Just got back from seeing Yimou Zhang's Full River Red at the cinema, which was part of the "Films From South" festival, a week of movies from Asia, Africa and South America.
I've enjoyed some of Zhang's earlier movies ("House of Flying Daggers", "Hero" and even the much maligned Matt Damon starrer, "The Great Wall"), but this one was a massive disappointment.
A fictional story set during Shaoxing period of the Southern Song Dynasty, sees a group of characters trying to unravel an assassination plot against the Prime Minister after a diplomat from the opposing Jin Dynasty is murdered. It starts off well enough; the characters are interesting and it manages to be fun and silly in all the right places, but after a while, the wheels come off.
This movie wants to present a complex conspiracy by continually casting doubt on who's in league with who and by pulling off double crosses and twists left and right, but, unfortunately, most of it is done in a rather clunky manner and it simply becomes tiresome rather than interesting after a while. It certainly does not help that the movie clocks in at two hours and forty minutes, which is at least one hour too long, in my opinion.
It should be said that the English subtitles seemed to have been translated by an early beta of Google translate circa 2010 and that pulled me out of the proceedings numerous times. It also made some of the dialogue nonsensical in places, so it is possible that the plot would have seemed more sophisticated if it had been properly conveyed.
An example of an interaction:
"Can I borrow your background?"
"I don't have a background, I earned all myself"
uh, okay, what?
I am tempted to seek it out online to see if I can find a version with subs translated by a person with a proper understanding of both languages, but the fact remains that the movie is sooo long and convoluted that I'm not sure I'm gonna bother.
EDIT: I forgot; this movie has the second most enervating and annoying soundtrack I've heard in a movie all year, beaten only by the assault on the eardrums that is the "Poor Things" soundtrack.
"Blink Twice" - absolute banger from first time director Zoe Kravitz. Kind of a feminist "Get Out" meets "Glass Onion" thriller with superb performances from Naomi Ackie and Channing Tatum. Darkly satirical but also upsetting - highly recommended.
@LN78 Agreed, I went in blind, knowing nothing about it other than it was a thriller of some sort. I was initially a bit worried, as it took a while to set up the mystery and while Kravitz infused the proceedings with a smidgen of dread, I wondered if I had been wrong about the thriller angle. Then the second act hit and it all clicked, leading into the third act that was just all kinds of great. One of my favourite trips to the cinema this year. Kravitz is definitely one to watch
(and side note: I first saw Adria Arjona in "Hit Man", which I caught in the theatre earlier this year and I loved her in that. She was also a very pleasant surprise in this one, as the only cast member I knew about going in was Tatum, and she rocked it again. Also one to watch)
Francis Ford Coppola was on the Colbert show last night. Remarkable poise, dignity and eloquence for a guy that just blew out over $120 million of his own money on what is widely regarded as a massive artistic folly.
@BlAcK_Sw0rDsMaN I think I may be in the minority, but I liked it quite a bit. I felt it was a pretty decent legacy sequel that balances the new and the old quite well. "The Frozen Empire", however, was just a nostalgia w@nk and had absolutely none of the charm that Afterlife managed to pull.
@BlAcK_Sw0rDsMaN
I loved the 1980s films and I must say I enjoyed Afterlife as well, even if it was quite heavy on the nostalgia call backs for fans of the franchise like myself. The new characters were mostly likeable as well.
I agree that Frozen Empire is just bad though, that film has too much going on that it lacks a sense of coherence in my opinion.
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
@BlAcK_Sw0rDsMaN I wasn't a fan of it, thought it rehashed too many ideas from the previous films for my liking. I'm not even going to bother with Frozen Empire, and I'll just watch the first two films which I have on Blu Ray.
Life is more fun when you help people succeed, instead of wishing them to fail.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
@Ravix I can barely remember it even though I watched it a few months ago. It was just ok, far too made up with itself. There was one particular Wolverine moment I couldn’t help but smile though the mask bit
Edit: Looking at the artwork for the various releases, it looks like they ruined that moment anyway. Well done, Disney 👏
Peeps maybe indifferent with the film, but apparently the 4K blu ray for Deadpool and Wolverine is supposed to be top tier both in audio and visual terms. It is one of the ones that Sony handled for Disney.
I like that one review mentioned that he can now stop calling Disney 4k Blu rays as in 'At Mouse', due to there poor quality previously. 😂
@JohnnyShoulder I've got it, but haven't been able to check it out yet. I also hear good things about the A/V quality (and I'm one of the few who doesn't go into a Marvel movie expecting/hoping that Marvel suddenly made something different than a Marvel movie, so I actually got what I expected and enjoyed it )
I did nearly buy the 4K before i'd seen it 😅 but glad it's a good version.
Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for it, but it just didn't seem very funny or that good, i dont know. I'm not trying to take away from anyone else having enjoyed it. I recently watched 1 and 2 knowing I'd be watching this one, too. And I feel I got way more out of some of the other Marvel films, tbh. So it's not about it being "too Marvel" or anything like that, in fact, I'd actually say it wasn't Marvel enough. So you can put that snarky remark away, Mr. Furious 😛 I think you may have misunderstood what I meant by my expectations going in
I honestly thought they were going to fully trash on and be way more anarchic within the multiverse tbh, so it's probably on me for expecting a real Marvelwide beatdown style film.
It's maybe on me for not realising he'd destroyed the time travel doo-dad I can't remember seeing that in any form of media yet, but it was mentioned in exposition. Maybe they did show it at the end of 2? Someone else might know more about that 😅
"I just brought a couple of people back to life and then broke it" was the exposition it touched on for a second.
Like, I thought at the end of 2 he now had the ability to time travel, and that was going to be the basis of this entire film. But it just wasn't 😅 and then there's no Cable consequences for doing that either, or any follow on from 2 other than the quick bit of exposition I mentioned.
This is what I mean by not what I expected. The jokes and action were very similar to what I expect from Deadpool, but it didn't really resonate with me for some reason.
There were some high points that I still enjoyed, it's just an overall feeling of "awww sh**, I expected more from this one"
@Ravix hehehe, but I live for the snark! I should say that the comment wasn't really targeted at you; it's just that there seems to be a sport in Marvel bashing these days and I keep wondering "why do these people keep seeing Marvel movies?" and "what are they expecting going in?". I just find it odd and a tiny bit tiresome. I will readily admit that the MCU output has taken a quality downturn, but I will also argue that it's never really been high art, at any point. Seems people have an affinity for the infinity saga that, to me, seems disproportionate to the hate currently on display (and I don't necessarily mean by the people on here). It's always been silly comic book fun and nothing more. Varying quality, sure, but people should stop acting like Kevin Feige killed their kitten or something I think many are just hate watching these days.
As for D&W in particular, yeah, any sort of continuity from the previous movies were pretty much out the window, for some reason. I must say I was sort of surprised that any of the secondary characters from the others even made an appearance; I was expecting this movie to simply pull Deadpool out of his reality and just set him loose in the main MCU reality. What we got was something more or less in the middle between yours and mine expectations, I guess. I was also dead set of bringing back Hugh Jackman's Wolverine (my main gripe with the MUC currently is it's insistence on living in the past instead of moving forward), but when I realised that they actually made it work, I was all aboard.
Three Thousand Years of Longing - I’ve been chewing on this one for a bit now and thought it was worth posting about. This reminded me a lot of Tarsem’s The Fall and shares a lot of that film’s faults but rises above them with two outstanding central performances, beautifully lush cinematography and a ‘just ambiguous enough’ exploration of its themes to give immense depth to its straightforward and somewhat contrived narrative. Not the best film I’ve seen recently but easily one of my favourites. Highly recommend checking this one out, especially for those who appreciate George Miller’s unique creative voice.
@JohnnyShoulder@Ravix@FuriousMachine As most people in this topic know, I'm a huge physical media advocate and a complete sucker for top notch movie transfers with pristine A/V quality. You still couldn't pay me to watch "Deadpool 3" again in any capacity. That movie is effing terrible, even by the toilet gutter standards of recent MCU releases. The "collect both editions" steelbook release strategy is also an affront. Get bent, Disney.
PS While I agree that MCU output has always been silly, disposable entertainment, the movies themselves were often (though not always) pretty good, particulaly when compared to the dreck being offered by rival outfit DC/WB. Post "Infinity War" that just has not been the case. - one (maybe two) movies in that time have just about passed muster. The scripts have been terrible, the overall lack of meaningful direction palpable -and I'd suggest that the multiverse concept - with its inherent negation of meaningful consequences - is largely (though not entirely - hello Disney+) responsible. I'm not hate watching the movies - I'm watching them in the hope that they'll be good again. Seems unlikely.
Does anyone else watch the movies YouTube Movies has for free with ads? I had a lot of late night movie sessions recently and saw a ton of different movies. I maybe watched around 11 or so movies off there, and they offered a pretty good selection of animated movies and even some anime! If I can recall the full list of movies I watched between October to November, it was:
Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie Poupelle of Chimney Town The Wonderland The House of the Lost on the Cape Terminator 2: Judgement Day The LEGO Movie All Dogs Go to Heaven Rock-a-Doodle Paprika The Secret of N.I.M.H Barnyard
I liked a lot of what I watched, though there were a few movies here that I thought were mediocre, specifically The Wonderland, Rock-a-Doodle, and Barnyard, though I slightly like the latter a bit and rewatched it twice, so you could say it’s a guilty pleasure for me haha.
I am unsure of what to watch next, I’m mostly just waiting for them to release Sonic 3 in theaters next month. Excited for that one. I rarely go to movie theaters or actually watch new films.
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