Obex

 Conor (Albert Birney, who also writes and directs) lives as a shut-in in a small Baltimore house with his dog Sandy (Dorothy), where he runs a small mail-order business: People (kids, mostly) send him pictures along with five dollars, and he sends them back a portrait rendered in the futuristic medium of ASCII on a dot-matrix printout.

 Can you think of a more 1987 job than that? Connor even runs an ad in Personal Computing magazine, and the issue it's on gets flipped through lovingly on-camera. Birney, who made this film with a tiny handful of collaborators and a diminutive budget, was five in the year Obex is set, but does a good job of capturing the feel of being into computers in that decade (some petty technical quibbles aside). I should probably note that he co-directed the (also) very enjoyable Strawberry Mansion; This one's got a similar sense of warmth, wry humour and weirdo sensibilities. The humour, slow pacing and nerd-nostalgia-driven setting also reminded me a little of Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess.

 It's a slow, slow film, easing us into the particulars of Conor's life before the truly weird shit arrives. Our protagonist is good company, and Sandy is a very, very good girl, but be warned you'll be also be treated to a midi-assisted, strangely sedate karaoke rendition of Gary Numan's Cars, and a prolonged taping of Nightmare on Elm Street before anything really happens. Eventually the plot does kick off: Obex, a dodgy computer game Conor signs up for on a whim, ends up summoning a demon into his house (a wonderfully creepy, well realized scene); The demon, Ixaroth, kidnaps Sandy and takes her back into its evil castle, forcing Conor to put on a Legend of Zelda cap and venture out past the cicada-infested wilderness out back and into the computer game, running into a couple of friendly NPCs and some hilariously naff insect-headed, army-jacketed goons.

 While Conor's quest never quite gels as high adventure (not with this budget), it does manage to make its otherworldly jaunt feel adventurous and weirdly creepy. Angry skeletons are put to rest, an ubiquitous storekeep (Callie Hernandez) lends help and exposition, and perilous locations are traversed via the medium of overlaid maps. Birney and his cinematographer (and co-star) Pete Ohs have a gift for dream-like imagery; Their black & white digital photography gives the film an effective, uncanny atmosphere and an enveloping sense of darkness, even when it's inevitably punctured with a goofy joke or two. It's all rounded out by a lovely, on-point retro synth score by Josh Dibb (he of Animal Collective).

 Obex is a slight - very slight - dark fantasy, one that balances its fundamental sweetness (remember, this is the tale of an overtly shy guy that risks everything for his dog) and gentle sense of humour with some surprisingly dark moments and a fairly effective sense of dread. It's DiY to a fault and takes its sweet time to get anywhere, but if you have the patience and the temperament for this sort of thing, it does so in an extremely likeable way.

War of the Wizards

 War of the Wizards, renamed as The Phoenix when released in the outside of Asia a few years later to cash in on Clash of the Titans' success, is a budget 1978 Taiwanese fantasy epic that's hobbled by a deeply unlikable little shit of a main character and some really turgid plotting. Stick with it, though, for a bunch of extremely charming old-school practical and visual effects, and a scene that might be the single funniest bit of intentional comedy I've run across in any of these films.

 Two things happen when hapless fisherman Tai (Hsiu-Shen-Liang) finds a magical bowl that allows him to create anything he wishes. The first is that he uses it to become rich (and in so doing, an absolute asshole). The second is that a large number of threats, supernatural and not, come after him to get the relic.

 One of these threats - an interstellar (yes, literally) wizard called Flower Fox (Betty Pei Ti) eventually steals both the bowl and Tai's two brides (long story), prompting a more traditional, heroic second half where our complete waste of a protagonist skills up and overcomes a few obstacles to get what he thinks he deserves. It really is a movie of two halves, so let's have a look at them separately.

 The first half of the movie is, by far, the worst; There is absolutely no reason to root for Tai, who's venal, shallow, a complete idiot, and deeply unfunny - but for far too long the script insists on presenting him as a hero, and we get a lot of his inane antics here. He does eventually get a very mild comeuppance (the film is not that dumb, I guess), but it's absolutely a case of too little, too late. In the meanwhile we're forced to watch him behaving like an entitled little nouveau riche dick and have to suffer through his daft, uncomfortable attempts to woo not one but two beautiful ladies (Terry Hu and Chow Chi-Ming). They are, of course, in cahoots with the main villain to rob the relic, but they do develop feelings for our idiot of a protagonist. Sigh.

 As bad as this first act is, it does contain an unimpeachable bit of comedy: A long scene where Tai is accosted by a number of colourful, powerful assassins at a restaurant. I'm not about to spoil what's easily the best scene in the movie, but do know that it's perfectly executed and, on a conceptual level, ridiculously ahead of its time - a cheeky, slightly post-modern piss take of a scene that only gets funnier as it goes along. Gags in these films rarely get this elaborate.

 Tai remains insufferable for the film's more enjoyable back half, and the fact that he keeps failing upwards and getting more and more powerful with seemingly very little effort no sacrifice won't endear him to anyone. Bonus shitty points: he's very focused on recovering his magic bowl, but rarely devotes a thought to his two hijacked paramours.

 So it's not like the plot gets any better, but at least there's a lot of cool stuff going on. The idiot in charge learns to absorb sunlight and shoot lasers with his sword, and gets the freaking Phoenix as a mount (a very endearing, janky puppet that looks like a peacock but has the rough shape of a turkey). Meanwhile, Flower Fox flies, can breathe fire, summons a giant stone creature and has a huge henchman at her beck and call (Richard Kiel - Jaws off the Bond movies) and causes tidal waves, letting co-director Sadamasa Arikawa show off his chops with miniature cities and boats.

 While there's a lot of Kung Fu wizardry, the fights remain resolutely mediocre. This is not a martial arts film by any stretch of the word - the choreographies are closer to... oh, say a Bud Spencer and Terence Hill movie.

 The Kung Fu wizardry is pretty good though. It's all very low budget, of course, and I'm sure the soulless fucks at the internet would have a field day complaining about how shitty it all looks. And... yeah, some of it, especially the optical effects, do look pretty bad. But if you can allow yourself to enjoy this sort of thing at all (and you should, don't be like those other losers!) there's definitely a lot to like; Cheap it may be, but there's a lot of effort behind this, and the special effect techniques cover the full gamut except maybe stop-motion.

 I don't want to oversell it - this is definitely not a good movie, and the dipshit protagonist makes it an even tougher sale. But there's enough good stuff here to make it a pretty enjoyable watch.

Irati

 After giving a Basque spin to an ancient European folk tale in Errementari, writer/director Paul Urkijo Alijo turns his attention to the legends of his own country, adorning the margins of the story of the first king of Pamplona with all sorts of mythical flourishes.

 When Charlemagne's armies march towards their domain, the young scion of the local ruling family  turns his back on his Christian faith and makes a deal with Luxa (Elena Uriz), a powerful witch: blood for blood, as demanded by the old ways. He slits his own throat during the battle, and the covenant is fulfilled when giant rocks fall from the sky, squashing the invading franks.
 While the armies fight, his young son Eneko narrowly survives an encounter with a soldier and a lamiak, a river spirit (to the basques, they were apparently men-drowning river spirits more similar to Morgen, Groa'ch, or Rusalkas than the Greek Lamiae). There he meets Irati, the near-feral apprentice to the witch who his father made the deal with.

 With the Franks repelled, the locals are forced to honour the dead lord's deal and bury him in a pagan mound, which the local priests are none too pleased about. In the aftermath young Eneko is sent to get a Christian education elsewhere, and his just-widowed mother is married off to a neighbouring muslim lord to help secure the borders.

 Fifteen years later Eneko (Eneko Sagardoy) returns, saving Irati (Edurne Azkarate) from some sleazy lumberjacks running an illegal logging operation on his land. The eight-century equivalent of an action hero foiling a drug store robbery by chance. When he gets home after that, he's just in time to hear his grandfather's last words. Say what you want of Eneko, the guy seems to have an impeccable sense of timing.

 His grandfather's final request, by the way, is to be buried on hallowed ground by his son. The villagers happily go back on their deal with the witch and exhume the body; During the exhumation, they find that the lord's body has been turned into a goat. Pagans came up with some pretty fun penalties for breaching terms and conditions, it seems.

 Luxa is arrested for rightly calling the Christians out on their bullshit. Later, she tells Eneko that his father's body lies in the lair of the goddess Mari deep underground, along with the treasure from the defeated Frankish army.
 Faster than you can say Hark, a quest!, Eneko sets out to recover his dad's bones, taking along Irati as a guide. They are followed covertly by the henchmen of a duplicitous lordling who's gunning after both the treasure and Eneko's birthright; That conflict will come to a head, of course, but not before they all run into a small selection of Basque mythical beings - all the way up to goddess Mari herself (who sports a gorgeous bit of costume design).

 Irati is a bit of a strange movie - a swords and sorcery saga that's fairly low on adventure, and an epic story that feels slightly less than the sum of its parts. Urkijo Alijo also scripts, adapting a graphic novel (by J. L. Landa and J. Muñoz); But while the script is well constructed, it feels like he couldn't find a good balance between its elements. It's melancholy by design, but that solemnity feels almost at cross purposes with plotting that includes (too few) monster attacks and a dastardly noble rival.

 Visually, though, I have no complaints. The film is gorgeous, with the director, cinematographer Gorka Gómez and the rest of the crew squeezing as much natural beauty out of the forests, caves and mountains they film in as humanly possible. The special effects are low-rent and rely heavily on CGI - but as in Errementari, they complement the film's heightened aesthetics, and there's a ton imagination and a strong sense of visual design on display. That they managed to make this at all with a budget of four million euros is a miracle.

 The characters are fine, and I do like that the main thrust of the movie is for these two people - one following an ascendant faith, the other following a path that's disappearing as she walks it - to find common ground. But the love story is a little too abrupt to be convincing, and the acting a bit uneven; Azkarate cuts an imposing figure (Irati gets a lot of moments where the camera frames her as a badass), while Sagardoy always looks... kind of bemused to be there. He's not bad, precisely, and I think the intention is for him to be out of his depth most of the time - but he doesn't have a lot of presence, which is a huge drawback in the few scenes where it's his turn to shine. More damningly, he doesn't have a lot of chemistry with Azkarate either.

 With all these caveats, I did like the film. File it under interesting rather than great, but there's room for that too - especially if it goes all out to portray a folklore I knew next to nothing about. Plus, there are as many shots of a gloriously unimpressed goat as you could possibly want.

Errementari

 I tend to be down on Netflix original movies, but that's a stance heavily coloured by their would-be blockbuster attempts - the shit they put out with Snyder or the Russo brothers, for example. But in their eternal hunger for ever more content, they've also done the world a favour giving money to, say, German or Spanish martial artists to fund their action epics, not to mention giving funding to people like Jeremy Saulnier and Pablo Larrain, or snatching interesting projects like Nimona from oblivion.

 This is a really roundabout way to say I really appreciate it when they use the some chump change (from the money they got by breaking movie business with their unsustainable practices) to help get stuff like Errementari made.

 The title sounds like the beginning of a racist joke, but it just means Blacksmith in Basque; It refers to a scattering of ancient European folk tales (according to some ethnographers, one of the oldest known) about a blacksmith who makes a deal with hell and ends up getting the better of old scratch.

 The blacksmith in question is Patxi (Kandido Uranga); A man so evil, so cruel, the animated prelude informs us, that the devil himself would learn to fear him. He spends a good part of the first act off-screen, an ogre-like hermit cooped up in his old smithy.

 The film instead follows some of the regulars of the local inn as they try and help a visiting government official (Ramón Agirre) in locating some gold the smith was said to have stolen during the first Carlist war - and also Usue (Uma Bracaglia), a little bullied girl who may have some relationship to the old man.

 The inn crowd runs afoul of Patxi soon enough, setting the residents of the small town in a collision course with him. Usue, meanwhile, steals away into the smithy, and ends up freeing the demon the Smith had imprisoned in an iron cage. Oops!

 The script (by director Paul Urkijo Alijo and Asier Guerricaechebarría) is all over the place, especially in the early going, but the shambolic structure helps give the film a strangely offbeat, authentic feel, and when things go to hell (figuratively at first, then literally) it's hard to predict where the story is going. But the focus remains on the characters and their destination is, thank goodness, hugely satisfying - I have a lot of time for a movie that manages to juggle sweetness and badassery.

 It never even attempts being scary, but that's ok - this is horror only by default, and it's better to think of it as dark fantasy or even a fairy tale. It certainly looks like one. Colours are tightly controlled - it looks a little fake in one or two shots, but most of the time it's beautiful; The movie owns its artificiality. Paul Urkijo Alijo and cinematographer Gorka Gómez Andreu also use non-standard framing to make things feel a little mythical; For example, I love a scene that tracks Usue as sneaks into a room, but she's in the background, out of focus - the camera stays on the smith's sleeping face throughout. It feels like a scene out of Jack and the Beanstalk. And as you'd expect out of a dark fairy tale, the film also takes some visual cues from Guillermo Del Toro.

 But things never get quite as dark as its closest touchstone, Pan's Labyrinth. There's quite a bit of humour threaded throughout: some of it home-baked (got to love those ubiquitous bear traps), some of it courtesy of a faithful display of the visual wit of medieval demonology (expect faces in inappropriate places). The themes are heavy, but not too much so, and while it's rooted in medieval Christianism there are more than a few welcome modern touches, such as the Sandman-like detail that human souls go to hell because they want to be punished.

The effects are excellent for the modest budget - a mixture of really great makeup with digital touch-ups for that signature Bosch/Bruegel look. The acting is mostly strong - there are a couple of iffy child actors, and it took me a while to warm up to Bracaglia's Usue, but I was fully on-board with her soon enough. What kept throwing me off, as a native Spanish speaker, is that the Basque language falls into a sort of uncanny valley where it really sounds like Spanish but I couldn't make out a single word. Pretty disconcerting, but obviously neither a major problem nor something I can blame on anyone but myself.

 Despite a slow start, this was a lovely treat - imaginative, unique, and affecting - an idiosyncratic take on a folk tale, tweaked for modern sensibilities but fairly faithful to the mostly medieval mindset that spawned it. Well... except for a certain sympathy for the devils, but that's a given in these degenerate, godless times.

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale

It's recently come to my attention that Uwe Boll directed a sequel to his Dungeon Siege movie, this time starring Dolph Lundgreen. Morbid curiosity compels me to check it out, but it puts me in a dilemma: I don't remember the first thing about the original movie, which I know I've seen. Now, I could forget about it and just watch the damn thing, since I somehow doubt there'll be any clever callbacks or that it will build upon the worldbuilding set out in the first movie. But I'm curious - I do remember quite a few things about Boll's other movies, mostly to do with the fact that I didn't think they were any good. So why have I completely blanked out on Dungeon Siege, a movie based on a series of games I have quite a bit of affection for?

 A mystery! So here we go again, into the Uweverse, documented for the first time. Spoiler alert: Turns out it's just a really mediocre, unmemorable movie.

 It's been a long, long time since Uwe Boll's last bid for public visibility - So much so that some people might not even be aware of him. So here goes: Boll is a crazy German who built himself a niche making video game adaptations. Pretty fucking bad videogame adaptations: House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, even an atrocious FarCry adaptation made before Ubisoft, and the game series, became huge.
 He's also famous because he's very outspoken and more than a little toxic - calling people retards, launching a huge publicity stunt calling out his biggest internet detractors to boxing matches, and a bunch more nonsense. If you're to believe internet sleuths, his movies were a front for a The Producers-style German tax evasion scheme - I don't think that was ever proven though.

 In a world where there's a whole company devoted to making movies specifically designed to rip off the clueless ("Hey, I heard you liked Atlantic Rim, so I got you a copy!"), I think maybe the hatred for him was a bit outsized; Gaming as a culture is nothing if not petty and vindictive, after all. His stuff is bad, sure, but it's not like it's got any pretensions. You can't really say he ruined FarCry's story, or even Dungeon Siege's (have in mind I like those games!). Postal had some solid jokes, and was respectable in its tastelessness.

 So. The obvious main draw for In the Name of the King is the cast, which is stacked with affordable recognizable names. But for me the biggest and best surprise is that the action choreographer is Ching Siu Tung - an actual Hong Kong legend, director of motherfucking Duel to the Death, plus The Swordman-ses and the A Chinese Ghost Story-ses. I hope he got a huge paycheck, because the editing and shooting of the action scenes undoes most of his good work. It still shows through... sometimes. A little.

This scene deserves a much better movie around it, dammit.

 You might notice that I've been talking about what's around the movie instead of getting into in as I usually do... and that's because it's just not very interesting. But let's give it a go:
 The kingdom of Ehb is being attacked by the Krug, who will henceforth be known as Lumpy Turd Orcs (LTO's), because that's exactly what they look like - Shit-covered orcs, walking around in a sort of silly waddle which I think is a combination of them not being very mobile under the bulky armor and an attempt to make them more animalistic. They end up looking like Power Rangers mooks.
 The LTOs are being led by a sexy evil wizard with a New Jersey accent (Ray Liotta) who's seduced the good wizard's daughter (Leelee Sobieski) and is literally mooching the magic off her. Sobieski's performance here is... something else; Let's just say that she gives the role the exact the amount of effort it deserves.

 Meanwhile Jason Statham runs a farm, because he's Farmer, you see. He's got an idyllic life with a lovely wife (Claire Forlani) and a son, and is best buds with Ron Perlman. So of course that means the LTOs strike, kill the kid, abduct the wife, and set Farmer off on a collision course with the evil wizard controlling them (incidentally, the effects when he controls them look almost exactly like a low-rent version of when anyone puts on the true ring in the Lord of the Ring movies).
 There was an earlier version of the script that had to be scrapped and rewritten (by Doug Taylor) because it was too similar to Lord of the Rings; the final version still extensively... ahem, 'homages' those movies, visually, aurally and plot-wise.

 Anyhow. At the same time Farmer goes off on a rampage, the King (Burt Reynolds, who like Sobieski can't be arsed to act), the good wizard (who's all-in because of he is John Rhys-Davies and John Rhys-Davies never half-arses anything) are trying to figure out who's behind the invasion They're passively opposed by the king's nephew, a petulant, perpetually drunk nee'r-do-well played y Mathew Lillard, who at least seems to be having fun trying on an English accent. He's in cahoots with the evil wizard, of course.

 There's quite a few fights, with some interesting twists. The action is quite a bit more martial artsy than other fantasy movies, owing to the pedigree behind it. Statham actually does all right by it, with a lot of kicks and tumbling about, though the shooting style lets it down by featuring a lot of cuts and constant camera movement. I've seen some behind-the-scenes style shots of some of these scenes and they actually look much better than the end product; In them you can see the actual film camera whizzing by, on rails.

 There's some silly stuff as well which seems like it would be right at home in a Chinese movie, so I do wonder how much influence Ching Siu Tung had on them. There's honest-to-god ninjas that join a general melee at one point, that's fun (I think they're meant to be elves). There's a surprising amount of heightened tree climbing and brachiation, including Kristanna Locken in a leather push-up bra and friends swinging down from the treetops in magical vines. Also, the LTOs build a giant slingshot to launch themselves into battle. The final fight against sexy evil wizard Liotta has some cool moves and poses, possibly the place where you can most see the action coordinator's influence.

The effects are mostly poor, the designs tend to ape Lord of the Rings... poorly, and the dialog is terrible - so many scenes consist of people talking nonsense at each other, stuff that sounds vaguely ominous or cool-sounding but doesn't actually mean anything. And the music, when it's not trying to mimic Howard Shore, often poorly fits the scenes it's scoring. This is especially galling as the games had some truly excellent, very memorable music; I wonder if they needed to pay extra to get it?
 Stay through the credits for not one but two Blind Guardian songs, plus one by Hammerfall. None of them written for the movie, and neither of the Guardian songs are as good as the one they wrote for an actual videogame.

 It completely fails as a fantasy movie mostly because despite an abundance of pretty nice-looking locales and sets, there's next to no sense of it being a coherent world, just a jumble of elements and places, many of them pretty derivative. Few of the actors even try to put on an accent, any accent, and I seriously doubt anyone thought about trying to coordinate them in any way.

 As a game adaptation... meh. It does follow the events of the first Dungeon Siege game, somewhat: the LTO attacks, a broken bridge, the evil and good wizards, etc. I'm not even going to pretend to care that they did the story wrong or whatever, since the first two games were extremely poorly written, all po-faced fantasy filler. I mean, the kingdom is called Ehb! That's how much effort the original game writers put into it. The third Dungeon Siege game was handed out to another company and actually had an excellent story, but that came out years after the movie got made.

Dude, where's your armor?

 The main crime it commits against the games (and common sense) is kind of hilarious, conceptually: The protagonist keeps his farmer's simple shirt and breeches for the whole movie, even when he goes to war. Because he's Farmer, dontcha know, a simple guy, guv.
 The Dungeon Siege games are an offshoot of Diablo, and all about collecting and equipping incrementally better loot; So if the adaptation was serious about doing the game justice, it'd have Statham wearing incrementally more elaborate costumes, until by the end he'd have spikes all over, a dozen-meter-long cloak and police lights on his shoulders.
 It's also pretty funny (and so, so stupid) that the guy doesn't get out of the same peasant's outfit throughout the whole movie, even when he finds out that he's the crown prince (spoiler!). Success don't change him none. It's thematic!

 To be honest, I wouldn't say this is a trainwreck or anything; If I had to compare it to something, I'd say it's most similar to shitty TV fantasy shows like that horrible Earthsea adaptation the Sci Fi channel did back in the oughts - and this is easily better than that. It's just kind of bad, and mostly boring. Weirdly inert and so, so bloated - asking us to give two shits about side characters that we couldn't even muster a half-hearted fart for. Though that's probably my fault for getting the 30-minutes-longer director's cut.

 Maybe I'll get around to the sequel someday, which at least is only ninety minutes... but this has kind of killed my enthusiasm for it.

The Show

 Alan Moore's kept busy after finally quitting comics a few years ago. He's put out a (great) book of short stories, might actually be finishing a long-in-gestation book on magic, and more importantly for our purposes here, he actually wrote and shepherded a full movie to production.

 The Show -a title so generic it's almost as if it's flipping two birds at search engines- is a wonderful trawl through Northampton's more psychedelic side, a noir yarn warped by Moore's acid-tinged surreal sense of humor. A suitably droll, very witty, hyper-literate sense of humor.

 A man (Tom Burke) arrives at Northampton looking for another man (Darrell D'Silva), one who beat his client's daughter and stole a precious heirloom. We'll mostly be following the former - goes by Steve Lipman, though his name changes often, as does his cover story - as he hits the streets and meets various colourful characters, slowly putting together a pulpy, twisty story that will lead to a confrontation with an East London mafioso and a sort of vaudeville act of the damned that seems to impose their reality upon our dreamscapes. Their apparent ringleader? A dead cult comedian called Frank Metterton, played by none other than Alan Moore hisself, made up to look like a crescent moon. Or a waning moon, I guess, depending on which side you look at him from.

 

 The story serves as an excuse for a lot of digressions and to parade a bunch of wonderful characters, but it isn't an afterthought. Unlike a lot of surrealist work the plotting here is loose but coherent, laced with dream-logic but sound enough to work within its chosen genre. And it builds up to near-traditional beats and payoffs, even while structurally it remains a shaggy dog story.
 There is so much to unpack here; As is usual with Moore's work, the whole thing is dense with detail, allusions, gags and homages. One thing I love about surrealist films is that it puts me in a mode where I'm constantly double-guessing myself, trying to work out some bit of incidental symbolism rather than plot mechanics- and in that sense this movie is a treasure trove. With all the references to dreams in the early going, I at first took Lipman's shirt to be a nod to Freddy Krueger, but no- it becomes clear later, with his choice of weapon, that he's actually meant to be the Beano's version of Dennis the Menace, all grown up. Does it mean anything? I'm not sure, maybe not - Moore's gone on record about reading a lot of those comics as a kid, so it might be just a homage. Is it positioning him as an agent of chaos, or further grounding all this weirdness in the working class? Possibly; It still got a huge laugh.

 The characters are so much fun: A pair of pre-pubescent gumshoes who come with their own black and white palette and speak their hard-boiled noir narration out loud (later, they do the two-kids on a trench coat gag.) A natty club doorman constantly contradicts himself and backtracks on everything he says. A brutally direct, standoffish woman gets some seriously funny lines in. There's also a Voodoo priestess drug dealer, a gravitas-laden superhero whose laptop is branded with his insignia... silly, silly stuff. That's not even counting Faith (Siobhan Hewlett), a very likeable near-fatal victim of erotic asphyxiation who becomes integral to the story early on.

 If it all sounds a bit too twee for you... well, it might well be; This is the sort of movie that will provoke a strong visceral rejection in a certain sort of moviegoer. But it's very well made. All the actors are having fun with their roles, the staging shows the limits of its budget but wears them well- and the production design is outstanding, filling the background with marginalia like an advert for 'Amityville and Usher, realtors' or a soap opera called Wittgenstein's terrace where a shouting match devolves into epistemological debate. Moore's frequent collaborator Mitch Jenkins shows a little flair where money allows but mostly remains unobtrusive, reserving his most striking shots to frame the characters in memorable ways.

 In something as wide-ranging as this, it's inevitable that some bits will fall flat. There is the one scene in particular - a nightmarish courtroom incident - which I found almost intolerable, the sort of terrible self-consciously arty and surreal dream sequence that that the rest of the movie skillfully avoids doing.

 Other than that, I really loved the film. Everyone involved is trying to get a TV show based on it off the ground, which hopefully will come to pass someday; There's also a series of shorts, now more than a decade old, which feature the same characters; I'll need to hunt them down now.

 No, it's not for everyone, but I couldn't be happier I found this.

The Sword and the Sorcerer

  It'd be unfair to blame the success of Conan the Barbarian for the run of early eighties fantasy movies - especially Albert Pyun's The Sword and the Sorcerer, which came out on the same year. There must have been something in the water... or maybe it was D&D's popularity at the time.

 What is interesting is that most of these movies fit more in the Sword and Sorcery genre, as popularized by Robert E. Howard and other pulp authors, than within D&D's Tolkien pastiche. Unlike D&D-style fantasy, S&S tends to downplay the fantastic elements, avoids clear morality, and borrows a lot from horror. Magic is evil, or at least dangerous, and always mysterious.
 This movie follows suit, as the title makes clear, but it's not a great take on the genre. Clearly, it's not in the same league as the first Conan movie. But it's not in the same league as The Beastmaster, either, which also came out in the same year; Sad to say, despite directing some B-movie classics the late director Albert Pyun was mostly a purveyor of mediocrity, and this... well, I do kind of like it, but can't really say it's not mediocre. There's some good stuff but you have to wade through a lot of crap to get to it.
 More along the lines of Hawk the Slayer, then, or The Barbarian Brothers, though it does seems to have a respectable budget for this sort of thing.

 The movie begins with an excursion to an evil misty island, where the main villain of the piece king Titus Cromwell (Richard Lynch) awakens the secondary villain, an ancient snake sorcerer called Xusia (Richard Moll). His sarcophagus is a thing of beauty, a great bit of prop design with stone faces carved all over, which of course animate when the sorcerer is revived. Very cool.

 What's not cool, though, is Xusia; When one of the kings lackeys questions what the sorcerer brings to the table, instead of killing the lackey, he kills the witch that revived him! Asshole. Also, whenever he does magic his fingernails turn bright pink, like light sabers, in an effect that never stops being funny.

Seriously, though, that's one damn cool resting place.

 In any case: King Titus is going after the kingdom of Ehdan, one of those prosperous, good kingdoms ruled by peaceful goodie-two-shoes. With Xusia's help he wipes out half their army, but then backstabs the sorcerer, who escapes by jumping off a cliff. Then he proceeds to kill the royal family, but one of the heirs - Prince Talon escapes him, bearing a really goofy-looking three bladed sword (the blades are in parallel, which you'd think would be a problem when trying to use it to slash at anything). Luckily it seems they realized the thing is so stupid-looking, so they don't ever really show it used in a fight, but they do show it shooting off the two blades on the side.

 So King Titus managed to lose a dangerous, evil sorcerer, and the last descendant of the royal house he's usurping. The guy really needs to get better at tying loose ends.

 We jump to eleven years later, and Talon's grown up to be a Conan-like figure (the narration makes a point to name a lot of Conan's titles, even) played by Lee Horsley, a smug little shit with a perma-lopsided grin and immaculate feathered hair. He comes back to Edhan with his mercenary company to 'repay a debt', and things develop from there.
 Unfortunately, this is where the movie kind of dies on its ass, as we delve into the politics of Ehdan - freedom fighters staging a coup, a beautiful princess figure (Kathleen Beller) who's basically pressured to pay Talon with her body so he goes to rescue her brother, a conspiracy to kill off the kings from neighboring kingdoms, Xusia pulling strings from the shadows... ugh, honestly, I can't be arsed.

 The acting is porn-level bad, the characters are broad and stereotypical, there's no wit to be found in the script as it goes through the paces, and the action is mediocre, only redeemed because every now and then it gets pretty bloody. And it's all smothered by an orchestral score that buries everything under swashbuckling themes. The tone is kept pretty light (aided by that fucking soundtrack) but the script just can't support it, dumb and charmless as it is, and neither can the unlikable, barely delineated characters.

 There are good bits strewn throughout, enough to keep the whole thing from being a complete waste of time. The acting is bad enough to be funny sometimes. And despite the cinematography being pretty workmanlike, Pyun does have a pretty good eye for striking shots, so we get some of that. Also: lots of boobs and a few gory deaths.

Axe to the faaaaaayce!

 Re: boobs - women don't tend to get a lot of respect in this genre, and this is no exception. They get very little to do other than look pretty, and the female protagonist's big thing is to use her feminine wiles and then knee people in the balls. Ineffectively. Even animals get in on the action - there's a bit where a snake attacks a lady late in the film, and it has to get in between her thighs like it's on a Whitesnake album cover or something. So if that sort of thing bothers you, this is not the movie for you. Also, if you're looking for a good movie.

 It made a shitload of money compared to its budget, and is well-remembered enough that it got a sequel (as promised in the end credits) almost thirty years later, with Kevin Sorbo. I guess I'll need to watch that someday, but forgive me if I put it off for a while.

The Great Yokai War (Yôkai daisensô)

 Japanese folklore is rife with all sorts of spirits, ghosts and monsters. They range from objects that gain sentience after one hundred years of existence, to Llorona-like ghosts looking for their children, to weirder stuff like giant heads floating in the sky and nature spirits of all sorts.

  They're collectively known as Yokai, and pop up everywhere from comics to movies to videogames and more; they've been codified and illustrated for centuries, most famously and recently by Shigeru Mizuki, who produced a huge number of popular Yokai comics since the 1960's and is responsible for how many people visualize them these days.

 The Great Yokai War is Takashi Miike's loose remake of a 60's movie known as Spook Warfare. Shigeru Mizuki was a consultant, and even has a small role in the film, so it makes sense that the movie does its best to recreate Mizuki's designs.

 It follows the adventures of a little boy (Ryunosuke Kamiki) who is bitten by a radioactive ritual parade float, which marks him out as the destined Ki-Rin rider, a warrior for peace and stuff. The kid, Tadeshi, has other problems - his parents are recently divorced and he was sent out to a small town in the country. His mother is never around, so he needs to look after his senile grandfather.

 But the wheels of destiny are spinning, and somewhere in Japan the ghost of an ancient warlord is mustering hordes of dissatisfied spirits in an industrial hellscape that doubles as his base and is also a giant flying monster(!) He's rounded up all the innocent yokai he could find, to throw them into a furnace and turn them into an evil robotic army.

 So... yeah, Tadeshi needs to fight the evil ghost. This involves a group of Yokai seeking him out, a magic sword, adventures and misadventures... it's a kid's film through and through, and to be honest, not a terribly engaging one. The effects weren't great for 2005, much less now, and while the Yokai are all charming and mostly creative costuming, the main opponents here -the machine-yokai hybrids- really aren't that much to look at, as well as being composed of the aforementioned bad CGI. 

 I am really not the target audience for this, despite loving Yokai lore. Miike's a great director, and manages some memorable imagery here, but the film is just pitched too low. To be honest I liked it the most while the Yokai haven't really made their presence known, as once they're in the picture they crowd out any subtlety or a hope for decent pacing; the early scenes of Tadeshi's daily life strike a lovely, wistful tone, and an early scene where he goes look for the sword on his own works really well, with some lovely natural scenery.

 After that... there's things to like, for sure. The main villain (played by Etsushi Toyokawa) cuts a striking figure, but the biggest impression is made by his #2, Agi (Chiaki Kuriyama,) a henchwoman with the obvious hots for her boss, rocking a white beehive hairdo and tight dresses. She fights with strings she swings around like whips, and is basically a lot of fun to watch.

 The Yokai themselves are cool to look at, but not so interesting to listen to. There are a lot of them, though, especially when they form a ridiculously large mob near the end - a seriously impressive bit of spectacle.

 So it's not really something I would recommend, except for babysitting purposes. There are a few touches that are pretty inappropriate for children -a severed arm, gushing blood, or multiple shots of kids lustily groping a Yokai's milky thighs- but nothing your typical kid can't handle these days. I've seen worse in other Japanese kid's movies, so I wouldn't really blame them on Miike.

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

 Dungeons and Dragons always been a big part of my life. I was sold the Advanced set when I was eight by a neighbor, and I've been playing it, off and on, ever since. I can't really say the same for the dreadful 80's cartoon, or the terrible movies they made back in the 00s. I had zero expectations for the movie, based on trailers that did a pretty bad job of selling why it was appealing except for the promise of Gelatinous Cubes and other classic D&D beasties on-screen. It just looked like a Marvel movie clone.

 Well, it kind of is a Marvel movie clone, mostly taking after Guardians of the Galaxy. The good news is that... well, the Guardians movies are not a bad thing to crib off. This is, like last year's Top Gun: Maverik, a fine example of a crowd-pleasing blockbuster done exactly right, with so much love and care lavished on everything from the script on up that it's all but impossible to begrudge it anything. It's about as light as an entertainment as it could be, studiously avoiding anything that may possibly cause anyone offense, but that's hard to fault when the result is so effortlessly charming.

 Directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, who also wrote the script (along with Michael Gilio,) have a deep love for the game, and it shows; The story they crafted may be a bit too good, too clever, too scripted to accurately portray a standard roleplaying scenario, but it showcases the appeal of these sort of stories extremely well. You can tell that they didn't just think about the characters in the story- I'm willing to bet they also have a pretty clear image of the fictional people who are playing those characters. It's also full of the sort of improvisation and weird tangents that make playing the game a joy.

 But there are no metafiction shenanigans whatsoever here, unless you go looking for them. The movie tells the story of a band of rogues: charming bard Edgin (Chris Pine), burly barbarian Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), Simon the Sorcerer* (Justice Smith, who between this and the Jurassic Worlds is kind of getting typecast as an ineffectual nerd) and finally Doric the half-demon druid (Sophia Lillis).

 Edgin and Holga start the movie imprisoned in the Forgotten Realm's northern reaches, D&D's most popular setting, and we get treated to some exposition as Edgin recounts how they were captured in a botched heist, betrayed by the person who hired them.

 After a very funny escape they go back to their hometown and find that another previous companion has hit it big in a nearby city, and is now the guardian to Edgin's daughter. This companion, Forge, is played by none other than Hugh Grant, and... is it a spoiler to say he'll betray them and become one of the film's main villains? If so, spoiler warning! He'll betray them and become one of the film's main villains. Seriously, it's pretty obvious, since Grant is basically reprising his character from Paddington 2 (minus the acting fetish). He's in cahoots with the wizard that got Holga and Edgin imprisoned in the first place, and wants to keep Edgin's daughter, as (in a fantastic bit of petty villainy) he's grown a bit fond of her himself.

 So that's where the film's central heist comes in, and before you can say 'you look like a trustworthy fellow!' Edgin fills out the party so he can steal his daughter back. What follows is... not necessarily predictable, as plans go awry and new complications are introduced.

 The story zigs and zags, baking in a lot of comedy into the mix, but what impressed me the most was just how clever and varied the action is (which includes a little, but not much actual combat; another way the movie differs from your standard D&D session.)

 It does have some really corny jokes (part and parcel of the Marvel style it perpetuates), but even when it, for example, makes the obvious joke of huge Holga being really into little people (hobbits, basically), it quickly moves past that obvious bit of silliness to find a softer, more humanistic thing to say about her character. This is way better written and conceptualized than its most obvious inspirations - much as I like James Gunn's creations, their plots are not this intricate or well formed.

 

 The action -both combat and otherwise- is great- fun, funny, and clearly shot. The movie won't win any awards for visual excellence (other than the effects, which are varied, pretty damn good, and with a great eye towards the ridiculous), but it conveys its outlandish and often complex ideas effortlessly and has the time to drop in a lot of cool little flourishes: the movie is fond of overhead shots, for example, making the characters seem like miniatures on a battle map. There's a ton of fan-service, but it's all in service of jokes or the story, so it doesn't stick out. And as a fan of monsters in general, and D&D's monster manuals in particular, I couldn't find it in me to resent it anyhow; So many beasties.

 The characters are all great and fun to hang around. Everyone is game, playing pretty much to type but doing it well, and supporting the tone expertly. It's... it's just an all-round ludicrously entertaining movie, a cotton-candy confection that's a tiny bit insubstantial but sweet as all hell and fills its two hours and something with an amazing amount of fantastic locales, beasts, and story.

 I have no idea what the film's (deserved!) success bodes. A Forgotten Realms cinematic universe? A Dark Sun or Ravenloft series on HBO? Shadowrun or Exalted getting their own movies? There may come a time to bemoan the long tail this movie is sure to have. But for now, let's celebrate its unlikely brilliance.

*: Yes, seriously.

Three Thousand Years of Longing

 Now this... this is something special.

 George Miller has made a bunch of movies in the last thirty-odd years; from Mad Maxes to Happy Feetses to Witches of Eastwick... They're all heartfelt, idiosyncratic, and have more thought and care put into them than most other things out there. Other than that it's a pretty eclectic list, isn't it?

 All of his stuff is pretty personal. But with the success of the latest Mad Max so far he got the clout to finish a passion project of his. So if Fury Road was 'a movie for them', what does 'a movie for me' even mean?

 We're talking about the man who followed up one of the purest story-book movies ever with (the wonderful, but very strange) Babe: Pig in the City. So yes, his new movie is weird, personal and dense. And oh yes it's good; So, so good.

 Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) is a narratologist* who's got a little more than her toes dipped in the realm of imagination. Despite being collected, completely logical-minded and pragmatic, hallucinations of fantastical and mythological characters often intrude into her life. She's learnt to ignore them.
 In light of this, Dr. Binnie isn't overtly surprised when, in an Istambul hotel room, she accidentally frees a Genie from a bottle. She is a bit concerned, though, when the Genie played by Idris Elba (always referred to by its more mythological name, Djinn - Ifrits make an appearance too!) won't politely go away.

 The Djinn, you see, needs Alithea to make three wishes - not just any wish, it needs to be something straight from the heart - before he can be set free from his curse, or back to the bottle he goes.

 Alithea refuses to ask for anything at first. For one, she claims she's perfectly content with her life and insists she wants for nothing. And besides, as a student of stories and mythology, she's perfectly aware that in stories about wishes, irony and poetic justice prevail: they'll always come back and bite you in the ass.

 So they get to talking, and then swapping stories. The Djinn tells of how he was imprisoned by Solomon himself: It seems Solomon went to see the queen of Sheba (not the other way around - take that, Bible!) and he did not take kindly to the Djinn competing (futilely) for his affections.

 Moved by the story, Alithea tells of how she had an imaginary friend as a child whom she inadvertently killed in a fit of doubt. In turn the Djinn tells of his other 'incarcerations', as he ironically calls the previous times he was freed from the bottle. They're lovely little stories full of unexpected turns and tangents that take us from the golden age of the Ottoman empire to Byzantium to the decline of the Ottomans in more modern times.

 Each story is lavishly and beautifully represented on the screen with an eye for detail and humorous moments and the sort of visual panache you'd expect from Miller.

 As they talk and exchange stories, Alithea (who has confessed she doesn't feel as others do - she only really feels emotions through stories) becomes lost in the Djinn's tales... and makes a wish.

 A pretty rotten one, as far as these things go, but it's granted by the genie with no protest. And I'll leave things there, because seeing how things progress is part of this movie's powerful spell.

 There is ugliness in its many stories, and it brings up that old chestnut that our modern world is hostile to magic. But at no point is there bitterness. Humanity and the fruits of science are celebrated to the end by one who stands metaphysically opposed to them. And despite everything, it's still an unapologetically romantic story.

 It's an incredible, beautiful, thorny movie that hides beneath its romantic exterior a tangle of themes and ideas that I'm still trying to unpick a few days later. It's the closest I've ever seen anything come to The Sandman - and I do not deploy this comparison lightly, since the full Sandman comic run is one of my favorite works of literature. It's easily the best and most original thing I've seen this year, which is high praise considering Everything Everywhere All the Time came out only a few months ago.

 I should mention the surfaces of this thing - bright primary colors, tightly composed images, well thought out camera moves and imaginative and cool visual effects... but also the music, the acting (both Idriss Elba and Tilda Swinton are superb) and the editing! Scene transitions are a marvel, smoothly progressing visually into each other, or linked by sounds that drift from one to the next. A thing of beauty.

 I should probably also warn that this is a movie that feels as if it was custom-made for me - from one of the segments being set in Byzantium to the focus on stories and mythology, I don't think I could be objective about it even if  I wanted to.

 Would I recommend this to anyone? I suspect a lot of people will find it too shapeless, too weird, or like some elements but not be engaged by others. And that's fine. But something this original and well put together deservers you at least give it a shot.

* - Surprisingly enough, it's a real field of study. Though I do wonder if they draw enough attention to run TED-talk-like seminars on the academic circuit...