movie compulsion….

At various times, I’ll admit, often in the midst of depression, I feel the urge to purchase things. Owning things is so stupid… yet the act of acquiring them can also be intensely satisfying.

I splurged on Monday and bought some movies off ebay. Twin Warriors, Hero, Juvenile and Wonderful Days. Twin Warriors is the only one I’ve seen before, and I remember it as one of the better choreographed kung-fu movies I’ve ever seen. I read somewhere that most of the fighting is actually Tai-Chi as well, (The hong kong release title was The Tai-Chi Master.) and I’m sorta excited to watch it again with that in mind.

Hero I heard about last weekend at Minicon in a panel where guest of honor Walter Jon Williams showcased his kenpo skills and talked about how martial arts has influenced his writing. The kenpo was interesting, but I left mainly with a list of action movies I now want to see.

Juvenile and Wonderful days were just movies I decided to pick up because they were a) cheap on ebay, b) highly rated on IMDB and c) foreign science fiction films I’d never even heard of!

Alright, I’m off to spend a little bit of time with laura before we go see a sneak preview of Kill Bill vol. 2 tonight. I’m glad I don’t have to pay money to see the sequel. I sorta reserved judgement on the first one, despite some excellent action sequences. I don’t really feel action alone is enough to carry a movie anymore… it makes it “worth seeing”, but not, in my opinion, good. Although maybe I should also say that there are some movies I like only for the action, and that is enough for them to be good–but if there also happen to be other aspects of the film that I dislike, then the action is not enough by itself to sway the movie into my “good” graces.

7 Replies to “movie compulsion….”

  1. Interesting that you have two categories there: “Worth seeing” and “good”. In my opinion, for something to be “worth seeing”, it should also be “good”. If it’s not the second, how could it possibly be the first? Now the action sequences could be interesting to see on their own, perhaps as part of a compilation, or if someone else had the DVD and you could just skip to the cool sequence. But if the movie isn’t good, one shouldn’t have to sit through the “not good” in order to get to the action sequence “worth seeing”.

  2. I also feel a bit silly about my occasional excitement to purchase things. Hopefully, I’m getting better at figuring out what kind of things I’ll really enjoy.

    Anyway, I like Walter Jon William’s older stuff lots. I haven’t read any of his more recent stuff, but how neat just to see his name mentioned (I reprimanded DrBombay for not checking his stuff out at MiniCon).

  3. Really, DrBombay, there are infinite answers to that question! Including but not limited to “it’s a campy cult classic!” and “how else ya gonna keep having arguments about whether or not Highlander II was really truly the worst movie ever made?”

  4. As long as there’s “Robot Holocaust”, Highlander II will never honestly claim the title of “worst ever made”. Maybe if it rigged the ballot boxes…

    Hollywood tells us that all movies are good. Hollywood is your friend. You wouldn’t be doubting Hollywood now would you, grid? ;)

  5. I just think Kill Bill on a whole was very well done. I thought QT did a great job of taking different styles of film that he liked and putting them together. It wasn’t a great acting film. It wasn’t this great meaningfull art piece that will win hundreds of awards. It was just fun. I had a great time with both films.

  6. Just action! Just action! How could you say that? I think that Kill Bill was an extremely complex layering of cinimatic genius. I mean, you have not one, but TWO really hot chicks performing those action sequences. What more do you want?

    All kidding aside, I sort of viewed it as a Tarantino homage to all the Kung Fu films he loved as a kid. That’s why it’s so rediculous and bloody, like it’s from the brain of a thirteen year old boy. it’s enough to get me to pay full price to see Vol. 2. With bells on. And mebbe some really big boots.

  7. Robot Holocaust, eh? That’s new to me. Guess I’ve got rental plans for the weekend. But I can’t imagine a movie called “Robot Holocaust” that takes itself quite so seriously as the Highlander quadrilogy, and it can’t count as “bad” if it’s not trying really hard to be good.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *