Bloodsport and Kickboxer where both decents films in there day.havn't seen for years though

Kickboxer ***
(Nth Viewing)

Kurt Sloan is the corner-man for his brother, U.S. kickboxing champion Eric Sloan. When Kurt witnesses his brother become maliciously paralyzed in the ring by Thailand champion Tong Po, Kurt vows revenge. With the help of Zion, a kickboxing trainer who lives in a remote area of Thailand, Kurt trains for the fight of his life.

Head and shoulders the best Jean-Claude Van Damme movie along with Bloodsport. Great action and fighting scenes and Michel Qissi was great as "Tiger" Tong Po. I enjoyed his performance more in this movie as the villain than I did Bolo Yeung's in Bloodsport.

I liked Kickboxer 2 much better than the original.

"If my brother knew I was teaching women's aerobics he'd come back from the dead and beat my ass"

Yeah and I LOVED the way they wrote in brother #3

The One * 1/2
(First Viewing)

There is not one universe, but there are many, which is a multiverse. Supposing you are just one person, there are many other versions of you in the other universes, there are ways to travel, but only a police agency, MVA, can travel only for police procedures. Gabriel Yulaw (Jet Li)is a former MVA agent, who killed another version of himself in self-defense. It made the other versions of him stronger. When Yulaw found out about this, he became power-hungry killing the 122 other versions for two years. After killing Lawless (also played by Jet)and getting captured by his former partner Roedecker (Delroy Lindo) and a new MVA agent Funsch (Jason Statham) Yulaw managed to escape the prison and is trying to kill his last target, Gabe Law (also played by Jet) who is a police officer. Roedecker and Funsch now have to arrest Yulaw before he can kill Gabe.

Another movie watched based on a recommendation from a friend. The CGI and wiring were blatantly obvious in parts which hindered my enjoyment of the film. My motto is if you want to use CGI, fine. But try to make it look neat and presentable. Obvious wiring or CGI just sticks out to me and almost makes me want to laugh. However, Jason Statham and Carla Gugino were nice additions to the film. Not Jet Li's best (see Hero and Fearless for that).

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Kubrick;1964) ****

This is my first time watching this film, believe it or not. I was going through the free movies in my "OnDemand" menu, and came across it. I'd heard great things, so I decided to watch it.

The only thing I regret is not watching this film sooner. Great performances all around, especially Peter Sellers (Group Captain (G/C) Lionel Mandrake/President Merkin Muffley/Dr. Strangelove) and George C. Scott. (Gen. 'Buck' Turgidson).

But my favorite was by far was Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper, as portrayed by Captain McKlusky himself, Sterling Hayden. His constant rants about bodily fluids had me in stitches.

My favorite quote from the film:

Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"

Lionheart ** 1/2
(First Viewing)

Lyon Gaultier's brother gets murdered after welshing drug associates in Los Angeles. Lyon is in North Africa serving the last six months of a hitch in the French Foreign Legion when he gets word of the incident, and he unsuccessfully petitions his cold-blooded superiors for leave to tend to family matters. Desperate, Lyon knocks several legionnaires out and stows away on a steamer headed for America. Once Lyon gets near New York harbor, Lyon jumps ship and tries to come up with a way to get enough money to head for California. Lyon comes into contact with street-fight promoter Joshua, an alcoholic ex-street-fighter who links Lyon up with Cynthia, an organizer of no-holds-barred bare-knuckle fights that secretly entertain the wealthy across the country.

An enjoyable Van Damme movie and Harrison Page was great at being the funny guy of the movie.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)



Nicholson went nuts in The Shining, but he did the time in Cuckoo's Nest as a rough-and-tumble felon looking to escape hard prison by spending a little quality time in a psychiatric institution. Little does he realize his phony illness is about to get him into all kinds of trouble. Louise Fletcher's Nurse Ratched, however, is the character who has since entered into the American lexicon, as have a host of other characters and scenes (most memorably: Nicholson's narration of a World Series game that's not on TV). Faithfully adapted from Ken Kesey's stirring novel.

Along with It Happened One Night and The Silence of the Lambs, these are the only three films to win all four major Oscars (actor, actress, director, picture).

4/5

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is Shawshank with a tragic ending. I don't mean plot wise, but its general message. A great film and great characters.

Rocky Balboa ** 1/2
(First Viewing)

In this new installment of the Rocky series, Rocky Balboa returns to the ring to fight the present world champion. It's been many years since Rocky Balboa has been in the ring. Through that time his wife Adrian died of cancer, and he and his son, Rocky Jr., have been growing apart. Rocky owns his own restaurant, and people will come in just to hear his stories. Now ESPN is holding these virtual boxing matches pairing up fighters from different eras, it is a competition. And in the end it showed that if there was a match between "Young" Rocky and the champion Mason "The Line" Dixion, Rocky would win. Seeing this virtual fight makes Rocky remember how much he misses being in the ring. So he re-registers for his license which creates a media firestorm, and who should hear about it but Mason himself. Pay-Per-View won't pay him anymore because they believe that he is fighting all second rate fighters, and that he's a "paper champion". So his people suggest a fight between him and Rocky. The opportunity is brought to Rocky who at first is a little cautious at first, but soon agrees also. Now it is a Battle of the Ages. A true battle of Will v.s. Skill. With the help of Paulie, Tony (his old trainer), and of course his son, it is truly, his final countdown.

The most enjoyable part of the movie is the final fight between Rocky and Dixon because it is so authentic to a HBO Pay-Per-View fight. The camera movement, angles, announcers were all were with care and it showed. Other than that, the first hour or so of the film seem to move rather slow and Mason is never built up as a superior champion/threat so Rocky's fight (in my mind) isn't as great as his past foes.

El laberinto del Fauno Pan's Labyrinth
Guillermo del Toro 2006 Mexico / USA / Spain 1st time; big screen
Spain, 1944: a young girl arrives at a mountainside camp with her pregnant mother, newly married to a captain in Franco's regime, and finds both comfort and anxiety in her fantastical imaginations.
Del Toro is doing all kinds of interesting things here: his shots are crafted with transitions already in mind - he'll often zoom in to black and then re-emerge in a different world, or show different angles within the same scene via effortless pans, so that cuts are often sweeping and invisible, and keep the momentum going between the different narrative threads. Speaking of which, the narrative is much more dependent on the 'real' world than the trailers made out, and all the better for it. Visually excessive, it is highly original, very inventive and altogether weird.

London to Brighton
Paul Andrew Williams 2006 UK 1st time; big screen
A prostitute and a young homeless girl flee from a gangster whose pimp father they killed.
The kind of gritty 'realist' thriller that knocks a few critics to the floor and is hailed - for not very long - as the best British film in years. It is shot not only in Scope but almost entirely in close-up, so there is an in-your-face brutality to it throughout. The acting is effective and real at times, particularly in newcomer Lorraine Stanley, who begins and ends the film with a ferocious black eye, and in between shows various faces as a well-worn girl who accepts the dangers of prostitution.

Last Days
Gus Van Sant 2005 USA 3rd time; DVD
The final hours of a rock musician who is surrounded by hangers-on.
A film which ranges from intense (Michael Pitt making his way through a succession of instruments) to flat (Van Sant's non-linear editing by now seems to have lost novelty and purpose). It gains much from Pitt's mumbling performance, and a lot of images, most of them of the actor in white T-shirt and red pants, surrounded by greenery, are likely to leave a haunting impression, of loneliness more than anything. The 4:3 ratio isn't quite as powerful here when seen on the small screen, and it isn't as visually innovative as Gerry or narratively ambitious as Elephant.

Raw Deal **
(First Viewing)

Mark Kaminsky is kicked out of the FBI for his rough treatment of a suspect. He winds up as the sheriff of a small town in North Carolina. FBI Chief Harry Shannon, whose son has been killed by a mobster named Patrovina, enlists Kaminsky in a personal vendetta with a promise of reinstatement into the FBI if Patrovina is taken down. To accomplish this, Kaminsky must go undercover and join Patrovina's gang.

A decent 80s Arnold action flick with a pretty noticable cast including: Darren McGavin, Paul Shenar (whom I haven't seen since Scarface), and Robert Davi.

Hey Irish, if I remember correctly you really liked Sin City right? Did you find that a lot of the connections were too easy to pick up on? That kind of ruined the movie for me

Is Raw Deal the famous "You shouldn't drink and bake," Ah-nuld film?

I just checked IMDB......thats the one Mrs. R

What do you mean, a lot of the connections were too easy to pick up on? What connections? And yes, I absolutely LOVED the movie (my favorite movie of 2005).

Between the 3 different people, you could figure out how a certain person was involved in the 3 different stories right away. I think that was something they were trying to build up as a shock to "bring everything together" but I figured it out WAY too early. Its a good movie though, I like the black and white but how they use certain colors.

My favorite part is when he is finally going to war with the mobsters. He throws on his shades, blasts the Rolling Stones "Satisfaction" song, and kicks out the windshield!

Vintage Arnold.

Good movie.


Don Cardi

Sudden Death ** 1/2
(First Viewing)

The Vice-President is being held at gunpoint. The Pittsburgh Civic Arena is wired with enough explosives to blow up the whole city. And if $1 billion isn't delivered soon, thousands will die. Darren McCord (Jean-Claude Van Damme) is in the arena. An arson investigator, he's seen what explosives can do to people. And he won't let it happen again. Because this time, one wrong move and his daughter dies, too.

Man, Powers Boothe can be a cold-hearted b*stard when he needs to be. In fact, those are probably the only roles I've seen him in other than Red Dawn. Boothe definitely carried the movie by himself as the cunning and witty terrorist/villain/bad guy.

I watched it AGES ago. Time to rewatch. I'm a huge fan of these psychiatric/hospital/prison movies.....The more disturbing the best! BTW, anyone remember Shock corridor (USA 1963, director Samuel Fuller). GREAT ONE!

I've just been given Garfield 2 as a Christmas present. Can't wait to watch it! Garfield is my hero. Lazy, smart and slightly overweight. I definitely can relate.

La pianiste The Piano Teacher
Michael Haneke 2001 France / Austria 1st time; DVD
A piano teacher who lives with her possessive mother seeks solace in a pupil who has fallen for her, but her tendency towards what society looks at as depraved drives them apart.
Haneke is a fantastic director: not only is he daring and confident, but also fiercely controlled. His films are rich in all kinds of thematic intricacies, are almost always of visual interest, and uphold an intense and unsettling ambiguity in their exploration of psychologically elusive characters. Not only is this film fascinating to watch as a character study, but is interesting in how its narrative unfolds as a series of matter-of-fact events which never really lead into one another; what might be considered as emotional detachment is made intimate by a powerful performance from Isabelle Huppert. Original stuff, and throughout the entire duration of the film, which seems far longer than it is in some rhythmical resounding way, you can never predict what is going to happen next.

Trop belle pour toi! Too Beautiful for You
Bertrand Blier 1989 France 1st time; DVD
A car salesman cheats on his beautiful wife with his seemingly ordinary secretary.
The promotional synopses and critical responses to this film seem to have missed the point: even positive reactions tend to focus on terms such as 'amusing romantic comedy'. It is certainly not without a good dose of wit, but to say it is funny or even romantic seems to be overlooking: a) its seductive cinematography, b) its elusive editing technique, and c) the melancholic unfolding of the narrative. What begins as a film told in flashes and snippets of reflection moves into something far more weighty and 'active', using Schubert's music as a means of both diegetic and non-diegetic emotional core. Impressive and underseen.

Sauve qui peut (la vie) Slow Motion
Jean-Luc Godard 1979 France / Switzerland 1st time; DVD
The lives of a filmmaker, his lover and a prostitute cross.
Difficult to sit through without fidgeting, so few are this film's interesting ideas; it begs for revisits, but doesn't do anything to deserve such attention. Visually dull, it is caught in the creatively inert void between Godard's moving camera of the sixties and his static compositions of the eighties. Tedious.

Timecop ** 1/2
(First Viewing)

The perfection of time travel brings with it new opportunities for criminals. The government sets up a special police force (T.E.C.) to ensure the new technology isn't abused. Max Walker, one of these timecops learns of a corrupt politician's plot to become president using the device. Senator McComb discovers Walker on his trail and the real action begins--in Walker's own past!

I remember seeing previews/trailers for this movie when it initally came out 12 years ago but thought I wouldn't enjoy it (I'm not a huge Sci-Fi fan). However, I did enjoy this film very much which kind of surprised me because I didn't enjoy The One with Jet Li that I saw only a couple of days ago. Plenty of action and humor to go with this interesting look at the dangers of time travel. Finally, it was great seeing Mia Sara whom I haven't seen since she played Sloane Peterson in Ferris Bueller's Day Off 8 years prior.

Universal Soldier ** 1/2
(Second Viewing)

Luc Devreux and Andrew Scott are US soldiers who kill each other in Vietnam when Devreux interferes with Scott's slaughter of a friendly village. Listed as MIA, they are actually flash-frozen and shipped to a top-secret facility where a team of scientists turn the two, along with other select specimens, into super-soldiers known as "UniSols." While helping foil a terrorist takeover of the giant McKinley Dam, Devreux starts having flashbacks to his former life, and makes a break from his colleagues. The increasingly human Devreux teams up with TV reporter Veronica Roberts, while they are chased across much of the Midwest by Scott, and the police, who capture them long enough for Scott to find them. After a chase, thinking that they killed Scott in a truck crash, Veronica takes Devreux home to his parents in Louisiana, only to have Scott catch up with them for a brutal confrontation.

Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren work well together as "UniSols." I'm disappointed Dolph wasn't given more big action roles as I felt he could have been a big action star (maybe not the caliber of Schwarzenegger or Stallone, but definitely along the lines of Van Damme). It was also good to see a cameo from Tommy 'Tiny' Lister, whom people will remember as Deebo from the film Friday. Finally, Ally Walker was sensual as reporter Veronica Roberts and I wonder why her career never took over either?

Double Impact is Van Damme's best film, I think.

Not into Kickboxer or Bloodsport?

I've not seen either of those to be fair, but I remember loving Double Impact. I must have seen that film more than five times.

Dial M for Murder
Alfred Hitchcock 1954 USA 1st time; TV
An ex-Tennis champion plots with an old friend to murder his wife, but his plan goes wrong and he has to backfoot…
One setting, essentially, and a thriller told in two halves, the first constructing "the perfect crime" and the second re-constructing it, or deconstructing it, as a plausible work of fiction. The first half works best because everything is meticulous and convincing; the second half is interesting for its self-reflexivity, but lacks conviction and seems a rather unnecessary way to save Grace Kelly, since the cop who solves the case has no purpose or reason to do so.

From Russia With Love
Terence Young 1963 UK Nth time; TV
SPECTRE recruit a Russian spy to kill James Bond and steal an encoding machine.
Possibly the best Bond film, the second of the lot, grounded enough to be taken seriously, though marred by camp one-liners and obvious gags - it is at its best when it is being brutal, the fight scene on the train being the main attraction. There is one throwaway scene in Turkey, in which Bond is invited to watch two near-naked gyspy women settle an affair by fighting one another; it has all the crowd-stroking hilarity of a risible Russ Meyer catfight.

Tom Jones
Tony Richardson 1963 UK 1st time; TV
In 18th century England, the adopted son of a nobleman causes havoc, follows his love to London, and is followed in turn by those who wish to hang him.
On the surface there's no evident reason why this should work: a period piece which does not want to be taken seriously, high production values seem overlooked in favour of bawdy humour, and the frequent breaking of the fourth wall seems contrary to the box-office takings at the time. It is an original film, possibly or probably influenced by John Fowles's novel The French Lieutenant's Woman, with a narrator who knows everything about everyone; in turn it has possibly or probably influenced Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story and Jeunet's Amelie. Energetic and exceedingly witty, its irresistible charm stems from its hero, who seems to have been directly placed from the present day into a time where society's moral tirades get in the way of simple love.

Bad Santa ***
(Nth Viewing)

It is the height of the festive holiday season and merry shoppers have begun their yearly pilgrimages to their local malls. Among the drove is a pair of con men, on a decadent road trip as Santa and his elf. Rather than spreading good cheer, the duo's motive is to rob each establishment, a strategy that becomes complicated when they encounter an 8-year old that teaches them the true meaning of Christmas.

This is fastly becoming one of my favorite Christmas movies of all-time and this was the first movie that I liked by Billy Bob Thorton. Tony Cox was great as his sidekick, Marcus as was John Ritter as Bob Chipeska. Finally, Bernie Mac makes his presence known as the security, Gin.

I hated bad santa. It was plain bad IMO. I don't know, maybe I just don't have the appreciation for "dark humor"

To each his own svsg. I loved it

Wake of Death **
(First Viewing)

Ben Archer (Jean-Claude Van Damme) is a thug/enforcer for a criminal organization. Tiring of the work, he tells his coworkers that he's ready to retire. His wife Cynthia is a social worker for the INS. She brings a Chinese refugee girl to their home. Soon, Sun Quan (Simon Yam) wants his daughter back. Cynthia Archer is murdered, and Ben's son Nicholas disappears, along with the Chinese girl. Ben must save the children and avenge his wife's murder.