It's funny how much shit Arnie gets as an actor, and yet no one seems able to fill his shoes and pull off those kind of roles. This and the Conan remake really helped reinforce for me how good he really was in the right roles

SAMURAI COP
While I only recently heard of this movie while watching RedLetterMedia's Half in the Bag show, apparently it's been a cult classic for quite a while. It's about a cop who is brought onto the LA police force who is also a samurai. Supposedly he's fluent in Japanese and lives the way of the samurai. I never saw that happen in the film. I think it's safe to say the movie doesn't live up to the box art.

So Samurai Cop is tasked with bringing down a drug cartel run by an insane but oddly sympathetic Japanese (samurai?) man. His henchmen are faceless Asians. His samurai? A big white guy who is the main antagonist of the film and a bald Asian guy who doesn't do anything whatsoever.

The dialogue is stilted and hamfisted. The acting is atrocious. The production value is near zero. The soundtrack is awesome in that late 80s cheesy kinda way. I swear it was shot on super 8. The EDITING, if you can call it that consists of hard cuts between fights, character interaction and sex scenes. There's one cut in particular where they talk about needing to get somewhere and as soon as the guy finishes saying that sentence BAM, we're there. I got whiplash.

It's fun and funny to watch with some memorably awful quotes. Definitely a movie to get together with your friends and watch. It didn't feel like it reached it's cult status potential with me personally, but I can see why people enjoy the movie.

Here's a taste:

Note: the version I saw looked nowhere near as nice as this trailer.

Basic Instinct (1992) - 7/10

Shamefully hadn't seen this until just now, even though I really like Paul Verhoevens action outings.
Bill Hicks famously, and hilariously expressed comedic disdain for it, but it is actually a really good movie. The plot is basically a cat and mouse game between a cop, Michael Douglas, and a suspected murderer, Sharon Stone. The meat of the movie is basically relationships between characters, mostly with alot of sexual tension. There's alot of fairly explicit sex scenes, though it never felt gratuitous, it always felt extremely well directed and choreographed, and rather than feeling like simple exploitation, they contain alot of very subtle character work and great acting.

Really well shot by Jan de Bont, the famous Sharon Stone interview scene is shot in a very segmented, showy way with alot of push-ins, quick pans, and different techniques, but I still really liked that scene in particular. Feels like an old-style stand-off, the cops and the suspect. The rest of the film is also very attractive overall. The Blu-ray is in pretty great shape.

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) - 8/10

So well directed. At first you have no idea where the film is going, if some odd stuff is happening the movie isn't acknowledging them most of the time. As it progresses the storyline becomes more and more clear, and the characters more and more intriguing.
Great character drama, lots and lots of tension is created with little means, just great editing, acting and direction to always maintain the perfect tone from scene to scene. The movie never really telegraphs itself through music or cliches, the story moves along so organically. By the end it is a pretty heartbreaking character study.

Sort of feels like a european, more sophisticated, riviera American Psycho. Highly recommended. Lots of subtlety, detail, texture and nuance.

Last edited by TechNoir (2013-09-27 22:22:02)

Just finished World War Z. Wow, what a piece of shit. Dull, drab, and dumb. The characters might as well be steaks on sticks for zombies to eat, and the narrative essentially boils down to, "Here's Brad Pitt looking grim in Korea! Here he is looking grim in Israel!" and repeat. And people thought this was one of the BETTER movies of the summer? Wow.

Jesus, you are a better man than I am. The Sean William Scott movie sounds kind of appealing, heist movies tend to be hard to completely botch since they always have that inherent appeal of how it's going to end. In my head I see Ocean's Eleven with SWS in Clooneys role. I'm intrigued.

And now in the final installment of movies BDA got paid to watch.

Dear Frankie. (2004)

Gerard Butler gets hired by a woman to pretend to be her deaf sons father for a day. Yeah, pretty much what it sounds like, drama with a splash of romance.

This one was part of an Edmonton Film Festival event. It's...alright.

I kinda missed the first 15-20 minutes because the (heavy) scottish accents echoing off every damn building in downtown edmonton made it near impossible to understand. Luckily almost nothing happens in first 20 minutes. Unfortunately, almost nothing happens in the first 20 minutes. Once Gerard Butler shows up things get moving pretty quick and it keeps a decent pace until the end.

I do have to give some credit for a shot near the end, of Gerard and the Mom outside thier apartment. It holds on the 2 of them, nearly motionless (I got a little worried the DVD had stopped playing for a second...kinda an inverse DIF Attack of The Clones if you will) staring at each other for a soild 45 seconds as they slowly lean and kiss. It's was really nice to see someone just hold on a shot like that and trust the actors to carry it.

But on the whole I wouldn't call it anything to write home about, always nice to see Gerard playing the most awesome dad ever though...even if it does just deepen the fantasy that one day Gerard Butler can be my dad too, but eh, whattya gonna do?

Epic (2013)

Another one by Blue Sky studio, (Ice Age, Robots, Horton Hears A Who and Rio). I should say up front the first Ice Age is still among my top 5 animated movies, and Robots is in my top 10. And Horton and Rio are both really quite good. But Epic is just not up there.

The way I've been describing it to people is not as good as Ice Age or Robots, but not nearly as horrible as the Ice Age sequels. It's good, but I think it falls into a lot of the tropes of the hidden fantasy universe thing, with the war and good vs evil and the crazy scientist dad. It all felt very familiar without really adding much to the ideas.

Now, that being said, it did everything it was trying to do very very well, the world is beautiful, the art direction and design is amazing, and the story connects together and the emotions are all there. But I've seen this story before. It's Fern Gully and Avatar crossbred with Spiderwick Chronicles. And unlike Avatar it didn't give me the... excuse me....epic... world that would have carried it through that wholesale.

But at the end of the day, that really is nitpicking. I did enjoy it, there's definitely some really great moments, Christoph Waltz KIIIIIILLLS it as the villian (no surprise), and all in all I fell into the wonder of it all and I really can't help myself falling in love with universes like this.

So take that for what you will.

Also...why is it called Epic?! It seems like a really arrogant title to throw on your movie...let alone THIS movie. (also, you really wanna be affliated with Epic Movie?).

Last edited by BigDamnArtist (2013-10-01 00:24:48)

Kon-Tiki (2012)

I read the book in grade 8 and from what I recall this is a pretty accurate retelling (though they skip a lot of the boring bits in the middle). Amusingly the menu offers the options of the 'English dubbed version' or the 'Academy Award Nominated Norwegian version'. Well when you put it that way... The best behind the scenes fact was that they filmed on the actual raft that Heyerdahl's grandson made to repeat the journey. Makes a good double feature with Trollhunter. Norwegians be crazy.

Last edited by Phi (2013-10-01 01:58:04)

Must be a How To Train your Dragon/Shrek/Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs thing.

Last edited by BigDamnArtist (2013-10-01 03:53:54)

Oh my god that's really the title. I assumed this was a joke.

Watched Jiro Dreams Of Sushi on Netflix last night. I have never tried sushi & have no desire to. I also have a pet peeve of watching people eat, it grosses me out. That being said, it was wonderful. It's more about the man than the food, and I really enjoyed the shallow depth of field used so much and the wide shots, really nice scoring as well. Gorgeous is a good word to describe it.