KJBishop.net » Movies

“Kooky”

kjbishop — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 23:43:18 +0000

Kooky is a film by Jan Sverak about a boy who is forced to throw away his teddy bear, and the adventures he imagines the discarded bear having in a forest inhabited by strange creatures. The film combines live action, puppets and stop motion, with puppets and props designed by Jakub Dvorsky, the founder of Amanita Design, creators of the wonderful game Machinarium.

By the looks of the trailer, the film’s going to be a delight (or rather, is a delight in the Czech Republic, where it has already been released, and will be a delight for English speakers when the English-dubbed version gets distribution). There’s also an illustrated e-book of Kooky, sample pages at Amanita.

Kooky at imdb, Wikipedia

The Warrior’s Way

kjbishop — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 11:36:00 +0000

I saw The Warrior’s Way a couple of days ago. Enjoyed so much! This movie has: a cool, handsome assassin (Jang Dong-gun), a feisty gal out for revenge (Kate Bosworth), the wild west, ninjas in badass leather costumes, a circus troupe living in a broken-down town, Geoffrey Rush as the town drunk, a really cute baby, and one of my favourite things — dynamite! Oh yeah, and a plot gleefully strung together out of Western and martial arts cliches, with two sets of bad guys, the aforementioned ninjas and a gang of desperados who look like they were rejected from Mad Max 2 for looking too rough.

Here’s the trailer. This interview says that Lee initially wrote the script 11 years ago and envisioned a more contained, low budget film, and there did seem to be signs of a more low-key story getting compressed to become part of the movie’s plot. I can’t help being a little curious about the original script, but anyway, I thought the end result was a whole lot of w(h)acky fun. I could criticise this and that, but why criticise a film I smiled nearly all the way through (with a couple of squick moments)? I basically agree with this review. Oh, and The Warrior’s Way would make a great double feature with The Good, The Bad, The Weird.

Spaghetti Western Sunday

kjbishop — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 11:26:03 +0000

Last night I watched The Good, The Bad, The Weird, a (the?) 2008 South Korean spaghetti western by Kim Ji-woon (Korean title Joheunnom Nabbeunnom Isanghannom … aka “Nom Nom Nom”). Set in 1930s Japanese-occupied Manchuria, it’s a tale of gangsters, killers, bandits, and a treasure map. Inspired by Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, GBW takes the same trio of a bad guy, a kooky bad guy, and a “good” bad guy, adds a cast of other assorted colourful bad guys, plus the Japanese army, and sets them all at each other (with weapons ranging from a morning star to a machine gun — one of the things I enjoyed about the film was its milieu of cultural and technological worlds in collision). I have to agree with the reviewer who called it “a cartoon of a cartoon” — and some of the cartoon lines are faint, notably in the characterisation department. And as you might expect in a cartoon of a spaghetti western, there are no female characters to speak of, except for a few decorative girls and a granny, who was cool in an old silent granny way but didn’t have much screen time. But I still thought it was a lot of fun. (Not to mention that Byung-hun Lee as “the Bad” Park Chang-yi is my kinda man in black.) Here’s the trailer.

My other recent discovery in the spag-western field is the Spaghetti Western Orchestra. An Aussie group, formerly the Ennio Morricone Experience, they do what their name suggests: play spaghetti western theme music, with great playing, amusing theatrics, and fine scream-yodelling. This is their version of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.