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Zatôichi [2003]

Director: Takeshi Kitano
Actor: Takeshi Kitano

A traditional Japanese film, misunderstood and under-rated, with people leaving the cinema half-way, and snorting derisively at the last scene, a large tapdancing act, featuring most of the actors and seemingly unrelated to the rest of the film.

Zatôichi, a sword saint – or kensai – is walking the earth like Caine from Kung Fu, hiring out his services as a masseur and spending his nights in gambling dens. He’s blind, and nobody knows that his walking stick is really a well disguisedkatana, the samurai’s sword. He keeps his profile low, and his identity hidden, known only as “old masseur,” presumably because otherwise he’d be challenged by everyone who could lift a sword.

He comes upon a small village where two yakuza clans are fighting it out for supremacy over the village, and is taken in by one of the widowed peasant women, living just outside the village. Her nephew spends his time by the old masseur’s side in the gambling dens at night, terrible at gambling and riding the wave of luck and fortune that the blind masseur seems to hold. They get caught up in the gang-war as soon as Zatôichi exposes the gambling den for cheating.

Meanwhile, a wandering ronin, a disgraced or masterless samurai, and his wife walk from village to village, looking for the man that disgraced him in a fight, causing him to lose his rank as samurai. His wife is ill, and in order to pay for all the expenses, he hires his sword out to the highest bidder, as a soldier, bodyguard or assassin. He finds work with one of the warring yakuza clans.

During the same time, the old masseur meets up with two geishas, who were orphaned a decade ago when their parents, and family were murdered by one of the warring yakuza clans in the village as they were looking for the riches of their father, a wealthy rice-merchant. They used the money stolen from their family to start their criminal operations in the village. The two, a boy and a girl, survived by pretending to be geishas and plying the men with alcohol and robbing them afterwards. They are looking for revenge.

All in all these three stories converge at the same time, in the same village, during the same gang-war.

I loved this film, and it’s the only film that can get away with the appaling CGI that makes up some of the sword fighting. Daki, go see this film.

Underworld (2003) [2003]

Director: Len Wiseman
Actor: Kate Beckinsale, Scott Speedman, Wentworth Miller

After a lot of debate surrounding this film, and it’s supposed great likeness to Vampire: The Masquerade, I decided I wanted to see it, despite the bad reviews it got among some of my friends. Of course, living in Europe, I had to wait a couple of months to do so, and so patiently I waited. Until a couple of days ago, in a fit of boredom, I downloaded the DVD rip and watched the film.

I’m definitely going to see this film in the cinema. (RIAA, I also downloaded that big bastard of a file, so don’t come a-huntin’, please) I don’t think my puny computer monitor did the “visuality” of the film any justice. It looks awesome. I mean…perfect. This is exactly how I want these type of films to look. Blade was different, but equally brilliant in that respect – the second film was so-so, but the first one had something cold, steely and very menacing about it. I was talking to one of my friends about the film – one of the ones that gave it such a bad review – and she wholeheartedly agreed that the film looked nice…

…but that the acting and story simply sucked ass. The acting wasn’t that good, true. I got the feeling that they tried to make up for it with cold, angsty, brooding stares and English accents, but it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t Syngenor or anything.

The story was, I think, befitting of the first of a series of films, which, I think – depending on the amount of money Sony ends up making off of this – will be the case. The entire story is, though a bit cliché here and there, not entirely bad and from what I could see not filled with contradictions and logical discrepancies that usually plagues films like these.

Kate is hot, in fact, I think all the people in that film are very good looking, and looks very good in her rubber and latex outfits. Oh! Oh! I almost forgot; God, do I love the fact that, physically, werewolves are much stronger than vampires. Cool! Cool! Cool! Suddenly, vampires aren’t the almighty uber-creatures that they always get made out to be in films. Also, kuddos for the accent on age being a determining factor in strength. Very well done.

Solaris [2002]

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Actor: George Clooney, Natascha McElhone

My first interaction I had with this film was with its website, which is pretty good, and with its soundtrack, which is even better. The story reeked of Event Horizon, which it really isn’t. It deals with similar things, but Event Horizon is done somuch better. Also, Solaris is a love drama, whereas Event Horizon is a horror/thriller. Another book/film that this movie borrows from heavily is Michael Crichton’s Sphere, but as it doesn’t measure up to Event Horizon, here Solaris also falls short.

Mediocre film, though stunningly done, with an excellent soundtrack.

Mystic River [2003]

Director: Clint Eastwood
Actor: Sean Bean, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden, Laura Linney

This film is a brilliantly acted out drama recieving solid acting from all actors involved. Special mention goes out to Sean Penn and to a limited degree Tim Robbins, who both are phenomenal in the film. We see Kevin Bacon is a good guy role, as well as a heavier Lawrence Fishburne in a role which is not Morpheus aspired at all. It’s good to see how didn’t get type-cast right after the Matrix Trilogy.

Three neighbourhood friends grow apart to become entirely different men the day that one of them is taken by people impersonating police officers and is raped for several days before managing to escape.

Sean Penn, a former hijacker and strong-man who now runs a local family supermarket finds his oldest daughter dead by an unknown assailant. Kevin Bacon, now a federal agent, and his partner Lawrence Fishburne are charged with the investigation, while it seems to point in the direction of Tim Robbins, who plays Dave, a not-so-intelligent guy, and the one who was taken when they were younger, leaving him deeply confused.

I recommend this to everyone, since it has a very broad appeal, I think.

Bad Boys II [2003]

Director: Michael Bay
Actor: Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Gabrielle Union, Theresa Randle, Joe Pantoliano, Peter Stormare, Henry Rollins

Let me start out by saying that when I walked into the movie theatre last night, I fully expected to get the same as in Bad Boys, just more of it. And I was right. Bad Boys II is almost the same as Bad Boys except that everything’s a little more. More beautiful women (Theresa Randle as hot hot hot!), more guns (bigger, mostly), more explosions, more funny shit, nicer cars (Ferrari instead of Porsche) and just more insanity. If you liked Bad Boys, then you’ll like this. And if you’ve seen Bad Boys, then you sorta know what this film is going to be like so I’m not going to bother with breaking down the story.

A few points that I found interesting:

• Yesterday I watched the first ten minutes of The Cell, and it struck me that it has been a while since I was so immersed in a film that I was sad to see it was over. I remember being a kid and not wanting the films to end because they were so cool. I started to wonder why that was, and when I was watching Bad Boys II, I got a pretty good idea…

  I think it has to do with the way movies – especially action films – are cut; everything’s fast cut, changing angles and POVs, places and sometimes even time so fast that you can’t really settle into the scene. You’re constantly changing directions and the director keeps you in a constant state of confusions, which, I suppose, could be seen as a good thing, considering the almost pro forma state of action and violence.

• I was very pleased to see the introductions of a bad boy Yardie gang into this film, because, to be honest, it’s a threat that has yet been overlooked by most cinema. Sure, there was Predator II and Marked for Death, but the films portraying these gangs, gangs with such self-sacrificing drive, mysticism and predispostion towards violence in real life that they often just come off as ludicrously portrayed while in all actuality it’s closer to fact than fiction.
• One of the things that they stepped up more is the goofy inaptitude of Martin Lawrence and the “I’m an over-the-top cop with a badge, a gun and a trustfund” coolness of Will Smith. Smith couldn’t do anything wrong in the entire film – even though Lawrence’s character criticised him for killing potential suspects, etc. they really didn’t do a good job of conveying how much of a lose cannon Smith’s character was – and Lawrence wasn’t able to do anything right. And even when he did, all the way near the end, Smith’s “That’s how I want you to shoot! From now on you _always_ shoot like that!” bit just didn’t accentuate the fact that it was Lawrence’s dedication and not Smith’s bad-assedness that saved the day.
• As seen in the opening shot of Panic Room, Michael Bay made use of a camera technique where it seemed the camera was moving through tight holes in objects. In Panic Room it was still rather crude – I think Fincher came up with it, or something – but Bay perfected it during a shoot-out in a Yardie hide-out with the camera spinning around a wall, with on one side Smith and Lawrence, and on the other side a squad of pissed of Yardies. Very well done.
• Oh, right, I almost forgot; this film is gratuitous in it’s violence, gore and it’s want for shock. It wasn’t bad, but it did make me cringe sometimes…because of what they were doing to their rating, rather than their display of blood and brain.