Son of a bitch. I just wrote up a huge long post and WordPress ate it. Sorry, I’m not going to do it all again, here’s the highlights though.
Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen (7/10)
- HK movie starring Andrew Lau
- Sequel to Fist of Fury (Bruce Lee) or its remake Fist of Legend (Jet Li)
- Starts off strong with kung fu WWII action scene
- Then goes noir with a lot of hanging around a nightclub unsubtly called “Casablanca”
- Masked avenger subplot a la Black Mask, but should have either been cut or gone into more, it was an odd thing to be a small sideline
- End fight scene in Japanese dojo a shout-out to earlier Fists movies, but wasn’t nearly as good
- Starts strong, then goes downhill
Bedevilled (8/10)
- S. Korean movie, didn’t know what to expect based on blurb and pic
- Self absorbed bitch Hae-won living in Seoul goes back to the island she grew up on, which has only about 9 souls living on it, eking out a 12th century subsistence lifestyle
- The men abuse, the old ladies enable, and the one woman friend of Hae-Won, Bok-Nam, and her daughter are the ones to take the brunt of it
- Hae-won keeps to her “not my problem” policy as bad things happen
- Slow build and then in the last act the payback begins
- Very well done movie, not a typical slasher/revenge movie, great indictment of those who stand by and won’t speak up when others are doing bad things
Red (8/10)
- Based on Warren Ellis graphic novel
- Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren are retired secret agents who get provoked by Karl Wagner et al. and have to swing back into action
- A straightforward but well done comedy actioner, much better than the “Expendables”/”A-Team” kind of crap we’ve gotten lately
- In theaters soon – heck, I may go see it again when it comes out
The Last Circus: Balada Triste (3/10)
- Strongly hyped by Harry Knowles (AICN founder, FF co-founder) in slavering terms
- Balada Triste = Sad Trumpet
- Spanish film by Alex de la Iglesia about a kid whose clown dad is killed in a battle during Spanish Civil War, which is fun
- Forget that and skip forward, now he’s a sad clown and working for a circus, he falls in love with a circus performer who has a violent happy clown boyfriend
- He gets his ass beat
- Both he and the other clown get all deformed and have Joker transformations
- They fight over the “sad strumpet” a lot and are all surreal
- I want to cut myself
- Some people justified the movie’s weaknesses because of its “compelling imagery” but just because you’re Spanish doesn’t mean you’re Guillermo del Toro
- Q&A indicates that Knowles loves this because of the comic book references
- Worst film I saw at the fest, agreement on that assessment from the people I was attending with
Geek Related 