Blood, sweat and hobbits

The fantasy film genre is a pretty interesting one. To define the genre; fantasy movies have magical, supernatural themes, fantastical, exotic settings, and larger than life characters. To put it simply; the fantasy genre can deal with anything outside the realms of common believability. Then there are a few subcategories of movies within the 'fantasy' genre. There are horror, supernatural, mythological, science fiction, historical, romantic and sword and sorcery fantasy films.

The 'sword and sorcery' sub genre is arguably the most popular fantasy sub class. Sword and sorcery films are fairly self explanatory. Heroes and villains, warriors and wizards, dungeons and dragons. You know sword and sorcery when you see it. It's very Tolkeinesque. They have archetypal characters; clearly defined representations of good and evil, muscle and magic. They almost always have a quasi-medieval undercoat, with a second layer of monsters and sorcery. They have an almost magnetic attraction to most self proclaimed geeks. Throw a magic acorn at a geek film convention and you'll probably hit a six-foot tall dwarven warrior, or a lanky guy with fake, pointy elf ears.

If you take a look at the fantasy movies that Hollywood has produced over the years, you see it's a very hit and miss affair. You really have to wade through the less than great stuff to find the diamonds in the rough. But there are some truly great, genre defining titles out there to enjoy. The problem with making a fantasy movie is usually the cost. To make these fantastical worlds come to life convincingly, a studio has to throw a lot of money towards any given project. Just look at 'The Lord of the Rings'. Stanely Kubrick, when considering taking on the monumental task of directing Tolkein's legendary book trilogy, was quoted as saying that it was 'un-filmable'. Thank Crom for Peter Jackson and company. The other roadblock to a sword and sorcery film's success, is Hollywood's reluctance to take the genre seriously. Despite the mega success of films like the Rings and Star Wars, many studios see fantasy as untested, silly and that it only has a small, niche audience. There is some justification to this attitude. For every Lord of the Rings, there are half a dozen 'Deathstalker's', 'Krull's' and 'Hundra: Barbarian Queen's', or in other words, awful movies.

There are, however, many great, well made, interesting sword and sorcery epic's out there. Here are my top 5...


5. Willow - Willow is a something George Lucas threw together, obviously heavily inspired by The Lord of the Rings. Ron Howard directed the mid-eighties epic about the half-pint, aspiring magician (Warrick Davis), out on an adventure to protect a prophecized child, told to be the only hope of overthrowing the evil Queen. Along the way you get to meet Val Kilmer as a swashbuckling warrior, some hairy trolls and a villain that likes to turn her enemies into pork.



4. Star Wars - Some might argue that the Star Wars trilogy doesn't fit the sword and sorcery genre, but I think it clearly meets the specifications. Star Wars has always felt far more 'fantasy' than 'sci-fi' to me. It has the clear cut, black and white sides of good and evil, the young farm boy that wants to take up his fathers sword, the ominous black knight, the cackling, old evil wizard, and even the unscrupulous, dashing rogue...and his wookie sidekick.





3. Legend - When Ridley Scott, one of the contemporary greats, wants to bring a world to life on film, he really, knows how to bring a world to life on film. Wether it's ancient Rome, sci-fi San Fransisco or a beautiful, fairytale, fantasy world, like the one in 1985's 'Legend'. This flick, about a forest dweller named Jack (Tom Cruise) and his quest to save the princess and the world from the clutches of a maniacal villain (played with relish by Tim Curry), is an underrated film. Every shot looks amazing. Shigeru Miyamoto even sites Legend as a big inspiration for the Legend of Zelda video game series.





2. Conan the Barbarian - Ron E. Howard's Hyboria is a harsh, unforgiving world where you either live by the sword or die upon it, brought to life in his classic series of dark, pulp fantasy novels. When Arnie put on the loincloth and brandished Conan's enormous, phallic, broadsword, a classic was made. This is an eternally watchable epic, complete with blood, sweat, snake cults, larger than life characters, an immersive world and, of course, Crom. Strong in his mountain. This is a top notch production from start to finish. It feels dirty, mythic and darkly poetic, much like Howard's source material. Easy to recommend to anyone that loves action epics.



1. The Lord of the Rings - The trilogy of trilogies. The one trilogy to rule them all. Tolkein's books invented the fantasy genre at large, it's only fitting that a typically epic movie series be made by some truly game changing film makers, tackling the monumental task of putting Middle Earth on film. Peter Jackson knew what he needed to keep from the books, he new what he needed to omit, he kept the spirit that Tolkein instilled in his stories, and made films that would appease the die hard fantasy fans and mainstream audiences alike. Some of the scenes that are brought to life need to be seen to be believed. A film trilogy that belongs in any ones DVD collection.

Multiple nerdgasm's

If there's one thing the contemporary video game industry loves, it's sequels. Franchises are a big deal these days. Publishers love 'em. That's why we look set to see a new Call of Duty game every year why Bobby Kotik still has blood pumping through his veins. That's why the most hotly anticipated PC game is Diablo III. This is why Mario is a cultural icon of our generation. We all watched the sweet, fat, stupid little Italian grow from a hand full of barely animated pixels to a fully realized polygonal character.

But there are some franchises out there that are ripe for a sequel. When you can't take another CoD campaign, what games would you like to see receive the next gen sequel treatment. There are some games that are aching for a follow up. Here are the top five that would give me multiple nerdgasms.


5. X-Wing Vs. Tie Fighter - The original X-wing vs Tie was an amazing game. It was basically a fighter sim Star Wars style. It controlled amazingly and the shield/weapons/engine power triage was really fun to manage. Throw a next gen sequel on 360, live multiplayer with a top gun leader board, maybe the ability to form persistent squadrons with your friends; how could it be anything but awesome.


4. Full Throttle - Take the classic Lucasarts dystopian future biker adventure game, pretty up the graphics (retaining the awesome cartoonish artstyle), make it an action/adventure hybrid, maybe even make it open world if you want to get really crazy. Explore the highways and byways of the Full Throttle world, upgrading your bike, fighting biker scum on the backroads, but keep a strong story component. Now that's a sequel.


3. California Games - With the current popularity of sports compilation games, on all manner of motion controlly, remote jibby jabby systems, this one is a no brainer. A cool gen-x styling, with the more extreme, totally rad sports on offer. Kinect hang gliding. Wiimote hackey-sack. Tell me this wouldn't work.


2. Thief - I loved the original Thief games. The dripping atmosphere, the dark, mysterious setting, the excellent stealth gameplay, taking out guards with the good 'ol blackjack. These games need a sequel. Make Garret a little more mobile, ala Assasins Creed, give it a dark, gripping story, and make the stealth interplay with the surrounding world and it's inhabitants complex and challenging, maybe through in a Splinter Cell Conviction style co-op campaign. What is the sum of these parts? Total gaming gold.

1. Syndicate Wars - Syndicate Wars is a special game. Take a dark, futuristic cityscape, some cybernetic hatchet-men, a truckload of ultra cool weapons (pursaudertron anyone) and throw them into a complex, squad based strategy game and you have Syndicate Wars. This game had destructible buildings ( I mean every building on the map), a totally cool Blade Runner esqe setting and some really fun missions. I think a new Syndicate game would be kind of cool in the form of a Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter style tactical squad based shooter. I think I'm about to nerdgasm.

(Post) Apocalypse Now

Despite the bugs and sporadic crashes I'm really enjoying Fallout New Vegas. The worlds that both Bethesda, with Fallout 3, and Obsidian, with New Vegas, have brought to life are really fun to explore. New Vegas has a slightly different atmosphere than Fallout 3. The interplay between the different factions is cool and I love what they've done with Caesar's Legion; a faction of militant marauders who sweep across the wasteland killing or enslaving anyone they come across. From what I understand many of the employees at Obsidian formerly worked for Black Isle, who of course made the original Fallout and Fallout 2. Apparently Caesar's Legion was conceived back after Fallout 2 was released and they were going to be in Black Isles Fallout 3 but, of course, Black Isle closed before that could happen. It's kind of awesome that those guys are getting to use that material now in New Vegas. It's just a shame the game keeps crashing and I keep running into broken quests...

Whenever I play a game in a certain setting, such as Fallout's post apocalyptic world, I end up wanting more in a similar motif so I usually go to the old DVD collection to see what I can find. Here's my top 5 post apocalyptic films.

1. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior - Possibly the greatest Australian film ever made, a legend of the post apocalyptic genre. Mad Mel Gibson fighting for fuel out in the desert wasteland. Dark and dirty and great car scenes, don't need to say much more about this other than if you haven't seen it you really need to.

2. The Road - I absolutely loved this book and I really liked the movie too. Cormack McCarthy's barren Central United States are among the bleakest settings I've ever seen and the film did a fairly good job of replicating the feeling of hopelessness. The story of the boy and his father wandering down the road, trying to reach the coast, in a dead world beset by marauding cannibals. A hard watch, especially if you're a dad (or mum), as the father (played perfectly by Viggo Mortensen) try's to shield his son from the horrors that surround them.

3. The Book of Eli - Denzel Washington traversing the wastelands of a desolate Earth and fighting with Garry Oldman and his goons over the last surviving copy of the bible. Some cool popcorn action scenes and Michael Gambon as a crazy old cannibal into the mix. Awesome stuff.

4. Waterworld - This movie seems to receive alot of ridicule I think because it's a Kevin Costner production and because it was a box office flop. I think you need to watch it for what it is. Sure, it pretty much is The Road Warrior on water, but I don't understand how anyone couldn't find this an entertaining watch. The plot; the Earth's polar icecaps are all melted and the surface of the planet is totally flooded, leaving the remnants of the human race to do battle upon the surface of the endless ocean and search for the mythical 'dry land' that is rumored to exist somewhere out there. Costner himself as the stoic lead and Dennis Hopper having a ball as the ridiculous bad guy.

5. Six String Samurai - A low budget gem sneaks in at my number five just for being so damn cool. The hero, Buddy (who looks suspiciously like Buddy Holly) traverses a post apocalyptic world with nothing but his six string and his samurai sword, on his way to 'Lost Vegas' the rock 'n roll capital of the future. This movie is all about having fun so don't take things seriously and you're in for a good time.

The old and the new...

Movie nostalgia is a seemingly immeasurable factor when thinking about your favourite movies from your youth. Are things really as great as you remember them or are you thinking about them through child's eyes? When you revisit movies that were important to you as a kid some things hold up and some don't. If you made a list of your top five movies when you were fifteen how similar would it be to the same list if you made it now? Sure, you loved ewok's when you were twelve but isn't it a tad hard to watch them ambushing all those heavily armed and trained stormtroopers when you watch Jedi these days? There was no problem with it when you were a kid because that filter in your mind hadn't developed yet. Movies were just something fun and a little bit magical and bullshit like whether a bus could jump a fifty foot gap in a highway overpass didn't enter into the equation.

If you made the two lists, childhood versus adulthood, how much crossover do you get? Is there anything you loved as a kid but can't watch today without cringing? Here are my two lists.


Top 5 movies when I was a kid;

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark - I've watched this film at least 100 times. It spoke to my imagination like nothing else ever had when I first saw this at about age seven or eight. Indy was the definitive action hero and Raiders was the definitive adventure movie. I'm pretty sure I didn't even know what a Nazi was back then, they were just like villains from a Bond movie to me. I think I loved Raiders so much because the action and characters were great, the 'good guys' and 'bad guys' were very black and white which spoke to a kids understanding of what was going on and I thought Ford was the coolest guy I had ever seen. This near obsession with Indy spilled over to the two sequels and the old Fate of Atlantis adventure game that Lucasarts put out in the early nineties. I loved this movie.

2. The Goonies - When this first aired on tv back in the eighties it was the first thing I recorded with the brand new VCR that dad had just bought. I watched that old video cassette until it was worn out and chewed up. As far as light hearted kids adventure movies went this one was my favourite. What can you say about Goonies? Kids going on an adventure looking for pirates treasure...what more could you want when you were seven? Data, of course, was my favourite. Not only was he from Temple of Doom but he had all the cool gadgets. When I see this one as a adult it is still endearingly charming. It's also amusing how much they could say 'shit' in a kids movie in the eighties. I've recently heard rumors about a remake of this one. Only time will tell how that turns out.

3. Return of the Jedi - There was only one rule for growing up in the eighties; you had to be a Star Wars fan and Jedi was my favourite. The third movie from the original trilogy felt the most 'swashbuckling' to me, with the awesome scene on Jabba's sail barge, the speeder bike chase through the forest and the ewoks, oh the ewoks. I wanted to go live in an ewok village and have ewok buddies and become 'an honorary member of the ewok tribe'. Plus you got to see Darth Vader with his freaking helmet off! That was a mind blowing moment for a young geek. I think Jedi still holds up great these days. Not as well as The Empire Strikes Back maybe, but there is Mark Hamil's performance in Jedi, which I believe is underrated. He is great and when Vader goads him in the last act and Luke looses his composure and lashes out he is so believably on the edge, so close to falling to the dark side. It makes you wonder why the same character duality is handled so clumsily with Anakin in the prequel trilogy.

4. Lethal Weapon 3 - Cops and robbers is one sure fire way to entertain a kid craving some action and Richard Donner's Lethal Weapon series were among my favorite of the 'old school' action flicks. When you watch these today it's clear the first movie is the strongest but back in the early nineties I was all about Lethal Weapon 3. Mel Gibson back in his prime acting days could piss pure charisma and Danny Glover was like the African American second dad you always wanted. As ridiculous as these 'buddy cop' antics were I'm sure I believed this was what cops were like when I was ten. There was something about this that captured my imagination perfectly that I can't clearly define. The 'cop killer' bullets? The exploding buildings? Leo Getz? Who knows.

5. Jurassic Park - When my dad took me to see this at the movies in '93 I didn't really know what I was in for. I remember this movie being hyped to high heaven before it came out and I was keen to see it as I was in the mid stages of collecting dinosaur magazines that came with a bit of a plastic t-rex model every week, so I was into dinosaurs at that stage. Then Spielberg worked his black magic or whatever it is he does and drew me so deep into his world that I made dad take me back to see Jurassic Park four more times. This is an incredible movie. The plot, the special effects, the performances and everything else about this movie owned me for the two hours or so that I sat in that cinema every time I went to see this. I recently watched this again with my five year old, and it is a testament to the directing of this film that when the t-rex shows up it is truly suspenseful. My kid watches alot of stuff with me and it's rare anything effects him too drastically, but when that huge, razor toothed maw is trying to get the kids through the perspex roof of the car my kid freaked out and made me turn the movie off. The iconic build up of that scene and the tension injected into parts of this film are amazing. Dr. Grant and the kid trying to get out of the tree before the car falls on them, the electric fence and any scene with those raptors; this stuff is all so good. To this day whenever I see the words 'objects may be closer than they appear' printed in a rear vision mirror I smile and think of Jurassic Park.


Top 5 movies now;

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark - Some things don't change and for me the top slot is still the same as is was twenty years ago. Raiders is, and I believe always shall be, my favourite movie of all time. The pacing is perfect the plot if simple and fantastic and the action is so entertaining I never get sick of it. I love the way Indy gets put through the wringer; the guy is not James Bond. He's never on top without even breaking a sweat. Instead he gets thrashed half to death in just about every scene but always manages to come out on top by the skin of his teeth. I love the way Indy is a Catholic but has a lackadaisical attitude towards religion; he believes in the historical importance of the ark but quote "I don't believe in magic, a lot of superstitious hocus pocus" is his attitude about it when Marcus warns him. Something must be said as well about John Williams score for this film. It is so iconic and so well executed. Many movie scores are incidental to the film but I believe this one is so important to the movie and the characters that it could well be my favourite film score.

2. Children of Men - This movie is something special. It is that brilliant kind of science fiction that makes you think and makes you look at the world you live in differently. The fundamental question Children of Men asks is what happens to the human race when it is suddenly faced with it's own mortality. The answer, in this dystopian, near future, is that it tears itself apart. This movie is comment on society, immigration, religion, terrorism and war. It's put together so frighteningly realistically that all this violence and hopelessness feels almost too real. The hand held shaky camera work and the long takes that don't cut for ten minutes at a time speak to that part of your subconsciousness that recalls seeing this kind of violence on the news or in documentaries. I love the way Clive Owens central character never picks up a gun in this film, even though he has ample opportunity to. Children of Men is what I love about movies. It makes you think and it makes you feel.

3. O Brother, Where Art Thou? - The Coen brothers. What can you say about them? They have certainly left their mark on modern cinema and, personally, O Brother is my favourite of their work. An epic, ancient Greek poem put in a 1930's southern United States setting? How could that work? I don't know how but it certainly does. This movie is eternally charming, funny and brilliantly acted. You come for the Coen trademark writing, wit and directing flare but you stay for the performances. George Clooney, John Turturro and the late, great Tim Blake Nelson are each wonderful as the three escaped convicts on their 'odyssey', having chance encounters with fame, a hilarious John Goodman as the intimidating cyclops and a run in with the Ku Klux Klan are among some of the best moments in this film, not to mention this great folk and blues music that is featured throughout. This is one of those films that you can watch over and over and never tire of it.

4. Leon aka. The Professional - The story of a hitman that takes a young person under their tutelage is almost a cliche' now but this film does it with so much style and a real, human relationship between Jean Reno as the assassin and a very young Natalie Portman as his understudy give this movie a gravity that imbues it with some emotional punch, where it could have just been another disposable action film. Reno's Leon has learned to suppress his emotions in order to be the consummate killer but those suppressed emotions surface when he finds someone to care about in Portmans young, orphaned Mathilda. Gary Oldman, in the role of the movie stealing corrupt, violent and psychotic cop, is not to be missed. Luc Besson's directing and action scenes are typically awesome and it all makes this film another of those movies you can watch time and time again and never get tired of.

5. The Fellowship of the Ring - Since reading The Hobbit as a kid I've been waiting for Middle Earth to be brought to life on screen. I wasn't quite prepared for just how epically and faithfully Peter Jackson's production was going to do it before I saw this movie for the first time in 2001. Differences in the source material aside, this filmaker understood the world he was bringing to life and captured the spirit of Tolkein's work in incredible fashion. I love fantasy adventure and there is so little of it that is truly good on film, so I was blown away by Fellowship. It is my favourite of the trilogy I think because I have affection for the whole 'party of adventurers on a dangerous journey together' aspect of the plot that speaks to my love for Dungeons and Dragons and fantasy novels. This movie is an example of what fans of a fiction can get when someone who is both talented and loves and understands the source material is in charge of making the film adaption.