candybowl

too funny… candybowl

as ‘don’t let the Man get you down’. 🙂

candybowl

Went to see Iron Sky at SIFF Uptown last Sunday. This is an interesting movie, for several reasons:

1) It was apparently paid for in part by crowdsourcing – and given the diverse production credits (made by Finns, add’l product Down Under and Germany) that seems about right;

2) It kind of plays as a ‘Steampunk sci-fi epic meets Weekly World News fantasy with the ulltimate villains (Nazis, who else?) thrown in”

3) This may be the only way a certain self-important right-wing freak ever gets her claws on the White House (well, indirectly) – and that’s a good thing!

So in a nutshell, apparently a bunch of Nazis got to the moon and built a base prior to losing WWII, and are ‘discovered’ again by a new (meaning modern, not Apollo era) moon landing. There is a lot of attention paid to little details (actual vintage Beetles hauling them around the huge moonbase, over-fascination with huge ‘revenge weapons’, etc.) and the special effects – done in Lightwave (hooray!) are very good, IMHO. With this discovery, Ze Space Nazi’s now think their cover is blown and that Earth plans an invasion, so naturally it’s so ON, people! Battle(s) ensue and I wasn’t prepared for the ending, either – well done!

The actors are good, even though dialog-wise they are pretty flat and played for satire, not seriousness. Astute viewers will note the Bruno Ganz tribute just into the second act of the film (I won’t spoil it for you but pretty funny), how appropo. And the Spaze Nazi invasion force has to be seen to be believed.

So in summary, if you are looking for a ‘serious’ sci-fi epic – e.g. Prometheus (which was a sizable let-down in the end, see review) – this isn’t it. But it IS very entertaining, well made and worth a relaxing evening if you can catch it while still in art-theaters or later on DVD. Ja voll!

other reviews:
– The Guardian (UK)
– The Hollywood Reporter
– Rotten Tomatoes

candybowl

Supposedly there is a new Godzilla film in the works. While the comic below is funny, I hope they are not taking cues from Doug Savage as to its plot 🙂

candybowl

So finally saw the latest Batman movie tonight, The Dark Knight Rises.  Definitely a better overall movie than The Avengers, with less plot flaws.  Here’s what I saw as the pros and cons (SPOILER ALERT from here onward!):

Pro – great acting, cast and plot twists.  Bane goes for broke and you believe all along he doesn’t give a crap save to destroy everything, just like The Joker in the last film.  The ‘ultimate evil’, to be sure.

Pro – more great Batman gadgets, this time the crazy motorcycle and ‘the bat’ flying machine, while his tank-vehicles get turned against him by Bane’s army.  Also well done on making Tom Hardy (Bane) look like he’s 7 feet tall (he’s actually only 5′ 10″) and towering over Christian Bale (who is actually two inches TALLER than Tom Hardy at 6′ in real life).

Pro – they (again like in Batman Begins) return to Batman’s membership in the obscure Eastern martial-arts school, because Bane was ‘excommunicated’ from the same, and yet again the movie isn’t another run and gun comic book fight mashup (one of my gripes with The Avengers‘ big end battle, actually).

Pro – couple minor things – funny seeing the Lambo get towed when Bruce Wayne gets kicked out of his company’s Board meeting; great Cillian Murphy cameo as the ‘sentencing hearing’ officer (although it would have been even better had he been wearing his Scarecrow burlap head-sack and then taken it off at a key moment); and the true genuine human moments (Bruce Wayne with Marion Cotillard at the fireplace; Michael Caine has at least two great short speeches).  And Matthew Modine‘s turn as the dufus Police Chief attempting to be the next Commissioner Gordon – a bit overacted but still good.

Pro – NO 3D!!  It doesn’t add anything, guys!  We saw the movie in IMAX, which is cool – but not silly, even though it of course costs more.

And now, the list of nits:

1) In the (few) quiet times of the movie – do you HAVE to have the background music still noticeably building tension and sounding like the Jaws theme in the background?  It isn’t consistent with what’s happening onscreen and is a distraction at best…

2) When Batman, C. Gordon and Catwoman are standing there in the street staring at Marion Cotillard dying for a minute or more – WHILE THE BOMB IS STILL TICKING AWAY with only MINUTES left to go – hel-LO?

3) 5 months(!!!) go by and THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES GOVT/MILITARY leaves the USA’s biggest city alone to an insane warlord while 3,000 police are trapped in a subway?  Bomb or no, that’s just fantasy, guys.  And then to top it off, Batman shows up at (literally) the 11th hour and wins the day?  Ok, I know why THAT is, but still a bit farfetched…?

4) How they are talking early on about the nuke becoming more and more unstable as time goes by when Bane pulls it out of the reactor system – yet later they act as if it’s timer is the most precise thing in the world (because they are all trying to stop it at the last minute, of course 🙂

5) The sound could have been a bit *lower* than ’11’ guys – I was already into the movie enough without having to go deaf too!

But definitely the best (new) movie I’ve seen yet this summer, even if I think the first two Christopher Nolan Batman movies are a wee shade better than this one?  But Batman has definitely been ‘saved’ movie-wise from the terrible earlier movies, of which only the first one in 1989 was even tolerable, the rest just dreck.

Other voices:

The Dark Knight Rises: Review (ScreenRant)

Anne Hathaway is the best Catwoman ever (Vanity Fair)

There’s still Brave, Moonrise Kingdom and a few others out there yet to see, but summer isn’t over yet, either 🙂

candybowl

not Quite as impressive as the Big G, but who is? Still pretty funny 🙂

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

So I watched one of Jackie Chan’s earliest movies a couple days ago – Police Story.  This was a pretty entertaining movie, despite being from 1985 and very low budget.  Several things really stand out, however:

1) the stunts in this movie are simply out of control.  Given its budget (according to the DVD featurette’s, only $2M)  and genre, there are NO special effects here – just a slightly crazy team of stuntmen led by Jackie Chan (who also directed it) who was obviously taking more than a few risks himself here.  The car chase and bandit shootout early in the movie has to be seen to be believed, and the ‘mall brawl’ at the end is also very memorable.  I won’t spoil either for you.

2) I had read where Jackie Chan (like probably many other asian martial arts stars of his era) struggled to make his own way in the wake of Bruce Lee’s passing.  Ultimately besides many cop-action movies that involve crazy stunts but no apparent wire work (unlike the more ‘traditional’ kung fu movies) – he also settled on including humor wherever possible and not taking himself so seriously.  It’s apparent here – when they do human interest-type scenes, he’s hamming it up and usually taking the brunt of the joke – and while sometimes clumsy or obvious – often it’s simply funny, too.

3) As I try to do with most asian movies if possible – I watched it in Chinese with subtitles, rather than dubbed.  I’m still of the opinion that this conveys the best sense of the original actor rather than another unseen person’s second interpretation – here the subtitles are sometimes a bit off (although I’ve seen far worse) but generally do a good job.  Some of the scenes are way over the top anyway, so no amount of dialog is going to make the scene believeable anyway – and that’s why we go to the movies, no?  🙂

I may have to now go back and see Rumble in the Bronx again (saw it many years ago but don’t remember a lot of it) to see the difference 10 years made in JC’s onscreen mayhem – Here JC is so young and probably trying a bit too hard, vs. the later movie, i’d wager.

This is DEFINITELY a great movie to see if you like such films – don’t miss it!

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