Kung Fu Cult Master (1993)

I saw Kung Fu Cult Master almost 20 years ago during my first big Hong Kong movie phase when I really dug into the genre and tried to see as much of it as was available to me then. Due to Eureka’s recent BluRay release of the title I rewatched it and it turned out to be just as good as I remembered. Though saying it’s good is really subjective in this case as this is really a non-stop assault of plot points and wuxia flying martial art scenes that defy physics and proper sense mixed with some rather improper humor.

It’s based on a novel series which explains why they tried to stuff as much content as possible into its running time and it ends somewhat unfinished as it was supposed to be the first of a two-movie adaptation, with the sequel never made. Despite all these flaws it’s a highly entertaining tour de force that sees Jet Li as the main protagonist learn martial arts in a day to survive the various schemes of the diverse martial arts schools fighting to get control of the ultimate fighting technique.

Though the real enemy is the government that played the various martial arts schools against each other to likely keep them down. The overall setup and how the plot develops is rather convoluted and it’s easy to get lost with who is allied against whom and then ten seconds later all the alliances shift again.

It has relentless pacing with fight after fight that remains consistently entertaining if you don’t mind that it’s mostly fantasy wuxia fighting and not something more grounded. This isn’t a movie to take seriously but enjoy for how it embraces and pushes wuxia genre tropes to its limits.

Equal Rites (1987)

Equal Rites suffers from what in TV shows is usually called early-installment weirdness, so much so that it wasn’t referenced in other Discworld books for ages and mostly memory-holed. It’s Terry Pratchett’s first attempt at telling a somewhat feministic story undermined by being as subtle as a brick and failing to wring out a coherent finale supporting those themes and instead forgoing it for something entirely else.

It sports a prototype Granny Weatherwax that sits in an uncanny valley of being very close to what she became later in the series but different enough to not really fit with her later portrayal.

The setup goes like this. A dying wizard bequeaths his powerful wizard staff to the newly born eighth son of an eight son not realizing it’s not a son but a daughter. This goes against convention as women with magic become witches and only men become wizards as their approach to magic is entirely diametral. Still, the girl has manly wizard powers now and things are about to get dicey

Once Esk gets old enough her powers awaken and Granny Weatherwax goes with her to Ankh-Morpork to enlist her in the Unseen University to learn to deal with her powers. There Esk runs headlong into the glass ceiling holding women back from becoming wizards and needs to find other means to learn wizardry.

At this point the narrative kind of derails as it ends up about fighting and stopping demons from the dungeon dimensions from entering our world, probably because a book that says women should be wizards too, loudly telling everyone from the first page sort of has run out of interesting ways to argue for equal rights once the finale comes around. Once you’ve started with your message repeating again and again won’t get you anywhere and Pratchett didn’t figure out what else to do with the story.

It’s still an overall fun romp with lovely characters that works most of the time. The most irritating thing is really how close and yet so far Granny Weatherwax is from how Pratchett used her later (and honestly the one we got used to is a much better character, this one here feels slightly unfinished). It’s easy to skip but for all its flaws it’s a pretty fun, self-contained story with themes that Pratchett would revisit again but not quite with this angle.

The Immortal Hulk by Al Ewing (2018-2021)

Al Ewing, a comic writer I hadn’t heard of before until I saw some hype surrounding his stuff, seemingly wrote one of the most revered Hulk runs of recent memory that ran for 50 issues straight from 2018 to 2021 and a couple of one-shots that fit in the run as well, all collected in another of those massive omnibuses (1600+ pages) in 2023.

After having heard so much hype about this I was expecting great things and it started splendidly. What he did was introduce ideas that explain a superhero comic cliché (no hero or villain who dies stays dead) for all gamma-related characters in the Marvel universe while tying it to some even bigger concepts.

Apart from that he managed to shift the mood from mere action to genuine horror in parts due to the excellent art by Joe Bennett who redefined the visuals of Banner-to-Hulk shifts and vice versa. The combination of brilliant visuals with the deft storytelling by Ewing made for a great mix that felt like it genuinely did a lot of new things with the Hulk and his entourage while managing to weave in a lot of callbacks to previous Hulk lore.

But at the halfway mark I felt like the story, which seemed to hint at something big it was building toward, was stalling and using filler content like the conflict with the Roxxon minotaur boss to not progress naturally toward where it should have been heading. From the start, I expected to find out what the One-Below-All was planning for the Hulk, and I expected a kind of conflict between them that led somewhere meaningful.

Instead, the entire series ends on a whimper that, if you aren’t religious, feels overly pretentious, pointless, and boring. Some comic runs are more about the journey than where it all leads to, but the way Ewing had hinted at things from the start of his run this felt like it was building toward something. And when his resolution to it wasn’t really interesting or meaningful in any way it somewhat spoiled it for me.

It’s still really well written with lots of great moments and I liked a lot of what was going on along the way (Betty as the Harpy, Joe Fixit, the Devil Hulk) but ultimately this feels like another Bruce Jones moment. Started great but the ending is kind of a let-down.

Captain Marvel by Peter David (1999-2023)

Peter David once wrote Captain Marvel for 61 issues straight, a run stretching from 1999 to 2004, which was collected in a massive 1400-page omnibus last year. This isn’t the original Captain Marvel nor any of the female superheroines who took up the name, but the “son” of the original one trying his hands at being a superhero. I put son into quotation marks because he’s really the outcome of his mother putting her and the genetic information of the original into a blender and then aging the outcome to adult including fake memories of growing up. That’s superhero comics for you.

Anyway, this was an interesting read with the most notable feature being how it’s really two consecutive runs. The first from 1999 to 2002 which ran for 35 issues (or 36 if you count the 0 issue) and felt less like a proper superhero book and more like a sitcom taking place in a superhero universe. These things can work (see Dan Slott’s excellent She-Hulk run) and Peter David certainly made this amusing for the whole time while the art by ChrisCross is just beautiful.

That said, it lacked a certain narrative trajectory and while entertaining seemed to go nowhere. There’s no real character development and worst of all, Genis-Vell, the titular character remained incredibly bland, upstaged by his sidekick Rick Jones all the time. It’s really hard to gauge why Genis-Vell is in the hero business in the first place and remains one.

Eventually, the series ended and was restarted (run for 25 issues from 2002 to 2004) but instead of following the same path, it did something completely different. Peter David retooled it by making Genis-Vell go crazy. He became a sort of cosmic psycho who tried to tackle big issues by using violence and murder freely for those not following his logic. In a way, the book tried to be philosophical and deep but felt rather pretentious and as subtle as a stick in the face. This wasn’t fun to read honestly and I had a real hard time getting through some of those issues.

There’s some really fun content in the first half of Peter David’s Genis-Vell run if a bit aimless but the second just wasn’t my thing. I’m surprised that went on for almost 25 issues, with Peter David writing a meta and somewhat whiny final issues complaining that people didn’t like his approach enough.

What’s interesting is that Peter David went back to Genis-Vell again for a 5-issues mini-series that ran from 2022 to 2023 and that took up a couple of ideas from his old run on the character but packaged it into a far stronger story than either of his early approaches managed to. If his entire early run had been as good as this mini-series I likely would have enjoyed his Captain Marvel far more. Sadly to really appreciate this mini, you have to have read his early runs and I’m not sure that’s an entirely worthy investment of time and money.

The Hunt for Red October (1990)

I recently rewatched another old favorite of mine and it still holds up as an all-time great cold-war thriller about a cat-and-mouse game between a US intelligence agent, a Russian submarine captain, and the Russian side trying to stop one of their own from defecting. Interestingly, the book it’s based on came out when the Cold War was still a thing but by the time the adaptation came out it was already dated, and yet the movie just works.

It perfectly captures the Cold War though paints people on both sides as rational actors trying to avert the worst excesses of that “cold” conflict and above all from letting it get “hot”. The movie manages to make the audience guess just what is going on and even long after you have figured out what Ramirez wants to do you’re captured by Sean Connery playing him as an enigmatic and competent leader who knows what he is doing but plays the game a bit too close to his chest (though given that he grew up with political apparatus of the Soviet Union that’s no surprise and makes complete sense).

And Alec Baldwin really gives the performance of a lifetime as a likable and competent office worker who rises to the occasion and risks a lot based on his hunches. After that movie, Baldwin was Jack Ryan for me, and none of the sequels based on later Tom Clancy books and with Harrison Ford in the role ever worked for me. Also, after Hunt for Red October and The Cardinal in the Kremlin, Clancy’s work left me uninterested. Those two books were political thrillers that captured the zeitgeist like few others had and his later books, while arguably selling a lot and speculating on newer, more updated threats to the then-present US never had the same impact as those two books.

The Hunt for Red October, the movie, managed to capture that zeitgeist just as perfectly as the book it was based on, despite coming out later when that time seemingly had moved on. But just for a moment, it felt like the perfect time capsule to be transported back to that era when fiery doom from atomic threat felt ever-present and the world was only a step away from falling into that abyss.

The movie captured that everyday existential horror but also the hope for a better tomorrow and so, in a way, was the perfect bridge from the Cold War era to perestroika and a world where global annihilation wasn’t on everyone’s mind all the time.

And rewatching the movie now, even decades later, it still conveys that feeling of hope that people from opposite sides can work toward a common good even if it takes a lot of hard work to come together. But you need some people to make the first step, to trust the other side and hope for human decency despite coming from different cultures. There’s a reason this is a timeless classic, such a great movie with stellar performances and perfect pacing from start to finish.

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023)

I wasn’t sure on what note the entire DCEU would end with the Aquaman sequel, whether it would be a complete disaster or just a mediocre movie. I hadn’t heard much about The Lost Kingdom except that it wasn’t as well received as the original. Which I liked quite a bit, not because it was something substantial or deep but really well-done popcorn cinema.

And the sequel is pretty much this only more…choppy. I have a hard time defining what’s the issue here except, that for all that this has pretty much the same mix of ingredients as the first part it feels like it lacks a final pass of polish that leads to tonal unevenness. Some scenes feel just wrong with good actors suddenly overacting or in some scenes almost looking like they are lost looking for proper directions from a director or anyone.

I came away from this mostly enjoying it, it’s a grand epic with a climactic battle, and it picks up a side villain from the first movie and uses him to kickstart the main antagonist. In a lot of ways, this reminds me of Thor 2, the main big bad is evil just because, and the story is more about the protagonist getting back together with his “evil” brother and finding some common ground.

And just as Tom Hiddleston was the real MVP as Loki in The Dark World, Patrick Wilson is the real MVP as Orm in The Lost Kingdom. Which is funny as I didn’t like his character much in the first movie but here completely overshadows Jason Momoa as Aquaman who has no character arc left and is only there to provide muscle. It’s Orm who has to learn that his brother never wanted to replace him, it’s Orm who has to accept that he was wrong in the first place and try to be better.

Sure, in the end, the movie too easily forgives him for his evil deeds from the first movie but it’s a comic book reality, it’s so common there that I don’t mind it. And Patrick Wilson together with Jason Momoa is really funny to watch.

Without the above-mentioned choppiness to its tonal pacing, this would be just as good as the first movie. It’s not but as far as sequels go I was mostly happy with it. Not the worst movie to end the DCEU on.

True Lies (1994)

I hadn’t seen this one in a while and only remembered that I liked that quite a bit. So when James Cameron finally allowed to get this published on BluRay and 4K UHD and led to a monstrosity of AI-“enhanced” picture quality, I got that Spanish BluRay about which nobody is quite sure whether it’s legal or a bootleg.

The movie reminded me of Mr. and Ms. Smith with an unequal power dynamic where Arnold goes on spy missions while his wife gets bored with her life. When she is catfished by a fake spy, and Arnold’s character finds out, he goes ballistic and sets up a complicated ruse to give his wife some of that “real” spy action to spice up her life. Only to then get derailed when the real terrorists arrive.

This is mostly a still good action-comedy though some of the parts have aged worse than others. The whole jealous husband who stalks his wife and then sets up an incredibly cringeworthy almost-striptease for his wife is just not a good look and not as funny as I remembered it twenty years ago. Some of the action still looks incredible. It’s funny in parts, though not all.

Overall an enjoyable diversion if you can stand some of the cringe moments the movie dishes out. Also, Tom Arnold as Arnold’s side-kick/voice of reason is an underrated performance and steals the show in almost every scene he shows up.

Ernest & Celestine (2012)

People often complain about the lack of animated movies with the look of hand-drawn visuals that made Disney such a powerhouse of animation in the first place. What they overlook are the many underappreciated and completely overlooked animated movies that come from other places and are just as great as Disney was in its prime.

Ernest & Celestine is a beautiful movie with great characters that find together through hardship and prejudice and overcome both in a story that could have easily fallen prey to sentimentality or shoddy writing. Despite how hard those things are to deal with in the real world, it’s easier to make it believable against the background of a world where bears and mice are not on friendly terms.

When Ernest and Celestine meet each other, things don’t go the usual route of hate and fear. Both because the two of them are kind of outsiders in their cultures and each of them looks for someone else to connect to. Ernest wanted to become a musician instead of a judge as his parents wanted him to be and ends up alone and poor.

Celestine rather draws than goes out collecting teeth as the other mice kids do (the mice society here thrives on collecting bear teeth to replenish their own used-up ones which are the foundation of their society because with their teeth they make all the things they need).

Mice in particular grow up with stories of evil bears out to eat them, though in reality, they are rather more civilized and most of them wouldn’t eat mice (except when very hungry, which is the hilarious first meeting of Ernest and Celestine, who lectures Ernest she’s a very bad catch with not enough meat on her bones).

The movie works because as sentimental as this whole story sounds, the creative forces behind it managed to make it all feel very genuine by making Ernest and Celestine such well-realized characters. Celestine is a dear, headstrong, willing to stand up for her beliefs but also at times as scared and lonely as she is, and she admits to it without holding back or lying about it. Ernest is a more gruff fellow but with a heart of gold that Celestine eventually manages to capture and together they are better for it.

We don’t see too many stories about friendship in movies like this, it’s either romance and love or buddy movies with few emotions. Here we see the story of two outsiders who are good for each other (and their interactions despite the dramatic depth are incredibly funny at times while also really heartwarming), recognize what they have, lift each other up, and then fight for their friendship when the rest of the world tries to break them apart.

All beautifully drawn, well-written, and just perfect in every aspect. Great movie, everyone who likes animation should check it out.

Kung Fu Panda 4 (2024)

I’m quite a big fan of the Kung Fu Panda series, one of the few animated series of the last two decades that only got stronger with each sequel and has yet to disappoint me. So I read with some trepidation the reviews of this and the reaction unlike with the other movies was much more muted. Not terrible, mind you, but not great either.

Expecting the worst I kind of put off watching the movie altogether but eventually relented. Color me surprised how much I enjoyed this. After three movies and a couple of TV shows of questionable canonicity I wondered what was there left to tell. Turns out the movie does the unique thing of passing the torch, of allowing its hero to grow up or at least realize he won’t be the main character forever.

Po unconsciously wants to hold on as long as he can, after all this is the job of a lifetime and he’s enjoying it far too much, but when a great choice presents itself for passing on his knowledge and skills, he realizes what all teachers before him have, that sometimes seeing the next generation coming into their own is just as rewarding.

A lot of that isn’t exactly spelled out, this is still a mix of action and comedy on the surface but the thematic heft of the story makes me appreciate the movie even more. There are far too few Hollywood movies about gracefully getting older. Maybe the only issue I have with the movie is that Po doesn’t look noticeably older. But his entire arc is really about that at its core.

After this I can’t wait to see where the series is going next as with Zhen we have a new character with so much potential that it makes me excited for KFP5 and possibly KFP6. I also loved seeing the Furious Five training Zhen in the credit sequence, even if I wished we had seen more of them overall. Still, what a great and enjoyable movie overall.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023)

I don’t know how DC Studios managed to botch sequels to the few good movies they made, but they sure did. I enjoyed the first Shazam! movie, maybe not on the same level as Wonder Woman or Aquaman but it did a fine job of introducing the main character and one of his major villains. It had a teenager as the main character who didn’t make me feel annoyed watching him.

The sequel throws out all the goodwill that the first movie created, introduced some random trio of evil goddesses with an ill-defined plan of what they want to achieve. At the same time and far worse all the convincing acting that both the Billy Batson actor and the other teenagers showed in the first movie has been replaced with cringe so bad that the first half of the movie is an act of violence against good taste and proper movie-making.

Once you get through that valley of tears the movie picks up some speed in the second half with some good moments, some good fights, and great visual designs for unicorns and that’s it really. The second half isn’t terrible, almost fun in a way but to get there you have to get past the absolutely dire first half.

It was directed by the same director and the script was written by a duo, of which one was the guy who wrote the script for the first movie, so you can’t really put the blame on new people coming in and meddling up something good (though who knows what happened behind the scene). It felt like the creative people behind the first movie had a very good idea of what to do with Captain Marvel, the sequel shows that it was maybe just luck that the first movie worked as well as it did.

That said, that DC has consistently fucked up its sequels shows that the studio’s overall approach to them is borked. Well, the DCEU is dead anyway, let us hope James Gunn can make something better of his DC movie universe.