Showing posts with label half-watching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label half-watching. Show all posts
Sunday, January 5, 2014
Half-Watching: The Grandmaster (2013)
Chinese folk hero/martial artist/Communist avant la lettre Ip Man (Tony Leung Chiu Wai looking uncannily like Barack Obama) kicks the crap out of various luminaries of historical Wuxia, as he does in a number of other movies. Ip, being an upstanding citizen and Kung Fu hero, has the Superman problem that he can never really fail, so the filmmakers smartly focus on the fallible and thus far more interesting Gong Er (Zhang Zyi) a woman heir to the other great school and thus torn between familial honour and traditional sexism. The fight scene between the two manages to make wirework legitimately sexy.
Saturday, January 4, 2014
Half-Watching: Children of the Corn (1984)
Playing on the natural antipathy for small children in suits and fishy-lipped redheads, it's clunkily acted and unsure if it wants the good kids to be precocious or endangered. The South Park parody had me expecting better, but this is Maximum Overdrive with, well, children and corn.
Friday, January 3, 2014
Half-Watching: Lair of the White Worm (1988)
A new use for the blog: Keeping track of all the movies I watch in 2014, particularly those that exist at the periphery of my consciousness as I'm watching them, or that I have to leave part way through, or otherwise are half-watched.
I spent most of Lair of the White Worm trying to figure out if the Scottish archaeologist was Peter Capaldi before the ravages of time kicked in, or just a similar-looking guy. Turns out that he was, which I believe makes this movie official Doctor Who canon. It certainly fits in with the modern show: It's relentlessly goofy, grim underneath and has a weird, icky relationship with women. Capaldi digs up a mysterious fossil which is theorized to be the dragon slain by the ancestor of local nob Hugh Grant. The fossil gets stolen by Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe as a scenery-gnawing one-woman cult) who plots to use it to resurrect her dark god Dionin. Since Grant and Capaldi beating up a lone woman isn't much of a movie, she has a handy venomous bite that turns people into her servants after they suffer through some of the most Freudian-ass hallucinations Ken Russell can imagine. There's a lot of to-do about snake-charming music and a subplot about filling tunnels with poison gas that leads to very pretty shots of the English mountains and nothing else, but at it's heart it's a pretty standard Call of Cthulhu-style monster-hunting movie, enlivened by the crazy-ass hallucination sequences. Bram Stoker wrote the original story, one presumes after deciding that Dracula was just too subtle about the dangers of female sexuality; Russell takes that theme and runs with it by way of Cannibal Holocaust and Video Toaster. Recent experiences have given me a renewed appreciation for the interestingly goofy, and Lair meets that criterion in spades.
I spent most of Lair of the White Worm trying to figure out if the Scottish archaeologist was Peter Capaldi before the ravages of time kicked in, or just a similar-looking guy. Turns out that he was, which I believe makes this movie official Doctor Who canon. It certainly fits in with the modern show: It's relentlessly goofy, grim underneath and has a weird, icky relationship with women. Capaldi digs up a mysterious fossil which is theorized to be the dragon slain by the ancestor of local nob Hugh Grant. The fossil gets stolen by Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe as a scenery-gnawing one-woman cult) who plots to use it to resurrect her dark god Dionin. Since Grant and Capaldi beating up a lone woman isn't much of a movie, she has a handy venomous bite that turns people into her servants after they suffer through some of the most Freudian-ass hallucinations Ken Russell can imagine. There's a lot of to-do about snake-charming music and a subplot about filling tunnels with poison gas that leads to very pretty shots of the English mountains and nothing else, but at it's heart it's a pretty standard Call of Cthulhu-style monster-hunting movie, enlivened by the crazy-ass hallucination sequences. Bram Stoker wrote the original story, one presumes after deciding that Dracula was just too subtle about the dangers of female sexuality; Russell takes that theme and runs with it by way of Cannibal Holocaust and Video Toaster. Recent experiences have given me a renewed appreciation for the interestingly goofy, and Lair meets that criterion in spades.
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