(”Hey, bros, watch me pose shirtless with these swords I never actually cut anyone with.”)
I always get a couple people whining in the comments section when I rip on Ninja Assassin (from Wachowski Bros protege James McTeigue and Korean pop star Rain), but come on, tell me this synopsis doesn’t give you a major case of the dismissive wanks. From Collider:
Raizo is one of the deadliest assassins in the world. Taken from the streets as a child, he was transformed into a trained killer by the Ozunu Clan, a secret society whose very existence is considered a myth. But haunted by the merciless execution of his friend by the Clan, Raizo breaks free from them…and vanishes. Now he waits, preparing to exact his revenge. In Berlin, Europol agent Mika Coretti has stumbled upon a money trail linking several political murders to an underground network of untraceable assassins from the Far East. Defying the orders of her superior, Mika digs into top secret agency files to learn the truth behind the murders. Her investigation makes her a target, and the Ozunu Clan sends a team of killers to silence her forever. Raizo saves Mika from her attackers, but he knows that the Clan will not rest until they are both eliminated. Now, entangled in a deadly game of cat and mouse through the streets of Europe, Raizo and Mika must trust one another if they hope to survive…and finally bring down the elusive Ozunu Clan.
Blow me. And of course the clips are all stylized slo-mo and wire fu. Haha, I love you, masturbatory posturing. All I’m saying is if you film two guys sword fighting, someone better be getting a limb cut off or else they may as well be frotting.
Here I was in the middle of writing a subtle, intensively-researched, impassioned piece about the health care crisis, when all of a sudden this new clip from Ong-Bak 2 shows up in my inbox. As you can see, the scene is that the black knight from Monty Python and some guys in masks are having a knife-sex party up in a tree when Tony Jaa decides to interrupt… WITH FISTS! AND KICKS! AND KNEES AND ELBOWS AND BONE BREAKS TO THE CHEST PARTS! Holy crap, nothing gets me fired up like new Tony Jaa clips. In fact, I just headbutted my coffee mug and beat my roommate to death with his own cat. Crap, I gotta go guys, I should call someone about this.
“THIS CHICK SEEMS FEISTY.”
Opens October 23rd in theaters, already available on OnDemand
Jason Reitman directs movies about every two years, which seems about right for staying relevant without overextending yourself. This is the first clip from Up in the Air, his follow-up to Juno and Thank You for Smoking (the rare movie adaptation that’s actually better than the book). It’s based on a 2001 Walter Kirn novel about a guy on a personal quest to rack up a million frequent flyer miles. In the clip, George Clooney and Vera Farmiga talk miles, upgrades, and the latest hotel trend — an atmosphere that is “faux-homey,” or “fauxmey.” The term seems unnecessary as it relates to travel, but “faux-homey”? I think we’ve finally found the politically correct replacement for “wigger.” Used in a sentence: I went to Ben Lyons’ and Danny Masterson’s DJ show last night, and man can those fauxmeys spin!
I’ve been pretty vocal about hating everything about George Romero’s latest movie, Survival of the Dead, from the stupid title to the idea of yet another George Romero zombie movie. But after seeing this clip, I acknowledge the possibility that I’ve been wrong. I thought this was a lot funnier than anything I’ve seen from Zombieland, which is trying a lot harder. Get it? The Asian guy can’t stop catching zombies! Asians be fishin’ y’all.
[via CHUD]
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a hell of a book, the kind of thing you wish they’d make more movies out of instead of crap like The Lovely Bones. It’s about a man and his son (who never get names) wandering through a post-apocalyptic wasteland of cannibals and roving bands of outlaws. Though so far, reviews of the John Hillcoat-directed movie adaptation have been sort of mixed. I wasn’t a huge fan of Hillcoat’s last movie (The Proposition), but Viggo Mortensen is perfect casting. That dude has looking like the survivor of an apocalyptic cataclysm down pat.
It also stars Kodi Smit-McPhee as the boy. I don’t know much about this kid other than that he clearly has a couple of a-holes for parents. Really? It wasn’t enough to stick him with a hyphen, you also had to make his first name a misspelled version of crappy name to begin with it? AND you put an ‘I’ at the end? Was he supposed to dot that with a heart? You only had nine months to come up with something he wouldn’t have to drag around like wheelbarrow full of cement his entire life, so well done. Might as well have named him Stealmylunchmoney McPussy. Then again, that was my nickname, and look how well I turned out.
