——Chinatown Kid——

(C+)

I don’t know what it is, but Kung Fu movies just don’t play as well in the modern day. I’d rather see someone beat up a Manchu over a street thug any day. Maybe it is the fact that there aren’t really too many Kung Fu masters in the modern day that makes the problem. As it is in this movie, it’s pretty much one guy who’s really good cleaning up the streets. Guns, I think, take a little bit of the magic out of it too.

Anyway, this movie suffers from wanting to do too much in a small amount of time (how much of that is the director’s fault is debatable, since my version of this is obviously cropped to fit into the 90 minute mark). The story starts off with a young kid trying to make it with his Grandfather in Hong Kong. He gets mixed up with a mobster and has to go to America. In San Fran he once again gets involved with the mob, but this time a rival gang realizes that he’s the only guy in America that can actually fight and recruits him to join their side. He rather quickly moves up the ranks to gang boss, but then the people who liked him before say he’s sold out and won’t talk to him. He then decides to tell his underlings that they are out of drugs and other questionable activities (how exactly are they going to make money then?) and then his gang tries to take him out.

It’s a rather predictable mob story, extremely subpar in a lot of ways. The Kung Fu is the only high point, but it’s of the more street-brawling variety and left me wishing for the more graceful fighting of the period pieces. Not really recommended.

——Coffy——

(B+)

While at times not the greatest film (the writer likes to use exposition like how some people like to use salt; some scenes tend to hang around longer than they should) it is an extremely entertaining piece of exploitation cinema. In the first scene Coffy blows off a dealer’s head with a shotgun, and just about every woman in the movie becomes topless at some point. That’s just some of the general bizarreness that’s in this movie.

Pam Grier plays Coffy, a nurse (which is kind of a joke, because you never actually see her do any work) who’s little sister got hooked on smack and is now in the hospital. Coffy has thus decided to take out a one woman vendetta against all the dealers, working her way to the top. While the plot is pretty predictable, every thing else is hilarious. Coffy becomes a Jamaican whore for a pimp mack-daddy King George, and is so hot that she makes all of the other whores jealous, which results in a gigantic cat fight where Grier proceeds to beat the hell out of and then rip the top open of every whore there. Grier gets naked quite a bit too, but you know that everyone that sees her naked is going to end up dying some horrible death. She’s like a black widow.

The soundtrack is funkalicious. The dialog is hilarious. It’s also pretty raunchy, surprising even me. There is definitely none of Hollywood’s holding back in this movie. And Grier is fantastic, especially in the last sequence, which probably made black women everywhere stand up and cheer. This is a very entertaining movie.

——LotRs: The Two Towers (Extended Edition)——

(A)

Out of all three films, TTT I thought had the weakest theatrical cut, and honestly, although I like all of the added scenes in the Fellowship EE I still prefer the theatrical cut on that film. That didn’t bode well for my viewing of the TTT EE, but luckily it didn’t matter at all, because the TTT EE is amazing.

Magnificently, all of the pacing problems I had with TTT has been corrected, and I feel like almost every added scene should have been in the theatrical cut, they’re so good. I still dislike how the film opens, but after that first five minutes or so it’s all gravy from then on. A lot of people commented on the whole middle movie syndrome, on what a middle movie should do since it has no real beginning or end. What should it do? Prop up the two bookends, silly. So much added good information. I loved it.

Two scenes that could have been left out. That scene at the beginning where Frodo and Sam climb down the elvish rope rightly was cut, because all it did was show how cool the elves were, and how Sam thought they should keep the Shire in mind, two themes that are only brought out, say, a hundred more times in the movie. And while I loved the inclusion of the Ent Draught sequence, the scene where the tree roots eat up Merry and Pippin just seems really wacky and out of place. If you hadn’t read the books, what the hell would you make of this scene?

Two scenes that should have been left in the theatrical. Aragorn is like 87 years old? No shit! It’s so cool, and the scene is so short I don’t know why it didn’t get left in. And the flashback with Boromir, Denethor and Faramir, why the hell was that cut? Not only does it set up RotK nicely, it also helps give important backstory and motivation for Boromir and Faramir. Boromir and Faramir aren’t really jerks, they are really nice guys spoiled by daddy. Watching their spirits get crushed by their father was an important scene, I though.

All and all, giving back time to Treebeard and by lengthening out our time in Rohan a little bit helped a lot in strengthening the movie. Interestingly enough, the sequence that I thought worked best in the theatrical cut, the intercutting of the different battles, is the one part of the movie that appears to contain no new footage. Thank God we have this EE.

——Gentlemen Prefer Blondes——

(B+)

I’m not really sure, is this a musical? I think it’s a musical. They definitely sing enough. And yet, except for maybe one or two exceptions the songs seem to fit seamlessly into the plot. And then there are big chunks of time where there is no music, and it better resembles a straight romantic comedy. Either way, this movie is pretty entertaining.

The two leading ladies are quite good, Marilyn Monroe especially as the ditzy blonde seemingly only interesting in money, who actually isn’t as stupid as she acts. The Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend number especially is really good. Lots of great color use. Worth seeing once.

——The Big Sleep——

(B)

Great acting, great one-liners, and a plot so confusing I’m still not really sure what the hell happened. That’s definitely the film’s one weakness, it becomes so complex and confusing, with so many characters giving exposition instead of just talking that the movie can become exceedingly dull at points. It’s not really anything I would ever watch again, but it was OK, and Lauren Bacall was really good.

——Big Fish——

(A-)

I was actually kind of surprised I ended up liking this as much as I did. The movie doesn’t really start out too well out of the gate, but as the movie moves on and (contrary to what you might think) it becomes more sentimental, the better it gets. The father/son relationship is quite good, and most of the weird stories that make up the film are really good. Some of them are a little too quirky though, which is where I find fault in the film. It’s not too big a deal though, and I immensely enjoyed this. Allison Lohman, who plays the young version of Jessica Lange, I absolutely love too, by the way.