Dragon Tiger Gate

It was filed under superhero movies. I claim that the renting of Dragon Tiger Gate was completely not my fault. I love superhero movies. My DH loves kung fu movies. Clearly this would be an amazing together-activity, right?  Not so much. We did watch it together and we did bond over it. But that moment of shared experience was thinking “What were they thinking?”

The movie jumps around a lot in the timeline. It’s based on Manga, so you just know there are whole issues that are flashback. But there is no cohesion to the flashbacks, so they go from current to recent-past to long past to possible future to current in some random order at intermittent times.

The plot is that two brothers are separated in early childhood. There was a conflict between the spoken English and the subtitle English, but it seems to have been that Dragon and Tiger are half-brothers and their father Two Wrong FuHu  (or something like that) cheated on Dragon’s mother, so they were thrown out of their home and replaced by the new and improved family while Dragon’s mother went to live in the ghetto slums. Tiger tries to keep his brotherly bond, but Dragon is having nothing of it. Then Dragon’s mother dies and Dragon is adopted by a complete stranger instead of returning to his father.

But the premise of the plot is that Dragon owes fealty to his father and must return to “The Gate”. Dragon feels he cannot because he has dishonored his kung fu.

But even now after watching the whole thing, I have no clue who the bad guys were. At first it seemed like this gang. Then it was a traitor within the gang who was Dragon’s bit of fluff. Then it was this escapee from the Power Rangers.

Oh, and a huge part of the plot is that no one seems to believe Dragon and Tiger are related because they don’t look alike. Maybe if I were Chinese I would be able to tell, but to me it looked like that ancient Parent Trap movie with Halley Mills and Halley Mills.

All the fight scenes are completely ludicrous. They look a bit like the car-fight scenes in Speed Racer where jump-jacks can shoot the car straight up and into a barrel roll. By the time we get to that part though, we’re on our fourth evil mastermind and this one looks like a cartoon reject, so I just assumed this was supposed to be hilarious and a parody. (I wonder if I might have liked Coughing Tiger, Hidden Moron if someone had told me it was all tongue-in-cheek?)

The story is all over the place with technology. Cell phones, but no one has a powered vehicle.

Some parts of the story were interesting. Love interest. Foreign Family Values. Etc. But it really was written by the three faces of Eve or something. Just completely incoherent.

Garden State

Garden State
Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 4/10
Meets Expectations: -1
Apparent Rating: 3/10

The summary for Garden State says it is a “whimsical comedy”. What? Nothing in this was funny. Oh, sure, people tell you that a movie about someone going home for their mother’s funeral and seeing what their old friends have gotten up to is bound to be hilarious. But the mother killed herself after being stuck in a wheelchair for 20 years because the son broke her neck when he was 9. The old friends are grave diggers, but only for Jewish funerals. Everyone uses hardcore drugs at the post funeral party. The main character has been medicated by his doctor-father for decades in a way that is tantamount to child abuse.

While “back home” the main character meets a woman at the neurologist’s office. She’s a chronic liar and wears a The Thing helmet and kills her pets.

The whole thing is like this 90 minute stoner meltdown and I really have absolutely no idea why anyone thought this was a good story. Perhaps if one is desperately aching for more fiction from Stalinist Russia and the Gulag era, then this might be worth watching. But in my opinion, all these characters are so crushed, hopeless, and miserable that death would be a kindness.

Total downer of a movie. Zero comedic value. If you have to watch it, put the subtitles on and fast-forward so less time is wasted. This was bad.