lots of movies
Sep. 28th, 2012 01:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI have a new second favourite thing: Emperor and the White Snake, a martial arts and magic film with Jet Li. It's second favourite after Woochi the Demon Slayer. Clearly I need to find more magic martial arts.
The title and the back of the box have very little resemblance to the actual film. There is a White Snake. There is no emperor. It's about monks fighting demons, and one of the demons falls in love with a herbalist, and the herbalist doesn't know she's a demon and nearly kills her, and when he goes to save her he accidentally breaks the spells that keep demons safe in prison, and there's huge fights with tidal waves and shining hands and really big snakes. I like it because it's the buddhist version of demon hunting, they don't kill them or send them to hell, they catch them so they can have a good think about things and the buddha is merciful. And if the demons are being nice they tell them to go home instead of smiting them. Is better. It isn't as simple as Good vs Evil, it's everyone doing their best and learning stuff about mercy and love and helping people.
Also there's lots of kicking and smashing things up and fighting with magic and also with monk things like cymbals. So it's a religious kissing and kicking movie. It's like all my favourite things.
Granted I can think of ways to configure all my favourite things that could quite possibly be better, but since I don't have a big stack of films that are all my favourite things, I like this one rather a lot.
The reviews I found don't like it. Complain that it's all CGI and no heart. I liked the CGI, there's big magic and using it to do very shiny things. I liked the love story and I liked the religion stuff with the monks and how it was about how your choices are the important part. Possibly if you don't like the religion stuff there's very little movie left.
There are two female characters with names and they talk to each other. Mostly about a man though.
There's lots of other female characters, but they're all demons. Being a girl is a 100% indicator of being a demon in this one. That's rather a problem. But being a demon is not a 100% indicator of being evil or hurting people or anything, so that's better.
I watched a bunch of movies lately.
Mongol was about Genghis Khan before he was boss of huge empire. Mostly it was about other people saving him from stuff. And his wife. She saved him from stuff by sleeping with a rich guy and getting the money to buy him out of slavery. He ended up with two kids that were his wife's by other men but he was very clear he was their father because he loved her. He didn't go around rescuing her, when he turned up to rescue her she had slit the throat of the guy that stole her already. So for a lot of the movie she was the strong one. Yet it kept following him around like he's the hero. I think it was trying to be about how he decided to go conquer everything in sight because the world was full of bastards at the time so he decided to impose better law so women and children wouldn't have to go through what happened to him. But that means most of the movie was watching him get dragged around having bad stuff happen to him, and to be honest I got bored. *shrugs*
The Lost Bladesman is a Donnie Yen film. Awesome fight sequences. There's one guy trying to get the woman he loves back to her husband, and then there's Politics, and he keeps trying to be a hero by one set of rules but ending up with everyone opposing him because of practical politics rules. Like, it doesn't matter if the Emperor in theory has the mandate of heaven, the new guy is feeding people, which helps more. So he ends up being cast as the bad guy just by doing hero things, everyone afraid of him. Being totally kick arse in a fight is not in fact going to fix anything. And then things get even more complicated, and the woman has other ideas about the going back to her bloke thing, and it's all a big tragic mess. With very good fights.
I liked it. Being a hero, never simple.
I did not so much like that there's basically one woman who exists to be the love interest and die. I'm really quite tired of that.
Divine Weapon is about a woman developing new weapons, rockets and missiles, to try and defend her country from huge neighbour country. The neighbour country is evil cause it orders maidens and eunuchs sent as presents. So when the huge great exploding arrows get developed and kill a few thousand enemy soldiers it's a big victory for the good guys. In theory.
... I quite liked this film while I was watching it, there's a couple of kick arse women and lots of fights and complications and politics and tension. But on the whole I think I like catching demons in bowls more better. Reality is painful.
Conan, the Jason Momoa one, was not ethically complex. Evil bad guy of evil goes around killing a lot of people so he can become all powerful, Conan goes around killing a lot of people so he can free slaves and shag them and eat and drink and go kill some more people, especially the ones that killed his people first. Apparently killing people for vengeance is okay but killing them for vengeance and dark magic is not. So that's simple.
:eyeroll:
The thing is, there's a black guy who doesn't die, and two named women who talk to each other about something other than a man, including swords, sharpness of, and human sacrifice, imminence of, as well as somebody's mother. So that's more successful by the tick boxes than really a lot of other films. Granted, one of the women is evil and creepy, but you can't have everything.
... I'm not really planning on watching this film twice, but I was in a really stabby mood when I watched it once, so that worked out.
I also rewatched The Sorcerers Apprentice. It irritates me in the same ways as the first time I watched it. The sequence where he's going around the world looking for the heir to Merlin still reads as 'and all them brown people turned out not to be good enough'. The way that all the women are somebody's girlfriend or evil is irritating. The thing where it doesn't bother establishing which side is good or evil before expecting us to cheer for them is a bit cheap. What's wrong with Morgana anyway? It kind of says, hey, this is the bad lady, lets get on with magic fights. If the sorcerer who took an apprentice, or the apprentice, had been a woman then the film would be considerably better. Though I guess then I'd be complaining about the all-for-love motivations. Hmmm.
I liked the magic a lot, and also the tesla coils. It was a lot of fun.
So: more movies with more magic and more women kicking arse please.
... even the films where they're evil beat the ones where they're simply non existent.
The title and the back of the box have very little resemblance to the actual film. There is a White Snake. There is no emperor. It's about monks fighting demons, and one of the demons falls in love with a herbalist, and the herbalist doesn't know she's a demon and nearly kills her, and when he goes to save her he accidentally breaks the spells that keep demons safe in prison, and there's huge fights with tidal waves and shining hands and really big snakes. I like it because it's the buddhist version of demon hunting, they don't kill them or send them to hell, they catch them so they can have a good think about things and the buddha is merciful. And if the demons are being nice they tell them to go home instead of smiting them. Is better. It isn't as simple as Good vs Evil, it's everyone doing their best and learning stuff about mercy and love and helping people.
Also there's lots of kicking and smashing things up and fighting with magic and also with monk things like cymbals. So it's a religious kissing and kicking movie. It's like all my favourite things.
Granted I can think of ways to configure all my favourite things that could quite possibly be better, but since I don't have a big stack of films that are all my favourite things, I like this one rather a lot.
The reviews I found don't like it. Complain that it's all CGI and no heart. I liked the CGI, there's big magic and using it to do very shiny things. I liked the love story and I liked the religion stuff with the monks and how it was about how your choices are the important part. Possibly if you don't like the religion stuff there's very little movie left.
There are two female characters with names and they talk to each other. Mostly about a man though.
There's lots of other female characters, but they're all demons. Being a girl is a 100% indicator of being a demon in this one. That's rather a problem. But being a demon is not a 100% indicator of being evil or hurting people or anything, so that's better.
I watched a bunch of movies lately.
Mongol was about Genghis Khan before he was boss of huge empire. Mostly it was about other people saving him from stuff. And his wife. She saved him from stuff by sleeping with a rich guy and getting the money to buy him out of slavery. He ended up with two kids that were his wife's by other men but he was very clear he was their father because he loved her. He didn't go around rescuing her, when he turned up to rescue her she had slit the throat of the guy that stole her already. So for a lot of the movie she was the strong one. Yet it kept following him around like he's the hero. I think it was trying to be about how he decided to go conquer everything in sight because the world was full of bastards at the time so he decided to impose better law so women and children wouldn't have to go through what happened to him. But that means most of the movie was watching him get dragged around having bad stuff happen to him, and to be honest I got bored. *shrugs*
The Lost Bladesman is a Donnie Yen film. Awesome fight sequences. There's one guy trying to get the woman he loves back to her husband, and then there's Politics, and he keeps trying to be a hero by one set of rules but ending up with everyone opposing him because of practical politics rules. Like, it doesn't matter if the Emperor in theory has the mandate of heaven, the new guy is feeding people, which helps more. So he ends up being cast as the bad guy just by doing hero things, everyone afraid of him. Being totally kick arse in a fight is not in fact going to fix anything. And then things get even more complicated, and the woman has other ideas about the going back to her bloke thing, and it's all a big tragic mess. With very good fights.
I liked it. Being a hero, never simple.
I did not so much like that there's basically one woman who exists to be the love interest and die. I'm really quite tired of that.
Divine Weapon is about a woman developing new weapons, rockets and missiles, to try and defend her country from huge neighbour country. The neighbour country is evil cause it orders maidens and eunuchs sent as presents. So when the huge great exploding arrows get developed and kill a few thousand enemy soldiers it's a big victory for the good guys. In theory.
... I quite liked this film while I was watching it, there's a couple of kick arse women and lots of fights and complications and politics and tension. But on the whole I think I like catching demons in bowls more better. Reality is painful.
Conan, the Jason Momoa one, was not ethically complex. Evil bad guy of evil goes around killing a lot of people so he can become all powerful, Conan goes around killing a lot of people so he can free slaves and shag them and eat and drink and go kill some more people, especially the ones that killed his people first. Apparently killing people for vengeance is okay but killing them for vengeance and dark magic is not. So that's simple.
:eyeroll:
The thing is, there's a black guy who doesn't die, and two named women who talk to each other about something other than a man, including swords, sharpness of, and human sacrifice, imminence of, as well as somebody's mother. So that's more successful by the tick boxes than really a lot of other films. Granted, one of the women is evil and creepy, but you can't have everything.
... I'm not really planning on watching this film twice, but I was in a really stabby mood when I watched it once, so that worked out.
I also rewatched The Sorcerers Apprentice. It irritates me in the same ways as the first time I watched it. The sequence where he's going around the world looking for the heir to Merlin still reads as 'and all them brown people turned out not to be good enough'. The way that all the women are somebody's girlfriend or evil is irritating. The thing where it doesn't bother establishing which side is good or evil before expecting us to cheer for them is a bit cheap. What's wrong with Morgana anyway? It kind of says, hey, this is the bad lady, lets get on with magic fights. If the sorcerer who took an apprentice, or the apprentice, had been a woman then the film would be considerably better. Though I guess then I'd be complaining about the all-for-love motivations. Hmmm.
I liked the magic a lot, and also the tesla coils. It was a lot of fun.
So: more movies with more magic and more women kicking arse please.
... even the films where they're evil beat the ones where they're simply non existent.
