Lords of Chaos (2018)

Lords of Chaos (2018)

Dir. Jonas Åkerlund

As a long-time fan of early Norwegian Black Metal, I didn't know what to expect from LoC. Would it be parody, satire, mockery, or bullshit sensationalism? Wikipedia describes it as a 'horror-thriller film', which was worrying.

The answer, as I see it, is that the film is none of those things entirely, but it does lose its way as the narrative goes on. Before that, however, for about an hour of its runtime it's a pleasingly straightforward presentation with a comfortable amount of black humour and a half-decent (but mostly surface deep) depiction of the lifestyle that informed the music, and vice-versa.

It's based on the book Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground (1998) by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind. I've not read the text, but am familiar with how the stories were reported across Europe, firstly by having been a reader of the UK music presses at the time of the happenings — which might seem like too peripherally a connection, but is itself something that the film alludes to, in one of its most daft scenes — and later through personal research on the internet.

Godzilla: Reiwa Era Films (2016—)

29. Shin Godzilla (2016)

Dirs. Hideaki Anno + Shinji Higuchi

NOTE: numbering continues sequentially from the Millennium Era. For simplicity I've used English titles, but it's always the Japanese language versions of the films that I refer to.

Another hard reset of the franchise, with a new creature design and new origin story behind it.

The majority of the film involves politicians, bureaucrats, military leaders, etc, talking about how to deal with the irradiated daikaijū threat.

It utilises fast cuts to give the impression that things being discussed hurriedly is some kind of compensation for things being uninteresting - but it's really not. The first hour in particular is dense with such dry, ponderous dialogue.

Godzilla, referred to as male more than once in the English subs, is mostly CGI, mo-capped so that it moves kind of like a man in a suit. It gets points for good intentions, but ultimately it's just another CGI creature with zero personality. If I wanted that I'd watch the American films.

God Save the Queen (2007)

God Save the Queen (2007)

Author: Mike Carey | Illustrator: John Bolton | Page Count: 96

"Okay, these are the rules. We run fast, we dance like animals — and we say yes to everything."

An adult tale filled with visceral imagery and harsh realities that merge the aesthetic of British Punk with the magical but equally fearful nature of the cautionary tale / fairy story. Those two things on the surface would seem to have nothing in common, but author Mike Carey somehow makes the pairing work.

You'll meet characters from other well-known DC Vertigo titles, namely The Sandman, The Dreaming, and The Books of Magic, but the book exists on the fringes of all three titles, so you don't need to have read any of them prior to settling down with God Save the Queen.

The story revolves around Linda, a bored, alienated, self-absorbed and self-destructive young adult. If trouble doesn't find her, then she'll actively seek out and embrace it. The rebellion of the individual against society and family is concurrent with the catastrophic repercussions that follow when Titania, the Queen of Faerie, receives an unwelcome visitor to her realm.

Stargate: Continuum (2008)

Stargate: Continuum (2008)

Dir. Martin Wood

The Ark of Truth (2008) had a fairly pleasing final scene, the kind that draws a line under what came before while acknowledging the role of an unwritten future in franchise-land, so there was no real need for a second TV Movie. But one could argue that the villain of Continuum was a loose end from the TV series that needed tying up, I suppose. Whatever the case, Continuum is definitely not as good as the previous TV Movie. I've watched it twice and grew bored both times.

Among other things, it's a story of the Stargate itself, before it got transported to the US to become the central part of the Stargate program at SGC. Well, it's kind of that, but in a more science-fictiony way. It connects an event on the Tok'ra homeworld to a ship carrying a special cargo in the Atlantic Ocean in the year 1939.

It's good that it doesn't introduce a new 'one time only' big-bad, but what I enjoyed most was seeing some cast members from yesteryear alongside the regular ones. Fan-service it may be, but it's also complementary to the plot.