The New Shaolin Boxers (1976) – A good alternate title would probably be No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. A young kung fu fighter with an overdeveloped sense of justice keeps taking the side of the innocent in fights with hooligans and gangsters; he doesn’t lose any fights, but there’s enough resulting property damage each time that the local businessmen want him to stop rocking the boat. His kung fu teacher sends him off to live with in the mountains with a monk, who is of course both eccentric and highly fu-skilled.
Standard but fun stuff, although there’s a bizarre third-act detour into a subplot about one of the minor characters selling another of the minor characters into prostitution.
Stalker (1979) – It’s been 20 years since I last watched Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and I find all of my previous opinions of the film still intact:
- It’s an incredibly confident film. With an average — average! — shot length of 88 seconds, barely any music above the level of sound design, and a focal fantastic story element that purposely stays unseen, there’s no way that an American director (especially one backed by a studio) could ever remake it without stuffing it to the gills with “appealing” elements: an attractive cast, fast editing, a Hans Zimmeresque score, etc.
- It would be an interesting experiment to edit the 222 minutes of film and see how short one could could make it without losing either a line of dialogue or a single shot.
- As entrancing as it is, I still think that it should have ended about ten minutes sooner.
We’ll see if my opinions have changed in another 20 years.
Logan (2017) – In a sane world, Fox would stop making X-Men movies now. This near-future story of Logan with his years catching up to him and Professor X losing control of his weapons-grade mind, against a backdrop of the twilight of mutantkind (strangely meta, as X-Men comic books are also a thing) should end it on an honest, gritty, cathartic note. Instead, the franchise will keep churning out blockbuster summer fare that both numbs and agitates a crowd that has learned to check its brain at the door.
I liked NEW SHAOLIN BOXERS a lot (note: the original US release title was GRANDMASTER OF DEATH). I liked the idea of a society of people willing to let themselves be oppressed because they don’t want any trouble, only for someone to step up and say, “Is this the way you really want to live?”
I washed my hands of the X-Men franchise after X-MEN: APOCALYPSE. There’s a scene in that movie where Jubilee and the gang come out of the RETURN OF THE JEDI and she mentions how the third film is always the worst, an attack on Brett Ratner’s X-MEN: THE LAST STAND. Well, she ended up describing her own film, as far as I’m concerned.
My last X-Men move was DAYS OF FUTURE PAST. Continuity was so bungled by that point that it was clear nobody gave a crap.