Community – Modern Warfare

You can watch the episode free until 05/29 (my birthday!) and I recommend it highly. It plays on just about every great action movie trope from the last 30-odd years – Warriors, Die Hard, Terminator 2, The Killer and Hard Boiled… so many homages. The fight sequence with Ken Jeong alone was incredible.

Another great bit – they take a few huge digs at the show Glee. Loved it.

Me neither. That’s totally not the reason I’m awake right now.

Bronson

I’d seen a trailer for this a while back and it struck me as the kind of movie that I’d dig. And I did, for the most part. It was just a little too weird and and not quite interesting enough. It was a character study and they tried to make the character more intriguing, but what it really came down to was oddness and fighting and way too many naked men. Maybe that’s historically accurate. I watched this over the Netflix Watch Now and it looked great on the bedroom television. Maybe I wasn’t in the mood for it. Oh well.

Zach Galifianakis: Live

Just off seeing this guy in The Hangover for the first time, I wanted to see a bit more of his comedy. He has a strange sense of humor that reminds me a little of Mitch Hedburg but more coherent, with the ability to hold a joke even past the point of being funny and it starts being performance art and then funny again. You’d have to see it to know what I mean, but the bit of business with his ‘brother’ is too much.

The Hustler

I remember watching The Color of Money a long time ago and thinking it was a cool fun movie with the required bit of sad business near the end. So I’m watching The Hustler for the first time and this movie is hardcore. Nothing but sad times. Good examination of moral gray areas and the flaws and weaknesses in all of us that lead us down. While it served to bolster my love for Paul Newman, it gave me more ammo for my pro-George C Scott position. My mother hates him, since she hated Patton so much. Whatever. Her loss.

The Dirty Dozen

I dug the hell out of this one. What more could you ask for? Marvin, Bronson, Sutherland, Cassavetes, I can see why Tarantino showed this to audiences to prep and gauge reactions for Inglourious Basterds. This is another one of my secret shame, never seen it before movies. Another movie scratched off the list. Lots of fun, silly ending.

Black Snake Moan

Sure, it’s Cristina Ricci jumping around in panties for over an hour, but this was a mean little movie. I didn’t know quite what to expect, but Samuel L puts in a great performance, as does Ricci. I was also happy with what Timberlake did. There’s a great bit of business at the end that really spells out the tragedy of these young people’s lives. Also really loved the music in this one. I’d heard Jackson’s version of Stagger Lee a while back and thought it was pretty good – still doesn’t hold a candle to Nick Cave’s – and it was better watching it in the movie. Good stuff.

Dreamgirls

I added this to the list because of a description of Eddie Murphy’s acting from Aintitcool.com a few years back. The scene the described was his introduction, and I didn’t see what they saw. What I saw that I think they saw happened almost near the end when Eddie’s Jimmy is trying to change his sound and he gets dismissed and he just silently takes out his cocaine and starts getting ready to use it. At any rate, it was a fine performance. I was okay with the music in the movie, but was more interested in the stylized take on the history of Motown. Jennifer Hudson got everything she deserved for her role. I do have to say that the movie seemed to drag. I thought it was almost over and then found out I was only an hour into the 2 hour plus runtime. Looking around everyone else is saying the movie is fast-paced.

The Fountain

I’ve been a fan of Darren Aronofsky ever since I saw Pi on DVD. I loved the abstract Drum and Bass soundtrack and the nerdy math/scifi subject matter. It got Clint Mansell working after Pop Will Eat Itself ended, which made me really happy. Mansell has been Aronofsky’s go-to composer ever since. Requiem for a Dream is quite possibly the most depressing movie I’ve ever seen. My girlfriend at the time ran out of the theater bawling with ten minutes remaining. Anyway, The Fountain is a bizarre little movie. An indie art film with a largish budget, dealing with such pleasant and uplifting subjects as death and loss. I really liked it, the cyclical nature of the storytelling, the universal concepts present in diverse theological and philosophical backgrounds. I think the minimalism and simplicity of it makes it seem a little trite, but it’s lean storytelling and focuses entirely on these two people bound across one thousand years. It felt like a Kubrick film, which is a good thing in my book. I still need to see The Wrestler, and I’m always excited for new Aronofsky projects.

Netflix Catsup is a weekly or every-other-weekly attempt for me to get through my massive Netflix queue. You can check out my queue’s RSS feeds or just check back here every so often to see the small dents I’m making in them.

Beowulf

I didn’t really consider how much Avatar was a game-changer until I watched Beowulf for the first time this past weekend. It was touted as the greatest example of digital animation, that the actors were photorealistic and lifelike and they didn’t have the dead eye problem you got in Polar Express. And I also knew that it was a stylized take on photorealism, and that aspects of the movie were meant to appear cartoonish, as this was a legend and legends take on supernatural aspects. And it was all those things. It was well told and well shot, but in the end it felt like a video game cinematic in places – people didn’t move quite right, some characters weren’t rendered as well as others. It just makes Avatar look that much better.

Beowulf was a better story by far, of course.

Rambo

I enjoyed the hell out of this movie. Following Rocky Balboa from the week before, it was a bit of a shocker. It has a low budget and you can see that, but every penny is on the screen. The ridiculous gore and violence of it worked for me. I loved First Blood and have no real desire to see any of the other films, but this was great. Julie Benz was awful in it, though. Just … just awful. Man, I couldn’t wait for her to die, and it hurt that much more when she didn’t.

I see that Stallone is making a Rambo V now. Good for him. It sounds like he just had more fun making those movies than the Rocky movies.

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

AH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH

The Oscars

On a side note, I tried not to watch the Oscars, because I hate the idea of 10 best picture nominations, and acceptance speeches are always dumb. I really only cared that Christoph Waltz won for his role in Inglourious Basterds, and I hoped that District 9 would walk away with something. A little surprised to see Sandra Bullock snatch the Best Actress award, but I haven’t seen the movie (and won’t – I hate inspirational movies, they always come off saccharine and make me squirm in my seat), so more power to her. Glad that Avatar didn’t sweep the night – it’s a good movie, and it’s important, but I wouldn’t make it Best Picture. Winning for Cinematography and Visual Effects is more appropriate.

As should you all.

Rocky Balboa

I’d heard this was good, and it was. I think Stallone is one of those guys who makes a really, really good movie once every ten years, and then spends the years following just producing garbage. Now that he’s really too old to be an action hero, it’s interesting to see the choices and chances he’s taking. I think he’s an intelligent man with the ability to be a good actor. Watch the first Rocky, First Blood, Copland, Judge Dredd (okay, that last one was a joke), and you should agree. I think he’s a good writer, too. But still, he’s written a few good movies and a lot of really shitty ones. Anyway, it was a fun movie to watch, and brought the 80s training montage back a little and the fight at the end was well shot. They didn’t go cheeseball with it, and the ‘love interest’ was well done.

The Queen

I expected a British biopic. What I got was a week in the life of the Queen of England and PM Tony Blair, centered around the death and fallout of Princess Diana. A great bit of storytelling. Only thing weird for me is that I have a huge, huge crush on Excalibur- and Long Good Friday-era Helen Mirren. She’s a wonderful looking woman at her age now, but man, her Morgana drove me crazy.

Dead and Buried

This is another movie that took me a while to figure out what it was doing on my queue. A little research showed it was written by Dan O’Bannon, who co-wrote the original Alien. Alien it was not, but it was a pretty cool Lovecraftian zombie story. Small east coast town where people who visit end up dead, killed by the townspeople, and then suddenly reappear as new citizens who’ve ‘been there all along’. Cheesy and dated, but fun.

This weekend I’ll be watching the new Rambo, Beowulf, and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Wish me luck.

The opening cards for Shinobi: Heart Under Blade tell me all I need to know:

• A land of darkness
• Hundreds of years ago
• People with mystical powers
• Constantly fighting

Sounds good to me. So far it’s silly fun, all the more silly because it seems to be taking itself seriously.

If it’s at all possible to put the following words together without losing my mind: I have now seen a magical ninja with a teased mullet in a fantasy period piece.

They’ve referenced Hattori Hanzo. Cool beans.

Yeah, it was a silly movie. Not too bad, and some cool ninja action.

It’s a kung fu movie where the main character watches children playing with dragonflies and doesn’t figure out how to beat the big bad guy from it.

This film takes all the cliches of the kung fu genre and uses them in a serious, dramatic way. There’s the headstrong leader of a kung fu school who ends up pissing off the wrong people through his brash behavior (usually reserved for the bad guy, but this movie craves character development through something other than a training montage and a new set of moves inspired by an animal). There’s the crazy town drunk who usually turns out to be some long forgotten master with something to show our hero, but in this case his lunacy is nothing more than a repetition to add poignancy to one particular moment. There’s escalation and revenge, but it consumes the hero rather than vindicating him. I haven’t seen a wushu film quite like this before. And I’ve seen a lot of wushu films. Everything from old Shaw Bros films to Hero. And Hero is great, but this is something different.

While I’ve seen a lot of wushu films, I’ve also seen a lot of Jet Li wushu films. His Wong Fei Hung movies (Once Upon a Time in China, and a dozen others, with both goofy and dramatic takes on that famous character) are great, and they really strive for what Fearless ends up being, but in the end they always devolve into a big brawl. When Li said this was going to be his last wushu film, I wonder if they mistranslated – I think he meant it was going to be his final wushu film. Sure, it’s pretty much the same word, but where last means it’s at the end chronologically, I like to think of final meaning the end result. This is what he built up to.

I’m halfway through the Director’s Cut now, and I hope it doesn’t turn out to be like every other martial arts movie I’ve seen. Satisfying but inevitably empty. It’s a good story to tell and so far they’re doing a great job. The film is shot with a serious eye and Li is doing a pretty good job with the acting bits. I’m at the point where the character has been broken down to nothing. He’s an emotional and spiritual blank slate with a lot of dangerous skills. Let’s see where this goes.