Legend and card game Time Barons.
Friday, 4 August 2017
Monday, 31 July 2017
Friday, 21 July 2017
Thursday, 20 July 2017
Martin
George A Romero's pointedly unromantic take on the vampire myth drops any semblance of Eurotrash sophistication to recast the central bloodsucker as a prowling, sweaty home invader. John Amplas' Martin, who's either a directionless youth emblematic of inner-city rot or a hundred year old creature, resists being completely deciphered. His crimes are cowardly and opportunistic, often involving people that have either been kind to him or those who are simply down on their luck. His motives are selfish, hinging on supernatural details that the film (wisely) chooses not to clarify. The rush of full-blooded sexual excitement usually associated with the amorous undead is replaced here by clinical encounters in which Martin dopes and abuses his victims. Romero - who writes, directs and edits - uses an early encounter on a train to establish Martin as both dangerous and repulsive.
After attacking a woman in her carriage room with a syringe full of tranquilizers, he lulls her to sleep with soothing baby talk before staging her suicide, drinking and bathing in the gushing blood. Despite the sudden and alarming violence done to the woman's wrist, it's Martin's strange temperament that linger. Most screen monsters, especially in their moment of victory, might allow delight to creep into their demeanor, to gloat over their prey. Romero and Amplas never permit their creation that kind of power. Martin is always pathetic, pleading even. He isn't strong enough to overwhelm, nor alluring enough to seduce. He sedates and supplicates, a methodology that slowly seeps out into the film itself. Scattered throughout are brief black and white interludes depicting Martin drifting around billowing, Hammer Horror situations. These clips are layered into the film at crucial moments, representing either memories that clash with Martin's current, depressing reality or juvenile justification dreamt up to protect the killer's fragile sense of identity.
Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers Tournament - WNF 2017
A short extract from an Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers tournament that shows off, among other things, how utterly broken the new Violent Ken character is.
Baby Driver
Ansel Elgort's Baby isn't your typical wheelman. He isn't an intense spectral presence waiting to be prodded, he's gangly and animated, an observer, locked into his own headspace by a cocktail of tinnitus, crate-diver playlists and some truly terrifying associates. The titular Baby Driver copes with this stimulation overload by obsessively recording and cataloging his interactions, then retreating to his apartment to transform them into chopped up musical loops.
Baby doesn't allow information to stream in at him, he blocks out as much as he can, pruning and refining whatever penetrates until he has his own product at the end of it - be that the terse half-sentences he uses to communicate or the hundreds of C-90 audio cassettes he consigns to an unwieldy briefcase. It's a small detail in the overall film but Baby's analog audio suite, rescued from flea markets by Edgar Wright's pal Kid Koala, reads like a physical manifestation of the writer-director's magpie process.
Baby Driver is built out of Wright's earworms, the shots and movements that have lodged in his brain and refused to budge. Wright's film chews up and recontextualises the bits and pieces of film history that the director has clung to, be that the freewheeling buzz of The Blues Brothers or the unkillable enemy of The Terminator. Given Wright's big screen fluency, Baby Driver has a lot of material for editors Paul Machliss and Jonathan Amos to cleave through. The duo assemble the film on pronounced, insistent beats, using music and diegetic sound to layer and dictate pace even outside the action. This energetic, often chaotic, approach to film form peaks with a warehouse shoot-out that uses automatic gunfire to transform a geographical mundane sequence into a ferocious series of jolts.
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