Scott Pilgrim vs The World (2010)

Scott Pilgrim is a 23 year old Canadian slacker who spends all day playing old video games when he isn't playing bass in a shitty band. I guess you could call him a hipster, although that word has been abused so much that I don't even know what it means anymore. He is dating a 17 year old girl named Knives Chau, although she is all but forgotten when he becomes obsessed with a mysterious American ex-pat named Ramona Flowers. He learns that in order to win her love he is going to have to deal with the emotional fallout from her past relationships and hopefully grow up a little in the process and stop being such a whiny douchebag. I should also mention that in the world of Scott Pilgrim (the one he is versus) these kind of issues are generally dealt with through wicked awesome kung fu fights and the acquisition of video game style powerups.

Before we get further I should lay my nerd-cards on the table and admit that I'm a big fan of Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series, although it shouldn't come as a surprise that I like a comic book that uses fistfights as metaphors for dealing with emotional baggage. I was also pretty excited when I heard that Edgar Wright was going to direct, as I like pretty much everything he has done. I don't get this mentality amongst nerds that a film director has to be "one of us" in order to "get it", but I think in this case it's pretty important and anyone who has seen Spaced knows that Wright shares a lot of the same obsessions as the comic. He's a solid filmmaker to boot. I knew the series was in safe hands.

The appeal of the comic is that it's full of all these crazy ideas that bubble up without comment or explanation. In the world of Scott Pilgrim, delivery girls travel through "subspace highways" in people's subconscious and veganism gives you telekinetic superpowers. Indie bands can rock so hard that they literally kill you and every argument is resolved through video-game-inspired epic kung fu battles. When enemies are defeated in battle they explode into change; "Not even enough for the bus ride home" Scott laments after he defeats his first opponent. All of this is carried through into the movie, which uses all sorts of audio and visual effects to make it look more like a cartoon or a video game. Wright peppers the film with all sort of joyfully absurd touches. There is one scene in the film that has a laugh track like an episode of Seinfeld, complete with theme music. No real reason that I could tell.

There are also all the video game references, which get a bit obnoxious after a while. The first time a band is named after an obscure old video game it's cute; the fourth time it isn't. However, one thing I like about both the comic books and the movie is the way it incorporates video game iconography to tell the story, using things like status bars and experience points as metaphors for Scott's personal growth. Video games have a language all of their own, so it's interesting to see it being used in a different medium.

With a visual style drawn from comic books and video games, this film could have easily been hyperactive and visually overwhelming. Luckily this isn't the case, thanks to some skillful editing and meticulous composition. The fighting in particular is great, shot in an exaggerated, wire-fu style which suits the source material perfectly. No shaky-cam bullshit here (The Expendables, I'm looking at you). Everything is accentuated with sound and visual effects to make it seem like a video game. As a result it never seems like anyone is in any real danger of being hurt, so the fights don't really have the tension of a tradition action scene, but they are really well put together and are a lot of fun to watch.

Another thing that could have gone disastrously wrong was the pacing. It's never an easy task to compress six chunky graphic novels into a feature film, but they were very smart in the way they pared down the narrative to the bare essentials. It was touch and go for the first fifteen minutes, which goes from jump-cut to jump-cut so rapidly that it's completely disorienting, but it settles down to a more manageable pace later on. Even with some good script decisions (the film completely drops the subplot about Knives' dad, which I thought was pointless anyway) it moves way too fast to develop any of the characters. To be honest I would have preferred a few more character moments, even at the expense of an evil ex or two.

This ties into the major problem with the film (and to a lesser extent the comics), which is that the central protagonists aren't particularly likeable or interesting. It's never clear why Scott Pilgrim is infatuated with Ramona Flowers or vice versa, a pretty damning flaw when the plot is structured around Scott fighting for their relationship. I've heard people say that their relationship is intentionally shallow, another manifestation of Scott's emotionally stunted world view, but that doesn't fly with me. I'm pretty sure you're supposed to be rooting for Scott to defeat Ramona's seven evil exes and win over her love. You can use meta-textual arguments to justify all sort of narrative shortcomings. The ending of the comic book was more satisfying in that respect. It plays out a lot differently than the movie, which is not surprising since the last book hadn't been written when it was being filmed.

I also have to mention the casting, which is excellent. Ellen Wong is a particular highlight as Knives Chau. Aubrey Plaza is great as the bitchy Julie Powers (although this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has seen her in Parks and Recreation). Kieran Culkin is great as Scott's gay roommate Wallace Wells, Jason Schwartzman is eminently hateable as Gideon Graves, and I just should stop before I just list the entire imdb credits. Special mention must be made of Toronto, who is typically typecast as New York but here has a rare role playing herself. Congratulations, Toronto. Nice to see you getting some recognition.

When it comes to the cast though, the skinny, awkward elephant in the room is the choice of Michael Cera as Scott Pilgrim. Now I don't have a hate-on for this guy like a lot of people do. He doesn't have a lot of range as an actor but I think he's good at what he does, so I don't want it to seem like I'm riding a wave of Internet e-hate when I say that I don't think he was a good choice here. Scott Pilgrim comes across as almost unbearably whiny, and while Scott Pigrim was whiny and self-absorbed in the comics he could be cocky and self-assured too. That doesn't come across too well in the movie, making his character a lot less likable and a lot more punchable.

Anyway, I think this is a fun film worth seeing. It's definitely worth seeing if you are a fan of the comic in any way, shape or form, although if that's the case you've probably already seen it. Good thing too, because I don't think it will be in cinemas for much longer. It has flopped so hard. Audiences have spoken and they would rather see Julia Roberts engage in self-indulgent travel-porn. Between this movie and Kick-Ass, I think producers are going to think twice about funding big-budget nerd-pandering movies, regardless of how well they are received at Comic Con. It's a shame, because while flawed it's pretty rare that a film comes along that is this fun and creative.

The Expendables (2010)

I'm not going to insult your intelligence by explaining the cast or premise of The Expendables. If you have fond memories of the same 80s action movies that I do, then you probably already know about it and have been gritting your teeth in anticipation of it's release, but I guess that's part of the problem. Any film that trades so heavily in nostalgia is bound to raise expectations to impossible levels. I'm certainly not immune. Let's face it, it's been a pretty lean decade for action films and I'm only human. When you've been subsisting on direct-to-video scraps, a film like this is going to have you climbing aboard the hype train for a one-way trip to Disappointment Interchange. Luckily my natural cynicism kicked in before catastrophic derailment, and my excitement was tempered to manageable levels. In the end I found the film enjoyable but seriously flawed. Not quite a non-stop express to Awesome Central, but an exciting if bumpy ride that eventually pulls into Adequacy Station.

If there is a penny on the train tracks that threatens to derail the whole film, it's the script. At its core it's a fairly standard action movie scenario. A corrupt CIA agent (Eric Roberts) is stirring up trouble in a fictional South American country (surprisingly it's not Val Verde, the fictional country referenced in Commando and Predator) and it's up to Stallone and his team of Expendables to take him down. Somehow though, it seems oddly structured and paced, curiously missing in typical action-movie beats. Apparently there were a lot of rewrites due to scheduling conflicts, and it shows. You know how sometimes a big-name actor will drop by the set of a Direct-to-Video film for a quick paycheck, but because their scenes are so rushed they seem weird and out-of-place? Well most of this film is like that.

The other major problem with writing a script for such a big, iconic cast is that it's really hard to juggle them properly. Inevitably some actors are going to get shortchanged. Statham and Stallone get the bulk of the screen time, Li and Lundgren get a lot to do as well, but some of the others, like Crews and Couture, just show up inexplicably in the middle in the film. It's sad, because at 107 minutes there just isn't enough time to develop any of the characters properly, or at all. There isn't even a getting-to-know-you scene where everyone is introduced by name and specialty. Crews's character has the hilarious name Hale Caesar, but they don't even bother to mention it as far as I could tell.

A couple of Expendables appear briefly but manage to steal the show anyway, and one is Mickey Rourke as their mentor Tool. There's a part where he's chatting with Stallone and gets all emotional as he relates one of his old war stories. It's a cliched moment but Rourke sells it, and I was thinking "Why are you in this movie, Mickey? You are too good for this script." He's given the character his trademark Rourke quirks (or "quourkes", as I call them) like goofy glasses and a big pipe. He steals every scene he's in. Can we have some prequels about Tool's previous adventures with Stallone please? You can call it Toolin' Around.

The other Expendable I liked was Dolph Lundgren, who, like in the recent (and awesome) Universal Soldier: Regeneration, looks like a terrifying Frankenstein's monster. When he calls someone "cockroach" or "insect", I can believe that they'd shit their pants in fear. I particularly liked the bit where he stands on a guy's head (while he's driving!) and when he pulls him up off the floor he's got a Dolph-sized bootprint on his face. I'm glad they gave his character Gunnar his own little mini-arc too. When the film begins he is acting crazy and Stallone kicks him out of the gang. He is hired by the bad guy and tries to kill the other Expendables, but at the very end of the film (spoiler) all is forgiven and he is brought back into the fold. I thought that was very nice of them. I guess they aren't that Expendable after all.

Nobody is expecting a brilliant script from a film like this, but I do expect one or two badass one-liners and I'm not sure I got them. I know terrible one-liners are action movie staples, but here they don't seem to make a lot of sense. There's a part where Terry Crews blasts some bad guys and then shouts "You remember that next Christmas!" What does that even mean? When Schwarzenegger pinned a guy to the wall with a machete and quipped "Stick around!" it wasn't exactly Oscar Wilde, but at least it made sense in context. Schwarzenegger's much ballyhooed cameo in this film is particularly disappointing. It almost seems improvised.

Unpolished banter is just one symptom of a script riddled with weird moments. Subplots are brought up and then abandoned. Certain lines seem important but go nowhere, like vestigial organs from earlier drafts of the script. Stuff that is common to direct-to-video but is strange to see in a big budget film. For instance, there's a part where bad guy Eric Roberts is discussing the evil General's rebellious daughter, and when he discovers that she's a budding artist he shouts "She paints too? This is how it starts!!" I don't know where this art-hating thing comes from, but in a neat callback the General later paints up his men with lightning bolts on their faces like they're the Baseball Furies.

Now, I hear you saying "Nobody gives a shit about the script! If you want more than tits and explosions in your action films then you're a gay homo fag etc." I really hate this attitude, but okay. Let's talk about the action scenes.

As we all know, the current style of filming action scenes involves strapping handheld cameras to some hyperactive labradors and then cutting between them every half second. This method is the mortal enemy of old-school action, which emphasised choreography, clear geography and visual storytelling. If modern action scenes were a person (I picture them as a two-headed monster with the heads of Michael Bay and Paul Greengrass) the old-school action hero would impale it with a pipe and tell it to "let off some steam".

I thought if anyone could understand the appeal of classic action movie choreography it would be Stallone, but alas it was not to be. The fight scenes in this film are over-edited and sloppily put together. There was a Li/Lundren fight that was apparently choreographed by the great Corey Yuen, but damned if I could tell from the way it was edited. It's a pity, because from what I could see of the fights they were pretty good, with lots of creative and interesting violence. Gary Daniels gets a particularly grisly and entertaining death.

The action isn't all bad though. Action sequences that do not involve hand-to-hand combat are filmed well, with lots of fiery explosions. The final assault on the General's mansion is a particular highlight, with a body count in the triple digits. I can think of a lot of good bits, such as Stallone's crazy-fast reloading skills, Terry Crews mowing down dozens of bad guys with his full-auto shotgun and Statham tossing knives into many uniformed bad guys. With moments like these I can't write the film off completely. It's still a lot of fun.

I should note that most of the blood effects in the film are all CGI. Obviously I would have preferred squibs, and if I had to guess at why they went in that direction I'd think it was so they could have the option of selling their souls down the track and cutting the film down to a PG-13. There's also a bit where Steve Austen stumbles around on CGI fire, which looks terrible. I know Steve Austen is a big guy, but I'm pretty sure you could have found a suitably huge stuntman and put him in an asbestos suit. Or put a normal sized stuntman on a miniaturised set, like Godzilla. There are many options. CGI fire is the coward's way out.

So yeah, the film had some flaws, but it also had some good action and memorable moments. I enjoyed it a lot. Judging from the crowd at the showing I went to, I suspect there are a lot of hipsters seeing this film simply for snark potential, but luckily they can only pay for their ticket in real money and not Irony Dollars, so the film is still doing pretty well. I was worried that it would be another case of Snakes on a Plane syndrome, where everyone is so busy making fun of the premise that they forget to see the actual film. Hopefully it makes enough money that they can make a sequel. I'd definitely see it. I'm even hoping for a Direct-to-Video knockoff starring Steven Seagal. They can call it The Dispensables.

Cybertracker (1994)

Cybertracker is a film that dares to ask the question:
What if the Terminator was Robocop?

In Cybertracker, Don "The Dragon" Wilson takes a break from pumping out Bloodfist films and teams up with Ring of Fire cinematographer Richard Pepin to dabble in a slightly different genre; one with lots of towering glass skyscrapers, hugely powerful corporations with generic names like Cybercore and lots of green computery fonts that roll out onto the screen with a series of electronic bleeps and blorps. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Not Too Distant Future. Wilson plays Special Agent Eric Philips, a bodyguard for the US Government, who has been assigned to protect the controversial Senator Dilly.

Dilly is the main proponent of the new Computerised Justice System, where a computer program determines the guilt of defendants and the frequently lethal sentences are carried out by low-budget Terminators called Core Trackers. It doesn't seem to be very popular, because when the first see Dilly at a press conference the attendees are greatly outnumbered by anti-Cybercore protestors. They are waving hilarious signs that say "Computers don't have hearts" and "Computers aren't machines... they're killers". The best part is where a guy angrily shouts "Computers killed my brother!" I want that on a t-shirt.

The speech is interrupted by an attack from an anti-Cybercore terrorist organisation called UHR, or the Union of Human Rights. Wilson foils the attack and saves the senator's life (scored by some ridiculously over-the-top choral music), much to the chagrin of Dilly's personal chief of security Ross, played by Richard Norton. Despite Ross' protests, Dilly decides to test Wilson's loyalty by making him a witness as they brutally execute a Cybercore scientist who they suspect of collaboration with UHR. Wilson balks and is consequently framed with her murder. With a Core Tracker chasing him down, he is kidnapped by UHR and forced to help them infiltrate Cybercore's headquarters and steal evidence of their illegal activities.

Although the Trackers are supposed to be virtually indestructible, Wilson takes out three of them over the course of the film, the first one 25 minutes in. Every time he destroys one the bad guys get another identical Tracker out of cold storage, which really deflates the tension. Taking a cue from Terminator 2, their bodies are made from some sort of rubbery protoplasmic goop, allowing them to store guns in their thighs with tearaway stripper-panels in their pants for easy access. Of course this feature also allows Wilson to shove a live grenade into it's abdominal cavity, so it's a pretty serious design flaw. The Trackers are played by Jim Maniaci, who makes for a pretty imposing/hilarious bad guy as he is fucking enormous. Unfortunately it makes it particularly unconvincing when he has to tuck a tree-trunk sized arm into his leather jacket and pretend like his arm has been blasted off.

Although the film is far too busy ripping off the Terminator to include an actual plot, they do manage to work in a love interest. At first Wilson is too hung up on his ex-wife, sitting in his apartment watching security camera footage of them fighting over his job, which I guess he recorded for some reason. This scene is pretty hilarious as it includes some terrible acting and head-scratching dialog like "I can't live my life waiting for you to walk through that door, dead or alive." Eventually though, Wilson meets Connie, a TV news reporter and the secret leader of UHR. Though for the leader of a terrorist organisation she's not very secretive about her political views, regularly including UHR-sympathetic , anti-Cybercore editorials in her news reports. She and Wilson exchange quips, bodily fluids etc.

It's easy to forget that this film is set in the future since the technology looks particularly dated, even for 1994. One weird touch is that Wilson's apartment is controlled by a voice-activated computer that is basically his robo-wife. It asks him annoying questions about his day and gets huffy when he's curt with it, and he even apologises to it like a chump. For some reason it's programmed it to simulate drunkenness, which sounds like a pretty bad idea. I think we've all drunkenly bought stupid crap off the internet, I wouldn't want my computer doing that shit too. It has all my credit card numbers. His computer also helps him sleep by blasting his head with lasers. Hopefully when he breaks news of his relationship with Connie it doesn't start jealously chasing him around the apartment with kitchen appliances like in Electric Dreams.

Since this is a Merhi/Peppin film it's really about the action, but unfortunately it's mostly rote and uninteresting gunfights. It's established quite early on that the Trackers are virtually immune to gunfire, so I'm not sure what anyone gains from three uninterrupted minutes of UHR freedom fighters cowering behind crates and firing clip after clip into it's torso. There are some decent stunts now again, though. I love seeing people flung across a room by gunfire or explosions, even when the wires are clearly visible as they are here. There's a good bit where the Tracker gets caught in a fiery explosion and stumbles around on fire for a while before getting blasted through a fence with a bazooka.

One thing they do love in this film is having cars ramp into the air, flip over and explode. I believe it happens three times, including once with a fire engine, regardless of whether it makes any sense. In one scene Wilson parks his car across the road to block the path of an incoming van, only to have it ramp up off his car, flip over and explode, leaving his sedan completely unharmed. And that one makes the most sense, other times there's a car just parked in the middle of the road for no reason except to obscure visibility of the stunt ramp, which is clearly visible anyway. I do appreciate their realism-shunning commitment to vehicular mayhem though.

They also work in a few excuses for people to be unarmed, so that Don Wilson can unleash "The Dragon". Consequently he does a lot of kicking of guns out of people's hands, a move I wouldn't think would be very effective in reality but here it's like the evil henchmen's kryponite. There's also a scene at a police station where they have an order to shoot him on sight yet they still attack him with billy clubs. None of it is as well choreographed as I would like. I was looking forward to the big Don "The Dragon" Wilson/Richard Norton fight at the end, but while it's the best fight in the film it still isn't that great. It's one of those fights where the combatants politely take turns wailing on eachother until one of them finally goes down. Wilson gets in a few cool spin kicks at the end, though.

If you showed a robot The Terminator and Robocop and told it to make a movie you'd get something like this, unless the robot refused to participate in the production of anti-robot propaganda on political grounds. It's like Terminator without the thrills and Robocop without the social commentary. As a delivery vehicle for car explosions it's okay, but it doesn't use the sci-fi setting to say much of anything, except that a judicial system controlled and operated by computers would be a bad thing, which isn't really blowing anyone's minds. Surprisingly the film ends with a quote from Ayn Rand, who I'm sure would have appreciated the film's anti-corporate message and the notion that emotion and compassion are vital components of the judicial system.

Undisputed 3: Redemption (2010)

Dolor keeps his pimp hand strong

I was really impressed with Undisputed 2: Last Man Standing, a direct-to-DVD sequel to a Wesley Snipes film that was way better than it had any right to be. It starred Michael Jai White, so I was predisposed to like it anyway, but it's surprising quality really comes down to the one-two punch of director Isaac Florentine and his high-kicking frequent collaborator Scott Adkins. Florentine does some amazing things with fight scenes and Adkins steals the show even in minor henchmen roles, so when I heard that Florentine was directing a third film in the series and bumping Adkins up to a starring role, I just about vomited in excitement.

As the title suggests, Undisputed 3: Redemption carries on the series tradition of having the villain return as the protagonist of the subsequent film. Well, maybe after two films it's too early to call it a "tradition", and it's probably not so much a thematic consideration as it is a financial one, but I still think it's a neat idea. In this case it means the return of Scott Adkins as Yuri Boyka, who touts himself as the world's most "complete fighter", whatever that means.

When the movie begins Boyka's knee and confidence are shattered after his loss to MJ-Dubs. It must have been a while because he has grown a hobo beard. He spends his days mopping the filthy prison toilets and his nights re-training his injured leg with a system of weights and pulleys. You'd think the rest of the film would be about Boyka fighting his inner demons and crawling his way back into the ring but no; it takes all of five minutes for Boyka to give himself a shave and a haircut (he did an amazing job with just a rusty razor blade) and leap into the ring. One of his signature double-spinning kicks and the prison's best fighter is down for the count. Boyka is back.

The first Undisputed film was about an underground prison boxing ring, while the second film moved the setting to Russia and changed it to free-form martial arts. The third film goes the next logical step and introduces an International Prison Fighting League, where the best prison fighters from around the world are shipped to a remote prison in Bulgaria and forced to compete for the amusement of rich guys. This allows for a wide mixture of fighting styles, with Koreans (Ilram Choi) bringing some Tai Kwon Do, Brazillians (Lateef Crowder) busting out the capoeira moves, etc. Of course there's also a loudmouth American named Turbo (Mykel Shannon Jenkins).

I don't know if you're supposed to think Turbo's in-your-face American sass is supposed to be charming, but he annoyed the shit out of me for the first half of the movie. This guy never shuts up. He's the complete opposite of Boyka, who rarely says a word except to give Turbo a richly-deserved "shut the fuck up" now and then. Of course, it's pretty clear from the beginning that these two are destined to get into a fight and then be BFF. Eventually they do the bonding thing and although Turbo gives Boyka his life story (he's ex-military with two kids etc), Boyka doesn't reveal anything about his past, which I liked. It would ruin the mystery.

The villain here is Dolor, played by Marko Zaror, a Chilean martial artist who you might know from Killtro and Mirageman. He's the pampered, drug-addicted superstar of the prison fighting league. He even gets to sit under a tree sipping a cocktail while the rest of the fighters break rocks in a quarry. Turbo and Boyka have the last laugh because they make prison wine out of lemons and turn hard labour into an impromptu training session. Dolor seems completely unhinged and makes a pretty colourful villain, but unfortunately he doesn't get a lot of screen time. Hopefully they can remedy that in Undisputed 4: Fistful of Dolor.

There's not really much of a plot here, but I like that. Like in Ninja, Florentine just jettisons all the superfluous bullshit. We spend some time with Turbo and Boyka's fight managers, Farnatti and Gaga (no relation to Lady I think) who in the end decide to sell out their fighters to the crooked kingpin and bet all their money on Dolor. Even worse, it also turns out that all of the losing fighters are driven out into the middle of nowhere and machine-gunned. Boyka doesn't find out until the very end, when he learns it from the old man who sweeps the fighting ring. If you're ever in a prison fighting league, keep an eye out for an old guy with a broom; he's probably an ex-fighter with some helpful tips.

At the end the guards rig the fight by crippling Turbo before his match with Dolor, so Boyka helps Turbo escape the prison so he can fight in his place. Not sure why the guards didn't just beat the shit out of Boyka too, especially after he injures a dozen guards during that prison escape, but I guess they thought he'd never win with his gimpy leg. The joke's on them, because after Dolor breaks his busted knee he wraps a filthy mop around it and he's as good as new. I hope that wasn't the mop they used to clean the shitters.

The big attraction here are the fights, and do I ever love the way Florentine shoots his fight scenes. The guy is a martial artist himself, so he knows what his fighters can do and how to show off their moves as effectively as possible. Ring fighting can be really boring if filmed incorrectly, but here the camerawork is almost as acrobatic as the fighters themselves, sweeping around in a way that makes you feels like you're the one getting kicked in the head. The fights are choreographed by Larnell Stovall, and combine the bloody brutality of early 90s kickboxing flicks with the acrobatics and careful choreography of Hong Kong kung fu films. Every punch and kick feels like it's going to take someone's head off.

Watching something like this it makes me wonder when people got together and decided that shaky-cam was an acceptable substitute for fight scenes. I know it got really annoying in that post-Matrix period where every film had to have slow-motion wire-fu, but this is a million times worse. Surely I can't be the only one who feels this way. I'll bet one day I'm going to find a pair of sunglasses that reveal subliminal messages on billboards that say SHAKY HANDHELD CAMERAS ARE MORE REALISTIC and RAPID EDITING MAKES THINGS MORE EXCITING. Thankfully we've still got Florentine fighting the good fight.

Bad Lieutenant (1992)

You know, everyone uses that shot of Keitel pointing his gun at the
camera, so instead here he is jerking off in front of some teenage girls.

When I first heard that Herzog was directing a remake of Bad Lieutenant starring Nicholas Cage, I thought it was a great idea; the perfect synthesis of Herzog weirdness and Cage's ludicrous overacting. In the end it wasn't quite as crazy as I was expecting, and instead I developed an itch to rewatch the original. It had been years since I saw it and I didn't remember too much about it except for a few famous scenes and the fact that you saw Kietel's dong. For some reason male full-frontal nudity was a big deal back in '92. Mostly I remember it being a joyless slog, but since I was probably drunk at the time I decided to give it another chance.

In this film Harvey Kietel plays a policeman of questionable moral fiber. He is not named as far as I can tell, so I'm going to assume his name is Lieutenant Bad. The guy is a real asshole and an absolute drug friend; there is barely a scene where he isn't shooting up heroin, smoking crack, snorting coke or gulping down liquor. At one point he shows up at a girl's house (Zoe Lund from Ms. 45) to freebase some heroin, and when she answers the door he's holding a six-pack and swigging out of a can. I assumed it was beer, but it turns out to be Diet Coke, which is arguably worse. The label is featured quite prominently, so if it was product placement it was a pretty ballsy move on behalf of the Coca-Cola Corporation.

Even worse it seems like he doesn't care about crime at all. In one scene he just watchesa guy break into some parked cars as he casually talks to his bookie on a pay phone. The closest he comes to doing his job is when he wanders into a crime scene, steals whatever drugs and cash he can find and then walks off. In one scene he walks into the aftermath of a convenience store robbery and shakes the criminals down for money, right in front of the store owner and with another cop a few meters away. I don't know how he gets away with it. Makes you wonder how he ever made it beyond Bad Detective. You never see him at a police station or anything. If he didn't chat with some of his fellow officers now and then I could have easily assumed that he was just some maniac pretending to be a cop, like Maniac Cop.

Once thing I forgot about the film is that he has kids. There's a pretty funny scene where he berates his two boys as he drives them to school and then sits in his car snorting coke as he watches them walk into the school building. There's something about fatherhood that makes his behaviour seem that much worse, particularly the famous scene where he sexually harrasses two teenage girls. Under the threat of calling their parents he blackmails one into showing him her ass and the other into miming fellatio while he talks dirty and jerks off. It's a pretty uncomfortable five minutes, and to cap it off I think he ejaculates all over the side of their car, adding insult to injury.

One thing I really liked about the film was that you get this real sense of Catholic guilt. Keitel renounces his Catholocism, but still there's no escape for him. Everywhere he goes the film hammers him with religious iconography. Jesus is watching. There are rosary beads hanging from his rear vision mirror, those teenage girls he harrasses are wearing crucifixes, and I especially liked the drug dealer with the Jesus-themed couch cover. Nothing says piety like lighting up your crack pipe as you park your ass on the face of the Lord.

This all ties into the crime that drives Kietel into making a last shot at redemption. A nun gets raped by a couple of gang members, and although she knows who the perpetrators are she refuses to tell the police. She has forgiven them, like Christ forgave the nun-rapists in Bethany. Kietel doesn't get it: Surely the best thing for her to do would be to turn them in so they couldn't do it to anyone else? This all culminates in that incredible scene at the church, where Kietel blames a drug-induced vision of Jesus Christ for his problems, eventually breaking down and begging for forgiveness. One thing this film has over the remake is a pretty fantastic performance from Kietel. Nicholas Cage's acting style may be entertaining but it's not believable. Kietel is. You will believe a man can call Jesus a "rat fuck".

The whole movie is set against the backdrop of a baseball match between the New York Mets and the LA Dodgers. I don't know shit about baseball, but the gist of it is that the Mets start making a miraculous comeback after trailing the Dodgers 3-0. Darryl Strawberry gets mentioned a lot. Kietel bets against the Mets each time, losing over and over again and getting deeper into debt. A lot of time is devoted to this sub-plot; it's always on the television, on the radio, it seems to be all anyone talks about. His mulleted bookie tries to warn Kietel that he's attracting the attention of some dangerous people, but he just laughs it off.

As things spiral out of control it becomes clear that there's only one way the film can end, but they still wrap things up in a pretty interesting way. In a typical "bad cop" movie, your Dirty Tom, Dick and Harrys, you put up with the crooked cop because you know that in the end the he is going to go mete out some "street justice" by going places that the law can't. Here you expect something similar, specifically for him to shoot the two rapists in the face, but they pull the rug out from under you. Kietel knows he is going to die, so his last ditch attempt at redemption is giving the rapists a bunch of money and putting them on a bus out of town. I also like how bus driver just sits there watching Kietel slap the shit out of these assholes until they get on the bus. I probably would have driven off.

Herzog claimed he'd never even seen this film and that the title was just a marketing exercise. I can believe that, since the two films deal with similar material in pretty different ways. In the remake the Bad Lieutenant just wanders around doing crazy shit until the situation resolves itself. Here the situation is worse but the character has more of an redemptive arc, like It's a Wonderful Life with drugs and sexual harrassment and Jimmy Stewart waddling around in a Christ pose with his weiner hanging out and crying. Therefore I have to award the points to the original, although I think Ferrara might have gone a little bit far when he said that everyone involved in the remake should "all die in hell". I think the world is big enough for two Bad Lieutenants.

Inception (2010)

It's been a pretty dismal year for blockbuster films, so I had all my hopes pinned on this one. Usually that ends with me curled up in the corner and sobbing uncontrollably about the state of modern cinema, but it paid off this time with an original, masterfully-crafted blockbuster that doesn't treat the audience like a bunch of drooling babies. Looks like Nolan is becoming the go-to guy for thoughtfully-constructed big-budget thrillers. The Anti-Bay, if you will. If I had to describe this film in a sentence I'd say that it's as if Nightmare on Elm Street had a baby with The Matrix but The Matrix had a problem with her lady parts so Ocean's Eleven had to carry it term, but really it's one of those films that's better experienced than explained.

The trailer told me precisely fuck-all about the film, but I had heard it was one of those joints where you have to take your brain with you instead of checking it at the door like usual. I came to it expecting some Primer level mindfuckery, but it turns out it's not that complicated. It's pretty complex for one of these big summer blockbusters, but if you're paying attention you shouldn't have any trouble following what's going on. Why would you pay $10 to sit in front of a huge screen in a darkened theater for a couple of hours and not pay attention anyway? What else have you got to do? Eyes front, buddy!

Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the leader of a team of "idea thieves" who use some mysterious dream-sharing technology to enter people's subconscious and steal secrets out of their brain. The secrets are usually a pretty literal interpretation, like some top secret papers in a safe. It would suck if they were really abstract and surreal, like an elephant wearing a bowler hat, and you'd be stuck there thinking what the fuck does this mean? Luckily they've usually got someone on the team called an "architect" whose job it is to create dream-worlds that are complex and realistic enough to fool the dreamer into thinking it's reality. Dom can't do it himself because his dead wife keeps sneaking into the dreams and fucking things up.

After they fail a mission to steal industrial secrets from Saito (Ken Watanabe), he offers them a job to infiltrate the brain of a corporate rival (Cilian Murphy). There they will commit an act of inception, the implanting of an external idea in someone's brain. It's widely thought to be impossible, but Dom knows it can be done, and it quickly turns into a heist movie as he assembles his crack team, formulates a plan etc. Because inception is such a difficult process they have to create a three-level dream: a dream within a dream within a dream, which later becomes a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream. Each layer becomes more unstable and there's also a time-dilation effect which is multiplied the deeper you go, so by the third act when everything inevitably goes tits up, you've got multiple action sequences happening simultaneously in different universes with time moving at different speeds.

It's kind of a miracle that everything makes as much sense as it does. They throw you in the shit straight away and expect you to keep up, only explaining things a little later on when they hire a new architect (Ellen Page). There's a lot of exposition at that point which eats up almost an hour of screen time, but to their credit it feels really streamlined and it never gets boring. It does a good job of explaining the rules of the dream world, but you never find out too much about the dream-sharing technology or the world they live in, which at times feels more scattered and surreal than the dreams they inhabit.

Corporate types can also train their mind to repel invaders ("like white blood cells fighting an infection" as Dom puts it), so the NPC inhabitants of their dreams (called "constructs") become hostile and militarised. This allows them to stuff the film with gunfights, car chases and explosions. This doesn't bother me much since I love a good action movie, but Nolan still can't direct a fight scene (gun or fist) for shit. I know I sound like a grumpy old man with this complaint, but the geography and choreography is constantly undermined by close-ups and shaky cameras. There's a gunfight in the snow that's almost impossible to follow because everyone is wearing white and the camera is attached to a pogo stick. Nolan really needs to hire a second unit director for that stuff. His car chases are great, though.

Of course, the fact that the dreams are so grounded and realistic means that the dreamscapes in this film aren't particularly imaginative. There's a good, in-universe explanation for why, so it's not a major complaint. When weird stuff does happen though, it's still pretty cool. There's a lot of special effects sequences in this film that do things that I've never really seen before. A big highlight is when Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character fights some goons in a hotel hallway as the gravity keeps changing direction before finally disappearing completely. How did they do it? There's other parts where cityscapes warp like a piece of paper or ruined skyscrapers collapse into the ocean. I guess Nolan likes really tall buildings.

Another complaint I've heard about Nolan's films, including this one, is that he's more concerned with elaborate gimmicks and plot mechanics instead of characters. Apparently being an intelligent, well-made piece of entertainment isn't enough for some people. It's clear that the guy is more fascinated with exploring the human mind through puzzle-box movies than developing his characters, but I still thought the subplot about Dom's wife was handled really well. I've heard people say that they couldn't connect with the movie because it was too emotionally distant, but I guess I'm a blackened husk of a human being because it drew me in like a motherfucker.

I can't really fault any of the acting. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page it's like Attack of the Babyfaces, but they're all really good so that's okay. Between this and Shutter Island, let's see if Leo can get another one of these tortured-husband-brooding-over-his-wife's-tragic-death roles and make it a trifecta. He's pretty good at it. I don't have much to say about the technical aspects, since it's all really good. Blah, blah, great cinematography, blah, blah. It's got one of those seat-rattling Hans Zimmer scores that's full of big string instruments and blasting tubas, so it always sounds like the movie is on the verge of the apocalypse. It might be overly-dramatic for some people, but I liked it.

Yeah, this is a good one, folks. I'm sure there are going to be lots of people who complain that there's too many 'splosions and not enough psycho-drama, and others who complain that it's too hard to follow and makes their brain hurt, but for us normal people with simple tastes and functioning brains, I think it hits the sweet spot. Why can't all blockbusters be like this? I guess it's kind of sad that it takes a mega-success like Dark Knight for a studio to bankroll a film like this, but now that it's here I'm not going to complain.

SS Camp: Women's Hell (1977)

Nazi experiments to create the ultimate "three-legged race"
contestant didn't go as well as anticipated

Like Bruno Mattei's twin Nazisploitation efforts SS Girls and Women's Camp 119, Sergio Garrone shot this one back-to-back with SS Experiment Love Camp. It recycles the same actors, sets, costumes etc, but unlike Mattei's films it doesn't try as hard to establish a different identity for each film. It's virtually the same fucking movie, save for one difference: this one isn't as squeamish about exploiting it's setting. The first film delicately avoided any topic that might be deemed too holocausty, but this one begins with real holocaust photographs of emaciated corpses being loaded into incinerators, shovelled into mass graves etc. Faaantastic.

Like all of these movies, it starts bunch of semi-attractive young women being herded into a camp and lectured by villainous SS officers, here Colonel Strasser (Giorgio Cerioni) and his female second-in-command (Patrizia Melega). Both of these actors are playing pretty much the same characters as in SS Experiment Love Camp, even down to Melega being an evil lesbian. There's also Magda (Paola Lelia), the madam of a local brothel, who has the authority to take her pick of the girls. She takes a particular interest in Alina (Rita Manna) and I can't really blame her since Alina's easily the most attractive of the bunch. Alina is apparently Jamaican even though she has a broad American accent, but I guess everybody in this film has a broad American accent so it's not a big deal.

Subsequently there's the obligatory shower scene (Magda leers over them creepily as she insists that they must "take perfect care of their bodies") and in preparation for a big party the girls are led into the brothel where they laugh and fight over dresses. All except one girl, who inexplicably stares at a sequined dress in confusion for the entire scene. Once they are all dolled up and led out to the guests, Colonel Strasser becomes infatuated with Alina. I don't know why, since she displays no emotion and peppers him with passive-aggressive insults, but if I've learnt anything from these Nazisploitation flicks it's that these SS guys were into some weird shit. Later, back at Strasser's private quarters, she starts fondling a plastic banana and then does a sexy nude dance with the banana dangling suggestively over her crotch. Like I said, weird shit.

Meanwhile, the girls rejected by the brothel are used as fodder to test an experimental burn ointment. They set fire to the girl's gams, sans anaesthetic of course, and then apply the ointment to the wound. Apparently they've killed over a thousand prisoners this way with no progress, which would suggest that the ointment is pretty useless, but the evil scientist demands more time and more test subjects. There is one scientist, Dr. Abraham (Attilio Dottesio, once again playing virtually the same character), who disagrees with the experiments and only works under the condition that his daughter Judith (Paola Corazzi) is spared from the gas chamber.

When Alina isn't busy boinking Strasser she helps some of the other girls to get employed at the brothel so they can execute a daring escape plan. One of the girls steals a bottle of poison from the infirmary by pretending to be sick and seducing the lesbian officer, who is for some reason treating injured prisoners instead of the doctors. Actually the infirmary is just a storage room with red crosses painted on some cardboard boxes and the her treatment for a head injury is a sensual boob massage, so it's not surprising the camp has had so many fatalities among it's test subjects.

After they get the poison they take it to the brothel and use it to kill the madam and all their clients. They sneak through some surprisingly lax security and try to escape through the crematorium, through the back of the ovens, which for some reason open out into freedom. Unfortunately the camp guards are waiting for them, and they lock them inside the ovens and burn them alive. I don't know why the guards didn't intervene earlier and save the lives of all the officers at the brothel, but I guess the irony of burning the escapees alive in their own escape tunnel was too much to resist.

As further punishment, the same bald sargeant from the first film (Serafino Profumo) and the evil lesbian gather up some random prisoners, strip them naked and try to torture some information out of them. One girl gets her fingernails pulled out with pliers and the old matches-under-the-fingernails trick. One girl has a metal strap tightened around her head until it crushes her skull. One girl is punched in the gut with a pair of spiked knuckle dusters until her flesh is torn to ribbons. Another girl has her tongue torn out with a pair of tongs. Wow, this is a pretty nasty scene actually.

The bald sargeant also develops the hots for Judith (between this and the previous film, I guess he's got a thing for blondes) and eventually rapes her while she's trapped in a jail cell. She gets pregnant, but when she goes to see her father he refuses to abort her rape-baby. Seriously? Now is probably not the time to come over all Pro Life. They've been executing prisoners by the truckload; do you really think they are going to think twice about sending her to the ovens, pregnant or not? In desperation she goes to the evil scientist, who agrees to perform the operation. When her dad walks in on them he flips out, throwing Dr Evil onto some electrical equipment, killing him. Daaang.

While lounging around with Colonel Strasser, Alina learns that the Russians are approaching and that orders have come in from Berlin to eliminate all the evidence (including the prisoners) and abandon the camp. While Strasser is talking to a couple of guards Alina uses the opportunity to steal a pistol from his desk. It's pretty weird because she is standing right in front of them and they don't even notice her until she shoots the guards and Strasser cops a gutful of their return fire. Alina tells Dr Abraham about their plans to exterminate all the prisoners, so they decide to kill a bunch of guards with a makeshift gas chamber, steal their guns, and make a last stand against their oppressors.

What do you say about a film like this? Debating it's quality (bad) seems beside the point, since a quick glance at the title is enough to tell you whether you are interested in seeing it or not. The threadbare production values and terrible acting may save it from being truly horrifying, but the lack of taste involved in a production like this is truly mind-boggling. It's pretty surreal having characters explain how Jewish prisoners are "processed", complete with real holocaust footage, juxtaposed against standard women-in-prison tropes like sexy shower-room catfights. Jesus, now I need a shower. Not recommended for the easily offended, arduously offended, or indeed anyone capable of being offended at all.