Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Last Legion!

Mid Aryan of 460 AD (colourised).

2007's The Last Legion has a twist ending that you will probably guess, but in case you want to see it fresh, avoid reading anything about it since even the tagline on the second-hand DVD I got of it gives it away.

You stream capeslop on your neighbour's Net Flix password; I imbibe kino on a busted DVD player held shut by an elastic band. We are not the same.

Loosely based on a book and looselier based on allegedly real events and persons, The Last Legion takes place in the 5th Century AD (not "CE"; get back in the locker), where Odoacer (Peter Mullen), unsatisfied with the Danegeld lavished upon him by the crumbling western Roman empire, sacks Rome (in reality it was Ravenna) and captures the boy-emperor Romulus Augustus (Thomas Brodie-Sangster).

Me to my bathroom mirror, ages 5-present (colourised).

Though this flick clearly has zero aspirations to contemporary relevance, this period in history is more worthy of scrutiny than anything on your high school curriculum. Machiavelli wrote of how the empire's overreliance on its foederati cadres - mostly Germanics - led to its inevitable dissolution, but today we're assured replacing purged chuds in the US military with illegal aliens is a good idea, so what did he know?

"O Caesar, the barbarians are at the gates!"
"Well, don't be a biggot - let them in!"
-from the Dialogues of Lapis Iactare

Odoacer would happily whack the young emperor and be done with it but finds himself talked out of it by Ambrosinus (Sir Ben Kingsley), the boy's enigmatic tutor and protector, and instead sends both to an island fortress while he sets about wrangling the senate. This gives heroes Ambrosius Aurelianus (Colin Firth) and Mira (Aishwarya Rai) scope to stage a daring rescue, in the course of which the young Caesar discovers his ancestor Julius's sword, because it was just there. You can bewail the contrivance of this all you like, but it saves time, and the sequence is fun.

To effect the rescue, Rai steals this random fisherman's boat by yeeting him in the water. This cracks me up because she could have just asked.

The fates of the historical Romulus and the titular Ninth Legion remain obscure to history, so the movie combines them with the pleasingly neat premise that our heroes set off to Britannia to enlist the aid of the long-missing legionnaires. You'd think the long trek through mainland Europe would chew up most of the runtime, but you'd be wrong, as it's glossed over in a few dissolves of what are presumably meant to be the Alps.

"Remember when they climbed the mountain in Lord of the Rings?" - Dino de Laurentiis

Sure, The Last Legion is derivative of every sword-and-sandals flick you've ever seen, hobbles along on a budget dwarfed by the Jackson Tolkien films and Troy, and seems rushed and first-drafty, but it's one of the last honest entertainment vehicles ever to emerge from Hollywood. Like Showdown in Little Tokyo, it could actually use more fat, as character dynamics are almost ascetically undernourished. There's a sword-swapping motif that provides milestones in the bonding journey between Firth and Brodie-Sangster, but it's so perfunctory the payoff underwhelms, while the buddy sidekick duo of Demetrius and Batiatus(?) are defined almost solely by a single scene where they arm-wrestle. On the other hand, I don't care, because it's fun to spend time in a world of historical fanfic, and there are charming little hints of character among the noise, like this moment where little Caesar tries it on with Rai:

This look right here where she contemplates where those blve eyes came from ain't acting. Low caste bros, it's over.

That the grand finale pales next to the spectacle of Helm's Deep or the Kalekeya battle in Baahubali only really shows how spoiled we've become. That it takes place in the under-exploited atmospherics of foggy pre-medieval Albion gives it mythopoetic resonance to spare.

I will not rest until menhirpunk is a genre.

Jimbo: The Thinking Barbarian - 20. One Way Ticket to Midnight (Part 1)!

Many are the tales of Jimbo: Hyperbolean, warrior-philosopher, impossible man. The few that have been rendered for your entertainment are the tip of the iceberg, and so many are now lost to the record, in codices consumed by flame and tablets sundered by the hand of mad despots and vandals now forgotten. As my life slips from me, my Nahuatl fails me, and the translation grows wearisome. Yet this climactic story must be told, in as many parts as it will take me. Some will say that it was all a fever dream; the dying delirium of a boy who never left his head. When I am gone, it will be you alone who carry on the flame. Now read of high adventure, deeds of glory, and the thunderous peal of fate.

Theme: Woman and Man - Ween

To be continued...

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Edge of Eternity!

♪Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away...

Like stunts, scenery porn should have a category at the Oscars (in the Berenstein dimension where the Oscars are about rewarding anything worthwhile). In the hierarchy of sights I'd gladly watch all day, the Grand Canyon ranks between Stacy Keibler dancing and the Stephen McDaniel interrogation (fourth). Since Edge of Eternity is set in and around the aforementioned landmark, and makes still-impressive use of aerial photography, plot and character are optional bonuses, which is fortunate, since the movie opens with a guy trying to off a guy by pushing his car into him and thus over the edge of the canyon.

Like just push the dude son, damn.

Hitchcockesque poetical illogic is forgivable in old movies because they don't posture as "self-aware" like all today's shitflicks that still have stuff this dumb in them. Moreover, opening your late-50s kino with a classic car tumbling down the Grand Canyon is cool. Edge is populated by a strong cast, but a stronger cast of automobiles with that increasingly alien look of that dream-time between the birth of rock and roll and television and the malaise of the 60s proper.

Cars don't look like this anymore because you voted for anal sex flags on government buildings.

Cornell Wilde plays a sheriff's deputy investigating a series of deaths surrounding an abandoned gold mine and a redhead with a penchant for speeding. You won't care too much about the details, but the payoffs are solid and the procedural schtick affords us a pretext to tour the long-gone world of 1959. The ending also prefigures Cliffhanger in its let's-have-everyone-fight-on-a-thing-above-a-canyon spectacle:

*Record scratch* *freeze frame* yep, that's me. I bet you're wondering how I got into this predicament...

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Red Sonja!

If random stills from your movie don't look like Helloween album covers, you're doing it wrong.

There is perhaps no less useful term in the bloated field of Writing On The Movies than "camp", which can mean anything from the leering grotesquerie of Joel Schumacher's Batman to the prototypical Airplane! shenanigans of Adam West's Batman. While recognisable cousins, one is unwatchable and the other is enduringly endearing. Remove "camp" altogether and you get the unutterably awful THE Batman, in which a world-famous celebrity billionaire played by the guy with the most recognisable face shape in the world stands two feet away from a dozen cops wearing a bat costume and you have to assume they're all just humouring him by pretending they don't know exactly who he is. What we can accept in the psychedelic cartoon reality of the Adam West show becomes so absurd in a sovlless grimdark iteration that the exercise becomes contemptible.

POV: you have the gall to like THE Batman on my bloggue. Also, for zoomoids who use this meme template: this is what a POV shot actually is. It stands for Point Of View, not Any Random Camera Angle.

Perhaps then "camp" is like a seasoning that, when applied judiciously, renders mere footage into entertainment, but in excess renders it inedible. The more "camp" you add to something, the more entertaining it becomes until the "camp" component overpowers the meat and potatoes and makes you want to hurl. Like a Roger Moore James Bondkino, Red Sonja daringly teeters on the brink of that event horizon. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who plays not-Conan, declared it his worst film, which might mean he's successfully mind-wiped Batman and Robin from his memory. Yet Red Sonja's goofy excesses are tempered by titular heroine Brigitte Nielsen's oaken inability to emote, and by its lean runtime of 85 minutes, so that it settles nicely into the Goldilocks just-right zone between crass and dull, which we'll call "entertainment".

Arnold yeeting Short Round would have been worth ticket price alone.

Mixed praise for a greatest movie of all time, perhaps, but shut up. The story begins on an incongruously dark note, with Sonja - sole survivor of a war party led by the evil and deliriously hammy Queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman, also of Conan) - being BRUTALLY GANG RAEPD in punishment for spurning the queen's sapphic entreaties. Nielsen and Bergman are both six feet tall so doubtless this is someone's fetish bingo card. Fortunately for Sonja, she's approached by magic gods or something which offer her superpowers that amount to being able to hit people with a sword, so she can seek her revenge to the strains of Ennio Morricone's why-the-fuck-is-Ennio-Morricone-scoring-this-flick score.

A pyramidal temple held aloft by carven naked hoes is where I imagine Frank Frazetta had his studio.

But first, Queen Gedren makes another stop at this temple where Sonja's sister works as a hot priestess tasked with keeping the MacGuffin safe. It's a glowing green sphere that causes earthquakes in the presence of light (why not?) and in their ritual to seal it, the priestesses do this:

Shot from above, this looks like an eyeball dilating; a powerful symbol of the joy that entertainment brings, or sexual excitement. Hey, you'd buy it from Rob Ager.

Queen Gedren's goons defeat the priestesses but Sonja's sister escapes by ziplining (why not?) to warn Arnold's not-Conan so he can pass the message onto Sonja, none of which is necessary since Sonja was going to go after Gedren anyway. You might think an 85-minute movie wouldn't fit much padding, but you'd be wrong: everything in this movie is padding. Anyway, not-Conan finds Sonja training to be a gladiator or whatever under this guy:

Who lives here:

I highlight this because the movie is charmingly over-designed. Every costume and location is festooned with totally unnecessary flourishes unthinkable to srs bsns g*me of thr*nes fans, because fantasy entertainment once aspired to the fantastic, not to 95 IQ umm-ackshually takes on half-remembered history books written by le cockwombling fuckcrustable beard-cultivators.

Random shit like this litters the landscape like a prehistoric version of those roadside kitsch attractions signposted on Route 66 roadtrips.

Arnold and Sonja team up off-and-on-again through a series of vignettes ranging from vidyaesque boss fights to such surreal scenarios as rescuing Short Round from teetering on the dismembered hand of an enormous statue while berating his manservant.

This scene might be equally at home in a Buñuel piece or a Harryhausen adventure.

Meanwhile, Gedren brings the MacGuffin back to her evil castle, where to maximise its seismic impact she's constructed a room full of candles (why not?)

Just filling a room full of candles renders a more striking and impressive set than anything anyone's been able to do with unlimited options with CGI greenscreens.

Gedren's castle is a great location rich with overwrought designs and she has a cool pet spider:

This will be my castle too when I reign.

It's a shame then that her plan will necessarily destroy her ornate lair, because her plan goes:

    Step 1: Expose the light-powered earthquake machine to a room full of candles.

    Step 2: ???

    Step 3: Profit!

Neither Gedren nor the writers thought that far ahead though, and who cares besides? There's a perfectly good formula for entertainment: hero, villain, love interest, wise mentor, sidekick, MacGuffin, three setpieces, climactic fight, lair explodes, roll credits. If you're not named Ozu, Sjöström or Paradjanov, you should probably stick to it.