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Be True To Your Pleasure – Three beautiful short films selected by Xavier Dolan

Be True To Your Pleasure – Three beautiful short films selected by Xavier Dolan

Be True To Your Pleasure – Three beautiful short films selected by Xavier Dolan

Vie Magnifique : Be true to your pleasure is a short film competition launched by the acclaimed director Xavier Dolan and i-D magazine, in collaboration with Magnum. On the theme Be true to yourself, the director has selected three independent filmmakers to create short films related to personal pleasures, indulgence…

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"Outland" (1982) Starring Sean Connery, Peter Boyle, and Frances Sterhagen plus the always lovable James B. Sikking* Written and Directed by Peter Hyams I got to thinking that another take on the kill or be killed forced to fight scenario was when the honest, dude-good gets in over his head in some armpit of a place and is forced into a life-or-death confrontation with murderous SOB's who really don't care who or what they have to kill. And the dude-good just wants to get back to his family or comfortable apartment or whatever. And perhaps he's also a lawperson. And also, Sean "the fuck" Connery Which, of course, brings us to my favourite example of the myriad of these types of films, "Outland", where obviously the rough and tumble two-bit burg is actually on Io. You know, Jupiter's coolest moon (knowledge note: Jupiter has fifty moons, but the Galilean ones are generally accepted to be the best). And it happens to feature Sean "the fuck" Connery. A great movie, with pretty good special effects for its time (and a title sequence unabashedly, and senselessly, aped from "Alien"), except that it's interesting to note that in the future when we have the ability to mine a moon millions of kilometres away the weapon of choice is the sawed-off shotgun. It does look cool, especially if you put a telescopic sight on it, which one chap does, and in using it, IT COSTS HIM HIS LIFE! Because Mister Sean "the fuck" Connery realized how dumb it was and made that chump pay by enacting a bat-shit crazy plan to get said chump to blast a hole in the installation's greenhouse and get his dumb-ass sucked into the infinitely cold black of space. How cool is that? Damn.

*

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Dude be dream creepin'.

Damn.

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"Kill or be Killed" aka "Karate Killer" aka "Karate Olympiad" (1976) Starring James Ryan, Charlotte Michelle, and Norman Coombes Written by C.F. Beyers-Boshoff Directed by Ivan Hall

This movie is truly amazing. A must watch, seriously (which you can because the embedded video is the full freaking version. Watch it and be prepared to shit blackbelts for a week). Besides having truly bonafide awesome karate battles, it not only checks all the boxes, it freaking invents the effing list. To the death karate tournament at the deranged Nazi commanders castle in the middle of the desert - check Karate dwarf whose best friend is a puppet - check Dude head butts guitar then beats up piano - check Dude takes off shirt, beats up wild dogs, then makes sweet love to his woman in the moonlit desert - check Dude and his woman make a desert sailboat out of a Volkswagen Bug then sail it across the desert singing opera to each other - check Japanese karate master named Miyagi that looks like Woody Allen and has a thirst for diamonds - check Karate dude who weird whistles - check Shirtless to shirted dudes ratio of approximately 13,500 to 1 - check Dudes with long flowing hair - supercheck Psychedelic guitar soundtrack - check Nazi commander conceiving whole crazy tournament of death as a revenge plot just to get an apology because he lost in the '38 Olympics to a Japanese dude - check Also, it has a surreal Maurice Binder inspired title sequence but instead of beautiful naked women having the credits projected on them it has semi-nude dudes doing karate (speaking of Maurice Binder, the site "Art of the Title" is a must visit). I cannot overstate it,  this movie is amazing. So much so, they made a sequel. Damn.

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Of all the forcing space explorers to fight aliens (or each other) story lines they did on Star Trek, this is my favourite for a myriad of reasons. Mostly, Kirk builds a freaking cannon. When it's either you or some weird rubbery green dude, you have gotta think outside the box, damn-it! Innovate! Throw some crud in a log and set that shit on fire!

And then, those super cool cats at Mythbusters re-created it, with mixed results. So awesome.  

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"Arena" (1989) Starring Paul Satterfield, Hamilton Camp, and Claudia Christian Directed by Peter Manoogian Written by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo You have got to love Charles Band. The dude has 264 freaking producing credits in the last 30-odd years. One of which is this one. Intergalctic gladiators going mano y weirdo on a space station in the middle of--well, space. Pretty good creature effects for what can only be surmised as a not huge budget. Cool marrying of low and high tech. For instance, the character Shorty (played by Hamilton Camp) has four arms, and they just gave him a hump so they could stick a dude behind him and then just stick his arms out through the folds of his cloak. GENIUS! One can only think that if "Batman" had not been released that same year THIS would have been the most talked about movie of the time, and the one to usher in that great, grand decade known as the 90's. Funny gladiator movie factoid: ARENA is a popular title. We've looked at "The Arena" (1974), and "The Arena" (2001), and "Arena" (1953), but how about:

Samuel L. Jackson playing an uncharacteristically un-sympathetic bad-guy who gets it on with two Asian ladies and runs an underground internet Gladiator racket that makes the mistake of thrusting a rugby player into the mix. Includes senseless full-frontal nudity, a hip dude in a funky hat, a guy getting shot with a nail gun, and that guy from "Lost" who is angry with his wife. Also, an M. Night Shyamalan-ian twist. Still, no lasers or bizarre intergalactic musical numbers sung by a sexy Earthling. Or 3-D rodeo clowns. Or Pam Grier. The universe can be so freaking complicated some times. Damn.

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Scenes from Gladiator whilst sitting on the toilet.

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I love this show. It was super inspiring when I made "I Heart Doomsday" and the nice people over at Indy Mogul were awesome enough to support and promote our efforts. Mostly, what the hell is not awesome about making a freaking flamethrower? Or any of the other myriad of crazy cool things they show you how to do. Including this very, very, very important stuff--

This puts me at total peace. Let's make movies.