Lady Liberty is my Neighbor

Strigoi 
directed by Faye Jackson
TL;DR: A wonderful dark comedy involving Eastern European politics, small town isolation, and vampires.  A must-see for lovers of indie-horror looking for something truly different.

( I'm not even sure how to describe this film )

So it's been 2 years since it came out at the IFC, but I missed it then, so I finally got around to watching The Good, The Bad, The Weird, a korean action-comedy-homage to Sergio Leone in particular and Spaghetti Westerns in general.  It shouldn't be much of a surprise to anyone that I'm very fond of Spaghetti Westerns.  They're the original summer blockbuster - bombastic, anachronistic, and gleefully ridiculous.

GBW isn't a remake, as I originally thought, but a stylistic re-interpretation of the genre in a 1930s Korean setting.  As you might imagine, the story is classic Leone-style: the Bad is hired to steal a map of great important to the Japanese, the Weird shows up and steals it first by accident, and the Good is just out to bring the Bad in for a bounty.  Nothing more, nothing less.  And yet, in the resulting chase between the three draws in two local gangs, the Korean independence movement, and the Japanese-Manchurian army.  In the end, the plot is really there for one reason: for the three main characters to slowly but surely get drawn tighter and tighter together in increasingly ridiculous set-pieces (including possibly the greatest horseback chase scene in history) until the inevitable final showdown.

So how is it?  In a word...wonderful.  This flm has everything.  Cowboys, machine guns, bandits, trains, motorcycles, Tarzan-style gun-battles, ridiculously out-of-place boy band haird, and bullets that never run out until a character needs a cool reloading pose, all set to a soundtrack that is about 50% genre music and 50% techno K-hop.  The three main characters are each really funny in totally different ways, and are complete different in style, temperament, and approach.  This is one of those films where you can tell that they had a blast just making it.

Highly recc'd for anyone even curious, it's on Netflix streaming.

Friendship is Dragons.

AKA, MLP: Friendship is Magic as a D&D campaign.

Riffing off of feiran's reply to a post by trinityvixen, I find it greatly amusing that Ben Stiller's greatest cultural contribution, without irony, may be the use of the phrase "Blue Steel" to refer to that pinched-face male model expression.

 In light of trinityvixen's post about Scott Adkins in Ninja, I wanted to throw in a shout-out review of Ip Man, starring Donnie Yen (who, like Adkins, worked closely with Yuen Wo Ping and Cory Yuen throughout his career), and directed by Wilson Yip, who also worked with Yen on Flash Point.  Ip Man is a romanticized biopic of, well, Ip Man, a grandmaster of Wing Chun in the first half of the 20th century, whose many accomplishments include being the first grandmaster to teach Wing Chun openly and being Bruce Lee's first, and most influential, martial arts instructor.

Similar to Fearless, Jet Li's "biopic" of Huo Yuanjia, quite a few liberties are taken with story events to make the narrative tighter and more cinematic.  But that's okay, because we get scenes like this:


Choreographed by Sammo Hung, who Yen worked with on the Yip-directed spectacular crime/martial-arts thriller, Killzone, Ip Man isn't quite as hard-hitting either the former or Flash Point, but it's a much stronger story about a man who probably loomed as largely in Bruce Lee's worldview as Lee does in ours.

Where the hell was this version when I was a kid?

It's totally worth clicking through and watching in 720p or higher if your comp can manage it.



EDIT: So apparently (thanks to TV, in the comments) it's the most elaborate film pitch ever. Good luck to the guy. I know some people will complain about the (supposed) lack of the game's larger mythology, but I really don't care, but I only have visions of a yellow top-knotted dude with an extra pair of rubber arms.

and

Pure awesomeness!




Regular link if the embed fails: http://www.b3ta.com/links/dark_knight_trailer_done_by_kids

In January, if someone had told me that Spring 2008's killer game ap would be a Squaresoft game, I would not have been surprised.

If they had told me it would be an RPG using a twisted, cracked-out combat system that could only be described as the unholy union of Okami and DDR with a snort of cocaine on top, set in a strange cross-dimensional other-space which looks exactly like Shibuya city, has a premise which is possibly the genetic chimaera of Battle Royale, Gantz, the Matrix, and Shojo Kakumei Utena, and stars emo Harajuku labelwhores as the protagonists...I would have said they were crazy.

No, actually, I would have said that even the crazy train had left the station, and that the only thing left was totally fucking crackers nightly express to psychotic-ville.

But it's true.

Take notice, boys and girls, the world ends with you.