What was the last movie you watched?

[stethacantus]

Martial Arts of Shaolin ( 1986 )
This film was released just after the first edition of Ric Meyers book on the history of martial arts films was published. That book had a list of what he decided were the top 10 martial arts films, one of which was Shaolin Temple ( 1982 ), the first old school martial arts film shot in mainland China, and the screen debut of Jet Li. It was a big enough success that  a sequel was made in 1984, Kids From Shaolin which had the same cast back playing identical characters, but taking place about 100 years later. This was the third film in the franchise, and once again Jet Li and the other returning cast members played identical characters, but the story taking place in a different era. Jet Li is an orphan who was taken in by Shaolin and grew up trained to be a monk, who finds out the corrupt government official who had his parents killed is inviting performers into the Forbidden City to perform for his birthday. Wanting revenge, Li joins a group of performers to sneak into the city. Despite being choreographed and directed by Lau Kar Leung, and produced by Shaw Brothers, this doesn't seem like a Shaw Brothers film. Formula story and corny humor, but with some great fights, and filmed in the actual Shaolin Temple and Forbidden City. It was probably frustrating for the Shaw Brothers  to find out what a huge superstar Jet Li would become in the following years. They had a chance to sign Bruce Lee, but offered  him a standard contract that had him paid scale, which he turned down. Six years later they blew their chance too sign Jackie Chan. The last straw was the death in a car accident  of their biggest star Fu Sheng, so by the time this was in production, they had already made up their minds that they were closing the film studio. And here they had Jet Li working for them. So for the third time they missed their chance at signing one of Hong Kong's three biggest martial arts stars.

Spring Breakers ( 2012 )
Seen this a bunch of time, have reviewed it at least twice here.

[stethacantus]

The Bare-Footed Kid ( 1993 )
At it's peak, Shaw Brothers Studios produced about 50 feature films a year. By the mid 80s they were down to about 20 films a year. Shaw Brothers Studios in Hong Kong was just one of a number of businesses run by the family, which included other studios in other parts of China, and beginning in 1967, a television network called TVB. By the 70s the only studio they kept open was Shaw Brothers Honk Kong as it had unexpectantly become very profitable in the 19600s and remained the most profitable studio in Hong Kong until the 80s when rival Golden Harvest finally overtook it, and a lot of smaller motion picture production companies ( the independents ) became serious rivals.  For two decades Shaw Brothers had cornered the movie market in Hong Kong, but by the 80s were finally facing competition.  They were still very profitable, but their television network, TVB, was making a lot more money for them. And television was seen as the future of entertainment. The death of the studio's biggest star, Alexander Fu Sheng, was most likely the final straw. In 1985 Sir Run Run Shaw made the decision to shut down the film studio, then use the back lot and sound stages for production of TVB programs. Nearly all of the stars and directors who had worked under contract for the studio were suddenly unemployed, and struggling to find work elsewhere in the Hong Kong motion picture industry. It probably would have made sense for the Shaws to move everyone who worked for the studio into their television production company, but as far as I can tell, they already had their television writers, crews, directors and stars under a separate contract, and it was cheaper just to dump everyone working for their motion picture division.

This is where most fans of the Shaw Brothers films consider the end of the Shaw Brothers filmography. f course, Sir Run Run Shaw still continued to occasionally release films under the Shaw Brothers banner, But these were basically films that the company financed. These included a co-production with rival Golden Harvest in 1988 for the drama Painted Faces, which was basically the story of the kid Peking Opera group called The Seven Little Fortunes that included Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, and a lot of others who would go on to be big movie stars for Golden Harvest. ( So basically, an origin story for the Golden Harvest stars. ) Other notable later day productions included the critically acclaimed King of Masks in 1996, and Drunken Monkey in 2003 which was a retro martial arts film that capitalized on the renewed interest in the Shaws martial arts films after a year earlier Celestial Pictures began re-releasing the Shaw Brothers film library on home video for the first time in over a decade. It was notable for bringing  back a few of the studios stars from the 70s, and was the final movie directed by Lau Kar Leung. There were also the occasional film directed by Johnnie To, who began as a director for TVB television. 

Aside from those were what I would call the secret Shaw Brothers films. These were movies that Shaw Brothers fans had no idea the studio had produced. The first of these was the American film Blade Runner ( 1982 ) which despite Run Run Shaw being listed as a co-producer, was secretly a major attempt by the studio to enter the American market, albeit with an all American cast and crew. Martial Arts of Shaolin was thought of for many years as a mainland China film, until Celestial revealed it was a Shaw Brothers production in 2002. Shaw Brothers kept their studio name off the picture for political reasons, and had the mainland co-production studio release it under their logo. But The Bare-Footed Kid? Celestial restored it and re-released it with the Shaw Brother's opening logo. But it is still not listed on any of the Shaw Brother's filmographies.  Sure, it was directed by Johnnie To, had Mona Fong listed as a producer, and was fight choreographed by Lau Kar Leung. But it was a film I didn't know existed until it was listed as being released on the Shaw Scope Volume 2 Box Set. At first I assumed it must be a compilation movie from one of their TVB series.

The commentary track and mini-documentary explain a little more how this somehow is a Shaw Brothers film. It was made around the time Johnnie To's film career had taken off, and was made between his classics, the female superhero film Heroic Trio, and it's sequel Executioners ( All in 1993 ).  Basically, Mona Fong wanted to do a remake of the Chang Cheh film Disciples From Shaolin ( 1975 ), which was the movie that Lau Kar Leung had partially choreographed but quit midway through due to no longer wanting to work for Chang Cheh. ( Shaw Brothers would immediately hire him back as a director. ). Not sure exactly why Mona wanted to remake this film. But she was able to get Lau Kar Leung back as choreographer, and even got 70's Shaw Brothers star Ti Lung to return as a co-star. Many see this as the farewell film to the Old School martial arts cinema. ( forgetting that was what Jackie Chan's Drunken Master II made a year later was supposed to be. It also had some choreography by Lau Kar Leung and co starred Ti Leung. ) But aside from Mona as producer, Ti Leung in the cast, Lau Kar Leung choreographing the fights, and it being a remake of a 70s Shaw Brothers movie, this has a New Wave director and a New Wave cast ( including Aaron Kwok and Maggie Cheung ) and is clearly directed in the New Wave style. So if Celestial had not begun releasing it as a Shaw Brothers film, I don't think even the die hard Shaw Brothers devotees would have known this is supposed to be a Shaw Brothers film. It was originally released as a Cosmopolitan Film without any mention of any of the Shaws. But apparently this movie belonged to the Shaw Brothers film library when Celestial acquired the rights. If it was a Shaw Brothers film, I have no idea why they hid it, as they were releasing a lot of other Jonnie To films under their logo, including The Mad Monk which was also released that year.


I found a lot of reviews claiming The Bare Footed Kid to be some sort of underrated classic. And yet, I can find no reviews of it prior to Celestial releasing it on home video as a Shaw Brother's film. I did a little more research and found a review in Asian Cult Cinema, a book that was published on April Fools Day 1997, by Hong Kong Cinema enthusiast Thomas Weisser, who saw most of the films reviewed from videos rented at Asian video rental shops, which probably meant they were bootlegged and had the subtitles cropped. This would explain why it is listed in that book as Young Hero, the title it was given for it's Taiwan home video release. Weisser gave it three out of four stars, but basically gave it the extra star because Johnnie To directed it, making it look better than the material deserved it to be. My own opinion... This is no better than the other New Wave potboilers from the 90s. Not what I would call a classic, although maybe a bit more memorable than Disciples From Shaolin, but as forgettable as the other New Wave pot boilers. The 70s Shaws had the advantage of long takes during fights instead of the film cutting after every blow, no fake looking wirework during the fights, and none of that blurry slow motion crap.  I can sort of se why they decided to include this in the Shaw Scope set as a deep cut release. But Shaw Brothers studios had so much better to offer, none of which made the first two volumes. Oh well, perhaps Volume Three? In the meantime, this concludes my Shaw Scope Volume Two set.

Ready Player One ( 2018 )
I would not call this one of my favorite Steven Spielberg films, but it is such a good guilty pleasure film. I suspect one of those movies that if you turned to it on FX or TBS, you would feel compelled to watch until at least the commercial break. And I know a lot of people didn't like this, and I get it. It is not as emotional as it is meant to be. But it is fun to watch, so it stays in my rewatch pile.

[stethacantus]

The Knight of Shadows ( 2019 )
Here is one of those films you should have heard about, but for some reason didn't. A big budget CGI film starring Jackie Chan, which only got a direct to video release in the United States, with no promotion at all. Sort of a throwback to those late 80s-early 90s Hong Kong fantasy films with a love story between a beautiful monster and a human. In the case of this film, a beautiful soul eating demon and the man who accidentally turned her into a demon. The only difference is the more advanced CGI effects, which are.... well, about on the level of an X-Box open world video game. About the biggest complaint are the cutesy CGI characters that are Jackie's traveling companions. Chan is a mystic who travels around ancient China catching demons. The redeemable ones are turned into his companions, while the unrepentive evil ones are trapped in his book where their souls are destroyed. Things get tricky when he meets another mystic who is trying to protect the female demon he is in love with, resulting in a CGI battle at the end of the film. A decent enough potboiler, but don't expect any real action from Chan.( Other than some CGI action. )

Breaking Away ( 1979 )
Blue Crush ( 2002 )
A double feature of films I have already seen and reviewed here. Breaking Away was knocked out of my top ten favorite films with the release of The Avengers Blue Crush is not in my top ten, but probably should be. One of those guilty pleasure films that seems to get better each time I watch it. The common theme of both being recently  high school grads . Still haven't decided what I will watch next week.

[Charles Castle]

Once upon a time, I might have named I Walked With a Zombie (1943, directed by Jacques Tourneur) as my favorite of the Val Lewton horror films. In this, as in many things, I am at odds with my younger self. It's difficult for me to look at I Walked With a Zombie anymore without having my view of it jaundiced by the fact that, in its barest essence, it's a fundamentally racist narrative. It's a film where the problems of white people play out against a background of the colonialized. It's more honest about the nature of its power relationships than many classic films--prominent among its props is a figurehead from a slave ship in which a black man is feathered with arrows--but its narrative tension between faith in voodoo and faith in reason is framed in a vaguely paternalistic way. It's a troublesome movie.

I Walked With a Zombie is a famously perverse reworking of Jane Eyre, transported to a sugar plantation in the West Indies. Nurse Betsy Connell accepts a position tending to the catatonic wife of plantation owner Paul Holland, falls for the woman's husband, and is enmeshed in the internecine sibling rivalry between Holland and his half-brother, Wesley Rand. No treatments seem to work on Mrs. Holland, but the islanders offer a darker explanation for her condition than the brain fever to which the island's white doctor subscribes: She has become a zombie, the living dead. Eventually, Betsy starts to believe this too, and late one night takes Mrs. Holland by the hand and walks with her through the cane fields to the Homefort, a place of voodoo ritual, to see if she might be cured. In doing so, she uncovers dark family secrets. She can't disentangle herself, either, because she's fallen for Paul Holland.

The Lewton unit was a big believer in set pieces. Sometimes, the films were generous--Cat People has several memorable set-piece suspense sequences. Sometimes, they held them in reserve for effect (perhaps under the sway of Poe's insistence on final effect). I Walked With a Zombie's big fright sequence is the titular walk through the cane field by moonlight, and it's a doozie: no incidental music, the only sounds on the soundtrack the natural sounds of the tall grasses swaying in the wind. It's profoundly creepy and I can only imagine what it must have been like for the audience of the day, weaned on the sturm and drang of the Universal horrors. This is a sequence designed to elicit a mood and to wind the audience up for the payoff. The Lewton unit was among the first to employ the so-called "jump scare," and the end of the walk through the cane field has one at the end. But typical of the Lewton films, this makes something of it as the film progresses. It's easy to focus on this sequence as the film's high point, which it surely is, but the film is subtle in its other effects and they deserve some scrutiny.

Most accounts of the movie tend to focus on its place in Lewton's canon--it certainly falls within Lewton's preference for literary horror movies, after all. What is perhaps less obvious is its place within Jacques Tourneur's canon. This film expands on the theme of reason versus superstition that was a minor thread in Cat People. This theme would find its fullest flowering in Night of the Demon fifteen years later, but this film has the same dialectic. Is Jessica Hammond the victim of a brain fever or is she a zombie? Does voodoo hold sway in the world or is it just superstition. The film is cagey about this, which is typical of Tourneur. Tourneur is perhaps acutely self-aware of the fact that his own worldview--he was on occasion an overtly Christian filmmaker--is another kind of supernatural world, and because of this, he doesn't always or even often side with reason. In the scenes late in the film when the voodoo priest attempts to draw Jessica back to the homefort, it seems plainly obvious that the supernatural is real. This is perhaps the film's most effective insinuation of the horrors lurking behind the mundane.

You also see in this film the genesis of the basic triangle of characters Tourneur would re-use under much different cover in Out of the Past, with Holland and Rand sundered because of a woman. For what it's worth, this film "corrects" one of Cat People's more glaring mistakes, in so far as it sides with Tom Conway as the leading man rather than Kent Smith (or in this film, James Ellison). Lewton hews to the Universal horror films in one respect in so far as his leading men were often wet noodles. Conway, a villain in Cat People, is urbane and fascinating in this movie. I mean, if you can't get George Sanders, you might as well get his brother. He gets the girl in this film, which is right and proper.

One of the things that stood out to me on rewatching the film is how Lewton and Tourneur elide information. A great deal of this film's exposition is related through the song that Betsy and Rand overhear at the cafe, which provides a shorthand map of how the relations in the Holland/Rand family play out in the movie's end game. This scene is delightfully uncomfortable in and of itself, but its function as exposition is efficient. Efficiency is the watchword for all of the Lewton films, and even with my qualms with the politics involved, I admire the hell out if its formal qualities. It's a gem of a film.

[stethacantus]

The Final Master ( 2015 )
Wing Chun is in danger of going extinct. Only one practitioner of the style is left, and if he does not open a school to pass the style on to students, it will die with him. Unfortunately the town he has taken refuge in after being chased out of Canton, Tianjin, has complicated rules set by the local martial arts masters basically keeping anyone from outside towns from setting up their own school. A loophole in that law allows the Wing Chun master to take on a local as an apprentice, and if that single student then goes on to beat the top students from the eight schools, then agree to fight the grand master of the region, the Wing Chun master will have built enough of a reputation to be allowed to open a school, while the Grand Master will strengthen his reputation by beating the apprentice. Unbeknownst to the Wing Chun master and the Grand Master, the widow of a deceased master is plotting a deception with the Grand Master's top student that may have the Wing Chung master and his student killed and the style lost forever. Outstanding plot, outstanding acting, but not enough of the actual martial arts. We only get to see the apprentice fight one of the eight schools, and the other fights are just mentioned as having happened. A really good film, but a slight letdown on the martial arts.

The Drawn Together Movie: The Movie! ( 2010 )
With the death of actor Treat Williams this week, I decided to watch Steven Spielberg's epic mess 1941 which, depending on my mood, is either a great comedy of destructive mayhem, or just two and a half hours of tired nonsense. This Saturday I was in a good enough mood, looking forward to seeing it, and had the entire evening to watch it, with the possibility of watching another Spielberg film after it if it hadn't worn me out. And then everything went dark. Or at least, as dark as it gets around dusk. You see, for some reason not one, but three idiot neighbors decided throw those loud parties where what sounds like hundreds are packed into a city back yard, and each has it's own band. First were the people from India and what sounded like a Bollywood film being reenacted in what sounded like next door. but was across the street and a bit down the block. Then almost immediately on the corner property on my own block, the Hispanic party began. Then somewhere mid block the party with Hip Hop music began with a DJ  who blasted stuff over his PA system loud enough that the International Space Station could hear it. At least I thought it was a Hip Hop party until Bunny Hop started playing, followed by "Hands Up" and Chicken Dance. Then the Bollywood party band turned up their speakers. Then the band at the Hispanic party started up as I heard the familiar sounds of the electric guitar feedback. And then nothing. Everything wen silent, all the electricity ended. The transformer box on the power lines began shooting out sparks.  I can't prove the three parties had anything to do with it ( the Bollywood party, which was the only one I could clearly see, also had a huge bouncy castle and not one, but two of those stick figure things you see dancing in front of car dealerships, and hundreds of lightbulbs strung haphazardly everywhere, turned on even though it had not grown dark enough for anyone to put on lights. ) But I am going to blame all three parties. Too much of a coincidence. So the electricity went out, and you could hear the guests going AAAAAWWWWWW! coming from three different directions. And within a half hour, all the cars double parked along my street  ( and many parked cars ) drove off. Only the Hispanic party continued. About 1AM in the morning Con Ed finally showed up and took about an hour to repair the damage. The electricity came back, and almost immediately the Hispanic party began playing what sounded like hundreds of versions of the same Salsa song at different tempos over and over again until the sun started coming up abound 4:25AM, then the music went off, and it was just the sound of loud drunken Hispanics gradually filing out of their yard. Well, anyway. About 2Am the power came back, but was way too late to start 1941. So I grabbed the Drawn Together movie instead, as it is only an hour and hour and ten minutes long. May as well went for the Spielberg film as the party just kept going for another hour and a half, and there was just no sleeping through that. ( watched a bunch of random Drawn Together episodes instead. ) Did I review the Drawn Together movie here before?  Well, basically it was the direct to video series  finale after Comedy Central cancelled the series, which killed of characters, indirectly roasted South Park, and did a lot of gross stuff that I am sure they wanted to do on the regular series, but Comedy Central would not let them do. Also ridiculed an incident where actress Petricia Heaton nearly had the series cancelled in it's first season because her daughter saw a billboard for it where two of the female characters were kissing, then immediately called up the head of Comedy Central to complain that they would air such a show. This is truly an X rated cartoon, and a worthy wrap-up to the series. Also, it is in 3D!. Although I was in no mood to watch the 3D version.

[Charles Castle]

I wonder what it is about Shakespeare that makes actors want to be directors. Olivier and Branagh are the famous ones, and here we have Ralph Fiennes mounting Coriolanus (2011) with himself in the lead. The play itself is one of The Bard's more stylized late plays, written after the great tragedies and so far as anyone can determine, never performed in Shakespeare's lifetime. It has one of Shakespeare's more opaque heroes, too. Caius Martius Coriolanus is not the bottomless well one finds in Hamlet. He's more a symbol than a character, as if Shakespeare, having redefined the tragic hero, decided it would be more interesting to portray the tragic hero as a calamity to those around him. This is something that Fiennes as a director "gets." I'm not entirely comfortable with the way it modernizes the play. It's still a Roman play. It doesn't change that. It rather sets itself in "a place calling itself Rome," a place that resembles the Balkans, actually. Whatever that place is, it's a multi-ethnic locale. A cosmopolis of the mind, if you will. I like that this gives Fiennes the license to cast multiple people of color in his movie, given that short of Othello or Aaron (in Titus Andronicus), there's not usually much of an excuse. I'm less enthusiastic about the action filmmaking here, which is indistinguishable from most other action filmmaking in this era of film. But I'm becoming philosophical about this.

Coriolanus follows war hero Caius Martius, a man who despises the common people he serves because they have no belly for struggle or war. He turns them aside at the beginning of the film when, having stormed the city's granaries, they're blocked by the army. Martius might as well be turning them aside with his withering scorn. This incurs the bitter enmity of First Citizen Tamora and Second Citizen Cassius, who are leading the uprising. In truth, they were already enemies, but Martius gives them reason to hate. Meanwhile, the Volscians have invaded the provinces. Martius is dispatched to stem the invasion, and engages the enemy in the city of Corioles. It's here that Martius encounters his bitterest rival, the Volscian leader, Auphidius. They've met before. Each meeting has left scars. This is not a fatal meeting. The battle goes to the Romans, though, and Martius returns to Rome in triumph, where he is made Consul. Unfortunately for him, his political enemies plot to turn the people of Rome against him. These are the weasley polititians Brutus and Sicinus, both tribunes. Martius's sole ally is the third tribune, Menenius, who can do nothing to prevent his friend's disgrace. Exiled, Martius goes to the only place where he can be of use, to the camp of Auphidius, where he offers to be killed or to be a weapon against Rome. Auphidius chooses the latter, and Martius leads the Volscians to the gates of Rome itself. Only the pleas of his mother and wife stand between his vengeance and Rome.

By the time Shakespeare wrote Coriolanus, he had pretty much demolished the Aristotelian "rules" for tragedy, so it's interesting to see him writing a late play that's so drenched in tradition. Caius Martius is a classic example of a tragic hero. His tragic flaw is pride. This is writ large in the text itself. Martius is also a type from earlier plays. He is mostly inarticulate--as much as a character speaking in iambic pentameter can be inarticulate, I guess--and is mostly action. There's a subtle theme running through Shakespeare that suggests that soaring rhetoric fails in the real world. His most effective king, for instance, is the warrior king, Henry V, while the least effective is the metaphysical poet, Richard II. Martius is closer to Henry, or, more accurately, Othello, who was similarly brutish in his speech. The most eloquent character in the play is Menenius, who turns out to be totally impotent to prevent both Martius's fall and to turn him aside in his vengeance. He ends up a suicide in the traditional Roman way.

But then, maybe I'm wrong about Martius's tragic flaw. Maybe it's NOT pride, because it's not pride that causes his fall in the end. It's compassion. He heeds his mother, Volumnia, and his wife, Virgilia, and his son when they stand between Martius and the ruin of Rome. Auphidius, very much Martius's twin brother in this play, views this as a betrayal and kills him, but kills him as if he were a jilted lover. The relationship between Martius and Auphidius is almost a romance, it should be noted, but they're doppelgangers, too. When Martius greets Auphidius for the first time, he says: "I'll fight with none but thee, for I do hate thee."Auphidius replies: "We hate alike." I admire the hell out of that economy of expression. What more needs to be said? Later, they meet like lovers. Auphidius:

"Let me twine
Mine arms about that body, where against
My grained ash an hundred times hath broke
And scarr'd the moon with splinters: here I clip
The anvil of my sword, and do contest
As hotly and as nobly with thy love
As ever in ambitious strength I did
Contend against thy valour."

The movie dispenses with the weird stylization of the play, with its citizens acting as a Greek chorus. This is especially true of the end, which while keeping the essential events of the play, changes their circumstances dramatically. In its place, Fiennes has substituted the grit of contemporary British cinema. It's not a bad substitution, but it's equally stylized.

Ralph Fiennes makes a crucial... well, decision, I guess, in casting this movie. I don't think it's a mistake, necessarily, given the way the character of Caius Martius functions in the story. Anyway, he casts actors that are more than capable of outshining him in key supporting roles, and I may or may not find this odd. I just can't tell. Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Cox, and (surprisingly) Gerard Butler all burn more brightly than Fiennes himself. This is surprising, given that Fiennes, for me, has been one of the most watchable actors in the world for 30 years. I actually backed out of the movie to check the year of release while watching it. "2011. Did he lose himself in playing Voldermort?" I asked my wife. Whatever the reason, he seemed to be lacking some of his movie-star charisma, and toward the end of the movie seems like a poor man's Brando (Meesta Kurtz, he dead). Both Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Cox know something about holding on to movie star charisma; each of them command the screen when they're on it, regardless of who else is there. Their scenes together are a pleasure to watch. Gerard Butler's interesting career has seen him play Dracula, Attila the Hun, The Phantom of the Opera, Leonidas I, and Beowulf, so I shouldn't be surprised to see him in Shakespeare, and doing well besides. His Auphidius is a more than worthy foil to Fiennes's Martius, and whenever he's on screen, he's the object of the camera's adoration. I wonder if all of this is deliberate. I mean, this is obviously a vanity production. One doesn't mount a production of Shakespeare, cast oneself in the title role, and direct the thing ones self without some measure of ego and self-aggrandizement. But it's a curious choice of play and of casting, because, as I say, Martius is one of Shakespeare's most opaque heroes. He really is a force of nature. "...grown from man to dragon," as Menenius says. He's a disaster, and the other characters measure themselves against him. So maybe they're supposed to outshine Fiennes. If that's true, then he accomplishes it with a flourish. And, by the gods, Vanessa Redgrave is incredible in her final scene. That scene is worth the price of admission alone.

[Charles Castle]

I was pretty annoyed and uncomfortable for stretches, but it wasn't until I got to the end of the movie that I really started to hate Sucker Punch (2011, directed by Zack Snyder). I mean, I was irritated by it already, but the credit sequence, in which the filmmakers stage a big production number in which Oscar Isaacs and Carla Gugino sing Roxy Music's "Love is the Drug" and then completely fracture the frame for the requirements of the credits such that you can't actually see much of it was salt in the wound. The movie already wants to be a musical, and if the filmmakers were willing to go that route, it might have ameliorated the appalling sexism inherent in the movie, to say nothing of its other narrative flaws.

I have no doubt that the filmmakers view what's onscreen as some kind of half-assed empowerment of women. By dressing its mostly female cast in fetish outfits and having them slay dragons, they're indulging in the Strong Female Character fallacy that makes reading comics or playing fantasy games of any sort kind of an ordeal if you're not, y'know, an adolescent male. Don't get me wrong: I like looking at gorgeous young women in fetish outfits as much as anyone, but seriously, don't pretend that this confers any kind of empowerment on these characters. They're dolled up for the male gaze. The fact that the internal fantasy of the film's central character is a nested Russian doll in which she's alternately a stripper/whore trapped in a club owned by slavers and a videogame super-heroine who kicks ass in heels should be a giveaway. This is not a film about women taking control of their own sexuality for themselves. This has all been suitably derided elsewhere, though, so I'll refrain from piling onto this point, and even though it's annoying, it's not the most annoying thing about this movie. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The story finds our heroine, Babydoll, committed to an institution in retaliation for resisting her stepfather's designs on her inheritance. Her stepfather pays off one of the orderlies to make sure that she's the victim of a trans-orbital lobotomy, and as she waits for that to happen, she escapes her situation into a dual-layered fantasy world. In the top level fantasy, she's been trafficked into the service of a high-end brothel/strip club, where the girls dance for and service the rich and the powerful. It's Madame Gorski's task to train the girls to dance, and Babydoll is special. During her dance sequences, she escapes even further into a fantasy world in which she is on a quest and needs to brave dangerous missions to retrieve the items necessary to escape from her predicament. The women who are patients/inmates with her show up in these fantasies, too, and they form a kind of elite ops squad, who go up against armies of clockwork zombies and fire-breathing dragons. Unfortunately for her, the final item of her quest is something she needs to determine herself, and the answer derails everything.

For me, the most annoying thing about this movie is that whenever one of Babydoll's fantasy sequences has ended and she returns to the main layer of her fantasy world, all of the characters are agog with amazement at how she dances. This is all well and good, so long as you eventually show her dancing. SHOW HER FREAKING DANCING! This isn't rug pulling, or sucker punching if you want to take the title literally (more on that in a second), this is making a huge fucking promise to the audience and then completely reneging on it. I mean, maybe Emily Browning can't dance and they're working around her, but that's a limp excuse in a movie where she's asked to perform elaborate action choreographies. There's not a lot of difference between dance sequences and martial arts sequences.

I almost hesitate to go off on the narrative shift at the end, when we learn that everything we've seen so far is a sham, that the Maguffin doesn't even have any meaning to the end of the movie. The narrative structure cheats the audience as much as the film's aversion to dance. For a while, I thought this was going to end the same way John Carpenter's much more economical The Ward ended, or Scorsese's Shutter Island (which is more or less the same thing). But no. This has ideas all its own as to what constitutes a narrative sucker punch. It indulges in a non sequitur. At this point, I should probably give the movie it's due, though. The opening sequence, largely silent, knows how to tell a story, and I won't say I don't like watching Carla Gugino done up in dominatrix drag while channeling Marlene Dietrich, cause I totally do. For that matter, I don't necessarily disapprove of the way Snyder films his action sequences. Overwrought, perhaps, but comprehensible. Better this method, where the geography of the scene is almost always clear, than some dumb run and gun style that would make an already indigestible movie nigh unwatchable.

I dunno, maybe Zack Snyder is taking his lessons from Sam Raimi, who discovered to his sorrow that fanboy culture won't put up with dancing in its entertainments. Instead, he's provided "awesome" set-pieces, where the stakes are ever escalating and the action ever more absurd. Hot babes in fetish outfits fighting dragons? Cool! This is the trouble with the poisonous virus of fanboy culture: it values shock and awe over actual, y'know, quality. Everything these days is awesome. Special effects are at a zenith. What kind of praise is it that a movie has great special effects when everything has great special effects? The new frontier in this kind of filmmaking isn't how astonishing the things are that can be filmed, it's how beautiful and artful they are. Sucker Punch seems awfully derivative on this point. Its grimy slowmo music video aesthetic seems as second hand as its dragon, who is another descendant of Vermithrax Pejorative and even has the exact same moment of pathos over her dead offspring. Awesome at second hand is more draining than inspiring. Show me something new, motherfucker. Show me Emily Browning dancing to make my jaw drop. Now THAT would be awesome.

[stethacantus]

Gundala: Rise of a Hero (2019 )
So I got this because Amazon said they were running out of them. No DVDs left, one Blu-ray left in stock. It was among the Well Go movies that were about to go out of print. In the past few years Well Go has been at the forefront of importing the latest major Asian movies ( They are the company distributing the Train to Busan series, as well as many of the latest Jackie Chan films, ) They are the new Dragon Dynasty. If it is released on Well Go then it is most likely worth buying if you collect martial arts and Asian action films. I knew this movie was some sort of Superhero film featuring a martial arts superhero. I didn't know exactly what it was until I watched it.

The film opens with a bunch of unidentified comic book superheroes in what resembled the original MCU opening logo. This could not possibly be a superhero cinematic universe, could it be? We then go to the film without any opening credits. Actually a very well directed drama about a homeless  orphan boy who gets martial arts training from an older orphan. He grows up to be a security guard  at a newspaper printing plant who one day is forced to fight a gang and discovers he has super strength, and can shoot lightning. It turns out he gets his powers whenever he is struck by lightning, which thanks to the rainy season, happens almost every night. He designs a costume, and becomes a superhero who protects the town against gangs of thugs. Thrown in is a deformed villain who has a plot to poison all the pregnant women in the city, who decides he must stop the new super hero in order to carry out his scheme. This was a well made film that I enjoyed despite Indonesian, having a two hour running time and not having the lead character turn into a superhero until the final half hour. but then came the ending. The superhero Gundala is chasing a van carrying the poison they hope to inject pregnant women with. The criminal driving the van shoots the tire out of Gundalla's motorcycle, causing him to crash. An just when you think the van is about to get away, a female superhero shows up out of nowhere, stops the van, and disappears. WTF?! This is followed by another scene which teases the villain for the next movie.  Then a post credit scene where some other characters looking to build a superhero team are introduced.

So, I checked this movie out on Wikipedia and discovered it is the first in what is to be the Bumilangit Cinematic Universe featuring Indonesian superheroes. The second movie was to be Shri Asih , the female superhero who briefly appeared at the end of this movie. However, that film was postponed due to COVID-19. Supposedly it and the third BCU film, Virgo and the Sparkings were released this year, although not in this country. So to date, we have the MCU, the DCEU, possibly a Sony Spiderverse, the extremely cheap Nightveil Media cinematic universe, James Gunn's probably abandoned cinematic universe, M. Night Shyamalan's cinematic universe, the Valient Cinematic Universe, and the now dead FOX cinematic universe where neither one of their versions of the Fantastic Four met the X-Men.  And now this.

Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (1995 )
Gamera: Attack of Legion ( 1996 )
Gamera: Revenge of Iris ( 1999 )
I was reluctant to watch these, as I am planning to upgrade to buying the entire Gamera series released through Arrow Video on Blu-ray, all fully restored and including Gamera the Brave. However, It may be a year before I get around to buying them, especially as I am waiting to see if on further releases they combine  the two sets into one. The problem with this release, not the best quality picture, although still impressive for three 90 min films combined on one disk. None of the text subtitled. And half of the subtitles missing. Also, no English dub. At least the Mill Creek release of every Gamera film but Gamera the Brave only cost about $5. Well, If I am probably not going to watch these films for another year, then may as well get my value out of the Mill Creek set I already own before giving it away to a friend.

[stethacantus]

Operation Mekong ( 2016 )
A surprisingly good action movie based on the actual events of the  2011 Mekong River Massacre where a drug lord based in the Golden Triangle ordered his men to attack two Chinese cargo ships and execute their entire crews, and the subsequent agreement between China, Myanmar, Laos and Thailand to create a joint task force to capture the leaders of the drug cartel responsible. 

Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula ( 2920 )
Super 8 ( 2011 )
A complete waste of my time. Every time I go into the storage room to search my boxes of DVDs and Blu-rays for specific movies I am looking for, and usually end up unable to find them, I always make an attempt to rearrange the films I find so that they are grouped together by topic. For example, all the MCU films together in one box, the Batman films ( including animated and Lego ) together in another box, and the James Bond films together in another box, etc. When they were moved to this house they were haphazardly dumped into the boxes and storage bins they are in right now. Grabbed off their shelves, dumped in piles on the floor, then from there picked up and shoved into the moving boxes wherever they would fit. I was fully anticipating there being shelves  for me to put them on where they would once again be  grouped via categories, dates, and alphabetical, so I could know where every film and television series I owned could be found. Rearranging the boxes was the next best thing. At least I would know which box had what category, so I could find what I am looking for instead of picking through every box until I find it. The problem is that some people in this house who want to watch movies while I am at work, and dig through the boxes until they find something they fancy, tend to just dump everything on the floor until three boxes worth of films are in separate mini piles, and then just put everything back in any old box. This weekend I was in the mood to rewatch The Post. For the past couple of years all of my Spielberg films were piled together in one of the open bin boxes. But this weekend only half my Spielberg films were in that box, mixed with a lot of other films from various genres, such as a few WC Fields films that were once in a box with the soother WC Fields films. So basically, The Post is missing, perhaps moved to the bottom of one of the other boxes. Damn it. I pulled out a few other Spielberg films, including one I plan to watch on July 4th, and I found Peninsula which had been moved from wherever it was hidden to the Spielberg box, I had been in the mood to rewatch this movie for the past three weeks, because it's trailer is on the other Well Go blu-rays I have been watching. I had given up trying to find it when it showed up unexpectantly. I liked this movie even more on the second viewing, even though this time I elected to use the English dub track. Not often do you get a sequel that does not retread the plot of the first film. Super 8 is JJ Abrams tribute film to Steven Spielberg which Spielberg ended up producing and collaborating on the plot.  A minor potboiler which is still loads of fun.

[stethacantus]

I probably will not be seeing any movies for a while. Saturday Morning the two year old child of a visitor shoved a jelly sandwich into my Blu-ray player, which shorted it out. Which means the Blu-ray player is officially dead. So now I am going to need to order a new one, which the parents of the kid are not going to chip in for, because against my objections, the rest of the family decided it was an accident. Call me old fashioned, but you are supposed to keep your eyes on your little brat, and if he breaks something, then you should pay for it. Fortunately I finished watching the last of the bonus features on the Monty Python set on Friday Night. ( The review for that in the Television section. ) I should also point out that on Tuesday I finally got around to beginning my new July 4th tradition. Watching Jaws. I mean, they do mention in the film that the shark attacks take place on the July 4th weekend. So why not?

[ihavemyreasons]

I probably will not be seeing any movies for a while. Saturday Morning the two year old child of a visitor shoved a jelly sandwich into my Blu-ray player, which shorted it out. Which means the Blu-ray player is officially dead. So now I am going to need to order a new one, which the parents of the kid are not going to chip in for, because against my objections, the rest of the family decided it was an accident. Call me old fashioned, but you are supposed to keep your eyes on your little brat, and if he breaks something, then you should pay for it. Fortunately I finished watching the last of the bonus features on the Monty Python set on Friday Night. ( The review for that in the Television section. ) I should also point out that on Tuesday I finally got around to beginning my new July 4th tradition. Watching Jaws. I mean, they do mention in the film that the shark attacks take place on the July 4th weekend. So why not?

What terrible parents.

Bad Day at Bad Rock (1955)
Had never seen it before. WW2 veteran shows up at small town to be greated by unfriendly locals who are hiding a secret. Imagine it doesn't have the same impact it had when it came out. Spencer Tracy and young Lee Marvin and young Ernest Borgnine. Very much like a play with performances good by play standards. Kind of predictable but not overly dumb like modern movies that tell similar stories  Wouldn't make my list of great movies but well with seeing.

[Pastor of Muppets]

I probably will not be seeing any movies for a while. Saturday Morning the two year old child of a visitor shoved a jelly sandwich into my Blu-ray player, which shorted it out. Which means the Blu-ray player is officially dead.

Man, I remember my cousin shoved a grilled cheese sandwich into our VCR back in 1993.  I thought thinner media meant we were past such hazards.

[LucasM]

I probably will not be seeing any movies for a while. Saturday Morning the two year old child of a visitor shoved a jelly sandwich into my Blu-ray player, which shorted it out. Which means the Blu-ray player is officially dead. So now I am going to need to order a new one, which the parents of the kid are not going to chip in for, because against my objections, the rest of the family decided it was an accident. Call me old fashioned, but you are supposed to keep your eyes on your little brat, and if he breaks something, then you should pay for it. Fortunately I finished watching the last of the bonus features on the Monty Python set on Friday Night. ( The review for that in the Television section. ) I should also point out that on Tuesday I finally got around to beginning my new July 4th tradition. Watching Jaws. I mean, they do mention in the film that the shark attacks take place on the July 4th weekend. So why not?

What terrible parents.

Bad Day at Bad Rock (1955)
Had never seen it before. WW2 veteran shows up at small town to be greated by unfriendly locals who are hiding a secret. Imagine it doesn't have the same impact it had when it came out. Spencer Tracy and young Lee Marvin and young Ernest Borgnine. Very much like a play with performances good by play standards. Kind of predictable but not overly dumb like modern movies that tell similar stories  Wouldn't make my list of great movies but well with seeing.

Agreed: "you break it, you fix (pay for) it" is KINDERGARDEN-level responsibility!  To have parents say, "we fucked up your property - oops!" is BULLSHIT.  Maybe do so with their car's vent (maybe with a tuna or sardine sandwich?), say, "oops - it was a mistake," and see their response. 

[Pastor of Muppets]

I saw Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny on Friday.  Good movie.  I thought it represented a good return to form, with a Nazi as the villain again.  It opens in 1944, then flashes forward to 1969 where most of the action takes place.  It  isn't as physical as the older movies, since Harrison Ford is far too old for that kind of thing.  Still, they get some good action scenes in via high octane car chases and liberal usage of stunt doubles.

The ending didn't make a lot of sense though.


If Archimedes built the Antikythera Device to summon help from the future to the Siege of Syracuse, why did he split it into two parts and make it so hard for his would be rescuers to find?

[stethacantus]

Some clarification and an update.

The jelly sandwich was one of those foods made for toddlers. Basically a Poptart with the jelly on the outside which you microwave. Basically the kid ejected the disc which was in the player, which was one of the OOP MST3K discs released by Rhino, threw it on the floor, put the sandwich on the tray, jelly side down, and then pushed the door closed. There were a room full of people watching him do it and no one bothered to run over and stop him. As if yelling "What are you doing? Don't do that! I said no!" is going to stop a two year old. One of the witnesses to the incident said the brat looked back defiantly at them before shoving the trey shut. Figures the kid would do that when I was in the kitchen.  It wasn't exactly the parents refusing to pay for the damage, but family members immediately telling the parents they would not be held liable. I was taken aside and told the parents could not afford the extra expense, and the brat was too young to know what he was doing, and I better not make a scene and basically let the kid get away with the crime. And we didn't know how damaged the player was until after they left.

Thank God the MST3K DVD survived without a scratch or anything sticky getting on it.  If the kid had chosen to destroy the DVD rather than the player, that would be a worse tragedy. A used copy of that  MST3K volume would probably be more expensive than two Blu-ray players.


So, I thought that would be it for watching movies this summer. I looked on Amazon  and the cheaper models were around $70, which wasn't bad. Then came Prime Day 2023. What is Prime Day? Apparently Amazon's attempt to create a second Cyber Monday. Out of curiosity I went onto Amazon and immediately a window for a door buster sale popped up which was based on my recent search history. A Sony Blu-ray player for $10. Only two left in stock.... BUY!   Wait a second. I don't have Amazon Prime. Do I get the sale price? I do? And free shipping? I was pretty sure the AI running Amazon made a mistake, but I ordered it, paid only $10 and tax, and the shipping was free. They even had it delivered by Thursday. Which is sort of a happy ending to the story. But I am still down $10. And Iam not sure if this is one of the cheap models that break down after a month.

Anyway, back to business....

Cold War ( 2012 )
Well Go shows trailers for their next releases before you get to the main menu. If it looks like a good movie, I write it  down and order it later. Cold War 2 looked like a good action film, and had Chow Yun Fat in the cast. And then after ordering it, I realized I would need to see  the film it was a sequel to. So, before I could watch Cold War 2, I had to order this off of eBay. It ended up arriving a week later than promised, but ten again the Blu-ray player was busted last week, so things sort of worked out?  This is a police thriller about terrorists who  hijack a police van with four cops inside and demand a ransom. There are some good action scenes, but the majority of the film is  the police doing detective work to figure out who is behind the kidnapping.

War of the Worlds ( 2005 )
Or should I say Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds because apparently there were three War of the Worlds feature films released in 2005. Two of them being direct to video releases designed to mockbust Spielberg's film. This movie is truly frightening. I is also another road picture everyone forgot to add to their lists.