Cap'n Howdy's (Back)Log: Documentary Recap!

   While it may come as a surprise to readers that the Cap'n spends time watching more than just schlock, more often than you'd expect I'll sit down and watch a documentary. What you may notice is that I don't often write about them, usually because I don't feel like rehashing what they're about. Ultimately, the question is whether there's something new to learn about the subject that you didn't already know (if you knew anything about it in the first place), and I suppose that most of the below succeed in that category to one degree or the other. In this instance, I'm including these mini-reviews to let you know they exist, because I hadn't seen or heard too much about them prior to screening.

Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters - It's hard not to see this movie and draw parallels to The King of Kong, because they are, in essence, about the same thing. Tetris fan Pat Cotri discovers that while there are a number of rankings on various sites, there has never been a tournament to determine a champion for the game, so he organizes one and invites various "masters" from around the world to compete. Looming over the entire event is the question of whether Thor Aackerlund, the legendary wunderkind of the Nintendo World Championships of the 1990s, will return from a self-imposed exile in order to join the tournament.

 Where Ecstasy of Order differs from The King of Kong is that there's no "David vs. Goliath" angle, ala the Billy Mitchell / Steve Wiebe high score battle. These are evenly matched players who accomplished extraordinary feats with the game of Tetris (the NES version, for those curious), including the rumors that Thor not only reached "Max Score" but has more lines than anyone on the "Kill Screen," - the point at which lines begin to fall so fast it's nearly impossible to line them up.

 Rather than deal with human conflict, Ecstasy of Order centers around technique, about the approach to Tetris, and about the many ways players accomplish feats most of us didn't know where possible. It becomes a bit hypnotic, and that's well before the demonstration of the "invisible pieces" version of Tetris appears in the film. I won't reveal who does and doesn't make it to the tournament, let alone who wins, but I appreciated the level of respect among competitors. The title of Tetris Master is no misnomer in this case.


 Rewind This! - A documentary about VHS tapes and the people who love them? Yes indeed, my friends. Designed as a love letter of sorts to a (mostly) defunct staple of home video, Rewind This both covers the history of the videotape, its rise and fall, and the fanatics who go out of their way to collect the obscure and the bizarre releases that will in all likelihood never be released again. As somebody who grew up during the era of home video (and who has more than a few VHS tapes at home), it's nice to see that the love for the format still exists, even though tapes have a worse chance than vinyl of enduring over time. The very things that come up about why VHS is so endearing - the tracking lines, the wear over parts of the film replayed repeatedly - are the very reason that they don't last. Tapes wear out, break, and can sadly be erased at a moment's notice.

 Now that hasn't stopped me from keeping the ones I have (and coveting the one VCR I own that still works) but the truth is that it's harder to maintain this medium. The nostalgia factor and the access to titles that, quite frankly, have and probably will only exist on tape is the driving thrust behind the documentary (not to mention a continuing thread on series like Red Letter Media's "Best of the Worst" or Everything is Terrible), so it was nice to see a celebration like Rewind This!. VHS essentially launched home video, and it was (and, I suppose, is) the longest running format to date. After all, DVD barely made it ten years before Blu-Ray began chipping away, and who knows how long that has before digital or the next innovation takes over? Eventually we may come to a point where the tapes no longer play, and Rewind This! might go from a love letter to an archive of a lost era, but in the meantime, it really got me jazzed to fire up the VCR again...

 41 - I didn't know much about George H.W. Bush - as a President or as a man - when I watched 41 so in that regard this HBO documentary was informative. It's much more focused on Bush as the man rather than as the public servant, and surprisingly doesn't cover much of his time as President (or, for more obvious reasons, his period in the CIA). If you don't know much about him or his family history, it's certainly worth checking out, but don't expect much in the way of political gossiping, ala Clinton's My Life. Other than a very curt mention of how he "doesn't want to talk about" Ross Perot and the 1992 election, Bush is remarkably magnanimous towards most of the people he worked with. You also won't learn too much about what he thinks about George W. Bush, or Jeb for that matter, but there's plenty about the dogs. I don't mean to undersell the documentary as fluff, because it really isn't - you'll learn a lot about Bush's personal history and home life, but there's a limit to the political lessons to be gleaned from the experience.

 Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic - Showtime produced a rather thorough documentary about the life of Richard Pryor, from his earliest stages of comedy right up until his premature retirement due to advanced MS. I must admit to being surprised at how much of Pryor's career I wasn't aware of, in particular the period before he dropped out of comedy to reinvent himself in anonymity out west. There's a great deal more to the "freebasing" incident that led to burns all over Pryor's head and body than one would think based on more cursory career retrospectives, and certainly more about how he lived after MS sidelined him (something even a heart attack couldn't do earlier in his life). I'm not sure that I'd ever seen footage from the failed attempt at Live on the Sunset Strip that preceded the concert film we all know, but it's fascinating to see his awareness that it's just not happening. My only gripe is that among all of the other comedians, celebrities, friends, and lovers interviewed, I don't understand why Dave Chappelle was included if he only appears twice in the documentary, for a total of less than two minutes. Both times he appears the comments are more conjecture than insight, and it seems like a waste of Chappelle to bring him in only to add nothing.


Necessary Evil: Super Villains of DC Universe - My familiarity with the villainy of the DC Universe is mostly limited to Batman, with a smattering of Superman and Green Lantern antagonists thrown in for good measure. Other than knowing the names Manta Ray, Black Adam, Reverse Flash, and Gorilla Grodd, I don't know much of anything about them. I'd like to say this documentary helped, but while a lot of DC antagonists are included, the focus sways heavily on psychoanalytical reasons for villains to exist and how each DC hero's rogues gallery is uniquely suited towards them.

 This is not to say that the documentary, narrated by Christopher Lee, isn't interesting, but if you're looking for more than the most cursory discussion of major villains, you might wish that this could be spun off into a series. Lex Luthor and the Joker get most of the screen time, and that's not actually that much, because at a little over 100 minutes, there's more of a focus into breaking them down into types with the occasional brief overview of characters like Man-Bat or Harley Quinn (again, Batman characters I already knew about).

 I'm not certain who this documentary is for, either, considering that many of the participants - including DC executives, artists, writers, voice actors, and people who on the surface have next to nothing to do with the comics (WWE Superstar CM Punk shows up once specifically to mention Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, and nothing else!) - talk about major characters as though fans have never heard of them. Doomsday's entire first appearance is covered, up to the death of Superman and an explanation of what happens if you kill Doomsday. Perhaps Necessary Evil was designed as a primer for readers of DC's new-ish "52" re-launch. I'm not sure. It's fun to watch, but I must admit that it amounts to little substance by the time it ends.


Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown - There's a lot of substance at hand in this documentary about one of the titans of horror writing. Yes, Stephen King sells more and Clive Barker is more disturbing, but the influence of H.P. Lovecraft permeates every crack and crevice, every darkened hallway of horror to this day. What I wasn't expecting from Fear of the Unknown, what turned out to be the most welcome, was how in depth the coverage of Lovecraft's personal life and how they influenced his writing. The documentary moves in a basically chronological fashion through his life, but takes detours to analyze major stories in depth with a who's who of writers, directors, and historians.

 Among the interviewees are Lovecraft biographer S.T. Joshi, writers Neil Gaiman, Ramsey Campbell, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Peter Straub, and directors John Carpenter, Stuart Gordon, and Guillermo del Toro, all of whom bring a wealth of knowledge about the author and his stories. Carpenter tells the story of how, as a child, he read The Rats in the Walls in a horror anthology and its lasting effect on him. Much to my surprise, the racist tendencies in Lovecraft's writing isn't glossed over and discussion and contextualization of his opinions on immigration appear throughout Fear of the Unknown, often with a more frank and less apologetic tone than might be expected. The analysis of the stories is most welcome and the participants go well beyond rehashing the Elder Gods mythos in bringing insight to Lovecraft's many phases of writing. Also, make sure to watch the extra interviews if you pick up the disc to hear Carpenter discuss In the Mouth of Madness, Gordon explain why his adaptation of Shadow Over Innsmouth is called Dagon, or about del Toro's (currently) aborted attempt to adapt At the Mountains of Madness.


Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony - Well, maybe this should be called "the Extremely Unexpected Pre-teen to College-Aged Male Fans of My Little Pony," because at least at the outset, that's what Bronies seems to be about. This documentary is all over the place, and while I suppose it is enlightening, I'm not sure what audiences are supposed to take away from it, other than adults watch My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

(After doing a little research, it looks like the documentary was originally going to follow John de Lancie at conventions (he appears on the show as the voice of Discord) but when the Kickstarter campaign ended considerably more successful than anticipated, the scope changed. I'm not sure it was for the better.)

 Bronies is a schizophrenic film, one that starts with a montage of teenage guys talking about how weird it is that they like My Little Pony ("it's for little girls") and then later the persistent argument is that it shouldn't be weird but gee, isn't it so weird you guys? It's never a Trekkies level of "freak show" documentary* but I really think that if people didn't continually mention how weird people must think it is even though it's totally not and we should get over being prejudicial about the fact that adults watch cartoons for kids, the message might just sink in for itself. Seriously, all the documentary really needed was the scene where the dad of one Brony who doesn't know how to feel about his son liking the show talking to another dad who embraces his son's fandom. It says more than a dozen talking heads repeating ad nauseum that "there's nothing 'weird' about it" and that bullies should stop picking on Bronies. Yes, we got it. Please can we not keep reminding the audience that it's not weird that people are geeky about things. Most of them - particularly ones who are inclined to watch a documentary about Bronies - are going to move past the "weird" phase quickly.

 That said, the increased scope does mean that while the focus is all over the map, there is more of an international vibe to the film. Bronies follows an Israeli DJ who makes music based on the show, a couple in Germany who make their own figurines, a young man in England with Asperger's who travels to Manchester for his first convention, and stateside, a fan from a small town in North Carolina who is incessantly bullied for proudly displaying his fandom for the show. Hearing what the show means to all of them is worthwhile, and while I don't necessarily think it's "weird" for adults or young adults (we don't really meet adult fans until well into the movie) to like a cartoon, I get that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is probably viewed differently than Invader Zim or SpongeBob Squarepants (shows that started airing when I was well into my twenties).

 Interviews with de Lancie and voice actor Tara Strong are valuable, as well as insight from creator Lauren Faust, but I think Bronies tries too hard to be too many things - a late inclusion that "oh yeah, adult women like My Little Pony: Friendship is magic, too!" seemed, well, odd, as though the focus needed to shift once more well into production. This is a side note, but I could tell it was a Kickstarter funded production when the movie ended with nine minutes to go, and sure enough, eight of those nine minutes were names of people who helped to fund Bronies. I hope they don't mind that I skimmed that part - normally I watch the entire credits of a film out of respect for the people who made it, but even the Cap'n has limits. Still, enlightening, I guess, in that I a) had no idea there was a new My Little Pony show (and I worked in a toy store!) and b) that it had unexpected adult fans. Good on you, Friendship is Magic!

* In truth, nothing is ever as strange as the Trek-themed dentist, and yes, I get that initially My Little Pony cosplay just looks like neon "furries," but I've seen weirder examples of fandom. Like Steampunk. Yeah. Steampunk Comic Book Cosplay. That is a real thing.

Retro Review: The Other Resident Evil Films

 So when I said yesterday that "The Cap'n has a long and storied history with the Resident Evil franchise," I neglected to mention that none of it made the transition from old Blogorium to new Blogorium. Back in the days before twittering, the Cap'n was delivering bite-sized reviews ("fun" sized?) and when the time came to pick and choose what I thought people might want to read in the "official" Blogorium archives, 98% of all things related to Resident Evil didn't make the cut.

 Obviously there are the So You Won't Have To Reviews for the last two films, and I believe that there are brief mentions of Resident Evil in the "Mission Valley Years" retro review. The first film even made it on to my "List of Movies I Regret Seeing." That said, when I went to look back and see if I wrote anything about it, surely enough I did not. So I will now:

 I saw Resident Evil with two friends who, along with others, made up a consortium of movie-going hooligans known to terrorize otherwise sensible adults. They would pay good money to see Jeepers Creepers, 8mm, and Dungeons and Dragons, and we would descent like a pack of MST3k-aping hyenas, callously commenting on everything in the film. Think of us as the dinner theater equivalent of a Mr. Plinkett review and you have some idea why the ushers had to come down and yell at us.

 (Unrelated to Resident Evil, my favorite "Shush!" moment happened during 1998's Godzilla, when I launched into a tirade about how absurd it was that the French of all people would be equipped to wage war on fake American Godzilla. When I was justifiably hushed from a few rows back, I politely turned around and replied "well, you know it's true!")

 Seeing Resident Evil only made sense, because we played the games and the movie looked stupid and at that point in time WE SAW EVERYTHING. WE SAW IDLE HANDS AND AMERICAN PIE 2 AND THE IN CROWD, for crying out loud. There wasn't a movie so unwatchable (Loser) that we couldn't find an excuse to go see. Resident Evil at least had the pretense of kind of being related to something we liked.

 The movie itself, like every film Paul W.S. Anderson has been directly involved in (by that I mean directing in addition to writing) not named "Death Race", was tedious, over-edited, and underwritten. But, and I will never forget this as long as I live, it provided my friend with the opportunity to use the second most inappropriate nickname for female anatomy during the first of Milla Jovovich's full frontal nudity scenes (scenes which ended when the series moved to 3D, by the way). It is, in fact, inappropriate enough that I won't even repeat it here, but I'm sure the guilty party could be cajoled into putting it in the comments. *coughProfessorMurdercough*

 I tried to watch Resident Evil again on DVD with another friend of mine who hadn't seen the films but liked the games, and he fell asleep. I did not, and I feel like he got the better end of the deal in that situation.

 Now here's the funny part: I would imagine you think I hate all of the Resident Evil movies, but the truth is that I kind of like Apocalypse and (to a lesser degree) Extinction. What they have in common is that Paul W.S. Anderson didn't direct them, probably because he was off ruining Alien vs Predator and something else that wasn't Death Race*. He produced them and was involved in writing them, but in the hands of someone not named Paul W.S. Anderson, the first two sequels were kind of dumb, but had a kinetic energy to them, a vague sense of scale (especially in the third film), and action sequences that didn't make me want to fall asleep.

 The following link takes you to a review of Resident Evil: Apocalypse by our own Professor Murder, which features what may be my favorite SPOILER ALERT ever.

 As to Resident Evil: Extinction, a film that I have even less to say about than I thought I did, the Cap'n did manage to dredge this up:

 Resident Evil: Extinction - Here's the best instance of "yeah, like I was going to watch that", so I did it for you. What can I say? It's trying really hard to further the Resident Evil story from the first two movies, while trying to be scary and action packed. Well, it's not really scary. There's not a lot of action. What there is amounts to lots of shots of crowds of zombies, tons of people dying, and Milla Jovovich shooting and slashing anything that moves. RE:E has a decent sequence that reintroduces Jovovich as Alice, both as a cloned experiment and as the real deal, and it seems like the movie might be building to a really cool action sequence in what's left of Las Vegas. Then it abandons pretty much all of that in favor of a REALLY rushed "stalk the monster" sequence which makes up the last 3% of the movie. It's like someone said "we need to get this over with" when the movie's barely 90 minutes long, and it feels like a reel is missing or something. Still, I guess if you liked Resident Evil: Apocalypse, you might want to rent this.

 Also, it the following made it into my Year End Recap for 2007:


Resident Evil: Extinction - I'm on the record not liking Resident Evil. I think Resident Evil: Apocalypse was a dumb antidote to the "trying to be smart" first film. Resident Evil: Extinction has some good ideas that don't really get the attention they should. It doesn't help that the film feels like it's missing a reel near the end.

 And that's about it. I'm actually surprised that I remember the film at all, because it only really comes to me in fits and bursts. The kid named after a store, Mike Epps being eating by zombie crows, Milla Jovovich falling into some kind of trap with zombies, and the introduction of the Alice clones that Afterlife promptly did away with in its prologue. Wesker is in there somewhere, and I think Claire (Ali Larter) but don't hold me to that. I'm not invested enough to go back and be sure. Foggy memories seem to function best as it pertains to Resident Evil films.

 Now you have a better idea of my "long and storied history" with Resident Evil, and perhaps that give some context to why I think the fourth and fifth movies are gigantic turd sandwiches you don't need to see. Ever. 


 * I'm not kidding or being sarcastic about Death Race. I actually think it's the one good movie he's ever made, one that openly embraces its schlocky nature and is actually fun to watch. It is the antithesis of the type of movies Paul W.S. Anderson usually makes.

So You Won't Have To: Resident Evil - Retribution

 
 Cap'n Howdy has a long and storied history with the Resident Evil franchise, and while I'm not proud to say I've seen all five films (three of them theatrically), I have seen all five of the Paul W.S. Anderson VGINM* "adaptations" of the Resident Evil games. Now, until the character of Alice (Milla Jovovich) appears in a Resident Evil game, it's not actually an adaptation of any game so much as cramming in characters, monsters, and locations into a vaguely related story.

 As I mentioned in my Resident Evil: Afterlife review, the series is getting to the point where it's almost impossible to know what's going on if you haven't played the games. Afterlife, in particular, was chock full of unexplained plot elements you could only follow if you had finished Resident Evil 5, even though the movie itself had nothing to do with the story of Resident Evil 5. So while the movies don't bother copying the increasing theatrical nature of the games, "What Script" Anderson just takes things that wouldn't make any sense and using them as significant plot devices, like why returning hero Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory from Resident Evil: Apocalypse) is now a villain working for the eeeeeevil Umbrella Corporation.

 But it doesn't matter, I guess, because people that still come to see Resident Evil movies at this point are either slavish in their devotion to the series or want to see how much stupider the films can get. I can't help the first group, but for the people I know who make a habit of seeing these as an example of "how can they make it worse than the last one?" you can sit Resident Evil: Retribution out. I promise. Allow me to explain.

 Resident Evil: Retribution isn't a movie. Resident Evil: Retribution is a 95 minute trailer for whatever Anderson decides to call Resident Evil 6, since he already used up "Apocalypse," "Extinction," "Afterlife," and "Retribution."

 How is it not a movie, you ask? Well, a movie has a plot, generally speaking one with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Retribution is missing at the very least two of those, and the other bit barely qualifies as "story." Filler, maybe.

 There's no retribution in this "film," by the way, just a lot of recycling of elements from other Resident Evil movies, and the appearance of two characters from the games who hadn't yet been dragged into this mess, Leon Kennedy (Johann Urb) and Barry Burton (Kevin Durand)**.

 Let's take a look at the "beginning" of the "story" of this "film": Retribution opens with the battle between Umbrella and Alice that Afterlife left as a cliffhanger already underway.

 Backwards.

 Yes, as in "played in reverse" and in slow motion in its entirety, until the helicopters approaching the boat Alice, Claire (Ali Larter) and Chris Redfield (Wentworth Miller) were on at the end of the last movie. Then we pull back into a room full of monitors while Alice explains the last four movies to us (I'm not kidding) in order to catch us up to the battle we've already seen, which then plays out (in slow motion) but forwards this time.

 If that wasn't bad enough, after Alice is knocked into the water by a helicopter she causes to crash because we had to see the shotgun that fires quarters one more time, she wakes up in a suburban household with different hair. And she's now married to Carlos (Oded Fehr), but his name is Todd now, and they have a daughter, Becky (Arianna Engineer) who doesn't appear to be deaf but they still communicate with through sign language.

 None of that really matters because this is all a prelude to Paul W.S. Anderson's remake of the opening of Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead. Why? Because the Resident Evil films are in theory based on the Resident Evil games which were, at one point, about zombies. So we need zombies attacking the suburbs, zombies who run fast and break down doors and cause cars to crash and explode in almost exactly the same way that it happens in Dawn of the Dead. Because people liked that, right?

 Almost everything that happens in Resident Evil: Retribution seems to be based on that idea. People liked seeing zombies attack, and they liked the big guy with the hammer / axe from the last movie. They loved the Licker, so that's in there too. And hey, let's bring back Michelle Rodriguez (Rain), Sienna Guillory (Jill Valentine), Oded Fehr (Carlos), Boris Kodjoe (Luther West), Bingbing Le (Ada Wong), Colin Salmon (James "One" Shade) and The Red Queen, played by a different little girl than in the first film although I honestly thought they just made a shitty digital version of the effect from the first film.

 Oh, and Wesker (Shawn Roberts) is back, but this time he's a good guy.

 "But didn't Shade die in the first movie? Don't they show him dying during the exposition scene in Retribution?"

 Hey! I told you that it wasn't necessary to see this movie and you did it anyway?

 Well, then you know that it involves clones - thousands and thousands of clones, and not just clones of Alice - that was the pointless subplot in Extinction and Afterlife. In addition to creating the T Virus, the Umbrella Corporation also runs underground facilities that can replicate Tokyo, Moscow, New York City, and "Suburbia" to run "doomsday scenarios" using clones of virtually every major cast member you remember from previous Resident Evil films.

 With the exception, it would seem, of Ali Larter, Wentworth Miller, or Mike Epps***. They must have been busy that day.

 They developed this facility in an abandoned Russian submarine factory so they could film these scenarios and sell their bioweapons to global superpowers, thus creating the zombie apocalypse that we hear about all the time but rarely see. Seriously, if you think The Walking Dead is short on scale and scope, most Resident Evil movies take place in Umbrella facilities with white light paneled walls. Almost ALL of Retribution takes place in this environment.

 Now, this might just be me, but it seems like a MASSIVE waste of resources to clone thousands of people in gigantic underground facilities just to demonstrate your T Virus turns people into zombies with tentacle mouths, but how else are you going to explain to the producers why you need to film in Moscow, Tokyo, and (maybe) New York City?

 And now we come to the "plot," a term I use loosely because when you "adapt" a video game into a movie, that means you can leave out the "we need to get through this stage and this stage so we can rendezvous with this team and escape before the timer runs down and the facility blows up." Paul W.S. Anderson clearly missed that part of screenwriting 101, so that's literally what Alice and Ada Wong have to do - clear the "New York" and "Suburbia" sections of the Umbrella facility to meet Leon, Barry, Luther, and some other Red Shirts in the Moscow stage.

 That's it. Jill and clones of characters are in hot pursuit but none of them can die until our heroes get to the elevator, and a Licker shows up. Oh, and Ada and Alice have to fight TWO of the huge guys with hammer axes, because that's twice as cool, right?

 Now I'm going to ask some reasonable questions that aren't answered in Resident Evil: Retribution.

 Why is Wesker helping Alice? How did Umbrella attach the brainwashing mechanism to Jill? How did Luther escape from the tunnels in the last film and end up recruited by Ada's team? Why does Alice feel the need to bring along the clone of her nonexistent daughter other than to make part of Retribution also a ripoff of Aliens? Why does the Los Plagas virus now create zombie soldiers wearing Russian Infantry uniforms? Why are those zombie soldiers more interested in shooting people than eating them?

 If evil Michelle Rodriguez clone can punch people hard enough that we get an ESPN Sports Science-style CGI shot of broken bones and that also causes your heart to stop, why is Alice able to get up but Luther is (presumably) killed? If Wesker had the ability to restore Alice's superpowers at the end of the film when she gets to the White House, why didn't he have Ada inject her with it in the underground facility? Wouldn't that make their escape MUCH EASIER? In fact, since Wesker also still has his stupid super powers, why does he even need Alice to be the "ultimate weapon"? He took her powers away in the first place, and apparently decided that she needed them back when he took over as President of the United States? What the fuck is going on in this movie?

 Anyway, so Alice gets her powers back, Jill is returned to normal, and everything we spent the last hour and a half watching is basically undone. They go to the White House where Wesker is preparing for "humanity's final stand." There's an obviously digital camera pull-back that shows monsters preparing to attack Washington D.C., and we cut to black. That's it, movie's over. See you for Resident Evil: The Alamo or something like that.

 Imagine, if you will, that The Two Towers left out everything related to Helm's Deep until the last ten minutes of the film, then cut to the Orcs and Uruk-hai marching to the walls and preparing to attack, and then Peter Jackson stopped the movie right there. No battle, not this time. Sorry guys, it's been 90 minutes and my shift is over. We should totally get together and finish this in like two years. You cool with that?

 Okay, please stop punching me for comparing Resident Evil to The Lord of the Rings and answer the question.

 You aren't? Well, I'm sure you won't remember how you paid twenty bucks to see a 90 minute trailer when the next movie comes out. Why don't you go rent Death Race when you get home? That movie was fun, right? And Event Horizon! You always trot that out when people say "Paul W.S. Anderson never made a good movie in his life!" Now you guys make sure to buy the 3D Blu-Ray next month so you can relive when Alice shot the quarters at that pilots face again!

 So yeah. Maybe this So You Won't Have To review is suddenly causing you to NEED TO SEE THIS MOVIE RIGHT NOW, but I can assure you that it's a waste of your time. What the previous paragraphs don't convey is how tedious, unengaging, and perfunctory the "action" in this "action movie" are. Not only does it not make any sense, but like almost all of Paul W.S. Anderson's films, it can't even be vexing in an entertaining fashion. It's just lifeless and bland, and it makes me long for the terrible yet gonzo charm of Ghost Rider.

 Yeah. Ghost Rider. Get it now? That's why I watched Resident Evil: Retribution.  

 So You Won't Have To.


 * Video Game in Name, Mostly
 ** To be fair, I didn't realize that was who Durand was playing until he pulled out his signature pistol, RIGHT BEFORE HE DIED.
*** Maybe you can't be cloned if you were eaten by zombie crows.

Blogorium Review: Indie Game - The Movie

 Here's a great example of a documentary that takes a subject I wouldn't normally be interested in (the developers of independent games) and making an engrossing film that I thoroughly enjoyed. I guess between The King of Kong and Indie Game: The Movie, maybe I should rethink the whole "why would I want to watch a movie about gaming?"

 I guess there's a built in assumption I have based on knowing how boring it is to watch someone else play video games (or for someone to watch you) that this would somehow translate into a cinematic experience. I know, it's short-sighted and ridiculous, but when I first heard about Indie Game: The Movie, my initial reaction was "eh." Positive reviews kept coming and when the opportunity arose, I said "why not" because I do like to try out movies I wouldn't normally gravitate towards*.

 Not knowing much about the world of independent game developers (to be honest, I haven't really played that many indie games), I came in with no real expectations about what directors Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky would be documenting. Indie Game: The Movie showcases four developers of three games - Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes (Super Meat Boy), Phil Fish (Fez), and Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid, one of the most successful indie games ever.

 Team Meat is closing in on finishing their hotly anticipated game, with Refenes and McMillen working on either coast (Asheville and Santa Cruz) working feverishly to meet Microsoft's X-Box Live Arcade Game Feast promotion. The stress of taking the flash version of the gory, politically incorrect Super Meat Boy - which involves a skinless boy trying to save his bandage-covered girlfriend from and evil fetus in a jar - is wearing on Refenes, who is broke and has no social life to speak of. McMillen, the less socially inclined of the two, is nevertheless feeling the strain on his marriage as they reach the final stretch.

 Phil Lord's Fez, announced at the Independent Games Festival in 2008, is still trapped in a constant state of development four years later, and the anticipation towards his game is turning into open hostility. Lord and his one Polytron employee Renaud Bédard have torn down and rebuilt Fez from the ground three times, but the conceptually fascinating game - a 2D pixellated character discovers the world is actually 3D - requires hand designed textures and its open-ended levels are difficult to explain to the waiting masses. With his former partner threatening a lawsuit, Lord is wracked with anxiety about debuting the long-awaited demo for Fez at the Penny Arcade Expo, but with his booth set up an attendees lining up to play it for the first time, he faces another nightmare: the Fez demo has a number of "game killing" glitches, forcing him to restart the game while players stand aside.

 Blow, who created Braid in a burst of experimentation and included his "deepest flaws and vulnerabilities" in the game, was met with acclaim upon release in 2008, but it came at a cost to the designer. Despite the accolades, Blow felt that reviewers and players of Braid were missing the deeper messages and themes of the game, and in his attempts to defend his intentions, he was treated as someone with thin skin who looked down on his audience, tainting his experience and success.

 There's a small moment when McMillen and Refenes are voice chatting on Super Meat Boy's release day, and Edmund says something to the effect of "do you remember that game Braid?" and Tommy laughs and says "yes." While the overall conversation is about the possibility of beating its sales record, based on the section about the reaction to Braid (including screengrabs of people criticizing Blow), it did make me wonder if Team Meat shared that opinion as well. (Another interviewee jokes that Blow "must have something better than Name Alert" because of his supernatural ability to locate any time he's mentioned online and post a comment.)

 Indie Game: The Movie is less about the development of the games than it is the people who make them and what drives them to devote so much time and energy. There's surprisingly little footage of coding, and other than a section devoted to Lord's in-progress design of Fez's background textures, the film is more about the four developers and their games are in the background (albeit an ever looming background for Team Meat and Polytron). Edmund McMillen's story about one his earlier games, Aether, mirroring how he viewed life as a child and then discovering a drawing his grandmother kept that validates him is touching. Lord, introduced through footage of winning an award for Fez in its conceptual state and through online interviews when he was "hot," is quick to put a human face to the guy being lambasted for not delivering his game fast enough.

 While it shouldn't surprise anyone that people are unfairly maligned online by their "fanbase," it is nice of Pajot and Swirsky to show us what all that piling of feels like to someone trying their hardest to make concept reality, and not blithely ignoring them or leading them on. Fez did come out in April of 2012, by the way - the film was completed before its release.

 So Indie Game: The Movie, like The King of Kong, is successful because the people behind the games are so fascinating. I've never been much of a Donkey Kong player, nor do I have an X-Box, so I can't play Fez or Super Meat Boy from the XBLA, but I will probably look into Braid (it's available on the PSN), and I did try the demo for Warp, one of the games that plays during the closing credits. Indie Game: The Movie was made possible by Kickstarter, and it's a fine example of a independently funded film that gave me insight into a world I might otherwise have overlooked. It comes highly recommended by the Cap'n.



* Okay, so that hasn't been the case lately; I mean, let's look at every review since this summer started. Clearly I need to get back on track with what you wouldn't normally see.

Retro Review: The YAD Archives (Part Two)

 Welcome back to another special edition of the Retro Review. Today we'll continue looking at a heretofore forgotten collection of reviews from defunct online magazine You're All Doomed. Today I thought it might be fun to take a look at a series of reviews by Professor Murder, titled "Hey Dirtbag!" They range far and wide in the spectrum of cinematic quality, but I continue to laugh at his spoiler for Resident Evil: Apocalypse.

 Disclaimer: The only thing I've changed with these reviews is replacing Professor Murder's actual name with his Blogorium moniker. Trust me, his employers wouldn't want this coming up in a Google search.

HEY DIRTBAG! Go see Resident Evil Apocalypse!
by Professor "The Hammer" Murder

I don’t often like movies based on Comic Books so when I heard about Resident Evil 2 you can only imagine my trepidation. But when one of my friends managed to score a rough cut of the movie directly from the studio, I figured, “What the hey! I’ve got some time to kill so I might as well do this as opposed to something else!” I must warn you however, there are spoilers ahead so when you see the word “SPOILER” in all caps like that, skip it if you don’t wanna know what happens. 

The movie opens with a couple of cops or something riding in a car. They’re jibber-jabbering about some company called umbrella, and how stuff is going wrong with it. Then I hear the word Zombie and my ears perk up. So after a very impressive CGI scene involving the car, the guy who’s driving it ends up on this street that appears abandoned. UNTIL ZOMBIES START TRYING TO EAT HIM. So he freaks out, after realizing he does not have many bullets and runs toward a, quite conveniently placed I might add, Ammo store. The clerk tries to shoot him yadda yadda, and then gets turned into a zombie. Luckily, for The Cop, there’s some ammo and a box of health lying around. He kills the fresh zombie and runs to a nearby Police station or HQ for the uninitiated. This is where the Producers kick it up a notch, because my friend told me that if I go to the DVD menu, and press some buttons, The cop would get a whole bunch of new weapons that he wouldn’t normally get till later into the movie. So, wanting the best for the Cop, I did. THEN HE GOT A FLAME THROWER! AND A GATLIN GUN. AND A BAZOOKA! Or maybe it was a rocket launcher, something like that. The movie was pretty great from

SPOILER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

THERE IS A HUGE FREAKING SPIDER IN THE SEWER UNDER THE HQ!

here on out except for one part. Just when the movie hits its cadence as it were, the whole movie starts over with the chick who was riding in the car with the guy cop. Then you have to watch the whole thing over again with a different character. Well, you will if you go see it. I turned it off around there. 

---

Run Ronnie Run

by Professor "The Hammer" Murder

"I recommend it."
-also-
"You can give it some stars or something if you want."

---

HEY DIRTBAG! Go see “Kingpin”
This was from before the Farrelly brothers were known crap perpetrators so I will let it slide as I still really like this movie.
by Professor Muder

Seriously. If you have a girlfriend, go see Kingpin. Even if you do not have a girlfriend, Go See freakin Kingpin because, and I sincerely mean this, it could help you get a girlfriend. Ok. The movie starts out with woody from Cheers in this Bowling Alley. So, there are these girls, they must be around 17 and they’re all giggling and stuff and putting on their bowling shoes and then woody is all “hey what lane am I on?” and the clerk says Lane 32 and He goes “cool”. Now I know this sounds boring, but it is all crucial to the plot line. So then Woody starts bowlin’ and what not and then the guy from those vacation movies who’s not chevy chase shows up with a bottle of Everclear. Well Well Well, thinks the audience, Now this party is getting started! So Woody’s all like “Hey Guy from Vacation! Come compete with me on lane 32, which is right next to these young hotties” which makes the young hotties giggle. SO vacation guy is all, yeah, I’ll come and compete with you but you must remember that I am Amish and mistrust machinery. Woody goes, “yah whatever. Hey. Let’s play this game. I’ll say something to the hotties and then you have to do something to top it.” Vacation guy says “werd.” So they do some stuff and get drunk on everclear and Woody turns out to be a pretty good bowler but at the end he looses his hand in the ball retrieval system and Vacation guy is all “I told you not to trust machinery”

---

Hey Dirtbag!

Did you just rent Van Helsing?

This movie is not so bad… as long as your bullshit goggles are appropriately adjusted. Don’t worry if they aren’t yet… they will be by about five minutes in.  You see It appears that all the universal movie monsters live in the same world and that Van Helsing’s name is not Abraham as “Bram Stoker” would have us believe but rather the far cooler Gabriel. Oh… and then he gets bitten by a werewolf and is really pissed until he realizes the power he can unleash.  Oh yeah also, only werewolves can kill Dræ-kewl. Not to mention the fact that the character who we will for all intents and purposes call ‘Q’ has invented something that can produce light “to the intensity of the sun” but has no idea what to do with it. Idiot. ‘Q’  also gives ‘Gabriel’ a gasoline powered cross bow with which to kill things. Dear Van Helsing, what a great crowsbow you have. The better to kill you with. Fuck the state penn, fuck hos at penn state.

            Kate Beckinsale is always hot. That’s all there is to it. Even when she’s trying to be marginal, she’s still really REALLY hot and she’s not trying to be marginal in this movie. She’s just full on screamin’ hot. I’m up in the MGM coked up PSYCHE! Induce sign language, ordered hot coffee with a Danish. RELAX! whispered “they rap entertainers. I love that pepsi commercial with her. I freakin bought UNDERWORLD because she’s so hot. Plus the movie’s really funny but that’s another story.

            -Professor Murder

Blogorium Review: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

I was pretty mean to the vocal contingent of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World fans. Since they make up almost everybody I've ever heard talk about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, you'll have to excuse me for making the leap that they represent the general consensus about Edgar Wright's big budget adaptation of Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novels. I came down pretty hard on the reviews that quickly elevated the film as "best movie ever" or "groundbreaking," and I went to town on fans who dismissed The Expendables in order to justify Pilgrim's poor audience attendance in theatres.

So we had to come to this point, where the Cap'n is working on his year-end roundup of films, when the time came to say "am I going to watch Scott Pilgrim vs. the World or not?" When it came down to it, and when I took the film over to the Cranpire's, we couldn't come up with a compelling enough reason NOT to watch the movie. Going in, I tried as hard as possible to watch the film on its own merits and mentally divorce myself from its acolytes, which I'm actually pretty good at. I assumed that this review would either be a) the Cap'n gloating in the wake of a movie he hated, or b) the Cap'n eating some serious crow.

What happened instead is that neither is the case. I think that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is wildly misrepresented as something it isn't (exactly), and while I find the film to be technically engaging with some fine supporting performances, my central problem with the film itself is less about being annoyed by how "hip" it is and more about not caring about the lead characters.

Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is a 22 year old layabout dating 17 year old Knives Chau (Ellen Wong) as a means of getting over being dumped by Envy Adams (Brie Larson). Scott is the bassist in a band called the Sex Bob-ombs with Stephen Stills (Mark Webber), Kim Pine (Alison Pill) - another ex-girlfriend - and hanger-around and sometimes back-up bassist Young Neil (Johnny Simmons). He shares a bed with roommate Wallace Wells (Kieran Culkin), who has a habit of stealing boys away from Scott's sister Stacy (Anna Kendrick), and Wallace, Stacy, and Julie Powers (Aubrey Plaza) all disapprove of the ambition-less Pilgrim's under-aged rebound relationship.

Things change when Scott has a dream about Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and then meets her at a party. Despite the fact that none of his usual pick up lines seem to work on the perpetually aloof, impulsive Flowers, he somehow wins her over enough to fall in the bad graces of her League of Seven Evil Exes, headed up by Gideon Graves (Jason Schwartzman). Scott must defeat of each of Ramona's evil exes: Mathew Patel (Satya Bhabha), Lucas Lee (Chris Evans), Todd Ingram (Brandon Routh), Roxy Richter (Mae Whitman), and the Katayanagi twins - Kyle (Keita Saito) and Ken (Shota Saito). In the process, Scott needs to figure out what he wants to do with his life, how to break up with Knives, and if he can survive dating Ramona*.

To describe Scott Pilgrim vs. the World as a "game changer" or "next level shit" actually does the film a great disservice. It's an open invitation for cynics to say "oh yeah?" and sharpen their blades in order to definitively prove its ardent supporters' claims erroneous, but beyond that, the hyperbole robs the film of what it actually is: a very well made synthesis of stylistic and narrative story-telling tricks from a clearly talented young director**. Edgar Wright may not be operating from a wholly unprecedented playbook - as some have claimed - but it doesn't mean he hasn't put together a visually engrossing, fresh-feeling film just because overenthusiastic fans rushed to crown Scott Pilgrim vs. the World as the next wave of filmmaking.

The audience reaction was actually pretty easy to take out of the equation, in part because my problems with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World centered around Scott Pilgrim and Ramona Flowers almost exclusively. In short, I'm not really sure why I should care about either of these characters: Scott is, at best, an admittedly lazy, sort of skeezy user of women who provides his friends nothing, not even companionship. The characters that don't already hate him (like Julie and Kim) seem to simply tolerate him, and despite the fact that he openly admits to cheating on Knives and Ramona, he somehow gets a pass without any kind of character arc. (I should point out that this is not a criticism of Michael Cera, who plays the role well, but the character he's playing. The same applies to Mary Elizabeth Winstead - who I genuinely didn't recognize, despite having seen her in Death Proof and Live Free or Die Hard - below).

Now, this is not to say Ramona Flowers is any better: she's perpetually annoyed and guarded, even when she seems interested in Scott she behaves as though he ought to know the Seven Evil Exes are coming and that - save for the fight with Roxy - she's not going to do anything about it. She abandons Scott, (justifiably) breaks up with him, and tries to duck out in the end after Pilgrim murders her former lovers (which, when one looks at what's really happening here, is precisely the case). If the idea was to have two characters you don't like just barely trying to have a relationship they can bail out on at any time, then okay, but I really don't know why I should be invested in the film.

On the other hand, I did enjoy almost all of the supporting cast, particularly Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans, Alison Pill, and Mark Webber. Even the one note characters, like Anna Kendrick's perpetually indignant Stacey or Aubrey Plaza's eternally pissed Julie, make some impression. Brandon Routh would steal the show as Todd Ingram, the super-powered Vegan bassist of Envy's band The Clash at Demonhead, were it not for two inspired cameos that close out his fight scene (more on that later). Even Schwartzman, who essentially plays "sleazy" with a dash of evil, is a credible "Boss" for Pilgrim to defeat. The "video game" component of the film introduces the villains at an even keel and Wright keeps the film from feeling episodic.

On some level, I can understand how the film's most vocal champions (other than Harry Knowles, who really ought to know better) aren't aware of the numerous cinematic and cultural precedents being used - and I must add, expertly - by Wright in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. The film, from its 8-Bit Universal logo opening to its "extra life" final act, is designed to appeal to a specific type of fan: twenty-to-early-thirty-somethings raised on video game consoles*** who listen to indie rock and read comics that dissect the superhero comic books their older brothers read. There's some overlap with film geeks, but it's easy to see how some of these "ground breaking" techniques were mistaken as new.

For example, I suppose most of Scott Pilgrim's audience didn't know that hip hop videos have been arbitrarily shifting aspect ratios for the last five years or so, or the dialogue bridges from scene to scene are easily recognizable in films like Breathless or Singles. Sound bridges have been around even longer, and the on-screen title card / descriptive elements were prominently on display as recently as Fight Club (compare the Scott's apartment layout to the narrator's "catalog" apartment sequence, just for starters). Still, to be fair, I'll give most viewers the benefit of the doubt and assume they went in knowing as much about film history as Knives Chau does about music halfway through the film.

Surprisingly, I'm not as annoyed by the myriad of video game, film, and "hip" music references as I'd expected to be. For example, the Sex Bob-ombs (get it? it's like Tom Jones' "Sex Bomb" but with the Super Mario Brothers Bob-ombs) didn't really bother me, or the fact that characters are named Stephen Stills and Neil Young (oh wait, that's Young Neil; my bad). It's so commonplace in the world of Scott Pilgrim that one eventually tolerates their omnipresence, and occasionally it's kind of clever: for example, I chuckled at the Ninja Ninja Revolution arcade game and laughed out loud when Thomas Jane and Clifton Collins, Jr. appeared as the "Vegan Police" to strip Todd of his Vegan status. Wright doesn't lay on the referencing in such a thick way that it's irritating, and small jokes like a "Gloom Rock" and "Sad Music" section in the record store, or the use of the Seinfeld "theme" elicit a grin.

In the end, I can't say that I loved Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. I'm not even sure I liked it yet. I appreciate what Edgar Wright accomplished technically and stylistically, and the momentum of the film keeps the nearly two hour running time brisk. I enjoyed many of the supporting cast, didn't feel one way or the other about the music or myriad of references, and don't regret seeing Scott Pilgrim vs. the World in total. However, I just can't get past the fact that the primary love story is strained at best and wholly unbelievable at worst. Scott and Ramona a simply characters that didn't appeal to me, and regardless of the actors' best efforts, it's hard to really get behind a film when you just don't care.

That's too bad, because I would like to listen to one of the always entertaining Wright commentary tracks, but I'm not positive I'll ever watch Scott Pilgrim vs. the World again. At least I didn't like the film on its own merits rather than its over-the-top (and honestly, foolish sounding) fan base. Do your homework, kids, and I suspect you'll still like the movie for what it is, but please stop trying to sell the world a different film than what's there; I think we might be more inclined to "take your word for it" that way.



* There are reviews that claim the film's breathless exposition may be too much for some audience members to follow, which I honestly don't understand. There's nothing difficult about following the characters introduced and how they relate to each other, and several of them are so broadly sketched that it's quite simple to keep up with them after long periods of time.
** I would like to add, at this point, that much of what Edgar Wright is praised for in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World are the same things Quentin Tarantino is constantly derided for by the same people - cobbled together imagery from other sources, intertextuality, incessant homage, and levels of self-reflexivity that border on parodic.
*** Video Game Disclaimer: the Cap'n was not involved in the "console generation," save for visits to friends' houses. Other than my brother's Game Boy, we never had a game system in the house until I was in college, when I brought home a Nintendo 64. The nostalgic love for all things Nintendo and Sega are things I can appreciate, but don't necessarily share.

So You Won't Have To: Resident Evil - Afterlife (in 3-D)

Folks, I know what you're thinking. Before the chants of "no duh, of COURSE Resident Evil: Afterlife" was a waste of time from start to finish, allow me to make my case. I hated Resident Evil, and I haven't been able to watch even part of it since the first, unfortunate, time. Resident Evil: Apocalypse and Resident Evil: Extinction are loud, stupid, vapid entertainment, but at least they succeed in entertaining on some level. The sequels are the kind of films you feel bad having watched and hesitate to tell your friends about, but as high budget schlock goes, you get what you pay for. I've certainly seen better made films that were less amusing.

Resident Evil: Afterlife, on the other hand, was a waste of time, money, and brain cells.

Of course, the missing link in all of this is why Resident Evil Apocalypse and Extinction work and the first and fourth films do not: Apocalypse and Extinction were written by Paul W.S. Anderson, but not directed by him. Resident Evil and Afterlife were written and directed by the same hack that brought us Soldier, Event Horizon, Alien vs. Predator, and Mortal Kombat. To date, the only movie he's made that I found remotely re-watchable was a remake / sequel to Death Race 2000, which works in spite of his inability to tell a story visually.

For a horror / action / video game movie, Anderson fails to generate any tension, atmosphere, or scares. This shouldn't have been a big surprise to me, since he's never been able to do that, but I thought the sheer desperation of 3-D would provide some chuckles. Instead, the 3-D gimmickry is used for no apparent reason other than to demonstrate how the pointless use of technology can be in the hands of a creatively bankrupt "auteur" (by the fourth time Alice shoots someone with a shotgun full of quarters and the coins fly at you, the gimmick has lost even a rudimentary charm). When James Cameron said this:

I tend almost never to throw other films under the bus, but that is exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D. Because it just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3-D horror films from the 70s and 80s, like Friday the 13th 3-D. When movies got to the bottom of the barrel of their creativity and at the last gasp of their financial lifespan, they did a 3-D version to get the last few drops of blood out of the turnip.

I really wish he'd been addressing Resident Evil: Afterlife 3-D, because unlike Piranha (which it was directed at), RE:A actually utilizes Cameron's specially developed technology, cameras, and projection methods. But it's all gimmick, servicing a film that barely has a plot and is most certainly deserving of the "bottom of the barrel of their creativity" moniker.

Resident Evil: Afterlife is an incoherent mess of a narrative. For what it's worth, the Cap'n will try to explain what passes for a plot:

Alice (Milla Jovovich) is continuing her assault on the Umbrella Corporation, headed by Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts). Umbrella was responsible for unleashing the T-Virus, which turned most of humanity into bloodthirsty zombies. After Wesker foils the attempt by Alice and her clones (it's a holdover from the end of Extinction), Alice escapes and seeks out Arcadia, the "last refuge for non-infected survivors," but instead finds Claire Redfield (Ali Larter, reprising her role from Extinction) with some sort of jewel on her chest that stole her memories and renders her semi-feral. Alice and Claire fly down to Los Angeles from Alaska for some reason, land on a prison where survivors have holed themselves up, including former sports star Luther West (Boris Kodjoe), Hollywood Agent Bennett (Kim Coates), and soldier / prisoner Chris Redfield (Wentworth Miller). They then discover that Arcadia is a boat, have to wander around the prison, and discover Arcadia's horrible secret just in time for the final boss fight, followed by an obligatory tease for an epic battle between our heroes and former "good" character Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), who has a jewel on her chest.

See how that sounds more like a synopsis? There's no overriding story or motivation for much of anything that happens in Afterlife. At the points in the film where exposition is desperately needed, or connective tissue would make all the difference in the world, W.S. simply dissolves, cuts away, or jumps ahead without bothering how, why, or even what it means for the characters to move from one point to the next. Bennett, for reasons of plot convenience, steals Alice's plane and lands on Arcadia. By the time we next see him, he's working for Wesker and looks like he's been infected with... something. Only Anderson never bothered to get around to that part of the plot. It's enough that we know he's EEEEEEEVIILLLL now, so that his death at the hands of Wesker is semi-ironic.

Resident Evil: Afterlife is astonishingly willing to leave audience members behind. The first film, while narratively sluggish, insulting, and utterly without tension, at least made sure the audience had some idea who the characters were and why anyone should care about them. Apocalypse and Extinction went the next step and periodically integrated characters from the games with some modicum of personality. Afterlife has no such interest: Chris Redfield (a fairly major character in the series) is introduced in a way that doesn't make sense (he's being held in a makeshift cell in the bottom of a PRISON!) and the when's and why's of his release and relation to Claire Redfield are irrelevant. He's really just there so that Claire and Alice have someone else to fight Wesker with. The point at which Claire goes from not remembering that Chris is her brother to being best pals isn't something we're privy to; it's only important that Alice saves them in time to shoot Wesker, Boondock Saints style (pay attention to that; it'll come back later!).

Speaking of which, if you haven't played Resident Evil 5, almost nothing about the character of Wesker is going to make sense (he has a cameo in Extinction, but otherwise is introduced wholesale in the film). The easy argument is that "you probably won't be seeing the movie unless you play Resident Evil," but the truth is that you can easily watch the first three films without knowing anything about the games and do just fine. Not so here.

What you can do, however, is marvel at a section of the movie where Alice, Chris, and dispensable female character (Kacey Barnfield) need to travel underwater through the prison in order get to the secret military armory. I guess it's supposed to be tense, but Anderson is such a terrible director that all of the shots are close-ups on the characters faces, or mid-shots where they appear to be WALKING underwater. They also hold their breaths for what I'd consider to be an unreasonably long time, but who cares, right? They also come out of the water and are able to fire their weapons with no problem at the dozens of zombies they somehow missed while walking underwater.

Meanwhile, Claire and Luther are standing at the prison gate as a Axeman (that's what the character is listed as), a giant wielding a half axe / half spiked mallet is pounding away at the only thing keeping hundreds of zombies out. Considering that it takes five minutes before they make any effort to stop him at all, it should come as no surprise that he appears just in time for a mid-level Boss Fight with Claire and Alice, which is really just an excuse for more "quarters in your face!" 3-D shenanigans.

Professor Murder was so disgusted with Afterlife that he took his glasses off halfway through the film and announced "It's sad when I have to say that Troy Duffy (The Boondock Saints) would have made this a more entertaining movie than this piece of shit." I'm astonished by the level of enthusiasm for Afterlife on IMDB's boards, because I can't understand how anyone would be willing to put aside a movie where nothing works at all (down to the 2003-esque score by Tomanandy and seven year-old A Perfect Circle song remixed with the title of the second Resident Evil movie).

It's not often when I can't find anything nice to say about a movie, but Resident Evil: Afterlife sucks. It just sucks, for all the reasons listed above and many more. I was bored well before the film was over, and both of us were angry we wasted time watching this movie. Paul "What Script" Anderson, there's no chance I'll ever pay for another one of your movies, and especially not the idiotic sequel that's no so much implied as assured in the credits. This puppy learned his lesson, and that lesson is you couldn't make a movie to save your life.

News and Notes (part two)

Welcome back. Once I finished writing out all three fronts, I realized this was quite a lengthy post, and determined it would be best to split them up and let you read them in manageable chunks. Let's continue with our other two "Fronts", Releases and What the Hell was That?

The Release Front:

Up-Front Disclaimer - I'm not reporting any of the following from the position of an expert, only from the position of somebody who did some poking around and added his own conjecture.

I don't know where else to put this, but Amazon put up links a few months ago for Criterion Blu-Ray titles that I can't find confirmation about anywhere else. In addition to two reasonably likely titles (Seven Samurai and Videodrome), Amazon is also listing Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited, and Lars Von Trier's Antichrist as "Not Yet Announced" Blu-Ray titles available for Pre-Order.

For their part, Criterion doesn't seem to be saying anything. I just checked their "Coming Soon" page (this would be June 10th, 2010) and you're not going to find any of those movies listed. The Criterion Collection has been coyly playing with fans on their Facebook page by including links to stories about Malick's new film The Tree of Life (they have released Days of Heaven on DVD and Blu-Ray, so there is some relationship with the director), causing comments to explode with questions about the "4 Hour Cut" that will no doubt be the next Spine Number from Malick. I just don't know, especially since 20th Century Fox released The Thin Red Line (see below).

For The Darjeeling Limited, well, I just don't see why Fox is going to let Criterion put that out. Yes, I realize that Criterion and Wes Anderson have a working relationship (all of his films, save for two, are Spine Numbers already), but it's important to note that none of the other films were released by 20th Century Fox (Bottle Rocket was Columbia Tri-Star and Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou all came from Disney / Touchstone). Fox, on the other hand, released The Darjeeling Limited on DVD and is already selling a Blu-Ray / DVD / Digital Copy combo for Fantastic Mr. Fox. Ergo, I don't really see that there's any incentive to let Criterion have Darjeeling, especially if they're doing pretty well with Mr. Fox.

Antichrist, well, to be honest with you, this makes plenty of sense. There is currently no U.S. release date for Lars Von Trier's latest film on DVD or Blu-Ray (it's available in Europe right now) and I don't know what studio really wants to try marketing it. Criterion has released The Element of Crime and Europa, and also has a history with "controversial" films like Salo and In the Realm of the Senses, so of the three titles, this one does make the most sense.

However, I have to reiterate that none of these titles are in any way actually confirmed. Pre-ordering them might be an exercise in futility, as Amazon has very limited information about the discs and the user reviews seem to reflect hopes more than any evidence they're coming out. The going rumor was that Yojimbo and Sanjuro were released on Blu-Ray because Seven Samurai's restoration was taking longer than expected, so I wouldn't be surprised if that is actually coming out. Videodrome is a 50/50 proposition, if only because Universal has been releasing back catalog Criterion titles on Blu-Ray (like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Traffic, and Spartacus) on their own. Keep your eyes peeled, as will the Cap'n, but don't rush to pre-order those movies until you hear they're really coming out.

Finally, the "What the Hell Was That Front":

I actually don't even know what to make of the Mortal Kombat "proof of concept" video floating around the internet. I'm betting it won't embed correctly here, so I'm just going to put the link up. Yes, that is Michael Jai White, and yes, that is Star Trek Voyager's Jeri Ryan. I guess it's a "gritty" take on Mortal Kombat, and that's either really silly or potentially cool. I just don't know. Watch for yourself and decide.

So You Won't Have To: Street Fighter - The Legend of Chun-Li

As I promised several weeks back, the Cap'n would bring SYWHT back with a bang, and believe me when I say Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li delivers. For once, even though I watched it so you wouldn't have to, you might want to consider queue-ing this stinker up. Just put on some nose plugs beforehand.

The Blu-Ray starts with the following trailers, to set the mood: X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Dragonball, and 12 Rounds (starring WWE Superstar John Cena and directed by Renny "Deep Blue Sea" Harlin). That should give you a pretty good idea of the quality you're in for. The top-billed "stars" are Kristen Kreuk, Chris Klein, Neil McDonough, Taboo (from the Black Eyed Peas) with an "And Michael Clarke Duncan" credit at the end. I'm not saying; I'm just saying is all...

(if it helps: Kristen Kreuk is on Smallville, Chris Klein was in.. uh, American Pie, Neil McDonough was the bad guy in Walking Tall, and Michael Clarke Duncan was in The Scorpion King.)

To answer the questions I asked (and many of you were probably wondering): yes, The Legend of Chun-Li is as bad as you'd think it was, and maybe worse. Plot points disappear and reappear for no apparent reason, characters die (or appear to die) only to show up again in the most lackluster ways, characters make decisions based on no logical criteria, and the film consistently feels like a B-Movie with an A-Movie budget. How they imagined this would kick off a Street Fighter franchise* is beyond me.

On the other hand, it is very entertaining for all of the same reasons. While not the worst movie I've seen this year, or even the most baffling-ly awful, Street Fighter manages to be dumb enough to keep you interested but not smart enough to disappoint. It's exactly the kind of arbitrary movie you'd put on with friends and kick back a few drinks to.

I'm not really sure how much we're supposed to cheer for heroes who kill the lead bad guy in front of his totally uninvolved-in-the-story daughter, or if I'm really supposed to understand why Charlie Nash (Chris Klein) is even in the movie, since he spends most of the running time kind of hanging around the plot. Actually, even when he is directly involved in the "Chun-Li getting even with M. Bison" story, it's only so he can shoot people and yell "Nash out!" into radios.

Truthfully, I'm not sure that I'm as onboard with the whole "give Charlie Nash his own movie" sentiment in most Street Fighter reviews. I do think that Chris Klein is pretty hilarious chewing scenery and delivering every line like he was preparing for the Golden Raspberry highlight reel, but much more of Charlie Nash would spoil a movie. It's almost better that he steals the film by having virtually nothing to do with the plot. If you stuck Klein's Charlie Nash into other movies he had no business being in, I might get behind that, but not his own movie.

For the most part, the actual plot doesn't make any kind of sense. Things happen either because a) they're convenient, or b) because a fight/shootout is necessary. Rather than walk you through the whole film, I'm going to bring up two specific point that demonstrate why this film is both a loser and a winner at the same time:

1) Chun-Li is a rich kid who may or may not be a concert pianist (the movie wants you to think so, but I'm 99% positive she's performing in front of a green screen with the worst "audience" painting ever). Her father is kidnapped/killed/something when she's young, leading to a ridiculous "Veangeance!!!!" stare and some kind of mysterious scroll when she's older. Her mother doesn't appear to age but instead dies of a mystery disease.

A wise woman tells Chun-Li she needs to "go to Bangkok." That's exactly what she says, but Chun-Li takes it to mean "give up everything you know and become homeless, wandering the streets until you get into a fight," which is exactly what happens. She then trains with a dude named Gen who teaches her how to throw fireballs. Until the fireballs, Street Fighter apparently was trying to be "realistic."

2) I mentioned Taboo earlier, because he plays Vega. At least he kind of looks like Vega, since he has a mask and claws, unlike Michael Clarke Duncan, who plays Balrog as Michael Clarke Duncan. Vega kills several people off-camera early in the movie and then disappears until he's summoned to kill Chun-Li.

The set-up for their "epic" battle is virtually nonexistent. Chun-Li is upset that Master Gen lost his necklace in an explosion (meaning that he must be dead), and is running around Bangkok. Then she decides to jump across rooftops, and bumps into Vega. At least, that's how the lousy editing makes it look. I guess maybe she sensed he was following, but there's nothing in the direction of this sequence to suggest A leads to B leads to C. It just happens.

Chun-Li and Vega fight (kind of), and she knocks his mask off. Instead of being disfigured or vain or something, he just looks like Taboo from the Black Eyed Peas, but Chun-Li says "No wonder you wear a mask. If I were as ugly as you I'd wear one too!", which is just odd. Then she jumps on him and knocks him out off-camera. We see her drop the knocked out Vega from a roof, where he's tied up by his feet but still has his claws!

Maybe we'll see Vega again? Nope. Not in this movie. At least Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li remembered to pay off the fireball, even if the CGI resembled Syfy Channel original quality.

I know it sounds like I'm bagging on this movie, but the truth is that you spend most of the time laughing at how inept this movie is. Whether it's the totally unexplained hookup between Chris Klein and Moon Bloodgood, the faux-lesbian club sequence that transitions into a strip club shootout, unwarranted c-sections, the really unnecessary reminders of the most obvious visual clue in the entire movie, or just Chris Klein staring past the camera and muttering one-liners that don't make sense, it's hard not to enjoy this kind of crap. It's bad, but far from unwatchable.

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li may not be Death Race, but just because you Won't Have To doesn't mean you shouldn't give it a try, provided you're in like-minded company with lots of alcohol.

Cap'n out.


* the end of the film sets up a "tournament" where Master Gen will find "Ryu something-or-other" that Chun-Li decides to sit out of. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess Fox will also sit out on this Street Fighter tournament too.

It Can Only Go Up from Here...

Paul W.S. Anderson. Uwe Boll. Paul W.S. Anderson. Uwe Boll. Paul W.S. Anderson. Uwe Boll.

In case you weren't around one year ago when I promised to spend all of 2008 without speaking their names (or the names of their films) in this blogorium, that's who I occasionally refer to. The almost bottom of the barrel in cinema* in terms of output and competence.

Uwe Boll makes almost exclusively video game adaptations, but he does them so badly that at this point they're games almost no one has heard of. He made House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, Bloodrayne, Postal, and the subject of our first review of 2009: In the Name of the King.

Actually, that should be In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, because the first half isn't stupid enough by itself. I kinda-sorta reviewed it in when the dvd came out last spring / summer, but since I couldn't identify it by name, many of you probably just shrugged and moved on. Bad call.

Until ITKOTKADST, I had a longstanding embargo on Dr. Boll. I refused to see any of his movies, no matter how many big name actors he tricked into appearing in his films (*coughBenKingsleycough*). But somehow the bizarre list of actors in Dungeon Siege (jesus, there's no way to shorthand the title that isn't a mouthful) got me curious. It was a congregation of too many "really?" and "they're still acting?" that I broke my embargo.

Allow me to share the people involved in this "movie"

Jason Statham
Ron Perlman
Ray Liotta
(it drops off pretty sharply from here)
Matthew Lilliard
John Rhys-Davies
Leelee Sobieski
Claire Forlani
Kristanna Lokken
a dude I thought was Michael Jai White but is instead named Brian J. White
and
Burt Reynolds

With a universally reviled "director" at the helm and the highest budget he's ever seen (courtesy of the German government), how could this not be a disaster of epic proportions?

And boy howdy is it. I guess he blew his budget on the endless helicopter shots that are all over Dungeon Siege, because there's no way that cast commanded sixty million dollars. Statham and Perlman are the biggest stars and I don't think they command twenty five million apiece, probably not even ten. The rest of the cast, well come on. Burt Reynolds is doing commercials for some X-Box game now. The rest of those jokers were probably happy to have work or just say yes to everything (*coughJohnRhysDaviescough*).

He certainly didn't spend it on makeup effects, since the masks on this Lord of the Rings ripoff look cheaper than the masks in Battle for the Planet of the Apes, and that's saying something. Everyone is "acting" at level ten for the whole movie, except the aformentioned Statham and Perlman who foolishly try to take the material seriously. It's not their fault, but you can really only elevate horse shit to dried horse shit.

The "plot" involves a character named Farmer (Statham) who is a farmer to go to battle against an evil wizard (Liotta) that's trying to steal the kingdom of whatever from Burt Reynolds. Helping the wizard is the King's idiot son (Lilliard) and a bunch of other characters none of you care about. I sure didn't, because every five minutes or so Boll hops in a helicopter and films the German countryside in slow motion. Sometimes there are even actors involved.

The dialogue is howlingly bad, especially when spoken by Lilliard, Liotta, or a clearly bored Reynolds. I'd rather not get into Sobieski, Forlani, or Loken because they mostly stare into the distance or utter things woodenly. I swear that's Michael Jai White. Seriously. There's no way that's Brian White or whatever his name is**.

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale is the kind of movie you'd expect to see on the Sci-Fi Channel, but somehow made it to theatres. Apparently, it topped out at around seven million dollars in US gross, which to me is still astounding. That means up to one million Americans saw this, and I hope they were all drunk.

The funny thing is that I'm recommending this to you. It's bad, but you're going to have much more fun consuming alcohol and watching this joke of a movie than you would being baffled at how The Happening exists. You won't enjoy Dungeon Siege for the reasons Uwe Boll intended, but you might find yourself laughing all the way through the credits.

However, I'm not going to watch another one of his movies. This level of ineptitude is not something I'm willing to repeat. One was enough, and this appears to be the high water mark in his filmography.

---

Tomorrow I'm going to take on Paul "What Script" Anderson's ill-conceived remake of Death Race 2000, titled Death Race also starring Jason Statham (sigh). Stay tuned: we're off to a great start this year!



* the actual bottom of the barrel, as I understand, are the guys who made Disaster Movie, Epic Movie, Date Movie, and Meet the Spartans. I couldn't say from experience, never having endured one of their "movies", but that's the consensus from those in the know.
** they aren't even related!