dragon tiger gate

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0482930/

this review is for all the mothers out there.

dragon tiger gate is pretty clear on what it is about.  the acting is just good enough to justify fighting.  the plot is a device that moves the characters from fight to fight.  the scenery is built to be pulverized in fights.  the special effects are used to make cool-looking fighting techniques.

so it is a fighting vehicle, then.  you can relax and forget about who this "scaly" guy is or why he wants to fight everybody.  you can opt to not worry about how it is that dragon got so much better at fighting than tiger if he left the training hall at a young age, while tiger kept training.  you can even decide that the preposterous liability of a haircut worn by every single main fighting character is of no consequence.  just sit back and enjoy the fighting.

dragon tiger gate gets three flying knees to the face.  happy mother's day!

swedish auto

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0800228/

swedish auto is the kind of movie where, after about twenty minutes, you turn to the person next to you and say "so...want to make out?"  you would say this no matter who was sitting next to you, because the point of making out would not be to get jiggy with it, but rather to distract yourself from the horrible horrible things being shown to you by the moving pictures box.

i rate it one swedish fish, begrudgingly.  i do not like swedish fish.

the promotion

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0803057/

i made it about 20 minutes into this train wreck before i decided it would be a good idea to double-check the recommendation i had gotten for it.  as it turns out, the recommendation i had gotten was to avoid this movie at all costs.  "i rescind all previous potentially positive comments," quoth the cheerleader.  on the strength of the first 20 minutes, i wholeheartedly agree and give it one shopping cart.

chungking express

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109424/

to me, chungking express represents the ghost of netflix recommendations past. netflix recommendations have been responsible for causing me to watch a number of terrible movies, and i suppose it was foolish of me to think that i would be free of it just because i had cancelled my subscription. i should have remembered that the human brane is a mess of all the things you have ever heard or seen, which means i am warped for life.

anyway, netflix recommendations presumably pointed me at this one because of all the other terrible movies it tricked me into watching. i hated the story and all the characters, and was unable to tell which parts were dreaming and which were awake. they may all have been awake with characters merely saying that they felt they were dreaming. i also remain confused about why this was framed as two stories that were essentially disjoint. one story, i could have understood. three or more stories, i could also understand. but why two? two stories means both have to be long enough to be shortish movies in and of themselves. and if you go that far, why not just flesh them out and have two films? presumably, the writers had two disjoint stories and could not sell either, so they smashed them together to make something they could.

none of that really matters, but it is the kind of thing that i obsess over when trying to understand the overarching aspects of a film. all i really need is a guidebook. for life. even something as simple as annotations that say "there is something interesting here you should try to understand," or "this detail is not important," or "avoid the tuna salad, they left it out on the counter overnight." dysentery is no laughing matter, and neither was this movie.

see? that is how you connect two disjoint things together. with a circle.

shutter island

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1130884/

i wish i did not have to dislike leonardo dicaprio so much, because he is in so many otherwise-good films. i think i first saw him in the "the beach," which was terrible. then there was "what's eating gilbert grape," which i hated, but only because i cannot stand watching soft-hearted people get backed into corners. i started to watch "romeo + juliet", but had to turn it off because it was so godawful, so i am not sure whether to count that one. a buddy talked me into going to see "the aviator" at an actual theater, and let me just say that i have not seen this "buddy" since. "gangs of new york" was ok. "the departed" was pretty good, largely because i have a deep, abiding love for pretty much everyone in the cast who was not dicaprio. ("infernal affairs" was still better, though.) i went so far as to actually like "inception." finally, i watched "shutter island" and realized that leonardo dicaprio always plays a crazy person. how did i not notice this before? this new knowledge is sure to ruin every movie he is in from now on.

not counting leonardo dicaprio, shutter island was pretty ok.