The Blogboard Jungle

    I remember growing up looking forward to all the action movies coming out every summer, for a while during the era of Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damm we had films like that coming our fairly regularly.  But, after Jackie Chan, a few Matrix films and some of Jet Li's stuff it seems that form of action is pretty scarce.  So a while back when I saw trailers for some films that seemed like they were fitting the bill I was pretty excited.  I have finally seen both of them, and Man of Tai Chi is definitely the better movie. This film is directed by and stars Keanu Reeves as the main villain who runs an underground fight club for the 1 percenters.  He plays Donaka Mark a private security company CEO who does the illegal fight club streams on the web to the rich as his black market income.  A lot of my friends don't like Reeves because they find him a little dry in most of his performances but for this film that actually works well for him as a...

"Wanna Fight?"  Only God Forgives reunites Ryan Gosling with Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn and there is a lot of familiarity with the visuals and story flow. If you saw Drive you can expect a lot of the same story telling pace in this film. Very slow, to the point of getting annoying, then very interesting. Visually from beginning to end the movie is beautiful, especially the color mix with interior shots in the clubs. Goslings character Julian owns and operates a Muay Thai club (Muay Thai is Thailand's style of kickboxing). The trailer led me to believe this was going to be a martial arts based drama or action flick that had me so excited for it I wrote about it before . While it did lack in the martial arts, there is still plenty of violence in this film mostly from one of the other characters in the film played by Vithaya Pansringarm who must have been some kind of Muay Thai icon by the way he moved in his fight scene with Gosling. If you read a synops...

     If you are a martial arts movie fan than you know the line in quotations after the name above, and you know the name.  Jim Kelly played Williams in Enter the Dragon , in my opinion the greatest martial arts film with great martial artists in it. Characters like Black Dynamite and Afro Samurai always make me think the creators of these characters must have had Kelly in mind during their inception of these newer characters, caricatures of Kelly at his best.     Holding a black belt in Shorin-ryu Karate he was a world champion competitor and awesome athlete in general.  For me, his scene against Han in Enter the Dragon is very symbolic of the mental struggles many martial artists have when it comes to competition and winning or losing.  Han asks him how he deals with the possibility of defeat and Kelly's character tells Han he does not waste time worrying about being beaten, when Han asks why he responds with; "I'll be too busy looking ...

I'm looking forward to some new martial arts flicks in the theater  If any film genre has been neglected lately in my opinion it is the Martial Arts genre.  I know it was it's biggest in the 70's and 80's but you really don't see them released as often as back then.  I never saw the RZA's film The Man with the Iron Fists but I always appreciate when Hollywood releases a new film that can fit that genre.  I also like that they have been more open to releasing some from over seas when they are epic enough such as Jet Li's Hero .      When they put their money and talent into something for that genre I always appreciate the effort even though the films may suck.  That being said, I've been keeping an eye on two films being released soon that fit the bill.  Only God Forgives stars Ryan Gosling and pairs him with Drive director again who wrote the film, it looks like a gritty revenge film that takes place in Bangkok.  Revenge i...