23 July - "Fellas like you and me, we don't run."

The Warrior's Way (2010)
dir. Sngmoo Lee

CAST

Dong-gun Jang

Kate Bosworth (The Rules of Attraction, 2002)

Geoffrey Rush (Elizabeth, 1998)

Danny Huston (Leaving Las Vegas, 1995)

Tony Cox (Beetlejuice, 1988)

I'm sick with some sort of heinous derivation of a summertime flu and life is basically miserable for me now as I sit and wait to see how my body will let me down next. The silver lining is that this is a perfect time to take advantage of Mom's On Demand and buy all these movies that I've been wanting to see (and a few just so my little brother will sit quietly with me).

From the descriptions I've read (because I don't think I actually watched a trailer for it) I was expecting a sort of inverted spaghetti-western, but running that phrase through my brain, I'm not exactly sure what that means. I guess I was thinking about The Magnificent Seven, which isn't a spaghetti western at all (usually when people are talking about those, they are thinking about Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) --Rather, The Magnificent Seven was westernized retelling of The Seven Samurai, which I've never seen but it's probably something I should get around to.

So I guess my point is that this movie is like how a Japanese person imagines and idealizes the old American West. It is spare in scenery and props, but all of the ones that are there are over-the-top and in-your-face. The villain is villainous, barely humanized. He rapes girls with good teeth. The hero is quiet and noble with a dark past. He barely speaks. The ending scene was anticlimactic, totally unnecessary to the conclusion of the story arc, but upon exit interviews, this scene held my little brother's favorite line of the movie, and my mother's favorite part as well. So, buttons.

This movie is good. It's unexpected and totally different. It uses a few common tropes, like the typical old-time circus characters, but these are satisfying and not boring. Kate Bosworth is sort of annoying as always (can I say poor-man's Jessica Simpson, or is that too cruel?) being the spunky-girl-in-the-old-west. OK, I get it. You're like Annie Oakley. Let's not overkill the folksy expressions.

I feel like this review was vague. I'm tired and sick and I have to make my own chicken soup and the kitchen stove doesn't work. Next I think I'm reviewing Megamind or else that one is coming up soon.

27 June - "The little statue speaks"

Kiss of the Dragon (2001)

dir. Chris Nahon

starring

Jet Li (The Warlords, 2007)

Bridget Fonda (Rough Magic, 1995)

Tchéky Karyo (The Patriot, 2000)

I have to add Jet Li to my list of actor crushes, because that guy is so cute. Kiss of the Dragon is about a Chinese cop who is framed for a murder by a French cop. This movie has it all, Jet Li acting like he has no personality, Bridget Fonda as an American prostitute with a 12% plausible excuse for being in France, French ninjas...and so much more!

It's a Jet Li movie, so what you really want to see is a bunch of awesome martial arts, and wow, do they provide. I liked Kiss of the Dragon almost as much as District B13. Early on they find an excuse in the plot for why Jet Li doesn't have any guns, and so he just wails on everybody for like 45 minutes with whatever's at hand. He's like a tiny tornado of fury!

This still reminds me of a fella I used to date, sorry about the awful quality. Jet Li is short, that's what I'm trying to emphasize here. Although the contrast wasn't quite so stark between me and my former beau, because he didn't let me wear high heels :P

So the characters and plot lacked a bit of depth, but there were plenty of great setups for fight scenes. Like after Jet Li beats up Lupo the pimp and his cronies, this big black shows up out of no where and takes off his shirt! And all this is before Jet Li figures out that Bridget Fonda is the hooker who witnessed the murder he's being framed for!

Later, Jet Li finds a whole room full of ninjas, somehow, for some reason, they were all practicing together or something in a room adjacent to the villain's headquarters. This scene really made no sense whatsoever.

Of course Jet Li kicks all their butts!

16 June - "Without Green Destiny, you are nothing!"

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

dir. Ang Lee (Lust, Caution, 2007)

starring

Chow Yun Fat (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, 2007)

Michelle Yeoh (Sunshine, 2007)

Ziyi Zhang (Memoirs of a Geisha, 2005)

The first time I saw this movie, I was about ten years younger and I though to myself - Aww dang, a subtitled movie :(

But by the end I was totally engrossed, I forgot that I was reading and just got lost in the story. But I still must have been hopping around my bedroom because somehow I missed that whole romance between Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun Fat, which was lovely and tragic.

It reminded of someone saying, and I probably heard this in another movie, that you have to be even braver to make the decision to be happy, because it's always easier to make no decision and keep being frustrated*. These folks are making the easy choices, choosing to empower the status quo rather than admitting that they would be happier doing something else.

The primary conflict is created by a rogue warrior, the Jade Fox, a woman who turned bad because the teacher of wutan (their flying-around fighting style) kept her around as a consort but would not teach her the secrets of fighting, and so she stole the book and took a wealthy bureaucrats daughter as her apprentice. The student soon outmatches her teacher, but is uncertain whether she want's the pursue the path of her wayward teacher, flee with her true love - a bandit king from the desert - or stay at home and get married. She leans toward the latter option until she get in over her head stealing the sword of Green Destiny.

I'm trying to think of lesson, or to relate this to my own life somehow. Maybe it's something like the way you don't get the chance to make everything right until it's too late. Maybe the important thing was the way the warriors were able to float up walls and fight on the tops of bamboo branches. It might be a metaphor for being untethered to the world, the freedom of being unbound by custom, and yet the inability to create a bond with anyone else. Which might be why the young girl wasn't able to be with her love, because it was too late to undo the things that had been done.

The end was very sad.

* I remembered! It was Kamikaze Girls - A really great movie

1 May - "Now that's what I call an idea"

District B13 (2004)

dir. Pierre Morel

starring

Cyril Raffaelli

David Belle

Dany Verissimo

Oh MAN! This movie was all kinds of awesome. You know, sometimes I shy away from the ones with subtitles because I some kind of compulsive disorder where I can't stand to not be doing something with my hands and it bugs me when I have to sit still and read the dialogue, but it's usually worth it, and this this time it definitely was.

Basically, District B13 is a walled-off ghetto in France ruled by a gangster warlord named Taha. Our hero, Lieto, is an idealistic roughneck who believes that the French government has abandoned District B13 unjustly. Lieto's sister, Lola, is kidnapped by Taha and Lieto gets arrested and has to team up with a cop who needs to break in to District B13 to diffuse a stolen bomb. There's lots of mixed martial arts and I think parkour, if parkour is what I think it is. Whatever, it's cool. I don't ususally go in for artfully choreographed fights scenes - I guess I prefer my cinema violence to be a little more raw and blunt, we aren't at the ballet. But this was cool. I caught myself exclaiming out loud "oh shit!" a couple of times. So I guess that's good. I will recommend this movie to male types so they will think I am cool, but they'll be right in that assumption. Because I am.