The Last Movie You Watched

[awty]

Last night I watched "There Will be Blood"...didn't really like it any more than when I saw it years ago in a theater.

Just finished "Walk the Line" which wasn't as good as I'd hoped it would be.

Off to find something else to watch/listen to.

[Angrboda]

Mulan.

"Her Midichlorian count is off the charts!"

[Rev. Rye]

[Rev. Rye]

Addendum to the take on Dirty Love: Not-Uwe Boll was actually supposed to be Not-Kevin Smith. The fact that in 2005, he was only starting to make bad movies and that he looks fuck-all like Kevin Smith threw me for a loop. This is apparently because he was rude to Jenny when she auditioned for a role in Mallrats and didn’t even wait until she was out of the office to laugh at her.

Also, somehow, I didn’t find out until the movie was over and the two-hour edit window was closed that the reason her eventual love interest looked like Freddy from Freddy Got Fingered is because that actually was Freddy from Freddy Got Fingered himself, Eddie Kaye Thomas.

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project is a film called Fist of Fear, Touch of Death. And before I get into it, I have to talk about Brucesploitation. What is Brucesploitation, you may ask? Well, thousands of years ago, before the dawn of man as we knew him (and by that I mean 50 years ago), a young Hong Kong actor named Bruce Lee managed to make it big in the United States and start a craze in martial arts.  And then, just as he became popular, he died of a combination of a cerebral edema and an allergic reaction to meprobamate. No more Bruce Lee, and worse for the Hong Kong film industry, no more Bruce Lee pictures. Except maybe if you count Enter the Dragon, which was released six days after he died, and another five films made up largely of stock footage that would be completed years afterward. This led to a shitton of companies trying to make a shitton of movies starring a shitton of actors who I'm sure were born with names like Bruce Li , Bruce Chen, Bruce Lai, Bruce Le, Bruce Lie, Bruce Leung, Saro Lee, Bruce Ly, Bruce Thai, Brute Lee, Myron Bruce Lee, Lee Bruce, and Bruce Lei / Dragon Lee in the hopes of capturing lightning in the proverbial bottle. Fortunately, at least one of these Bruce Lee actors made it big in the West, but only after he stopped trying to be Bruce Lee and started being just plain Jackie Chan. And this film is seen as the worst Brucesploitation film of all. 

• And we start off with fanfare that's familiar to me,  but I can't place my finger on what it is. Fortunately, it goes on long enough that I try to shazam it three times. Unfortunately, all it can give me is "Ascension" by The Beetz.
  
• Um, no, that touch of death thing is bullshit. You cannot just kill a person by touching them in a particular way. At least, I think that's what they're going for, since it's never explained in any meaningful way.
  
• That's not what misadventure means. It means an unfortunate incident, one that caused a death to occur, like, for instance, taking a painkiller that it turns out one is allergic to and exacerbates a potentially lethal condition into one that's actually lethal.
  
• There's also quite a bit of dubbed stock footage from Bruce Lee himself, either dubbing over an old interview with random truisms about karate or Kung Fu (they don't really differentiate between the two, let alone mention his actual discipline. Jeet Kune Do) or dubbing over an episode of an old movie he starred in, which was, unfortunately for the fans, is a serious drama based on a play called Thunderstorm. What's the quality of the dub? I'll let this clue you in.
  
• Self-hypnosis doesn't sound all that mysterious or elusive.
  
• Why the fuck does everybody think Fred Williamson is Harry Belafonte? And it's not like they look all that similar. They're black, they have short hair, and are fairly tall, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. Or was there a stage where he wore a big-ass porn moustache?
  
• Oh, that's right, I forgot to mention this was basically a mockumentary about a karate tournament at Madison Square Garden where people are fighting to be considered Bruce Lee's successor.
  
• Okay, the boxer seems to be closer to the truth on Bruce Lee's death when he mentions some swelling, even if he's still insists Bruce was murdered.
  
• She's got glass in the ass?
  
• What a coincidence. These four guys were harassing a woman in the park and the boxer just randomly went there and beat them up. He didn't even have to know what they were doing.
  
• This white dude was the first person who spot Bruce Lee's talents? Gee, it's almost like this movie exists as much to suck his dick as it does to lionise Bruce Lee.
  
• Bruce Lee's grandfather was one of the greatest Chinese samurai in the 19th century?
  
• We now interrupt this movie about a  Chinese martial artist with these random clips from a samurai movie. Because it's not like they're totally different disciplines in totally different cultures, especially two different cultures that fucking hate each other and one had been subject to horrifying war crimes from the other well within living memory when this movie was made. Actually, looking it up, this is actually a Chinese movie called Invisible Super Chan, even if the hairstyles look far more Japanese than Chinese. Still fairly certain that it's kinda fucked to treat Chinese and Japanese culture as interchangable.
  
• Also, as mentioned before, they redubbed an old movie Bruce Lee starred in. One with zero fighting that's apparently based on a famous Chinese play called Thunderstorm. I guess it's a valid approach. It's like if Barbarella had an extended flashback that was just the same adaptation of A Doll's House Jane Fonda starred  in and overdub it with random shit that vaguely connects with the plot of the former film, and then added flashbacks within that flashbacks to another movie set in another time that has fuck-all to do with anything.
  
• A black belt? Unless your dojo is just that shit, that should be something to be proud of.
  
• You know, if I wanted to watch a martial arts movie dubbed over with some random bullshit, I'd watch Kung Pow: Enter the Fist.
  
• So, this stock footage took up 33 of the first 53 minutes of this 83-minute film.
  
• And they went back to scenes of a random woman being sexually assaulted just so this guy can slowly walk up and kick the asses of her rapists.
  
• No, these guys aren't bothering me, I'm just into really rough shit in public.
  
• And I can totally imagine that this Asian dude with the Meathead moustache and domino mask is named Bill Louie.
  
• And why does she still have her arms held in the air? It's not like anybody's keeping them up.
  
• Yes, Bruce Lee's the #1 promoter of martial arts. I've never even heard of Aaron Banks until today.
  
• And this technique, never seen before in the United States is called The Reverse James Caan in Misery.
  
• Well, it's nice to know that Fred Williamson is greatly undermining the whole premise of trying the successor of Bruce Lee.
  
• Huh. Justin Whang is a record-breaking martial artist. Who knew. Okay, technically, it's Richard Barathy. I wonder if we can get him to split that nice piece of ash I bought the other day into a good size for the guitar I'm building.
  
• And now, we're on a random boxing match that will apparently decide the whole competition about who will be Bruce Lee's successor. Even though he barely actually boxed in his films. That said, he did briefly box and even won a single tournament.
  
• And even Adolf Caesar's even pointed out that this plan to find a successor to Bruce Lee is bullshit.
  

Next week, I'm finally going to take on Tentacolino.

[Rev. Rye]

Some thoughts on Practical Magic

Big head says: The sisters could have avoided most of this plot if they had just told the detective that they killed him in self-defense, y'know, what with him kidnapping them, holding them at gunpoint, threatening to rape and kill them, and attempting to brand and strangle Gilly.

Little head says: Nicole Kidman is barefoot throughout most of the movie. Why is it that the best shot we have is when she's burying him in the dead of night?

Autism head says: Whoever decided replacing Michael fucking Nyman's score was a good idea should have taken Belladonna.

[Rev. Rye]

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project, Snakes on a Train, also known as What Do You Mean There's No Point in Making a Mockbuster Of A Movie That's Already Schlocky? or maybe Huggy Bear's Favourite Porno. Yes, this was a mockbuster of Snakes on a Plane, one released 3 days before the actual film.

• I'm just saying, maybe the Mojave desert isn't the best place to film your Biblical epic.
  
• It takes 3 minutes for there to be any dialogue in this movie and it's in a combination of unsubtitled Spanish and unsubtitled some other language that's either Arabic or some Native American language (spoken by a guy who looks like Jesus), but could also be a different dialect of Spanish. And, as a result, after all this time, I have no idea why the guy's making this woman puke green Jell-o. Or what those random close-ups of snakes have to do with anything.  
  
• It's kind of awkward that the racist is the only person I'm giving a shit about because at least I can understand what he's even saying.
  
• Also, those snakes don't seem all that intimidating. This could just be the non-herpetologist in me, and the fact that it's shot in darkness, but that just looks too small to be much of a problem.
  
• Huh. This train line's announcements sound like I'm approaching the periphery shield.
  
• And all of a sudden, they actually speak English? Maybe that would have come in handy when they were talking with the racist.
  
• You know, for a movie that exists to rip off Snakes on a Plane, this is proving bizarrely gritty.
  
• And it takes 20 minutes for us to actually get an explanation for what's going on: a woman is under a Mayan curse that causes snake eggs to hatch inside her and they either try to eat their way out of her or get puked out. They're trying to get to LA because there's a Mayan shaman who can lift the curse. Apparently, they have to keep the snakes she regurgitates in glass jars because they're apparently a part of her somehow.
  
• Maybe the guy should have been clued to the fact that there's something he should not be fucking with when he saw the woman puking up chocolate syrup.
  
• Turning chocolate syrup into Green Jell-O in a single shot, the lamest magic trick in history!
  
• Fun Fact: Apparently, during one shooting day, the set was invaded by a stampede of cattle. Somehow, I get the impression that this would be a better movie than the one we got.
  
• You know, would a snake even get that far on a train? I mean, between cars? I know there's gangways between cars, but they're in the luggage car. Does there tend to be a gangway between the luggage car and the publicly accessible sections of the train?
  
• And now the snakes the woman regurgitates have to be kept together in glass jars for whatever cure the shaman has to work. 
  
• "Open the Box. Someone told me it's called the Lament Configuration or something."
  
• Okay, I had a yawn and all of a sudden Jesus is pulling out a guy's heart from his chest with Troma-level special effects and it's infested with baby snakes.
  
• What's his deal? Obviously, he comes from a timeline where Brad Pitt's character from 12 Monkeys decided to become a cowboy.
  
• Silencio, Silencio, No hay Banda, No Hay Banda. And if you got that, you probably have good taste in film.
  
• Cowboy Brad Pit is really rapey, it turns out. And this leads to the most boring sexual assault in cinematic history.
  
• Wait, looking at that one snake, it looks like at least some are definitely harmless. Red to black, friend to Jack, Red to Yellow, kill a fellow. That one snake is definitely a friend to Jack.
  
• That wasn't a little girl, dude. That was a grown woman he was raping.
  
• Is it just me or does the audio sound like it's clipping a lot of the time? 
  
• Well that was an ass pull of a twist: the woman turns into a giant snake and eats the train. Fun Fact: this scene was apparently added just to appease audiences in Japan.
  
• No, she's not wrapping the train around her, she's just eating it the normal way.
  
• Is that the vortex from the Director's Cut of Donnie Darko? And are the even going to explain how they escaped the train after the snake woman ate it?
  

And so, next week, because there's only two sci-fi movies eligible for the Project left on Tubi, and R.O.T.O.R. looks more interesting than Rollerball 2002, I'll be watching that movie. Hell, given that Paul Verhoeven has said that Robocop, which it seems like a direct ripoff of is an allegory for Jesus, maybe this is a fitting film for the week following Easter. Maybe I should have done that, but it's too late now.

And, just to be on the safe side, I decided to check what films are left on Tubi for the Project:

Action: Hangmen

Comedy:

• Deck the Halls (Netflix)
  
• InAPPropriate Comedy
  
• Joe Piscopo: A Night at Club Piscopo
  
• Surf School
  
• Swept Away
  

Drama: Singing Forest [PRIDE MONTH]

Horror:

• Alice in Murderland
  
• Arachnicide
  
• Creepozoids
  
• Curse of Pirate Death
  
• Destination: Infestation
  
• Devilman 2004
  
• Hobgoblins
  
• House of the Dead (Hulu)
  
• I Spit on Your Grave: Deja Vu
  
• Monster
  
• Shark Exorcist [SHARK WEEK]
  
• The Source (Pluto/Tubi)
  

Sci-Fi:

• R.O.T.O.R. [NEXT WEEK]
  
• Rollerball 2002
  

Youth:

• Cry Wilderness 
  
• Home Alone 4 (Disney+) [XMAS]
  
• Home Sweet Home Alone (Disney+) [XMAS]
  
• Leo the Lion (Amazon Prime)
  
• Three Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain 
  
• Zoo Wars
  

[Gwaithmir]

[Fake Messiah]

I watched that biopic about Ryan White (the kid who was stigmatized because he had AIDS in the 1980s). I was disappointed because there was no Michael Jackson character since they were big friends and I really wondered what role he played in all of this. Reading on Wikipedia I was surprised to discover that even Donald Trump attended his funeral in 1990 - I mean why?