——Branded to Kill——

(A)

Although I loved the mind-bending Technicolor camera work of Seijun Suzuki’s other film on Criterion DVD, Tokyo Drifter, the plot wasn’t great, and at times was a little confusing (I assume purposefully so. Seijun was really playing with the production line scripts he was given making a movie that was all style, so much so that the studio demanded he “play it straight next time”). No such problem with Branded to Kill. Although unfortunately this film is in black and white, the cinematography is brilliant, and the plot and style are very reminiscent of a French New Wave film. The plot is much tighter in this film and a hell of a lot of fun to watch.

The film is about No. 3, a hired killer who is aroused by the smell of rice cooking. Although he has sex with his wife in all sorts of weird places (Suzuki makes a joke of this by cutting back to the immaculately made bed that hasn’t been touched) like wild animals, he soon becomes infatuated with a woman who gives him his final job in pure crazy Hitchcock style. Because of a butterfly obscuring his vision for a brief second on the job he kills the wrong person and thus the organization he works for aims to rub him out for his failure. The final act of the film has No. 1 playing a sadistic game of cat and mouse with him, until he ultimately actually moves in with him in a bizarro Odd Couple fashion.

The movie is an insane, over-the-top take on a generic genre picture and is a whole lot of fun to watch. The camera work is superb. I totally recommend you check out this movie.

——Sister Street Fighter——

(A)

This is like camp movie heaven. It’s as if the director watched a whole bunch of Bruce Lee and James Bond movies on drugs, and then decided to make a movie out of the combination. The whole thing is just crazy and hilarious. Finally a Sonny Chiba movie I can call a favorite.

A few things to clear up first though. Although there is a sister in the movie, and she is a street fighter, she’s not the sister to THE Street Fighter, Sonny Chiba. Also if that wasn’t confusing enough, although Chiba is listed in the credits as The Street Fighter, he’s not actually the character from the Street Fighter movies. In fact he doesn’t really have much of a character at all, and instead is just a cool cameo guest star who appears occasionally (and usually randomly) to kick some ass. The real star is the sister (who I think is the same actress that was the “dragon princess”).

The plot: The sister is called to Hong Kong when her brother, operating undercover in a drug ring, disappears. The sister tracks him back to a drug czar in Japan who acts like a crazed Japanese Bond villain. Also, he’s surrounded himself with a bunch of trained killers who are absolutely HILARIOUS. There is this guy who wears a red jump suit and has two nunchuks and screams like a girl whenever he attacks. There is Hammerhead, who dresses like a traditional samurai and has a gang that travels with him that wear black leather masks that look like giant Buggles. There is a group of woman Thai boxers who call themselves the Amazons and wear those 1930’s Flintstone’s-esq leopard print caveman dresses and weird paper mache masks. And there are SO many more. It’s fantastic.

Thankfully with so many villains the movie is chockfull of fights and ass kicking, in the most extreme Bruce Lee HIIIIYAAAA! fashion. It’s excellent. The acting is camp-tastic and the villains secret underground lair has plenty of extreme fashion sense and bizarre traps (a pit full of spikes; a trap door say, oh, in the middle of nowhere). Add to that more cheesy cliches than you can handle and the fact that the villain’s master plot is to soak wigs in heroin in order to get them through customs (making this probably the only movie where the line “Quick, put out the fire! You must save the wigs!” has been uttered) and you have the makings of one of the best movies EVER!

——Rambo III——

(C+)

Is anyone else a little confused by the title of this movie? Isn’t it really Rambo II: First Blood Part III? Oh well, I’m nit-picking. This first half of this movie really blows. Lots of lame dialog delivered flat, or lots of inspired dialog that quickly becomes preachy and annoying. It’s all just really bad and boring, and not really worth sitting through. The problem with Rambo is that he has no sense of irony. Same thing happened to a lot of action stars in the 80’s, most notably James Bond in License to Kill. No one wants to see that. The best thing the revamp of Bond in the 90’s did with Goldeneye was to start making joking reference of the quickly becoming stale cliches of the genre. Rambo could use a little shot in the arm of that.

That said, once the shit hits the fan Rambo sure is a fun action hero to have around. I love it when he pulls out the explosive tipped arrows (where the hell did he even get them?). He’s always doing everything to excess, and that’s what I like about Rambo. From Stallone’s super pumped body to the scene where Rambo cauterizes a wound by pouring gunpowder in the wound and lighting it, everything about Rambo is super hardcore. I love the now cliché sequence where he picks Russians off one by one in increasingly hilarious situations. The movie should play that stuff up more.

But nothing is quite as funny as when Rambo takes out a tank with a single Moltov cocktail and then plays chicken with a helicopter. The tank is hit with numerous tank busting missiles by the helicopter (didn’t Rambo just take it out with a little flaming alcohol?) and seems to keep moving forward just by Rambo’s sheer willpower. Then there is the scene where Rambo screams, which is quickly cut with the helicopter, actually running into the tank and exploding. Hilarious! Rambo climbs out of the tank with no more injury than being a little shaken up. Classic Rambo. The movie needed more of that.

One thing about the DVD. It has a surprisingly good and comprehensive documentary on the history of Afghanistan that you should really check out if you still aren’t exactly sure why we are now fighting a war there against the Taliban after the Russians already tried and failed there. It’s a shame that after the Russians pulled out, so did we, because if we actually helped build a democracy there there would be no 9/11 and considerably less terrorism.

——Shogun’s Ninja——

(D-)

Oh man, several times I questioned my sanity in the need to watch all of this. It’s SO bad! The shame of it all is that it might not have been so bad if there had been a few small changes made to it.

Before the movie even started there was something wrong with it. Whoever made the DVD took the pan and scan version and letterboxed it. Why, I don’t know, but it looks like crap. I’ll take my fullscreen any day, thank you. But to the movie itself: This movie has absolutely, positively THE WORST soundtrack ever. This is a historical movie that tells the (fictional) account of how the Tokogawa period of Japan got started and the soundtrack sounds like the easy listening jazz version of the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack. Important characters die and instead of feeling sad you want to get a bag of frozen peas or step off of an elevator. It is totally mismatched with the action, and not even in a hilarious way. Just a bad, BAD way.

Add to that the fact that the main character becomes a flaming closet homosexual halfway through the movie (he starts dancing at one time for no reason at all, and ditches his traditional traveling garb for a short-short bathrobe) and not even the fact that Sonny Chiba was the fight choreographer can save this mess. Some of the fights are kind of cool (that’s why the movie isn’t a F) but you really can’t enjoy them because of all of the other crap in this movie. Stay the hell away from this mess.

——Fists of the White Lotus——

(A)

This movie manages to be both a remake and a sequel to the excellent Executioners from Shaolin at the same time, and is just as entertaining, if not more so, than that movie. It’s really more of a preference thing, do you prefer a more epic storyline (Executioners) or do you prefer more awesome kung fu (White Lotus)?

This is a remake in that the basic plotline is the same but at the same time Pai Mei (if you remember correctly this is the old guy that could suck his balls into his abdomen; also he is the character Gordon Liu will be playing in Kill Bill Volume 2) is killed by two brothers working in unison in the opening sequence. The Ching take revenge against the Shaolin schools who have just been released from prison by killing them all, and the master of the White Lotus clan who pretty much looks and fights like Pai Mei but isn’t tracks down the brothers that killed him. I missed how they were related, but I think they are brothers and his real name is Pak Mei (usually he’s referred to as White Lotus).

The one brother is killed, so the other brother (Gordon Liu) tries to train with his brother’s wife so that he can learn both brother’s styles and combine them as one to defeat Pak Mei. Pak Mei kicks his ass though, as he has a new technique that Pai Mei never had–he’s as light as the wind and will blow away from the force of Liu’s blows. The brother’s wife then teaches him a technique based on needlework that’s more gentle and feminine, and after perfecting that he goes after Pak Mei for a final showdown.

The movie is basically one of two scenes, either a hilarious one where the impatient Liu is trying to learn better kung fu to avenge his brother’s death or one in which he takes on Pak Mei. The latter scenes are spectacular and are both well-choreographed and fun to watch. The final battle takes on almost superhuman qualities as the two fighters use bizarre techniques to ward off the other’s blows. It’s a really excellent kung fu movie, well worth checking out as a double header with Executioners from Shaolin.

——Bruce Almighty——

(C+)

The movie really could have been a lot better, but it doesn’t really offer you anything more than the trailers give you. There’s a lot of lame hokey dialog that’s well beneath the talent of Jim Carrey and he struggles admirably to do the most with what little he has to go on. The soundtrack is also pretty bad, reminding more of a Beethoven movie than a big Hollywood comedy. I’m really surprised it made the money it did. And at the end it really became a movie with a theme It’s a Wonderful Life did a whole lot better.

Speaking of which, I managed to catch the last 15 minutes of that movie on NBC after we were done watching videos. Isn’t the end of that movie great? It’s both the most heartwarming and freakishly disturbing thing you’ve ever seen at the same time. Here is a guy who was just shown how shitty life would be without him, and when everything is finally back the way it was you’ve got this crazy man running up and down the streets cheering over, just to name a few, blood trickling out of his mouth, random buildings, his totaled car and the fact that he’s going to be arrested. If I saw this I’d think maybe he hit his head a little too hard in the accident. Then there is the hilarious part in the movie where Ingred Bergman shows up trying to tell him how the town came out to save his business and he can’t stop making out with her. Not that I blame him, but really man, get a room!

——Hud——

(A)

This was a lot more like Last Picture Show than I was expecting, but that’s a good thing. Great acting, great writing, great black and white cinematography. It’s really rare now day’s that you see a movie that’s actually about something and doesn’t try to rush itself in saying what it has to say. Hud’s a real dick but never one-note or cliché. He can be charming and he can be thrilling, but after you get to know him a little bit you really don’t want to be around him. He’s completely self-centered and a really miserable person to be around. That the movie was able to tell all of this slowly, giving out information as it was needed, in a great character drama makes this a really interesting movie to watch. And the cast is just great. This could just as well be a documentary, and I think that makes this a must see movie.

——Something’s Gotta Give——

(A)

I wasn’t really expecting to much here, especially since Nancy Meyer’s other movie, What Woman Want, was a typical “chick flick”–cute and yet nauseating in its simplicity and lack of depth at the same time. I’m not really sure if this screenplay was much better, but there does have to be something said about how she lets the relationships in this movie draw out naturally over the course of almost 2 hours and 10 minutes. The real saving grace of this film however is the acting, which is just brilliant, especially Diane Keaton who manages to steal every scene in the movie and somehow is able to be the only actor I can think of to drag your attention away from Jack. He’s great too, don’t get me wrong, but this is really Keaton’s movie and she holds it up magnificently. Her comic timing is just perfect, and if she doesn’t manage to get an Oscar nomination out of this role I’ll be surprised. She and Jack are perfect together, and their perfect acting and great chemistry together make this movie so much fun to watch. It’s real, not cliché, and that’s what I really liked about it. It’s a whole lot of fun to watch, and funny as hell.