Jamie
What a great Bring a Friend we got to decide on here. I was dead set on watching Fateful Findings, a true classic of the bad movie genre. Sure we have watched a Neil Breen picture before, but that was Twisted Pair for a Twin Cycle. By all accounts it’s no Fateful Findings. But what should we pair it with? It’s the eternal question of Bring a Friend… what is it? What are we trying to do? Are we trying to just watch the best film from the same year? Should they be similar in plot or theme? Should it really just be an opportunity for a best-of-the-best wild card? If you look through the data I think you’d find that the answer is “All of the Above.” This time there were really just two choices: 47 Ronin, a big budget disaster that fits BMT like a glove, or Paranoia, a film no one remembers that shares the leet haxxors plotting of FF. Alas, no matter how much hacking of planets Paranoia promised it never stood a chance. Bring on some CGI monsters.
To recap, Keanu is a boy found in the woods by the ruler of the Ako Domain in feudal Japan. The samurai scoff at him because he is half-Japanese, but Keanu is OK and knows his place within the clan. He turns out to be a great warrior and helps defeat the monsters and such that could ruin the domain’s plans to host the Shogun, but still the samurai get all the glory. He’s still OK with that. The source of these monsters is Lord Kira who wants Ako for himself and when the shogun visits he meddles such that Keanu shames himself when he is forced to take the place of a samurai in a battle. Ultimately, the ruler of Ako is hypnotized into attacking Lord Kira and is sentenced to death for the insult. He is allowed an honorable death, his daughter Mika is forced to marry Kira, Keanu is sold into slavery, and all the samurai are sent away. The head of the samurai, Oishi, is thought to be dangerous so he’s imprisoned for a year… you know so that he gets out juuuust before the marriage that will cement Kira’s place in Ako. But I’m sure he’s harmless now… wrong! He immediately assembles all the samurai and sets off to find Keanu. They rescue him from the fighting pits of whatever where he’s fighting monsters. He then is like “we need swords” and takes them to where he grew up and it’s revealed why he is such a good warrior… because he was trained from birth for this shit. With swords and quite a lot of Ronin (I can’t remember exactly how many) they set off to crush Kira. They first fall into a trap, but half of them escape and so they regroup to attack the wedding itself. There they pretend to be an acting troop where they act their asses off before fighting their asses off. In the end they kill Kira. This is against the law but the Shogun kind of digs it so they let Oishi’s son off the hook to preserve his family and he lets the rest of them, including Keanu, have an honorable death. THE END.
I had more trouble with this one than the other recent BMT films (which I mostly disliked, but also mostly bored me). Do not get me wrong, this film is so dull it actually defies belief. But its heart is in the right place and it looks beautiful. It wants to bring a classic Japanese story (that is definitely very cool) to an American scale for American audiences. Not to exaggerate but it’s like Scorsese making Silence (alright, fine, that’s a step too far). But really I liked a lot of what was on the screen, it’s just crushingly dull. I also have a theory that Keanu directed this film. I do not buy for one second that the official director of the film (a noted crazy person) delivered a big budget epic to theaters. So I choose to believe Keanu cared about this and made it happen. Kudos to him and so I will say I was fine with this film. As for Fateful Findings, this one really lived up to its reputation. It is nuts. Kid of a perfect so-bad-it’s-good. The magic sauce in a film like this is truly not being able to tell whether the people making the film know exactly what they are doing. You keep looking at Breen’s face to try to see a smirk or a look in his eyes where you can go “oh, good. He’s not serious.” But he is serious. Bafflingly beautiful.
Hot Take Clam Bake! They should have spared Keanu. This is a guy who grows up in some weird monastery being turned into a human weapon. He escapes and gets razzed all day for not being a samurai and being half-Japanese. He then tries to warn everyone about a witch and instead of being listened to he is sold into a gladiator pit. He then fights monsters for a year before totally redeeming himself in the eyes of EVERYONE. Even the shogun is like “this dude is dope.” His reward? Congrats you get an honorable death. Hold on. He doesn’t get to marry his lady love and continue his honorable line? The reward is death? That’s bullshit. Hot Take Temperature: 47 Bone-in Steaks.
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! Fine I’ll say it if no one else will … Keanu, can we not? Let’s go!
I remember when this came out. I remember the feeling of seeing the trailer and being like … what the fuck is this? And then it came out and critics were like “what the fuck is this?” And then I never forgot it. It has always been on the docket for BMT (as a matter of fact we were already doing BMT by then, so likely it came up in conversation in 2013 or 2014 as a distinct possibility). In reality I kind of knew the movie was probably just going to be all spectacle boring trash, but we had to see.
It was all spectacle boring trash.
Really, it is just a lot of CGI with a loose story and it could have all been made a lot better without any of the supernatural stuff. If it was an insinuation that this person’s a witch, and that person’s a demon, but in reality it is shown that that is just a perception colored by different religions basically, I think the film could have been more interesting.
I does come across as a vanity project for Keanu, but weirdly at a time when Keanu couldn’t afford it? The Matrices were over ages before, and then he did Constatine (2005) and A Scanner Darkly and The Lake House (2006) which were all fairly successful. But then there was the catastrophic The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) and from there it is just bomb after bomb right up to this. Then what happened in 2014? John Wick, and his career is completely revived. He ends up kind of getting lucky. He released a straight to video film in 2013. That was probably almost his fate.
Should I talk about this film. I guess I’ll just leave it with one last thing. I liked all of the other actors in the film. It was great to see a film like this done with actually famous Japanese actors. Keanu is jarring though and it would have been better served by someone less famous or at least maybe younger and who didn’t read as much as an established American film star.
As a friend we brought along Fateful Findings which is our second Neil Breen film. The film started off slow, but quickly morphs into “Oh my god, he really is the worst filmmaker of all time … nah, he must know what he’s doing … OH MY GOD HE DOESN’T!!” Just banger after banger of weird scenes where a person who maybe can’t act like a human being directs people and makes them not act like human beings. It is truly sublime. There is at least one more Breen film we have to see, but I think we’ve seen what are considered the top two now. I’ve heard bad things about the most recent one, in that it seems like he has maybe become tired of the process of making films and so he’s fallen back to mostly using green screen and automating a lot of it. He is a year away from making the first ever feature length AI film where the film is just made using cheap out of the box LLMs by a University of Nevada computer science major for $1000. A, not as good as the earlier Breens I think, but much more weird and entertaining than I expected.
Read about my sequel in the quiz. Cheerios,
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