Undisputed 2: Last Man Standing (2006) Review

IMDB Review: Undisputed 2: Last Man Standing (2006)

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

spoilers are not about the plot.

apparently people on IMDb don't care if the fights scenes are sped up. like (dacascos) drive, this movie fizzled every time a fight happened, due to sped up photography that makes everything feel phony...and comedic. just look at the crowd in the background-- they move like limited 70s animation.

the narrative works better than i was expecting, and has a few touching moments, but every fight scene is disappointing. jump cuts hide missed impacts. slow motion and undercranking hide the speed of the live performance.

adkins is an amazing kicker with great form, but the moment i see a bunch of sped up stuff, i'd rather be watching buster keaton or harold lloyd than a martial arts movie.

Drive (1997) Review

IMDB Review: Drive (1997)

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

the spoilers are very vague and not related to the plot.

this is a heads up to martial arts movie fans who can't stand sped up fighting.

it's too bad that so much of the thoughtful 'drive' fight choreography was undercranked/sped up or had "hidden" jump cuts. it was cut offline on an avid, so it's very easy to pick an choose frames.

after seeing this movie, i can't actually tell how talented donnie osmond--i mean dacascos--actually is. about 60% of the final fight appears sped up or altered and about half of the bar fight and hotel fight are similarly falsified.

martial arts movies are different from other action movies in that most of the best examples are not technical displays of cinematographic bravura, but showcases in which the martial artist and choreographer can show their stuff, and oftentimes, years of training.

so something like 'drive'-- a movie loaded with sped up shots and jump cuts-- deflates the most important element of a martial arts movie and is an automatic fail for me, especially with a terrible plot like this one has, weak villains and 60+ minutes of situation comedy that yields about 6 or 7 laughs.

The Avengers (2012) Review

IMDB Review: The Avengers (2012)

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

i like some avengers comics (especially the first ultimates series) and thought the second iron man movie was pretty good, but the avengers is a mess of exposition, cluttered action and pandering references.

some problems...

1. loki is the villain. terrible idea to have this team essentially fighting 1 medieval hero for most of the movie. and makes them seem weak, too. 2. stupid proclamations about "we're at war" seems silly throughout (until the end) when really...they're just fighting loki. 3. good guys with mind control turned into bad guys is always very bad in movies. 4. roughly 30+ minutes of bad speeches by & conversations with loki, each like the dumbest bad guy explaining himself scenes from james bond movie. 5 scarlett johanson is as bad as she is cute. totally unbelievable at all times. 6. lots of self-conscious dialog that would play okay in a comic book, not great here. 7. samuel jackson should be a newscaster 8. the good build to the hulk transformation was then injured by a weightless, bad cg hulk no better than the ed norton version. like all thoughtless directors who don't understand physics, wheedon has the huge character move like hummingbird or a gnat and thus it feels like a weightless video game. as bad as the cave trolls in fellowship of the ring or worse. 9. the only clever idea--- stark starting the propeller with his suit--- just "happens" rather than having a sequence building up to it of the ship going down and him getting in there and helping. like all action scenes in the movie (except the long take) it is unfocused and "shows" rather than "builds." 10. if it weren't for the character development outside this movie, the iconography of these characters and the charisma of iron man & thor, this wouldn't even be a 5.

Damsels in Distress (2011) Review

IMDB Review: Damsels in Distress (2011)

I like all whit stillman movies prior to this one.

Damsels in distress is very self-conscious and out of touch, sort of like woody allen's approach to directing twenty-year-old women, mixed with mamet at his least natural (oleana, which is still far, far better than this). 

The major part of the movie contains actresses reciting dialog they can barely handle with varying degrees of discomfort and musical cues that don't at all make up for the lack of emotional content. lots of uncomfortable spaces are left for the audience to laugh, and at the show i saw, nobody did laugh excepting a pair of women who were really forcing themselves to do so, which was yet another forced layer of this tedious and often risible movie going experience. while there are occasional moments that could have been funny if the delivery was there, a lot the comedy is very, very broad stuff with yelling and mugging/"funny faces." yeesh.

At least noah baumbach can make a pretty good whit stillman movie these days.

Shigurui: Death Frenzy (2007) Review

IMDB Review: Shigurui: Death Frenzy (2007)

...it would be called Shigurui Death Frenzy.

This thing is a very atmospheric horror samurai tale. The baroque approach reminds me of Lynch on occasion, and the bloody and nasty violence certainly recall the icky tactile gore of Richard Laymon's books and some of Takashi Miike's best known work.

The narrative is not straight forward and there is a fair amount of ambiguity, so this is not thoughtless action fare. Typically, when things get this violent in anime (nc-17 kind of stuff), the creators have far lower aspirations than did the makers of Shigurui-- this is bold experimentation with the medium and dark/perverse storytelling. (Yoshiaki Kawajiri is involved, the man best known for Ninja Scroll and Highlander and Wicked City, but should be best known for directing the X TV series, which is the most nuanced and beautifully navigated television show of the last decade in any format).

Anyways, Shigurui is structurally diverse, very dark, graphic, engrossing and disturbing (really, there's some unsettling stuff here, not just 'blood fountains'). It compares to Berserk, though is more experimental and darker. Really.