Netflix pays off again.
May. 21st, 2003 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynLast Thursday, like I said in my journal, I didn't get to check my post office box. As a consequence, three DVDs were waiting for me when I got to look on Friday. I didn't get to watch them immediately, as we were busy preparing for my sister's surprise wedding shower to be held on the 18th, but I have now watched all three of them - or at least tried to.
I got about ten minutes into Heroic Trio before I had to send it back. I've seen the movie before, with my old Feng Shui GM, and I liked it then - but this was the Miramax release. It was dubbed into English. It just sounded wrong, especially since I'd seen it before. Maybe if the voice actors were better matched to the visual acting it wouldn't be such a problem - or maybe if the voice script didn't repeatedly refer to 'Wonder Woman' as 'Shadow Fox'. Yeesh. That's up there with the way the female character Bacha in The Seventh Curse was referred to in the subtitles as 'Betsy'. Where the hell did they get that from?
Postman Fights Back was at least okay. I actually watched that one first. I have since realized that I really can't trust the Netflix summaries to tell me who the star is and must check with the Internet Movie Database. This one made it sound like Chow Yun-Fat was the main character, a courier in the early days of the Chinese Republic. He's not. He's not even close. He's good in the part - an arrogant little prat with a go-go gadget dart thing tucked up his sleeve, which makes it look like he has m4d ch1 sk1llz capable of knocking a horse over at ten paces - but he's not the star. That honor belongs to Leung Kar Yan, who I have to say does a pretty good job in the part. This is a drama with a heavy dose of Hittin' People Action. The premise can be summed up as "here, you four, deliver these packages but don't even THINK of opening them, blow them up if you have to but don't look inside". It features a really graphic illustration of the lesson the Boxers failed to learn- you can't fight bullets with kung fu. However, it suffers from one really glaring flaw: a poorly integrated ninja.
Yes, folks, this movie is the first one I've seen yet that violates the Ninja Hypothesis. This movie would have been better off without the ninja. "How is this possible?" I hear you cry. Well, it's simple; the ninja doesn't appear until well into the second half of the movie, gets mentioned more as an afterthought than anything else, starts fighting after nine-tenths of the decisive plot events have already happened, and pulls such a ridiculous pop-up-and-disappear act in the final fight that it's more like watching a game of Whack-a-Mole than seeing a ninja fight. If you are going to put a ninja into your movie, use him properly. Geez... Also, I'm not really impressed by ninjas who dress in white. Unless you are a Winter Ninja from the Ice Planet Hoth, or you are a Salt Ninja from the inland regions where seas evaporated and left behind a layer of blinding white, that outfit is not going to keep you particularly hidden. Go dress in camo if you must, but the whole point of the ninja outfit is to be subtle and difficult to spot. Don't let the fact that your character gets to kill Chow Yun-Fat's with a gardening fork to the base of the skull go to your head, m'kay? Thanks...
Okay, this was a movie worth watching. I knew from the start that it was supposed to be a romantic drama, so I wasn't expecting Hittin' People Action, or Things What Go Boom Action, or Hot Hot Lead-On-Human Action. Nope. Wanted to see Da Man in his original milieu - dramatic acting - and oh, my friends, Chow Yun-Fat did not disappoint. This movie was released in 1984 and is also known as Waiting for Dawn or Waiting for Daybreak. The three main characters are Wong Hak Keung, a laborer whose family once had money; his girlfriend Han Yuk Nam, whose father keeps trying to arrange marriages for her for the sake of money and power; and Yip Kim Fay, Chow's character, a former actor from up north who's come to Hong Kong as one step on his journey to emigrate to Australia or America. Nam's got a seizure problem that crops up in times of stress, which puts a lot of people off, and she really doesn't wanna marry the guy her father arranges for her at first - which is not as bad as it sounds, since the guy doesn't want to marry her either on the grounds that loveless marriages are bad all around. Fay and Keung become friends pretty quickly early on in the movie, and both of 'em have a certain measure of interest in Nam. The day the three of 'em are supposed to leave Hong Kong for the mainland, the Japanese invade, and life gets really and truly ugly. Let's just say that I spent a stretch of this movie alternately wincing at the thought that Baghdad was probably suffering similarly due to the same war-induced lack of law, and feeling at least marginally relieved that the worst atrocities were things that the American army, for all its flaws and problems, would not ever have done. From what I remember of my history books, you really didn't want to be a civilian in Japanese-occupied anywhere during the Second World War, and this movie makes it pretty clear HK was no exception. Between the love triangle plot - Keung gets engaged to marry Nam after the lawless first few nights leave her in a situation where her father couldn't get her married off if he tried, Keung loves Nam, Nam loves him and is grateful to him but also loves Fay, and Fay does his best not to acknowledge any feelings for Nam on the grounds that he wants her and Keung to be happy - and the life-in-wartime plot, I was pretty well impressed by this movie. I was even more impressed when Fay demonstrated exactly what he was willing to do to make life better for both his friends and his countrymen... if you can find this somewhere, rent it and you'll see what I mean. If you can't and you belong to Netflix, I'm sending my DVD back today, so's you know.
The next three movies I'm expecting are Blackadder Back and Forth, Once Upon A Time In China 2, and The Emperor's New Groove, so it might be a while before I do more reviews. Thought I'd keep those of you who're interested in these things up to date.
I got about ten minutes into Heroic Trio before I had to send it back. I've seen the movie before, with my old Feng Shui GM, and I liked it then - but this was the Miramax release. It was dubbed into English. It just sounded wrong, especially since I'd seen it before. Maybe if the voice actors were better matched to the visual acting it wouldn't be such a problem - or maybe if the voice script didn't repeatedly refer to 'Wonder Woman' as 'Shadow Fox'. Yeesh. That's up there with the way the female character Bacha in The Seventh Curse was referred to in the subtitles as 'Betsy'. Where the hell did they get that from?
Postman Fights Back was at least okay. I actually watched that one first. I have since realized that I really can't trust the Netflix summaries to tell me who the star is and must check with the Internet Movie Database. This one made it sound like Chow Yun-Fat was the main character, a courier in the early days of the Chinese Republic. He's not. He's not even close. He's good in the part - an arrogant little prat with a go-go gadget dart thing tucked up his sleeve, which makes it look like he has m4d ch1 sk1llz capable of knocking a horse over at ten paces - but he's not the star. That honor belongs to Leung Kar Yan, who I have to say does a pretty good job in the part. This is a drama with a heavy dose of Hittin' People Action. The premise can be summed up as "here, you four, deliver these packages but don't even THINK of opening them, blow them up if you have to but don't look inside". It features a really graphic illustration of the lesson the Boxers failed to learn- you can't fight bullets with kung fu. However, it suffers from one really glaring flaw: a poorly integrated ninja.
Yes, folks, this movie is the first one I've seen yet that violates the Ninja Hypothesis. This movie would have been better off without the ninja. "How is this possible?" I hear you cry. Well, it's simple; the ninja doesn't appear until well into the second half of the movie, gets mentioned more as an afterthought than anything else, starts fighting after nine-tenths of the decisive plot events have already happened, and pulls such a ridiculous pop-up-and-disappear act in the final fight that it's more like watching a game of Whack-a-Mole than seeing a ninja fight. If you are going to put a ninja into your movie, use him properly. Geez... Also, I'm not really impressed by ninjas who dress in white. Unless you are a Winter Ninja from the Ice Planet Hoth, or you are a Salt Ninja from the inland regions where seas evaporated and left behind a layer of blinding white, that outfit is not going to keep you particularly hidden. Go dress in camo if you must, but the whole point of the ninja outfit is to be subtle and difficult to spot. Don't let the fact that your character gets to kill Chow Yun-Fat's with a gardening fork to the base of the skull go to your head, m'kay? Thanks...
Okay, this was a movie worth watching. I knew from the start that it was supposed to be a romantic drama, so I wasn't expecting Hittin' People Action, or Things What Go Boom Action, or Hot Hot Lead-On-Human Action. Nope. Wanted to see Da Man in his original milieu - dramatic acting - and oh, my friends, Chow Yun-Fat did not disappoint. This movie was released in 1984 and is also known as Waiting for Dawn or Waiting for Daybreak. The three main characters are Wong Hak Keung, a laborer whose family once had money; his girlfriend Han Yuk Nam, whose father keeps trying to arrange marriages for her for the sake of money and power; and Yip Kim Fay, Chow's character, a former actor from up north who's come to Hong Kong as one step on his journey to emigrate to Australia or America. Nam's got a seizure problem that crops up in times of stress, which puts a lot of people off, and she really doesn't wanna marry the guy her father arranges for her at first - which is not as bad as it sounds, since the guy doesn't want to marry her either on the grounds that loveless marriages are bad all around. Fay and Keung become friends pretty quickly early on in the movie, and both of 'em have a certain measure of interest in Nam. The day the three of 'em are supposed to leave Hong Kong for the mainland, the Japanese invade, and life gets really and truly ugly. Let's just say that I spent a stretch of this movie alternately wincing at the thought that Baghdad was probably suffering similarly due to the same war-induced lack of law, and feeling at least marginally relieved that the worst atrocities were things that the American army, for all its flaws and problems, would not ever have done. From what I remember of my history books, you really didn't want to be a civilian in Japanese-occupied anywhere during the Second World War, and this movie makes it pretty clear HK was no exception. Between the love triangle plot - Keung gets engaged to marry Nam after the lawless first few nights leave her in a situation where her father couldn't get her married off if he tried, Keung loves Nam, Nam loves him and is grateful to him but also loves Fay, and Fay does his best not to acknowledge any feelings for Nam on the grounds that he wants her and Keung to be happy - and the life-in-wartime plot, I was pretty well impressed by this movie. I was even more impressed when Fay demonstrated exactly what he was willing to do to make life better for both his friends and his countrymen... if you can find this somewhere, rent it and you'll see what I mean. If you can't and you belong to Netflix, I'm sending my DVD back today, so's you know.
The next three movies I'm expecting are Blackadder Back and Forth, Once Upon A Time In China 2, and The Emperor's New Groove, so it might be a while before I do more reviews. Thought I'd keep those of you who're interested in these things up to date.
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no subject
Date: 2003-05-21 02:17 pm (UTC)*STARES at you* You haven't seen EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE? Ohmigawd. *gapes* You're gonna love it.
Dammit, /I/ have three movies from Netflix that came today, and now I want to watch ENG. :P
Re:
Date: 2003-05-21 02:31 pm (UTC)