Amph What was the last movie you saw?

The Mighty Peking Man (1976) & Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (1983)

Neither of these are Shaw Brothers' brightest moments: The former is a MST3K candidate for worst King Kong rip off. It's that bad, I groaned a lot. How MPM got a blu ray release in the U.K. when there are dozens of superior SB films in need of HD upgrades is beyond me.

The latter is a rather grim Shaolin vs. Mongol bit that appears to be a fan favorite yet I have no idea why. Perhaps because Fu Sheng died during filming (in a horrific car accident not on set.) I'll say this for the latter, the ladies in the film are good, and Ko Fei was great as a monk who loses his title to Gordon Liu in a Shaolin rod duel, but overall, it was boring and over-maudlin (even before Fu's character "disappears.")

Presently revisiting Dirty Ho (1976) - in which Gordon Liu escapes the monk trappings for once (thank goodness) to play a rascal prince who makes life crazy for Wong Yue (1000 points there...) Liu is the 11th Prince in disguise as Master Wang. The title character is the bumbling thief played by Wong Yue whom the 11th Prince ultimately trains to be his bodyguard as the regal discovers someone in his family is trying to assassinate him. The heir to their throne will be announced soon, so the fewer siblings around the better. How Liu disguises his kung fu is fun, though Wong Yue continues to be my SB allergy in 99.99999% of what I've seen him in. I kind of like this the second time, though I prefer Lau Kar Leung as a choreographer / actor instead of director. It was good seeing Gordon Liu in something other than the stereotypical monk; yet when it comes to LKL Shaws, my favorite remains Shaolin Mantis and the opening 9 minutes of The Spiritual Boxer. Probably won't revisit this one either except for the scene below:

 

Best title ever.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Guy Ritchie's irreverent, laddish, stylized-cool sensibility somehow worked when blended with (and toned down a little for) Sherlock Holmes to create some enjoyably silly, yet surprisingly solid riffs on classic British stories. Lightning did not strike again with King Arthur. The film, which steals some names from the King Arthur legend but seems to be inspired more by metal album covers than anything in the Arthur saga, suggests the potential for an entertaining adventure, but it's dragged down by a thoroughly uninvolving plot, tonal whiplash between Ritchie's largely faltering attempts at scoundrel playfulness and his ponderous attempts at epic drama, and its total failure to have anything to actually do with King Arthur and consequent inability to have anything interesting to say about him. It's not a good match of material to director and it's not a very good attempt at the material from Ritchie. It just doesn't work.

Ritchie's street-rat-and-band-of-friends take does suggest that he chose the wrong medieval folk stories; he should have been making a Robin Hood movie, and maybe would have if Ridley Scott hadn't stolen his thunder with a similarly mismatched attempt a few years ago. We would have all probably been better off if Ritchie and Scott had gotten together and agreed to swap subjects.

 

Alien: Covenant

After opening with a nice Kubrick inspired scene with David, a rather disjointed and slow exposition leads to a relentlessly thrilling and suspenseful movie.
Great use of the original Alien soundtrack by Goldsmith. A talented cast does well with the story. I enjoyed the cinematography and sound and special fx.
Very evocative of that world/universe.

I highly recommend this film to fans of the franchise. It immediately jumped to third in my rankings after only one viewing. (after Alien and Aliens)
I rank Prometheus 4th, after Covenant.

Covenant is very much a return to form of what fans of the original know and love and that is fine by me.

Ridley Scott is the man!

 

San Andreas. Good FX! Not sure how plausible any of it is.

 

Kong: Skull Island (2017) - Plot; A team of soldiers and scientists go on an expedition to a mysterious island where many dangers await them.

Film #2 in the so-called "MonsterVerse"--because everything has to be part of a [Insert here]verse these days (thank you mighty Marvel)--Skull Island is an at times shockingly violent and gory movie that pushes the boundaries of its PG-13 rating. Where Godzilla was handsomely made, but ultimately dull and unsatisfying, Skull Island gives us more of the sorts of throw-downs we naturally would expect from this genre. It tries--not always successfully--to marry this to some deeper themes and allegory than it has the trunk space to carry, but it puts just enough meat on its bones to give it some heft. The cast is better than the characters they play, but the real star here is Kong anyway, and he's rendered exceptionally well.

Ultimately there are a number of commendable elements here, but when it was all over I couldn't help but feel that the whole was a tad less than the sum of its parts. - 6/10

 

Same here. I wasn't familiar with the character so I skipped it in the cinema, but I caught it on Sky Movies. Not bad. I had the same problem with Deadpool - wasn't going to spend money on the cinema but I thought it was pretty good when I saw it on Sky.

 

I did see it in the cinema, and while I knew some of the character back - story, the changes from comic to film made sense and went out of it's way to avoid certain issues that might have come with certain characters at different points. Overall, pretty good film.

 

Have you read the detective novels by Denis Lehane? I'd say A Drink Before the War was better and should've been made into a film over this one.

 

Martial Arts of Shaolin (1986) I think this was the absolute last film Shaw Brothers made before they turned to television, and honestly, it shows. Jet Li has an early role as a Shaolin Monk, as does sword master Yu Cheung-Hui as the evil official Li and his rebel friends want to assassinate (Yu is the reason why I sat through this and it's awful English dub.) This boring kill the government official tweak just proves why most of Lau Kar Leung's movies do not gel with me. I respect that he was showing off legitimate martial arts styles in every kung fu film he made (and some choreography was terrific) but great moments of kung fu do not a movie make. His characters are often annoying and not engaging. Ultimately, I just do not care. One of the reasons why I adore director Sun Chung so much is because no matter the budget (or in very rare cases the story itself), he always cared about the characters and their situations. Martial arts were an extension of Sun's cinematic denizens, not their reason d'etre (except for The Kung Fu Instructor which does that right.) Unless I revisit Shaolin Mantis or the first 9 minutes of The Spiritual Boxer, it's safe to say I'll probably avoid anything Leu Kar Leung directed going forward.

 

Dunkirk in glorious 70mm. It was pretty good. It had Tom Hardy Tom Hardying it up and Mark Rylance Mark Rylancing all over the place. It was also nice change of pace to see a WWII film about a disastrous Allied defeat. For a movie that seemed to be striving for realism, though, the implausible survival of most of its main characters got tiresome by the end-- there were what, three sinkings that Private Boy Band barely survived? It also surprisingly fails to give much of a sense of scale. They talked about the hundreds of thousands of troops stranded there, but I never got a visual sense of that even with flyover shots. That said, it's probably one of Christopher Nolan's better films. None of that faux cleverness present in Inception and Interstellar.

 

Human Lanterns (1982) By this point, director Sun Chung had been exploring snobby, elitist swordsmen for five years. That reached epic proportions in this film as this very gruesome, ugly take on keeping up with the Tans and Lungs / "Be Careful What You Wish For" tale goes far beyond anything Sun had done to that point (Ti Lung was hilarious as an arrogant peacock of a swordsman in The Deadly Breaking Sword), but here Chen Kuan Tai and Lau Wing are so haughty you want them to kill each other so the rest of the community does not have to put up with their increasingly psychotic anything you can do, I can do better feud.

Anyway, it's the annual Lantern fest and Tan (CKT) is showing off his masterpiece, along with a mistress that his glitzy rival Lung (Lau Wing) thought was his girl on the side. Humilated, Lung tells his lantern maker he wants a show stopper, only to find out said lantern maker is not the kindly old guy running the stall, but instead it's Chun Fang (Lo Lieh) a now disfigured and unhinged swordsman whom Lung bested some time before. Lung even stole Chun Fang's woman as his own. Well, Lung is a jerk and allows this obviously still resentful madman to create a lantern that will top Tan's and therefore make Lung the most gloriously wealthy a-hole in town. Oops. Chun Fang takes the local myth about human skin lanterns to heart and starts kidnapping the women of Tan and Lung to use for the end product (while dressed in a creepy ape fur and skull faced costume.) The disappearance of the ladies makes Tan and Lung turn on each other until, duh, they find out who has been playing them and killing their women.

Make no mistake, Human Lanterns was Sun Chung's major foray into graphic horror, but true to his particular visual style, the director rarely shows everything. That's good because skin removal is never a nice thing to watch. SB's make up department outdid themselves here.

Of Sun Chung's early 80s films, he did what I consider three horror movies: the silly, and awesomely crazy ghost zombie story Revenge of the Corpse (1981), Human Lanterns (1982) and the vicious, psychological horror The Master Strikes Back (1984 - MSB has some great Mario Bava like haunted house shots, but it is hard to watch given the story.) My favorite is Revenge of the Corpse which I hope lands an official release somewhere because it's just ridiculous fun, but when the urge to watch consumerism and power grabs gone horribly awry hits, I occasionally pop this in.

There's only one character who is remotely likable in this, the failed assassin Szu-Yi played by former Venom Lo Mang (LM would deliver his best performances, post Venoms mob and this little cameo was awesome.) Szu-Yi was hired by Tan to kill Lung, but um that didn't happen and so in the fight below, Tan wants to shut Szu-Yi up.

(the clip below is a little bloody but nothing like what I described above)



I watch this film occasionally because it is a great movie, but there are eight or nine Sun Chung films I screen more frequently than this. I'd say this is hard R for the graphic gore; but if you want to see a swordplay movie that goes into horror territory this is one you could consider.

 

War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) – Matt Reeves

No matter what you say, eventually you’d replace us. That’s the law of nature. What would you have done?

It would be tempting to say that Reeves has finished this new Planet of the Apes trilogy with a bang, but that would misrepresent the film, which is actually pretty quiet and almost entirely somber. Let’s just do away with the clever phrases and state things plainly: this is the best of the trilogy and essentially a perfect ending. Where things are headed next for the franchise is hard to guess, but whatever happens we have one of the most finely crafted and unlikely trilogies of modern times in this new Planet of the Apes trilogy. This trilogy has always gone in surprising directions. I argued that Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was a real accomplishment, a genuinely anti-violence summer blockbuster. This movie is also surprising. The title hints at epic battles and sweeping conflict and then dials the focus down to a simple story of revenge. You could call it an adventure film; much of it is taken up with a journey through wilderness and the quest of a hero to, more than anything else, refuse to become the villain. But this is too somber really for even that designation. It’s almost a revisionist western of a type, morally complicated, focused on deconstructing even its heroic characters. It’s a brilliant film, full stop, with great scripting and a surprising focus on characterization down to even pretty small roles. Serkis delivers, in my opinion, his best performance of the trilogy. It’s as morally complicated as Caesar has gotten and Serkis is up to the task. Word has to be given to the special effects team, of course, who get their fair share in terms of the deeply evocative performances from the ape characters, most especially Caesar. With each film, the rendering of these characters in their environments has gotten only better which is really something when you consider how breathtaking it was right from the jump. At this point, it’s nearly impossible to believe that these are computer generated creatures; it seems absurd, but you’ll find yourself thinking that, God knows how, they MUST have somehow gotten real apes to do all this stunt work. A word for Harrelson. I’m always kind of afraid when he’s going to be in a movie because I’m afraid he’ll fall back into his schtick and be tiresome; but he almost always proves me wrong and he absolutely does here. He’s wonderful as the villainous Colonel; he dials back almost all of his tics in order to play the Colonel very minimally which works very well to make him more frightening than if he’d just gone full throttle. Reeves’ direction is great as always; the film has a dark look to fit the dark tone. I’m fairly certain that you only see the sun for about five minutes out of this entire two-hours-plus film; the starkness of the grey skies and the white snow and the cold grey metal of the military camp all add up to create a real atmosphere of wintery chill. Ultimately, the Planet of the Apes pulls of another miracle. Right from Rise, this franchise has been exceeding expectations and surprising me in all sorts of ways. With this dark, somber, deeply emotional conclusion, they’ve done it again. And this time I basically went in expecting a masterpiece on the level of Rise or Dawn. But they got me again; this one is even better. 4 stars.

tl;dr – a perfect ending to a brilliant film trilogy, this somber, morally complicated story of revenge is well-written, beautifully performed and a true masterpiece. 4 stars.

 

Blue Ruin. A film about a man who sets out to kill the man who murdered his parents when he's released from prison, it's a revenge thriller, but of a unique type. A meditative indie about the way people get sucked into a self-justifying whirlpool of violence, it plays out with a striking sense of realism, looking something like what a revenge movie plot might look like in real life: a twitchy, bedraggled weirdo stumbling his way through an underthought vortex of ugly, clumsy violence. It's a really well-made film that does something genuinely interesting and original with a rusty genre. I really, really liked it.

 

Rogue1-and-a-half coming off of two strong entries and with it being one of the best reviewed films of the year (%93 RT, %82 Meta Critic), any theories why War hasn't fared as well as its predecessor? Here in North America it fell a whopping %63 in week 2 despite rocking numbers like a 7.9 IMDb rating, an %86 liked it score on RT and an %83 from Google users, so word of mouth should have been strong. I've seen people say everything from franchise fatigue to its dark tone turning people off.

Havac I've had Blue Ruin on my "to watch" list for a while now. Just waiting for the mood and the moment to coincide.

 

I also just recently saw Eight Diagram Pole Fighter. It's supposed to be one of the greats, but I don't see what the fuss is about personally. It wasn't helped by the awful English dub (I ended up muting it and turning on the captions and just pretending it was in Chinese) but the acting seems very overwrought (with Fu Sheng in particular going over the top). The most remarkable thing for ne about the film was that I recognised the opening story concept from a more recent film (Saving General Yang) and so this film ended up being an unintentional sequel to that. The choreography is well done and Gordon Liu is dependable as usual. I feel like this would have been better had it been about the two daughters instead.

 

late spring

this is a beautiful marriage of Ozu's late period style, and just a wonderful relationship between Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara's characters. both are a joy to watch. Hara's smile hides so much. what is happiness? why must a daughter marry? neither father nor daughter want to leave eachother but society and meddling family mean it must happen, and so both parties go against what they want... because, that's the way it is. that last scene, oh man. I've been watching a lot of old movies lately, some with rave reviews which I didn't necessarily agree with (L'Atalante); but this, itself also a critically acclaimed classic, is entirely justified.

 

Sicario

Pretty damn good, I thought.

 

Interesting. It's been a bit since I've seen it, but I liked L'atalante a lot.

Boy, say that five times fast: "I liked L'Atalante a lot." I really need to get into Ozu. Never seen any of his stuff.

I don't think it's franchise fatigue. With just three movies in this particular franchise, it seems like it would show up somewhere else before it would show up here. I think it is kind of the tone and also the scale of the movie. Honestly, there was more action in Dawn and, like I said, it's pretty much a movie about the dread of violence, not the reveling in it. You title a movie "War for the Planet of the Apes," people are going to expect, well, some actual war, which doesn't really happen in this movie. The apes themselves spend the entire movie on the defensive, fleeing the enemy, captured by the enemy, escaping the enemy. Caesar's the only one with any real initiative and his quest is for personal revenge and he ultimately abandons it in a moment of pity for his enemy. This is not the stuff of a summer blockbuster. I honestly think it's just a case of the relentlessly dark tone, the small scale personal scope and the fact that it's essentially not a movie about a war in any real sense. I didn't see the trailer so I'm not sure how it was marketed. But, not to be a film snob, I think it was just a difficult movie for the summer blockbuster crowd. I'm not surprised that it hasn't done well, but it is too bad. It's absolutely one of the best movies of the year so far for me, for sure of the summer.

I should say that there's probably no really easy explanation. I mean, plenty of dark movies have been really successful with blockbuster crowds and, like you say, word of mouth seems to have been good.

 

Just watched Animal Kingdom for a third time. Such a great film. Gripping & tense from the opening scene. SW fans will recognise Ben Mendelsohn & Joel Edgerton. The former steals the movie as one of the creepiest & most compelling villains in recent memory. Guy Pearce is also excellent. If you haven't seen this check it out asap. Just avoid any plot spoilers until you do.

 

Yeah, "War" may have had people expecting something that the movie doesn't quite deliver, and once it was confirmed by critics and early audiences that it wasn't action, action, action, they stayed away. Perhaps this more personal and intimate take would've played better in November or December than smack dab in the middle of the Summer "popcorn" season.

 

Alien: Covenant

Well, ok it was pretty much the exact same setup as a few of the other Alien films with a few distractions. It felt like it wasn't cohesive as far as a story is concerned, and I REALLY didn't care for the David thing. Fassbender was great, don't get me wrong, I just didn't like where they went with that. I didn't care for the spore thing either. Maybe I need to watch it again.

 

WftPotA is probably the best film of the summer. Wonder Woman would've been if it weren't for the relentlessly stupid climax.

 

I concur about Apes. Best action/sci-fi/fantasy movie of the year by far. Joke that it's not a bigger hit.

 

Alien: Covenant - probably the best nap I've had in a month. The puppy curled up at my feet and the movie lulled us both to sleep within 20 minutes. Did anything happen?

I only hope I can sleep half as well during the Blade Runner sequel.