A very interesting look at the music industry and artist success/failure in decades past vs. now. Here’s the article that spawned this graphic, and the article on BoingBoing where I saw this debate in the first place….
candybowl
Iron Monkey stars a (pretty young, this is from 1993) Donnie Yen and Rongguang Yu as two Shaolin traditionalist kung fu masters brought together (by fate?) to battle a series of corrupt govt. officials. Rongguang Yu is ‘the iron monkey’ – a kung-fu vigilante by night who acts as a local Robin Hood against the thieving local governor. Donnie Yen shows up with his son as a traveling physician who gets roped into a dragnet and set to capture The Iron Monkey when his kung fu skills are revealed to the police. But he learns that things aren’t as they seem rather quickly, and ends up as The Iron Monkey’s ally in a series of crazy kung fu battles by the end.
While there is a lot of wire work in this movie, it’s not really a bad thing. There’s still plenty of over-the-top fighting and action scenes. Also getting into the mix is Donnie Yen’s kid, Wong Fei-Hong (actually played by a 13 year old girl, Sze-Man Tsang), and Dr Yang’s assistant, Miss Orchid, who apparently have pretty darn good kung fu of their own.
It’s a pretty predictable set of characters and easy to pick who’s good and bad, enabling the movie to get on with the fight scenes – and boy do they. As compared with the later Ip Man, Donnie Yen is more of an over-the-top kung fu wizard here, and certainly has the moves to back it up. Rongguang Yu is no slouch, and the bad guys aren’t far behind in ability, either.
Also in a unique twist, here the main bad guy has a ‘poison punch’ – can’t remember its name – that leaves a huge bloody handprint on the victim, and causes him/her to die within about 30 minutes from the poison’s spread through the victim’s body. This (to me) seems likely to be the inspiration for the ‘deadly’ punch Uma Thurman hits David Carradine with in the second Kill Bill movie to finally off him at the end of her revenge spree.
In summary, another great martial arts movie – not sure how I found out about it – probably a trailer on a different DVD – definitely a great one!
candybowl
Well, another great year of the NW Pinball and Arcade Show this past weekend. You can see a walk-through and some other videos on YT below. Hope to see you next year!
candybowl
One of the great ones has passed on. Hopefully a stack of right-wing literature (maybe even with the authors) can be burned at 451 degrees in his honor……:)
R.I.P.
– candybowl
Where a horde of space aliens, steel balls, and sometimes unshowered nerds descend upon the Seattle Center for gaming craziness….woo hoo!
The 2012 Northwest Pinball and Arcade Show
candybowl
I’ve been watching 1998’s Cowboy Bebop on Adult Swim over the past several months (at one episode a week with 26 episodes, it can take a while) – finally finished them last week.
This is a great anime, if you like bounty hunters in space and don’t mind occasional crazy violence (and that they don’t usually explain a lot of what’s going on – you have to infer or watch all the episodes to really get it). The main characters’ backstory are slowly revealed throughout the entire timeline, and even though Spike’s fighting abilities seem a bit beyond his outward appearance – it still works. And the overall visuals are pretty much pre-CGI – now rare for a space-opera but like Akira – the animation is more than adequate and well done.
I think the only real downside for me was having to watch it dubbed in English – I prefer watching them in Japanese with subtitles to get the flavor of the original actors/authors as possible. But that wasn’t really too big a deal here.
The other downside is that now i’m done with the main anime’s on Adult Swim – I’ve seen Ghost in the Shell at least twice all the way through; I tried to watch an episode of Big O but just couldn’t get into it – and the others they show aren’t really of interest – doh!
check it out in any event – i’ll be headed back to Scarecrow myself….
candybowl
I loved the Goth Talk SNL skit back in the day, and Rob Lowe is classic here! The ‘home movie’ – esp. with Frasier intro – is TOO funny! Who knew that frisbee was so goth? 🙂 Click the link below to watch.
Candybowl
These pics are *very* cool – it’s hard to tell the scale of the quarry in the first few until you get to the later pics as he pans way out so you can see the scope of the quarry. Yet again I marvel at 18th Century grit and labor – because they didn’t have fancy boring and drilling machines nor huge dumptrucks, etc. – amazing to think about….
Article here:
Vermont’s “inverted skyscrapers” — and their architects
slideshow here
candybowl:
I have to say I like either ‘the Viewmaster’ or ‘the cylon’ the best….
candybowl
So I finally read the Gibson short story Johnny Mnemonic this past week, and as I had never seen the movie, thought i’d get that too. Hmmmm…not so much. While the short story is set in the Neuromancer/Count Zero/Mona Lisa Overdrive ‘universe’ of cyberpunk and The Sprawl – the movie just falls flat. The director and Gibson himself (screenwriter) changed too many elements (IMHO) of the original – apparently Molly Millions was changed to ‘Jane’ due to someone else’s ownership rights, but the whole NAS thing is silly – the short story is just much more taut and effective. The movie has many sequences that either lack dialog (where it’s needed) or have oddball distractions that don’t add to the plot, and the pacing of the movie isn’t very good, either. Too many slow parts that could have been edited out, and the action sequences are fairly clumsy, too..
A few interesting things I noticed, however. The LoTek clan’s hideout is on a burned out suspension bridge from Newark – echoes of his first Bridge Trilogy book Virtual Light (which had come out two years before this movie in 1993, although the ‘bridge’ in that trilogy was the Golden Gate Bridge in SF)?
Also, the look and feel crib (or steal, depending on your perspective) VERY HEAVILY from Max Headroom in a multitude of ways. Astute cyberpunk fans could say that MH in turn stole from (or was certainly inspired by) Gibson himself, given that his first two cyberpunk books, Neuromancer and Count Zero, appeared before MH debuted. It’s likely a tossup either way. The ‘wasteland future’ look here might also have been influenced by the even earlier Escape from New York, too.
Johnny’s overloaded ‘head of data’ – billed as 120GB but ‘stuffed overfull’ at 320 GB – seems quaint at best now, given you can buy a TB-sized USB drive at Fry’s for around $150 these days.
It’s interesting to think that while this movie was a failure, Keanu would be back in cyberspace MUCH more successfully only a few years later as Neo in The Matrix.
Finally – the depiction of ‘The Internet’ as conceptualized by the Neuromancer series was thought for a long time the way we’d browse – sadly didn’t turn out that way, despite similar thinking as seen in say, The Lawnmower Man.
So read the story – skip the movie.
candybowl