Miscellaneous Movie Musings

[Alex]

This weekend:

Drunken Master - The movie that essentially made Jackie Chan a star and went a long way towards establishing a more comedic form of Hong Kong martial arts movie. It isn't a great movie but has the seeds of everything that would eventually become great. On the plus side, it spends almost no time on story and is pretty much wall to wall fight scene. More like a porn model of storytelling than most. The choreography is too staged but it isn't horrible.

Bangkok Dangerous - Awful. Simply dreadfully awful. Since it is set in Bangkok and uses a mostly Thai cast I kind of hoped there'd be some Tony Jaa in it even though I hadn't heard such (but I hadn't been looking). Nope. I'm really sick of the conflicted hitman story. I'm really sick of the Nicolas Cage drawl. I'm really, really, really sick of the conflicted hitman story told in a Nicolas Cage drawl.

The Omega Man - I hadn't seen it since high school. Forgotten how bad it was (though I'm sure the Rosalind Cash nudity helped back then). Though I do wonder just how spitting mad the director must have been when they got the dailies back from the opening scenes showing a dead Los Angeles and in the far background of one cut there is a car driving and in another a pedestrian crossing a street.