The warrior Yang has trained at the hands of the deadly clan his entire life to become the greatest swordsman the world has ever seen. To fulfill his duty to his clan, Yang is ready to strike down the final survivor of an enemy clan. He tears through the survivor's bodyguards only to find that the final survivor is a baby girl. Upon seeing her face and hearing her little laugh, Yang can't bring himself to kill her and instead takes it upon himself to take care of her. Knowing that he's failed in his duty to his clan, Yang, and the baby April, set across country in a journey to find an old friend of his for help. This friend has traveled to the American West and once there, Yang finds that his friend came to a deserted town now settled by a band of misfit carnival workers. But Yang's friend has passed on, and now Yang and April find themselves adopted by the rest of the townsfolk.
Yang has abandoned his old ways and taken on the role of launderer in the town hoping that his new, quiet life will keep him from being found by his old clan. He soon discovers that the town has its own deadly past...
And that's all that I'm going to say about "The Warrior's Way," a little movie that literally came out of nowhere (as far as I'm concerned) and is one of the very best little gems I've seen all year. I only saw the trailer for this the first time when I saw "Skyline" a couple of weeks back. The trailer looked fantastic and my friends and I were ready to see this immediately on its opening. The trailer was exciting and stylish and loaded with action, but the final movie is another matter itself filled with a whole lot of heart and some wonderful, engaging characters.
The best way I can describe this is to reference a couple of international flavors. To me, this is like what you'd get if the French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet ("Delicatessen," "City of Lost Children" and "Amelie") made his own version of Koike and Kojima's classic manga, Lone Wolf and Cub.
The film's look is extremely stylized, having a "fake" quality that I think really works for it's storybook presentation. I love the fact that director Sngmoo Lee was confident enough in his skills to go with this look and run counter to what would be traditional of making it look all too real. The stylized action certainly sells the movie in the trailer, and its exceptional, playing right in hand with the look of the film. That action, though, isn't as large a part of the movie as you would think. It is predominant at the start and end of the film, but the middle portion is filled with building its world and characters, and that's just loaded with heart. Lee's look may be intentionally fake, but his feel is loaded with love for the genres that he's playing with here.
The cast really surprised me, simply because I wasn't expecting to see people like Geoffrey Rush, Kate Bosworth and Danny Huston in something like this. Now while no one here is going to win awards for this work, that's not to say that it's bad by any means. Their inclusion adds weight to this world and I thought all concerned did a great job, with big kudos to Danny Huston playing the sadistic Colonel who terrorizes the town.
The biggest plus in the cast though is South Korean actor Jang Dong Gun who plays the warrior, Yang. Jang has a quality about him that reminds me of Chow Yun Fat to some extent. He's extremely stoic here, but there's still something in his eyes and his body language that makes him very appealing, and he sells the action quite well.
As I said at the top, this one really took me (and my friends) by surprise. We were expecting to have a good time with this, sort of in the same vein as we did with last year's "Ninja Assassin" and what we got was a whole lot more. "The Warrior's Way" is a beautiful and exciting film just loaded with heart, and heart goes a long way. I don't expect this to appeal to everyone, but I had a ball with this. I can't wait to see it again.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Knight and Day Blu Ray Review
Overview : Big screen superstars Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz come together in this fun, action-packed thrill-ride that will keep you on the edge of your seat. When a small-town girl named June (Diaz) meets a mysterious stranger, she thinks she’s found the man of her dreams. But she soon discovers he’s a fugitive super-spy, who thrusts her into a thrilling cat-and-mouse chase that spans the globe. As the bullets and sparks fly, June must decide if her “Knight” in shining armor is a dangerous traitor or the love of her life.
Wilder Knights and Crazier Days: The cast and crew all talk about how fun it was making the movie. Most of the featurette talks about all of the stunts in the movie, and how Cruise likes to do all his own stunts.
Boston Days and Spanish Knights: It basically covers all the locations where the movie was filmed.
Knight and “Someday”: A behind-the-scenes look at Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes going to London to see The Black Eyed Peas perform “Someday,” which the original song can be heard at the end of the credits.
Viral Video: Soccer: Both Diaz and Cruise play soccer.
Viral Video: Kick: Cameron Diaz practicing her kicks with Cruise.
Knight and Day: Story: A nice promo piece of Interviews and film clips.
Knight and Day: Scope: Same here, a nice promo piece of Interviews and film clips.
Review: June Havens (Cameron Diaz) is woman traveling to Boston. Her line of work is restoring old cars. Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) is a phenomenal spy. He can fly planes, kill bad guys, and kick ass, and look good while doing it. But Roy is a government agent that ‘goes rogue’ when he’s framed for attempting to steal a top secret renewable energy source. In order to help clear his name, he actually does steal the energy source, kidnaps its fresh-out-of-high-school creator. While at the airport, Roy bumps into June and uses her bag to smuggle an item of great importance. She is unaware of his hidden agenda until later on.
From then on, we get to watch June and Roy travel the globe. Of course, there’s the double-crossing, close escapes, false identities, and head-spinning romantic snafus, which they come to realize that all they can count on is on each other.
Anyways, I feel for Tom Cruise whose gotten some really bad publicity as well as the negative reviews from this movie mainly because of his past behavior. But one has to see this movie with a tongue in cheek attitude. Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz sizzle together, there’s a lot of funny humor all through out the movie.
Director James Mangold did amazing job with his camera angles. He kept the camera steady especially during the action sequence scenes. It’s a fast-paced action flick with incredible car chase special effects. The only negative thing I had with the film is that there were more than enough facial close up shots on screen. You can really tell on Blu-Ray that both Diaz and Cruise have aged a bit with those close up shots but they still look good on screen.
The Good: Great camera work, great acting cast, some nice comic relief one liners, the action sequences were over the top in a good way, overall a very entertaining action-romance-comedy movie.
The Bad: Needed a bit more depth as far as the script goes.
Standout Quote from the Film:
Roy (to June): “Don’t worry June. We’ll be out of here in a few minutes. I got this.”
The specific aspects of the Blu-ray:
The Audio and visuals for The Knight and Day Blu-Ray Disc: The picture quality on this is Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC. Video resolution: 1080p, Aspect ratio: 2.35:1, Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1 and the Audio on this Blu-ray is DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1. (A+ across the board)
Blu-Ray Extras: Below check out the breakdown.
Blu-Ray Extras Listing:
BD Bonus:
BD Bonus:
The Sorcerer's Apprentice Review
The Harry Potter knockoffs keep coming, quickly and with more than a tiny hint of desperation. The thought process seems to be: give the people lots of teenagers crossed with the supernatural, and see if you can spread it out over at least three, and possibly eight movies. That's eight times the ticket sales, don'tcha know! So we get goodness knows how many awful Twilight movies. We get the stuffy, drearyChronicles of Narnia films. We get the stupid Golden Compass. We get Chris Columbus -- the director of the first two Harry Potters -- going back and selling his soul for the dreadful Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. We even get The Last Airbender, which -- heaven help us -- may be the worst of the lot. And there's no telling how many more sequels are still yet to be generated.
At least Disney, for its new ripoff, has gone back to a source that predates Harry Potter: a segment from the classic Fantasia (1940). In that, Mickey Mouse tries to use magic to do his chores, and pays the price as an army of renegade brooms begins to take over and flood the room. The new The Sorcerer's Apprentice cheerfully borrows this idea for one scene, but otherwise gives us a new-ish story. It begins with an oppressively stupid prologue, packed to the gills with exposition and bad writing. In the 8th century Merlin chooses three disciples: Balthazar (Nicolas Cage), Horvath (Alfred Molina) and Veronica (Monica Bellucci). Horvath goes renegade and decides to help the evil sorceress Morgana (Alice Krige) destroy the world.
Merlin is killed, and Veronica absorbs the soul of Morgana into her own body. Balthazar imprisons her inside a wooden doll called the grimhold. He also imprisons Balthazar there, and a few other evil sorcerers. Now, it's up to Balthazar to find the "next Merlin." He will do so by locating the one person who can wear a special, magical ring. He waits over a thousand years before young Dave comes along in the year 2000. They have a weird, scary little scrape in an antique store, before Balthazar and Horvath are imprisoned together in a magic urn for ten years. This gives time for Dave to grow up into Jay Baruchel. If you missed any of this, don't worry: the movie explains it over and over again.
After all this stuff is spewed out in an irritating, noisy mess, the movie happily settles down into a brighter, more cheerful mode. Director Jon Turteltaub (the National Treasure films) allows Jay Baruchel to be his usual character, which is more or less the same guy from She's Out of My League; he's smart and nerdy and unsure with women, although he's in love with blond hottie Becky (Teresa Palmer). He's convinced that his encounter with the sorcerers was a hallucination, so their reappearance makes him extra edgy, causing lots of nervous one-liners. Since most of these kinds of Harry Potter knockoffs are dreadfully humorless, even this kind of creaky, neurotic comedy is most welcome.
The rest of the movie is a race for the grimhold, and then a race to save the world. The best scenes are those between Cage and Baruchel; Cage finds a very nice balance for his character. He's mostly stoic, but slightly impatient and a teeny bit loony. (We like Cage best when he's on the verge of insanity.) He barely reacts to Dave's line deliveries, which makes Baruchel seem funnier, but Cage is more than just a straight man. He knows how to fire off his own kinds of deadpan jokes, such as dropping a line about "itch cream" in front of Becky. He goes straight for Dave's weak spot: his neurosis.
However, it seems as if these moments are more the result of lucky casting than anything director Jon Turteltaub has done. He expends the same amount of energy on other scenes with Molina, and with Toby Kebbell as Horvath's despicable disciple Drake Stone, a successful stage magician. Watching Molina here, it's hard to remember how great he was playing an equally evil fellow in Spider-Man 2 (2004); in that movie he had a kind of tortured soul. It was possible to understand him. Here he just spouts evil lines. We know what his goal is, but we don't really understand it. (Why does he want to destroy the world again? Because he couldn't get a date?) And Kebbell is just more comic relief, but without anyone to play off of. He flings his arrogant jokes in a vacuum.
Turteltaub also exerts the exact same amount of energy on the action and special effects scenes. During fights, he shakes the camera and cuts several times per second. Other action scenes are played for comic effect, rather than suspense, and yet they, too, roll on by without much real investment. If Turteltaub were a conductor, he would be holding his baton in the same position throughout an entire concert. This is impersonal, disconnected filmmaking without the benefit of basic, journeyman skill. It's only due to a lucky combination of acting, music (byTrevor Rabin), visual effects, and editing that certain scenes manage to come together.
It all comes down to that prologue. The reason it's there is that the filmmakers have assumed that the audience is stupid. It's true that this is a PG-rated movie aimed at kids, but kids are young, not stupid. Kids are able to follow well-told stories with very little spoon-feeding. The Sorcerer's Apprentice is not really about storytelling as much as it is about marketing. It's not about "what happens next" as it is "how much stuff can we cram in there, and how well can we sell it?" But at least this movie provides two helpful services. It's a reminder of just how well the Harry Potter movies work, with their genuine sense of personality, wonder and mystery. And it's much, much better than The Last Airbender.
At least Disney, for its new ripoff, has gone back to a source that predates Harry Potter: a segment from the classic Fantasia (1940). In that, Mickey Mouse tries to use magic to do his chores, and pays the price as an army of renegade brooms begins to take over and flood the room. The new The Sorcerer's Apprentice cheerfully borrows this idea for one scene, but otherwise gives us a new-ish story. It begins with an oppressively stupid prologue, packed to the gills with exposition and bad writing. In the 8th century Merlin chooses three disciples: Balthazar (Nicolas Cage), Horvath (Alfred Molina) and Veronica (Monica Bellucci). Horvath goes renegade and decides to help the evil sorceress Morgana (Alice Krige) destroy the world.
Merlin is killed, and Veronica absorbs the soul of Morgana into her own body. Balthazar imprisons her inside a wooden doll called the grimhold. He also imprisons Balthazar there, and a few other evil sorcerers. Now, it's up to Balthazar to find the "next Merlin." He will do so by locating the one person who can wear a special, magical ring. He waits over a thousand years before young Dave comes along in the year 2000. They have a weird, scary little scrape in an antique store, before Balthazar and Horvath are imprisoned together in a magic urn for ten years. This gives time for Dave to grow up into Jay Baruchel. If you missed any of this, don't worry: the movie explains it over and over again.
After all this stuff is spewed out in an irritating, noisy mess, the movie happily settles down into a brighter, more cheerful mode. Director Jon Turteltaub (the National Treasure films) allows Jay Baruchel to be his usual character, which is more or less the same guy from She's Out of My League; he's smart and nerdy and unsure with women, although he's in love with blond hottie Becky (Teresa Palmer). He's convinced that his encounter with the sorcerers was a hallucination, so their reappearance makes him extra edgy, causing lots of nervous one-liners. Since most of these kinds of Harry Potter knockoffs are dreadfully humorless, even this kind of creaky, neurotic comedy is most welcome.
The rest of the movie is a race for the grimhold, and then a race to save the world. The best scenes are those between Cage and Baruchel; Cage finds a very nice balance for his character. He's mostly stoic, but slightly impatient and a teeny bit loony. (We like Cage best when he's on the verge of insanity.) He barely reacts to Dave's line deliveries, which makes Baruchel seem funnier, but Cage is more than just a straight man. He knows how to fire off his own kinds of deadpan jokes, such as dropping a line about "itch cream" in front of Becky. He goes straight for Dave's weak spot: his neurosis.
However, it seems as if these moments are more the result of lucky casting than anything director Jon Turteltaub has done. He expends the same amount of energy on other scenes with Molina, and with Toby Kebbell as Horvath's despicable disciple Drake Stone, a successful stage magician. Watching Molina here, it's hard to remember how great he was playing an equally evil fellow in Spider-Man 2 (2004); in that movie he had a kind of tortured soul. It was possible to understand him. Here he just spouts evil lines. We know what his goal is, but we don't really understand it. (Why does he want to destroy the world again? Because he couldn't get a date?) And Kebbell is just more comic relief, but without anyone to play off of. He flings his arrogant jokes in a vacuum.
Turteltaub also exerts the exact same amount of energy on the action and special effects scenes. During fights, he shakes the camera and cuts several times per second. Other action scenes are played for comic effect, rather than suspense, and yet they, too, roll on by without much real investment. If Turteltaub were a conductor, he would be holding his baton in the same position throughout an entire concert. This is impersonal, disconnected filmmaking without the benefit of basic, journeyman skill. It's only due to a lucky combination of acting, music (byTrevor Rabin), visual effects, and editing that certain scenes manage to come together.
It all comes down to that prologue. The reason it's there is that the filmmakers have assumed that the audience is stupid. It's true that this is a PG-rated movie aimed at kids, but kids are young, not stupid. Kids are able to follow well-told stories with very little spoon-feeding. The Sorcerer's Apprentice is not really about storytelling as much as it is about marketing. It's not about "what happens next" as it is "how much stuff can we cram in there, and how well can we sell it?" But at least this movie provides two helpful services. It's a reminder of just how well the Harry Potter movies work, with their genuine sense of personality, wonder and mystery. And it's much, much better than The Last Airbender.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)