Tuesday, 16 February 2016
Sunday, 14 February 2016
Tuesday, 9 February 2016
Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - First Blood
Sylvester Stallone has a great look in First Blood. His body is pallid and wiry, teetering on the edge of malnourished. As an outline, it's worlds away from the inflated, oiled musculature of the later instalments. Stallone's physique isn't the draw here, instead it's a tool, a coiled visual signifier in a despondent film about being chewed up then spat out by an uncaring world. Complimenting the star's brutally svelte form is a long, unkempt hairstyle that acts as a frame for his face. The mop sits like a pair of drooping Basset Hound ears, drawing out Stallone's massive, brown eyes. In Rocky III, Stallone shot his own face to suggest sternness, a massive patriarchal figure struggling to make sense of his messy extended family.
For First Blood, Ted Kotcheff and cinematographer Andrew Laszlo use Stallone's eyes as a way to communicate a frazzled, bestial, calculation. John Rambo is always cautious, constantly running angles and assessing his predicament. Undermined by a brace of sequels that revelled in increasingly bloody violence, First Blood distinguishes itself by focusing on a character that is reluctant to do any real damage to his opposition. The Police and National Guard that chase Rambo up into the hills aren't engaged as an equal threat. Instead he stalks them, bleeding and undermining, demonstrating a withering assessment of their position in the pecking order. Rambo's violence is a calculated attempt to assert a terrifying level of dominance - he doesn't intend to kill his pursuers, he'd rather scare them off. Rambo just wants to be left alone.
Monday, 8 February 2016
Super Bowl Spot - Jason Bourne
Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon to the rescue! Rather than let Jeremy Renner tank the franchise, the Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum team are back, driving SWAT trucks through brightly coloured gridlock. Based on this short clip Greengrass is still very much in love with chaotic, hand-held reportage. The arrangement does look a little less seizure inducing though - we're asked to drink in Damon as a twisting, mechanical lump here rather than just glimpsing shredded encounters between countless darkly coloured limbs.
Super Bowl Spot - Independence Day: Resurgence
Enormous alien superstructures lancing cities while weightless, metropolitan debris fills the sky? While prepping Independence Day: Resurgence, Roland Emmerich and his CG teams were clearly hard at work, studying the destruction of Lithone sequence that opens the magnificent The Transformers: The Movie.
Super Bowl Spot - Captain America: Civil War
Captain America: Civil War's superhero piley-on is a strange direction for Marvel's best sub-franchise. Captain America: The Winter Soldier turned heads by focusing on 80s action norms like car crashes and bone-crunching interpersonal violence. Civil War bucks that trend, threatening more weightless, CG tomfoolery.
Sunday, 7 February 2016
13 Hours
Herr Bay dials it down. Instead of his usual coke and catwalks take on American exceptionalism, we get a refreshingly chaotic Fox News reconstruction that proposes the Benghazi siege as a critical moment in the Jocks vs Nerds debate. This is Bay seizing his moment, daring to dream of post-American Sniper box office (Oscar?) glory whilst simultaneously raking away at that security contractor itch that hounded his Transformers franchise. 13 Hours is basically Cemetery Wind: The Movie. A Mozambique drilling, brass-checking, thump of new machinery that dies alone on its arse every time someone tries to string a reflective sentence together.
As ever, Bay struggles with human perspectives. The operators are portrayed as malfunctioning kill-bots that occasionally buzz out the kind of human experience an alien might gleam from an infomercial. Conversely, the CIA are nebbish ditherers incapable of making any decision more forthright than passive observation. David Costabile's Chief is positioned as the kind of hysterical white collar dork Bay insists prop up the flabby mid-sections of his Bad Boys films. He's here solely to frustrate commitment. Contrast that arrangement with a silent, mechanical opposing force that rises out of a literal zombie land before attacking in increasingly hectic wave formations and it's clear where Bay's ire is directed - inaction is the only true opposition.
Saturday, 6 February 2016
Tuesday, 2 February 2016
Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - Rocky III
Writer-director-actor Sylvester Stallone takes a different tact with the third Rocky outing, arriving at a film that's as much about the numbing effects of money and fame as it is boxing. After several successful defences of the title he won from Apollo Creed, Rocky discovers that his manager has been secretly arranging squash matches to dodge challenges from genuine competition. The deception has a profound effect on Balboa, undermining his achievements and leaving him with an acute case of imposter syndrome.
Conflict rooted in ego drives Rocky III. Just as the title character has to overcome a paralysing lack of self-esteem, every other player is in search of personal validation that can only be conferred by locking horns with Balboa. Inveterate scumbag Paulie wants to be whisked up and given a job despite his unending negativity; Apollo Creed would rather set aside months building Rocky into a fluid fighting prospect than spend time with his own family. Mr T's elemental Clubber Lang has the most to overcome. He needs to conquer this evasive champion to get where he needs to be.
It's not like Lang doesn't put the work in either. While Rocky burns money transforming his training regime into an embarrassing expo event, Lang knuckles down, exercising alone in an environment that resembles the crawl space beneath a murderer's house. Shouldn't we be rooting for this loner? Is Rocky's gauche Scarface lifestyle supposed to be aspirational? Rocky III flips the underdog narrative on its head, asking us to cheer for an established and explicitly unearned status quo. Lang is too violent, too temperamental, too black to be the hero. Despite the two boxers sharing the exact same motivation - the paralysing fear of being poor in Reagan's America - it is assumed that the audience instinctively believes that one of these fighters is worthy to hold the title while the other is not.
Monday, 1 February 2016
Tuesday, 26 January 2016
Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - Escape to Victory
Sylvester Stallone ticks a box in Escape to Victory. A proven box-office draw, his presence guarantees a certain amount of interest from the otherwise cool-on-football American market. Like Steve McQueen before him, the star also lifts his allied internment film out of the staid, and faintly comedic, situations of The Wooden Horse into a realm of bombast seen in something like The Great Escape. Regardless of whether or not the idea rings true historically, British prisoner of war films tend to revolve around bait-and-switches that have more in common with knockabout boarding school capers than a life and death struggle.
Accordingly, Stallone's interloping brings a sense of desperation to Victory. While everyone else concerns themselves with training for the upcoming, all-consuming, football game, Sly's character Hatch takes time to run angles on the guards, looking for a chance to slip out of the camp. Stallone's is an outsider perspective, to the point of mostly existing within his own sectioned-off, VIP story. While Michael Caine and Max Von Sydow wrap themselves up in romantic notions like sportsmanship and post-war European brotherhood, Stallone has leveraged himself a subplot that takes him to Paris and gets him romancing Carole Laure's resistance contact. Since Director John Huston and screenwriters Evan Jones and Yabo Yablonsky are more interested in the big game as an opportunity for escape rather than an event unto itself, Stallone's contractually mandated holiday does a lot of the dramatic lifting.
RetroAhoy: Doom
After a bit of radio silence Stuart Brown is back with an absolutely fantastic 50 minute documentary focused entirely around everybody's favourite murder simulator, Doom.
Tuesday, 19 January 2016
Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - Nighthawks
Sylvester Stallone kicks off the 1980s with Nighthawks, a slack and improbable potboiler that reaches for William Friedkin style verisimilitude but instead ends up a Neanderthal example of the star's scowling bruise 'em ups. Stallone and buddy Billy Dee Williams play a pair of insufferable New York cops drafted onto a terrorist extermination squad seemingly because everybody else on the force hates their guts. The duo spend weeks being screamed at by a self-impressed British spook while Rutger Hauer's eurotrash assassin prowls around the city, murdering women and planning a series of topical explosions.
Ghost-directed - at least in part - by Stallone, Nighthawks offers long, rambling, takes that land like conceited acting exercises. There's none of that marching powder pep the director would later bring to Rocky IV on display in either the framing or the editing. Nighthawks works best as a document, the pivotal moment that Stallone stopped trying to establish himself as the next Pacino and embraced his more violent, guttural, instincts. The immediate benefits of this transformative thinking are apparent within Nighthawks. Hamstrung by a meandering screenplay, Stallone eventually finds he is better able to hold his audience's attention with close-up grimaces or macho declarations rather than by pretending to be a real human being.
Tuesday, 29 December 2015
Films 2015
5. Straight Outta Compton
Like basically every other rock biopic, Straight Outta Compton is about packaging a series of disparate, contradictory events into a feel-good through line. Presumably the thinking with these things is to renew enough interest to sell some more best-of compilations. Shepherded to the screen by Dr Dre and Ice Cube in full control freak mode, F Gary Gray's film ditches any of the misogyny or outright underhandedness inherent to NWA's story to arrive at a heart-warming yarn about a bunch of friends knuckling down and doing well.
4. Star Wars: The Force Awakens
JJ Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt's rejuvenation of the Star Wars brand not only locates several distinct, likeable, characters, it also finds time to snatch ideas from the Prequel run then transform them into engaging narrative grist for an expanding saga. It's tempting to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens as Lawrence Kasdan's moment, the Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars sequels writer finally getting to steer one of the great movie brat franchises without Steven Spielberg or George Lucas breathing down his neck. The structural bones may be familiar but the relationships and agendas Kasdan and his co-writers plant promise a saga built around traumatised, disaffected youth.
3. Ex Machina
Ex Machina completes a loose trilogy from writer-director Alex Garland about the effects of othering and automation on the human psyche. Never Let Me Go (adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro's novel) proposed an underclass of clones bred for the express purpose of organ harvest; Dredd offered up a ruling class of men and women trained to act like robots. Ex Machina circles similar neuroses, lasering in on a new life-form that is able to take the limitations men have imposed upon it and transform them into a formidable arsenal.
2. Bitter Lake
Adam Curtis waded through thousands of hours worth of raw news footage to assemble a piece that presents history as a chaotic beast that refuses to fit any one narrative perspective. Bitter Lake plays as an antithesis to the kind of glib, bullet point reporting designed to fill its audience full of certainty. The film clocks in at 136 minutes and digresses incessantly. Curtis uses growling, sunspot electronica and shapeless video footage to arrive at a street-level impression of how various hot and cold interventions have shaped Afghanistan post-World War II.
1. Mad Max: Fury Road
How does this film even exist?
Original Review
Also Liked:
Whiplash / Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation / Chappie / Tomorrowland / John Wick / Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief / Spectre / Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films / Inside Out
Like basically every other rock biopic, Straight Outta Compton is about packaging a series of disparate, contradictory events into a feel-good through line. Presumably the thinking with these things is to renew enough interest to sell some more best-of compilations. Shepherded to the screen by Dr Dre and Ice Cube in full control freak mode, F Gary Gray's film ditches any of the misogyny or outright underhandedness inherent to NWA's story to arrive at a heart-warming yarn about a bunch of friends knuckling down and doing well.
4. Star Wars: The Force Awakens
JJ Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt's rejuvenation of the Star Wars brand not only locates several distinct, likeable, characters, it also finds time to snatch ideas from the Prequel run then transform them into engaging narrative grist for an expanding saga. It's tempting to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens as Lawrence Kasdan's moment, the Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars sequels writer finally getting to steer one of the great movie brat franchises without Steven Spielberg or George Lucas breathing down his neck. The structural bones may be familiar but the relationships and agendas Kasdan and his co-writers plant promise a saga built around traumatised, disaffected youth.
3. Ex Machina
Ex Machina completes a loose trilogy from writer-director Alex Garland about the effects of othering and automation on the human psyche. Never Let Me Go (adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro's novel) proposed an underclass of clones bred for the express purpose of organ harvest; Dredd offered up a ruling class of men and women trained to act like robots. Ex Machina circles similar neuroses, lasering in on a new life-form that is able to take the limitations men have imposed upon it and transform them into a formidable arsenal.
2. Bitter Lake
Adam Curtis waded through thousands of hours worth of raw news footage to assemble a piece that presents history as a chaotic beast that refuses to fit any one narrative perspective. Bitter Lake plays as an antithesis to the kind of glib, bullet point reporting designed to fill its audience full of certainty. The film clocks in at 136 minutes and digresses incessantly. Curtis uses growling, sunspot electronica and shapeless video footage to arrive at a street-level impression of how various hot and cold interventions have shaped Afghanistan post-World War II.
1. Mad Max: Fury Road
How does this film even exist?
Original Review
Also Liked:
Whiplash / Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation / Chappie / Tomorrowland / John Wick / Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief / Spectre / Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films / Inside Out
Monday, 28 December 2015
Video Games 2015
5. Grow Home
A genuinely stressful experience in which you pilot a shambolic robot as it climbs up a star-scraping beanstalk. Initial prods can cause your droid to stumble off wildly, a model of movement that seems entirely unsuited to a slow, methodical climbing game. Once you finally manage to figure out the finickity controls though, Grow Home comes into its own, mutating from a frustrating Octodad into a tense, physically draining approximation of ascension.
4. Everybody's Gone to the Rapture
Slowly nose around an abandoned, provincial village, activating a series of sparkly, etheral conversations that drip-feed information about the total destruction of mankind as a physical entity. Find enough of these Radio 4 style chit-chats and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture allows you to trigger a cosmos altering crescendo. The Chinese Room's game mixes The Archers with John Wyndham to arrive at a deliberately paced snoop 'em up that faithfully simulates the onion-layered bullshittery at the core of British social interaction.
3. Fallout 4
Potter around an irradiated Boston getting into scrapes. Fallout 4 proposes a storyline about a parent desperately seeking their kidnapped child but this is more of a regulated series of diversions than a narrative backbone. Instead Bethesda's game is at its best when you go completely off-piste, excavating haunted slate mines or dressing up as a radio serial vigilante at the behest of a neurotic zombie.
2. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Hideo Kojima's final game for Konami isn't just the all-time greatest open world adventure game, it also gifts the player a truly wonderful action figure in the form of Venom Snake. Despite some fussiness bumping up against objects and their physical barriers, everything about driving this iteration of Snake is such fun that it takes an eternity for you to recognise the ceaseless repetition that powers this sequel. Whether creeping into Soviet forts or radioing-in precision artillery strikes, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is one-hundred hours worth of opportunities to feel unbridled, interactive joy.
1. Bloodborne
Bloodborne reminds me of Resident Evil or Devil May Cry. It's a game that plonks you in a corrupted version of something recognisable (architecturally speaking) then, when you've found your feet, it forces you further and further towards the source of this malignant transformation.
FromSoftware's genius lies in how this exploration unfolds. Progress is explicitly tied to raising various RPG stats but the environments and enemies are such fantastic actors you hardly notice. Since the player is always pushing deeper and deeper into some hallucinatory, transgressive horror, every step taken feels like trespassing. All visual and aural data demands you turn around and flee. You simply shouldn't be here. You proceed against all reason. How's that for a psychological model for adventure?
Also Liked:
Downwell / Axiom Verge / Xeodrifter / Tearaway Unfolded / Curses 'N Chaos / Arcade Archives: Mat Mania Exciting Hour / Under Night In-Birth / Ultra Street Fighter IV (PS4) / Call of Duty: Black Ops III (multiplayer) / Fallout Shelter / DmC Devil May Cry: Definitive Edition / Resident Evil HD Remaster / Transformers: Devastation / Devil May Cry 4 Special Edition
A genuinely stressful experience in which you pilot a shambolic robot as it climbs up a star-scraping beanstalk. Initial prods can cause your droid to stumble off wildly, a model of movement that seems entirely unsuited to a slow, methodical climbing game. Once you finally manage to figure out the finickity controls though, Grow Home comes into its own, mutating from a frustrating Octodad into a tense, physically draining approximation of ascension.
4. Everybody's Gone to the Rapture
Slowly nose around an abandoned, provincial village, activating a series of sparkly, etheral conversations that drip-feed information about the total destruction of mankind as a physical entity. Find enough of these Radio 4 style chit-chats and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture allows you to trigger a cosmos altering crescendo. The Chinese Room's game mixes The Archers with John Wyndham to arrive at a deliberately paced snoop 'em up that faithfully simulates the onion-layered bullshittery at the core of British social interaction.
3. Fallout 4
Potter around an irradiated Boston getting into scrapes. Fallout 4 proposes a storyline about a parent desperately seeking their kidnapped child but this is more of a regulated series of diversions than a narrative backbone. Instead Bethesda's game is at its best when you go completely off-piste, excavating haunted slate mines or dressing up as a radio serial vigilante at the behest of a neurotic zombie.
2. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Hideo Kojima's final game for Konami isn't just the all-time greatest open world adventure game, it also gifts the player a truly wonderful action figure in the form of Venom Snake. Despite some fussiness bumping up against objects and their physical barriers, everything about driving this iteration of Snake is such fun that it takes an eternity for you to recognise the ceaseless repetition that powers this sequel. Whether creeping into Soviet forts or radioing-in precision artillery strikes, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is one-hundred hours worth of opportunities to feel unbridled, interactive joy.
1. Bloodborne
Bloodborne reminds me of Resident Evil or Devil May Cry. It's a game that plonks you in a corrupted version of something recognisable (architecturally speaking) then, when you've found your feet, it forces you further and further towards the source of this malignant transformation.
FromSoftware's genius lies in how this exploration unfolds. Progress is explicitly tied to raising various RPG stats but the environments and enemies are such fantastic actors you hardly notice. Since the player is always pushing deeper and deeper into some hallucinatory, transgressive horror, every step taken feels like trespassing. All visual and aural data demands you turn around and flee. You simply shouldn't be here. You proceed against all reason. How's that for a psychological model for adventure?
Also Liked:
Downwell / Axiom Verge / Xeodrifter / Tearaway Unfolded / Curses 'N Chaos / Arcade Archives: Mat Mania Exciting Hour / Under Night In-Birth / Ultra Street Fighter IV (PS4) / Call of Duty: Black Ops III (multiplayer) / Fallout Shelter / DmC Devil May Cry: Definitive Edition / Resident Evil HD Remaster / Transformers: Devastation / Devil May Cry 4 Special Edition
Sunday, 27 December 2015
Music 2015
5. Lazerhawk - Escape from Germany
Produced for a John Carpenter tribute tape, Lazerhawk crosses the master's burnt-out St Louis beats with Sylvester Levay's fizzy TV music. Charles Bronson's robot brain is telling the attack helicopter to fire hellfire missiles at the muggers.
4. Tame Impala - 'Cause I'm a Man
Slowly sink into a pool of luxurious R&B while some guy who wishes he was Prince sings about being a massive bellend.
3. Blur - Ong Ong
Football terrace knees-up - smiling, laughing, singing, arm in arm with some cunt you've never met before. I have no interest in soccer.
2. Rihanna X Kanye West X Paul McCartney - FourFive Seconds (WoodysProduce Remix)
WoodysProduce slathers sweeping Casio noise all over Rihanna's deliberately spare, acoustic single. Get in there lad. Fuck it up.
1. Gabrielle Aplin - Sweet Nothing
Played this over and over and over trying to work out why I loved it so much. You've gotta do that. You've got to be ruthless with yourself. Everything you like is shite anyway. Finally, I dredged up a feeling of Anna Karina plucked out of Pierrot le Fou to front the Foo Fighters. Not cool, fuzzy 1995 Foo Fighters either, we're talking 1999, Learn to Fly, dadrock era Dave Grohl and pals. Magic.
Also Liked
Le Matos - Like Perfume on a Pig / Taylor Swift - Style / TV on the Radio - Trouble / Thomas Happ - The Dream / Shamir - On The Regular / Blur - Lonesome Street / Radiohead - Spectre
Produced for a John Carpenter tribute tape, Lazerhawk crosses the master's burnt-out St Louis beats with Sylvester Levay's fizzy TV music. Charles Bronson's robot brain is telling the attack helicopter to fire hellfire missiles at the muggers.
4. Tame Impala - 'Cause I'm a Man
Slowly sink into a pool of luxurious R&B while some guy who wishes he was Prince sings about being a massive bellend.
3. Blur - Ong Ong
Football terrace knees-up - smiling, laughing, singing, arm in arm with some cunt you've never met before. I have no interest in soccer.
2. Rihanna X Kanye West X Paul McCartney - FourFive Seconds (WoodysProduce Remix)
WoodysProduce slathers sweeping Casio noise all over Rihanna's deliberately spare, acoustic single. Get in there lad. Fuck it up.
1. Gabrielle Aplin - Sweet Nothing
Played this over and over and over trying to work out why I loved it so much. You've gotta do that. You've got to be ruthless with yourself. Everything you like is shite anyway. Finally, I dredged up a feeling of Anna Karina plucked out of Pierrot le Fou to front the Foo Fighters. Not cool, fuzzy 1995 Foo Fighters either, we're talking 1999, Learn to Fly, dadrock era Dave Grohl and pals. Magic.
Also Liked
Le Matos - Like Perfume on a Pig / Taylor Swift - Style / TV on the Radio - Trouble / Thomas Happ - The Dream / Shamir - On The Regular / Blur - Lonesome Street / Radiohead - Spectre
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