Tag: foreign film

RahXephon (2002)

The show has stunning visuals; long, meditative pauses; a sci-fi plot with humanoid aliens; giant mechas, good and bad; Mayan design motifs; a coming-of-age story; time distortion; love triangles; a chosen one; an immortality quest; military loyalty and in-fighting; and more hidden identities than you can shake a stick at. Weird as the show is, it all comes together in the end (unlike Lost). Highly recommended!

I bought this set in Singapore very cheaply—too cheaply, it turns out. The picture quality for a good third of the episodes is terrible. Though the box has the MDA approval sticker on it, I don’t think the discs are legit.

Furthermore, this version has English subtitles but no English audio, except for the random words that are in English in the original. Hearing the original audio is somewhat edifying because I still remember some Japanese words from a class I took back in… 2002, coincidentally. However, I watched the show in English years ago, and I remember the story as being thoroughly weird even without subtitles that come across as error-prone, awkward or downright mystifying.

I want to watch the show (and the movie) with English audio and better quality video, and I feel bad for buying some kind of knock-off—I really try not to do that, since I think the content owners should always get the requisite fees. Luckily, there’s a RahXephon DVD set on Amazon again.

Smaragdgrün (2016)

I should have paid attention to that little word “finally” in the synopsis. The fact that this is the third movie in a trilogy explains a lot. I had no idea. I just thought it would be fun to watch a German movie about time-traveling teenagers.

In any case, I should have known it wouldn’t be much fun to watch a fantasy movie—especially a widescreen version of one—on a screen that’s only maybe eight inches across. Not only did I have a hard time appreciating the costumes and special effects, I had a hard time reading the subtitles.

I can still say I enjoyed listening to the movie, though!

Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot (2015)

aka They Call Me Jeeg Robot (2015)

The Italian language is beautiful. This movie is not.

Blood, death… more blood, more death…

I mean sure, the thief with a heart (and watch) of gold saves the day, inspired by the manic pixie dream girl, but the path drips with gore. I liked the villain almost as much as I liked the protagonist, if not more. The villain’s music video was maybe the best part of the whole movie, even though it involved quite a lot of death. I mean, you gotta hand it to the guy. He had style.

Though I’m not interested in seeing any more movies about this superhero, the ending of this one made it seem like it was the origin story for a series.

Racer Legend (2011)

I’m a sucker for car racing movies, which means that occasionally I wind up watching terrible examples of the genre. Such as this one.

The protagonist is an arrogant, brooding guy who’s out of control because of his brother’s racing-related death. There’s a girl racer who hates racing and loves nature. There’s some stuff about the physics of making tight turns. There’s some back and forth about risk-taking (bad) and teamwork (good). Lots of vroom vroom on the track.

It all felt amateurish, exaggerated, and overly long.

Oh well.

Hard to beat Herbie for goofy nostalgia or Speed Racer for epic weirdness.

Wheels on Meals (1984)

In Wheels on Meals, Jackie Chan rides a skateboard to sell food from a cart in a plaza in Barcelona.

The other main characters are the other food cart guy, a private investigator, a mysterious woman, and the guy who kidnaps the woman and fights Jackie Chan at the end.

The fight is considered excellent, but I prefer the ones that are silly, and this one was pretty brutal.

The Wikipedia article about the movie can tell you more about the plot and the production history of the movie.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/wheels-on-meals/id1278562392

A Piece of Paradise (2013)

I’m pretty sure this was listed as A Piece of Paradise in Air China’s in-flight entertainment guide, even though the subtitles call it The Heavenly Corner. The Russian title is Pайский Yголок. According to Google Translate, the two words correspond to the words ‘paradise’ and ‘corner’.

My college friend who studied Russian expressed extreme surprise when I said a Russian movie I’d watched had a happy ending, but it does!

The basic idea here is that the female protagonist has everything she ever dreamed of (a successful husband, two lovely kids, and a comfortable life) but is unhappy in her marriage. She gradually realizes that her husband has become a real lowlife. He gets his comeuppance and she gets a new guy. Ta-da! That’s it, really. Still, it’s interesting because of the setting and language. I mean, how often do you get to watch a Russian movie? Not often, right?

For more information, you could follow this link, but it won’t help you much unless you or your web browser can read Russian. I’m just not finding anything in English on this movie at all.

http://www.kino-teatr.ru/kino/movie/ros/105810/annot/

Les Nouvelles Aventures d’Aladin (2015)

This French comedy, the title of which in English is The New Adventures of Aladdin, was the first and best of the ten movies I saw on my latest trip to the US.

It’s a story within a story; the frame story is set during Christmas and is about a guy who is planning an after-hours robbery of the department store where he and his buddy work. Before the time arrives, however, his boss makes him tell a story to a group of kids, and he chooses to narrate a ‘remix’ of the fantasy story of Aladdin.

This version of Aladdin is a mixture of the familiar 1992 Disney cartoon, the traditional Arabian Nights story, and the filmmakers’ own ideas. Some of the new ideas are wry anachronisms inserted by the character who serves as narrator; others are suggested by the children in the audience as the story progresses.

The whole thing is utterly hilarious, and of course there’s a happy holiday ending: the narrator—the proverbial thief with a heart of gold—decides not to go through with the robbery after all.

https://itunes.apple.com/fr/movie/les-nouvelles-aventures-daladin/id1045015238

For more on what I liked, with SPOILERS, keep reading.

Continue reading Les Nouvelles Aventures d’Aladin (2015)

Shaolin Soccer (2001)

I was eager to see the Chinese fantasy sports comedy Shaolin Soccer because I’d already seen and enjoyed Steven Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle. I think I liked Kung Fu Hustle better, but this wasn’t bad.

Steven Chow (writer, director, star) is a poor boy named Sing who has five brothers and who wants to bring Shaolin martial arts to the masses by packaging it in a unique way. He tries kung fu singing, but that doesn’t really work, and gets him and one of his brothers into trouble with some local rabble-rousers. Luckily, a crippled ex-soccer star is interested in teaching him to combine his kung fu with the game of soccer. Half the movie is gone by the time our protagonist has successfully recruited his brothers, seemingly unsuited for soccer, to form a team. Will this strange team be able to defeat the Evil Team, owned and managed by the cripple’s former rival? Yeah, probably so. And will our protagonist also win the love of the woman who uses kung fu for baking? Yep, that’s kind of a given, too. How do those two goals come together? That’s worth seeing.

The seams between the live action filming and the special effects are generally obvious, but the CG effects are amazing for 2001 and still pretty enjoyable. The best is when the Puma soccer ball turns into a puma.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/shaolin-soccer/id669315509

SPOILERS BELOW, including a detailed plot summary in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.

Continue reading Shaolin Soccer (2001)

The White-Haired Witch of Lunar Kingdom (2014)

I’m not an expert, but there seems to be a whole genre of Chinese historical-fantasy-war movies (wuxia). At any rate, that’s what this was. It had a dose of romance in it, too. Big budget. Nice effects. Entertaining. From my standpoint, actually, not that weird. It was good practice for me to listen to the Mandarin.

Chandni Chowk to China (2009)

For me, buying this movie was a bit like buying a German-Spanish dictionary, in that it made me a consumer of the product of two cultures, neither of them mine.

Lest you think that’s just an analogy, I hereby present my German-Spanish dictionary.

Chandni Chowk to China is a Hindi musical martial arts comedy.

Just let that sink in for a moment.

The main character is a superstitious Indian guy named Sidhu who works as a lowly vegetable cutter in a place called Chandni Chowk in Delhi. He has a lot of self-pity but not a lot of motivation to improve his station in life. (One day while cutting potatoes, he finds one that looks like the elephant-headed god Ganesha, and uses the coincidence as an excuse to neglect his duties, which earns him a kick in the pants from his foster father.)

His life changes when two Chinese guys somehow decide he’s a Chinese hero reincarnated and a Chinese fortune-teller friend convinces him to go to China. It’s wacky but kinda fun.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/chandni-chowk-to-china-2008/id312058686

See below for more about the movie, including SPOILERS.

Continue reading Chandni Chowk to China (2009)