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Another unrestrained banger from these guys. Swaps alt-history feudal Japan for alt-timeline contemporary Tokyo which allows for a lot of fun new antics.
Looks incredible the whole time, this studio is really ahead of the competition with CGI mimicking hand drawn anime. You'd still not mistake it for the real thing but I don't think they want you to, they seem to be pushing for a third thing. A best of both worlds look. And this looks astonishing the whole way through, extravagant maximalism for the entire runtime.
I really liked the first one and it has only gone up in my estimation since I first watched it. I do understand why people don't get on with these movies though (although I would argue that if you can buy that the talking gorilla broke the space time continuum as a base plotline then you really ought to shrug off 16th century castles turning into giant mechs) but I'm all for the bigger, wilder, stupider swings and I wish they'd gone a little harder in this one.
The first hour motors along beautifully but the last act feels disappointingly conventional by comparison. We already know Batman can defeat Superman, we've seen it a bunch of times already. Likewise the "justice league have gone evil" story is well trodden ground. It stays fun enough just by being beautifully animated but I could have used one last batshit twist.
I especially loved that Doomsday was murdered by Superman in a freeze frame flashback ripped straight from the Battles Without Honor series.
And lastly I guess I'm still mad that they can find the space for all four Robins but there's no room for Batgirl in these movies.
]]>I think this short film just tried to kill me.
]]>Another Yumeno Kyusaku adaptation then but unlike Girl Hell this one, for better or worse, is under no obligation to pretend it's pornography.
This movie is DOING A LOT and there was much to like but I'm not sure I entirely got on with it. Beautifully put together but I think I'll have to come back to it another time to really appreciate it. As far as I can gather the book it's based on is absolutely impenetrable.
Definitely interested in seeing Matsumoto's other movies too.
]]>Feel bad for all the Japanese people in the 1970s who just wanted to see a dirty movie and ended up with this horrible shit.
I thought it was great. Legitimately horrifying. I could not comfortably recommend it to anyone I know.
]]>John Wick goes nearly two full hours without being hit by a car in this one but then they hit him like nine times in quick succession so I'm not mad about it.
When I saw the runtime I did fear we were in for a world of BLOAT but it actually whipped by easier than some of the shorter ones.
It's not beating the Videogame: The Movie accusations, especially when they throw in a Hotline Miami sequence. Keanu now wields his suit jacket like Batfink deflecting bullets with his wings but if you're happily sitting down to watch the fourth movie in this franchise then you are just as committed to the bit as everyone making it is.
Would be easy to write off as a greatest hits tour except this feels like a graduation for Stahelski, everything is slicker and more accomplished although that does come at the cost of some of the thrill. The scrappiness of the earlier movies brought a lot of charm with it.
Obviously Donnie is fucking magnificent, I could have watched him fight and tell people to fuck off for another three hours tbh which BODES WELL for the spinoff. My man better do another one of those Popeye-ass wind up punches in it.
I have mixed feelings about Scott Adkins' German Wario bit. It's a legitimately fun sequence fatally undermined by the fat suit. Would have been far more enjoyable had they just cast a fat guy. I understand the impulse to give Adkins something to do but you can't tell me there aren't any actual big lads in the industry who could have pulled that off just as well if not better.
Anyway it was all going so well and then that very last scene absolutely stank, a real air of "fuck it, that'll do". They should retcon it asap. Or just have Keanu back at it in the fifth one without explanation, I don't think anybody would mind.
]]>Zach Galifianakis phoned this in so hard I thought it was a different actor until I saw his name in the closing credits. I was even ready to write "they cast Zach GalifiaNOkis" on here which I guess I still could.
]]>I hated this, I feel like you've all been fucking with me.
]]>Finally, some good fucking kung fu.
The opening 20 minutes delivers a fight sequence so good that the rest of the movie kind of struggles to live up to it although the last half hour comes very close.
I understand that they really wrote themselves into a corner with the last one so I'll forgive the convoluted and slightly flabby Casablanca stuff (although I'm not sure I can forgive Jerome Flynn's accent, wtf Jerome).
By the way, it is insane to me that this is somehow where both Jerome Flynn and Ian McShane's careers have ended up.
The casting is usually pretty great in these, loads of nice surprises. Holy shit, Angelica Huston is here now! That sort of thing.
I'm glad they finally let Lance Reddick do some murders in this one.
What a joy to see Mark Dacascos back at it, and they let him have fun with it too. Hope they bring him back, I don't give a shit how they do it. They could do the dog piss thing from Nightmare on Elm Street 4 and I'd be perfectly happy with that.
Anyway, easily the best one yet, loads of highlights, the thing that made me smile most though was the bit where Yayan Ruhian and Cecep Arif Rahman from The Raid movies hand Keanu his arse and tell him he's getting slow.
]]>Been wanting to see this for years and it didn't disappoint, immediately one of my favourite Miike ts. I fucking love Show Aikawa and he's great here, it was always going to be a fun time for me.
Shares some DNA with James Gunn's Super and Hitoshi Matsumoto's Big Man Japan, both those movies owe a debt to this.
You have to take the rough with the smooth when it comes to Miike, even with his best stuff, and if I had gripes with this they mostly come down to his less than judicious editing. This would have been better as a tight 90 minutes, two hours was a stretch. The movie is at its best when it's less concerned with making sense, as soon as they try to make the plot coherent it starts to get saggy. Makes up for the meandering when it starts barrelling through to the climax.
Being Miike I was braced for it getting nasty and it kept threatening to but then not going through with it which was probably sensible.
Felt bad for the eggplant stand man, he didn't deserve that shit.
]]>The guys making this must have been so mad when Turning Red came out first.
]]>When I play videogames I usually sink most of my skill tree points into making sure I can absorb more hits. I'm not great at dodging and I don't intend to improve and it seems like John Wick has done the same thing here, the man's just soaking up bullets.
It's not better than the first one but it's also not worse. For everything it improves on there's a downgrade elsewhere. Leaning into the more fantastical (sillier) elements does it a lot of favours but it's visibly struggling to find a story while simultaneously setting up a franchise, two things that never hindered the previous movie.
Again I appreciate that it's directed by an old stunt man so you know as soon as you see stairs that somebody on screen is about to tumble all the way down those motherfuckers. Fighting by a window? One or both of the guys is going through it. Great stuff. Wick gets hit by cars more than any other character in cinema I can think of.
Also a noticeable increase in the quality of the violence here. I know you can't really do squibs any more especially given the nature of these sequences, but the bullet hits in this movie have a lot more impact. Still waiting for someone to make a digital bullet hit look half as painful as a Robocop era squib though.
]]>I don't know why it's taken me so long to get to these. Maybe it's because I'd hoped Man of Tai Chi was going to be the start of a new chapter of fun kung fu movies in Keanu's career and I was mad that it didn't turn out that way. Maybe it's my aversion to Dead Wife Movies. The first ten minutes of this are largely the same beats as that fucking Ricky Gervais sitcom where he uses the death of his wife as a very thin excuse to be horrible to people.
You can tell this was directed by a stunt man and I mean that in both a positive and negative sense. Anyway I knew I'd dig this but I also know I'll probably dig the sequels more. It was fun but this all felt like groundwork laid for better movies, I hope they don't let me down.
Weird how almost every tiny part has been given to a wildly over qualified actor but then also Alfie Allen is here?
]]>Easy to write off as bang average but then my kid made me watch the animated series they made after it and now it looks like peak creativity.
]]>A LEGITIMATE BANGER.
Fucking hell, the pace of this. It does about two hours worth of movie in the first 35 minutes. I know everyone loves Lone Star or whatever but I reckon John Sayles did his best work when he was cranking out this kind of shit. This is probably a better script than Piranha, a shame Joe Dante didn't get his hands on this one. Teague does a decent job but he's either not interested in or not capable of engineering any kind of tension. He knows where the fun is though, hearing that dog corpse hit the concrete, pulling a legless guy out of the water, letting kids get ate. A good time.
My favourite bits were where the alligator hides, especially under the boxes and bin bags and shit. He's just having a laugh.
]]>Fucks sake David
]]>My kid has already made it clear she doesn't give a shit about the live action Disney remakes so I thought I'd dodged the Snow White bullet, BUT, she fucking loves going to the cinema and she doesn't know what Minecraft is so we went to this.
Wild how this has become a nuclear football for multiple fronts of the culture war, none of which I'm particularly interested in rehashing, but Rachel Zegler, bless her, is working so fucking hard to lift this film and it's a shame for her that almost every other element is pushing in the opposite direction. She managed to make a few scenes here watchable, even managed to pull focus from the digital horrors she's forced to sing and dance with a couple of times.
Anyway I was braced for this to be bad but my god it just keeps making diabolical choices every step of the way. The rewritten version of Heigh Ho has rendered it grating and charmless and that goes double for its computer generated singers. Snow White screams when she first sees one of the seven dwarfs and so did a couple of the babies in our screening. Horrible work, a baffling decision to build a film around these nightmares.
I can't tell if Andrew Burnap got a raw deal with a shite role or if he just sucked ass but all his scenes were bad.
I didn't really want to mention Gal Gadot but she's by far the worst thing here, her dogshit performance almost eclipses the crimes of the digital effects teams. She's been bad in everything I've ever seen her in but this is, by some distance, worse than ever.
Also, considering this is one of the most expensive films Disney has ever made, large parts of it look alarmingly cheap. You can see all of those reshoots clear as day.
I think my kid enjoyed it, she was not nearly as vocal about it as she has been at other stuff we've seen but she was pretty transfixed and claimed to have had a good time after. And somehow, despite it all, I didn't think this was the worst or most worthless of these horrible remakes that we've watched together (looking at you Beauty and the Beast). Or maybe I'm just getting worn down by the fucking things, I don't know.
]]>Your man here keeps wearing white tros when he's doing his weird sex murders and I have to respect his commitment to the look.
I've really liked all the more, er, *regular* Hasebe movies I've seen. Retaliation is an all time favourite, Black Tight Killers is just the most absolutely beautiful trash, his Stray Cat Rock movies are the better ones of the series, but then you look at his filmography during Nikkatsu's Roman Porno period and I just don't know if I'm ever going to sit down and watch "Rape!" or "Raping!" or "Rape! 13th Hour!"
This seemed like it was going to be the least objectionable of this era and while it turned out that was not the case at all Hasebe still really knows how to make a movie. According to the expert they've interviewed on the bluray (and I needed some background for this one because I don't know shit about pink movies) Hasebe didn't want to make pornos so given his background in action and crime movies he decided to make sex crime movies instead, kind of the same way Teruo Ishii pivoted to historical torture horror over at Toei. The studio suits still got all the sex and nudity they wanted but with weird caveats.
Anyway this is, clearly, problematic content, but done in such an odd and off-putting way and also really beautifully shot and with a mean sense of humour. I really enjoyed it and maybe now I will sit and watch "Secret Honeymoon: Assault Train!" after all.
And for what it's worth if you talk your boyfriend into doing sex murders for you I don't think you're allowed to get mad when he realises he fucking loves doing sex murders.
]]>Genuinely insane score. Some of the most depressing locations ever put on film. Scared to imagine how much this wouldn't work if they hadn't found Michael Ironside.
By all s this was a rush job but I think that works in its favour, Cronenberg makes some fun choices that I don't think he would have made if he'd had more time to consider shit (explosions).
Couldn't help but see Star Wars parallels all the way through on this watch, not least in Stephen Lack's Luke Skywalker-ass performance. He's at least believable as a pliable, easily manipulated dumbass, and to his credit he does the psychic spasms and face pulling as well as anyone else.
Ironside is obviously, famously, absolutely incredible here, and it is hard not to wish the movie focused on him more but his prolonged absences only make the appearances he does make shine brighter. A genuine delight every time he's on screen.
Visibly a case of doing what they could with what they had but they still knocked out one of the all time video rental classics in the process.
]]>I watched twenty minutes of this but it sure as shit felt like I watched an hour and forty.
]]>This has turned out to be one of the better things we watch on the regular. Most of the songs are ok and the kid in particular is really nicely animated, but it's ultimately let down by Lin Manuel Miranda's unlikeable and irritating performance as the stupid monkey.
]]>RIP Ted Kotcheff. I know this movie is seen as more of a punchline than a real film these days but for a while there when I was a kid it was genuinely one of my favourites. Probably had a terrible long term effect on my personality.
Also the concept here is an all-timer, the absolute audacity.
]]>My kid asked me if Elmer Fudd is a baddie and I've never really thought about it but you know what kid I guess he fucking is.
]]>I don't know what I was expecting, it's not like they're going to have new interviews with all these long dead men, but this was still pretty empty even as promotional fluff.
]]>Historically interesting I guess but it's like watching Killer Meteors, sure you can see Jackie Chan right there but it's not the Jackie Chan you wanted by any stretch.
That said I love this weird, gross, bulbous, shiny-ass Elmer variant. I'd watch another one with this guy, I guess that makes him Jimmy Wang Yu?
]]>Yes. More directors should make Steven Soderbergh movies.
]]>No thank you, I did not care for it, can't explain why.
]]>Incredible effects work here, some of the best of the entire series, beautifully shot and the creature design is on point. Biollante is a wild swing and it looks great in both of its giant forms, Godzilla looks about as good as he ever would, a real thick necked bastard. It's all delightfully gooey too, these guys have seen Rob Bottin's work and they liked it. Every time there are SPECIAL EFFECTS happening here it fills me with great joy but then it's all wedded to an absolutely fucking diabolical script.
The human elements here absolutely suck ass, there's a little bit of fun with some light espionage but it's mostly somehow a tedious chore to sit through despite repeatedly making insane choices. The psychic girl is here for what exactly? They keep wheeling her out only for her to do exactly jack shit. The thing reeks of behind the scenes disagreements over direction and tone, and the resulting movie comes off like nobody involved really got what they wanted.
I get why this is a popular one, it delivers hard on some spectacular kaiju action but good god you have to wade through some knee high shite to get there.
]]>I don't think I really realised first time around but there's a surprising amount of GOO in this movie, it's GOO HEAVY, it LOVES GOO, and I kind of have to respect it.
]]>This is distressingly ugly.
]]>Holy shit this was so fucking cool. All the animation is at MAXIMUM EFFORT, the mechanical designs are on point, the effects animations are pure showboating, it all just sings.
Wild decision to have so many of the sound effects just be a guy making "beep boop" and "pew peow" and "brum brum" noises with his mouth, like a kid playing with action figures but it works for me, I loved it.
Maybe it's because I watch so much soulless computer generated sludge with my kid but dope indie animation like this is water in the desert to me these days.
Shout out to brain slugs.
]]>I'm an absolute sucker for a cartoon dog and the dog in this is fucking brilliant, I don't know about the rest of the movie.
]]>Compared to the Super Mario Movie this suddenly feels like cinema. There's been legitimate effort to make a real film that's actually fun to watch rather than, as in Mario, a checklist of references beaten into the rough shape of a million other movies.
]]>I would love to not have to see this again but I guess this is us for a bit.
First kid's movie I've seen that has bleeped out swears as a joke so I reckon we're maybe five years away from an Illumination movie just outright dropping an F-bomb.
]]>This kid's parents absolutely suck ass, just doing a totally dogshit job.
]]>This is the only good Toy Story, don't even try and argue with me.
]]>Secret Life of Pets but they've all got superpowers but somehow even worse than that sounds. Better voice cast than it deserves made it watchable but the experience is still very much having a cliché cannon fired point blank into your brain for 100 minutes.
]]>Somehow the regular human characters' costumes are weirder, more colourful and less believable than the Eternians' and I think that kind of sums up a few of the ways this goes wrong.
]]>Incredibly slight but pretty much exactly what you'd hope an Akira Toriyama riff on Mad Max/Fist of the North Star/Tank Girl/Judge Dredd's Cursed Earth would be. Fun characters, cool world. Only wish there was more.
]]>Garth Marenghi's Evangelion.
]]>I don't know man, I'm sure keeping an independent animation studio afloat is a pure ball ache especially in this day and age or whatever, and you probably have to make pragmatic decisions at the cost of artistry all day long but so much of this just felt half baked. There were occasional glimpses of a much better movie in here but they only serve to make the whole look worse.
My kid lost interest an hour in.
I'm blowing a raspberry and doing a big thumbs down.
]]>This kind of thing worked better when it was confined to Dark Horse comics in the 90s.
]]>Lmao, obviously makes a lot of choices we're not okay with but as baby's first wuxia it works pretty good. My kid liked the fights and the horses and the witch (Gong Li doing excellent work) and all that shit, and I'm always happy to see Donnie Yen.
Bonus points for letting me bore my kid by telling her about Cheng Pei Pei.
]]>Love to watch a movie and then immediately get on Letterboxd to take loads of psychic damage from reading everyone's dogshit reviews.
]]>Somebody I follow on here posted a really scathing review of this about 48 hours before the news came out that David Lynch had died and I can't who it was but they've deleted it now and I hope they're okay and I'm sorry their review killed David Lynch.
]]>I missed Twin Peaks when it was broadcast and was relegated to catching up with it on VHS after the fact (a very expensive way to watch TV). What I didn't realise was the "pilot" on the UK VHS release was actually a re-edited feature length movie that just straight up told you who did the whodunnit and I spent the rest of the series totally lost as to why the whole world had been caught up in "who killed Laura Palmer" fever when there was no mystery to it at all. Can't help but wonder how watching this show that way for the first time recontextualised the entire experience, I assume for the better.
Shout out to the big man, the world isn't going to feel right without you.
]]>I like the idea that Louis CK got shitcanned and Patton Oswalt, who presumably knows him pretty well, still went "yeah I'll take that work".
]]>Appropriately this voice cast is dogshit.
]]>I know Sam Raimi only has a producer credit (and a little cameo) but those insert shots of the arrows flying in the opening sequence are the Raimiest thing I've ever seen, he definitely directed that bit.
Didn't really appreciate this at the time, thought it was ok but I didn't understand Jean Claude's appeal and none of it felt John Woo enough for me. Watching it now I couldn't have been more wrong. Obviously would love to see Woo's original edit before he got shut out but what's left here is still John Woo as fuck (aside from that dead giveaway at the start).
Van Damme's performance is more than a bit uneven, feel like Woo probably didn't know how to get the best out of him, Yancy Butler also struggles but you've got some ringers in the ing cast. Henriksen, Lemmons, Vosloo and, of course, Brimley all know what they're doing and they carry you through the spottier parts.
And when the bullets and the legs and the motorbikes and the pigeons do start flying it's a grand old time. The mullet is a haircut made for slo mo. The noises Henriksen makes after he pulls the fuse out the grenade are why he's one of the all time greats.
]]>Obviously not interested in avoiding the pitfalls of copaganda, it's for kids, but still super weird to see the bunny rabbit rewarded with a giant militarized cop tank at the end.
]]>The insane typeface used in the title sequence should have been all the warning I needed but I'd forgotten how genuinely odd this was. Strange in a way you can only really get when a movie is badly written but well made.
From moth POV shots and incongruous techno to bootleg Leatherface in the basement this movie makes baffling choices again and again. A ing character gets to pontificate in voice over throughout the picture except he's got nothing to say so he just keeps calling everything bullshit. The moth may or may not be Van Damme's dead wife reincarnated.
Written by idiots, directed by a master. Too clumsy and stupid to confidently recommend but legitimately unique.
]]>"reviewed" is a stretch if I'm honest, I still need to keep a list though
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]]>I'm not going to get into what does or does not qualify as a "kung fu movie", it is what it is
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]]>These are the movies I put a little heart next to for whatever reason, I'm not prepared to examine why
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]]>...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.
]]>From the ages of eleven to fourteen this was the only genre of film I gave a shit about.
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