----A film review site that focuses on the balance between trash and art, giving everything from Citizen Kane to The Toxic Avenger equal footing.
The Swordmates (1969)
dir. Chang Ying & Pan Fan
2.5/4
The Swordmates is a film riddled with flaws and reasons to write it off with simple indifference. Thankfully, the film is also filled with as many exciting fights as it is flaws, so despite being a rather average and clichéd film, it manages to entertain pretty well as long as you don’t have any expectations to mitigate. A plot to overthrow…
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13 Assassins (2010)
dir. Takashi Miike
4/4
I loved everything about 13 Assassins. Start to finish, it’s flawless. Opening as a slow-paced and very traditional samurai picture, and ending as an all-out action blowout, 13 Assassins is the samurai film of the modern era. This is the first Takashi Miike film I’ve seen, despite being very aware of his name for many years. I remember hearing hot shit about Audition after…
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Harmagedon (1983)
dir. Rintaro
How can I not love an 80s movie called Harmagedon? As soon as I realized I had missed out on what could only be a supreme gem of 80s awesome, I had to rectify the situation. Once I popped it in the DVD player and realized that this was also a film by Rintaro, my expectations were through the roof. Now I have…
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The Avengers (2012)
dir. Joss Whedon
3.5/4
As I noted above, I had huge expectations for The Avengers. Not because of a trailer; I didn’t watch any of them. Not because of the director, Joss Whedon; I’ve never seen a single thing he’s worked on. No, it’s all based on childhood comic reading, the combined…
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Happy birthday to Pam Grier - an icon.
Block-Heads (1938)
dir. John G. Blystone
3.5/4
For their next feature after Way Out West, Laurel and Hardy went contemporary. Block-Heads opens during World War I, as the tanks laboriously roll by and the soldiers march into certain death. Soon we focus down on a trench teeming with men, where Stan and Ollie prepare for war. But it’s not in the…
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Way Out West (1937)
dir. James W. Horne
4/4
As expected, I still love this movie unconditionally. Growing up we didn’t have cable TV most of the time, so our small VHS collection was always getting played and re-played. Way Out West was one of the first tapes we owned and it quickly became one of the…
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Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining v. Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master
This is exactly what I thought of when I saw the trailer yesterday.
(via oldfilmsflicker)
