Alan Rapp

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
  • IMDb: link

street-fighter-the-legend-of-chun-li-poster

There are bad movies, there are awfully bad movies, and then there are movies so ridiculously bad they force you to bellow with laughter and titter with glee as they instantly earn guilty pleasure status.

Street Figther: The Legend of Chun-Li isn’t a good movie, let’s get that straight. It is however a enjoyable trainwreck and one of the most unintentionally funny films I’ve ever seen.

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Ninja Assassin

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Ninja Assassin
  • IMDB: link

At a time when Hollywood seems dead set on giving movies bloodless one and two-word titles that don’t give you a clue as to what the movie is about comes a film called Ninja Assassin. It’s about ninjas who kill people. Finally, a little truth in advertising.

For more than 1,000 years, nine ninja clans have been stealing orphan children under the age of 10 and training them in the art of assassination. For centuries, these clans have sold their services to wealthy individuals, companies, and governments for the cost of 100 lbs. of gold.

When a Europol researcher (Naomie Harris) uncovers their secret, she puts herself and her supervisor (Ben Miles) in danger. This also causes an outcast of the Ozunu Clan named Raizo (Rain) to come to her aid. With her help, Raizo plans to take down the clans and settle a personal grudge with his former master (Sho Kosugi).

Over the course of the film, we learn more about Raizo’s past, his training, his reason for leaving the clan, and the driving force behind his battle to destroy them.

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The Road

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: The Road
  • IMDB: link

Like most post-apocalyptic tales, The Road isn’t exactly sunny. Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, the story follows a father (Viggo Mortensen) and a son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as they journey across a decimated world in search of food, shelter, and safety from bands of roving cannibals.

Okay, so it’s not a date movie.

This is really a two-character story. Other than the cannibals and occasional straggler the pair encounter, the only other person given screentime is Charlize Theron as Mortensen’s wife (though she is only shown in flashbacks).

This means the weight of the film falls on Mortensen and young Smit-McPhee. Thankfully they’re up to the task. Mortensen is as good as always, and Smit-McPhee holds his own against the Oscar-nominated actor.

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Fantastic Mr. Fox, Simply Fantastic

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Fantastic Mr. Fox
  • IMDB: link

I’m far from director Wes Anderson’s biggest fan. Although I enjoyed The Royal Tenenbaums (and to a lesser extent The Darjeeling Limited), in my opinion, most of his work seems to value style over, and sometimes at the cost of, substance.

Anderson’s latest Fantastic Mr. Fox is a stop-motion animated adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book about a fox fighting his own nature to steal from the wealthy farmers Boggis (Robin Hurlstone), Bunce (Hugo Guinness) and Bean (Michael Gambon), and provide his family with what he feels they deserve.

And, I must admit, it’s really, really good. In many ways the film is a perfect fit for Anderson and merge of its offbeat humor with his own. The stop-animation allows the director to play to his strenghts and design a a complete world. And as a book the story is naturally divided into the kinds of chapters Anderson enjoys breaking his film into (here he even provides titles for each).

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