THE HIDDEN BLADE (2004)

[Update 02/21/2021: need to redo this entire review and fix the screenshots.]

A samurai lives with his elderly mother. They once had a servant girl that he secretly (even to himself?) loved, but she (at the beginning of the film) was married into a merchant family. Fast forward three years and his mother is dead and by chance the samurai bumps in the ex-servant girl in the market. She tries to put on a happy face, but you can see she's hurting inside. Months go by and he continues his day-to-day activities as a lower samurai, which includes learning modern Western weaponry, then while hanging out with his sister he overhears her talking about how the ex-servant girl has be mistreated by her family and sick for two months. Infuriated by this news he goes to her home and finds her suffering from malnutrition and neglected. He takes her home and nurses her back to health. This doesn't sit well with the higher ups, so when an childhood friend of the samurai is found to be secretly plotting against the shogunate our hero is ordered to go kill him.

Anyway, this movie's great, almost as good as THE TWILIGHT SAMURAI, but not quite. I think Hiroyuki Sanada's performance in that film was so perfect that it was impossible for Masatoshi Nagase to match it. Also, the samurai in TTS had two adorable daughter's that would have been orphaned if he died, so that really ratcheted up the tension. All said and done THE HIDDEN BLADE is a excellent film.

I'M A CYBORG, BUT THAT'S OK (2006)

[Update 01/05/2022: Need to redo this review completely. Fix the screenshots also.]

A young woman who secretly thinks that she's a cyborg is committed to a psychiatric hospital after she slits her wrist, inserts some wires and plugs the wires into a wall outlet. Once inside she meets a whole slew of bizarre people and...well, that's pretty much the entire movie.

IACBTOK is a good movie and it had some charming moments - my favorite being the rice eating scene - but it's way, way too long. It would have an magical short film, but there's nowhere near enough story to justify this being a full-length movie. Good movie with interesting visuals, but I expected more from Chan-wook Park.

Sorry for the short review, but there's really nothing more to say, besides: what's up with that ending?! What even happened?

BRONSON (2008)

You ever wondered what would happen if Mr. Bean gained a 100 lbs. of muscle and turned into a violent psychopath? Yea, me neither, but BRONSON answers the question anyway.

Human punching machine, Michael Peterson, who, later in life, would call himself Charles Bronson, is a punch-drunk loser who goes around punching everything while screaming "You cunts!!!". Eventually all that punching catches up to him and he's thrown in prison. In prison, he continues punching things until they get tired of his punching and send him to an insane asylum. Finally he runs out of stuff to punch so they let him go. As a free man he punches things like gypsies, humans and dogs for money. Naturally, "the Man" is jealous of Bronson's punching abilities so he's thrown back in prison where the guards continue the mind-boggling habit of allowing him to repeatedly take hostages. They also, for whatever reason, only confront him right in the punching region. You would think they would just tear gas him, but I guess it's more fun getting punched. The End.

You would hope a story about the "most violent prisoner in Britain" would be interesting, but I found the whole thing to be a mess. There was zero character development to this guy. He just ran around nonstop bashing shit like the caveman on Aqua Teen Hunger Force when he sees fire. Even worse is the fight scenes were all really short and completely unconvincing, by that, I mean tons of non-connecting punches and pulled punches. Also, there were times before the main character started calling himself Charlie that people were already calling him Charlie. I found that confusing. Overall, the entire thing looked very low-budget...I don't mind low-budget movies, but I do mind when movies look like shit because of it.

There was material here for a good film, but it didn't happen. The whole thing was weak and nowhere as violent as I had hoped it would be. Outside of the language and multiple shots of the dude's tallywacker, this movie could probably air on network TV. Also, I have absolutely no idea what the quote "A CLOCKWORK ORANGE for the 21 Century" on the poster means. That makes zero sense.

EDIT: Well, I guess I'm going to have to have to backpedal on my review a little. I just read some stuff on Wikipedia about the real life "Charles Bronson" (Michael Peterson) and he's taken hostages at least 6 times. So it appears that some of the stupid shit that happened in the movie actually happened in real life. It also said that he was released from prison not once, but twice! Brilliant!

ZOMBIELAND (2009)

"I'm in Garland, Texas. It may look like zombies destroyed it, but that's actually just Garland."

This movie was disappointing. I watch a lot of zombie movies and read a lot of zombie novels (go buy "The Rising" by Brian Keene right now) and for some stupid reason I actually thought, based on the trailer and word-of-mouth, that this movie was going to have some badass, high-budget zombie action in it. Instead, ZOMBIELAND is a poorly written story about a dweeb, a semi-hot chick, the semi-hot chick's little sister and Woody Harrelson on a road trip across America after the zombie apocalypse.

My biggest problem with the movie are the lame jokes. I have no problem with a comedy set in the zombie world (THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD is one of my favorite movies of all time), but at least be funny! My second biggest problem is the lack of zombies. For a world taken over by zombies there's not many of them around. At the very beginning there's a little zombie action, but it's silly and played off more as a lame joke. It's like the zombies are just a nuisance instead of an actual threat. Then, for a long period in the middle there's only probably 6 zombies for like 45 minutes. Another problem here is how smug and slick this movie thought it was with the high speed camera action shots and the annoying "Rules" popping up all over the joint non-stop. They thought they were being clever, but after the 5th time it was just annoying.

I give the movie a little credit for at least trying, but it's still a failure. It felt like the filmmakers were trying to cash in on the zombie fad without actually being zombie fans...kinda like Christian music is always a watered-down, soulless rip-off of popular music. If you want my advise, just skip this dead duck and watch INFESTATION instead. I actually like that movie: the geek endearing, the story was interesting, the action was more entertaining and the hot chick was way hotter. Plus, there was a spider-dog!

Part 2 - Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)