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[Movie] 300: Rise of an Empire

300, why can’t I just quit you?

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Oh yeah. That’s why.

I can’t help it. It’s full of men with rippling six packs wearing nothing but tiny leather underpants1 and leather skirts with strategic crotch windows of the sort you normally see women wearing in fantasy art. I’M ONLY HUMAN OKAY2.

(light spoilers throughout)

It actually amuses me more than I can say that in this movie, there are two (wow, count ’em, two! we’re moving up in the world of Frank Miller, ladies. And neither of them are strippers!) women with major speaking parts, and both of them spend the entire movie wearing more than the men. Even during the one sex scene, Artemesia comes out wearing more than Themistokles because at least she’s still got her skirt. 300:RoaE feels like even more of a homoerotic ode to speedos than the original while desperately trying to be hyper uber no really believes us please you have to cartoonishly manly. There should be a subtitle that flashes in the lower right hand corner of every scene that says: **No homo. We swear.

In one scene Gorgo tells Themistokles to stop stroking his cock while he’s watching a bunch of Spartans wearing only modesty speedos wrestle. I’m not even joking.

This movie is ridiculous. And it takes itself so very seriously, which just makes it nothing short of hilarious in scenes. 300: RoaE contains probably the greatest hate fuck scene ever put to film. There are entire server farms no doubt devoted entirely to producing the gouts of cartoonish blood that fill the battle scenes, not to mention the horse that Themistokles rides across several ships that are on fire so he can have a massive sword fight with Artemesia.

And I loved Artemesia, even if I really wanted to lick a napkin and scrub some of the eyeliner off her face. She was just the kind of cold queen bitch character that I am helpless against, and what I loved best was she stayed bad until the end. There was no change of heart caused by an encounter with the One True Cock. (I would have thrown things. Seriously.) I almost died giggling when she taunted Themistokles “You fight harder than you fuck!”

I think that’s the reason I keep watching these movies, and damn me, I enjoy them. Despite the fact that even on their face, they are  cringe-inducingly problematic. It’s got all the unsubtle subtext of the original 300, but turned up to 11 just in case you didn’t manage catch it last time. The Greeks throw around the words freedom and democracy more than your average presidential candidate, and the existence of Greek slaves is for the most part carefully skirted around while slavery practiced by the Persians is given plenty of screen time. The “barbarian” bad guys are pretty much all middle-eastern or black, commonly deformed, etc, and there they are facing off against the chiseled jawlines of the Greeks3. There are even fucking suicide bombers in this one. No really. The Greeks make a great caricature of self-consciously hyperpatriotic America, complete with at one point Themistokles (I think it was him) saying that the Persians just want to kill them because FREEDOM.

But godammit, it’s so fucking pretty. It’s kind of like eating that extra large piece of chocolate peanut butter cheesecake that was baked for you by Satan himself, where you know you shouldn’t like it, you know it’s bad for you, and you just can’t help it anyway because at the time it’s just so nummy. Then next thing you know, you’re laying on the bathroom floor with crumbs in your hair and a mouth that tastes like regret, considering if it would just be better to sanitize the plumbing fixtures by setting them on fire, only hopefully you’ll die quietly from your gallbladder strangling your heart before you ever get that far.

There’s going to be a third movie. It’s inevitable. And I predict with advance shame that will see it too, and then have a mouthful of regret that no amount of nicely cut pecs will be able to erase. I can only hope in the next movie, maybe we’ll finally get an answer to the question of why Xerxes has eyebrows like a chola. Probably because he hates freedom.

(See also: io9’s hilarious review)

1 – Oh my god for extra hilarity, if you’re looking at this before this post falls off my blog’s front page check out which slice of the picture WordPress chose to represent the post. JUST LOOK AT IT. I did not pick that. Sometimes perfection just happens on its own.

2 – Just in case someone out there wants to leap on the fact that I have tacitly admitted that I am an actual human being capable of prurient interest in swathes of rippling man-flesh, I would like to note two important points:

  1. I would never in a million years advocate putting the above image or anything like it on the cover of the magazine of a professional organization of which I’m part.
  2. I would not use the phrase “rippling man flesh” or anything like it in such a venue either, because that would be super creepy. As a real-life grown-up, I know there is a time and a place for rippling man-flesh, and that normally involves my blog and a beer.

3 – There is a very token effort to humanize the Persians in this one. You see Xerxes’s grief over the death of his father, which apparently is what caused him to go soak in a mystical pool filled with a combination of nair and miracle-gro. You also find out that envoy that Leonidas killed at the beginning of the first 300 was actually the man who rescued Artemesia from death and raised her.

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[Movie] Non-Stop

Maybe this is just a combination of nostalgia and confirmation bias talking,but I could have sworn that back in the misty past, Liam Neeson didn’t spend most of his time on screen killing people. I feel like one day, he gained just a couple more gray hairs and little crows feet and that set off some computer in a secret bunker whose only job is to compute cragginess algorithms, indicating the moment when an actor becomes perfect for Male Baby Boomer Action Hero Wish Fulfillment.

I was only thinking about this because Liam Neeson’s looking particularly craggy and done with everything for Non-Stop. Which I’ll admit, Mike and I saw this weekend because there was literally nothing else both of us were interested in seeing at the theater. I like a good popcorn action with a bit of suspense flick as much as the next guy, when the next guy is Mike.

I actually liked Non-Stop a lot more than I thought I would. I came in just not taking any of it at all seriously–come on, Liam Neeson shoots people on an airplane, how fucking serious can this be?–and actually got very drawn in at the beginning. The film feels very gritty and claustrophobic thanks to the camera work, which I think helps it feel more serious than it has any right to be. I mean come on, the basic concept is that Bill (Liam Neeson) is on a flight where a mysterious person threatens to kill a passenger every twenty minutes if he or she isn’t given a bunch of money. And the hell of it is, it actually kind of works in the sense of convincing you to just give it a whirl and suspend your disbelief…until the last thirty minutes crosses the line of Too Damn Silly.

Eh, and I’m going to just hit some spoilers now, so consider yourself warned.

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Pompeii: Deadly Weaksauce Eruption Destroys City

Well, I did it, you bastards. I saw Pompeii. Sorry that it took me 24 hours to get my write-up done, things were kind of busy today.

So this is the thing. I went into this movie expecting to be incredibly annoyed by the geology. But actually, the geology wasn’t that bad. There were volcanic bombs when there shouldn’t have been, there was a pyroclastic flow that apparently put on the brakes just for the purposes of barfalicious romance dialog, and there was an overly large tsunami. But that stuff, I can put down to dramatic license; it’s nowhere near Dante’s Peak, let alone The Core levels of badness.

What actually really ticked me off about this movie, far beyond the utterly tepid romance plotline that almost made all of the googly eyes in 47 Ronin look like a great love story and the mustache-twirling stylings of Senator Weaksauce Villainus Pantsius was the way it so blatantly and desperately tried to rip Gladiator off.

Do not fuck with Gladiator.

There was actually a gladiatorial battle scene in Pompeii that lurched along all the same beats as the reenactment of the Battle of Zama scene from Gladiator, down to the bit where the smarmy antagonist observes that he doesn’t recall the Romans losing the battle. But the reason that scene was so fucking badass in Gladiator was because Maximus just takes control of his fellow slaves as a general and uses Roman tactics to win.

Oh yeah. That’s the stuff.

Pompeii didn’t have any of the requisite badassery, and the main character was no fucking Maximus Decimus Meridius. And there was absolutely no good reason for the slaves designated as the losing team to win other than oh the script says we’re awesome so we’ll just like…shove people a bunch until Milo can use his magical Celt horse powers and stuff.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Warning: Spoilers. Like you give a fuck.

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[Movie] So, about 47 Ronin

All right, so let me tell you about this movie. Once upon a time there was Keanu Reeves I mean a kid named Kai in Japan. He was half-Japanese and half-European and had been raised by the Tengu so he totally has magical powers no really you just read that correctly, I didn’t mistype. Just that sentence right there makes me deeply uncomfortable for a multitude of reasons (you should check out the racebending post about it) but I think what weirds me out the most is that he’s literally a (I am very sorry for using this phrase) “magical half-breed” trope personified and made inexplicably the main character of 47 Ronin. Despite the fact that technically he’s not even ronin (being, you know, not a samurai) and that the real main character of this thing ought to have been Oishi (played fantastically by Sanada Hiroyuki).

BUT ANYWAY.

So all the samurai in Akou are out hunting down a kirin (I think?) because it’s been, I don’t know, leaving massive piles of kirin shit all over Lord Asano’s lawn and that just won’t do because the Shogun is coming to visit. Kai helps kill the kirin and everyone is a douche to him about it. We see a fox with one brown eye and one blue eye and I sure hope you like that close up of those eyes because you are going to be seeing it a lot.

The Shogun shows up with Lord Kira (Asano Tadanobu, perhaps better known to nerds as Sir Not Appearing In This Movie Hogun in Thor) in tow and I’m not event certain why. But you can tell Lord Kira is evil because he smirks a lot and appears to be a patron at the same clothing store that supplies all villains of sentai shows with clothing made out of slightly cheap-looking metallic fabrics. And he has a woman with him who has messy hair and wears a shiny green kimono-ish but not really thing and DUDE LOOK AT HER EYES. NO REALLY. LOOK AGAIN. REPEATEDLY. CONSTANTLY.

This woman is the fox in human form, and she’s a witch. She’s also played by Kikuchi Rinko, doing her best Helena Bonham Carter impression. Her witch powers include:

  • Crazy, prehensile CGI hair
  • Turning into a piece of fabric and flying around the room like a demented magical carpet (but okay, this one looks pretty cool)
  • Being unable to stand up without exposing at least one of her legs up to nearly the hip because SHE IS A WITCH AND THEREFORE SEXY SEXY.
  • Making even the act of saying hello seem like a bad touch is about to happen
  • Turning into a really terribly animated albino dragony thing at the end and getting stabbed by magical Keanu Reeves.

Apparently Lord Kira is at Lord Asano’s house because there’s going to be some kind of samurai combat contest thing. And he has a magical giant suit of armor with a huge sword that he pits against Lord Asano’s champion. Only the witch does something to Asano’s champion so instead Kai steps in and just embarrasses everyone by losing (despite being taught by the Tengu to KILL ALL THE THINGS) and not being a samurai, so he gets the crap beaten out of him.

So then the witch and Kira use a magical spider that poops purple hallucinogenic fluid to make Lord Asano hallucinate and attack Kira. This is a massive no-no, so the Shogun orders Asano to commit seppuku. And once that’s happened, declares all his samurai ronin and decides that Mika, Asano’s daughter, will marry Kira. Mika is TOTALLY IN LOVE with Kai, though, because of course she is, and she has a thing about wearing coats with weird collars over her kimono and I don’t think they dressed like that back then.

Mika gets hauled off to live with the guy who effectively murdered her dad, which could potentially be some interesting character development for her, but instead we just know she’s having a bad time because Kira’s servants make her wear heavy eye makeup and blue-tinted fake eyelashes. Oishi (who was Asano’s chief samurai but enough about him let’s talk about Kai some more!) gets thrown in a hole for a year and then…dragged out. Because reasons.

After being released from the pit and no doubt smelling terrible, Oishi stops at home just long enough to get his son Chikara and have a beautifully understated and tender scene with his wife, then ride off to go get Kai. Because we can’t do this without Kai. Obviously. He hasn’t been in the movie nearly enough. Kai has been sold into slavery on Dejima because reasons. As Oishi arrives at Dejima, he runs across that dude you saw in the previews, you know the one with the whole body tattoos that makes him look like a skeleton, and asks for directions. Well, take a nice long look, because this thirty seconds is the ONLY time you will see that guy, despite the fact that he appears in the trailer and on the fucking poster.

I think Kai is supposed to be somewhat mad, indicated by Keanu Reeves staring at Oishi a little more vacantly than normal. Oishi manages to snap him out of it and then they run away together, cunningly using the fact that apparently oil lanterns are like poor man’s plastique.

And then all the ronin meet up! Yay! Except they don’t have enough swords! Boo! Oishi leads his men to a village of sword smiths so they can get some there, but Kira’s men have inexplicably taken over the village and we learn Kira’s evil plot is to take over Japan…somehow. Kai kills the shit out of everyone to impress the other ronin, and then takes them to the forest of Tengu, because if there’s one thing we all know Tengu have, it’s swords. (…actually no.) Oishi gets tested by the Tengu, where they show him some illusions of his men getting killed to try to force him to draw his sword, but he refuses. Kai shows off he has magical Tengu powers, I’m sure this won’t come up later at all.

Then there are swords! Yay! All the ronin gather again, accompanied by music that is pure desperation given audible form. They decide to try to kill Lord Kira when he goes to his ancestor’s shrine, but it turns out it’s a trap. The witch sets everything on fire and flashes some leg, and the lovable fat ronin gets shot full of arrows, after which he shares a scene brimming with manpain with Kai and Oishi and then expires.

The ronin decide they’re not going to give up. They write down their grievances and all sign their names and add a drop of blood. Including Kai, who is now apparently a ronin because one of the guys who was a dick to him at the beginning of the movie has given him a second sword to carry, and samurai all carry two swords and aggggggh. But anyway, they find a troupe of actors who have been hired to play at the wedding Kira will have with Mika’s fake eyelashes, and since everyone in the world thinks Kira is a dick even though as far as I could tell he hasn’t done anything but secretly betray Asano and make some really questionable fashion choices, they agree to help the ronin sneak in to his castle.

The battle scene is actually pretty cool, I’ll give them that. Up until the witch turns into a dragon thing that Kai has to kill using his super special magical Tengu powers so he can save Mika. Oishi kills the shit out of Kira, which was a relief to me because at this point I’d half expected Kai to show up out of nowhere and save him and do the deed the way they’d been playing him up as the most important character ever, no really. But no, Oishi cuts off Kira’s head and all of Kira’s samurai simultaneously shit in their hakama.

The ronin go back home with Kira’s head in a bag. The Shogun is annoyed with them, but lets them all commit seppuku instead of hanging them like commoners. Which they do. And just to remind us what the most important bit of the movie is, all of the close-ups and focus is pretty much on Kai and Mika, because fuck the ronin, we’ve got a love story with the unnecessarily added character.

And done.

So, I kind of figured the movie would be bad, but I decided to see it anyway because I thought it would be super pretty and bad. Well, it was super pretty, but the pretty did not outweigh the badness. It was the little things, like the awkwardness of some of the English lines when contrasted with the fluidity of hearing the Japanese actors speak names. The editing was even. There were a lot of little scenes that felt random, like they didn’t fit a narrative that seemed cobbled together. (And why did so many of the night close-up shots look so dang grainy?) The scenery was beautiful but the CGI monsters were distracting and looked mostly terrible.

But it was really the huge things, like the way Oishi again and again got shoved out of the spotlight that really should have been his so we could have even more emphasis on the barfalicious love story between Mika and the character who was added to the story because maybe Hollywood thought audiences couldn’t handle a 47 Ronin movie if all the ronin were actually Japanese. It was the way the final scenes of the movie were stolen from the titular ronin, making it about Mika and Kai’s vow to find each other in the next life instead of the incredible determination and sacrifice of the ronin and their deaths.

That made me so. Angry.

Why. Why, 47 Ronin. All you had to do was suck just a little less and I would have come away not feeling like I’d been robbed of two hours of my life and ten bucks of my money. Had it not been for Kai, this movie could have safely joined Onmyoji in the “campy historical fantasy film” box in my brain. But no. You just had to give us another shot of Mika and Kai staring at each other while the soundtrack tearfully begged us on its knees to care.

ETA: Well, this explains why the thing felt so disjointed. Even a lot of the dialog.

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[Movie] The Hobbit 2: The Desolation of Smaug

I’ll admit it right up front: the only reason I went to see The Hobbit 2: The Desolation of Smaug opening weekend in the theaters was so I could hurry up and say snippy things about it. I wanted to get my snark on before it got tainted by everyone else’s. And obviously, we already know I did not take it at all seriously.

Which is okay, because I think maybe it didn’t want to be taken seriously? I’m not sure. And that’s part of the problem.

First, let me note that I have very purposefully not reread The Hobbit since I heard the movies were being made. I want to address these on their own merit. (At one point, I used to believe movies should be faithful to books. I don’t any longer.)

And then spoilers:

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[Movie] Frozen, I feel guilty for not liking you more

So…Frozen.

Full disclosure: I’m one of only a handful of human beings who hasn’t seen Rapunzel sorry I mean Tangled haha that’s right these movies totally aren’t about women. At all. Anyway, I haven’t seen that movie. I keep meaning to, and then don’t get around to it.

I’m honestly not sure if Frozen makes me want to give Tangled a chance or not. I have really, really mixed feelings about this movie.

So, spoilers coming if you care about those.

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[Movie] Catching Fire

This movie made me actually cry twice and tear up an additional four times. What even gave you the right, Catching Fire? You’re supposed to be a big-budget sci-fi action movie. What’s with this actual heart-punching emotion in the middle of all the wacky fashions and shouting and stabbing things?

Effie made me cry. Effie Fucking Trinkett made me weep a silent, manly fashion. (Those weren’t tears. It was just sweat from my heart.) I can only guess that Elizabeth Banks is actually some kind of goddess.

I really enjoyed the entire Hunger Games series as books. I read all three of them in four days because I refused to put them down. The first movie was… all right. I wasn’t quite so excited about it probably because I loved the books so much, but I liked it in the theater even if I never felt compelled to actually buy it on DVD. In the first movie, the only scene that actively destroyed me was Rue’s death, and I’d gone in expecting it. (Though I should have known, you can never be prepared enough for that.)

I really feel like Catching Fire took everything that was good about the first movie and turned it up to eleven. There was just so much more emotion in it, loss and rage and helplessness. And the acting was all around so excellent that scenes didn’t so much tug at your heartstrings as wrap them up in a fist and just rip them right out of your chest.

All the major action points out of the book were there, but I never once hit a point where I felt like the action was going on too long, or like we were getting some big cgi production piece in place of actual character development. It’s incredibly unusual for me to feel that way about big budget movies these days. (I’m looking at you, The Hobbit.) I felt like there was a lot less shaky cam in this movie than in the previous one, and that it was better used as a way to make the action feel very immediate. Considering the movie was well over two house and didn’t feel nearly that long, they kept it cranking along.

There was a lot to put in the movie because there’s a lot of character development and emotional meat, and there’s no skimping on that. I think that’s why there’s so much emotional impact–the movie gives you a chance to get to know everyone, and their conflicts. You get to know that Katniss is not some kind of superhero, but rather a terrified, angry girl who is being pulled in far too many directions at once. The ways she’s being manipulated by nearly every person around her are very clear…as are the multitude of different ways she loves the people in her life. I’m so glad we got that instead of an extra ten minutes of CGI monkeys chasing very fit people in spandex body suits.

Oh, and Jennifer Lawrence? Still the most perfect. I adore her.

And I just want to say that while the guys all did an excellent job, to me the people who really stood out were the women. Jennifer Lawrence, Elizabeth Banks, and Jena Malone (Johanna) were all powerful. And Lynn Cohen as Mags, who did everything without even being able to speak, won the whole movie as far as I’m concerned.

So yes. I liked it. I’d recommend it. However, if you haven’t seen the first movie or read the book, you’re really going to need to do that beforehand. Catching Fire wastes no time at all on retreading the background story. And I’m glad for that.

Looking forward to being utterly destroyed by Mockingjay.

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[Movie] Lady Eve

As a happy birthday to myself, I decided to go see The Lady Eve at the Alamo Drafthouse, since it was one of their special offerings for badass ladies month. The Lady Eve was filmed in 1941, so I wouldn’t blame you if you’ve never heard of it. I certainly hadn’t, until I watched the trailer at the Drafthouse before Thor 2.

“I need him like the axe needs the turkey.”

And that was the reason I decided I had to see the movie. Just for that line alone, which was spoken by Barbara Stanwyck in an utterly predatory tone.

The Lady Eve is a romantic comedy, of sorts. I’m honestly not that big into romantic comedies, because any more they fall into the formula of a man-child causing a woman to give up her independence to become the stand-in for his mom while hijinks ensue. The Lady Eve is definitely not of that mold. Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) is a con artist who manages to utterly wreck the same man twice while he looks on in deer-in-the-headlights befuddlement.

And this movie is hilarious, with a distinct lack of the scatological humor that bores me half to death in a lot of new comedy movies. This one gets its humor from taking romance tropes and turning them on their ear. There is a marriage proposal scene that could have come out of any cheeseball romance where Jean and Charles are cuddling on a hill at sunset, and the entire time Charles is trying to make a romantic speech, a curious but insistent horse is trying to eat his hair. It’s wonderful.

I think the best part of The Lady Eve (other than that it almost caused me to pee myself laughing) is that Jean is the driving force behind the movie. She’s the one in charge. And even if the trope is that she’s the con artist that made the mistake of falling in love with her mark, she is still in control of the situation. It’s a wonderful inversion of gender roles that just filled me with glee.

Even better? If you want to see it, it’s on Netflix instant. And trust me, you want to see it.

(Also, it will forever be my headcanon that “Colonel” Harrington and Gerald are Jean’s gay dads. GO AHEAD, TELL ME I’M WRONG.)

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[Movie] 12 Years a Slave

12 Years a Slave is an absolutely brutal movie. It gives the audience no breathing room and no escape from the horrors of slavery on full display; not just violence, but the twisting of relationships, the abuse of power, the dehumanization. Director Steve McQueen is fond of letting scenes run long, far longer than where you’d expect there to be a cut to spare us some stomach-clenching cringing.

Which is at it should be, considering the absolute injustice and horror of what is often termed “America’s original sin.”

That phrase sprang to mind often as I watched the movie, because the other word I’d use to describe it is beautiful. Steve McQueen lets the landscape of the south speak volumes in long shots of moving water, reeds, or trees covered in spanish moss. It’s this last that makes the beauty feel distinctly sepulchral. The landscape is haunted.

The horror of 12 Years a Slave is in what humans do to each other, in the evil lies of justification they tell themselves, and what was pitilessly done to an entire people. The story of the film is built on betrayal after betrayal, from the foundation up when Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor, who is utterly perfect) is tricked to coming to Washington, DC in order to be drugged and sold into slavery in sight of the US capitol. Near the beginning, a plantation owner’s wife says to an enslaved woman who has just had her family broken up, “Something to eat and some rest, your children will soon be forgotten.” Even that is a casual, terrible brutality.

Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack was good–as usual, come on, it’s Hans Zimmer–but far more striking were the silences in the movie, where there’s nothing but the sound of insects, of wind, of people crying out. In one scene, Solomon is hanged from a tree with his feet just barely touching the ground so he can just manage to breathe. And he’s left there for nearly the whole day in a long, endless scene that made me want to beg for mercy so I could look away. There is no dialog in that scene, no music, nothing but the sound of the rope creaking, Solomon gasping for breath, the soft sound of his feet digging at the ground as he fights to stay upright and alive. These silences, too, are absolutely brutal.

But 12 Years a Slave is also about survival in the face of these horrors, about one man fighting against despair for twelve years. Early on, Solomon says he doesn’t want to survive–he wants to live. And later: “You let yourself be overcome by sorrow, you will drown in it.” That he maintains some sense of hope as he is repeatedly betrayed and brutalized is the truest beauty of the film.

This is a movie filled with more truth than is easy to stomach. More truth than I could handle without crying, that’s for certain. But I think that’s what makes it important.

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[Movie] Man of Tai Chi

So, this movie has a lot of major assumptions to swallow. The most difficult of which is probably Keanu Reeves being an evil martial arts badass that makes people fight to the death for the entertainment of his patrons. And that he lives in an evil Batcave.

Yeah.

No one in this movie seems to believe tai chi is capable of being awesome. Even in a martial arts tournament. I can only assume that none of these characters has ever watched an actual kung fu movie. Tai chi masters are always the biggest badasses to ever badass in those things.

Other than that, it’s a very standard boy learns tai chi, boy doesn’t listen to his master, boy betrays his master and then learns the awesome tai chi technique where you punch someone with your chi and make them vomit blood and thus suddenly knows the True Meaning Of Tai Chi. Only this involved Keanu Reeves looking like he wanted to rob a bank.

I thought the tai chi looked pretty awesome. Mike didn’t complain, though Mike is currently also very sick so he might not have had the strength. There was a sort of meaningless subplot where the police tried to hunt down the underground fighting ring, and it was all really a framework upon which to hang fight after fight.

The fights were… all right. Not bad. Not really good enough to distract me too long from tumblr. But it was nice to see a movie where tai chi was the focus and you could actually see it in action beyond moving very, very slowly. I don’t know if it was $8 worth of nice from On Demand, though.