BUNRAKU is a weird combination of elements. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where swords have replaced guns. It has fights choreographed by Larnell Stovall (UNDISPUTED III, NEVER BACK DOWN 2). It stars Josh Hartnett and a Japanese pop star named Gackt (so you know, like, lay off McG for a while) plus Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore. It takes place in a highly stylized, DICK TRACY-esque city – I think built on sound stages more than digital – designed to look like origami or miniature models, or maybe a puppet theater stage, since the title comes from a Japanese form of puppet theater. Anyway it’s all angles and solid colors, no curves or decay or complex shapes.
Posts Tagged ‘Woody Harrelson’
Bunraku
Thursday, November 3rd, 2011
Defendor
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
As much as I like Marko Zaror, I thought DEFENDOR was a much better take on the “regular person becomes super hero” genre than MIRAGEMAN. To be fair, Woody Harrelson is not as good of a martial artist as Zaror, and is not as Chilean either. But he is good in this movie.
You know, it seems kind of stupid to call Woody Harrelson “underappreciated” when he just got nominated for an Oscar last year. But I think he kind of is, and partly because he doesn’t get too many starring roles these days. In this one he did, but the movie hardly played theaters, and some of you probly never heard of it until now. (more…)
2012
Saturday, November 28th, 2009
A bunch of actual good movies came out this week, and I’ll review a couple of them soon. First I have to catch up with this crap I saw last week…
As you know, and as the TV news in this movie will tell you, the Mayans predicted that the world would end on December 21st, 2012. So in this movie it does. Actually, that must be the fictionalized, eclipse-fearing Mayans of APOCALYPTO that predicted that, because the real Mayans didn’t. They just had a calendar which considered somewhere around that date to be the end of an era. They also predicted things that would happen after 2012, so obviously they didn’t expect the world to end. Let’s not hang all this doom and gloom on them. They invented chocolate. (more…)
Zombieland
Friday, October 9th, 2009
Man, ZOMBIELAND was just begging for me to hate it. You know how picky I am about the balance between horror and comedy. And who the fuck makes a zombie comedy now? It feels exactly like that moment when somebody’s dad makes a reference to their favorite band from three grades ago, like he’s just catching on but he thinks he’s on the cutting edge. I was already sick of people talking about zombie movies back when SHAUN OF THE DEAD came out, and to be frankly honest even that one I didn’t really see what all the fuss was about.
I would’ve been even more skeptical if I had read up on it before seeing it, because I would’ve known it was written originally as a TV show by reality show producers trying to cash in on the “fast zombie” love during that couple weeks after the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake came out. It’s two writers and one of them says he’d only seen a couple zombie movies before (didn’t specify which ones), the other one had only seen SHAUN OF THE DEAD. And the director isn’t big on them either and had only done commercials before.
Plus the title is kind of cheesy, I don’t know why, I just don’t like it.
And not just that! The main character Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) has a numbered list of rules he always talks about, just like I hated in TRANSPORTER. And these ones are cuter because they appear as text on the screen whenever they’re mentioned.
But you know what, I have some rules of my own, tenets I believe in, and one is that Woody Harrelson is always pretty good, even when he’s in crap. Plus the projector was broken for the movie I came to see, so I switched my ticket for this one. (more…)
Battle in Seattle
Monday, May 26th, 2008BATTLE IN THE SEATTLE
Vern’s thoughts on the movie, the historical event, and Thursday’s
opening of the 2008 Seattle International Film Festival
NOTE: This is another one of those ones I sent in to Ain’t It Cool and they never ran it. But I was kind of thinking of making it a geocities exclusive anyway because I knew as soon as some asshole talkbacker pointed out it was long I would ram my head through a wall.
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IMPORTANT NOTICE – RFL/NFW: This will be a Real Fucking Long review that will also talk about my own observations of the actual historical events the movie is based on. You’ve been warned so NFW (No Fucking Whining).
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At a glance BATTLE IN SEATTLE might seem like a perfect opening film for this year’s Seattle International Film Festival. For one thing, it has the word “Seattle” in the title. For another it takes place in Seattle. Those are only two of the reasons.
But I was thinking it was a mistake because this is a movie about the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, screening within walking distance of where it happened, but most of the movie is filmed far away in Vancouver. And some of us might have a problem with that. Could be risky.
I got a big laugh when I flipped through the Seattle Weekly’s coverage of SIFF. The Weekly was bought out by Village Voice Media a year or two ago, so alot of their reviews now are just recycled from the weeklies in other cities. Here is a movie about protesting globalism in Seattle, and instead of a local perspective they re-use an old review from a previous film festival written by Texas-based Robert Wilonsky. Don’t call Alanis Morissette yet, I’m still looking into this, but I have reason to believe it may be ironic. (more…)
