What was the last movie you watched?

[stethacantus]

Invincible Shaolin ( a.k.a. Unbeatable Dragon ) (1978 )
The next film in  Shaw Scope Volume 2 is Invincible Shaolin.  An overrated Shaw Brothers film due to the fact that it is a Venom Mob film, and all six Venoms are in it. The emperor has decreed that Shaolin must send six experts to train the Manchu soldiers, and they send three from the South Shaolin Temple and three from the North Shaolin Temple. An evil Manchu general ( Wang Lung Wei )  decides to use this to hatch a plot to get the North Shaolin Temple and South Shaolin Temple to have a Fude. Telling the six experts that he actually only needs three experts, he asks them to have a duel to see which are the better experts, who  will then become the teachers while the others go home. The Northern Shaolin experts win the duel, but while the Southern experts are packing up to leave, the general does a sneak attack and kills all three using Iron Palm. He then sends the bodies back to the south Shaolin Temple telling them that the Northern Shaolin experts killed them during the duel. The plan works, as the head teacher at Sout Shaolin has three of his students train to defeat the North Shaolin experts for revenge. It is an okay film, but conceding  all the classics that have come from the studio around this time, pales in comparison.


Black Adam ( 2022 )
If you want to know why the DC Cinematic Universe is such a failure, then look no further than the moron executives at Warner Bros. who have zero strategy to building this universe. Beginning with The Green Lantern which was immediately removed from the universe, and Warners insistence that the follow up to Man of Steel be a movie where Batman and Superman have a fight, and from that point on could not make up their minds as to which D.C. characters would get their own solo films, cancelling some  in pre production and one in post production, then randomly screwing up every other film by having them reedited from what the original director intended, and you got a mess the executives like to blame on Zack Snyder, soon to be blamed on James Gunn. Unlike the MCU, the DCEU is a cinematic universe where you need prior knowledge of the full DC comic book universe to understand what is going on. Characters just show up that were never introduced in the DCEU and you are expected to know who they are. Which is not a problem with Batman suddenly showing up in the DCEU for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice as the character was already well known. But the members of the Justice Society who show up out of nowhere in this film? It as if you missed some DCEU films in the series. The MCU treats their audience as if they never read a Marvel comic book before, and the few cases where characters needed to be soft rebooted from pre-existing franchises ( Spider-man from Sony, The Hulk from Universal ) they offered enough explanation of the characters in their MCU debuts so you knew who they were.  The DCEU has yet to explain who the F&%k Amanda Waller is, even though she is about to get her own spin-off television series.

So far we have had more Suicide Squad films than Superman solo films. And in one year, two Shazam films? Because that is who Black Adam is, the original Shazam.  An anti-hero in the comic books, here he is presented as a super powered asshole. And to think, this was the character they were thinking would replace Superman, because for some reason the DCEU likes to use Superman as little as possible. The film is entertaining enough to kill two hours, but seems pointless. Also the two second cameo from Superman. Could someone explain why they had Henry Cavill playing the DCEU Superman, but used the theme from the Christopher Reeve Superman?

[stethacantus]

Kid with the Golden Arm ( 1979 )
In old China, An escort company has been asked by the government to transport gold across the country. The evil Deadly Valley gang vows to steal the gold shipment, and is brazen enough to send the escort company a message, carving "Kill, Kill, Kill, Kill" into the back of one of the guards working for the escort company to let them know they will be trying to take the gold. The Deadly Valley Gang is made up of evil martial artists, including Iron Robe, Silver Spear, Brass Head, and their leader Golden Arm. Thus begins the extremely thin plot for one of Chang Cheh's best Venom Mob films which is 105 minutes of deadly fights between the heroes working for the escort company and the various villains working for the Deadly Valey gang, several poisonings, and a confusing plot twist to end the film which is just an excuse for two of the heroes to have a fight.  Cartoonish? You bet. His Venom Mob period  was extremely cartoonish, in contrast to the serious dramas he made for his martial arts gangster films of the early 70s.

Morbius ( 2022 )
This was one of the films submitted for the Worst Superhero Film LoC, and received an overall 16% on Rotten Tomatoes. It is actually, not a bad film. I mean, it is a fairly paint by numbers vampire film that seems like more of a setup for that Sinister Six film Sony keeps saying they will make. ( Even teased it in the post credit scene. ) But aside from being predictable, it isn't bad. Just really pointless.

[Charles Castle]

David Cronenberg is a filmmaker who never throws anything away. Sprawled across his mannered and uncomfortable adaptation of Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis (2012) is the history of his film career, even the weird body horror with which the director made his name. It's a return to form, of sorts, but then, Cronenberg is almost never very far off model. Even in outliers like The Dead Zone and A Dangerous Method, Cronenberg's private universe is recognizable. At the time. Cosmopolis was Cronenberg's first screenplay in over a decade, which tends to distill his obsessions into a more concentrated brew. It is certainly perverse.

The plot of Cosmopolis is simple: billionaire asset-manager wunderkind Eric Packer gets it into his head to get a haircut. He is driven across town during a bad traffic day. The President is also in town, a rap star's funeral snarls traffic even more, and there is unrest afoot as spontaneous anti-capitalist demonstrations erupt in Packer's path. For his part Packer is insulated inside the safety of his stretch limo where he conducts all kinds of business with characters he meets on his journey: his glacial wife, the art dealer he's fucking on the side, a kid technocrat, a financial guru, his doctor, his head of operations. All the while Packer's fortune is evaporating as a bet against the Yuan goes south. It's clear as the movie unreels that Packer's quirky desire to go to all that trouble for a haircut is a journey into a downward spiral. There are credible threats on his life. He seems to be driving to greet them.

I haven't read the novel on which Cosmopolis is based. I am reliably informed that this is another instance of Cronenberg taking on an "unfilmable" book as he did with Crash and Naked Lunch. Of this, I have no knowledge. What I do know, however, is that whatever it was that drew the director to the novel, it gets filtered through his sensibility so thoroughly that it becomes Cronenberg's own world. A catalog of the director's signature tropes finds its way into the warp and weave of this movie. The director's horror of our own physicality is in full force in this movie, both in the fragility of our bodies and in the body's abnormalities. You also have an examination of identity through sexual behavior. Both of these themes are incorporated into the film's best scene, in which Packer has a conversation with Jane Melman (Emily Hampshire), a repressed functionary, while receiving a prostate exam. Packer, it seems, has an asymmetrical prostate. This scene functions like sex (it comes after a bout of rear entry sex between Packer and his art dealer, Didi Francher (Juliette Binoche), and I can only assume that Cronenberg was having a lark at the expense of star Robert Pattinson's usual fans. The rear entry sex in cars should be familiar to longtime observers, too. Cronenberg's occasional car fetish is there in the very first shot of the film, in which he dusts off the methods he used to film the drag racers in Fast Company. He applies the same gaze to the film's phallic stretch limos. He once again films sex mostly like car crashes.

Libido and frustrated libido is a theme in this movie, of course. Packer is the prince of the universe, but his wife won't let him fuck her. Theirs is a marriage designed to unite fortunes. He takes this frustration out on his female acquaintances. There's a hint that the financial markets rise and fall with the cocks of big time financiers. This amuses me to no end. Sex is the only thing with meaning for Packer, it seems, perhaps because sex with his wife is the only thing denied to him. Nothing else matters. Money? Packer doesn't seem to care. Politics? He's indifferent to The President. Art maybe, but art isn't enough. Packer is a right sociopath who feels nothing and moves through life as a zombie until he's on the brink of ruin. Only then does he seem to come alive, but he doesn't come alive enough. Near the end, Packer shoots his own hand to see if it makes a difference to his world and his fate. He feels nothing beyond a little pain. His existential crisis finds him spiraling into nothingness.

There's a hint of eschatology in this film, too, and of a kind of end of art as end of the world. The all too brief scenes of the Occupy-style protests outside the bubble of Packer's limo have a hint of the apocalypse, where rats become currency, and a huge rat, styled like a Chinese mummer's dragon waves overhead. In one scene, the head of the IMF is murdered on television, Videodrome-style. In this world, terror and violence are performance that only has meaning if there's an audience, whether real or mock (one of Packer's "threats" is a man who throws cream pies in the faces of the rich and powerful; he's surrounded by orbiting photographers). Earlier in the film, Packer contrived to buy the Rothko chapel, even though it's not for sale and "belongs to the world." Even art can be corrupted by capitalism, it seems. Significantly, both of the (excellent) credit sequences of Cosmopolis emphasize art rather than finance or technology.

This is a fairly claustrophobic film. Its two main settings are the high-tech interior of the limo (where Packer is even shown to urinate), and the wreckage of capitalism where Benno Levin (Paul Giamatti), Packer's "credible threat," squats. It could be filmed as a play, actually. It certainly has the kind of abstracted dialogue of a stage play. Benno plans to kill Packer and has a ridiculous gun to do it. Packer judges Benno's threat as if he's an art critic in the film's long closing verbal duel. Benno, it should be noted, is the film's only character who gives an unmannered performance. He has removed himself from the game. He sees the flaw in the system, its "asymmetrical prostate," as it were, and he can't bear it.

To an extent, this reminds me of core Cronenberg movies, and you'll pardon me for intruding on my narrative of Cosmopolis for an annoying personal anecdote. I used to name Cronenberg as my favorite director back when I was a gore-loving horror kid. I had seen every one of his features since Scanners in a theater (I saw Scanners at the drive-in, the late movie after Airplane II: the Sequel) until Cosmopolis, and Cronenberg's evolution as a filmmaker, moving ever so slightly away from a cinema of viscera to a cinema of the mind has mirrored my own evolution as a film viewer. But that evolution, that relationship, hasn't always been pleasant. I've loved the experience of watching Dead Ringers and Crash and M. Butterfly, but they are all films that function like a slap in the face, that confront my own sense of self and sense of the world in prickly, unpleasant ways, and even though I relish the experience of watching them, I often don't want to see his individual films again afterward. In the years between eXistenZ and Cosmopolis, however, that shock to the system had been absent. Whatever their relative merits Spider, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, and A Dangerous Method lacked that jolt. I didn't walk away from those films, as I had in the past with the director's other films, with my face burning, wondering what it was that I had just seen. Cosmopolis probably isn't as good a film as A History of Violence or even Eastern Promises, but whatever. It has that charge of old Cronenberg that those films lack. It has that clinical unpleasantness, that cold brutality, that distant examination, that formidable intellect. And I don't know that I want to see it again any time soon.

[Charles Castle]

Back when Event Horizon (1997, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson) was first in theaters, my best friend came back from a first-night showing and absolutely raged at how stupid it was. Such was his vitriol that I eventually passed on it. I never did catch up to it in the years since. Now I find myself approaching it with apprehension. The premise - which my friend detailed with the loving umbrage of the truly offended - is genuinely silly: The first interstellar spacecraft - equipped with a gravity drive that folds space and allows it to use an extra-dimensional shortcut to bypass the speed limit imposed by relativity - mysteriously vanishes on its first voyage. Seven years later, it reappears in orbit around Neptune, having, literally, gone through hell. Yes, hell. H-E-double hockey sticks. As a literal place.

The story here finds starship engineer Dr. William Weir taking a ship out to Neptune, where his brainchild, the Event Horizon, has reappeared after seven years beyond our spacetime. His ride is the Lewis and Clark, a search and rescue ship helmed by no-nonsense Captain Miller, and crewed by a seasoned group of rescue techs. Weir's mission is top secret. The fact that the Event Horizon is equipped with an experimental faster than light drive is the ostensible reason for the secrecy, but so is the last transmission from the ship, which bodes ill for all involved. Once they arrive and begin exploring, things become dire. The Event Horizon sends out a gravitic pulse shortly after the Lewis and Clark docks and once our heroes begin exploring, ripping a hole in the hull. The Event Horizon itself can only sustain life for twenty hours, so repairing their trip home becomes of paramount importance. They decamp to the Event Horizon while this is ongoing, only to discover that the ship is alive, that it is feeding our heroes their darkest nightmares, and that the gravity drive itself, powered by a black hole at its core, is a gateway to somewhere ...else.

This is basically Hellraiser in space. And, yes, I know that the fourth Hellraiser movie IS Hellraiser in space. "In space," is a Sargasso where horror franchises go to die and drift, derelict, on the shifting tides of the back shelves of video stores and, these days, in the back pages of streaming video. Event Horizon trumps these movies by omitting the franchise beforehand. I will say this, it's probably a more creative plot than many an Alien rip-off, though this doesn't entirely avoid that trap, either, given that it was shot by Adrian Biddle, who was a cameraman on Alien and the Director of Cinematography on Aliens. So it looks like Alien(s) in spite of itself. It also borrows from Aliens the idea of a time-limit as plot motivation and from Alien the idea of a distress call as dire warning. Event Horizon is another movie suffering from The Curse of the Krell: its monsters are monster from the id, made flesh by the force at the center of the film. The gravity drive generator? It's one part Hellraiser puzzle box, one part Krell planetary machinery. The line of descent for this runs through Solaris, of which, this film plays like a pulp fiction rethinking.

Okay, maybe this isn't that creative after all.

This is a film that eschewed American production resources. It was made entirely in the UK using British effects houses and production designer resources. There is certainly a different "feel" to the texture of this film, even if the production designers are looking back at films created by ILM or Digital Domain for inspiration. The sets are more intricately decorated than an equivalent film from, say, James Cameron. The look of the film is downright baroque. And, certainly, its horror set-pieces are more thoroughly nasty than what Americans were making at the time. The funniest conceit from the production designers is placing the Event Horizon into the upper atmosphere of Neptune so that clouds and thunder and lightning can rage outside the ship and then designing its med bay to look like the nave of a cathedral, stone arches and all, turning the whole enterprise into a proper full-dress Gothic. One only misses the rattling of chains in a dungeon, but it covers that in the endgame. The chamber with the gravity drive, I've already mentioned, is designed to recall the puzzle boxes from Hellraiser, but this film has it's own version of Pinhead, too, and spills gallons - nay, tanker trucks - of blood. Allegedly, Clive Barker was a consultant on this film, so it's not terribly surprising.

The actors are good, though they are made to inhabit characters who are stupider than they are. Sam Neill is Dr. Weir, a character who knows more than he's telling. Laurence Fishburn plays Miller, and he's the very model of a tough space ship captain. Also in the cast are Kathleen Quinlan, Sean Pertwee, Joelly Richardson, and Jason Isaacs. The supporting characters have been conceived by the filmmakers as stand-ins for the audience, ignorant of the theories behind Weir's faster than light drive in order to give the movie an excuse to explain it. This is absurd on its face, given that these characters all live and work in space, so it's not like they're ignoramuses - or it's not like they should be. On the other hand, Weir's reluctance to explain anything goes to this film's conception of him as a mad scientist, particularly late in the film. For a film that relies on the gee-whiz elements of science fiction for its best effects, this sure does distrust science. There are places that mankind was not meant to go, this film intimates in classic science horror fashion, but it resorts to an overtly religious ideation as a check on mankind's progress. Trespass on god's domain and you're going to hell.

Did I mention that this film is insultingly stupid? Well, there you are.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Ah, Event Horizon, I just went through my collection and don't see it.  So I either bought it on VHS (tossed most of my tapes when I moved last) or rented it, but I remember being mad that I spent any money on it.  Expected science fiction and got a stupid gorefest.

[Edward J Grug III]

Haha, Event Horizon may be bad, but I did enjoy my one watch of it.

[stethacantus]

Magnificent Ruffians   aka The Destroyers ( 1979 )
Another one of the Venom Mob films. Yuan Ying Fei (  Lu Feng  ) is the son of the famous martial arts hero Golden Blade, who's father left him the weapon and taught him his Golden Blade kung fu. However, it is the early 20th century, where villains now use guns, and trains and automobiles have made escort companies obsolete. Which means, aside from teaching martial arts, there is no longer any money to be made from knowing Kung Fu. As a result, martial artists across the country are  poor. Fortunately for Yuan, his father was rich and he inherited his fortune.  But has grown bored and spoiled, and gets his thrill by luring martial artists to his estate with a promise of work, then kills them with his golden blade. He has  used his wealth to slowly take over his town, owning every business except for a lone escort company that defiantly stays in business despite not having a client in years.  Yuen makes several attempts to buy out the company, but the owner ( Lo Mang ) refuses to sell to him, and beats up any of Yuan's men who  come near his property. Yuan finds four starving martial artists ( The rest of the venom mob ) and invites them to his home as his guests, and treats them well for several days. He then tricks them into attacking Lo Meng by telling them that he has been acting like a villain.  Once they have eliminated him, Yuan plans to announce he is avenging Lo Mang's death and kill them. Another one of Chang Cheh's films where the villain has a complex plot to turn the venom squad against each other. Chang Cheh's best films may have been behind him by the late 70s, but films like this were enjoyable enough to keep the director relevant.

Secret Headquarters ( 2022 )
Slight problem with collecting superhero  movies released on home video. Many have not. No problem with the Marvel and DC films. But about ten original character superhero films remain exclusive to the streaming services that produced them. Fortunately Paramount+ is not one of them, and has released this made for streaming movie in less than a year after it's streaming release. Hopefully the other streaming services will realize they are losing a revenue stream just so their streaming service has original content and eventually do the same. Paramount figured that out. Five months seemed like a good enough amount of time to keep this movie exclusive. Especially since it is doubtful any of these low budget superhero films are generating any subscription beyond their initial debut. So while I await the others to get some sort of physical media release, there is this.

This is sort of what you would expect from a limited budget superhero film. After being given powers by a crashed U.F.O., Owen Wilson becomes a superhero called The Guard. However, you never see his heroics, despite there being news reports of The Guard rescuing people from natural disasters and fighting terrorist armies, none of this is shown. Estranged from his family after his wife divorces him, his son, who has no idea he is a superhero, begins to hate him because he is always abandoning him claiming he has to do important IT work. So basically Owen Wilson disappears for most of the film, which not only meant the producer saved money on superhero effects, but only had to pay Owen Wilson for being in a quarter of the film. It is his son's birthday, and his mother insists he spend the day with his dad. But then Owen gets an emergency call, and apologizing to his son, tells him he has to go away for a couple of days on another emergency  programming job. However, instead of calling his mother to pick him up a day early, the son takes advantage of his father leaving him in the house alone and invites three of his high school friends over for a party. During which they accidentally discover the entrance to his secret headquarters and figure out that he is The Guard. They also decide to steal some of the Guard's tech and play with it, which allows a group of mercenaries who have been trying to find The Guard's headquarters for years, to finally track the base down. The film then degenerates into a poor man's version of Home Alone, followed by the inevitable ending where Owen returns, and father and son together defeat the enemies.

This was not a bad film. Or at least, I neither hated it, nor was so bored or irritated by it as I watched it that I wished it would end already. But it is just barely entertaining, is not funny in the parts that are supposed to be funny, not dramatic in the parts that are suppose to be dramatic, and is highly predictable. Still, the writers had a premise they could have done a lot with, and did the bare minimum, which I am not sure was due to them phoning in a script, or being told that this direct to streaming movie would have a lot of budget constraints. I have seen a lot better than this, but I have also seen a loooooooooooooot worse. Thankfully the 100 minutes didn't seem to drag, and I didn't feel like blowing my brains out while watching this, which has happened with lot of low budget superhero films ( and quite a few big budget superhero films as well. )

[Charles Castle]

My first impression of Calvary (2014, directed by John Michael McDonagh) was that it was deadpan religious noir. It's a film that attempts to reconcile the mission of the Catholic church with the wickedness done by that church's ministers. It falls into the category of noir because it's a crime film of sorts, one particularly concerned with a fall from grace. Its concern with states of grace is more (little "c") catholic than is normally the purview of noir, but its fall from grace is an equally dark descent. The punch, when it comes, lands with a brutalizing force even to a mocking unbeliever like me.

My second impression was that it was the cinematic equivalent of Hieronymus Bosch's "Christ Carrying the Cross," which has a central figure carrying the weight of the world through a crowd of leering grotesques. Bosch's painting has always had multiple interpretations, depending on the worldview of the critic. Is it deeply spiritual? Is it an irreligious mockery? I tend to think it's the former. Calvary provides a similar dichotomy, but it's more clearly an expression of spirituality. It's an argument for the necessity of the church in an increasingly secular and sinful world, and an indictment of the Catholic Church's utter failure in the face of its own mission.

The story here follows a week in the life of Father James, a priest in a rural Irish parish. At the outset of the film, one of his parishioners confesses to Father James that he's the victim of pedophile priests and since he can't strike out at the bad priests who serially abused him as a child, he was going to kill a "good" priest. He vows to kill Father James on the beach a week hence, giving the priest the chance to get his affairs in order. Father James knows who the man is, but chooses not to reveal it to his superiors. Instead, he goes about his duties as if nothing was amiss. His flock is complicated. The wife of the butcher is an adulterer and the butcher appears to have punched his wife for it. The wife's lover is an African immigrant who resents Father James as a representative of the "missionaries" who have so meddled in African affairs that their very mention suggests calamity. Father James's associate priest has no real religious conviction and is weak. The local business tycoon is drinking himself to death after the financial crash who wants to donate some money to The Church by way of penance, but who doesn't believe in the worth of anything but money. He amuses himself by pissing on the Holbein he owns because he can and taunts Father James about The Church's own obsession with money. The local policeman is keeping a rent boy who mocks Father James with provocative statements about what he does for fun. The local doctor is a hateful atheist who takes every opportunity to needle Father James's faith, the wife of a visiting tourist killed in an accident requires the comfort of religion, and Father James's own daughter returns from the big city after failing in a suicide attempt. This last provides a grim levity when Father James quips that she made the classic mistake and cut across rather than up the arm. Father James also ministers to a murderer when requested, imploring him to reveal the information that will lead the police to the bodies of his victims, to no avail. Meanwhile, the parish church burns and someone kills Father James's dog. He's a man under siege. And, eventually, he goes down to the beach to meet his fate.

There's a scene in the third act of Calvary that neatly summarizes the burden that Father James bears throughout the movie. He's walking on a back road and he comes across a little girl who is heading to the beach. He strikes up a conversation with the girl until her father's car comes screeching to a halt. He gets out and pulls his daughter into the car while giving Father James a deeply horrified look. Father James looks stricken by his regard. Such is the reputation of the Catholic priesthood in this day and age. Indeed, most of his parishioners mock him openly, and not just scabrous atheist Dr. Harte. The atheist and former Catholic in me has some sympathy for the scorn these people feel. I mean, let's face it, the Church has a LOT to answer for, and not just the pedophile priests who inspired the little girl's father to regard Father James with deep suspicion. For a "good" priest, one who actually cares about his vocation and the disposition of his flock, one who does his job as best he can, it's almost too much to bear.

It's not for nothing that this film is titled "Calvary." It's a passion play of sorts. Father James is a Christ figure, and each of the days the film counts down act as a stand in for the stations of the cross. The film heaps suffering on Father James until he meets his fate down on the beach. More, the film has twelve important supporting characters, representing disciples who abandon Father James as Christ. The film is more subtle than that, though. James's relationship with his daughter is nuanced, as is his relationship with the wife of the man who is killed. These are instances where the virtues of forgiveness - spiritual or secular, it makes no difference - are lovingly detailed. Beyond that: in his final confrontation with the man who has vowed to kill him, he's asked, "And when you read about what your fellow priests did to all those poor children down all those years, did you cry then?" he says "no." He has no legitimate answer. He's the embodiment of the Church's crimes in this instance and in some ways, he deserves the bullet. This film is nothing if not conflicted. The juxtaposition of this scene with the montage that follows suggests ambiguous interpretations. The images are provocative: The money-worshiping nihilist, the adulterer and her lover, the violent Buddhist barkeeper, the asshole atheist, the fallen priest reading The God Delusion, these represent a world adrift without The Church. These are the mocking grotesques of Bosch's painting. The last images in the sequence subvert this interpretation: the grieving wife taking comfort from God, the daughter granting some kind of forgiveness (maybe) to her father's murderer. When I first watched the film, the meaning of the last images didn't register. I just saw the grotesques. John Michael McDonagh, the film's director, has mentioned that Calvary is influenced by the films of Robert Bresson, but it can't quite bring itself around to the same level of spiritual misanthropy, perhaps because it's organized around a character the likes of which was an anathema to Bresson. The film is also more aware of the power of grotesques and its own roots in art. The most baroque example of this is is the conversation Father James has with Chris O'Dowd's butcher, which takes place in a meat locker and calls to mind Rembrandt's painting of a flayed ox hung up for meat. A more subtle example is the painting on which Dylan Moran's rich man pisses. It's Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors. a painting famous for the anamorphic skull painted on the floor. This is one of the film's cleverest memento mori.

What keeps Calvary grounded as a human (humane?) drama is the central performance by Brendan Gleeson. While many of the film's other characters are sometimes straw men for the film's broader thematic concerns, Gleeson's Father James is fully realized thanks to the force of Gleeson's personality and his keen attention to details. He gives Father James both an inward gaze and an ingratiating engagement with the world at large. It's a remarkable turn for an actor who is often used as a physical presence more than as a complicated human being (more Mad-Eyed Mooney than Martin Cahill). Father James is a complicated man, one who is aware of the both the role of The Church and it's fading position in the world. There's a weary resignation to the way he goes about his duties in the last week of his life, but a deep concern for his fellow man and a deep self-hatred towards his own limitations. More, Gleeson brings to the role a movie-star charisma that I didn't even know he had.

I often tell people that I don't respond well to spiritual films, but, strictly speaking, that's not true*. While I don't really care for films that act as devotionals, I do respond to films that examine and question faith, particularly those that examine a fall of man from a state of grace or, better still, a fall of faith itself. I think such films can provide great drama. The fact that I'm an ex-Catholic provides me with a connection with Calvary. I was never abused by priests, mind you. The priests I knew were generally the "good" priests among whom Father James is counted by the film, but that didn't stop my disillusion with The Church from taking root at a young age. It has a lot to answer for. In the piece I wrote about Philomena a couple of years ago, I mentioned that I'd seen an article asking the rhetorical question of whether that film was anti-Catholic and the answer I suggested was that it wasn't anti-Catholic enough. I think Calvary gets this right. It takes Catholicism to task, but it doesn't do this in a way that's obviously anti-Catholic. You could mistake the film for Catholic propaganda if you squint at it right. But I don't think that it is. And it carries a wallop as drama.

* The simple fact of the matter is that being an atheist doesn't mean I don't "get" religious art as art. I don't need to believe in the Greek gods or Jehovah or Odin to groove on the stories of mythology. And if being atheist means I don't get to listen to Sam Cooke or Johnny Cash... well, fuck that noise.

[stethacantus]

Ten Tigers from Kwangtung ( 1980 )
For some reason this film is considered one of Shaw Brother's classics. But it is really a mess of a film. Chang Cheh began filming it around 1978 when co-star Alexander Fu Sheng injured himself while filming scenes for another Shaw Brothers film, The Deadly Breaking Sword, which was being shot concurrently with this movie. Production was suspended, and eventually the film was cancelled. Cut to two years later. The Venom Mob has become very popular, and Shaw Brothers cant shoot Venom films fast enough to meet the demand. Suddenly they remember the Venoms were all in this film, which was shot before  Five Deadly Venoms. So decided to complete it so that a Venom Mob film could be in theaters while the venoms were still working on their next film Rebel Intruders. The problem,, the Venoms were busy shooting Rebel Intruders, and the rest of the actors in the film were either shooting another film for Shaw Brothers, or had left the studio to work at Golden Harvest. They only had an hour worth of footage shot, so came up with the idea of shooting the additional 30 minutes to pad it out to feature length with new actors. The new footage takes place 20 years after the events of the original footage. The students of the Ten Tigers are being killed off by the son of the villain who was killed in the original footage. Once they realize this is happening, one of the students tells the other of what had transpired 20 years earlier, and the existing footage is flashbacks. The original footage wasn't that good to begin with ( Although since that film is incomplete, it is possible the scenes that would have made it better were never shot. ) and the new footage, which makes up the final 25 minutes, is clearly padding. Although does have that final fight with the infamous scene where one of the heroes kicks the head off one of the villains. It is also the movie that villain Johnny Wang Lung Wei pulls out a f*&king naked woman statue as his weapon, which has to be the dumbest weapon ever used in any martial arts movie. ( I know I posted a picture of it here a long while back, but can not find it on the search. It was probably in Photobucket anyway. ) That wasn't the only incomplete film with the Venoms Shaw Brothers completed in 1980. The other was Heaven and Hell, also with Fu Sheng.

The King's Man ( 2021 )
A prequel to the two Kingsman films. My problem with this is the disposable first half, which is basically an hour long anti-war film where two characters are killed off for very dumb reasons. The second half of the film shifts into Ralph Fiennes suddenly becoming a spy and going after the head of a secret society that has been destroying western civilization and causing the first world war, all to destroy England. The second half is basically a decent action movie that seems to be in a completely different toe than the first. This was supposed to be the origin story of the Kingsman organization, but you see little of the origin. You suddenly find out that Fiennes created a spy network using servants from around the globe, and in the last minute of the film, announces he has bought the Kingsman shop as the headquarters of a new agency he has just formed. So, a half good film, and a half unnecessarily sappy film with dumb plot twists.

[stethacantus]

My Young Auntie ( 1981 )
This is considered one of Lau Kar Leung's masterpieces. I never really cared much for the film. Not enough action and too much comedy. The lovely Kara Hui is a loyal servant of a dying millionaire who does not want his estate going to his evil scheming brother ( Johnny Wang Lung Wei )  because he has no sons of his own The millionaire asks Kara to marry him in order to legally transfer his estate to his nephew. After the millionaire's death, Kara travels to Canton to give the will to the nephew ( Lau Kar Leung ), who is surprised that his elderly brother married such a young girl. And by custom, has to treat the woman as his elder. He is also shocked to learn that she knows kung fu. Much of the film then centers around the  in-fighting between Kara and the nephew's son ( Hsiao Ho ) who at first do not get along, but eventually become good friends. Of course, the evil brother is not going to let something like a will keep him from taking possession of his dead brother's estate, and sends goons to take care of the widow, culminating in her kept prisoner in his mansion while the nephew, his son, and a few other elderly relatives come to the rescue. Too much of this film diverts into comedy and musical numbers ( yes. It has some singing and dancing as well ) and not enough on fighting ( which is fantastic, but sadly not enough. ). Some Lau Kar Leung fans  call this his best film. I feel like it is more of a film where you are glad fast forward was invented.

Thoroughbreds ( 2017 )
Okay, this was my weekend. People were invited over to see the dual coverage of King Charle's coronation, and then the Kentucky Derby. I am lucky I was able to slip the one martial arts film in. Watched on delay via the DVR, everyone insisted on watching every single minute of the coronation with no fast forwarding whatsoever. Then I had a couple of hours before Kentucky Derby coverage started. The race itself starts at 7:00pm and lasts only about a minute. Which means the other four or five hours are just a dragged out pre-race show. I knew weeks in advance this weekend would be ruined, so thought I had made sure that every one of the superhero films I had purchased in January was completed by today so I would have nothing for this weekend. So the race ends and so does the post race coverage, and the guests want to watch the horse movie I had on my shelf. What horse move? Pretty much, the bookshelf behind the television which hasn't held books since the television moved in front to it, is where I keep any DVD I plan to watch, after which it is moved up to one of the storage boxes. That shelf thinned out to just the complete series sets I am currently going through, the Shaw Scope set, a couple of other martial arts films which will be watched after the Shaw Scope set is completed, and a couple of films I received for Christmas.  Despite all efforts to get my friends to agree to no gift exchanges, there is always a couple of friends who want to use Christmas as a way of exposing me to a film they are convinced I will like. Which means I then have to buy them a gift, which is a pain in the ass to figure out. ( I think I complained about this here before. ) Each year I swear to myself that if anyone gives me a surprise gift of a movie again, I will repay them by gifting them a horrible Brett Kelly movie. I am sure one of those  would cure them of gift exchanging forever. However, I have yet to have had the guts to do it, and wind up searching Amazon for indie or foreign  films I thing they probably will like. So anyway, as usual, the gift films sit there in the bookshelf for months, waiting for the week I have free time and have watched everything else. Usually I forget they are up there until the friend who gifted it asks if I watched it yet, and I sort of have to watch it. Well, a couple of guests somehow managed to see the spine of the Blu-ray box and made out the word's "Thoroughbreds" and assumed I had  brought out a film about horses to watch on Derby day. And were for some reason looking forward to seeing it.

I have no idea what they were expecting to see. There is a horse in the very beginning of the film. For about ten seconds. Before Olivia Cooke, who plays a mentally disturbed gird, pulls out a knife to slaughter it. You don't actually see the horse getting killed. In fact, none of the murders in this film are shown on screen. But they first suggest it happened, then later Olivia recounts in graphic detail how she killed the horse. I mean, you guys saw the film on the shelf and wanted to see it I probably wasn't going to get to it for another two weeks. Certainly wasn't planning to see it this weekend because I had guests, and when guests are over they usually want some movie off some streaming site I am not interested in and leave them to watch it. If they really wanted to see a horse film, I have a few. It Anit Haywith Abbott & Costello, Riding High with Bing Cosby as the owner of a race horse and with Oliver Hardy in a cameo role, A Day At The Races with the Marx Brothers....You should have asked instead of insisting you wanted to see this film and assuming it was about race horses. Don't give me that stink face! Someone sent me this as a gift.

This is basically a low budget independent film with two British actresses playing spoiled rich American teenagers. Anya Taylor Joy has a step dad she hates. Mentally disturbed friend Olivia Cooke, who is already facing animal cruelty charges for killing her mother's horse, suggests that Anna should have her dad murdered. They hire a local drug dealer, played by Anton Yelchin, to break into the house and faking a burglary gone wrong, shoot the step-dad while both Anna and Olivia are both out of state on their respective vacations and therefore have alibies for the murder.  This seems to be a set up for a Coen Brother style crime farce where the hired killer screws up the crime, and as a result a bunch of bodies drop. But then Yelchin's character disappears from the film. I checked with Wikipedia for the shooting date, and sure enough, it was the same month that Yelchin had his fatal car accident. So one can assume they wrote around the character's absence. Instead of the step dad being killed, you have a shadowy figure hanging out outside the house before chickening out of going inside. I am guessing the entire last act of the film was rewritten at the last minute to accommodate the sudden absence of a vital character. They get away with it, and come up with a suitable alternate ending that seems like the logical conclusion to the story.  But it isn't the laugh riot the critic quoted on the back of the Box said it was. I didn't laugh once. But that may have be due to some pissed off house guests staring in my direction every time something happens they do not agree with.   BTW, if you are expecting this to end up a lesbian film, then you are out of luck. It seemed like it was headed in that direction, with the two girls falling for each other, but then doesn't

[Charles Castle]

The billionaire class really ought to pay closer attention to what's bubbling through the collective unconscious of the current era. The horror movies of this decade, if not this entire century, have been sending them warnings that have gone unheeded. Horror movies are a canary in a coal mine, a good barometer of where the stress points on broader society lie. The moneyed class definitely should be alarmed that you never, ever, see a "good" billionaire in a horror movie. And if there's a tech-bro Steve Jobs-type dude in one? I can almost guarantee you that he'll be monster chum in short order. You can't buy yourself out of the horrors, movies are saying, especially the ones you've created yourself. There's a scene in The Menu (2022, directed by Mark Mylod) that is explicit on this point, when the corrupt billionaire who has financed the exclusive restaurant run by insane chef Julian Slowik is styled as an angel and lowered helplessly into the ocean where he then drowns. The obvious symbolism is that there are no good billionaires. Only a shade less obvious is the idea that billionaires as a class are fallen angels, i.e., they are devils. I appreciate the layered nuance. Mind you, this film is only a horror movie if you're rich. If you're not, then it's either a satire or a wish-fulfillment fantasy. Or maybe both.

The plot of the film follows Margot Mills, who has been invited by Tyler to an event at Hawthorne, an ultra-high end restaurant. Tyler has just broken up with his girlfriend, who was supposed to have gone with him. He's a hardcore foodie, for whom Hawthorne's chef, Julian Slowik, is a superhero. Hawthorne itself is on an island and the attendees meet at the dock. These include food critic Lillian and her editor, Ted, faded action movie star George and his assistant, regular customers Richard and Anne, and a trio of tech executives who work for the man who backs the restaurant. They are met on the island by Elsa, Hawthorne's maitre'd, who gives them a tour of the island before escorting the party to the dining room. As the courses of the event are brought to the table, it becomes clearer and clearer that Slowik is barking mad, a fact confirmed when one of Slowik's sous chefs presents a dish called "The Mess" and puts a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. The guests refuse to believe their danger, assuming that it's all theater. Margot believes differently, and when she rises to go to the ladies room, Slowick confronts her. She's not part of the menu. She isn't "supposed" to be there. Slowik can spot a "service worker" a mile away. Worse still, she's a substitute and Slowik categorically states that there are no substitutes at Hawthorne. As the night's menu unfolds, the subsequent dishes edge the diners and the restaurant staff toward their inevitable demise, something Margot wants no part of. The endgame becomes a battle of wits between Slowik and Margot, who has secrets of her own.

The Menu is a clever art film that has been disguised and smuggled into the multiplexes as a horror movie. It has a familial resemblance to other recent horror movies that have done the same thing. The end of the film bears a striking similarity to the end of Midsommar, for one example, while the trope of a working class woman having to outwit a bunch of insane aristocrats is reminiscent of both The Invitation and Ready or Not. But none of these films are The Menu's true ancestor. That film is Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel and its secret sharer, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, both of which trap a pack of degenerate rich people at dinner and watch them tear each other to pieces. If the allusion is entirely accidental, then the course of appetizer in which the assembled twits are offered "no bread" because it's a peasant food is an uncanny coincidence given Luis Bunuel's infamous documentary, Land without Bread. I'm pretty sure the filmmakers are aware of their film's provenance, though. It's very precise in its symbols.

This is a sly satire of contemporary food culture, with each successive dish trending more and more ridiculous. Its target audience, in the traditions of snobs throughout history, is too afraid to speak up lest they be thought a barbarian. The worst of them all is Tyler, played with a twitchy highbrow dudebro desire to explain things to his lowbrow uneducated date by Nicolas Hoult, who is in on the joke and aspires to survive by joining the winning team. His menu item is titled "Tyler's Bullshit," which is one of the best jabs at wanna-be artists I've ever seen. The artists come off best. There's a vein of self-hatred running through the menu concocted by Slowick's team that manifests itself as self-destruction in the quest to wow an audience. Exaggerated for effect, true, but on the money otherwise. This is what capitalism has done to art. It has taken the joy of creation away from the artist and created art that is empty posturing. It reminds me of an old Playboy cartoon in which an artist points a gun at his head with the intent of splattering his brains all over a canvas only to have his wife deadpan "It's been done." It also reminds me of that old Warner Brothers cartoon in which Daffy Duck swallows a bunch of explosives and follows it up with a match in order to get a round of applause from an audience. That's the impulse of Slowik's cult of underlings.

Back in December when I first saw this film, I followed it with a showing of Violent Night, in which John Leguizamo plays the Christmas-hating villain. I hadn't intended to see a Leguizamo double feature, but this one was particularly apt. In The Menu, he plays a washed up action movie star who is invited to the island because one of his lesser films offended Slowick with its mediocrity on a particularly bad day. I like to think that Violent Night is the film that Leguizamo's character made immediately before heading for Slowik's event. This is entirely outside the intentions of the filmmakers, but it was a perfect bit of synchronicity. I can imagine the lives of every character in the film outside the arbitrary time-frame of its running time. They aren't deep characters - oh, no. Their main functions are allegorical, else they are there to take up space in the film frame. The casting of the film exceeds their functions, though, and every character has some twitch, some prejudice, some lack of grace that suggests real people. This makes the satire bite harder. Janet McTeer's food critic is a smoker, which the movie is at pains to point out destroys the palate. Thus, she's a hypocrite. Reed Birney's Richard recognizes Margot because he engaged her services at some point. Thus, he's an adulterer. Tyler, an addition to Nicolas Hoult's growing catalogue of twits, knows everyone is going to die, but brings Margot with him anyway. Thus, he's an obsessive and a glutton, pursuing food experiences at all costs. And he's a poseur. All of this is in the background, though, because this is a two-hander at heart between Anya Taylor-Joy and Ralph Fiennes, who test themselves against each other. That's where the heart of the drama lies, between two professionals of a kind who are both tired of the personal degradation their clientele demand. Both want to walk away, but on very different terms. That's where the essential conflict lies, and it's the inflection point from which all of the film's thematic concerns derive. Both performances burnish the actors' resumes, but still serve the film. It's the best kind of star turn for them both.

Margot is the audience surrogate, significantly described by Slowik as "a service provider." She is not the target of Slowik's rage and he regrets catching her in the by-blow. He gives her a choice: die as one of the rich twits or die as one of the oppressed artists. She navigates the film looking for a third option. She finds it appropriately with food. She's having none of the chef's bullshit. She recognizes art made with hate and challenges him to make something with actual love. Her choice is a vulgarian choice, a dish no one at the event would ever choose, but which a film audience of similar salt of the earth responds to with a knowing nod of the head. Margot, significantly, is the only guest on the island who seems to grasp the story Slowik is telling, and who trusts her own palate rather than the performance and hype. There's an old saying that the secret to success is sincerity and once you can fake that, you have it made. Margot would probably disagree. She can smell bullshit just fine while everyone around her swallows it whole. This is a valuable skill when confronting everything about the rich technocrats and grifters who are shaping our society. The three tech bros are significant here. They are almost too on the nose for a movie that is generally more subtle, but they're the key to the film. This movie is about a lot more than food. The kind of food that Slowik is conjuring for these people might be crypto currency or some vaporous venture capital scheme. Slowik isn't necessarily someone like Elizabeth Holmes or Sam Bankman-Fried - the movie demonstrates that he absolutely knows what he's doing for one thing - rather he is someone who is disgusted by the kinds of people who sink money into thin air. So he provides a more rarefied kind of opportunity to show them exactly where the rich are leading us all. It's not for nothing that Slowik's lesson for these people burns the workers as well as the overlords. That's kind of the point.

[Charles Castle]

Dario Argento's new film, Dark Glasses (2022) strikes me as what you might get if you fed his old film, Cat O' Nine Tails, into an AI filmmaking engine. It would be equally soulless, but maybe that's being unkind. Dark Glasses isn't the same kind of car wreck Argento was making when last we met. Whatever the new film's deficiencies, it is an absolute baller in comparison to his Dracula. Faint praise. For a brief period at the start, I thought the Argento of the early 1970s was behind the camera. The opening sequence is creepier and more suggestive of a world out of joint than the entirety of the director's output this century. But it was not to be.

The film opens with Diana driving through Rome. Every person she passes on the street has their face upturned to the sky, shielded by dark glass or sunglasses. They are watching an eclipse. Diana stops her car and joins the throng at a park. She too looks up at the eclipse with her naked eye, then looks away as if burned. She puts her sunglasses back on. Later, a woman is leaving an assignation with a client. The hotel offers to call for a ride, but she declines. Just outside the hotel, she is attacked and killed by a man with a steel cello-string garrotte, who makes his escape in a white van. Diana, like the murdered woman, is a sex worker, and on her way home from a session with her own client, she is chased by a man in a white van, whose pursuit caused a terrible traffic accident when Diana's car collides with a car on a cross street. The passengers in that car are killed, but Diana survives, though her resulting injuries leave her blind. Her recovery is aided by Rita, who works to help the newly-blind adjust and become self-sufficient, and Chin, a local boy from China who is struggling to fit in in a new country. He vows to help Diana, though without telling his parents where he is. Diana also trains with a guide dog, who becomes her protector as well as her eyes. The police are interested in Diana, both because she's the victim of what appears to be a serial killer and because they suspect her of kidnapping Chin. Unfortunately, the man in the white van is also still interested in her, and between the cops and the killer, she finds her life under constant stress. Once the killer begins to murder the people in her orbit, she must take her safety into her own hands, protecting not just herself, but Chin as well.

It's been ten years since Dario Argento made a film. His last flurry of output produced The Mother of Tears and Dracula 3-D, two films so colossally inept that it's no shock that the director languished on ice for a full decade. I almost wish the Argento of Mother of Tears was behind the camera for Dark Glasses, because that director was unbounded by the tyranny of the well-made movie. Whatever his failings, he took risks. Dark Glasses, by contrast, is safe. It's a retreat to giallo, a form that Argento pioneered at the start of his career. And if it had retreated to those films, then maybe Dark Glasses wouldn't be such a slog. Instead, it calls to mind the director's late giallo films like The Card Player or Do You Like Hitchcock? The fact that this was written in 2002, largely contemporary with those films, explains some of its stylistic kinship with them.

In some ways, this is classic Argento. You have a central protagonist who is a witness to a crime but who has perceptual limitations. The usual structures of society are breaking down around her as the murderer slowly strips away anyone who might help her. You even have the crime itself as a tearing of the veil, in which the protagonist's world is stripped away and replaced with a world of utter chaos. You can even sense some of this in that metaphysical prologue with the eclipse, which provides a nice foreshadowing of both Diana's impending blindness and of a world blotted out by darkness. Some of the director's more particular tics are present in the film, too, including the absolutely savage murder of one of his own family members (Asia Argento plays Rita, the woman from the Society for The Blind) and, if I'm honest, some of his well-documented misogyny. By framing several of his characters - including the protagonist - as sex workers, he implies a punishment narrative. What this lacks is Argento's characteristic abstraction. This is a film that is flatly reportorial. Only the score by Arnaud Rebotini recalls the overbearing style of the director's best film, doing a manful imitation of Goblin if they had been retooled for the present moment.

But the rest? Meh. The performances aren't good. Argento has worked around weak performances before, but no such luck here. The end of the film suggests the director is doing penance for past films toward his canine characters (in, for example, Inferno). I doubt he could have found a more annoying kid. This is an era of absolutely astonishing child actors, but I wonder how much of that is down to directors learning how to use child actors. If it's on the directors, then Argento is particularly derelict here. One thing in the film's favor, perhaps because it's Italian and would never live down the fashion faux pas, is the fact that Diana's lingerie when it's on screen is high end. She must have been making a pretty good living before her blindness. The film has a dim view of the men who go to sex workers, though, for whom that high end lingerie is worn. Sex workers themselves must be immaculately gorgeous, while their clientele can be seen as gross, the type of men who could never get a woman without paying for it. But that's only a small part of the film. The killer himself, when he's revealed, is also a disappointment, and is maybe a counterpoint to Diana's clients. This is a dude who could absolutely get it, but instead he hates women so much that he must destroy them. Maybe Diana's clients aren't so bad after all. You can never tell with men. The concept of Schrödinger's rapist (murderer here) definitely applies. Worst of all, this is a category of film where other players outclass what's on screen. This film's closest analogues are Julia's Eyes and Blink, while the 800 lb. gorilla is Wait Until Dark. Argento provides no reasons whatsoever to prefer Dark Glasses over those films. None at all.

Ultimately this is a film that makes a promise at the start and fails to deliver. Par for the course for later Argento, alas. I wonder if he's even capable of the kinds of stylistics with which he made his name or if that's all behind him. I wonder if his financiers even permit that level of freedom anymore. If there is no more of that, then it's a shame. Everything beautiful passes from the world. Every beautiful sight fades to black in the end.

[stethacantus]

Mercenaries From Hong Kong ( 1982 )
The next movie in the Shaw Scope box set is this unusual film. The third film directed by Wong Jing, who had just a year earlier transferred from Golden Harvest to Shaw Brothers as a screen writer, and was occasionally given the opportunity to direct.  It has many of the top Shaw Brothers martial arts stars, but in a film that is mostly gunplay. And one of the rare films where Johnny Wang Lung Wei plays one of the good guys, and doesn't turn traitor. The story: Ex soldier Ti Lung is hired by a shady woman ( who you can tell is going to double cross him ) to go into Cambodia and capture the assassin who killed her father and bring him back alive. To do that, they must infiltrate the rebel  militia that he has taken refuge in. Of course he puts together a team of other mercenaries made up of his friends and acquaintances.  Pretty much, everything in this movie is predictable, down to guessing which characters will betray Ti Lung. Hong Kong gunplay movies were vastly improved upon by John Woo a few years later with A Better Tomorrow. while the gun action is not choreographed like the post ABT films, and is just guys mowing down each other with machine guns, it is still a reasonable action movie.

Ophelia ( 2018 )
Well.... with the writers strike, it seems all late night television has been wiped out for now. That includes Saturday Night Live which is on an unplanned hiatus, and most likely done for the season. ( Too bad, as leaving cast members are usually allowed final sketches with their popular characters, and a farewell sketch. ) This would have meant a lot of extra time to watch movies on the weekend. But alas, it turned into another weekend with company. Because the Mothers Day brunch that was supposed to be on Sunday was turned into a Mothers Day dinner on Saturday Night at the last minute. Aside from getting a lot of free time with the sudden loss of late night shows, I am in a planned period of taking a break from purchasing new movies, which I had planned to use to rewatch my favorite films. Last week's film with Olivia Cooke inspired me to rewatch Ready Player One again. But those plans were blown to hell with the celebratory dinner, and a number of the dinner guests returning to my house. I prefer watching my favorite films alone, or with someone I know will actually watch it too, as opposed to people wo like to talk through movies and ask stupid questions about the plot, mostly because they missed a plot point when they were too busy talking. Well, may as well use this weekend to get rid of the second movie gifted to me for Christmas.

William Shakespeare was an English playwright of the late 16th century who wrote a lot of comedies, which I guess were funny for 16th century audiences, and to compete against the Bear Baiting concession across the street from the Globe Theater ( A sport where a pack of dogs and a bear are released  into a pit and everyone bets on which animal will die first, ) Shakespeare also wrote tragedies. Which were basically plays where royal families ended up murdering each other until just the confused servants are left alive to make sense of it all. Hamlet is said to be Shakespeare's best play. Which isn't true. His best play is MacBeth.  But because rumors spread that the play was either haunted or cursed, theater companies would go for his second best play instead. Ophelia is practically a minor character. Yet was raised in prominence due to becoming the world's first meme due to a classic 19th century painting of Ophelia drowning, which had been ripped off by a lot of other artists ever since. In more recent times,  recreations of the painting have appeared in countless music videos, by photographers, and had is practically a genre on YouTube.  The one place it is rarely depicted is in the many film adaptions of Hamlet, as in the play the drowning never takes place on stage, Instead Queen Gurtrude, who apparently witnessed the drowning, shows up and describes what has just happened offstage. The first sound feature film depicted the  drowning, recreating the painting while Gurtrude's soliloquy of it is reduced to a voice over. Most of the films that followed  stuck  with the actual stage direction, as to not diminish the performance of the actress playing Gertrude. This would include the version of Hamlet shown on MST3K.

With a film specifically about Ophelia, you would expect the drowning to be shown on screen. Which it is, at the very beginning and just prior to the credits. So much for building anticipation. The rest of the movie is basically a flashback, and a recreation of the play, only from Ophelia's prospective. A lot of stuff was changed. For example, a romance between Ophelia and prince Hamlet is forbidden, yet in the play it is heavily suggested that the King and Queen had arranged for Hamlet to wed Ophelia, and the Queen even mentions she had hoped they would be wed. This is one of the problems with this film. It lifts a lot of plot elements from Romeo & Juliette in order to create a romance that didn't exist in the play. It also changes the manner in which the royal family ends up dead, changing around who killed whom. And it sticks in a surprise at the end of the film which, if you do the math, could not have happened. I am not sure who this film was meant for. Those not familiar with Shakespeare will not get this. Those who are will be outraged at the changes. It is mildly entertaining, but ultimately, seems to go nowhere. In short, if you want to see a royal family wipe itself out, then watch Game of Thrones.  At least  that one has dragons.

[ihavemyreasons]

Chop and Steele (2022)
Documentary about the 2 guys who started the Found Footage Festival and the lawsuit filed against them by the parent company of one of the TV stations they pranked with an appearance as a fake strong man duo.
Funny, entertaining and highly recommended.
Complaints would be an overall lack of a definitive explanation of the end of lawsuit - conclusion touched on but not very in depth - and it doesn't feature enough footage of the depositions - a lot of what was left out was hilarious - Nick being asked who else he considered fuckers besides the owners of the station by the station's attorney and then answering with a long list really should have made the cut.

[stethacantus]

The Boxer's Omen ( 1983 )
This was one of those films that no one outside of Hong Kong heard about until bootleg VHS tapes began circulating in the 90s. Thanks to Jackie Chan's Rumble in the Bronx being redubbed and released by New Line Cinema, the films of John Woo being released on North American home video, Jet Li joining the Lethal Weapon franchise and the series Martial Law starring Sammo Hung, Hong Kong cinema finally crossed over from screenings in film festivals to the mainstream. To capitalize on the sudden fad, many quicky books by so called Hong Kong movie experts flooded the market, many which featured a section devoted to wild Asiana films. The Hong Kong films that were so over the top, that you had to see them. These included such gems as Story of Riki, Sex and Zen, Untold Story, Wicked City, Naked Killer, Robotrix and many other films created to shock their audience. Thanks to the sudden popularity of Hong Kong films, many of these were either imported, or released on DVD by American home video companies. But not The Boxer's Omen. You see, in the early 90s the few home video rights to their films Shaw Brothers had licensed out in the 80s were about to expire. And instead of licensing  them out again or allowing the companies that had them to renew their copyrights, Shaw Brothers decided to withhold all home video rights. ( Something to do with the company releasing stocks, and wanting to inflate the value of the stocks by not assigning a value to their film library, which would happen if their films were available on home video..... or something complicated like that. Needless to say, their lawyers advised them to withdraw their films from home video before the stocks went publick. ) So although Boxer's Omen had a huge cult following on the bootleg market, Shaw Brothers would not license it out for release on DVD. It would not legally be released in North America until 2006 when Image Entertainment released 20 Shaw Brothers films on DVD. Celestial had acquired the rights to the Shaw Brother's film library in the early 00's so they could restore them and offer them for release on home video worldwide. Image was the first home video distributor to license the North American rights to the Shaw Brothers films, and the 20 films they acquired the rights to were mostly the ones with cult followings, and nearly none of the most popular of the martial arts films. By then, the director of The Boxer's Omen, Kuei Chih-Hung, picked up a cult following for his many horror genre films. Kuei Chih-Hung was pretty much at the very bottom of Shaw Brother's contract directors, mostly assigned their low budget exploitation films. Although he did direct two of the studio's best martial arts films. The Killer Constable is thought by many to be the best martial arts genre film made by Shaw Brothers. It was a rare opportunity for Kuei Chih-Hung to direct a big budget martial arts film, and the last time as it bombed at the box office on it's initial release. More recently it was revealed that The Delinquent for which Chang Cheh got directing credit and Kuei Chih-Hung only got co-director credit, was actually completely directed by him. ( Neither have had home video releases yet ) So Image released The Boxer's Omen, along with some other Kuei Chih-Hung films, The Killer Snakes and Corpse Mania.

The Boxer's Omen has a simple enough plot that takes an unexpected turn. It begins as a familiar enough kick boxing film. Phillip Ko is a badass Triad enforcer, and the brother of kickboxer Johnny Wang Lung Wei. He is ringside when his brother is in a championship fight against boxer Bolo Yeung. Johnny is about to be declared the victor of the match for a T.K.O. when he turns his back to Bolo to celebrate, and Bolo knocks him down and beats him so savagely that he ends up in the hospital paralyzed for life. Phillip vows revenge, and goes to Thailand to challenge Bolo to a match. No, if you are thinking "Hey! Isn't this the plot to Bloodsport?" then you are absolutely right. This part of the film was ripped off, right down to the casting of Bolo as the villainous kick boxer. But that is all that Bloodsport ripped off from this film. Because once in Thailand, Phillip ends up in a Buddhist  temple, where he is told that fate had brought him there, and his coming was predicted down to the day and hour he would arrive. It turns out that he had a psychic connection to the late abbot, because they were both twins in their past lives.  The abbot was killed by a black magic wizard, and the curse will now transfer to Phillip unless he becomes a monk himself, and uses Buddhist magic to fight the black magic wizard and his cult. A lot of gross stuff happens here, such as reanimated corpses and a lot of really gross potions. Als, a lot of very dated special effects, which would have been cutting edge back in 1983. And, plenty of nude woman.  It's a wild film, if that is all you care about and don't care much for plot. Although, in my opinion, Seeding of a Ghost which was released by Shaw Brothers the same year tops this. ( Who can beat a woman giving birth to an octopus like demon that mutilates the doctor as it is emerging from her? ) A Boxer's Omen is fun for what it is, and I suppose erns it's cult reputation.

Streets of Fire ( 1984 )
So, like I said. Due to some budgetary reasons, and nothing currently in the risk of going OOP, I may not be buying any new movies for a few months. This I had planned way back in November of 2022. In the meantime, I have amassed a huge film library. And I have not been watching the DVDs and Blu Rays I have bought after their initial viewing. Which is a bit of a problem as the whole point of buying something on physical media is that you plan to watch it again and again. So at the least, I will be able to grab the movies I really love out of my library and watch them. I picked this, because out of the batch I grabbed, it was the shortest movie, and I needed to go to bed early Saturday night due to needing to go somewhere early Saturday morning. But basically, I already reviewed this her, so no need to review it again.