Expelled Grey Matter

In Kill Bill: Vol. 2   he who is to eventually be killed tells the Bride a story during a flashback to her training with a kung fu master named Pai Mei, played by Gordon Liu.  The story goes that one day Pai Mei was walking down a road and, in a show of respect, nodded slightly to a Shaolin priest who was walking in the opposite direction.  When the priest did not return the nod, Pai Mei went to the temple and demanded the priest's head, which he was understandably refused.  To punish them for their disrespect he killed everyone in the temple from the students on up to the priests.  Also known as Bai Me or Bak Mei, he is an actual historical (and somewhat mythical) figure that betrayed the Ming Dynasty to the Manchu, and is often portrayed as a bad guy with almost supernatural fighting abilities.  That is definitely the case in this movie, where he is able to retract his nether regions, one of his two weak points, in order to capture an opponent's foot and then break both legs

Many martial arts films have little to no plot, and what there is of it is to get from one fight scene to another.  Then again, there are a number that seem filled to the rim with plot, so much that one starts wondering what happened to all the fighting.  It also leads one to wonder if any official in China's 5000 plus year history has ever not been corrupt, as this seems to figure immensely when it is decided that a movie needs a little bit more than kicks and punches.  Yang Tieh (Sheng Chang), the last student of the Five Venoms House, is given a task by his dying master (Dick Wei).  The school has become infamous for turning out students that do evil, and the master believes in the treasures belonging to the school are recovered and donated to charity then it may undo the bad they have done.  The problem is the other students are still out there, each under assumed names, and each having different abilities: gecko, toad, snake, centipede and scorpion.  The map to the treasure wa

Not every kung fu film has to have the most serious plot.  In fact, it could be said that in a good many of them there's really not much plot at all.  Even some of the best, like Enter the Dragon , are set up to just have a reason to get to the fighting.   In 1978 a major new star hit the screen in Hong Kong.  He had been around, playing bit parts and doing stunt work, but Jackie Chan finally got his own movie: Drunken Master .  It turned out to be a classic itself, combining comedy and action and, surprisingly, a pretty decent plot to keep things going.  And, in any film industry, if something is done right then everyone else will try to copy it.  Drunken Arts and Crippled Fist is obviously more than a little inspired by Drunken Master , but largely does away with anything other than a series of set pieces to do some comedic martial arts.  Hsiao Hu (Yi-Min Li) is sent by his father as a child to a kung fu master (Siu-Ten Yuen) to learn the arts so that he can take over as a kung f

I must be getting somewhat lucky lately with movie posters that deliver what they promise.  This latest entry in the MonsterVerse promises the first matchup between these two heavyweights since 1963's King Kong vs. Godzilla .  It also promises a world of teal and orange.  Get used to those colors because, except for a few exceptions, those are the only ones that'll be present for the next 113 minutes.  Also be prepared have a remote close so the volume can be adjusted up and down as needed.  With all the money thrown at this it would be nice to be able to clearly hear the dialogue.  Maybe someone has realized that nobody comes to these giant monster battles to hear speeches, but Godzilla: King of the Monsters   had even less plot than this, and I didn't have to sit through a bunch of mumbling or strain to hear what little exposition there was under the soundtrack.  This is quite disappointing as I have been looking forward to Godzilla vs. Kong .  I loved Godzilla: King of t

Although I quite liked Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance , I did feel like it spent too much time on an origin story before going off on a different tangent all together.  The flashbacks amp up the idea of revenge, introduce a rather interesting bad guy and his clan, and then have our hero and his son head to deal with a bunch of thugs at a hot spring that are involved in a completely different kind of clan intrigue.  This in no way changes the fact that it is quite a fun movie with some serious spaghetti western vibes. The first movie and Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart on the River Styx  were edited together (with a lot of the exposition removed) to make Shogun Assassin , which was released eight years later and had the American who did the editing take the directing credit rather than Kenji Misumi, who did a wonderful job on both of these films.  I guess he was thinking that by doing so it was thought that they were getting around the biggest flaw in the first film, but after watch

Bruce Lee is arguably one of the most recognizable martial arts film stars though his career was rather short.  His most well-known movie is arguably the last one he completed before his death, Enter the Dragon , even if a number of films tried to cash in on his fame afterward.  That includes the movie he was making at the time he passed away, Game of Death , as well as quite a few that used archive footage or even bootleg footage of his funeral.   Before Enter the Dragon , but after television roles, were two Hong Kong films directed by Wei Lo: The Big Boss and this one, First of Fury .  Also called The Chinese Connection, Fist of Fury was an extremely low budget production, but still managed to  help Lee establish himself as an international star.  It would also lead him to direct his own movie, The Way of the Dragon , after being upset with numerous script and and directorial choices in this one.   Chen Zhen (Lee) returns to his martial arts school in Shanghai upon learning of the d

It has been awhile since I've seen a Zhang Yimou film.  In fact, going into Shadow , I wasn't really thinking anything other than it sounded like an interesting wuxia film.  As it unfolds it shows that he has not lost any of the touch he had in Hero or The House of Flying Daggers .  The obsession with calligraphy pretty much sealed it. Truth is, because of foreign film classes I took long before Zhang began to get larger budgets to do his martial arts epics, I still associate him and Gong Li, who was featured in many of his early films.  He was one of the first mainland Chinese directors to start getting a lot of attention in the United States, and he always seemed to be walking a fine line early on in not trying to anger the authorities he was dependent on for whatever funding he could get.  The Chinese movie industry has changed a bit, but I always get the feeling that he still kind of walks that line - certain scenes and plot lines can be interpreted as either critiques of c

I do not think it is that much of a secret that movie series end up getting made up as they go along.  After all, if George Lucas had any idea where his story was really going when he wrote it in the early 1970s, I highly doubt he would have had Luke Skywalker making out with his sister.  Down the line the movies that make up a series can seem much different than what they were simply because, in most cases, there really wasn't any expectation that there would ever be another movie. Cloverfield was one of those films.  The 2008 film combined elements of kaiju movies, found footage and other alien invasion tropes that had a giant monster make its way through New York.  Unless Godzilla was going to appear at some time to go mano-a-mano with the Cloverfield monster then that was about it.  It did good box office numbers, was talked about quite a bit and was accepted as being a flawed, but important, entry in the giant monster genre of films.   10 Cloverfield Lane began life as The Cel

I can understand someone being quite confused with the poster for the movie.  It prominently features Bolo Yeung, and certainly he's big enough to earn the title of the movie.  However, when watching it, Michael Wai-Man Chan is the star, and he is quickly known by his dock worker friends for being able to carry 200-pound bags of rice and run with them.  By that definition either one could be a Hercules, but I can understand that Yeung commands more of a visual presence. As for the movie, it is from one of the lesser Hong Kong studios.  That does mean lower budget, but doesn't necessarily mean lower quality, as Ta Huang proves to be a skilled visual director and is good at filming the fight scenes.  Unfortunately I don't know if a better print than what I saw was available, as the English dub I saw had definitely seen better days.  Despite that, and despite the fact the main plot has been done many times over, it still turned out to be enjoyable. Shen Wei Ta (Chan) gets into

I often complain about a lot of comic book movies being all origin story and exhibition with a bad guy in there somewhere that doesn't really figure into the action too much.  If he does, it's not until the end and it's brief.  Then there is the big bad guy, hovering about, but there is never a real fight with him; instead we have to go off on another story after every time he shows up to spout some exposition but not contribute anything more than that.    The reason I bring this up is, although they are called manga to distinguish the stories from American comic books, manga are still comic books.  While Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance is not about a superhero the story still follows the same basic line, and it is based on a character created for a manga series.  The series is a classic in the chanbara (or swordfighting) genre of Japanese movies, and from what I understand the sequels largely excel in telling better stories, but this first entry is severely hampered

Jet Li became a huge international star in the 1990s, largely due to the Once Upon a Time in China series.  But, like many of his contemporaries in Hong Kong cinema, he started off with the Shaw Brothers.  He had been studying martial arts since he was a child so it's not a surprise that the studio decided to give him a starring vehicle early on.  It's also not a surprise that the studio decided to throw a sizeable budget at the film as well. Martial Arts of Shaolin gathered more than 300 martial artists from around China to participate in the movie and it is rather a beautiful spectacle.  Jet Li does what he does, Chenghui Yu makes a good villain and there is plenty of wonderfully choreographed fighting among some of the most beautiful landscape on Earth.  It definitely has everything needed for a movie to showcase the studio's new young rising star.  Everything, that is, except a little more than the merest hint of a plot. Zhi Ming (Li) is a monk at the Northern Shaolin T

A quirk of warp technology combined with using a star for gravity assist was established early on in the first season of Star Trek as a way of traveling back in time.  Although other methods popped up here and there - dimensional doorways and large-scale machinery used to open such - the series came up with a somewhat scientifically plausible way for the Enterprise to head back to the "modern" day whenever the budget began to run dry.  It was also much more of a believable method than the Earths with parallel evolution (right down to the same plate tectonics) that popped up every now and then. The truth was some of those time travel stories were the best episodes.  "City on the Edge of Tomorrow" is one of the standout episodes from the entire series and even the episode with Gary Seven is quite a lot of fun.  The penultimate episode of the the Original Series involves an entire society that has shipped itself back in time to avoid dying in a supernova, and it is a m

13 Assassins may have a title reminiscent of The Seven Samurai but, although the story does contain the spirit of Akira Kurosawa, it is not Takashi Miike's attempt to imitate the most famous Japanese director of all time.  Instead, this movie is a remake of a film of the title from 1963 that was directed by Eiichi Kudo, just heavily updated for the modern age by Miike.   It is 1845 and the various clans are at peace.  That is threatened by the actions of Lord Naritsugu (Goro Inagaki), the adopted brother of the current shogun.  Naritsugu enjoys torturing and raping for fun, believing all others, including his trusted samurai adviser Hanbei (Masachika Ichimura), are less than him.  Sir Doi (Mikijiro Hira), the adviser to the Shogun, secretly hires Hanbei's former classmate Shinzaemon (Koji Yakusho) to gather a team to assassinate Naritsugu before he secures a place in the shogun's government and thus threatens the fragile peace.  13 Assassins, though it may appear to have so

For mainstream audiences this is probably going to be one of the most recognizable Shaw Brothers martial arts films.  If not the movie, then the title would be, as it was rephrased as Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), a classic hip-hop album by the Wu-Tang Clan, replete with quotes from the English dub of this film.  It should come as no surprise due to the heavy influence martial arts films had on the Black community in the 1970s, and Shaw Brothers turned them out like no one else. This was also one of the best movies to come out of that studio, directed by Chia-Liang Liu and featuring an epic plot and colorful sets.  It's unfortunate that it originally hit the United States under such a generic title as Master Killer, when The 36th Chamber of Shaolin is a title that contains a sense of mystery and adventure.  It also better sums up this film as it contains themes such as developing self-control, doing one's duty to society as well as the need for institutions to change with th

Director Robert Clouse definitely has a unique distinction.  He was responsible for directing Enter the Dragon , the last movie Bruce Lee completed before his death and also one of the best martial arts films ever made.  He also was responsible for this movie, which often turns up on lists of the worst movies ever made.  Not just martial arts movies, but movies in general.  To be honest the closest thing he directed that was even near the level of Enter the Dragon was its intended follow-up, Game of Death , which down the road was finished with body doubles of Bruce Lee. Personally, I have always wondered how much of these movies Clouse did direct because, without Lee, his attempts at making other films (like Black Belt Jones ) featured rather clumsy fight choreography and a directing style that could generously be called competent.    That generosity barely extends with Gymkata.  Jonathan Cabot (Kurt Thomas) is recruited by a government agent to go to the country of Parmistan.  The U.

The first Saw was made largely to get James Wan and Leigh Whannell's feet in the door in Hollywood.  Just out of film school, they figured out how to make a horror film with limited budget and limited locations and, through connections, got a few named stars to be in it.  At the time they thought it would do the box office of most horror films, which means turning a profit but not not turning them into instant millionaires. Saw , however, proceeded to do just that.  The quality of the movie, and the word of mouth it generated, resulted in unforeseen worldwide box office returns.  As usual when this happens the next question that came up was what to do next.  Since it was made to be a standalone film, with a big reveal at the end and everything wrapped up for the characters involved, there had never been any thought on making this into a franchise. Luckily for Lionsgate and Twisted Pictures there was Darren Lynn Bousman.  He had been trying to get a script he wrote made into a movi