ABOVE THE LAW (1986) (a.k.a. RIGHTING WRONGS) really is about the law. It begins with Yuen Biao after graduating from law school. A group of conspirators, including one with a gun tucked behind an accordion, try to assassinate his professor. The shit goes down just as he’s saying his goodbyes and the prof is giving him a law book as a gift. In the chaos the book goes flying in the air, is shot through with holes, and then is stepped on by panicking witnesses. I don’t know why but I almost feel like that could symbolize something. Probly not. (read the rest of this shit…)
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Above the Law (not the Seagal one)
Tuesday, July 24th, 2012Get the Gringo
Monday, July 23rd, 2012
Well, I don’t want to start up the ol’ Mel Gibson debate again. We all know how that goes. At some point somebody’s gonna point out that he didn’t kill anybody, so why is he persona non grata in Hollywood? Well, because of multiple crazed incidents where he threw raging tirades about Jews, blacks, rape and cutting off his girlfriend’s head. Yep, he pretty much hit all of them except gays. And him being a movie star we still start to forget about it after a while and want to forgive him, but then every time he seems to be almost in the clear he does another one. Like he wants to be caught.
So I can understand why some people might not want to work with him. Don’t pretend like you don’t. If he was just a guy and not the star (and director) of movies we love you wouldn’t want to share a shift with him or invite him over for the family barbecue, and you fuckin know it.
(read the rest of this shit…)
The Dark Knight Rises
Friday, July 20th, 2012
Well, shit. I had been staying offline working on this review for a couple hours before I had to check a detail on IMDb and found out about the massacre in Colorado last night. Fucking horrible, man. Be safe everybody.
We had a fucked up tragedy in Seattle a few months ago, and even though that was on a smaller scale you see how many people it affects. For those of us blessed enough to be unscathed it still has a psychological effect, it forces you to think about yourself and your loved ones having to go through that. Because I walk by the place where it happened, I know people who went there all the time, I’ve dealt with mentally ill people that could’ve been that guy. Or in this case I love movies too, I went to a midnight showing too, alot of my friends did, alot of you guys did. It’s just as bad as all the other things we read about on the news but it seems more personal.
But I’ve also seen how the community has come together, has celebrated the lives and the art of the people who died, are continuing to hold benefit shows and fundraisers for the families and for the little cafe where it happened. You see that people really do care about their neighbors. And I hope we will also try to learn from these horrible things and figure out how to improve the system to identify the root causes and fix things, get sick people help or whatever needs to be done long before it comes to this.
Warner Brothers is pulling advertising for the weekend, canceled a premiere in France and all TV appearances for the stars, because it seems tacky to promote a movie during this. But instead this sick asshole gets to pretend he’s a super villain, he gets to be on TV, the whole world has to pay attention to him. He gets to stand in for the big summer event movie.
Is it wrong to let one psychopath intentionally take away this source of joy, this thing we’ve been looking forward to so long, that we we want to discuss and (possibly) celebrate? Or is it superficial to still want to do that in the face of this sickening loss of human life? I don’t think Batman movies are the most important thing in the world but shit, I want to talk about Batman movies!
I don’t know what the right thing to do is. Maybe it’s too depressing to think about right now, but when you’re ready for my review of the new Batman movie here it is.
THIS IS AN ALL SPOILERS, I’M-ASSUMING-YOU’VE-ALREADY-SEEN-IT REVIEW. If there’s anybody out there still deciding whether to see it or not this is not gonna help, don’t read it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Gremlins
Friday, July 20th, 2012
GREMLINS is a weird only-in-the-’80s mix. Like POLTERGEIST it’s a Spielberg production of a PG-rated horror movie directed by a legit horror director, Joe Dante. I mean, we can’t pretend THE HOWLING is on the level of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, but I think it’s a minor classic at least, genuinely creepy horror only overshadowed by that other even better werewolf movie that came out the same year.
But the other important factor at play here is that while Dante came up under Roger Corman he’s more of a goofball and cartoon nerd than a horror master. So his monsters are vicious bastards but also funny. Like the martians in MARS ATTACKS! they seem to live more to fuck with us than to kill us. And they plan to do both.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Heroes Shed No Tears
Wednesday, July 18th, 2012
HEROES SHED NO TEARS is not just a great phrase to tattoo on your back or use as an adult recreational softball team name, it’s also a messy pre-A BETTER TOMORROW John Woo picture. We always talk about how the Hong Kong film scene that Woo thrived in was the Wild West compared to the Hollywood that ruined him. Well, then this was Rome or something. This is Woo when he was a straight up exploitation director. He was filming in Thailand, and shit must’ve been even crazier then than in the Tony Jaa era, ’cause they say they were using live rounds in some of these shootouts. Just shoot at stuff behind the actors. Squibs are too much trouble.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Friday Foster
Monday, July 16th, 2012
I didn’t realize this until recently, but the Pam Grier movie FRIDAY FOSTER came from a comic strip. It ran from 1970-1974 and was the first syndicated comic with an African-American woman in the lead. It was created by a journeyman writer named Jim Lawrence who also wrote for radio shows such as Green Hornet and comic strips based on James Bond and Dallas (!). The artist was a Spaniard named Jorge Longarón until the last year, when it was taken over by Gray Morrow, co-creator of MAN THING.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties
Saturday, July 14th, 2012
When last I saw Garfield and friends, I was in a Bush-re-election-induced mania, the type that would cause a man to watch the movie GARFIELD. Now I decided to watch part 2 as part of our nation’s celebration of the comic strip going on in San Diego. That shows you how tolerant we, as a society, have grown toward Garfield. It’s like the whole thing about a lobster in a pot and the burner turns on and it gets slowly hotter and the fuckin thing doesn’t notice ’til it’s too late because it’s so gradual. Somehow I went from being horrified by the bizarre digital abomination that stars in this movie to not really being that bothered by it when I choose to watch part 2 of my own free will.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Popeye
Friday, July 13th, 2012
Alot of people think, just because of movies like THE FANTASTIC FOUR and THE CROW, that comic strip books are only for kids. Well I’m here to tell you that actually they’re for everybody now. How else do you explain Robert Altman, the director of NASHVILLE and QUINTET, doing a movie based on the early-twentieth-century comic strip Thimble Theater by E.C. Segar? POPEYE is I guess the bizarre movie you’d have to expect when a set of weird old comic strip and cartoon characters are turned into a live action musical by the auteur of M.A.S.H. It uses cartoon physics but with muted colors (except for red or blue clothes) and dirty, lived-in settings. The plot is very simple, most of the funny lines are mumbled, it’s hard to figure out exactly what they were going for, and I sort of love it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Brenda Starr
Thursday, July 12th, 2012
Face it everybody, the nerds won. They had their revenge and then they burned down the village and took a shit on the throne and built a statue of some Japanese animation robot in the capital and made everybody bow to it and make offerings of Firefly episode guides. This week is Nerd History Week as well as the annual San Diego International Comics Con. I have never been to it but I know all about it because of Entertainment Weekly magazine and all of the other coverage. I do remember the zoo in San Diego was pretty good, that was not mentioned in the articles, that’s just a bit of personal experience, you know? The kind of thing you gotta live.
Anyway as a writer and reader on the films of cinema I cannot escape hearing about the convention, as most of my internetting colleagues attend every year and write about their favorite halls and panels and how much they hate their hard job of going to some crowded place and waiting in lines. I know I probly don’t have the salt to do it myself and that’s why I have chosen instead to stay at home at a regular job for low wages.
Three Outlaw Samurai
Wednesday, July 11th, 2012
I never heard of this one until the good ol’ Criterion Collection put it out a few months ago. I was intrigued by the title, which seems to indicate that it is about a trio of samurai who are each outlaws of some kind. And it’s a well-chosen title because that is exactly what it’s about.
It’s a Japanese picture from 1964, so it’s shot in beautiful black and white. It’s the directational debut of Hideo Gosha, whose next movie SWORD OF THE BEAST was also released by Criterion. The story involves three elderly peasants who kidnap the magistrate’s daughter and keep her hostage in a mill. Shit is real bad for the 8 clans in the area and the magistrate won’t listen to their appeals so they got desperate. Some JOHN Q type shit. (read the rest of this shit…)
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