SKYFALL

The best Bond movie in the last ten years was probably X-Men: First Class or maybe Michel Hazanavicius's deft parodies OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies and OSS 117: Lost in Rio.  The last three Bond films have been surgical procedures, designed to remove any last trace of fun, color, or personality from a franchise built on them.  In this film, right from the beginning I knew I was in trouble.  Bond opens a door and finds a room full of bloody murdered agents.  Ah, the childish fun of a Bond movie!

LA GRANDE ILLUSION (1937)

Can you say too much about La Grande Illusion?  When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, it was propaganda minister Josef Goebbels #1 mission to see every copy of this film burnt to ash.  You really have to hand it to the Nazis.  They were fucking evil.  This movie only contains two major German characters, and they are both heavily sympathetic.  Why did the Nazis want it destroyed so badly?  To put it in the kind of simple terms a Nazi could appreciate, this film is humanity, and the Nazis, and all those that would destroy art or knowledge, are inhumanity.

THE RAID: REDEMPTION

This film gets a new, silly subtitle in America and a silly, nu-metal soundtrack, but rest assured, you will still leave the theater clutching your sides and coughing up blood.  This movie will kick your ass.  In the slums of Jakarta, a SWAT team raids an decaying apartment tower where a crime lord has set up shop.   They have to ascend 15 floors of desperate and deranged slum dwellers who have been promised free rent for life if they kill any of the intruders.  Punch, kick, throw, slash, stab, shoot, crash, boom, bang, KAPOW!  It's an inside-out Indonesian Assault on Precinct 13 (the original damnit!)

THE ARTIST

If you like movies because they are a pleasant distraction then I'm not sure you'll like this movie.  If you loves movies because you love movies then you will love this movie.  That sounds familiar.  But it's true!  Make no mistake, this is a silent movie made in black and white by French people, so it's not exactly palatable to the average theater goer.  Well, fuck that guy.  He gets enough movies all year long.  This one is special.  Even with it's runaway success we're unlikely to see a renaissance of silent cinema so you better enjoy this one while you can, which will be damn easy because this film is a wonderfully charming melodramatic tribute to, well, artists I would say.

MACHETE MAIDENS UNLEASHED (2010)

This is the funniest film I've seen in quite some time.  And it's a documentary.  Don't let that scare you away.  The subject is the glut of American made-exploitation films shot in the Philippines, starting with blood soaked monster movies (like the Blood Island trilogy) and sweaty sexy prison romps (like Women In Cages) during the 60's and leading up to the end of the 70's and the unofficial greatest Filipino exploitation movie ever made, Apocalypse Now.  Why were movies made there and why is this a brilliant subject for a documentary?  Let me answer that with a quote from the film that comes pretty early on, courtesy of producer Jon Davison: "Human life was cheap, film was cheap, it was a great place to make a picture."

MADAGASCAR

BBC Earth Presents Madagascar: The Land Where Evolution Ran Wild.

That's one helluva title, isn't it?

Check out my first Blu-ray review for CHUD.com.

There's plenty of lemurs!

WIRED (2008)

Check out this review at CHUD.

What's it about?  Stealing Pounds.  That means money in England.

Bloody Hell!

TARAS BUBLA (2009)

Check out my first review for CHUD.

What's it about?

Vladimir Putin presents Braveheart except the Scots are the Ukranians, and the English are the Polish; also the hero is a pot-bellied 68 year old.

Sign me up!

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN (2011)

The poster is also better than the movie

This film's origin is more interesting than the film itself.  It's Canadian, it's the debut for director Jason Eisener, and it's the result of a promotional contest for the 2007 Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino debacle Grindhouse.  They invited budding filmmakers to submit fake trailers in the grindhouse spirit and the winner would be shown along with the movie's other fake trailers during select screenings in their home turf.  Since RR was able to turn his fake trailer for Machete into an actual film, and an entertaining one at that, it was only a matter of time before another trailer became a real film.  This one doesn't quite make the same smooth transition.  It worked better as a 2 1/2 minute trailer for the same reason that many trailers are better than the films they advertise: some ideas are great for a few minutes, not so great for 80+ minutes.

WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS (1970)

You might know this movie by its original Japanese title Furankenshutain no Kaijū: Sanda tai Gaira but you probably don't.  The plot has a simple beauty: there are two monsters who appear suddenly and mysteriously called Gargantuas that kinda look like 200 foot tall Sasquatchs.  The English dialogue calls them 'The Brown One' and 'The Green One' which is uncreative but accurate as far as their fur is concerned.  The Green One is better known as Gaira, named for his habitat of choice, the sea; The Brown One is Sanda, named for his home, the mountains.  What divides these colossal brothers and leads to their titular confrontation is their stances on killing people and smashing vehicles/buildings.  The Green One is strictly in favor of both those things, whilst The Brown One fondly recalls growing up in a laboratory amongst human scientists and subsequently is not too fond of eating them or smashing their vehicles/buildings.  Unfortunately for Japan, and very fortunately for the viewers, the only way for them to settle their differences is with a crowd-pleasing metropolis-leveling no-holds-barred death match; make some gigantic popcorn.

THIRTY TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD (1993)

This intriguing biopic takes the unique form of a 32 part anthology of short films.  But this obviously isn't just any old collection of stories.  Director Francois Girard didn't want to deliver one distinct impression of Glenn Gould, so instead the viewer digests thirty two different versions of Glenn Gould, the famed Canadian concert pianist who gave up touring to focus entirely on recording, whose numerous eccentricities could have served as fodder for thirty two different full length films.  Canadian national treasure Colm Feore plays Glenn Gould, and although this unconventional film's 98 minutes are arranged somewhat chronologically, the segments are incredibly diverse; some are barely longer than a minute, some are as long as seven minutes, some are documentary interviews with friends and contemporaries, some are recreations of interviews or events, and some are as abstract as animated color spheres set to his music or a rapid fire montage of all the prescription drugs Gould took.

JIGOKU (1960)

The plot concerns a young, weak-willed theology student, Shiro, his amoral doppelganger Tamura, and the web of sin they draw everyone around them into.  Strong enough for two remakes, the movie is sometimes also known as The Sinners of Hell, although the straight-up translation would be simply, Hell.  So you probably won't be surprised where all the main characters end up for the last third of the film.  You'll know whether or not you're hooked when this man appears and proclaims "I am King Enma of Hell, I am Lord of the Eight Hells of Fire, and I am Lord of The Eight Hells of Ice.  Hear me!  You who in life piled sin upon sin will be trapped in Hell forever.  Suffer!  Suffer!  The vortex of torment will whirl for all eternity!"  Don't worry, that vortex ain't a metaphor.

DAY OF RESURRECTION (1980)

The internets claim this was the most expensive Japanese movie ever made at the time it was released, and it was a huge flop.  Bummer.  The cut in America was missing about an hour and was retitled Virus so it would be more obvious what it was about, but it came at the tail end of the epic disaster movie craze so nobody was interested.  People are always worried about germs or parasites or viruses or some kind of creature they can't see that wants to gobble up their insides: ebola, SARS, bird flu, swine flu, turtle flu, etc.  Hopefully this movie will find a larger audience especially since it's available for free.  Early on in the film title cards lay out the stakes for us: A super-virus leaves only 843 people left alive on Earth.  How did it get this bad and where will it go from here?

KWAIDAN (1964)

This movie won the Special Jury Prize at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival, so at least some anthology films (sometimes called portmanteau films) used to enjoy more popularity than they do now.  No frame story this time, just four ghost stories; the title means 'ghost story' but it is untranslated in America.  I don't know why they translate some foreign movie titles but other times they don't.  Why isn't Yojimbo just called Bodyguard?  Oh forget it.  This movie is very colorful and theatrical, drawing on rich traditions of the stage, with gigantic sets depicting all sorts of natural and unnatural occurrences in vivid, expressionist bursts of artifice and design.  The stories are all slow-burns, even the abbreviated final story, that rely more on mounting tension and creeping suspense than blood and guts or things jumping out at you suddenly.

FAREWELL (2009)

This film is quite accurately described by Netflix as the 'thinking man's spy thriller'.  It has a lot more in common with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy than it does with Goldfinger.  In the early 1980's a Soviet Intelligence Colonel, thoroughly disillusioned with the broken promises of his government, starts leaking information in an effort to bring down the USSR.  Because the information he wants to leak concerns the network of Soviet spies in the Western world, especially their intelligence agencies, he decides to leak the information through an unusual channel: a French engineer working in Moscow who smuggles the information back home to Paris and passes it along to a friend in the DST, the domestic intelligence agency of France, thereby completely bypassing the already comprised traditional foreign intelligence routes.  If that description already scares you, then you should know it only covers the first ten or fifteen minutes.

RUBBER (2010)

Although all the dialogue may be in English, make no mistake, this film is foreign.  If the credits full of French names didn't tip you off, you could probably figure it out once the action starts.  Two stories blend together: one is about an audience watching the events of the film from a distance with binoculars.  This story does interact with the other story occasionally, but its mostly isolated and sort of a modern day meta-version of a Greek chorus.  The other story, and by far the stronger one and the one with deservedly more screen time, is the tale of a rubber tire cast off somewhere in desert, which suddenly and inexplicably gains sentience, malevolence, and telekinesis (another character calls it 'psycho-kinetic').

13 ASSASSINS (2010)

The men-on-a-mission sub-genre benefits greatly from a worthy threat, an adversary so substantial that the team of heroes assembled feels not only necessary but outmatched.  That could be why so many of the most popular men-on-a-mission movies involve sticking it to the Nazis.  Well, no Nazis necessary here to make an all-time classic.  This stunning film provides quite the sinister antagonist: Lord Naritsugu.  He's so young and handsome that he feels like the star of a different movie, but here, he is a stone cold psychopathic butcher, a man who barely even seems to enjoy his wanton killing sprees and impulsive rape-murder sessions.  Thirteen might seem like plenty of assassins to end his reign of terror, but since Lord Naritsugu is the Shogun's half brother and travels with a small army of bodyguards, the titular group has their work cut out for them.

I SAW THE DEVIL (2010)

Although the actual Devil fails to make an appearance, rest assured, this movie is filled with vile, unholy things that would make him proud.  A simple description technically covers most of the plot: A serial killer takes his latest victim and her fiancee vows revenge.  Any chance this movie is six kinds of bat-shit crazy? Hint: it's Korean.