Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness

So, another Dungeons & Dragons movie; more mock heroics and dodgy dragons, and perhaps another chance to see Bruce Payne in purple lipstick chewing on the scenery.

Right?

Well... not exactly.

The third D&D movie takes its title and setting from the game line's controversial Evil Bastard's Manual, released amid much sound and fury as a 'mature readers only' product from the pen of Monte 'Monte Cook's World of Darkness' Cook, introducing rules for sex, drugs and rock and roll (well, drugs and bad magic rituals at least) and making Tracy 'All thieves must be evil unless they are racially inclined to kleptomania' Hickman cry.

We open with the last of the Knights of the New Sun, an ironically old and defunct holy order who once threw down an evil sorcerer (the opening narration tells us so; with animation) and were the guardians of peace for centuries, but are now an irrelevance in an age when every small town has a curtain wall and a magically-shielded trove of enchanted treasures. Newly anointed knight Grayson takes his vows of duty and chastity, like his father and grandfather before him (seriously, they forswear the pleasures of the flesh, but there's a whole line of them; I pity their poor wives), but the mystical light show fails to happen, as it has failed to happen for decades, and he is feeling a little blue when the order are attacked by barbarians and wiped out, save for Grayson - who is left for dead - and his father, who is captured.

"I'm totally evil and committed to power, and we will in no way end up having sex."

In pursuit of the barbarians, Grayson gets help from a friendly prostitute, as you do. She hooks him up with a magic item seller - a contact that is no doubt of immense use to a small-town whore - who sells him some black armour and a jaggedy sword so that he can disguise himself as a badass. The prostitute - judging by the credits she might be called Carlotta, but names are elusive things in this film, and none of the actors are recognisable enough to narrow it down -then points him towards Akordia, a ruthless witch who is recruiting sell-swords in the service of the barbarians' master, Shathrax the Mind Flayer.

He does not make the best showing at first, given that the posse of evil bastards are unconvinced by Grayson's manly swagger. However, by killing one of her existing goons, Grayson wins a place on team evil, alongside Seith the Libertarian Assassin, Bezz the Vermin Lord, and Vimak the enormous black guy with the immense sexual appetite (I think someone slipped and fell on a stereotype). In the hopes of being led to his father he goes with them on their mission for Shathrax, despite knowing that he may have to betray his vows to maintain his cover.

"I'm totally as evil as the guy behind me! Look at my broody
face!"
"We're still totally never having sex."

Honestly, it's amazing that this works at all, given how incredibly bland and wet our hero is. If you picture a cross between Johnny Depp and Karl Urban, with all the manly passion and charisma of Justin Beiber, you're about there.

Also, this happens, because all small towns also have lavish
bordellos apparently.

This Fearsome Five head out, slay a dragon, massacre a small town and generally behave badly. Sure, they occasionally stop to discuss philosophy (Seith believes that poor people just exist as somewhere to keep his knives), ambition (Vimak was exiled for being weak and wants to go back and kill everyone who knows about it, although apparently he mostly wants to sleep with a huge number of women simultaneously), to kill each other (even Grayson commits murder, then hides the body in a Bag of Holding), or just to afflict people with bug plagues for the sheer, unadulterated hell of it (Bezz the Vermin Lord digs insects; go figure), but mostly it's just one bad deed after another. Finally, with most of them dead of friendly fire, they retrieve the cover of the long-lost Book of Vile Darkness from its keeper.

Seriously, this is high octane nightmare fuel right here.

Said keeper, by the way, is a 'slaymate'; an undead child betrayed and abandoned by her guardians and now subsisting on cruelty and hate. It is very, very creepy. Being allergic to all touchy-feely feels, the Slaymate reveals that Akordia is in love with Grayson after (spoilers) he betrays one of his vows when they have creepy, Red Sonya-ish 'you saved my life so I must do you' suddenly-submissive-Amazon, post-dragon slaying sex, which is a phrase almost as uncomfortable to say as the scene of Akordia being all 'the witchy law says you may ravish me as you desire' is to watch.

"Hand over all the black leather in the town and nobody gets hurt."

Finally, we reach the castle of Shathrax, who turns out to be a guy with his mouth sewn shut who speaks through two women he keeps on chains, which is creepy, but so not a Mind Flayer. Grayson rescues his father, and when they are cornered his defiant hope kindles his paladin amulet into life (bizarrely in response to his declaring himself a blackguard, which in D&D is an anti-paladin rather than a bounder and a cad). Shock, horror! This turns out to be a trap, as the villains need 'liquid pain' extracted from a true knight using a machine clearly knocked off from Count Rugen's design in The Princess Bride to ink the new Book of Vile Darkness, but Akordia betrays the dark lord for love and light returns.

The end.

The Book of Vile Darkness is... bad, but not as bad as the first D&D movie and for different reasons. The attempt at grimdark is partially successful, but Grayson is painfully bland and Akordia not much better and the less said about the awkward stab at sexing up the franchise the better. Seith, Bezz and Vimak are the stars here, since they are clearly having fun, especially Bezz, whose presence seems to be as a reminder that not all evil is Lawful Evil. There are also some nice moments, with Grayson hiding a corpse by stuffing it into a bag of holding being a standout for me, and even some half-decent dialogue.

All in all, however, if you're not siting up into the wee small hours waiting for your laundry to finish, there are probably better choices available.

A Prairie Home Companion

One of the delights of the old BBC 7 - now Radio 4 Xtra - was The Garrison Keillor Radio Show, the international broadcast name for Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media's long-running (39 years and counting) radio variety show, A Prairie Home Companion. For those of you not familiar with the format, it's like The Muppet Show, if the Muppets were humans, on the radio, mildly sedated and really into country and American folk music. Garrison Keillor presents the show with the kind of warm milk delivery that lulls you into a sense of absolute comfort, and musical acts are interspersed with comedy skits and spoof advertisements for Powdermilk biscuits or the Professional Organisation of English Majors.

And then they made a movie of it.

To say that my mind was boggled would not be far from the truth. How, I wondered, could this be done?

Given the movie's limited release in the UK, it took me a while to find out. It was, in the end, the final movie directed by Robert Altman (The Player, Pret a Porter), and with an all-star cast portraying characters created by Keillor and the radio show's rep company (most of whom have cameo roles) it is a typically Altman ensemble piece, depicting the last broadcast of a fictionalised version of A Prairie Home Companion.

The action is limited to the stage and dressing rooms of the Fitzgerald Theatre (aside from a couple of scenes in Mickey's Diner). Kevin Kline narrates as Guy Noir, ex-Private Eye-turned-security guard, and the stories of the various characters - Keillor as himself, Woody Harrelson and C. Thomas Howell as singing cowboys Dusty and Lefty, Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep and Lindsey Lohan as members of a singing family - are threaded through by Asphodel (Virginia Madsen), an angel in a white trenchcoat come to escort someone to God. The camera moves from the stage to the backstage, from performance to 'reality', as the cast of the radio show face their impending cancellation with varying degrees of resignation and denial.

That's really all there is to it.

In a lot of ways, it's like the radio show. It isn't exactly daring, but it's not as bland and safe as it initially seems. There is not much plot and its humour is distinctly odd, but it knows it. At one stage, Asphodel actually discusses with Keillor a joke he once told (two penguins are standing on an ice floe. One turns to the other and says: "You look like you're wearing a tuxedo." The second penguin says: "How do you know I'm not?") and why it is, or isn't, funny ("It's funny because people laugh.") It is packed with great performers giving good performances, and if not exactly Altman's greatest work, it has much to recommend it if you're a fan of that sort of gentle, rambling experience.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and 47 Ronin

Because that sort of pairing is just how I roll. Okay, in truth I went to see The Secret Life of Walter Mitty with Hannah and Arya a week or so back, and 47 Ronin with my friend Jon yesterday, but I would rock that double bill if the opportunity presented itself.

Ben Stiller's incarnation of James Thurber's protagonist is, like Danny Kaye's earlier interpretation, at first an ineffectual daydreamer, but later engages in real adventures which sublimate his need to fantasise. Intelligent, skilled, but unappreciated by his new bosses, Mitty finds himself tasked with locating a missing photo negative which photo-journalist Sean O'Connell (Sean Penn) has recommended for the cover of the final print issue of Life magazine. At first an apparently simple task, Mitty's attraction to his co-worker Cheryl (Kristen Wiig) prompts him to adopt the search as a quest, which in turn pushes him to abandon his humdrum existence and to live the kind of adventures he has been dreaming of.

The film is a triumph of the underdog travelogue for the middle-aged and underappreciated. In refusing to separate fantasy and reality by on-screen cues, the film almost threatens us with an unrealised reveal that none of the positive parts of Mitty's life are real, but this only makes the eventual validation of his adventures and his final, soft-spoken takedown of the evil asset stripper who has tormented him throughout more heart-warming.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is never laugh-out-loud funny, but has a gentle humour which won me over completely, despite initial reservations. While he can be abrasive as an actor, Ben Stiller plays Mitty with a genuine likability he has increasingly displayed of late, and the supporting cast are all solid. Wiig is an especially good fit as Mitty's love interest, both bringing a similar gentle strength to Mitty's own, and flying the flag as an attractive older woman in a main romantic role.

Speaking of stand out female roles, do we all remember Mako Mori in Pacific Rim? Hold onto that, because I'd rather think of Rinko Kikuchi in that role than in 47 Ronin, and you probably will as well.

The film tells the story of the 47 Ronin, the samurai of Lord Asano who avenged his death in defiance of the Shogun's command after Asano was forced to commit seppuku for striking another daimyo. In the original tale, this happens because Asano is young and rash and Lord Kira is a dick; in the film Asano is old, revered, and bewitched.

The leader of the ronin is Oishi (played by Hiroyuki Sanada, who has an honourary MBE for his King Lear with the RSC, by the way); that's him in silhouette at the bottom of the poster. Given Lord Kira's alliance with a heterochromial witch, he recruits Asano's adopted weirdo half-breed might-be-some-sort-of-demon, Kai (Keanu Reeves), who can see through witchcraft and is all sorts of badass.

Joining Kai and the witch on the poster are skull tattooed English bloke, who has one line, and big metal samurai dude (giant Englishman Neil Fingleton is, for some reason, credited as 'Lovecraftian samurai'), who has none.

What follows is pretty much the story of the 47 Ronin, just with added monsters, witches and Keanu Reeves.

Rinko Kikuchi plays the witch, in a role where everything about the character - her hair, her clothes, her expression, her voice - basically screams sex. You know how in Pacific Rim Kikuchi wore a sculpted body suit and still looked serious? In this film, even when she shapeshifts into a fox, it's clear that this is a fox who is no better than she ought to be. It's not subtle, and placed against the other female characters - Oishi's wife, a stoic and dutiful samurai bride; and Asano's daughter, Kai's love interest, who is painfully virtuous and lovelorn - it is clearly intended to make her seem bad, which is kind of disappointingly conservative.

The fight scenes are well done, and when it's not being all weird the film has a good handle on the story it's telling. It's a shame it seems to feel the need to spend so much time dwelling on Kai's past, his magical powers, and his doomed romance with Lady Asano, and the funky-flowing-cloth and snake-haired witch, instead of getting to the meat.

Also, Tadanobu Asano is so clearly channeling Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa's smug-snake performance as Shang Tsung that when Tagawa's name came up in the credits I almost wondered if he as aging backwards or something.

What I Hope to See at the Cinema in 2014

It's a new year, and that means another 12 months of films to look forward to in a vaguely specific way. So, what's on my list (as of early January's schedules)?

From Last Year
47 Ronin - Because I love me some martial arts, however much tosh the rest of the film may be.

January
Last Vegas - Good cast, simple premise; could suck horribly of course.
12 Years a Slave - I have a lot of time for Chiwetel Ejiofor and Michael Fassbender.
Mandela: The Long Walk to Freedom - Probably one for DVD, but I would like to see it, if only for Idris Elba in a proper dramatic role.
The Railway Man - Again, probably on DVD and largely for the cast.
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit - Kevin Costner dares Chris Pine to do better by follwing Baldwin, Ford and Affleck into the role of the CIA's greatest boy scout.
I, Frankenstein - Monsters fighting and Bill Nighy is the lord of the undead again, apparently. Sign me up.

February
The Invisible Woman - Ralph Fiennes on Dickens and his wicked ways, and not a Fantastic Four spin-off after all.
Mr Peabody and Sherman - Shenanigans in time with a genius dog and his human ward.
Robocop - Remake city; have they bothered to make it a satire or just gone for action?
The Lego Movie - Could be great, could be dire. I wish to know.
A New York Winter's Tale - Love, death, and a big, white horse.

March
The Machine - A love story with mad robots, or something. I'll bite.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier - Marvel continues to impress, on the big screen at least, so this is a must.
Muppets Most Wanted - I'm a little disappointed by the absence of apparent European actors and celebs in this European-based sequel (apart from a villain), but I'm willing to cut the Muppets considerable slack.

April
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 - I liked the first one, although it felt oddly unnecessary. It's just a shame it isn't linked to the wider Marvel Film Universe.

May
Godzilla - It's a Godzilla movie, and it's got to be better than the last one, right?
X-Men: Days of Future Past - Go on, movie; explain how they fit together. I dare you!
Edge of Tomorrow - Tom Cruise, admittedly, but the premise is intriguing.

July
How to Train Your Dragon 2 - Because I adore the first one.
Transformers 4 - Because I keep telling myself they have to start getting better at some point.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes - I actually really enjoyed the most recent Planet of the Apes, and I'm interested to see where they go from here.
Jupiter Ascending - I need to know if Sean Bean makes it to the end of the film (I doubt it).

August
Guardians of the Galaxy - Rocket Raccoon!

November
Mockingjay - By this stage, Arya will be too old to come in with us, so some manoeuvring may be required.

December
The Hobbit: There and Back Again - To see how it ends.