Forbidden Kingdom

Forbidden Kingdom
a fantasy/kung-fu movie
IMDb | Netflix
Overall Rating: 4/10
Meets Expectations: +2
Apparent Rating: 6/10

This is my kind of story. I did not think it would be because I have very little enthusiasm for kung-fu as a movie genre. But the story was about a young man in the inner city who is transported to this magical realm while unconscious from a fight.

While he’s there, he learns to fight in several animal styles of kung fu fighting and completes a quest to save the world. He learns what it is to sacrifice for his friends, what it costs the hero to save the world, how to have deep feelings for a woman, and what the bonds connecting him to others mean. He becomes a man and we can see it.

It’s probably my favorite plot.

Unfortunately it’s really badly implemented here. Jackie Chan comes off a lot like Shaggy in the Scooby Doo movies. Jet Li is well, I’m not really sure which character was Jet Li, but all the other ones were cardboard. The girl manages to sound like she doesn’t speak English and we’re supposed to believe she’s stoically trying to avenge her family, but mostly she sounds retarded because she speaks of herself in the third person. The worst part about this is the pacing. The story can’t develop because we rush through all the plot to watch yet another ridiculous fight scene. And the fight scenes are all “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” style where suddenly they have lunar gravity for no apparent reason, so it’s stupid and pointless and wastes gobs of film time.

If we had actually seen the story told, with the building of personality so the characters’ motivations were clear, that would have been an awesome experience.

Some of the humorous parts of the movie require external knowledge of previous kung fu classics, so unless you have seen some of the Drunken Master series, or the ones with Aunt 13, or whatever that one with the emperor of the desert was, you’re not going to get the joke. But the dialog and most of the scenes are blocked with the intent that the audience is going to be laughing along with the cast. I did not find it even vaguely humorous, even when I got the joke.

This was a great story, wasted on this telling. I enjoyed it, but you probably won’t. If you’re a fan of kung fu movies, you’re likely going to be offended by their tongue-in-cheek treatment of the genre. If you’re not a fan of kung fu movies, most of the movie will go over your head and you’ll get to the end frustrated and feeling taunted. However, if you like superhero movies and can put up with the attitude problems the people making the movie have, it was entertaining.

Smart People

Smart People
a drama movie
IMDb | Netflix
Overall Rating: 4
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 4

I did not particularly like Smart People. I liked it better than Netflix thought I would, since they said I would give it 1.5 stars at most. There were several things that made this underwhelming, mostly that none of the characters seemed really catchy. I can’t tell if that is because the acting was mediocre, the script was bad, or because the intended characters just suck.

We have the bitch-dad who cares about no one except how they can be demeaned and insulted. He’s a teacher who manages to not teach and to turn all his students off his subject while complaining that no one really wants to know English and its literature. We have the daughter who is fulfilling the wifely roles in all but affection, while trying to graduate high school and make a life for herself. We have the stoner brother/uncle. We have the son/brother who is in college where dad works. None of these people struck me as especially brainy or brilliant or insightful, so we have only the title to tell us they’re “smart people”.

In my experience really smart people do not need to study. They read the material, they listen to the lectures, they do the required assignments which exist for idiots who need to drum things in even though it’s just busywork, and then when they want to learn something they do outside work. So the daughter who was studying for her SATs struck me as rather dumb. Plus everyone knows the SATs have been watered down until the scores are meaningless.

There was not a lot of real plot in this movie. We have the daughter who hits on an older man. We have the son who is secretly a published poet. We have the father who thinks he wants to be head of the English department and whose book has been rejected. Then we have the father gets a girlfriend plot. That was the really repulsive aspect.

The girlfriend is a doctor. Their first date went so badly she walked out and he had to plead piteously to get a second chance because she really does not like him. They shag on the second date and although they use a condom she gets pregnant. It is my understanding that unmarried women who are sexually active and non-monogamous take contraceptive pills as a matter of course, even though everyone engaging in risky behavior should use barrier methods as well. Condoms break, fall off, or there are user errors. Having sex with a man who has been chaste for a decade (since his wife died) who freely admits he has not used a condom before– well, I think any woman who did that is taking a foolish risk. Any woman who gets pregnant with a man she does not like is criminally stupid. There really is no rational reason for how an educated woman could bring an unwanted child into the world.

I have no idea how I would have felt about the movie without the problems it had. If the writers had actually known smart people, not just assholes who were smarter than the writers, and if a supposedly intelligent woman who can write prescriptions could have done the right thing and gotten herself emergency contraception—- I think I might have enjoyed this thoroughly. But that’s a completely different movie.

And a note about the rating, I think most average people are turned off by movies about (supposedly) smart people, so I think they would inherently expect this to be a 2/10. So my -2 rating is actually down from my expected rating of at least 6/10. And I do really think it was a 4/10 for most people. Most people seem to think that an unwanted baby makes everything better so they would consider that to have been a happy ending which is worth about +2.

Rocket Science

Rocket Science
a movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 4/10
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 2/10

This was supposed to be “outcast boy makes good in intellectual competition”. It was “loser boy, from loser parents who shouldn’t have bred, screws up his life more with help from an evil bitch-girl, intellect be damned”.

The acting is terrible. The situation is badly written, so the “trick” of switching who the good guy is seems like an obvious technique that was telegraphed from the beginning. The supporting roles are horrible horrible characters, so bad that they must be caricatures or someone should have called Child Welfare.

There is an element of what debate is supposed to be about, but when the story starts with the end of the previous year’s debate, we see a student fail. Then we hear he dropped out of high school and now works at a dry cleaners because of it. That’s almost a mockery of “people taking things seriously”. So it manages to look like debate is an activity for snooty people and everyone else should just stay home. Maybe it really is like that and it’s not about ability. Certainly joining a high school sports team requires more than athletic ability.

I didn’t like how intellect was not honored in this story. It really might have been a movie about loser boy getting conned into joining the track team instead since it was a movie about how outcasts are kept out.

We’re told to feel sorry for the main character, because he stutters and it keeps him from doing anything fun in life. We see him struggling to make progress when the school’s idea of “help” is a guy who studied pallative treatments for ADD and has no idea what to do in terms of speech therapy. But I can find 10 ideas on how to deal with stuttering, just online. Most of them are free— free advice and the advice doesn’t cost anything to implement. So it’s a case where he doesn’t even try to do anything to help himself.

There was a lot to really loathe in this movie and the resolution was not particularly pleasant.

It’s not uplifting, it’s not well told, it’s not about real people trying their best, it’s a movie showing that horrible people keep doing horrible things and they seem to like it that way.

Cruel Zinc Melodies — Glen Cook (fantasy)

Cruel Zinc Melodies
a fantasy book by Glen Cook
Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 4/10

There are a number of books in Glen Cook’s Garrett PI series. They are all adjectival metallic nouns. Cold Copper Tears, Cruel Zinc Melodies, Silver something. Whatever. Generally these foci are forced into the story and we’re made to put up with it. I can see it being a useful method for writing a series because the author can use it to hold things together. I really hate it when the technique is obvious though.

The main character used to be downtrodden and put upon and can’t seem to get past that. It’s really irritating to have someone who knows the chief of law enforcement, the heir to the throne, the best telepathic monster, a team of fairies, the head of the were rats, the biggest heads of the criminal underworld, the driving forces behind the biggest manufacturing enterprises, someone in every branch of the military, the best accountants, the royal tailor, the best security people… if there is someone at the top of any heap, Garrett knows him. And the guy cannot stop whining. He also can’t stop referring to himself in the third person–romance manner. (In romances, there’s this stylized referenced manner, people aren’t referred to by name but by descriptor. The red-headed lady. And because that can’t be constantly repeated like a pronoun, there are endless variants… Titian-maned, crimson locks, ginger girl, whatever. It’s always clear the writer bit off too much thesaurus and is burping it back.) Garrett refers to himself as “Mother Garrett’s Blue Eyed Boy” Or Mama G’s or Ma Garrett’s or whatever variant. I wanted to get in Mr Cook’s face and say “emulating pulp romances is a step down! Stop it.”

These are all irritations. But it’s been years since the previous book. And I spent the whole book trying to remember what was so interesting about these books. I liked it. But I have no idea why. If you are not a desperate fan, don’t bother.

The plot was really strange because about halfway through the narrator (who is Garrett having hindsight) said they should have been able to solve the mystery since they had all the information. Only the way the ending went, they didn’t. I think. I was amazed Garrett could follow along with the plot. He doesn’t seem that bright.

In summary, drunken asshole makes good, can’t seem to appreciate that, and story magically works out while idiot tells us we’re the stupid ones.

The Derby Stallion

The Derby Stallion
Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 4/10
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 2/10

The Derby Stallion really suffers from failure to implement formula. We are all familiar with “underdog makes good over bully because the bully doesn’t deserve success” formula. When you get the main character in the “underdog” role who is the son of a professional baseball player, it’s hard to see him as disadvantaged. There was no question that the bully was a bully, but that just looked like a complete breakdown in law-enforcement. (Someone should have put a camera up, taken video of the big-name kid doing thousands of dollars of damage and put him in jail. The kid says no one will believe the old man who is complaining, but that problem would have been solved by evidence… and chronic vandalism should have garnered the attention of the sheriff whose investigation would have generated the evidence necessary.)

We’re told that the reason people don’t like the old man is because he’s an alcoholic and black. But there’s no real evidence of alcoholism before we’re told that, so it does look like racism. He’s the only main character who isn’t white, which leaves the impression that the suburbs grew around him and he’s now unwelcome.

We’re told that the old man buys a racing horse. Then a handful of months later, the county forecloses on his property. It seems rather ridiculous that a house could be foreclosed upon without seizing the horse and truck… but having the house foreclosed doesn’t change anything.

We’re told that the winner of the steeplechase derby gets a college scholarship. Er. Not where scholarship==free ride, not to a real school anyway. There is no possible way that the purse for a steeplechase is more than $50K. Maybe they mean it’s enough to cover in-state tuition at a backwater school…. but even so, why does the son of a professional ball player desperately need a scholarship?

This movie was ridiculous, full of holes, it flings prejudices around but doesn’t deal with them, and is a really bad implementation of a feel-good family film. I am not the only one who thinks this because the movie has dropped $12 in price since it was released on DVD. I found it hard to finish watching and if I had known how it would turn out, I would have spent the 90 minutes watching paint dry instead. Originally, after first watching it, I was less offended. My Netflix rating says 2 stars out of 5, I know that is a rounding error. It is at most 3/10, and I talked myself down through the process of explaining what was wrong with this movie.

The Lost Language of Cranes

The Lost Language of Cranes
Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 4/10
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 2/10

Somewhere there are people who intended this to be a good movie with an involving story and coherent allusions and great acting. Those people are probably ashamed of what this movie became. It isn’t quite that bad, but there was all this intellectual stuff about children who are raised without parental influence end up speaking their own languages (the “lost language of cranes” is about a toddler who modeled his communication off building cranes because he didn’t interact with people.) But there is no clear association between this lost language and how a gay man learns to find his way in the world.

The production values on this DVD are terrible. It looks like someone ported the VHS to DVD. The subtitles are mediocre and necessary because it manages to sound even more foreign than the English setting would imply.

Anyone considering viewing this movie should be aware that there is brief but full view male frontal nudity. There is no real sex, very little physical interaction at all, but at one point a man gets out of bed and walks toward the camera with everything showing.

The beginning of the movie seems to be about the relationship between Philip and Eliott. But the movie’s summary says it’s about Philip and his father. It also seems like it’s about Eliott and his roommate who is the sociologist. And it seems like it’s about Philip’s father and mother. And about Philip and his new love after Eliott deserts him. There is no clear thread connecting these stories what-so-ever.

Philip’s mother is one of those disgusting cows who thinks everything is about her house while she’s having an affair and her husband is leaving her for another man. But the way it’s shown, we’re supposed to feel sorry for her because everyone else is progressing and she’s been left behind. I do agree that the ability for people to openly express their sexual preferences is progress, but I do not agree that being homosexual is better than being heterosexual, so that cannot be thought to be progress inherently.

We are also supposed to feel sorry for Philip’s father because he’s been a closeted homosexual for more than 20 years. Mostly though it seems like something he’s brought on himself by dishonesty. No one forced him to marry a woman and ruin her life too.

I don’t know where Eliott fit into things, except he was a gay man raised by two gay men and still managed to destroy his relationship with Philip. And Eliott’s roommate, the sociologist woman, suddenly bags her whole thesis near the end of the movie for no apparent reason except the movie is ending and she wants to be able to go out with Philip and his new love.

For the people writing the screenplay, please to be remembering not to put the plot and characters in the blender and taking out chunks at random. This movie was not worth watching, but throughout there were glimmers of movies which might have been fabulous.

Tadpole

Tadpole
(no links will be provided because I didn’t like it.)
Overall Rating: 4/10
Met expectations: -3
Apparent rating: 1/10

Tadpole was touted as a comedy about a really smart young man who happens to have a crush on his stepmother. I could see that crushing on an unrelated family member could be comedic and would be something only a really smart person would do.

However, the movie was about this average-seeming kid who crushes on his stepmother to the point that he has (apparently unprotected) sex with her best friend.

In the meantime, we see the kid talking to his best friend. There might have been some comedic elements there, “Stick to your own mom.” But the whole thing was overshadowed. The kid says his stepmother is not a biological relation. This is true. There shouldn’t be an inherent taboo there. The kid’s friend is appalled because in his own mind the taboo doesn’t bind via incest but via familial relationship. Both boys go to the same private school, so on one hand we’re supposed to believe the main kid is totally smart, but we’re supposed to see the kid’s friend as a dumb loser. It doesn’t work like that.

There was a lot of New York in this movie. Not in terms of scenery, but in terms of attitude. No one questions how an underage kid could end up having sex with his parents’ consent. Even when they find out it was with a 40+ age woman, no one seems upset about it. He’s barely 15. The father and stepmother are completely hands-off in terms of raising the child, even though he’s only there on holidays. It’s like they didn’t want a kid at all, so they expected him to parent himself. But even though this is completely obvious at the party, none of the other adults seem surprised. This movie made it easy to negatively stereotype New Yorkers and wonder why contraception wasn’t more universally practiced.

John Ritter was in this movie as the father who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about his offspring. Sigorney Weaver was in this as the stepmother. The kid was some no-name with a retro 50s geek hairstyle.

Humor value was zero. It was very dramatic, but since all the characters were horrible people, it was not something I would recommend to anyone.