Trailer Review - The Blind Warrior

I am very aware of Roger Ebert's admonition against the review of trailers. I normally would wholeheartedly agree with anything that came from the venerated critic's fingers, but I've already broken the rule and discussed numerous projects that have not come out, sometimes not even on the basis of a trailer. However, I don't think that my assessments of Dragonball: Evolution and Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li are particularly audacious or unwarranted (they will be crap).

Furthermore, there are some films that I will likely never get to see, but can glimpse snippets of through the good graces of the owners (or whomever else) that saved trailers and stuck them on DVD's of films that can be seen. Mondo Macabro's release of Virgins from Hell - a women-in-prison/biker chick/exploitation flick from Indonesia's prolific Rapi Films - comes with a second disk full of trailers for movies that aren't likely to be anywhere near as entertaining as my mind has built them up to be.
Among these trailers are the sort of fair one would expect from Mondo Macabro - lots of awful looking horror films and sleaze - but some surprises show up here and there. There's actually trailers for three (I believe there's at least four) of the Jaka Sembung films starring the always entertaining Barry Prima. The Jaka Sembung films were released in the West (Europe, even the US) under the title "The Warrior." It's potent mix of senselessly gory violence, cheap special effects, heroic posturing and what was likely unintentional slasher movie aesthetics was a smash hit at the local box-office and over the years it has gained a great deal of notoriety among aficionados of kung fu, exploitation, and horror movies. It's success brought on a new wave of Indonesian fantasy and martial arts flicks during the early to mid 1980's, including such notable films as Ratno Timoer's The Devil's Sword (not coincidentally, also starring Barry Prima). However, the trailer that made me cough up my own skull was for Timoer's final film (and by my count one of the last of its kind) The Blind Warrior.
It's probably safe to say that the trailer is itself the coolest thing ever made. Like many of the Indonesian martial arts/fantasy films, it frequently plagiarizes other (superior) films from other countries. In this case, the obvious source of inspiration is Zatoichi. Ichi-san, however, never had to deal with an evil, idol worshipping cult and never had to use his palm powers to cause everything to explode.
Yeah, the idol can shoot fire.
But the fire shooting idol has absolutely nothing on The Blind Warrior's own chi power.
Before palm of doom...
Palm of Doom...
And after.

Sadly, I seriously doubt that this one will ever get a proper release. I would say that stranger things have happened - and they have - but it still doesn't mean that this being released is any more likely. There is hope in that both The Devil's Sword and The Warrior have seen DVD (in pristine condition no less), neither of which I would've given much of a chance. But with the market for DVD's under serious pressure from disappearing businesses, sparse shelf space, new formats and file sharing, as well as the possibility that a usable copy might very well be difficult to come by for Pete Tombs and the MM crew, it's looking like a slim hope at best. I want to see it, but I don't want to see it in a crappy rmvb file from a nth generation vhs rip with a German dub.

What a hot mess, though. I never would've thought that bad Zatoichi imitations would have mixed so well with bad Indonesian fantasy film-making. And perhaps they don't, but this trailer gets a bloody nub up from me.
Not bloody likely.

Mana Energy Potion ... Review?

Ever watch the show “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern?” I do. In one episode, the hefty host remarks that drinking fresh from the utter donkey milk on a Chilean street is one of those times that a man has to take a moment to wonder what he is doing there, about to put warm, frothy-headed donkey milk in his mouth.

I’m sitting at home, yet I find myself wondering that same thing.Not about donkey milk fresh from the utter, though. Staring across from me is a “Mana Energy Potion,” which the cardboard advertisement in Fry’s Electronics described as “energy for gamers.”

As I have always understood them, energy drinks are the 21'st century equivalents of health-tonics, promising not only an invigorating buzz brought on by excessive amounts of caffeine, guarana, taurine, or some other cocktail of stimulants, but any number of possible benefits, usually related to what is rather nebulously referred to as lifestyle. “Rockstar,” for example, is always sponsoring extreme sports competitions, unmusical music festivals and Girls Gone Wild, letting consumers know that they’ll be able to expend all the energy they need while surfing and ogling drunken seventeen-year-olds without experiencing fatigue. “Mana Energy Potion,” I suppose, let’s gamers experience that same kind of free-wheeling, devil-may-care thrill of boundless energy as they quest to level up their Dwarven raider in WOW. Somehow, even the thrill of snake oil salesmanship is diminished when its selling point is that it will help fat nerds obsessed with their fantasy games continue their unhealthy fixation without pause. They could even bring the mana potion into their larp games without turning any heads.

Unable to resist any opportunity for ironerdic self-reflection, I actually popped open the cute little bottle - as you can see, no larger than the palm of my hand - and downed the disgusting blue concoction while playing the nerdiest game I own, The Nightmare of Druaga, a faux-roguelike RPG of the “mystery dungeon” mold and sequel to a Japanese arcade game considered to be one of the founding pillars of Japanese action RPG’s (and never released in the US).

Were I a food critic, I might comment on the taste, which is sour and tart with faint traces of the B-vitamins that it’s teeming with. The nutrition facts state that it contains over %6000 (!) of the daily recommendation for vitamin B12, which supposedly helps to metabolize carbs (thus providing more energy). It has an aftertaste and aroma reminiscent of what I figure petrol to have. Now bear with me... Imagine your mouth was a vagina, and every taste bud a tiny...

Actually, screw the extended metaphor. It tastes like crap. I’m not a food critic.

I’m also not much of one for energy drinks. I prefer slower, more natural ways of absorbing caffeine. Coffee is good, so long as it doesn’t taste like a sugary-sweet milk shake. Tea is good. I love iced tea, in particular, although not sweet tea. Many southern delicacies have caught my fancy; however, the appeal of sweet tea will always elude me.

Much like the free-association of my writing (and speaking, I’ve been recently informed) I prefer to take my time with drinks that are supposed to have some sort of benefit aside from hydration – and especially with drinks that are supposed to keep me awake. There is an art to brewing tea, even with the Lipton bag variety, a ritual that effects not only the how you experience the taste, but how you use the buzz. Good tea is something to be savored; a taste to contemplate as it is enjoyed, an indulgence to compliment what you’re doing, and to help prolong it. I don’t drink tea to keep myself awake while playing video games, because tea isn’t something to be downed in between turns during your “epic boss run.”

This whole idea is completely foreign to most people, and it appears to be especially so with my fellow nerds. The company claims that they are themselves gamers, making a product for other gamers, and their blog links to an IGN article written in two parts by Mark Bozon and Scott Lowe. I don’t know much about these guys or the brand of journalism that they normally practice, but their article is embarrassingly effusive. The pseudo-irony, hyperactive descriptions, the obnoxious pics of the staff as RPG characters (along with a stat card featuring the stalest of memes) are even more nauseating than the product they're used to describe. The “hilarious” non-sequiturs fully complete the hideous amalgamation of repellent fanboyism, and still don't manage to be the least bit funny.

Go read their “impressions” and return, and if you doubted the inherent truth of what I’m saying, you should now feel like an idiot. I am not taking this too seriously. I am right. “Mana Energy Potion” stands for all that I fear becoming, and all that I fear every one else in the world has already become. If we can actually commercialize and market by demographic – especially the nerd/geek demographic - the putting of something into ourselves in order to keep us going, humanity has truly lost its soul, not to mention its taste buds and possibly its stomach, having replaced it with a fuel tank.

In its defense, “Mana Energy Potion” does do what it promises: it kept me awake for several hours with its massive shot of caffeine. If you can trade your immortal soul and any pretense of good taste for that, than the thirty shekels (it’s not far off: I paid almost four dollars for one) you drop will probably be worth it.

Game Review: Knights of the Round

Given my repeated (and likely obnoxious) posts regarding the ways that oriental culture is badly translated by occidental culture for entertainment purposes, I figure that the same scrutiny aimed in the opposite direction is in order.

There's plenty of material for this, especially with the recent release of Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django and Kim Ji-Won's The Good, the Bad and the Weird, two films in which the hoary trappings of the Western are now populated with Asian actors. Furthermore, there are probably a bazillion Anime that either adapt western literature or use European period settings, such as the influential Shojo anime series "The Rose of Versailles." Plumbing the dusty archives of my memory for all of the video games I've wasted my time playing over the years, however, I recall a Capcom developed, Final Fight-esque brawler developed for CPS2 hardware and originally released in Arcades (but that I first played as an SNES port) titled Knights of the Round.

It is as it sounds: a brainless side scrolling beat-em-up coin muncher based on Arthurian legends in the most inappropriate and superficial ways. And as it probably sounds: I love it.

So I fired up Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2 with the intent of coming up with funny things to say about a game in which Franco-English-Germanic myth is reductively pasted onto a generic model of a brainless early nineties side-scrolling arcade game. The funny moments are unfortunately few, to be honest. There is a certain amount of humor to be derived from the haphazard way that about five centuries worth of arms and armory has been assembled for use by the enemy armies. Rapier wielding acrobats fight alongside Zweihander swinging warriors dressed in full plate armor, while bosses range from a mechanically operated suit of armor to a Japanese swordsman in red named Muramasa. At no point in the work of Malory nor in the romances attributed to Chretien de Troyes have the knights quested to the far eastern lands of Japan. Same goes for the ending, in which it turns out that in the course of quelling rebellions throughout the British lands, Arthur, Perceval and Lancelot were also looking for the Holy Grail, which was sitting in a castle of a local Italian warlord named Garibaldi. Who knew?

The game itself is Final Fight. An attack button and a jump button are utilized, and the three characters are differentiated between power (Perceval) and speed (Lancelot) with Arthur being the most balanced of the group. The controls work fine, the graphics are bright and attractive, and the difficulty is absurd. Arcade games are not known to be fair to the player - their goal is to eat as many quarters as they possibly can, and that means that the player has to lose, and lose often. The SNES cartridge gives you nine credits, the PS2 Capcom Classics Collection gives you unlimited credits. Items can be attacked, splitting them and allowing a second player to take half. The horse riding mechanic is unimportant. The characters also level up, but truthfully, the only differences are cosmetic.

Honestly, there's a lot to like if arcadey action games appeal to you. In spite of the fact that it's connections to Arthurian myth are minuscule and the characters betray a certain non-chalant lack of concern for historicity or believability or aesthetic principles of the medieval age, I love this game. It's simple gameplay done well enough that occasionally I'll play through it with unlimited continues and laugh at the insanity of a saber wielding, excessively feminine Lancelot fighting off a prancing fop named Phantom of Nightshade or King Arthur beating fat guys and vaguely semetic wizards with an oversized sword in the middle of the night surrounded by Japanese lanterns. It's that non-malicious though still inconsiderate treatment that makes the game less grating than it is delightful in spite of itself.

Blogs suck.

Blogs suck, and so does blogging. I've considered the possibility that all people who blog - or at least do so regularly - are afflicted with either extreme narcissism or a ridiculous amount of time on their hands. How else would they have so much time to post "lolcat" pictures and whine about their girlfriend/boyfriend's extreme paranoid-manic episodes that resulted in them being kidnapped in Turkmenistan for a few hours?

That's one of the reasons blogs suck; how can people with such extreme self-loathing manage to write thousand word entries on themselves without realizing how completely full of themselves they really are? God knows - I can already tell it, and I don't care to continue reading until the authors figure it out for themselves. However, setting aside the attention whores, the mouth breathing furries, those who opened blogs after an emotionally crippling ban from Deviantart, and pretty much all of livejournal.com, what are we really left with?

There are film review blogs and video game review blogs; there are personal blogs and travel blogs; there are religious blogs and blogs that advocate secularism/atheism; there are political blogs and music blogs; there are obscure shit blogs and even more obscure shit blogs. Almost all of these are useless. There are too many of these damn pages and too few of them provide any actual content.

Is this rant going anywhere? Am I announcing my retirement from the "blogosphere" (Lord help me, I hate that term too)? Did I write this with the sole intention to write as many repetitive rhetorical questions as I felt? No, it's a simple observation. Print media is dying; "Electronic Gaming Monthly" - a publication that drove much of my literacy as a younger person - is going to be printing its final issue in February. I don't play new video games. As a matter of fact, I rarely have the time to play older ones. But as I read the online entertainment software editorials on sites like GameFAQs and watch the videos of amateurs (of varying degrees) on Youtube, I find myself with an opportunity to whine about the impending death of prosaic composition and style, and contemplate how I've actively contributed to it.

These are a few hundred words in which I've expressed my self-loathing, and yet still, a hundred words written about myself, by myself.

Yeah, blogging sucks.

Bias... in this case my own

I won't avail you, dear reader, with tales of my New Year's Eve. Suffice to say, they were sufficiently unusual for myself, as traditionally, New Year's for me has not normally included the drinking of Mexican beer before drunkenly crashing parties and attempting (more or less successfully, most surprisingly) to make out with strange women whom I had known for less time than it took me to drink myself into oblivion.

A successful night, by my counting. And I got to hang out with a friend who - for the purposes of keeping this blog more or less anonymous - I call Pilgrim.

But I'm not posting about that. Instead, I'm posting about something that occurred to me not long after my hungover subsided, as I was watching the (more or less) recently released An Empress and the Warriors the newest film from Director Tony Ching Siu-Tung. The initial hype (for myself, at least) came from the literal English translation of the title "The Kingdom and the Beauty" which lead me to believe it would be a remake of the 1959 Huangmei Opera film from Li Han Hsiang of the same name. It was something that sounded perfectly bizarre, pairing a couple of pop stars (Kelly Chen and Leon Lai) with Donnie Yen for what I assumed would be a kung fu musical with the sort of action that could be seen in the director's own films from times past: The Sword, Duel to the Death, and A Chinese Ghost Story.

Granted, it turned out to not only be a non-musical period film, but a non-musical that felt as by the numbers and lack luster as much of Hong Kong's recent genre cinema. It was, however, mostly inoffensive, and occasionally, earnest and fun. That isn't to say anything in favor of the film as genuine cinematic craft or art; the narrative drags, the acting is amateurish (especially from the female lead) and Ching Siu-Tung's direction seems to have been cobbled from scenes out of other films. The sword being thrown and sticking from the ground scene - as seen in Braveheart is there, as is a set that looks suspiciously similar to either the planet Endor or the Forests of Sherwood if you've witnessed the turd known as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Not coincidentally, there's a poorly inserted romantic sub-plot that was more than slightly reminiscent of the recent Harlequin romance-esque treatment of Tristan + Isolde, another movie by director Kevin Reynolds (aka Ridley Scott's bitch). And how could they forget the ever cliche "woman needs a wound dressed but is too shy/fussy to undress in front of a male doctor" scene? Well they didn't; there's more than one.

However, it's this sort of sillyness that made many historically set "wuxia" films of Hong Kong's past so enjoyable. Films that I fully enjoy - Dragon Inn, Kung Fu Cult Master etc. - have just as little concern for historicity, for coherent plotting or the integrity to put decent acting ahead of physical appeal. Compared to some of the movies I admit I enjoy, An Empress and the Warriors really should come out looking rather favorably. It's got a nice, expensive, color-corrected look with some killer production design (the detail on the armor, each individually crafted, is incredible) and there's a nice homage to Chang Cheh towards the end, wherein Donnie Yen leaves a thorougly unlikely number of people dead before he finally gets stabbed, at which point he bares his chest and ties his shirt around his gaping belly to hold his guts in, and continues fighting.

It has all the things I like, and yet I don't really like it that much. What's wrong with it? What's wrong with me? Have I fallen into the internet nerd-critic trap - liking things for incomprehensible reasons relating to seventies exploitation movie practices and comic book references and disliking them for arbitrary notions of commercialism and genre? Would I like the some of my favorite movies if they had been released in theaters this week, instead of having seen them for the first time after hunting for obscure, out-of-print DVD's?

I don't know how much of that is true about me. All I know is that I like Dirty Hairy, but I don't like Gran Torino. I'd rather watch a movie starring Steve Reeves than one starring Vin Deisel, and when it comes to tasteless cinema, CAT III smut, 70's Pinku-eiga and 80's slasher flicks will always beat out Japanese horror remakes, Misty Mundae's direct to dvd skin flicks, and Eli Roth in my book.

Godzilla > Cloverfield.

Truth be told, much of this stuff is subjective. I fully envision my current indulgence in bad taste coming back to haunt me in the future, with my children bringing Van Helsing or BloodRayne into my home, and giving perfectly defensible reasons for how much they enjoy the crap that even I found too heinous to sit through when it first came about. However, I'm still absolutely correct about everything I say. That's the power you can pretend to weild after admitting that you're horribly biased. In my case, I'm biased against everything. I'll find a way to hate anything, even the things that I like. Surely we can all admit that that's pretty awesome.

Godzilla > Cloverfield. I like that. That might become the new title for my blog, although I'm considering revising it to Cloverfield < Godzilla, just to make it a fully negative statement.

I was just accused of being German...

...by my own mother to boot.

I said in the previous entry that anything I'd post would likely have something to do with beer. And my mom told me this afternoon that my fondness of beer and onions were distinctly German traits. Since I don't have German family, this has me slightly confused.

Speaking of Germans, Valkyrie finally showed up in theaters. Apparently it sucks.

But who didn't see that coming? It's budget is estimated at around $95 million. It came in fourth at the box office this weekend. It's in no way going to regain for Cruise any sort of esteem or personal interest capital (even making fun of him and his Scientology is slowly going out of style). I say that Xenu did it for the lulz.

Tom Cruise, you see, is no Clint Eastwood. Clint can make a movie with more than a passing resemblance to the goofiest of Charles Bronson's late career output (Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects, in this case) with the utmost seriousness and not only get away with it, but receive lavish critical praise that falls just short of verbal fellatio. Clint Eastwood wants to be a racist with a heart of gold who will eventually die in a Jesus pose saving the poor non-whites from their own depraved elements while teaching everybody a lesson... and sing the theme song to bookend the film? Damn straight, he can direct it too! Some might argue that Gran Torino is Eastwood's semi-ironic attempt to re-examine his archetypal "scary white man with a big gun" character. However, Clint is more a stereotype than an archetype. He's a pretentious film maker making a B-movie without realizing it, using silly metaphors that can be guessed at a mile away. Spoiler: the Gran Torino represents Clint's innermost soul! It's as hokey as it sounds, and unfortunately, it isn't being played for laughs. Yeah, good luck trying to top Gran Torino, Xenu. If Tom Criuse tried that he'd be rightly laughed at.

I think the worst thing about the Holiday season is that my favorite movie that's been released so far has been Un Secret. It's French. Oh how it pains me to say that. It's the complex and earnest WWII film that Valkyrie dreams of being, focusing on less than sympathetic Jews - one of whom is a cruel bastard who hates his child (whose only real flaw is unresolved oedipal issues, and those aren't really his fault) for not being athletic enough - rather than on heroic Nazis. It's been one bizarre Christmas movie season, no? I haven't even seen that poo eclaire known as The Spirit yet.

C'est la vie, c'est la vie.

Renovations

This Blog is changing from an unfortunate school project into something of a personal blog. I'm keeping some of the old entries though, so if you see terms like "media criticism" and "cultural artifact" it's because of that. If it annoys you, sorry.

Supposedly, that ethereal, mysterious thing called "content" is coming. Expect it to be about beer and movies.