Month: November 2022

Here we are, yet again, with another installment of Recent Blu-Ray Hauls.  I’m not going to be including the Horror Pack this month.  Why?  Well, let’s just say that bills need to be paid.  When all was said and done, what I had left I needed for other things.  Such is life.  I might do a post on my experience with Horror Pack, but I still managed a pretty decent haul with it this month.  So, let’s get right into the nitty gritty of it, shall we?  Starting off:

Top Gun: Maverick

This one was always going to happen.  I really enjoyed the original film from 1986, but Maverick is in a whole different league.  It’s one of those rare sequels that outdoes the original in every way.  The story is very simple as it has Tom Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell train a group of Top Gun grads.  Their mission is to hit a nuclear stockpile in enemy territory.  Again, simple.  But it’s the characters that really drive this movie forward.  Well, that and the jet sequences, which are second-to-none.  Movies really aren’t made this way anymore.  It all feels real, because it is.  The actors are up in those F-18s doing the cinematography themselves.  It’s brilliant film-making in the way that only Tom Cruise could do.

The Virgin Spring

A lot of movies that we see today are often inspired by older movies.  Star Wars was heavily influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress and Seven Samurai, for example.  Even one of the most notorious movies ever made, Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left was inspired by an older movie.  In this case, Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring.  The story follows a young woman as she heads towards a church bringing some offerings.  One the way, she’s raped and murdered by a group of goatherders who seek refuge in her father’s house.  When he discovers what they’ve done, he enacts his revenge.  The difference between this and Craven’s movie, is that Craven focused more on the cruelty of the crime and revenge rather than the characters.  This is not an easy movie to sit through, even though it’s much less graphic than House.  The theme is different as well, as there is a lot of religious elements.  The Criterion set has a lot of really interesting special features.  It’s worth taking a look at.  Also, Max Von Sydow is amazing.

The Seventh Seal

The second Ingrid Bergman film on this list, The Seventh Seal follows Max Von Sydow’s character as he plays a game of chess with Death himself.  This is one of the more grim movies to come out of the 50s, but it’s remarkable for an outstanding story and great acting.  There’s a lot of allegorical elements in the film, which is appropriate considering Mr. Bergman’s strict religious upbringing.  But the idea that we are all playing a game of chess with Death is a really compelling one.  We all lose eventually, but it’s just a matter of keeping the pieces on the board.  Absolutely fantastic movie, and brilliantly filmed.  It’s a must-own movie.  If you consider a real film buff, this should already be in your collection.  For me, it’s better late than never.

Silent Hill

In the pantheon of video games, Silent Hill is regarded as one of the best horror games ever made.  That said, I’ve never actually played it.  Never got around to it.  I’m more of a Resident Evil guy myself.  But the movie of Silent Hill is a pretty decent movie based on the game.  It came out back in 2006, but a lot of the visuals and CGI still hold up.  It’s incredibly atmospheric, and has a really solid cast that includes Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean, and Alice Krige.  Alice Krige can play a villain like it’s nobody’s business, and she’s fantastic here.  I would rank Silent Hill as one of the best video game-to-movie adaptations out there, even though the bar really isn’t that high.  It’s just a shame that the sequel was god-awful.  It does run a little too long.  They could’ve shave about 20 minutes and it probably would’ve been a lot better.

Fall

I’m a huge fan of survival thrillers.  You know the ones.  Somebody gets stranded out in the middle of nowhere and they have to find someway to survive.  I guess I really like them because I like to think I’m smart enough to not put myself in those situations.  Fall is about a woman who loses her husband in a tragic climbing accident, and she spends the next year getting drunk.  Her best friend manages to convince her to climb a 2,000 foot tall radio tower.  Look, this movie’s not going to win awards for realism, but it might win awards for making people’s palms sweat.  It’s intense.  It’s very simple, but the idea of climbing an old, rusty radio tower works.  While I think the film could do less with the interpersonal melodrama, the actual climbing and survival aspects of the film are really good.  The two actresses do all their own stunts and it’s just a wild ride.

The Enforcer

Movies about human trafficking have been going on for decades.  Action movies involving this particular topic didn’t really become popular until 2008 when Liam Neeson starred in Taken.  That movie shined a light on one of the most insidious crimes being perpetrated.  Problem is, is that a lot of these movies tend to follow the same pattern: A retired or retiring special ops agent has a daughter/friend who gets kidnapped by traffickers and he has to hunt them down to save her.  Everybody got on the train, including Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: Last Blood.  Well, here’s one starring Antonio Banderas: The Enforcer.  Mr. Banderas plays Cuda, a mob enforcer who befriends a young runaway, Billie.  She gets kidnapped by crooks specializing in cyber sex trafficking, so he has to turn on his employers to save her.  This isn’t actually a bad movie, and there’s some real heart here.  But it only works because Antonio Banderas is so damn good.  If he wasn’t a part of this movie, it would’ve been just another forgettable generic action movie.

All in all, not a bad haul this month.  About Horror Pack, though:  I don’t know if I’m going to sign up again, the last two boxes I got, I ended up with movies that I already had, and their exclusive titles haven’t really been working for me.  Woman in the Chair was an exception.  I would say about the half the time, I’d be getting some decent stuff, but the other half?  Yikes.  As I said in my intro, I might do a post on the Horror Packs that I got.  Until next time, friends!

Released: January 2019(China)

Director: Cheng Si-Yu

Not Rated

Run Time: 74 Minutes

Distributor: Hi-YAH!/Well Go USA

Genre: Action

Cast:
Dennis To: Huo Yuanjia
Zhuang Han: An Bei
Li Ruoxi: Lady Wang
Naomen Eerdeni: Takeda

There was a time when the martial arts film scene was dominated by the Far East.  Specifically, China.  There’s a reason for that.  No other country has such a wide variety of martial arts styles.  You’ve southern styles like Wing Chun, Choy Lee Fut, and Hung Gar, while the north has Northern Praying Mantis, Baguazhang, and Tai Chi.  That’s not including the multiple animal styles as well as Wushu.  When it comes to martial arts movies, China has a lot of history to draw from with folk heroes like Wong Fei Hung and Beggar Su.  But the West really didn’t know about all these different movies until Jackie Chan exploded on to the scene with movies like Police Story.  But it wasn’t until Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that the West saw the real beauty of Kung Fu movies and what they brought to the table.  China had dominated the scene for over 30 years.  Unfortunately, the last decade or so saw a major decline in the quality of Kung Fu movies.  Unless it involved Donnie Yen or Sammo Hung, the quality of films was up in the air.  A lot of this was due to the Chinese government’s more direct influence of their film industry, deciding to move further away from their traditional martial arts movies and instead embracing a more MODERN take on action movies.  With movies like Kung-Fu League, Ip Man: Awakening, and Unity of Heroes, China lost its footing with martial arts movie fans, myself included.  With other countries like Thailand, Indonesia, and Cambodia stepping up to the plate, it became clear that Chinese superiority in the action film scene was longer there.  Well, we just got ourselves a new movie called The Grandmaster of Kung Fu, starring Dennis To.  You know what?  It’s pretty decent, actually.

The Grandmaster of Kung Fu stars Dennis To as the legendary Huo Yuanjia, a Chinese martial artist who was known for defeating multiple foreign fighters in public matches.  The movie sees Huo Yuanjia initially competing to take the leadership of a well-known martial arts school.  The group of masters are then confronted by a contingent of Japanese soldiers who believe that Japanese martial arts are superior to the Chinese way of fighting in every aspect.  With Japan taking control of China, Huo Yuanjia, along with other martial artists aren’t standing by when their way of life is being threatened.  Movies dealing with foreign invaders is pretty on par with a lot of what’s been coming out of Hong Kong lately.  They’ve been using those story-lines for decades, but the nationalism in this films has never been as “in-your-face” as they have in the past decade.  That said, the story in this film is pretty standard.  Like the Ip Man movies, the film-makers take a real-life figure and they build a fictional story around him, which happens every where.  It’s nothing new under the sun.  What I like about the story here isn’t necessarily the details, but rather how streamlined it is.  This movie moves at a very quick pace.  It has to, because it’s only 74 minutes long.  As a result, there’s no real room for character development.  Not for the hero and not for the villains.  There is something to be said for simplicity in action movies and The Grandmaster of Kung Fu is as simple as it gets.  That’s not really a bad thing, though.

Like I said before, for the longest time, China has had some of the best action film-making in the world.  Sadly, over the past decade, up-and-coming film-makers in Hong Kong seem to have learned the wrong lessons when it comes to filming action.  A lot of the more recent Kung Fu flicks have resorted to shaky-cam, extreme close-ups, and hyper-fast editing.  They’re not giving the action room to breathe, nor letting the audience see what’s going on.  When these things happen, it’s usually because the fight choreography isn’t that good.  If you have faith in your fight choreographer, you allow the camera to be able to sit still and allow the audience to see the action unfold.  Seeing the wrong kind of action film-making in a Kung Fu movie is really perplexing to me, and I wish they would stop.  It’s not edgy, it’s not cool, it glorifies incompetency and cements the wrong kind of mentality.  Thankfully, The Grandmaster of Kung Fu sidesteps a large amount of these issues.  It’s not perfect, and I wouldn’t call it a return to form, but it’s a step back in the right direction.  There’s more wire-work than I think there should be, but we can see what’s happening, and I’m okay with that.  There is clearly talent involved here.  Dennis To himself is a martial arts expert, but he’s also turned out to be a good actor.  I really like his turn as Yuanjia in this movie.  He brings the presence and physicality that the character needs.  Everybody is okay, but this is Dennis To’s show.  There’s no fight scene here that’s going to be remembered as iconic, I can tell you that right now, but the stuff here is actually pretty decent, and that’s more than what I can say for something like Kung Fu League.

I’ve drifted away from Hong Kong’s action movies for a while now, for the specific reason I already mentioned.  But that doesn’t mean they can’t do better.  The Grandmaster of Kung Fu is better.  Not that it’s a really high bar these days, but it is a major improvement over what Hong Kong put out recently that wasn’t with Donnie Yen or Sammo Hung.  I’m always game for a great martial arts flick.  Whether that comes from the West or the East, it doesn’t matter.  If it’s good, I’ll sing its praises from the highest mountain.  If if sucks, well…there’s other stuff out there.  The Grandmaster of Kung Fu isn’t great.  I wouldn’t even call it all that good, but it’s a decent way to spend 74 minutes, and that’s what matters.  I hope that film-makers in China don’t continue to make the mistakes they have made by replicating the mistakes that WE have made in film-making.  There’s a lot of great up and coming talent in China, and I seriously hope they get the chance to prove it.

Released: November 2022

Director: Ryan Coogler

Rated PG-13

Run Time: 161 Minutes

Genre: Action

Distributor: Marvel Studios/Disney

Cast:
Letitia Wright: Shuri
Lupita Nyong’o: Nakia
Danai Gurira: Okoye
Winston Duke: M’baku
Angela Bassett: Ramonda
Tenoch Huerta: Namor
Martin Freeman: Everett Ross
Dominique Thorne: Riri

When Black Panther was released back in 2018, the impact it had was massive.  It wasn’t just a superhero movie, it was a cultural landmark.  While the character of Black Panther isn’t the first black superhero, he was the first one to get world-wide recognition.  While the film was popular with everybody, it hit home even more so for African-Americans and other people of African descent.  Everything about the movie, from the music to the set and costume designs, was designed to expose the world to the various cultures that inhabit Africa.  But it’s the story and the writing that really propelled the movie with Chadwick Boseman giving one of his best performances ever.  So, when Mr. Boseman passed away in 2020, there were some serious concerns about how to move forward with a second Black Panther film.  It was going to happen one way or another, but Chadwick’s death was sudden.  It took the wind out of the sails for almost everybody.  How do you move forward with a project when the lead actor, who made such an impact as an actor and a person, passes away?  There’s never an easy answer for a situation like that, but I think Black Panther: Wakanda Forever provides a path forward while respecting what came before.

Wakanda Forever begins with the funeral of King T’Challa, who passed away from a mysterious illness, leaving his mother Ramonda and sister Shuri grieving.  At the same time, a group of CIA operatives discover a batch of vibranium at the bottom of the ocean, only to be attacked by a group of mysterious blue-skinned warriors.  While Ramonda and Shuri are on a beach trying to process their grief, they are visited by a being known as Namor, the ruler of an undersea city known as Talocan.  He threatens them to bring him the American scientist who developed a machine to detect vibranium.  While I think the story might be a little overstuffed, the stuff that works is phenomenal.  The tone of this movie is somber.  The opening scene with T’Challa’s funeral sets the stage for the movie.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of humor to be had in this movie, but the overall feel is kind of downbeat, and rightfully so.  This movie was supposed to have T’Challa take on a new enemy force, but when Boseman died, everything was re-written.  I think they did an incredible job considering the circumstances.  Bringing in Namor was a smart move, because this character is going to have an impact on the MCU moving forward, but more on him later.  I think the movie could’ve done without certain plot elements that involve Martin Freeman’s Everett Ross, since that plot doesn’t really add much, and makes the movie feel longer.  But overall, I really like the story that they told here.  It’s not the stupid slap-sticky garbage that ruined Thor: Love and Thunder.  This is far more character-oriented, and the movie is richer for it.

The acting here is some of the best I’ve ever seen in a Marvel movie.  Let’s just say that if Angela Bassett doesn’t get nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role in this movie, it would be a crime.  She’s got such an incredible presence.  She’s so incredible.  Winston Duke as M’baku is always a win.  He’s just so much fun to watch.  I wasn’t entirely sure that Letitia Wright would be able to carry a movie like this on her shoulders.  She does it incredibly well.  She’s the emotional core of the film, because her character is mourning the loss of T’Challa, so she has to step up to the plate.  Danai Gurira is wonderful as General Okoye.  The character is incredibly tough and strong-willed, but also patriotic and self-sacrificing.  The actor I want to bring up here, though, is Tenoch Huerta as Namor.  This guy is really good.  The people of Talocan were based on ancient cultures like the Mayans and the Aztecs, and considering that Heurta is of Aztec descent, it makes a lot of sense to make him the leader of Talocan.  The thing is, is that Huerta is a good actor, and he’s mesmerizing as Namor.  The acting would be for nothing if the characters weren’t strong, and they really are.  Namor is the main antagonist of the film, but like Killmonger in the first movie, Namor is one of the more sympathetic villains in the MCU.  You understand his motivations to protect his people and how far he is willing to go to do it.  This guy’s clearly a threat.  You know it from the moment he confronts Shuri and Ramonda for the first time.  The character moments in this movie are some of the strongest I’ve seen since…well…Black Panther.

Sadly, there are a few issues here that mar the experience.  First of all, the movie is just too long at 161 minutes.  You could shave off about 20 minutes and still accomplish what the film set out to do.  As I said earlier, there’s a plot point with Martin Freeman’s character that just doesn’t fit with the film’s narrative, at least not in the long term.  The action is also what you would expect from a big-budget Marvel movie.  It’s spectacular, but it’s very CGI heavy, and it doesn’t always work.  Still, it’s better than that god-awful CGI fight between T’Challa and Killmonger in the last movie.  But I just can’t help but feel that the action sequences in this movie feel way too familiar and not different enough to really care about.  Thankfully, the characters and story are strong enough to keep the action moving, which is more than I can say for Love and Thunder.  No, I will not stop dunking on that movie.  It’s awful.

Phase 4 of Marvel’s MCU has been an incredibly mixed bag.  It started off on the wrong foot with Black Widow, Thor: Love and Thunder, Doctor Strange 2, and most of the MCU shows on Disney Plus.  But, there were some excellent movies in Spider-Man: No Way Home, Eternals, and Shang-Chi.  I’m happy to say that at least Phase 4 will end on a fairly strong note with Wakanda Forever.  It’s a heavier movie than most people were anticipating, but it is an emotionally gratifying film that pays off in a lot of ways.  Also, that funeral procession wasn’t just for the character of T’Challa.  It was for Chadwick Boseman as well.  So, we as an audience mourned along with the characters in the film.  I was hoping that they would handle the situation properly, and I wasn’t let down.  I’ve said in earlier posts that I was stepping away from the MCU for a while.  I’m still holding to that, but if Ryan Coogler can give us more emotionally mature and powerful movies like Wakanda Forever, I’ll check those out.  But I’m going to be very, very picky about which MCU movie I see from here on out.  Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a great follow-up to an awesome movie.  So, yeah, I do recommend this one.  It delivered on what I was hoping to see.