The Green Hornet Review

Yes, I know this is not really a "Comic Book" movie, but it's fucking close enough. I'm kind of still pumped from seeing the movie despite it having ended a couple of hours ago. That will probably provide for an inaccurate review, but I'll just update this later after I've watched it again. This movie was fucking awesome! I was mildly hesitant going into it, and I watched it with a friend who said he had next to no expectations, and we were both pleasantly surprised.

The movie starts at out moderately slow, and takes it's time to build, but it really does know how to build. It's not too much too fast, it takes it's time introducing you to this city, and these characters. And the comedy is pretty much top notch from the beginning to end. Now seeing it in the small town theater that I did, I felt like my associate and I were two of like three people in the theater laughing, and the rest of the crowd was full of dead people... maybe the comedy in the movie is weird... but I thought it was funny as fuck. I mean there were parts I had trouble not laughing at. The banter back and forth between the main two characters, Britt & Kato, is just too good. Also, there are a handful of Bruce Lee jokes thrown in that I not only thought was a great way to pay tribute to the old show and previous actor, but also were really funny too. Not only that, but the villain is pretty funny too. He's like this late aged crime boss who's worried about his image, so he's constantly trying to convince his cronies that he's still scary, and throughout the film reinvents himself as a super villain, mostly just to stay "scary" whilst fighting The Green Hornet. This character could have easily turned into a caricature of a villain, but instead turned into a nice satire of these anti-heroes as a whole, and made sense in the world they set up. The action starts out fine, not too over the top, and slowly climbs up the ladder. When it starts out the pacing is similar to the old TV show (yeah, I've seen a few of them before giving up when they fought aliens in one episode...), and by the end gets to over the top action that's more reminiscent of Shoot 'em Up or Crank, and afterwards you kind of forget where it happened. It felt very well done and almost seamless.

I couldn't decide which photo I wanted to use, so I used both!

There was stuff I didn't like, but I'm honestly going to have to nitpick to point them out. Cameron Diaz... alright I guess I'll elaborate. I didn't know she was even in the movie until recently, and when I found out I guess it just seemed like a last minute addition in my mind, despite whether it was or not. Her part in the movie is awfully minuscule,  and whenever she is the two main characters talk about how hot she is, and they both kind of have a thing for her. This might have worked 10+ years ago, but not so much anymore... Maybe it's just me, but she's kind of not hot anymore. Now I mean she's still a beautiful woman, but not in the "Leading Lady" way. She would be a smoking mom in a movie, but those aren't the roles I see her in, and it's kind of not here either. Britt Reid sleeps with some smoking hot lady in the first fifteen minutes of the film, and Cameron Diaz is the main love interest character? Not so much... I will say they handle it pretty well and don't go a conventional route with this love triangle, despite how awkward it feels... My only real other problem with the film was that some of the effects seemed a little cheesy. Not all of them, I thought most of them were very stylized, and looked awesome, but a few here or there I noticed. Which kind of makes me happier, if they spent less on the effects, maybe the film makes more money and I get to see a sequel? Probably not, but I'll hope...

Everyone who was worried that Seth "I'm the fat awkward comic relief guy" Rogen couldn't pull off a super hero, hopefully you're pleasantly surprised as I was. Rogen re-imagines the character here, and seperates the character from a number of other characters he could easily be lumped in with. I mean why is it totally cool when Chris Nolan wants to completely retool Batman, and everyone loves it, but when the guy who made Eternal Sunshine does the exact same thing to a character no one really gives a shit about in the first place, people throw a fit...? In my mind, The Green Hornet is no longer just another detective superhero with gadgets and a side-kick, like at least half a dozen others I could mention, now he's his own brand of unique hero, and I hope we all get to see more of this version of the character in all forms of media. This movie was everything I wanted out of the Kick-Ass movie (I'll elaborate in a later review), and not only does this character fit into that world pretty easily, but anyone who liked that movie might want to check this one out too!

Thanks for reading

(and seriously go check this movie out! There's really not much out right now that deserves to be seen more...)

Chocolate Movie Review

Alright, so I don't know why i chose this as my first movie review. There's a lot to say about this film, because where there are a lot of reasons that I really enjoyed this, there are a few that made me take a step back too. Anyway, here we have a Thai film that came out in '08. So right off the bat, this is one pretty sweet martial arts film, but it's all in Thai, so unless you speak the language you're going to be reading subtitles. To me that's never been a big deal, but I know it bugs some people, But in this film it might not be such a huge deal for you. I'll explain why as I break this review into two parts. One that consists of the actual film, direction, and acting. And the other where I want to talk specifically about the action sequences. 

So my beef with this film lies mostly in it's plot. It's kind of weak, and not really a whole lot happens for the first 15- 20 minutes, which isn't too bad, because it's getting the setup out of the way to make room for the action. Basically the film revolves around this girl who has pretty severe autism, but with that she also has some kind of of savant like martial arts capabilities. There were a few things that kind of bugged me about this idea. I don't really know why they chose to go with this story, when it would have worked just as well if they hadn't used the gimmicky story, but what evs. So she has the ability to pick up on martial arts moves as she sees them. That's fine to me, I've seen this a few times before, so it works for me as an ability. Like a more grounded believable version of Taskmaster or that girl in season 2 of  Heroes. But my beef with this is that I'm not sure that even if someone was able to mimic these moves perfectly I'm not sure that they'd know the perfect timing, especially if they had autism. Not only that, but footing is something that doesn't even factor in. If she's autistic how does she know how to keep her footing and how to do all these acrobatic moves and shit. I mean sure she could mimic them, but what if the ground is more slick than when she saw the move used? There's even once where she pulls her pants up a tiny bit, which is totally common if you're in a fight, but i'm not sure someone with as severe a grade of autism as she has would know that that would get in the way of her moves. It wasn't a big deal, just something i noticed and chuckled at the 2 or 3 times it happened throughout the film. The main character's acting is pretty good. She goes from playing this character that I didn't doubt once was autistic, and instantly flipped to a bad as shit, ass kicking machine. Everyone else it was kind of hard to tell. Again the film wasn't in English, so i can never tell how much of the cheesyness is poor acting or just inflection. 

So while you have a kind of weak platform to base these action sequences around, they really made the most of them. I'm not sure if the director and the action director were the same person or what, but it's almost like a different film when they go into kick ass mode. There's little to no wire work, and it's all realistic acrobatics, with what appears to the untrained eye, mine, pretty awesome martial arts. I mean just when you think they can't get more imaginative with these set pieces they keep doing things to one up themselves. I mean the first action sequence, twenty minutes in, was awesome, and everyone after that was better and better. I will say though, there's one scene where this random dude walks out to fight the main character and he appears to have turrets and he fights a lot like Voldo from Soul Calibur or something. It was a cool fight but if you think about it for more than 30 seconds it's a little fucked up that these two gangs are having two handicapped people do their fighting for them... Then right after that one dude just pulls out a gun and kills as many guys as he can with that one clip, and then switches over to a katana for an all out sword duel. I loled. This is followed up by a platforming/fighting combo scene that involves a building, a monorail, and signs extending from the building between them. I mean this is so inventive and awesome to watch, it kind of makes me wonder why we haven't seen something like it coming out of Hollywood for films like Prince of Persia, or a Mario adaptation, where it actually makes more sense. My only problem with this scene is that it's the final action set piece, and it doesn't really feel like it. It almost felt like the last two major fights should have been switched. Both scenes are none the less awesome, but it was just a bit weird as a last set.

Now my point from before is that if you're watching this movie, you're really watching it for the action, so there's not really a lot of reading when there is, and during the action there's next to no dialogue, so you can sit back and enjoy the show without having to read at all. I enjoyed the shit out of this film, and I plan on buying it for my collection to throw on for background noise so that when I see the action scenes I can stop and watch them, and walk away during the boring parts. If you like what you see, and want to check this film out for yourself, you can Search Amazon.com for Chocolate, or you can just click the box below.