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Master of Kung Fu was a great comic, I have spoken.

That's not to say it didn't go off the rails several times, but with great artists like Paul Gulacy making magic the comic often sang to me, they were truly movie-worthy. A lot of these 1974-ish issues are online and still a pleasure to read, which saves me from climbing up into the attic and looking through old cardboard boxes. (I wonder what state they're in now, decades later?)

I probably don't need to repeat that the movie (which was a good action movie, I won't deny that) had very little to do with the comics except using Shang Chi's name. Yes yes there were good reasons they changed his origins, I get that, those “yellow peril” slurs that came hand in hand with his being the renegade son of Fu Manchu just couldn't be allowed. But that was a good background history. No magic or silliness, just a megolamaniac supervillain plotting to take over the world, and occasionally hurl the Moon out of orbit.

Indeed, although I haven't read many shang chi comics I was aware the film bore little resemblance to any I'd read. It was an entertaining movie, but pretty much a cookie cutter MCU by numbers.

I finished Shang Chi a d liked it. Unfortunately I don't know the comic so I can't comment on that.
I really liked the martial arts stuff in it.

—–spoilers—–

What I didn't like was that it followed the same dumb pattern of the Avengers movies and many other Marvel films:
The bad guy in all of the film turns out not to be the big bad guy, it's actually stupid Cuthulu CGI monsters that only come in at the very end. LAME.
The hero's fight the big band and the minor hero's fight the meaningless smallfry.

Apart from that I liked it overall
——-

I've almost finished Eternals.
The characters are good but the plot is poorly written :(

It starts off with a text infodump for goodness sakes!!!

——spoilers——

We get a mystery that perplexes everyone and is really interesting… And then it's all solved in one go in the middle of the film when a character explains it all.

We get another mystery and that's all solved as well when a character explains it all in flashback. Jeez! 🤯🤯🤯🤯

They also fight meaningless Cuthulu CGI monsters…
And then there's the stupid subpolot with the monster that gets sentiant and could become a big bad or their ally but it goes nowhere at all.

I haven't quite finished it so it might improve but so far the plot is a huge mess.

——-

Good characters and actors though.

—–

Ok, I finished the Eternals.
The plot didn't improve. It's still a feel good movie though, it ends on a positive note. I didn't hate it, it's just a great example of terrible plotting.
They could probably fix it with a recut.

The Mystery Of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes - Tries to uncover Marilyn's death, was it murder? Lots of ideas put forth from various people, some noted, some unheard of, but in the end it just looks like she died of her meds she overdosed on. A 2 on the Moizmeter.

That almost looks like an “A2” rating XD

Just watched my Friday night double feature on The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs. The pairing was The Little Girl Who Lived Down the Lane (1972) and Housebound (2014).

Gotta say, I vastly preferred the former.

I'm watching The Strange World Of Gurney Slade, a six part British comedy(?) from 1960 starring the then hugely popular Anthony Newley.
It starts out by breaking the fourth wall and then Gurney's world gets progressively stranger as he encounters talking dogs and dustbins while engaging in lots of existential first person narration.

It's quite a few years ahead of it's time for tv, hearlding what was to come later in the decade. David Bowie cited it as an early influence.

Ironscarf wrote:
I'm watching The Strange World Of Gurney Slade

Sounds really cool!

—–

I've been watching "Chuck“.
I thought it's be a fun action sitcom to binge while I draw.
It's about a young man who becomes infected with a powerful espionage intelligence computer database that he is able to randomly access info from when it's triggered by him seeing certain things. The CIA needs to use him as a secret ”spy“ because he is now the only copy of that database.
The other big setup part of the show is that one of his handlers is a pretty woman who's cover is that she's his new girlfriend.
This means there's a lot of ”will they, won't they“? relationship stuff happening.

Generally it's a fairly entertaining series. The characters are pretty good, the writing isn't top level but it's usually a B+
Yvonne Strahovski does a convincing American accent but she'd really do better with her Aussie one. I was introduced to Zahchary Levi in Shazam, but it's good to see how he started…

The silliest conceit of the series is how so much international conspiracy stuff happens around one little consumer electronics shop in Burbank and yet none of the bad guys ever seem to clue in properly on that. But that's normal for many series. I mean, how many murders do that have every year in Midsomer?

The only real annoyance for me in the show are the constant love triangles and missed romance plots- ”I love him but he doesn't love me“ - ”I love her but she doesn't love me…" SO awful.

The wife and I currently waiting around in annoyance for the latest episodes of The Offer and Strange New Worlds to drop. We are going to finish up Candy, however.

Candy has been interesting, it is nice to see John Bloom-adjacent content that isn't just Joe Bob Briggs, and the true-crime case is having a moment because HBO is going to be adapting it as well.

OPERATION MINCEMEAT - Colin Firth, Kelly MacDonald, Matthew Macfadyen, Jason Isaacs, Penelope Wilton, Johnny Flynn (as Ian Fleming), Simon Russell Beale (as Winston Churchill). Based on true story. 1943 Firth and Macfadyen devise a trick plan to fool Nazi's into thinking Allies will try to land troops in Greece instead of actual sight, Sicily. Very confusing at times for me, scenes keep jumping all over da place, and so many characters, who's who?? Too many ways plan could have gone wrong but, watch and see. A just under 3 on the Moizmeter.

“The man who never was” was the original… a MUCH better title. Sooooo much better. XD

———-

I finally saw The Edge of Tomorrow.
It was much better than I expected it to be. It was really promoted badly with that ugly Mecha suit design and the crappy helmet Tom Cruise wears. Ironically, there's a lady soldier in it who has her image used for propaganda purposes in the film who looks AMAZING in her mecha armour, they should have promoed with her.

The also went with the thing about him living the same day over and over in the promo, which wasn't the interesting part because we've seen that before. The really interesting thing is seeing him as a TOTAL noob who's shitting his pants on the battlefield, he doesn't want to be there.
That's not ever something you see from Tom Cruise in an action film.

It's only by reliving the day over and over that he becomes an amazing soldier. He EARNS it, which is much more satisfying than seeing the typically unnaturally skilled uber action star like John Wick, or the current version of James Bond, be dexterous in a way that goes beyond capable and ends up just being a parody of juvenile action fantasy.

The film comes off like a first person single player videogame, where the player repeats everything from the start every time they die. No save points.

Talking of better titles, “Live. Die. Repeat.” would have sold it better than “Edge of Tomorrow” – somehow they kept that as a tagline instead.

We hooted with laughter every time Tom got hilariously killed, I wonder how he reacted when he read the script? “M-my character dies? But it's only page 9…”

Love death and robots season 3. Only part way through but already a big improvement on season 2. Loving it.

dpat57 wrote:
Talking of better titles, “Live. Die. Repeat.” would have sold it better than “Edge of Tomorrow” – somehow they kept that as a tagline instead.

We hooted with laughter every time Tom got hilariously killed, I wonder how he reacted when he read the script? “M-my character dies? But it's only page 9…”

Ha! Not a bad idea!
Seeing Cruise die and die pathetically was pretty good 😅
Action stars just don't do that typically.

—

I'm just starting the new Rescue Rangers movie.
The premise is that they were actors in a TV show and this is the “real” them in the present day long after the fame has gone and they have real jobs and stuff… And then they all come together to solve a crime or something. I don't know, I haven't gotten that far yet.

There are some good little cameos from other cartoons, inuding Ugly Sonic with the human teeth 🤣

The first joke is a bit silly though- it's that Dale gets CGI surgery to be updated and look 3D while the rest are still 2D.
Unfortunately the movie was too cheap to actually to 2D animation and it gets pretty obvious pretty soon… Almost all (if not all) of the “2D” is just normal 3D CGI with a flat cell shading effect. It's almost convincing but as soon as you notice it, it's like cheap budget price Saturday morning cartoon level work.

Genejoke wrote:
Love death and robots season 3. Only part way through but already a big improvement on season 2. Loving it.

I agree that season 3 is a big improvement on season 2. All the shorts were quite entertaining. Well, with the exception of “Kill team kill,” which I thought was utterly uninspired and generic. I felt there were two stand-outs. “The very Pulse of the Machine” reminded me of an acid-drenched animated interpretation of Moebius' drawings. “Jibaro,” by far my favorite, was a peculiar addition to the roster, because it was really a pure art piece, as opposed to a piece of commercial entertainment.

. Definitely agree on the very pulse of the machine and jibaro being fantastic. Jibaro was artistically on of the best of the entire series. You summed up the very pulse of the machine perfectly. Even so I think I preferred bad travelling. Overall Im fairly sure Bad travelling is my favourite of the new collection, but it's like comparing apples and oranges.

Kill team kill wasn't bad, but was definitely one of the weakest. Along with the mini night of the living dead, both are well done but are ultimately shallow compared to the rest.
.

Rescue Rangers on Disney + was a bit of a surprise.
It was very knowing and meta. It was full of parody of animated adaptions and liveaction+Animated movies in general.
It was fun and entertaining.
Definitely not the movie version of Tailspin that a fan would hope for but that ship sailed decades ago, the fans who wanted that are few and far between now.

——————————-

I finally saw the Marvel film Black Widow.
This was really good!
It was way better than The Eternals and better that Shang Chi as well, especially because it avoided the boring Marvel trope of generic CG cthulu blob tentacle monsters and having a fake bad guy built up for the whole film only to have a real bad guy no one knew about at the very end.

Black Widow is an “espionage” based film. If you remember Captain America Winter Solder and Avengers Civil War they tried to do a cold-war espionage thing in those and it was weak and highly cliche in my opinion, turning Captain America into Jack Reacher.
The Black Widow film actually does it right in a way that fits perfectly with the character and her world this time. This movie succeeded in what it tried to do.

My only real complaint was the terrible Russian accents. I know the actors are trying to sound like they have Americanised Russian accents because they spent some time in the USA, but that's overdone and the non-acericanised Russinas are terrible, There are no good Russian accents and no Russian actors in the movie either it seems, which was weird. Even Ukrainians or other slavs would have worked…
Ray Winstone especially. He's a good actor but has zero range. If he's not an East end Cockney heavy he's out of his depth.

That's a personal compliant. It was good.

Funny thing about Russian accents is even with the worst imitation of one, you can find a real Russian that speaks English like that. It's freaking scary. It's like they learned to speak English by watching bad spy movies with totally British and American casts.

I've seen a movie or two where an actor has a horrible German accent. Looked him up, he was a native speaker from Switzerland as opposed to Germany or Austria but his native language was German. Where someone learned English or if they are just reciting phonetically and what regional dialect they speak all make a difference.

I've seen people complain about Maureen O'Hara ‘s Irish accent being bad. You know she was born and bred in Ireland? Oh.

Anyway, YouTube has had some great movies for free lately so I’ve finally seen Dracula: Dead and loving it and Tropic Thunder among others. Dracula was the last movie Mel Brooks directed and a real good one having Leslie Neilson as Dracula and Harvey Korman as Dr. Seward. But Renfield stole the movie. Perfect parody on the actor in the classic Lugosi movie.
Tropic Thunder was a great parody of Hollywood and action movies and actors. Tom Cruise was fabulous. Never knew he had it in him.

If you enjoyed Black Widow I would recommend both Agent Carter and Hawkeye series. The first season of Carter features a Black Widow as one of the villains, and another one shows up in Hawkeye later on. They both expand on the Widow lore that the movie went in-depth with.

I've always thought a flying city was, at best, impractical. Unless you have a good reason to do it, like the in the Crossgen comic Meridian where the lower atmosphere was poisonous.

bravo1102 wrote:
Funny thing about Russian accents is even with the worst imitation of one, you can find a real Russian that speaks English like that.

In the film it was more an issue when they were supposed to be Russians speaking Russian.
Ray Winstone was especially bad though. Good actor but the accent… oh my! XD
Besides, it's not really that reality might surprisingly mirror bad art, rather that it's better to represent a more reasonable expectation, especially in a mainstream movie.

bravo1102 wrote:
Tropic Thunder was a great parody of Hollywood and action movies and actors. Tom Cruise was fabulous. Never knew he had it in him.

The could be a great comedy or character actor, but he was suck as a mainstream heart throb hero :(

sleeping_gorilla wrote:
If you enjoyed Black Widow I would recommend both Agent Carter and Hawkeye series.

Ah, I'll have to look at them!

The flying thing in Black Widow… I never really noticed it. I was thinking it was some sort of counterpart to the hover carriers in Avengers. And it was called “Red Room”, which I thought was a silly reference to “redrum” aka “Murder”.

Non native speakers phonetically speaking dialogue in another language can be physically painful to watch. Even Toshiro Mifune had trouble pulling it off.
I watch a lot of war movies and hearing a guy playing a German speaking German with an obvious Australian accent – I had to focus on translating the words in my head rather than the Aussie twang in spoken German. And then the German accent speaking English and the twang is still there. (Sahara remake with Jim Belushi)

That's a made for cable movie. But then I have a good enough ear for German that Raiders of the Lost Arc is ruined for me with flat American delivery of German dialogue.

Yeah, you're so right. (Shudder)

I'll add another thumbs-up to Love, Death, and Robots Season 3. Big improvement upon season 2.

Currently watching The Pentaverate. It's a Mike Myers comedy about a secret society. It starts Mike Myers (as multiple characters). It's very Mike Myers-y. Lots of silly bodily function and innuendo humor. I'm enjoying it; pretty much exactly what I expected.

Ozoneocean wrote:

The flying thing in Black Widow… I never really noticed it. I was thinking it was some sort of counterpart to the hover carriers in Avengers. And it was called “Red Room”, which I thought was a silly reference to “redrum” aka “Murder”.

There is an episode in Agent Carter where they go to the “original” Red Room, which is just what they call the training facility for the Black Widows. I think it has more to do with Red being the country's color. Both shows are on Disney+

Barry season 3 - I saved up multiple episodes to binge ‘em. I think I’m up to episode 5. They're nice and quick. Pretty cool - a bit cartoonish.

Some character moves I applaud (I like Sally better this season) while some are baffling (Dammit, Fuches! You could have just left and had a great life! Of course, then you'd be off the show, which would be no good).

Henry Winkler continues to be a standout. I like what they're doing with his character so far this year.

Not much compares to Better Call Saul. The last six episodes are still five weeks away. I watch a lot breakdown/theory videos on it.

LOVE DEATH AND ROBOTS season 3

Thanks to the recommends from Genejoke and others, and the trailer, which is great, I'm definitely gonna start watching this soon.

What's this Barry thing?

I'm currently watching Good Omens
I think that was a joint project between Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.
The premise is that the Antichrist is being born and the end of the world is near so an angel and demon are teaming up to try and stop it.

It's a very nice looking fantasy series with many great actors and high production values.
The one trouble for me is that the logic of the world and even the ethics that the authors are espousing through the story are paper thin… Think about anything in it for more that 2 seconds and it melts away like wax.
Even so the performances are so good that you can shut your brain of fairly easily.

I enjoyed the Good Omens serial. It was more cohesive than the book. Of course, as with all book adaptations, it left out some of the bits I liked (most notably the other four riders of the apocalypse), but cutting some things did help streamline the story.

Those Who Wish Me Dead - Angelina Jolie, Finn Little, Jon Bernthal, Aiden Gillen, Nicholas Hoult, Medina Senghore. Angelina is a forest fire fighter who is haunted by a rescue she didn't make years ago. She now finds this young boy (Finn) who saw his father killed by these crooks (Gillen, Hoult) as he had a list of nasty men in politics. Jon and Medina help out sort of. It gets a 2 on the Moizmeter.

usedbooks wrote:
I enjoyed the Good Omens serial. It was more cohesive than the book. Of course, as with all book adaptations, it left out some of the bits I liked (most notably the other four riders of the apocalypse), but cutting some things did help streamline the story.

The four horsemen are there… They haven't ridden horses yet in the part I've seen but I saw Famine and War, played by that lady from Catch.

——————-

I finally saw two movies that came out in the 1990s that I've been avoiding for ages XD

First up Face Off
I avoided this because it was supposed to be ultra violent and also I was so disappointed to Nicholas Cage for turning into a big budget action star. After Raising Arizona I had hopes for him… Though that was an outlier in reality and Nicholas has always been a crazy actor who does whatever he wants.

The story of Face Off is that an FBI agent wants to hunt down a “terrorist for hire” because of the bad stuff he's done but also for killing his son years ago. He hunts him down and defeats him but there's still a bomb in LA somewhere and the only one who knows where it is, is the terrorist's brother and he wont talk to anyone BUT his brother. So the FBI guy swaps faces with the terrorist and goes to prison so he can con the brother…
And lots of crazy stuff happens.

Basically Face Off is a silly crazy Hong Kong mad action film from the 80s that's been copy and pasted to the USA in the 90s with English speaking actors and a Hollywood budget. It has all of the insane tropes and ideas of the maddest Hong Kong action films or even crazy Japanese animes from the early 90s… It's strange to see an American version.
This film is John Woo's mutant baby,

Second up White Men Can't Jump

I avoided this because it was heavily promoted as a sports film and sport bores me to tears… Also the promo tended to focus on the machismo of the characters and that's a real turn off. It was sold as a comedy sports film that had this buddy thing with Harrilson and Snipes, with the funky, bouncy 90s rap in the background… ew.

The story is about two poor men with poor families who struggle at the very bottom of society, literally scamming money where and when they can to get by, they even scam each other and are unrepentant and nasty about it.
Woody is a white basketball player from the Midwest who was very good but had to leave for various reasons. Weaselly is a low level scammer living in LA in a crime ridden neighborhood.
The two team up to scam money from people who play 2 on 2 basketball at small courts. Weaselly talks big, shows off an insults the players, brags and says he can beat any of them and is willing to bet lots of money, they can pair him with any other team mate. Woody hangs out looking dorky and white, so the guys pick him to be Weaselly's useless partner. Then they both trash talk and brag at the other team while beating them and taking all the money…

It's a more intelligent and thoughtful film than it was promoted as or than its stupid title would suggest. It's an interesting, if slightly facile look at poverty in LA in the 1990s. It ends on a slightly down note.


-BOTH movies have people saying the titular line over and over in a super obvious way.