Yeah - I heard about that a while back. Jackie definitely did it. It would be comical if it wasn’t incredibly sad.
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Chow Yuen Fatt(The Replacement Killers), Donnie Yen(Rogue One) and Tony Leung(the guy who plays The Mandarin in Shang Chi) also did it lol. It’s very common nowadays. Just assume every Chinese and Korean actress has had some form of surgery.
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I know. I see an incredible amount of black women shaving their heads and wearing wigs with western styles, too. It is what it is - I’m pretty adamant about letting people do what they want to do to make themselves feel comfortable, but there’s a fine line between doing what you want to in order to feel more comfortable as yourself and doing what you have to in order to become someone else.
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Well, I guess they needed to meet the standards of “beauty” in Asia. It shows how much Hollywood doesn’t understand even when it comes to simple shit like this. IIRC Jet Li also had double eyelid surgery way back.
Also, they all did this way back before HK movies were trying to break into Hollywood.
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Oh, I can see the reasoning behind it. It’s just a messed up thing to change about yourself, IMO. It’s also just as much about the standards of beauty in America. But yeah - when you stack it up with binding feet, it’s pretty benign, I guess.
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Watched Major Grom: Plague Doctor (2020) yesterday. I was expecting it to be bad and I must say it fulfilled my expectations.
Based on a Russian comic from around a decade ago, it follows the adventures of a maverick police major Igor Grom (grom meaning thunder) - who for some reason always dresses full Russian ghetto - as he battles a mysterious villain who calls himself the Plague Doctor. The Doctor wants to cleanse the city from the “criminal filth” and it’s Grom’s task to thwart him and more importantly uncover his identity. It follows all tropes of a superhero movies, with one (semi)unexpected scene in the credits.
Holy crap, old Soviet movies had more creative freedom and subtler propaganda. I blame it on a massive brain drain of movie/AV people from Russia the West in the last ten years or so.
There are some cool scenes snuck in, but overall the last quarter of the movie is full of wooden, political hectoring shoehorned by some bureaucrat who had to sign off the final version of the script - “self made rich people are bad, poor people are dumb as fuck and need to be ruled with an iron hand otherwise we’ll again descend into anarchy. Keep your head down because it could get much much worse”
4/10, it’s on Netflix so fans of the genre should maybe watch it for the Russian novelty factor.
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Have you watched that new horror movie called Sputnik? I think it’s Russian.
I read the synopsis and it looks interesting.
Nope, I’ve read the synopsis and it sounds like the Astronaut’s Wife merged with that UK zombie flick about sentient zombie children, can’t remember the name.
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I watched Books of Blood (yes, it’s based on a couple of stories from Clive Barker) and 47 Hours to Live because I had nothing better to do and I wanted to watch something dumb. They’re the kind of movies made for people who have nothing better to do and want to watch something dumb.
I regret nothing.
4/10
EDIT:
On a separate note, I just read that the director of The Eternals’s stepmother is Song Dandan. Holy fuck. Song Dandan is a better actress than Meryl Steep. She may be the greatest actress alive today. I think I’m actually excited for that movie now.
That doesn’t mean I’m watching Nomadland. Aside from not being in the mood for these kinds of flicks, which is why I’m mostly watching crap now, I’m afraid of being terribly disappointed BECAUSE it swept the Oscars. Look what you’ve done, Hollywood. Look what you’ve done. Fuck all of you.
Finished up season 1 of Invincible today. Thought it was phenomenal - writing, voice acting, animation, storyline - all solid. 9/10.
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Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
I thought this was going to be one of those silly Asylum produced microbudget flicks so I watched it. It turned out to be a pretty competently made big budget movie that took itself more seriously than one with a title like that would.
Of course, you gotta expect lots of silly shit happening by virtue of the subject matter itself. The story is so absurd despite it’s lack of cheap gags and self-aware cheesiness I don’t even know whether the intent was to make a statement on the Civil War and it’s relevant issues or a deadpan joke stretched out into a 100min movie.
Lincoln was a normal boy who grew up wanting vengeance after a vampire killed his mother because he was defending a Black kid from being whipped even though said kid was “born free” under the law. I don’t know much about this era of American history. I’m just going by what the movie tells me. No, I’m not saying I think vampires are in any of your history books. I’m talking about the real events which they’re trying to pull a Forrest Gump on.
When he grows up, he gets trained by a vampire hunter who gives him missions and intel on vampires and he leads a double life as a law student working at a store and hunting vampires at night. After a night where he’s lured into a mass vampire feast involving unwitting slaves, he realizes that the vampires, which even his mentor agrees with, need to maintain the status quo when it comes to slavery so they have enough people to feed on or they’ll start feeding on melamine deficient people too. So he decides that to really make a difference, he needs to go into politics instead of spending his time killing vampires. I have no idea why.
Fuck it. It doesn’t have to make sense.
You’re getting THE Abraham Lincoln swirling around a bigass axe decapitating a hoard of vampires with martial arts moves and shit. Just be grateful that someone managed to come up with something like this and it somehow got financed bigly. A 500lb deadlift? Fuck that girly man nonsense. This is the real badass shit right here.
I gotta admit I enjoyed this movie probably because I watched it after watching so much big budget crap these days. I think it was made 10 years ago but I never knew it existed. The fight choreography and some action scenes were great. The characters consist of the typical movie stereotypes but since this movie takes them seriously enough, you at least get worried for them when bad shit is going to go down. That’s good enough for me.
I don’t think they succeeded in blending myth with factual events and any hints of political undertones are mostly underscored by it’s relentless pacing. It’s an entertaining ride if you don’t have much expectations.
6.5/10
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Now you’ll have to check out “Sense and Sensibility and Zombies.”
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Holy shit, I loved this movie.
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Watched Without Remorse - new Tom Clancy movie starring Michael B Jordan. I like Tom Clancy’s stories usually, but the storyline was a strange mix of obvious and confusing, as in, “I know what’s about to happen, but why?” The characters are all one-dimensional, and it doesn’t even make up for all of this with eyeball-searing action.
Overall, in one word - forgettable.
3/10, only because I made it through the movie.
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I wanted to watch it. I’ve watched ALL the other movies made from Tom Clancy’s novels.
Almost did but something inside was telling me it was going to suck.
This is exactly the kind of bad writing I’m seeing in movies these days that I’ve been ranting about.
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I watched 10mins of Antebellum and figured it was going to be terrible because the direction was so bad. So I googled the plot on wiki to see if I should continue. Then I turned it off.
-10/10
Not only because you wasted my fucking time with horrible filmmaking, but you fucks decided to steal a fucking shitty twist from an M.Night Shyamalan movie that’s already universally considered a fucking shitty twist.
When I wrote “steal”, I LITERALLY meant “steal”:
“Veronica flees the pursuing soldiers into the chaos of a battle, revealing that the so-called plantation is actually part of a Civil War reenactment park, Antebellum, owned by the general’s true identity of Senator Blake Denton. Denton and his comrades intended to use the park to recreate an environment to bring back the slavery days using African victims. Veronica finally escapes as the police arrive.”
When I watched The Village, I thought no one other than Shyamalan would be retarded enough to write a dumbass twist like this but at least Shyamalan is a decent director who, before he made The Happening, could get you immersed in a movie even while you realize how dumb the story is. I don’t mind since I watch a lot of Dario Argento movies.
Does not knowing how much you can really bench make any sense to anyone who’s ever touched a fucking barbell? Of course not. Fuck it. Unbreakable was awesome. One of the greatest movies ever made in the past few decades IMO.
Aliens that melt when water hits them have the technology to fly all the way here from only God knows where in Shyamalan’s mind and, not only do they choose the ONE planet which is made up of like fucking 70% WATER, they can’t even open a fucking UNLOCKED DOOR? The Raptors in Jurassic Park were smarter than them. Fuck, the water content in the air alone should have fucking liquidated them. Isn’t the dude from India? The fucking humidity level there is at around 80% year round ffs.
I KNEW Bruce Willis was already dead halfway during The Sixth Sense but I went along with it because it was so engaging. It’s a silly twist but not at the level of The Village. But even The Village was competently made.
But I can’t fucking believe there are actually people stupid enough to think the twist from The Village was good enough to steal.
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It really is an amazing movie, despite the benching scene and the fake text over at the end. It’s also the only superhero movie I can stomach.
You could say that the crazy Mel Gibson pulled of a more sensible variant of the twist in Apocalypto and there’s a muted version in The Blind Swordsman Zatoichi
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Which one lol? I’ve watched so many of the old Zatoichi movies I can’t even keep up. They had Zatoichi marathons on late night TV in China a decade ago and I sat through a couple of them in my hotel rooms at different times. All I remember are the badass fight scenes.
Are you talking about the Takeshi Kitano remake where he reveals he’s not really blind at the end but can’t even walk without tripping when he opens his eyes because he’s not used to it?
PS
Say what you want about Mel, but he’s a fucking hell of a storyteller. I consider Apocalypto near Akira Kurosawa’s level when it comes to storytelling.
Yes, and the part when one of Zatoichi’s adversaries ineptly pulls out a Colt.
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LOL ok I loved that movie. Kitano’s like my favorite Japanese filmmaker when he makes Yakuza black comedies. Hanabi(Fireworks in other markets, I think) is among my top 10 list.
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