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⬆️ I just bought this dvd. It’ll take me quite a while to get to it, but am looking forward to it.
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Kung Fury (2015)

5/5

For me, it's rare to have as much fun as I did with Kung Fury. Even on multiple viewings the film still remains fresh. Brought back so many memories for me growing up. Love, love this film.
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Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'?

-Stan Brakhage





The Giant Behemoth (1959)

4/5

I'm a huge sucker for these kind of camp films. Each time I come across one I feel like I'm about to go on a vacation some place, bring my portable DVD player with me, and watch something mindless and fun for a few hours. Like Kung Fury, I love this stuff.




1st Re-watch...I have used the phrase in reviews of other movies and I now realize I was wrong...this is truly a "one of a kind movie experience." I have never seen anything like this and never will. You guys can have your CGI superhero movies, this is art...this is cinematic art. I am upping my original rating.


While Memories of Murder is probably my favorite of his (partly for some serious nostalgia reasons) this one is excellent.

The first time I watched it all I could process was just the elegant way that he uses the frame--characters constantly moving up and down staircases and in and out of the different spaces. Bong Joon-ho does very detailed storyboarding of his films and you can really see that in a film like Parasite.



You mean me? Kei's cousin?

Promare (2019) - First Time on Blu-ray

Some movies just work, even if they don't necessarily rub elbows with the five-star classics in the world of cinema. I already knew it wasn't going to be another Akira or another Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, but I also knew I was going to see this one eventually after seeing the dub trailer before a theatrical screening of My Neighbor Totoro and I'm not the least bit disappointed because it delivers on its every promise and blind-buying the Blu-ray certainly wasn't a mistake on my part. Hiroyuki Imaishi's Promare is pure unabashed genre fun, a popcorn muncher if you will, and it works simply by knowing exactly what it is and not pretending to be anything else. The animation is stunning. While the movie's budget isn't currently known to the public, I can only guess it was pretty sizable since the animation screams "money." Imaishi, a key animator on the beloved Neon Genesis Evangelion, clearly went all-in here. While some have criticized Kazuki Nakashima's screenplay, it's really not half-bad at all and certainly enough to sustain a 111-minute film that's largely wall to wall action. Gotta say, the soundtrack is also pretty rad; it's been some time now since viewing and I can't get Kakusei out of my head. NYAV Post, as they have for the likes of Your Name, A Silent Voice, and Mirai, has delivered yet another excellent English dub, once again directed by NYAV Post founders Michael Sinterniklaas and Stephanie Sheh. Billy Kametz is excellent as Galo Thymos, the newest member of a firefighting team named Burning Rescue. Galo is brash, a bit arrogant and by no means subtle, but Kametz molds him into a likable character with aplomb. The legendary Johnny Yong Bosch is equally impressive as Lio Fotia, the leader of Mad Burnish, a group of the Burnish, mutated humans who wield fire and often cause many of the fires Burning Rescue extinguish. Lio is a decidedly different character from Shotaro Kaneda, Vash the Stampede, and Toji Suzuhara, and even Takaki Tono, but Yong Bosch pulls it off with flying colors. Alyson Leigh Rosenfeld is also rock-solid as Aina Ardebit, Galo's partner in Burning Rescue. Crispin Freeman is both appropriately charming earlier in the film and appropriately sinister and "Eeeeevil!" later on as Kray Foresight, Galo's childhood hero and the governor of Promepolis who is not at all what he seems. Cowboy Bebop fans will want to watch out for Spike Spiegel himself Steve Blum as Ignis Ex, the captain of Burning Rescue. Kari Wahlgren is appropriately crazed as Lucia Fex, a mad scientist who creates equipment for Burning Rescue. If there's a negative, it's that Sinterniklaas himself feels wasted here as a rat named Vinny, especially since said rat does nothing beyond the usual squeals and I doubt he sounded much, if any, different in Japanese. Aside from that, though, NYAV Post has worked their usual magic and the dub script is completely natural. All told, Promare is a whole lot of fun. Sure, it's 111 minutes of straight-up genre fun but I'm sure that's exactly what some of us need during these troubled times and it's no surprise that GKIDS even had to bring it back to theaters by popular demand. Personally, I liked it a whole lot and I'll certainly be coming back to it in the future.
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Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970)


This was an above average cowboy romp. Manages to keep the humour and light-handed touch. Clint and Shirley are both acting well in a thin script!






Back In Time : A "Back to the Future" Documentary
(2015)
3.75/5

Many critics say it was one of the best scripts ever written.



Kahdeksan surmanluotia (1972)
aka Eight Deadly Shots

Yet another Finnish TV-production from the 70s. This is loosely based (or heavily inspired) by a real event of a drunken farmer shooting four police officers coming to arrest him. Director, writer, and leading actor Mikko Niskanen came from a similar background and was obsessed about the project (e.g. he was drinking and sleep-depriving himself to match the mental state of the actual killer). Whatever he did, it was worth it as his performance is superb. There are lots of amateur actors in the film as well, and they add to the authenticity of it all.

There are two versions of this; a theatrical cut of 145 minutes and the mini-series that's 316 minutes. I watched the longer one. Despite the fact that there are long periods where very little is happening, I wasn't particularly bored at any point. It's really intensive depiction of poverty, alcoholism, and the negative effects of urbanization (how it slowly kills the countryside). It's easy to sympathize with its characters, and kind of sad when you know where it all leads.

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The Gentlemen (2019)

Enjoyable Guy Ritchie romp...had me laughing (Colin Farrell especially) and interested in the story. Solid film.




Kahdeksan surmanluotia (1972)
aka Eight Deadly Shots

Yet another Finnish TV-production from the 70s. This is loosely based (or heavily inspired) by a real event of a drunken farmer shooting four police officers coming to arrest him. Director, writer, and leading actor Mikko Niskanen came from a similar background and was obsessed about the project (e.g. he was drinking and sleep-depriving himself to match the mental state of the actual killer). Whatever he did, it was worth it as his performance is superb. There are lots of amateur actors in the film as well, and they add to the authenticity of it all.

There are two versions of this; a theatrical cut of 145 minutes and the mini-series that's 316 minutes. I watched the longer one. Despite the fact that there are long periods where very little is happening, I wasn't particularly bored at any point. It's really intensive depiction of poverty, alcoholism, and the negative effects of urbanization (how it slowly kills the countryside). It's easy to sympathize with its characters, and kind of sad when you know where it all leads.

Hadn't heard of this one before. Thank you for the write-up.





"Boycotting the buses in Montgomery. Segregation in Birmingham. Now? Voting in Selma. One struggle ends just to go right to the next and the next. If you think of it in that way, it's a hard road, but I don't think of it that way. I think of these efforts as one effort and that effort is for our life."
- Martin Luther King Jr, Selma (2014)


Over the past week and a half, we've seen horrific images on both our television screen and on the web, images that would resemble a third-world country ran under a dictatorship. In troubled times like these, it's easy to let ourselves fall into cynicism and feel that nothing has changed in our 50 year war for racial rights. In fact, the day before I watched this film, I was prepared to bear such a sentiment myself by the end of it.

Selma recounts the final years of Martin Luther King Jr. (the Oscar snubbed David Oyelowo) from 1964 up to 1968, but it's largely centered on the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches led by King. Despite criticisms for certain historical inaccuracies, including the vilification of president at the time, Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), the events recounted in the film only further strengthened my conviction that little has changed since the '60s, from the excessive force exhibited by the law enforcement officers during peaceful protests to "covert racism" dressed under subtlety and hypocrisy to corrupted politicians waging a domestic war on American citizens, caring more about how it makes them look than what it does to the people. Yes, 2020 doesn't leave much room for optimism.

But then I started to pull back my rage and reflect a little upon our current privileges, our privilege to vote and protest regardless of race, gender or even sexuality - or sit wherever we want in a damn bus for that matter. There's light in the tunnel Martin has opened for us, and there's light to be found in this tale of the great man as well (one of the few movies out there actually about MLK and his civil right movements that's not a documentary, whereas JFK had at least five movies about him and his assassination). But more importantly, the light I speak of comes in the form of retrospect, that today, in 2020, we've come further than ever to a universal agreement that to persecute anyone by the color of their skin is not only intolerable, but an utterly barbaric and antiquated concept that would only revert society back to uncivilized times. Police brutality hasn't changed much, but at least now bystanders are doing more than just standing by idly. Furthermore, racism is now being documented on an iPhone. It's not much, certainly not the ideal future people have fought for their children in the '60s when a black man could be murdered in the daylight on the street, but the hard road has indeed come far since the days of cotton fields.

And I think such an optimistic perspective towards the film and the progress we've made is indeed befitting for the simple man who had a dream of equal men (and women). Hell, even the writer (Paul Webb) wasn't afraid to inject some humor into an otherwise grim look of human atrocities. There's a very uplifting approach to its theme of racial equality, particularly in its portrayal of white Americans who also share the heartache of witnessing people beaten down for demanding human rights.

In retrospective contrast, it certainly has a more sanguine approach than the likes of Malcolm X, a figure whose biographical film I shall visit the following week (though in retrospect, I felt like I should've watched it before "Selma").



Moonlight - 6
12 years a slave - 7



Onward - 2020

Totally adequate animated film. However for Pixar it feels a bar below for the standard they have reached. It's by no means a bad film. It just feels clunky in spots to me. I could feel the movie struggle to move forward at times unlike say a Wall-E or Inside Out where the movie just seems to flow naturally. It also felt way to overhanded sentimentalized. Uses it almost as a crutch. Feels like their goal is to make you cry, which never works on me when that's your goal.

Again its a fine movie, worth a gander. But not up to par of some other Pixar flicks.



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101 Favorite Movies (2019)