| RavenBlog |
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| Comments on Tuesday 27 July 2004: |
| Tsk, more movie reviews - do I do nothing else? To break up the monotony a bit, I shall first tell of an amusing juxtaposition of advertisements. First was an ad for Dove chocolate, which tells us something along the lines of "work is boring, clothes are boring, sleep is boring, life is boring... but chocolate shouldn't be boring!" The ad shows people being sad and bored in any non-chocolate situation, including having just run out of chocolate. Immediately after that ad was an ad for depression. Well, an ad against depression. One of those public service "depression is the silent killer, find out what you can do to help" sort of things. Presumably what you can do to help is buy sad people chocolate. The movies! First was Osaka Wrestling Restaurant, which doesn't seem to have an IMDB entry. After a very promising start, the movie was a bit of a let-down. The diverting sideplot that we're introduced to the movie with remains amusing throughout, but only occupies about eight minutes of the movie total. The primary plot is passable enough, but implemented with too little action, too much emoting. It ends up feeling more like a soap opera than a movie. The other was Moon Warriors. A bit disappointing in that I'd seen the majority of the eye-candy before in the form of trailers. Probably not a bad movie to see if you thought Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was the bee's knees - the wire-fu is similar, the dubious plot is similar, there's less fire but more water. But I'm going to ruin the end for you first, since there is only one thing that's really notably unusual about the movie. The plot is a fairly standard swashbuckling "brothers competing to be king, the evil brother has the majority of the power" situation. The good brother is fleeing. He has a female companion who turns out by the end to have been a baddie but to have been converted to the side of good by virtuousness and nicety. They bump into a peasant who is our primary hero. The three of them go to get a princess who is the good brother's girlfriend, largely for the sake of power-consolidation; the girlfriend works out but the power consolidation doesn't. So now we have four good guys versus the bad guy and his army. Now this is the good bit. The bad guy's army pretty much gets wiped out, and the goodies take on the baddie one by one. First the baddie kills the good-brother, then he kills the princess, then he kills the double-traitor-woman. Then we get the unusual twist - he also completely kicks the arse of our peasant hero. Then the peasant hero's friend slaps the bad guy down. With its tail. Because the peasant hero's friend is a whale. Unfortunately the ending isn't completed quite to my satisfaction, in that the peasant hero turns out to have survived. It would be better if only the whale was the champion. Then it could take the jade symbol and be made emperor of China. And we could cut to years later with people paying thousands of dollars for a vase from the dynasty of benevolent emperor whale. [15:37] |