Lady Liberty is my Neighbor

From Cracked's Top 8 Movies of 2011:

"The first four movies didn't make sense in the insulting way a dumb person doesn't make sense when trying to talk their way out of a speeding ticket. Fast Five didn't make sense in the awesome way that Wu-Tang Clan lyrics don't even try to make sense. The first four movies failed to ask the all-important question, "What if we rubbed melted butter on the Rock and told him to pretend to be Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive?" Fast Five asked that question, and had the good sense to realize the answer was, "That would be goddamn hilarious!""

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.

 This is practically a study in how trailers manipulate mood management.  This version of the film looks hysterical!

Dog vs Alan Turing


 

That said, I wish the staff had been more prepared.

Okay, I don't know if it's a step up or down for a director who is mostly known for doing vapid dance movies to be given the helm for the next GI Joe. 

However, I do think that a Dance Battle between the Joes and the forces of Cobra would be awesome.  And hey, Channing Tatum was in the first Step Up movie, anyways...

Spot the companions!

I grant I didn't recognize most of them, given my lack of Who-Fu, but was still awesome.

I died. (h/t io9)

EDIT: I can't stop watching this. It's hypnotic.