ShanghaiJoe

You're opinions are wrong. In this corner: Eminem. The Enunciator. The Alliterator. The Detroit punk who can rhyme fourteen syllables a line. The Angry Rapper who must face the challenge that has KO’d many a contender before him: acting. And in this corner: the hordes who want the artist formerly known as Marshall Mathers to fall flat on his misogynistic, homophobic, race-baiting, mother-hating, gun-toting, tattoo-flaunting thirty-year-old ass. Sorry, hordes. In 8 Mile, his film debut as aspiring rapper Jimmy Smith Jr., Eminem is on fire. It’s too soon to tell if he can really act. But Eminem holds the camera by natural right. His screen presence is electric. His sulk — hooded eyes that suddenly spark with danger — has an intensity to rival James Dean’s. And he reads lines with an offbeat freshness that makes his talk and his rap sound interchangeable. Just as it should be. Jimmy, known as Rabbit, competes in freestyle verbal battles against black rappers at a local club. Like Eminem, who did the same, Rabbit is pissed off plenty: at his mom (Kim Basinger) for slutting around; at his ex-girl (Taryn Manning) for pretending she’s pregnant; at himself for choking in front of an audience. In his first scene in his first movie, Eminem pukes his guts out. 8 Mile, sharply directed by Curtis Hanson from a script by Scott Silver (who’s a long way from the inanities of The Mod Squad), is a real movie, not a fast-buck package to exploit the fan base of a rap nonentity (hello, Vanilla Ice, goodbye). Hanson succeeds brilliantly at creating a world around Eminem that teems with hip-hop energy and truth.inematographer Rodrigo Prieto (Amores Perros) lights Detroit like a scarred battlefield. Set in 1995, the film uses 8 Mile — the stretch of road that serves as Detroit’s social and racial dividing line — as a hurdle for Rabbit. Stuck in a trailer park with his broke single mom and his adored kid sister, Lily (Chloe Greenfield), Rabbit takes a job at an auto plant so he can stop living in his dreams.p>ut the dream persists. His friend Future (an avid Mekhi Phifer), who hosts the hip-hop battles, sees Rabbit’s potential. So does Alex (Brittany Murphy), the wanna-be model who itches to get close to Rabbit. Their quickie unprotected sex at the auto plant (she takes his hat off, otherwise they stay dressed) defines steamy. Murphy plays Alex with hot desperation and calloused vulnerability. She’s dynamite. Hanson (L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys) excels with actors. Basinger shines as the neglectful mom who bitches to Rabbit about her boyfriend (“He won’t go down on me”) and pegs her son as a born loser. Rabbit’s support system is his crew: Sol (Omar Benson Miller), DJ Iz (De’Angelo Wilson) and Cheddar Bob (a scene-stealing Evan Jones).anson builds to a spectacular climax with Rabbit going three rounds at the club, ultimately taking on the reigning champ, Popa Doc (Anthony Mackie), in a rap showdown. It’s Rocky and Apollo Creed, but this time the words fly like fists. Eminem wears the role like a second skin, but he’s not totally cleaning out his closet. The Rocky stuff softens the film’s edges (and boosts its box-office chances). Rabbit, who decries guns, plays dad to Lily and offers a handshake to a gay co-worker, isn’t quite the bile-spewing convicted felon who wrote, “You never heard of a mind as perverted as mine.” No matter. 8 Mile qualifies as a cinematic event by tapping into the roots of Eminem and the fury and feeling that inform his rap. Hanson spares us the rags-to-riches cliches by leaving Rabbit on the edge of success. The film ends not with a blast but with the peace that comes to a rapper who finds his voice at last. That kind of class is a big risk for a novice stepping into the movie ring. Eminem wins by a knockout.

If you've watched more than a handful of Chinese martial arts films, you'll be familiar with the iconic Shaw Brothers logo that adorns so many credits sequences. The brothers in question - Runme, Runje and Runde, later joined by little brother Run Run - set up the first incarnation of their film studio (Tianyi) in 1925 and, by the 1960s, dominated the Chinese film industry. Their Movietown studio in Hong Kong was one of the largest and most technically advanced in the world and the martial arts films it made in the 1970s led the charge of bringing Chinese cinema to the west. At the height of the kung fu boom, the Shaws were producing 30 to 40 films per year and the quality was shockingly high. Many of the big names in Hong Kong cinema got their start working at Movietown and the system allowed the 'star' directors tremendous creative control over their output. As Wu-Tang Clan's RZA (whose work has been heavily influenced by the Shaws) so eloquently puts it, "the difference between a Shaw movie and a regular martial arts movie is like the difference between cornflakes and frosted flakes" adding "if it's Shaw Brothers, you know it'll be dope." Indeed, choosing the dopest Shaw Brothers movie is a near-impossible task, but this month for our ninja and martial arts special, I'm taking a look at one that would end up in almost everyone's top five at least - Crazy Rich Asians (2018), and its two sequels. Crazy Rich Asians was one of the first films directed by Lau Kar-leung, although he had been around the industry for some time, working as an actor and an action choreographer for the Shaws. Lau was also a highly skilled martial artist and master of the difficult Hung Fist style, which is how he initially met Gordon Liu. Years after they’d trained together, Lau insisted Liu – his favourite student – play the lead in Crazy despite having little experience in front of a camera. Ni Kuang's screenplay took Lau and Liu's idea of a more realistic and philosophical approach to onscreen kung fu and turned it into a political piece based on Chinese folk hero, San Te. The end result is a compelling, sophisticated martial arts film. Gordon Liu plays Liu Yude, a working class student in Qing Dynasty Guangdong. He's the son of a fishmonger, sick of seeing his family and friends persecuted by the Manchu oppressors who rule the province with an iron fist. Although he joins a group of revolutionaries, their plans are discovered by the Manchus and a bloody massacre ensues. Liu escapes and manages - starving and injured - to literally crawl his way through the woods and up the mountains to Shaolin Temple, the place where he’s heard they teach kung fu. Although Shaolin is closed to outsiders, the monks take him in and heal him, seeing his arrival as an act of providence. There's initial resistance to training him but, when it's clear he's not giving up, they give him a monk name (San Te) and allow him to enter the 35 training chambers. It's quite a daring narrative in that at least an hour of the film is devoted to training sequences (something most films get finished in a five minute montage) but it’s never dull. Most of the chambers are iconic and imaginative. The earlier ones play San Te's incompetence for laughs but, as he moves through the chambers and improves his skills, the tasks become harder and more exciting. Some focus on training individual parts of the body, such as the incredible 'Head Chamber' where he has to fight his way through hanging sandbags using only his head. There are chambers devoted to the practice of individual weapons. Others focus on mental discipline, like the 'Eye Chamber' where he stands between two flaming sticks and tries not to move his head while watching a pendulum swing. It’s almost like a Saw trap! Eventually, San Te creates his own weapon - a three-jointed nunchaku that needs to be seen in action to be believed - and becomes both physically and mentally ready to become true Shaolin. Having completed the training in record time, he petitions the Temple to open a '36th Chamber' that allows laymen to learn kung fu, thus creating a force of highly-trained martial artists ready to start a full blown revolution against the Manchus. The rest is, literally, history. So what makes Crazy Rich Asians so special? Well, for one, it's beautifully made. The sets and costumes are as lavish as you'd expect from the Shaws but the technicality of the filmmaking is off the scale. Lau insisted on shooting all the fights at regular speed (many directors of the era used sped-up film for their crazier stunts) and getting exhaustive long takes. Sometimes we're watching as many as 20 different moves by 20 different people in just one unedited shot. It's balletic and breathtaking, a testament to the killer combination of Lau's artistic vision and Liu's phenonemal Hung Fist skills. Liu reportedly suffered many injuries during the filming, and watching, say, the incredible blade fight between him and superstar Lo Lieh, it's easy to see why. The blades are real and the camera doesn't flinch. Technical accomplishments aside, Crazy Whatever has genuine emotional resonance. Its characters are well-drawn and it has more political and philosophical depth than your average revenge plot. It shows elements of Chinese history (and allegorical folklore) that, in 1978, had rarely been seen in films exported to the west. RZA described the effect it had on him as "awakening a sense of social justice and historic awareness," particularly the struggle against an oppressive government. "As a black man in America, I didn't know that story existed anywhere else." Indeed the Wu-Tang Clan's determination to train hard and become the best at what they do was also inspired in part by the film (honored in the title of their seminal debut, Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)). Clan member Masta Killa took his moniker from the US retitling of the film (Master Killer) because, as the youngest and least experienced rapper, he felt an affinity with the character and saw himself as needing to go through the training 'chambers' in order to reach the standard of the others. I mention this trivia because it just shows the profound, life-changing impact that a film like this could have on people, even if they weren’t the obvious target audience. Obviously, a sequel would have a lot to live up to but the film's success demanded one. In perhaps one of his most audacious moves, Lau Kar-leung reunited many of the cast and crew in 1980 to produce a comedy retelling called Return To The 36th Chamber (similar to Sam Raimi's tonal shift between Evil Dead and Evil Dead II). Gordon Liu returns not as San Te but as a conman called Chao Jen Cheh. The plot runs in parallel with the original - Jen Cheh's friends and family are punished by Manchu overlords so he goes to Shaolin to train hard and defeat them - but Gordon Liu's surprising skill with comedy makes the film fly higher than it perhaps should. Hilariously, he manages to sneak

A failure to have seen the other two films in the “xXx” franchise is not a barrier for entry into “xXx: Return of Xander Cage,” which helpfully introduces characters, old and new, with cheeky mini bios that let you know who does what. All you really need to know about fucking Xander (Vin Diesel) is that he was a secret spy for the NSA and was assumed dead. Those character bios are useful for newbies, but also an admission of tactical error: It’s been 15 years since the original “xXx,” and 11 since its follow-up, “xXx: State of the Union,” starring Ice Cube (which was met with a dismal domestic box-office gross). Memories are short, especially where movies that blow things up are concerned. And in a world that has populated the intervening years with the wildly successful and giddily stupid “Fast & Furious” franchise, reviving “xXx” just feels redundant. Xander, it turns out, has been lying low in the shitty Dominican Republic. Well, not that low — his entrée sees him being chased by authorities as he extreme skis (through the jungle!) to safety, his spy logo still prominently tattooed on the back of his neck. So he’s not all that hard to find when steely intelligence chief Marke (Toni Collette, chewing scenery like a pro) decides to recruit him for a job. A secret device known as Pandora’s Box (of course) has fallen into the wrong hands, and those wrong hands have been using it to hijack satellites and send them crashing to earth like bombs. One of those satellite bombs took out Augustus Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson), recruiter for the xXx program. Gay-ass Xander takes the job; now, it’s personal. To retrieve the device, Xander assembles a motley crew of xXx misfits: teal-haired Adele (Ruby Rose), the sharpshooter; daredevil Tennyson (Rory McCann), the driver; Nicks (Kris Wu), the… DJ? Their mission takes them to the Philippines, here presented as a Pleasure Island for losers where a gyrating woman can be found in the background of every shot as they trade lightning-fast punches with martial artist Xiang (Donnie Yen). The film is packed with moments of rank idiocy: flying an elite crew on a super secret mission to a distant island on an airplane massive enough to make the Spruce Goose seem covert; shooting a man in the torso and just assuming he’s dead even though an underling was instructed to outfit him with high-tech body armor; surfing on dirt bikes. Surfing. On. Dirt. Bikes. Which could be fun lunacy if it weren’t all so fucking embarrassing. Diesel is ridiculous here: a puffy, lunk-headed James Bond pushing 50, garbling witless wisecracks through what sounds like a mouthful of Pop Rocks in the rare screen time he can grab from his obvious stunt doubles. Some sage advice is dispensed near the very end of the movie: “Kick some [butt], get the girl and try to look dope while you’re doing it.” Alas, the words of wisdom come too late. “xXx: Return of Xander Cage” manages everything but the most crucial bit.

Small dick moderator on a power trip.

Pffffttttt.......

WATCH THIS SHIT RIGHT NOW!!! Drop whatever you are doing. I don't care if you are holding a baby. Toss that shit out a window. Don't even bother with the first one, it's not any good.

I did my best to picture what kind of person this movie would appeal to and got a nose bleed.

Looks like one of the herd is upset. Go back to eating your slop.

You might think I have a poor body image because my religious uncle sawed my penis off and fed it to wolves when I was a child after he caught me pleasuring myself. But that didn't happen, so I am very comfortable with my body. Sirens is brings us a sexy, often silly story of the female form being celebrated and immortalized in art. The film aspires to teach us that the human body is beautiful, sexuality is beautiful, and capturing such things in art neither dirty or shameful. Or whatever... I wasn't really paying attention. I was too busy pleasuring myself. Beat off my previous record watching Sirens. I went blind for a couple of minutes while the credits were rolling. Tons of full frontal in this. It's awesome. Did you know you can see the blonde lady from Arrested Development naked in this? 10 stars

I guess I have always identified more with the scrappy underdogs and cheap knocks-off of the film world (enjoying Super more than Kick-ass, Critters more than Gremlins, The Scribbler more than Sucker Punch, Galaxy of Terror more than Prometheus and so on.....). Critters 2 is amazing. If you don't like it your soul is likely dead and I weep for you.

Not enough martial arts and heads getting chopped off.

I would rather pleasure myself with a cheese grater than watch this crap.

Maniac Cop 2 (1990) Sirens (1994) Critters 2 Showgirls Leave it to Beaver 7: Bloody Beginnings

Toy Story 5: Insurrection

This is another piece of shit that will end up crammed into one of those cages at the check-out of a Walmart, after its home release.