Yoooooooo

I'm glad to see the brave souls at Machinehead Games and Arkane Studios are finally wading into that eternal conflict, that of Jocks V. Nazis.

Gimme that grit!

Give me Destroyer, already!



I mean, as much as I'm exhausted by the idea of another bad cop pushed to the edge. . . Man, I sure could go for a movie about another bad cop pushed to the edge. At least with the movie the nightmare is over in two hours. . .

And since we're here, give me that True Detective Season 3 already. I've been good. I've been kind. Just gimme that shit and let me get my heart broken already, okay? OKAY?

PUT IT IN MY VEINS

I guess this is one of them new surprises. The last I heard of Sicario 2, all they had was a subtitle and a vague idea that it was going to be about Benicio Del Toro's character. I didn't even know it was happening?



And now? Now? Give me that drug war stuff. Give it to me now!

I don't know what this is. . .

But I know I want it.



White God comes to America on the 27th of March, 2015.

A Trailer, a Thought, and More Defensiveness About Movies I Love

This looks like it might be a winner, right?



After watching the trailer for Automata (which is way too close to the warmed up left overs that is the Penny Arcade crew's Automata), I wondered something: Are we quietly living in the best era of science fiction since the late 70's/early 80's?  While that decade had Silent Running, Alien, and Star Wars and in the early 80's you have Blade Runner, Empire Strikes Back, Aliens, Terminator, and Outland.

Now, we have Looper, Moon, District 9, Inception, Primer, Her, Attack the Block, Snowpiercer, and the new Planet of the Apes series. . . I mean, these movies aren't perfect, but we're in pretty good shape here, right? They're either great pieces of cinema or they're interesting pieces of cinema.

And with that said, look at how good our big, dumb blockbusters are! Did anyone expect Guardians of the Galaxy to be that hardy of a picture? And while Edge of Tomorrow might be a lark, it's a smarter film than a lot of other sci-fi films that I do not care to name. Then there's Pacific Rim, which is a movie that I could go on about forever (and have).

And what did the 90's have? Total Recall (a great, great movie) followed by a bunch of Will Smith movies (you could argue for Terminator 2 (but that's more action than it is science fiction and that seems to be an outlier). Then you've got the 2000's which are stained with the legacy of the Prequels That Shall Not Be Named and, what? Avatar?

Oh yeah, Minority Report was awesome. Good call on that one, reader.

Maybe I just have a selective memory or a kind of blind confirmation bias. Who knows? Whatever the case is, we're lucky to be in an era where special effects have finally caught up with screen writing.

I don't know. Movie are cool. I guess that's what I'm getting at. We should be exicted about them. Which brings me to the next item on the agenda:

The script of Blade Runner 2 is complete.

There's been a lot of boring, Internet skepticism about this and as much as we all love a good skeptic now and again, it's important to remember you can shut the fuck up we have a goddamn Blade Runner sequel here. Thirty fucking years in the making do not take this away from me!

There's every reason in the world to trust Sir Ridley Scott on this one, too. I mean, he did make Blade Runner.

And Alien. And Gladiator. And Kingdom of Heaven. And Black Hawk Down. And Prometheus and fuck you, Prometheus is awesome. And sure, he's done quite a number of highly questionable films-- some of them as recent as the past year-- but, hey, when you're one of the greatest film makers of all time, you're entitled to a slump here and there. HE MADE BLADE RUNNER, YOU CURS.

In the meantime everybody go read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep as a warm up for Automata. And toss Neuromancer and Akira in there while you're at it, because, you know, they're great.



James Kislingbury is a writer, podcaster, and an enemy of mankind. You can follow him on twitter.

FOOTNOTES
*Notably I've left out Kathryn Bigelow, who would be perfect to take the mantle from Scott, except that she's already at work on Alien V, which is a fact that I am 100% is true.

Sino-Cinema and you!

I was watching the caper movie Let the Bullets Fly and I realized something that I wasn't proud of, I realized that I know jack shit about Chinese history.

I actually had to find out when the movie took place by watching the trailer. I guess it's assumed that if you're watching this film, you're Chinese, so you just know what the deal is. You understand the imagery, you understand the language (and there's a lot of that going on, which makes me feel bad for the Cantonese film student who has to learn about Billy Wilder), and you understand the forward movement of time in terms of China's history. I don't know any of that and it made me feel dumb and confused. I don't like feeling dumb and confused, Chinese film industry!

Really, though, why should they stop to explain their film? As lacking in knowledge as Americans might be of world history and geography you don't have to explain The Godfather or Apocalypse Now to an audience member. They understand the basics of this story and this time period without actually knowing anything about the Gulf of Tonkin Incident or that the mob is a CIA front for the New World Order. None of these movies pause to explain things to the slow foreigner, they just tell a story. Hell, maybe Let the Bullets Fly is payback for decades of westerns.

I can't rationalize my way out of this, though, not even if I tried. I mean, it's 2012, I'm a literate American, I have DSL, and China is a five thousand year old nation with a population of one-billion people and what I know about their history starts with Dynasty Warriors 3 and ends with Rush Hour 2.I also know that there's a rumor that the Chinese drink their own pee because it's good for your skin. I have my doubts about veracity of that rumor. Regardless of whether it's true or not that should not be the first thing to pop to mind when I think "What up with China?"

All knowing about this does is underline my ignorance of that particular chunk of the world. I don't know Sino from Shinola. So, I decided to solve this problem by watching some more movies about China and by the Chinese.




Naturally I started with a movie about the Rape of Nanking.

The Nanking Massacre is something I'm familiar with to some degree. I've watched a documentary or two on the topic and it's popped up in books I've read and classes I've had, so despite how ignorant I have positioned myself as the content of City of Life and Death did not come out of the blue.

It's a weird movie. On the outside it seems to want to be The Battle of Algiers. They're both gritty, they're both political films by their very subject matter, they're both chock full of violence, they both revolve around one particular city during one particular conflict, and they both chose to be filmed in black and white. The most important difference is that The Battle of Algiers is one of the greatest films ever made and City of Life and Death is not.

That seems to be where it ends, though, because despite its outward appearances, City of Life and Death is basically a straight melodrama with all of the devices and blocking of a standard blockbuster (with a few dashes of steady cam here and there). When this movie wants to go big, it goes very big, too big in fact to still have a foot in reality. None of this helps when you add on the fact that one of the best movies of all time shares a similar style and premise (Plus the title recalls Rome, Open City, which can't be doing it any favors either).

Now, again, I'm quite sure the Rape of Nanking was an intense event and I don't mean to denigrate that, it's just that it doesn't not quite translate into a film as well as it could have.In this case heightening the emotions of the film keeps it from being grounded, it makes it the viewer aware that they're watching a movie about Japanese war crimes and not an actual human experience.

I know there's a fine tradition of Chinese neo-realist films, it is just that going from Let the Bullets Fly to this makes this war movie's operatic moments stand out all that much more. Opera is fine and it has its place in film, but in this particular case the melodramatic aspects undermine what I imagine to be a serious and realistic film. Realistic films don't call for stage blocking. A stylistic quirk isn't something you want to be thinking about, especially when it comes to something like international war crimes. It's not something any film should ever want, really.

Then there's the fact that the very idea (or appearance) of sensationalizing rape and mass murder is a risky undertaking. Either it seems redundant to add further horror to something that is inherently horrifying or it seems exploitative about making a commercial product of somebody's suffering. It might not be a fair criticism and it isn't likely the intent of the authors, then again if the film worked better, I wouldn't be bringing it up.

City of Life and Death does have its moments in between its fairly average world building. I would imagine that it is much more emotionally arresting if you're unfamiliar with the Nanking Massacre and even without the cold shock it does stand out as a pretty solid drama. Despite some more questionable CGI, the film's action sequences are pretty well composed. They don't rank up their with the urban battles of Enemy at the Gates or, again, Battle of Algiers, they do seem to get across the very specific kind of terror that fighting in cities creates. Plus, I doubt that they had the resources of either of those films.

The film also doesn't sap the humanity out of the Japanese either, which, upon reading what they did during the war seems like a very reasonable stylistic choice. It gives its Japanese enough space and humanity to keep it from becoming the kind of one-sided, gung-ho history lessons that a lot of war movies decide to become.

Even though the Japanese soldiers seem to fit into very particular archetypes (here's the reluctant soldier, here's the proud and implacable commanding officer, here's the zealot, et al.), at does make the effort to make them human beings before they're war criminals-- no small feat for an army that perpetrated something called the "Rape of Nanking."

It shows them as people who are caught up in a situation they didn't create and what they do with it, regardless of their nationality and the Chinese (and their European defenders) find themselves in the very same situation.It's this parallel that keeps the film whole, even if it isn't particularly compelling. That's not a profound point to make, I know, it is appreciable when you consider the kinds of emotions this story must involve.

Despite how much the oddness of the "comfort women" aspect of the plot makes me want to squirm and tut approvingly there is one particular moment that tells me that a lot more thought was put into the subtext of this film than you would have previously assumed.

The scene in question involves a young woman being raped by a Japanese soldier at what amounts to a militarized brothel. There's a moment where this woman turns to a Japanese man and she gives him this look that very clearly states that she has all of the power in this particular relationship despite every outward indication that she is a victim. It's a complex and small thing to get across in this much larger film, but it stands out as the one memorable moment that isn't entirely based on shock or misery. I don't know that I've ever seen a woman give a look like that in cinema and I'm glad for that.

I know that saying it's one of the most elegant and rape scenes I've ever seen sounds like a glib joke.** I also know that its worth acknowledging that there are many ways that something like sexual assault can be handled in fiction besides, "Oh, isn't this terrible and fucked up?" These terrible things are not there to be exploitative or to victimize people and that actually does create some compelling, if brief, drama.

The next movie on the list that I tried to watch was the The Founding of a Party, which lasted for about twenty minutes before I went cross-eyed.




Remember when I had an editor and a maximum word count? No? Well, I was a mess then, too, but let's not let that bog us down.

Anyways.

Now, while it's embarrassing to be a grown man in 2012 with the internet and everything to know a high school Power Point presentation amount of information about a country with over a billion people, the fact remains: I really do not have the time for this. My dome is already chock full of World War II stuff and I've still got to cram a bunch more Afghanistan stuff in there and there is never going to be a point where I'm satisfied with what I know about those times and places.

The reality is that I'm always learning new things, even about things that I know quite a bit about already. For example, I didn't even know about the rumor that Afghan women, upon capturing enemy soldiers, would rape them and then pee down their throats until they died! I've been reading about Afghanistan for years and that's the first time I ever heard that!

I bet you didn't know that and now we've learned something together!

The closest I get to knowing anything either interesting or substantial about the Celestial empire has come from research I was doing about other countries. It's kind of impossible to dodge the Rape of Nanking and the Second Sino-Japanese War because you can't exactly read up on the Pacific Front of WWII without involving China in some aspect-- most historians consider them to be a big part of that whole affair. So, there's that.

The second era of Chinese history that I'm familiar with is a side-effect of trying to learn about British colonialism during the Victorian era (and there's a lot of it!). Specifically I was trying to learn about the upheavals and uprisings and minor empires of Central Asia during the second half of the 19th century and I ran into the Dungan Revolt.I mean, it's one thing to learn about small wars that nobody else has ever heard of, but it's an entirely different bag of marbles to learn that there's entire peoples that you've never even dreamed of existing. It's exhausting and it's discouraging and usually by the time I find out about this stuff, I say "Fuck it" and read a chapter of this Murakami book.

But my knowledge basically starts and ends with that singular event (and even that I am not too hot on). It's more or less like saying "I'm familiar with early American history because I am familiar with the works of Jeremiah Johnson." That shit won't hold together when you're defending your dissertation.

In my defense there doesn't seem to be any movies about the Dungan Revolt, so at least what I do know I can say I had to find in a book. Or, more likely, a wikipedia page of questionable historicity.

In my further defense, not knowing much about foreign peoples and histories isn't something exclusive to countries full of white people. Take France for example: I keep on finding out new things about there every time I go back into the World War II history hole. Like, do you know how many republics France has had? How many do you people need?

Oh, wait, no I do know one more thing about Chinese history, which is "Free Tibet?" Right? That still seems like the right choice to make, doesn't it?

All of this adds up to more than nothing, right?



Other Chinese films I have watched/tried to watch/got angry while watching-- I'll be brief--

Iron Monkey 2-- 

Iron Monkey 2 is most confusing because it seems that it could take place anywhere between 1890 and 1945. That doesn't seem to be a stylistic choice, it seems that the movie's budget was "Things that fell off of a moving truck on its way to an antique disposal facility." It's an ugly, confusing mess and I don't think that's due entirely to my pre-establish murky notion of Chinese history.I honestly have serious doubts about whether or not it is actually related to the original Iron Monkey in any way.

Project A 2--
Jackie Chan is always fun and while it has much better choreography and art design I still have to wonder why all of these Chinese men are wearing machine-made t-shirts from the 1980's. That is something I am certain is not an aspect of Chinese history.

The Last Emperor--
This barely counts, but I'm putting it on the list because it is an actual movie that is actually worth a damn.While we could talk about the cinematography or the epic storyline or whatever, this movie stands out in my mind because it includes a scene where it is established that the emperor has two eunuchs whose job description includes: "Smelling the feces of the emperor." There's a reason it won Best Picture. I'm sure there's a lot of people that think it's stylistic and "prestigious" nonsense and hardly deserves to be nominated for such prestigious awards, much less win them, but on the other hand fuck those people.

Nanking-- 
In my mind, one of the other burdens City of Death has is that it has to compete with Nanking.Not only does it overcome the pretentious premise, but it's one of the most arresting documentaries I've ever seen. It also succeeds as important in the way "important films" fail to do. It isn't about awards, it is about documenting one of the uglier episodes in human history. It also made me have to accept the fact that a Nazi party member could exist as proof of the potential goodness in all human beings.



Alright, that's enough of whatever that was. I'm going to go put this to bed by watching the rest of Big Trouble in Little China.

EDIT: Holy shit there's an arcade shooter called War in Shanghai 1937. Fuck.

*After doing ten seconds of research I discovered that the film was set during a period known as the "Warlord Era," which in terms of the name of an era is far more badass than the Gilded Age or the Belle Epoque. Plus, the Warring Twenties is even a cooler rhyme than its Western brother, the Roaring Twenties. I also like that "cliques" were apparently a major part of Chinese politics throughout the ages. It makes me think that China was ruled by insane high school girls for a number of years.


**Here's an article from Jezebel about how to make a rape joke. It was made in wake of Mr. Tosh's ill-advised response to a heckler and I think its safe to say that this is one of the better reasoned arguments regarding the subject

This is Why I Got Into Movies

At the risk of being too reflective or too effacing, this is what I got into movies for--


I got into them for "Ode to Joy" playing as a leitmotif. I got into it for crazy women and gay men playing romantic leads. I got into the kind of magical madness that only magic turned into light can bring. I love movies. I love the artifice. And as much as I complain and whine about what's wrong with movies (I won't stop the blog to go into all that, don't worry) I do this out of a real love for the medium.

There's this old Patton Olswalt essay* about this exact sort of thing. It was so long ago that I think I read it on MySpace (so, like, maybe five years ago, whoopee) and I have no desire to look it up. If I remember it correctly, people were complaining about how much he was complaining about movies. The reality is that they didn't get why he was being such a stick in the mud. The reality was that he loved movies. He was being a dick because he loves movies so much. The kind of particularity that comes out of movie fans-- real serious movie nerds-- appears as serious dicksmanship. In reality, it is a form of affection that can never be read by the thing it is aimed at. There are more efficient forms of prayers than fanhood.

To state the obvious: I am no Patton Oswalt. I'm not saying this as a revelation, I am saying this as insurance against people saying "Oh that James thinks he's a regular Patton Oswalt" as they chew their tobacco and watch their Jerry Springer, no doubt**.



My point is that I love trash. I love ridiculous films. I love Written on the Wind and All That Heaven Allows (and its remake) and it isn't simply because I had to watch these in college. It's a chicken or the egg type of situation and I can only dwell on it for so long before it turns into a soggy, over-fried mess.



Not to say I'm opposed to self-destruction.

Movies should be true to their form. As much as films are built around lies and tricks, they should be in the service of truth. I can't remember where I got this idea from-- Ideally someone will correct me on this account-- But films are pieces of fiction that tell the truth. If this weren't an entry simply on a semi-campy 1950's "Women's Picture" and where I more sober, I would go into detail on this. Nobody wants that, though, including myself, so I'll add this as my conclusion:

Films should be true to what they're trying to be. An action movie shouldn't make airs towards being a political drama and a romance shouldn't feel the need to include horror elements. Or whatever. Nobody wants to see a musical sequence in a court room potboiler unless you're Indian, in which case everything is a musical and nobody kissses.

All of that is grammatically horrific and horrifically vague and, you know what, in terms of art I think that is pretty goddamn succinct. It's certainly the best that a snob who loves garbage can do.

With all of that said, there is a factual error in the trailer of Magnificent Obsession--The stone cold reality is that the "greatest romance in cinema" is, in fact, Black Narcissus, a movie where no one kisses, no one has sex, and everyone leaves because they're failures and they hate themselves. Also: Deborah Kerr. Your move, Douglas Sirk.



*It's really a blog entry, but why denigrate his words by attributing such a horrible word to his poetry?

**How bad did all of you want to watch the Jerry Springer Too Hot for TV VHS tapes when you were a young 'un? Bad? Really bad? I think it was between that and the uncensored sections of Blind Date. Thinking back on that time of my life, it's crazy to imagine I was that willfully restrictive about what I wanted to get a boner about.

FILM NERD SHIT HEAD BONUS: