Dredd

Wow, the West remade "The Raid" a heck of a lot faster than I thought.  Six months?  That's efficiency.

I kid, I kid.  I'm not going to call this a rip-off of "The Raid", because it isn't.  "Dredd" is actually the second movie based upon the "Judge Dredd" franchise.  Its a remake* - I guess - of the 1995 Sylvester Stallone movie, "Judge Dredd", though the two movies could not be more different in style.  Its basically the difference between "Batman Forever" and "Batman Begins".  One is a massively campy 90s action blockbuster, with all the overblown silliness that you'd expect from that era, and the other is a gritty bloody as hell delicious death machine.  And apparently this one is more faithful to comics, so if you're one of those people who have actually read the comics, good for you.  I know a lot of people hated the Stallone version, partially because its over-the-top, partially because Rob Schneider, and partially because... Judge Dredd takes his helmet off?  Oh whatever, fanboys, Stallone is beautiful in that movie, I regret nothing.  Also, you have to love the way Stallone and Armand Assante are able to growl out the word "LAWWWWW!!!!"

The new version has no LAWWW!!, no comic reliefs, no giant robots, no Hershey, and no catchphrases.  The story is down to simplest narrative efficiency.  Rather than adapting a huge comic book story arc and dealing with dozens of characters, writer Alex Garland just cut through the knot and decided to do one single day in Judge Dredd's life of fighting crime.  Dredd and his rookie partner, "Other M"-style Samus Aran walk into a tower to investigate a few murders.  Then the local crime lord locks the place down, and Karl Urban has to kung-fu his way up and kung-fu his way down to stay away.  Actually, no, unlike "The Raid", Dredd doesn't use Indonesian martial arts, instead he shoots people in the face.  "Dredd" should have been named "Bullets Explode Heads: The Movie... In Brain Blasting 3D".  And this is a hard R, they don't spare a second of blood or gore.  People die, and they die badly.

If you're one of those people who hate violent movies and complained in the 80s about all those greasy action movie that glorified violence... well, fuck off.  "Dredd" is awesome.  Violence is cool, PG-13 needs to die and I know exactly how to kill it.  Put Karl Urban in a Judge helmet and have him blow PG-13's face right off.

Project X

Unfortunately going back to college has deeply inhibited my ability to review new movies, which makes new posts somewhat difficult.  So I'm pretty much grasping for straws for things to work with.  Unfortunately there isn't a great deal out there worth talking about.  "Project X" is a movie that really isn't worth talking about either, but its a movie that came out this year that I saw last night.  So its pretty much all I got.

Essentially the idea behind "Project X" is portray the world's wildest high school party ever.  Of course, high school parties are lame, so ignore that middle part there, and move it forward to:  the world's wildest party ever.  Its a perfectly terrible and shallow dream mostly full of terrible and shallow people rubbing up against each other in their own terrible shallowness.  Its essentially the ultimate high school fantasy, where three nerdy guys* put together the world's hugest and most disastrous party ever, spending literal millions to get the approval of hundreds of strangers who they'll never meet again.  And of course, to be the coolest kids in... high school.  Alcohol is consumed, houses get trashed, bras go off, babies are made, and eventually it all descends into a riot where the unending social greed of these little pricks is punished through epic scale in apocalyptic flames of destruction.

Actually I wasn't very mad at the movie watching it, but if you give it very much though, "Project X" is actually a largely terrible movie with a disgusting moral compass.  It is just a goofy comedy and basically nothing more than silly high school fantasy, but really its a movie totally devoid of real people or real characters.  Its all just as soulless as the drunken gyrations that made up the party.  This is a movie that says with a straight face that all that really matters is that you become coolest kid in school - high school.  No matter how much violence, damage, and probably deaths that have been caused in your massive struggle to be popular, its all fine if at the end of that day you can say "I had the biggest party in history, and I'm so great."  Usually high school movies that star kids with the (pathetic) goal to be the coolest kid in school eventually learn at the end that there's more important things in life than being admired by hundreds of strangers who honestly don't care about you, that the things that really matter are friendship, greater life goals, and loved ones.  Nope, that's not the case with "Project X".  Burn your house down, screw it, they'll never stop talking about you.  And I guess that's the 21st century dream.

Deadman Wonderland Anime

Who was the moron who ended this anime on episode 12???  I'm going to find you, and write the most beautiful story ever, just for you.  Its going to be a work of soul and magnificence, both clever, entertaining, and soul wrenching.  Then, at roughly, let's say, a third of the way through, I'll just cut off mid-sentence.  No conclusion, no nothing, I won't even finish that particular thought, the manuscript is totally blank after that.  You'll never know anything after that.  THEN YOU'LL KNOW HOW IT FEELS, YOU MONSTER.  SUFFER!  SUFFER FOREVER!

"Deadman Wonderland" actually isn't a bad anime series... its just a complete waste of time.

This was one of the two big new shows for the revamped Toonami for Saturday Night, along with "Casshern Sins"*, which accompanied Adult Swim's surviving anime series of "Bleach", and reruns of "Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood" and "Ghost in the Shell".  So it wasn't, honestly, the strongest line-up, at least at first.  "Bleach", to my great shock, actually got watchable again once it managed to focus on a battle between the main hero and a villain that actually matters.  "Casshern Sins" started really poorly but has gotten much better now it has a plot.  But really, for awhile, "Deadman Wonderland" seemed like the star of the line-up.  It had a dark bloody storyline, but also a great sense of irony, since all this brutality and slaughter was taking place in a tourist trap theme park.  And it was all going well... until it just ended.

Now, what I didn't know was that "Deadman Wonderland" is an adaptation of an ongoing manga - always a bad sign, by the way.  So they started adapting for only twelve episodes, hoping this would be the first season, then they'd take a year break, and presumably do another season and another and another, until finally the show was finished.  This is, in comparison to "Bleach"'s method of adapting a comic, which is make a new episode every week, never stop, and throw in a million dull awful filler arcs, because for some reason they can never stop animating.  Unfortunately, "Deadman Wonderland" was a huge flop in Japan, like a catastrophic disaster - which is strange since this show was pretty awesome - and they managed to sell like 1000 DVDs.  So the show got canceled, and we're watching an anime the truly hasn't been finished.  Yeah, it was a fine anime... while it lasted!  Then it just ends!  What the hell?

The secret here is:  don't watch the anime.  Read the comics instead.

Xenoblade - Part 1

Its not exactly the nicest generation for JRPGs, is it?  Actually we're living in a Dark Age, perhaps the very last years of this style of gaming.  I'm sure we'll see a trickle of these kinds of games for years to come but its hard to imagine them ever retaking their place of cultural relevance.  Especially when you never be sure any Japanese game will get exported to your country.  And the games that are guaranteed to be released?  They're "Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns"*.  Final Fantasy, the flagship of this genre, has scuttled, "Dragon Quest" has gone MMO, and the future could not look bleaker.

But all is not lost!!!  Not by any standard.  Because JRPGs are still running strong and there are plenty on the way to keep us going.  Last month "The Last Story" was released, there's "Pokemon Conquest", there's "Persona 5" on the way, we got the Studio Ghibli-Level 5 combination of "Ni No Kuni" next January, and Square Enix, despite their endless stupidity lately, are still making "Bravely Default: Flying Fairy", an excellent-looking classic RPG.   Premier amongst this list, though, is "Xenoblade", perhaps the best-received JRPG in years, at least of this current console generation.  Sadly it took us over a year of arguing, begging, protesting, and pleading to finally get it released here in the United States.  But we won in the end, and here's our spoils:  a damn good RPG.  Exactly the thing you need to forget just how bad certain other gaming franchises have gotten.

"Xenoblade" is a game made by Monolithsoft, and developed to be a vague tangential successor to "Xenogears" and the "Xenosaga" trilogy.  Its also directed by Tetsuya Takahashi, who was the primary creative force behind those titles.  The other Xeno games have a troubled history, one I'll probably cover when I eventually review "Xenogears" (which won't be for awhile), but all they really suffer due to over-ambition.  Takahashi usually goes into his titles thinking of massive epic tales that would require six games to complete.  This time he just made a single RPG, essentially taking the vast open freedom of "Final Fantasy XII" and multiplying it to infinity.  This game is huge in size, and that is really its primary selling point.  Just one location, the Bionis Leg, could fit pretty much all of "Final Fantasy XIII-2", and that's the second location in the game.  The size is mind-boggling in its epicness.  But its also a solid game with great characters, great music, and a gripping interesting storyline.  This is the game you should be playing now.

The Innnocence of Muslims

How often is it that a movie is so incredibly bad that people are killed over it?  "The Innocence of Muslims" is one of the very few cases in history of a film actually resulting in immediate deaths and carnage, because of how just unbelievably insulting, insensitive, and repugnant it is.  Years ago, films like "Passion of the Christ" created huge protests, "Song of the South" is never going to get released again for its quasi-racist undertones, and the British for awhile were particularly fond of banning gory horror movies.  But "The Innocence of Muslims" is on a whole other level, since it has directly caused the deaths of American diplomat in Libya, Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.  Worse, Stevens was a good man, working his best to help stabilize Libya and secure democracy there, so its a massive loss for everybody involved.

Really, the only movies that are on "Innocence of Muslims" level are Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda piece, "Triumph of the Will" and D. W. Griffith's historically revisionist silent-era Ku Klux Klan epic, "The Birth of a Nation"*.

Now, I haven't actually seen "The Innocence of Muslims", all I've seen is an incredibly-long thirteen-minute trailer on Youtube, which is pretty much a selection of choice scenes to give me the gist of what's going on.  And thirteen minutes is probably too much of this movie to even watch, considering how utterly terrible it is at its very core.  This is a movie with the central message that the religion of Islam is a lie, the Prophet Muhammad was an insane (homosexual?) womanizing pedophile, and that all the entirety of Muslim culture represent is violence, barbarism, and hilariously bad greenscreen effects.  With a message so blatantly hateful, its hard to say there's any message at all here, except as perhaps some kind of elaborate joke.  Eventually I'm sure there will be full cuts of this movie available, but its never going to theaters, and its never getting a DVD release.  Unless of course, you find some horrible racist right-wing Christian group to distribute it.  With production values as bad as the subject matter, "The Innocence of Muslims" is also a pretty good successor to movies like "Troll 2" or "Birdemic".  Only those bad movies had something of an innocent stupidity to them... this is just hateful.

I couldn't laugh at it.  I was laughing for awhile, but eventually the raw evil of this product overcame even my ironic love of bad cinema.  Its too much evil to me to enjoy.  There really is no reason for "The Innocence of Muslims" to continue existing.