Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy ( 2018 )
Sometimes weird stuff happens that you don't plan. Last week I saw a martial arts film where Dave Bautista was a villain. This week I saw another martial arts film where Dave Bautista plays one of the villains. Pure coincidence. Up to now the only Bautista films I have ever seen were with him playing Drax in the MCU. The reason why I got this film was because A]It is a sequel to the Ip Man films, B]it was directed by Yuen Woo Ping, C] it had both Tony Jaa and Michelle Yeoh in the cast. In small roles, but never the less, in the cast. This film follows Master Z, a character from the Ip Man films, a master who had once challenged Ip Man, and lost to him in a closed door march, after which he vowed to leave martial arts forever. But while trying to keep that vow by running a grocery store, he ends up saving a girl from gangsters who decide to teach him a lesson and burn down his grocery store. The girl he saved has a brother who owns a bar, and gives Master Z a job there as a waiter. However, it is not long before the bar gets into the crosshairs of the gang, who want to expand their opium selling operation into that neighborhood. And Master Z is reluctantly pulled into the conflict, eventually leading to him having a fight with Drax, who is the head kingpin of the opium gang. Despite being an obvious potboiler cashing in on the success of the Ip Man franchise, Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy is a fun action film with some top notch fights, including one memorable fight where the hero and a group of thugs fight atop of neon signs that line the street.
Shazam! ( 2019 )
First, some history for those of you who aren't comic book nerds. On April 18, 1938, National Allied published the first issue of Action Comics, featuring the first appearance of a character named Superman. The book became a best seller, so other publishers began creating their own superhero comic books. National decided that they owned the Superhero concept and that everyone was infringing on their copyrights. So they sued Fawcett over their character Captain Marvel. At the time, Captain Marvel was the most popular superhero around, outselling even Superman. If National was successful in their lawsuit against the worlds most popular superhero, then they would have set a precedent that they owned the copyright on the superhero concept, and would cause all the other comic book companies to cease publishing their own superhero comic books. It didn't really matter that Captain Marvel was very different than Superman. Not only a radically different costume, but where Superman and Clark Kent were the same person, 12 year old Billy Baston transformed into the adult Captain Marvel by yelling out the word Shazam! The lawsuit ended up dragging on for years. By the late 40s the popularity of superhero comic books waned, and most comic book companies discontinued publishing them. Sales of Captain Marvel comic books also plummeted, so Fawcett agreed to settle their case rather than have it drag on for another decade for a character they planned to discontinue anyway. As part of the settlement they agreed that they would never publish any comics with Captain Marvel again, and basically ceded the character to National.
In the late 1960s National ( now called DC ) decided to revive Captain Marvel. After all, they more or less owned the most popular superhero in comic book history. But then discovered they couldn't use the character's name because in the years that Fawcett had abandoned the character, no one had renewed the copyright for his name, which rival comic book company Marvel acquired by creating their own character called Captain Marvel. To revive the original Captain Marvel, DC needed to change the name of the comic book. Since the word that transformed Billy into Captain Marvel was Shazam!, DC decided to use that as the title of the book, and very rarely mention the superhero was actually named Captain Marvel. This lead to many believing the superhero's name was actually Shazam. While the revival didn't do so well, it did lead to Filmation licensing the character for a live action Saturday morning show of the same name, which is where most of the character's current popularity came from.
Which brings us to the morons running Warner Bros. who have no idea how to plot out their DCEU. For some really dumb reasons that only made sense to them, instead of giving The Flash and Cyborg solo films ( which probably should have been done prior to a Justice League movie, ) or introduce the Green Lantern and Martian Manhunter in their own films, they decided to go ahead and green light a Captain Marvel film instead, ignoring that in the years since Fawcett ceased publication of the original books the character has faded in popularity to lesser than Hawkman, or that the MCU had already announced they were releasing their own Captain Marvel film t the same time. Which means the current Shazam! film which is part of the DCEU has a hero who can not be mentioned by name at all. So basically, in this film the hero never settles on a name at all. BECAUSE HE CAN'T!
Okay, aside from that. It is a fun film. But very overrated. Basically, not as good as all the glowing reviews lead me to believe. But still very entertaining. And one of the very few kid superhero films ( yes, it's one of those ) that doesn't suck. But it doesn't really fit in with the DCEU, does it? This is a light comedy in a universe where every film is overly dark. If another Justice League is made, exactly how will Captain Marvel fit in? I do admire how the writers of this film addressed what it would really be like if a 12 year old became a superhero. In all the previous versions of Captain Marvel/Shazam, once Billy transformed, he had an adult mind. What makes this latest version of Captain Marvel work is having an adult superhero act exactly the way a kid would if he suddenly had those powers.
Black Samson ( 1974 )
It sort of caught me off guard that Saturday Night Live was a rerun this week. Whenever SNL is not on, I use the 11pm time slot to watch a second nighttime movie. And usually I time out my purchases for my DVD/Blu-ray film collection so that I have a second film in queue for those Saturday nights, instead of having a lot of unopened films I can not get to for a couple of months. I prefer watching newly purchased films within the deadline to return them to Amazon or wherever else I bought them from should they be defective. So basically this week would be a free week where I can go through my film library and pick out something I wanted to see again but couldn't get around to. And it was going through my film library, which is currently randomly stored piles of DVDs in boxes, that I found a film I had once bought that I havn.t watched yet.
Okay, lets go back a few years. There was a chain of stores in Manhattan that sold overstock and budget DVDs for cheap. They had a lot of those budget sets from Warner Bros. which had four films in a box for $5. And one of them was 4 FILM FAVORITES: Urban Action Collection which I got because it had three films I was planning on buying some day anyway for my martial arts collection. Blackbelt Jones, it's sequel Hot Potato and Three the Hard Way. All three films starred Jim Kelly, the black martial arts star from Enter the Dragon. The fourth film, Black Samson. A film that didn't have Jim Kelly in it. Why the one odd film out instead of having four Jim Kelly films? Who knows? It wasn't because they only wanted to use Warner Bros. films because Three the Hard Way is an Allied Artist Picture which Warner needed to acquire the rights for. They could have easily gotten Golden Needles or One Down, Two to Go as the fourth film. Or how about the Hong Kong film Tattoo Connection which has been erroneously sold on home video as Black Belt Jones II. In fact, they could have simply made the fourth film Enter the Dragon which they still had the distribution rights to.
So, you can guess why I only watched the Jim Kelly films on this set and postponed watching the fourth film for another date, then completely forgot I had the film. The hero of the film is Samson, a bar owner who has a pet lion and a large staff, presumably African in origin, that he uses to beat street thugs and racist white people. Samson has successfully kept gangs and drugs out of his neighborhood, all while running a bar that caters to at least one town alcoholic. A white gangster wants to expand his territory into Samson's neighborhood and begin selling drugs there. And to do that, he needs to eliminate Samson. So, for much of the film Samson is assaulted by carloads of white hoodlums, only to defeat them with his staff. The leader of the gangsters sends his girlfriend to Samson's bar to get a job as a dancer so she can spy on him. However, he begins to think she is sleeping with Samson and puts her in the hospital. Deciding to take care of him once and for all, the gangster kidnaps Samson's girlfriend and uses her as bait for a trap. Samson is able to defeat the gangster's army of about eight hoods ( hey, they didn't really have much of a budget for these Blaxploitation films, so eight hoods was pretty decent. ) After he rescues his girlfriend, the gangsters chase after him, but Samson drives up a street where an angry mob of African Americans are waiting for them. The film ends with Samson agreeing to have a one on one fight with the leader of the gangsters, which Samson naturally wins.
Okay, lets start with the pet lion. I mean, it was a cool concept in theory. But the lion in this film is old, worn out ( and probably heavily sedated, ) very skinny, and has a lot of visible mange. Like most American action films of the 70s, Black Samson was lethargically paced, with slow paced fight choreography, and only comes alive with the brief car chase scenes. There is an overuse of the word nigger by the white actors. Almost every white character is super racist, and has to use the word at least once every 15 second when they are on screen. The plot is a semi-rehash of High Noon, only this time around the townsfolk don't abandon the hero. And there are a lot of tits. Every actress in this film bares her breasts at least once it the film, usually go-go dancing in the bar. Which calls into question Samson's morality. On the one hand trying to uplift his ghetto by keeping out drugs, gangs and criminals. And on the other, running an establishment where everyone gets drunk, and girls dance in the nude for entertainment. Whoever wrote this film wanted it both ways. A hero who is both wholesome, lecturing everyone with sage moral advice, and the town's Huge Hefner. The big problem with the film. It is boring. Which shouldn't be the case with a film with so much violence and tits on screen.
Topic: What was the last movie you watched? (Read 1666032 times)
