Griff the Invisible

I was up late again last night trying to find something to watch on Netflix. I watched an episode of Supernatural, then an episode of Star Trek Voyager, and I  still wasn’t tired, nor was I in the mood for another episode of either of those shows. I skipped through a bunch of the suggested stuff and found myself at the bottom of the list on the Roku Netflix app thumbing through the recently added section and I saw the cover for Griff the Invisible. It sounded interesting enough and before I knew it I had clicked the watch button and was on my way. Griff the Invisible is a fairly low budget Australian film but I really enjoyed its quirky humor. Griff is sort of like Kick-Ass, but without the actual superheroes and focused more on the love story than the kicking of ass.

Griff the Invisible is the story of Griff (Ryan Kwanten, True Blood) a shy, bookish, and awkward young man that works as a shipping clerk by day and roams the streets fighting crime at night… well… sort of. Griff’s crime fighting persona is kinda sorta all in his head. His older brother looks after him the best he can, but Griff lives in a fantasy world that nobody else can ever truly understand. That is until he meets equally eccentric Melody. Melody (Maeve Dermody, nothing anyone outside of Australia has likely heard of) is an “experimentalist” who spends her time trying to walk through walls, and protesting protests. She also just happens to be dating Griff’s brother, Tim. Tim is ordinary and somewhat droll and Melody quickly grows bored with him. In Griff, however, Melody sees a companion that she can relate to, someone strange enough to understand her. She feeds Griff’s fantasy by sending him secret messages and designs for invisibility suits and sending him out on missions.

The story is quirky but fun. I was a little torn between being concerned for Griff since he was almost tragically out of touch with reality, and totally rooting for him as the avatar of every awkward, bullied moment I ever had growing up. I was shy and bullied a lot as a kid, and having grown up on a healthy(ish) diet of Saturday morning cartoons and comic books I often fantasized about being a hero too. Hell, I still fall asleep some nights imagining being a ninja assassin or shadowy anti-hero. In the end I opted to root for Griff and Melody. We can all use a little eccentricity in our lives. When we were kids and we ran around with a bed sheet or a bath towel tied around our necks pretending to be superman we were the freest we’ve ever been. We were encouraged to flex our imaginations and be whoever we wanted to be. Then, at some point, we were told to put away childish imagination and focus on the real world. Go to college, get a job, be an adult. Griff the Invisible was a fun reminder that it’s okay to be a little weird. That it’s okay to imagine being something we aren’t, because without that drive to be something different or better we just get stuck in that endless grind of adulthood until there is nothing left of us but deadlines and TPS reports.

So, if you’re in the mood for an offbeat movie I would recommend giving Griff a shot.

The way of the Samurai

Over the past few days I have been on a Samurai kick (ha!) and have watched 2 Japanese films on Netflix. The first was a film called Dororo. Dororo was kind of a weird story but was pretty interesting. In exchange for ruling the world, a warlord made a deal with 48 demons and traded his unborn son’s body parts so that the demons could have corporeal form on earth and wreak havoc. When the child is born he is severely deformed, with no limbs, eyes, or internal organs. To save the child from his father dear old mum puts him in a basket and sets him down the river. The child is found by a shaman who makes limbs and organs for the child out of the body parts of dead babies.

As the child grows he comes to think of the shaman as his father. One day a travelling story teller arives at the home of the shaman and gives him a sword forged from vengeance and the shaman attaches the sword in place of the kids left arm. Eventually the shaman dies of old age and the kid learns that he was adopted and that his body was sold to demons. Of course he goes off and hunts down the demons. Whenever he kills one of the demons his stolen body part grows back and he slowly becomes more human. He meets up with a thief who is a girl pretending to be a guy and they go off in search of demons and revenge.

The story was pretty cool, but some of the special effects and creatures/demons looked like something out of an old Power Rangers episode. Overall the movie was pretty good.

Next I watched a movie called 13 assassins.

Unlike Dororo, 13 assassins is based entirely in reality at the end of the feudal era in japan.  The Shogun’s brother is a sadistic tyrant who causes misery wherever he goes. In order to preserve the honor of the Shogun one of the Shogun’s advisers hires a retired Samurai to assassinate the tyrant. The Samurai, Shinzaemon, gathers a group of 12 Samurai and plans the assassination (the 13th assassin isn’t a Samurai and joins the team later on). The movie starts off a little slow with an almost Ocean’s 11 stretch of putting together the team. Once the team is assembled and in place all hell breaks loose. 13 Assassins boast probably one of the best, and longest, sword fights I have ever seen. It quite possibly even surpasses The Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves, if only for its sheer length–nearly 40 minutes of bloodshed. 13 men against an army of more than 200 engaged in combat in an abandoned village.

I don’t mind gravity defying wire work like in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or the Matrix films, but 13 Assassins forgoes the fantastical in lieu of gritty, blood soaked reality. If you like bloody Samurai movies I would highly recommend 13 Assassins.

Dylan Dog: Dead of Night

So, I have a little problem with sleep… as in it often eludes me. My girlfriend is usually in bed by 10pm every night which leaves me hanging around alone until usually 4:30am or so. I’m not sure if it’s insomnia, or if my circadian rhythm is all out of whack since I got laid off last year and the two part time jobs I now have to keep to make ends meet don’t require me to be up at the ass crack of dawn.

…anyway…

Whatever the case may be it leaves me with a lot of time to watch movies (and play WoW or Skyrim or Battlefield 3). The other night I wasn’t in a video game mood so I hit the Roku to see if there was anything to watch on Netflix. Rather than watching more Who I decided to watch Dylan Dog: Dead of Night.

Now, I remember seeing the trailer for this back when it came out in March of 2011 and thinking “Wow… that looks like an awful movie.” After having watched it I can now state, officially for the record, wow… that was an awful movie!

When I saw Superman returns I thought that Brandon Routh did the best he could with a horrible script. I remember thinking that he felt and looked so much like Christopher Reeve that I could forgive the ridiculous plot. In Dylan Dog it felt like Routh was barely trying to act at all. Dylan Dog offers a slightly comedic take on something that has been done before in movies like Constantine (2005) but with none of the visual style and appeal. I normally consider Keanu to be a pretty flat actor, but I have to give him mad props after watching some of the performances in Dylan Dog. Routh is boring and uninspired as the titular character, Taye Diggs is laughable as a villainous Vamp, and Dylan’s Zombie sidekick Marcus (played by Sam Huntington who was the Jimmy Olson to Routh’s Supes) was more whiny and annoying about his condition than he was entertaining and comedic. Even Peter Stormare, who was an awesome and creepy Satan in Constantine (and a most excellent German engineer) couldn’t be bothered to be a believable baddie.

**hooray for accidental alliteration**

The Noir voice-over (or rather the attempt at Noir voice-over) was painfully awful. Rather than utilizing the style as a subtle addition to the film it felt like it was drummed over my head and used to fill in all the plot holes that they couldn’t get around to via better writing, cinematography, and acting. As for the plot… well.. predictable doesn’t even begin to cover it.

All in all… this movie is bad. Just really, really bad. Avoid it. Unless you are a cinemasochist… in which case enjoy.

1 out of 5 “omg that’s bad”s