Take a look over under the "Archive" at Tom's Fishing with John post

Accidentally even more disturbing than the complete post title....

Until the light takes us (2008)

Until The Light Takes Us recollects the Norwegian Black Metal scene of the early 1990s. Made notorious by a series of church burnings and homicides the subculture was subsequently tarred as satanism by the media. The film revisits that time, interviewing many key people and readdressing some claims about their motivations and beliefs.
Our two key interviewees are Varg Vikernes aka Count Grishnakh of Burzum seen here as he was until 2009, in Trondheim maximum security prison. Also Gylve of Darkthrone, a more passive character very involved in the scene but whom never crossed the line into criminal or violent activity. The interviews are totally engaging, especially that of Vikernes who is eloquent and compelling in his beliefs against the christian church and in a music which is surprisingly provocative when explained from it's conception. The film paces well by constantly turning our head between our two main subjects Varg & Gylve, representing the past and the present, the origins and a critique of the commercialization of Black metal culture in Norway, you could even say two perspectives from either side of the law.
It might be a stretch but I couldn't help noticing many parallels between black metal and the Rap scene of the early nineties. So many artists wanting to be the baddest, no-one backing down, everyone wanting to be the most extreme and both scenes crescendo with a series of deaths before being exploited commercially. Obviously the modern rap/R'n'B business is turning round much more cash these days, but the parallels were there at the start.
The production here is decent but what makes the film is really the subject and the clever way in which things are brought together to avoid a one note movie. Instead of just being about the music and excluding most of it's potential audience, Until the light takes us is instead about the people behind the music and the environments and circumstances that made them who they are. It takes an anthropologists perspective on Black Metal as a subculture rather than simply a musical genre. The soundtrack to the film is mercifully not Black Metal, instead the filmmakers opted for some electronic music which is moodier, cinematic and just works better.
It left me feeling enlightened and more appreciative in general of a scene I never understood and had had little exposure to. I was shocked at times and in awe that all this had happened and I knew nothing about it, swept under the carpet mostly. Now the right people have a chance to talk about it to a quite objective, some might even say sympathetic filmmaker. Provocative and controversial, just the way art should be.

Best of the Year Tally

Kids,

The following is a tally of the average votes garnered for each title we kicked around as candidates for the best of the year. In an effort to rank these choices in a semi-apples-to-apples way, I've divided the list into 3 sections i) Art House Fare, ii) Documentaries and iii) Entertainment. I recognize that some films straddle the Art/Entertainment divide but wanted to somehow deliniate the Scott Pilgrims from the Revanches. Some titles skew up or down with only 1 or 2 ratings, but generally the ranking seems modestly valid in my view.

We have reviews on some, but not others. Does anyone care to pick a couple to do?

Thoughts on the above in the comments section if you'd be so kind.

Sporgey

Art House Fare

Prophet, A 5
Mid-August Lunch 5
Red Riding Trilogy 4.88
Winters Bone 4.88
Bad Lieutenant Port of Call: New Orleans 4.75
Revanche 4.6
Mother 4.5
Valhalla Rising 4.5
White Ribbon 4.5
The Square 4.5
Antichrist 4.33
Mesrine Parts 1 & 2 4.25
Wild Hunt 4.25
Bronson 4.1
$9.99 4
Eclipse 4
Escapist 4
Ip Man 4
Secret in Their Eyes 4
Terribly Happy 3.88
Bright Star 3.75
Lorna's Silence 3.75
The Killer Inside Me 2.83

Documentaries

Exit Through the Gift Shop 4.5
Art of the Steal 4
Baseball: The Tenth Inning 4
Until the Light Takes Us 4
Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage 3.88
Art & Copy 3.75
September Issue 3.67

Entertainment

Fubar 2 4.25
Inception 4.07
American, The 4
Losers 4
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World 4
Shutter Island 4
North Face 3.83
House of the Devil 3.75
Repo Men 3.75
Informant 3.58
A Christmas Carol! 3.5
Cold Souls 3.5
KickAss 3.5
How to Train Your Dragon 3.5
2012 2.75
Sherlock Holmes 2.69
Greenburg 2.33

Unception.

In all sincerity, can anyone tell me what Inception was about? ...and didn't I just watch this movie back when it was a much better film called Shutter Island? Can a movie be both flawless and utterly vapid? I need some varied interpretations of what Nolan was trying to do/say here....because mine are sorely lacking.


You were right Kris.

Sporgey.

Valhalla Rising (2010)

Valhalla Rising is Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn's near-about-face from last year's equally delicious, yet utterly different Bronson, perhaps the best one-two film-punch from any director in recent memory. Where Bronson drifted into near-avant-garde territory, Valhalla Rising is a Joseph Conrad-worthy existential journey into the depths of hell. The magnificent Mads Mikkelsen plays a one-eyed Scandinavian gladiator who, after beheading his owner (a Nordic clan chieftain who kept him in a cage like a Jabberwocky between medieval fight-club bouts), joins up with a bunch of equally-looney Christian Viking/zealots on their way to take over Jerusalem. A wrong turn at Albuquerque, leads the navigationally-challenged Crusaders to what looks suspiciously similar to the north shore of the St. Lawrence around Baie-Comeau, QC and into the invisible-clutches of some nasty orange-tinged North American primitives. Much slow-burn carnage ensues.

Valhalla Rising is absolutely magnificent, but it will have a hard time finding an audience. It's at once a gorgeous head-trip/art picture along the lines of Terrence Malick's The New World and a variation on Stallone's final Rambo entry. It's Kubrick by way of Tarantino, with some acid-laced Aguirre-era Herzog thrown in for good measure. In a strange way, it reminded me of Kick-Ass, perhaps because neither film seems to have an definable audience demographic, other than a few hardcore DVD industry participants, most of whom I know personally.

It's probably a stretch, but you get the feeling that Refn is working his way through Stanley Kubrick's catalogue, re-imagining various elements through contemporary Danish eyes. I first noted this with Bronson and the thematic territory it shared with A Clockwork Orange. This time out, Valhalla Rising's haunting soundscape reminded me of The Shining, the eerie buzzed-out atmosphere evokes 2001: A Space Odyssey and the violence, jarring and visceral like that of Full Metal Jacket. Malick is the other obvious influence here, but there are scenes in Valhalla Rising that wouldn't be out of place in an Aleksandr Sokurov flick either. The heavily-atmospheric screen compositions are constructed with varying degrees of saturation, emphasizing deep primary tones that feel almost primal in their rendering. While the combat scenes are bone-crunchingly graphic, Mads Mikkelsen brings a sublime and simple purity to the role, a combination of rugged charisma and inner stillness that makes him impossible to tear your eye/eyes off. He doesn't utter a single word in the film and yet owns every frame of it. Now that's acting.

This is one of those films that remains difficult, if not impossible, to recommend. I have no doubt that it will displace some high-ranking films on a few of your best-of-the-year lists, but I can't think of a single customer I would/could recommend it to. I've stumbled upon a few of these this year and this might be the best example.... a near-great film that simply won't find an audience, because outside a bunch of our fellow coworkers, one may not exist.

Sporgey

There is nothing like fresh air, with a rod in your hand.

Shot in '91/'92 Fishing with John is a fishing program not at all about fishing. Resembling any cheap 90's cable TV fishing program it mostly consists of horrible looking video, music that ranges from dodgy Casio beats to some lo-fi jazz noodlings and a Hollywood style voice-over dramatic enough to make fishing exciting. All these elements together are totally disarming at a passing glance, but give yourself 5 minutes and you begin to feel a surrealistic undercurrent. This is John and his friends getting stoned, talking a bit and failing to catch fish.
It's hard to imagine under what circumstances this show came to be. Was it produced in the spirit of a parody from the start and if so who was in on the joke? Were they really all high? What was the audience and where was this to be shown? I get the sense that without this Criterion release of Fishing with John we'd be very lucky to maybe catch the show at an obscure cult video festival or tucked away in a very late night cable TV slot.
I listened to the full commentary with director and host John Lurie to try get a handle on it all. Apparently, in the early nineties John had developed a habit of shooting his fishing trips with his film industry friends on hi8. He'd been threatening to do a show for a while, his take on what he saw as the bizarrely relaxing cable TV fishing show. Somehow he came to meet a Japanese investor eager to invest in almost anything and thus came forward the money for Fishing with John. I can only imagine the face of the producers upon receiving the show they had paid for. It's a surreal stoner's odyssey. We travel around the world with John and his guests Jim Jarmusch, Tom Waits, Matt Dillon, Willem Dafoe and Dennis Hopper. The commentary reveals an episode that never got made with Flea of The Red Hot Chili Peppers. That would have been golden. But the thing is Fishing with John is golden. It's so unusual, in some ways very arty and sometimes utterly dumb. One minute it's philosophical musings, the next it's staged scenes of drama. It has that elusive x factor, the allure of the too bizarre to be true found only in rare one off gems like King of Kong or I like killing flies.
According to John, Tom Waits got so seasick and irate that they didn't talk for two years after the making of the show, Matt Dillon clammed up every time the camera rolled, Willem Dafoe was hilarious, Jim Jarmusch was easy going and Dennis Hopper was high on sugar and couldn't fish at all. I could watch this show all day if there were only more episodes that existed. Never mind Speed Racer, Fishing with John is the real ultimate stoner DVD.

Best of the Year Start List (Updated #3)

I'm working on a web-only version of the Year End Review and have been slowly shortlisting films I've heard bounced around as contenders for this year's best releases. I've added a few of my own favourites and have arrived at this....updated, again, again.

$9.99

2012

A Christmas Carol!

American, The

Antichrist

Art & Copy

Art of the Steal

Bad Lieutenant Port of Call: New Orleans

Baseball: The Tenth Inning

Best Worst Movie

Bright Star

Bronson

Cold Souls

Eclipse

Escapist

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Fubar 2

Greenburg

House of the Devil

How to Train Your Dragon

Inception

Informant

Ip Man

Kick-Ass

Lorna's Silence

Losers

Mesrine Parts 1 & 2

Mid-August Lunch

Mother

My Son My Son What Have Ye Done?

North Face

Prophet, A

Red Riding Trilogy

Repo Men

Revanche

Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Secret in Their Eyes

September Issue

Sherlock Holmes

Shutter Island

Terribly Happy

The Killer Inside Me

The Square

Until the Light Takes Us

Valhalla Rising

White Ribbon

Wild Hunt

Winters Bone 
 
That's a wrap.
 
Sporgey

Skynet has become self aware.

Dear Elders,
I feel a contagious ripple of shrugs spreading through my generation. You've got us nailed, you're right. We are all dreamers with art degrees and iPods, Facebook and text messaging. Overgrown teenagers. We consider neuroses a positive character trait, we are douche bags. The funniest thing I've seen this month is a video of an angry Korean man careening down a lift shaft to his death. We call each other hipsters without ever confronting the irony in the fact that the key characteristic of being a hipster is to constantly label others as hipsters in a desperate attempt to set yourself apart. Right now, I'm listening to music that juxtaposes an angular post-rock jazz sensibility with twee and whimsical female vocals... in Japanese. I am by all categorical definitions and imaginable criteria, a dickhead.
However, It's time to embrace the dickhead and let our differences lie. We can't deny that the chasm between us is claiming victims all the time, as 25 year-olds take up knitting and your friends Mum hunts down student boys online we just need to look after each other. There is no real difference between us, the only thing that really changed is our environment, our climate. We construct all these ideas to help make sense of what has happened but in terms of actual, quantifiable change in personality, I don't believe it's so much. And this brings us to what we have to offer and what new things we can bring to film.
Watching Scott Pilgrim Vs The World a couple of weeks ago, I almost felt proud of my generation. We are annoying, but we're not living in a complete cultural void. Things are just happening too fast for us to straddle. We're really not all bad and as things have unfolded we're in a unique position with a whole bunch of phenomena to draw upon creatively. Cue this slew of internet related films and I feel like we're getting in a groove.
When this clip of a Winnebago salesman stressing out gets two million hits on you tube, eventually someone is going to pick up on it. When a bad movie reaches cult status 20 years after it's release and draws its star out from his everyday job as a dentist into an arena where again, he is the star. We need to capture that, I want to see that. And likewise with The Social Network. It's a story of our time, it's a story worth telling. These subjects that some would see as fleeting, are now starting to feel to me as what this era will be remembered for.
“Remember all those movies about McCarthyism/Vietnam/The Internet?”
Who knows, all this attempted wisdom should have probably just stayed in my head, but there I go again. Dickhead.

The Expendables (2010)

Existing on the dark side of the moon, at least when compared to the endless barrage of estrogen bombs going off at the cinema week in and week out for the last few years, Sylvester Stallone's Expendables certainly makes for an unusual viewing experience. As you might expect, it's an inverted, gender-mirror image of Sex and the City, the Twilight franchise and everything Nora Ephron ever directed. This is man movie territory, part homage to '80 action flicks, part sentimental longing for the good old days when men had testicles. Nearly everyone from the era is in it (except Seagal and Van Damme) and it reminded me that these guys have no modern day equivalents. Weird, isn't it? They just don't make movies like this anymore, which is, I suppose, both the point and the movie Stallone was making.

So, is The Expendables any good? Well, it ain't art to be sure, but fuck yeah, it's awesome! Sure, it might lack a little of the magic from the old days, but it works well enough on its own level. It's overly violent, gratuitous to a fault, ridiculous and improbable... and I didn't give a shit. Stallone is charming, funny and looks like he's nearly paralyzed on horse tranquilizers throughout. When he and Mickey Rourke hook up, you have to wonder who has more steroids coursing through their ever-prominent veins. The scene is 2 parts amazing and 3 parts jaw-droppingly creepy. It's like watching the results of a CIA super-soldier-science-experiment gone terribly right. The other ex-stars all hit their marks (and the bad guys) on cue and shit blows up over and over again.

And over again.

Gotta say....I really liked The Expendables. Sure, it was a silly throwbac......whoops, Donna's calling. All the girls have big boobs. Watch it.
 Sporgey

My shoulder feels a little...strange

http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/11/16/scooping-ice-cream-can-constitute-workplace-hazard-alberta-tribunal/