Post #258 Introduction to Judo
My son is going to get his first does of Judo next Wednesday. He is too young to do it, but he is going to come and watch me fight. I am interested in what his reaction will be since the outcome of most Judo experiences is pretty violent. Either he is going to see me beat a guy or he is going to see me get beaten. There is the off chance that we fight to a draw, but the way I do things I tend to win big, or lose big,
Everyone in the Judo club is eager for him to get a little older and join up, just because he's my son, but they don't seem to understand that I don't want to push him into any sport. I do hope he is active, but I really want him to choose his own thing. I would be really excited if he did something completely different from Judo, like ballet.
People seem to think I am joking when I say this but I am really impressed by dancers and their physical ability, it would also be cool if he could get into a team sport, which my personality seems to be completely unsuited for.
Should I survive (they have made me team captain again, against my will) I will post an update next week.
search tags: judo sports son ballet
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Pat Frm The Past:My son's only 3. Too young for here in Canada as well. I do want to sign him up for Judo at 5 though. Just to give him the experience. And because he'll likely be small, and smart. Knowing how to not get your ass handed too you on the school yard might also be helpful. If he flames out or seems disinterested, well, we'll move onto other things. Like gymnastics, which he's already taken lessons for and loves; swimming, which is the same as gymnastics; hockey, which he is currently obsessed with; or dance, which he is currently infatuated with as well.
I hear you on the dance thing.
Update:Surprisingly successful at the Judo tournament. Our team was kind of designed to be weak. We used a lot of our younger inexperienced players to give them a chance to experience higher level of tournament so winning the first round was a good sign.
I won my first match with a hold down. It was funny because he was small and a good deal faster than me so I didn't want to make the fatal mistake of underestimating him. He was made the team captain for a reason. He went for tomoe nage, which never seems smart to me when my legs are a good deal longer than someone his. But, its a big showy throw and I think maybe thats how he wanted to win.
The real problem is that I am not a showy fighter at all. In fact, you could say I am brutishly dull. When he went for the throw I blocked it and we went back to our line. He then went for the same throw again, I think, expecting the worst case scenario of me blocking again. I didn't, it is a big mistake to do the same thing twice in a row in a high level match. This time he went for the tomoe nage and I slipped through his defenses easily knowing where his body was going to be. The look on his face was pretty priceless as he obviously hadn't accounted on me being able to do this so quickly or easily. The hold down was a lock and that was an easy win after that. I even mugged to the kids from my club on the sideline which is a little out of character for me (in Judo).
The second fight doesn't have much to describe. We went back and forth, very evenly matched, I got him to tumble about 20 seconds before time ran out so the ½ point was mine and so was the match.
Oh, and my son, he didn't seem to notice the actual Judo at all, but he did notice the mats and wanted to get his ass out there and play on them.
Post #257 Putting more here
The problem with writing for multiple blogs is that everything is pretty clearly delineated and so when I am writing I am often thinking about how to categorize what it is I am doing. Once things get a category they generally don't end up here. Obviously there is no need to re-post things I have made for other sites, but each week or so I think it might be easy for people if I collected the posts I made and put them here.
Then rated them for quality.
The new Halo ODST trailer got me almost as excited as the new Modern Warfare game coming out. I 1. want a movie and 2. am willing to buy the game on release instead of waiting for a price drop. Thats some good advertising. Even if you don't like games, you should watch the clips.
Awesome.
I had my feet eaten for HikanNinja and it turned out good.
Also some various blog posts about a New Japanese TV series, Doraemons Birthday The same as my sons and a Blessing I might need for my xbox.
search tags: games halo odst hikanninja xpatslive
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Post #256 Mask of the Ninja
Casper Van Dien was Johnny Rico in Starship Troopers. Sure the movie didn't call for a lot of acting skills but he was perfect. I thought with that movie under his belt he would become fairly popular. There has been a lack of action stars and he fit that role fairly well. He could obviously do military and all-American without really acting. The next movie I saw him in was Dracula 3000 where he plays Captain Van Helsing (which isn't really fair since it was actually made the year before Starship Troopers) but it had Coolio in it and for some reason I think Coolio is something of a curse if you work with him.
The next non-television film he was in was Starship Troopers 3, which was way better than Starship Troopers 2, so he at least dodged that bullet. (This is a relative comparison, Starship Troopers 3 is a questionable movie at best and I don't really recommend to anyone but the most hardcore of science fiction fans. They will enjoy Jolene Blalocks [vulcan chick in tight clothes from Star Trek Enterprise] lips throughout regardless of plot holes).
You may very well wonder why I am talking to such an extent about Science Fiction movies in a Ninjalicker Internet Movie Kung-Fu Internet Movie Database review. It's because those are more enjoyable films than the actual movie Mask of the Ninja which starred Casper Van Dien and I spent a majority of the film wondering what had happened to his career.
I thought he had a career playing space marine guy set up for him for years to come and certainly all American action hero guy in lame but fun action movies but he never took off. I wondered (perhaps hoped) that he was off trying something new. Something new not being the train wreck that is Mask of the Ninja.
Do you remember the ninja movies that were popular in the mid 80's? Movies like Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja and Ninja Ninja Ninja? The creators of Mask of the Ninja sure do and they spend a good portion of the movie re-creating the look, feel and atmosphere of those movies. If you went back and watched one of those movie now you would get the feeling that they don't really stand the test of time. The plots are confused or poor, The inclusion of westerners seems tacked on to make the movie accessible. The fact that an inordinate amount of ninja's re-located to Los Angeles rarely made sense unless you were on the production team and knew you couldn't afford to go out of state to film. Well, even knowing those problems the makers of Mask of the Ninja forged ahead and made a near scene for scene re-make of a standard ninja movie from 20 years ago.
Please play this on a loop in the background the rest of the time you are reading this review.
There were always a lot of things that bothered me about Ninja movies, once I was old enough to realize when things didn't make sense and Mask of the Ninja could be a summary of them. You could do this yourself and make it into some sort of party game, but make a short list of all the things you know to be true of the mythology of Ninja's.
They used stealth more than head on tactics.
They tried not to reveal their true identities should they be seen. That kind of went with the stealth thing.
Their allegiances were mainly political and mercantile.
They killed in as quick and efficient manner as possible.
They avoided direct conflict.
Now, using these basic rules (you can add your own if you want to include things like magic, but I think that depends on the construct of the movie) every time one is broken, you get your cocktail enema. You could try and make the argument that the world of the movie could include its own definition of a ninja but they will often give short contradictory definitions within the structure of the film.
They do this in Mask of the Ninja. They do everything in Mask of the Ninja, minus teaching white hero guy some secret move he later uses to dispatch evil ninja leader. They couldn't get to that because Casper spends a goodly amount of time on his back falling out of consciousness because he just got a beat down. This movie does have clans and a daughter who is supposed to be hot and a multitude of ninjas who do the one things that annoys me more than anything else in movies of the ninja flavor. They walk around in plain sight in ninja suits. They guard doors, they stand by things, they assault a police station and they do it all dressed as a cliché ninja.
Thing is, even I know those suits were mainly designed for hiding at night, so wearing them outside in the daytime is not going to help you hide. In fact, They are so conspicuous I think they might even draw attention as people start to wonder if a ninja cosplay convention is in town.
I can tell you this. The ninjas who felt like they had to wear their ninja suits at all times were the ones who died out first, not the ones who survived for the last 600 generations.
Pretty much every ninja in this movie probably would have died on their way to work.
Another problem with Mask of the Ninja, and I can only say this because I have been listening to Japanese for the last 8 years, if you are going to have a guy in your movie speak Japanese, get a native Japanese speaker or one real good language coach, because this guy sounds like me trying to say something for the first time.
If you are going to write a movie, when you write something that reads a nonsensical please go back and try again. In this clip I could make the argument that if what Casper is saying is true, it would have been more sensible to not make the chip in the first place.
search tags: movie mask of the ninja casper van dien review
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Post #255 Sport Shirt Round-up
I hadn't thought of doing this but when I think about it for a while I realized I do wear a lot of sports shirts and I do have fairly strong opinions on them and have ended up talking to people about these things so it made sense to summarize here:
Nike: I figured I would get the bad ones out of the way first. Nike sports shirts tend to be heavy duty, last forever and get itchy as hell. The collar is always the culprit for me, but after a while the whole shirt doesn't feel that good.
Adidas: These are my favorites, Adidas tends to do a lot of things right. If I could go back in time and buy the same shirts I had bought before I would buy dozens. They are light, the more you wash them the softer they get. The best shirts have the insignia stitched into the shirt in the same color. They did away with labels in the collar that always itch like hell. The more I wear these shirts the more I like them. I bought a new one recently and was a little dismayed that the material felt different, not a silky, but that might be because its new.
UnderArmour: These are the most popular shirts with the other guys in my Judo club in Japan. I got one because just feeling the material made me think of some of my oldest adidas shirts. I bought the XL size and these shirts are designed to be skin tight. I didn't realize at first or I wouldn't have bought it to be honest. I'm not body conscious but I wouldn't wear this as anything but an undershirt or while wearing something else. Either that or I have to get some pec implants.
Ignio: I think this is a really small Japanese company. I bought a hat from them and was really happy with the almost complete lack of logo. Their sport shirts are dirt cheap, so its hard to complain but they hit a really nice average for these sorts of things.
Champion: I love Champion sweaters and track suits. Its too bad their sports shirts are some of the hottest I have worn. If you are looking to sweat these do the job well but I am usually looking for something to keep me cooler and something I won't notice while I work out. I notice these all the time when I am wearing them.
I was going to post links to the company stores but they are all super flash heavy and my laptop doesn't like that so much. This post is filed under Judo becuase its the only reason I wear sports clothes.
search tags: sports shirts nike adidas champion review
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Pat frm the past:Hey, you're RSS feed is FUBAR. Just saying.
Peter:Can you be more descriptive, because I get it fine. What reader do you use and what is wrong with it? It would help a lot if I got details, I might be able to fix it. Thanks.
Pat from the Past:When I go to http://www.ninjalicker.com/NLrss.php in my browser (Firefox 3.5), I only get the last two article, and when I reload, they disapear and don't reapear until I restart the browser.
I'm using the live bookmark feature of Firefox to load the feed.
Pat from the Past:I think I figured out the issue. Desktop Customization / Skype & Google <-- this title. XML doesn't like special characters like ampersands, quotes, less than and greater than signs out in the open. It should be & (or & if the first attempt looks just like a normal ampersand)
Pat from the past:I think you wrote the back end for this site yourself right? Try running the titles through htmlentities();
Peter:Thanks for looking into that. I wrote everything (codewise) on the site myself and while I had your comment in the back of my head I have been too busy to actually sit down and try and figure it out. I tried to make the RSS feed create itself dynamically out of the database, which seemed easy enough until I tried it. Overall its been working but feedback like this will make sure it works for more people more often.
I grant you this pencil lead with +1 intelligence.
Post #254 Blood The Last Vampire Review
Just posted my review of Blood The Last Vampire over at HikanNinja. For fans of the Ninjalicker Internet Kung Fu Movie Database all anime and Japanese related movie reviews end up there.
search tags: movie review blood the last vampire
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Post #253 Desktop Customization, Skype and Google
I think I have made a bunch of posts on productivity, each touting my latest effort to improve my personal productivity. I have to admit, while these have generally resulted in spurts of effort none of them have been sustainable. Basically I think it all comes down to self-discipline. Although it is possible to maximize your own efforts.
Recently I did a little overhaul of my laptop since I have decided to use it more for typing (at times sitting in front of the 30 inch monitor makes it difficult to work on text) and I also removed it's ability to play flash animation. This means no youtube on this computer. While I can check my reader I cannot spend hours watching random videos from the internet. This has helped greatly with the realization I can just save these posts and then watch them at a later time when I have finished my work. I have noticed it is a lot easier to sustain an effort without this very time consuming distraction.
The other bit of customization went to both computers, customizing the desktop. I really don't want too much style but I do want one big ass clock displaying all the time. That and the date. I don't know why, but it helps me organize myself better when I can keep track of time.
Rainmeter and customize.org for the pc and conky for ubuntu and I had made the desktops I want making my work environment just a little more pleasant. Screenshots unavailable since for some reason my screenshot program doesn't do the embedded images. The cpu usage meter and whatnot just look cool.
I have also begun using skype and google talk since my wife is still in Canada. For international calls it makes sense but I have found I have a lot of im conversations that go on a lot longer than they should as opposed to actually just speaking to the person. Especially when talking to co-workers about work. I would prefer to only use google talk since it integrates my google chat as well, but it only is available for windows at the moment (although the page says you can use it directly from gmail, but I need a mac friend to try to to see how well it works). Most of my friends seem to be mac users, go figure. I am hoping google gets on a linux version so I only have to have one chat program open on a computer at any time.
search tags: computer skype google talk custom linux
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Peter:Here are the much desired pictures of my desktops. I know you don't really care, but shut up.
Peter:Literally two weeks after I dump Pidgin for google talk exclusively they add support for the service. Sometimes I wonder if the world really is paying attention to my blog.
Post #252 Link Dump
Design site
Alpha 9
Hot or frightening?
Hitler L4D2
don't look
SING
Lego Corvette
Enjoy the kill
Effort realized
Kung fu
Morality
AT AT for the kids
For Real psychic power
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Post #251 Why Buy Porn?
I've had basically the same conversation twice and I don't think I am satisfied with any of the answers I've received. Why do people still purchase pornography in a physical form, such as on dvd or in a magazine? How is it these outlets still exist. In fact, it seems that pornography on dvd (and now blu-ray) is something of a booming industry.
With the prevalence of the internet and it's massive store of available pornography I can't seem to wrap my head around the idea of someone putting their hard earned dollars down to purchase said item. Everything available in any magazine is available for you on the internet, and probably much more that you never wanted to see.
The same goes if you want a little motion, for the same price you could get a fast connection to the internet and be surfing girls pooping on turtles or whatever gets you off. If you're willing to pay for a site I would be willing to bet you get a whole more more. (I've only ever looked at free stuff) My wife said that maybe they like the tactile sensation or having their own store, but I am betting the magazine doesn't satisfy the tactile part and as far as a store, I have a 500 gig hard drive and a 250 gig external. I could store a lot of boobies on that.
I don't have the wherewithal to actually go out and find a dealer in pornographic materials to ask them their opinion, so I am left with speculation. I got nothing.
I would love to hear another theory.
search tags: porn dvd internet
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Post #250 AllegraMan
Can Aquaman get allergies?
Superman, of course not, Batman, well, he could build a filter into his mask, but Aquaman, he is spending a lot of time completely out of his environment. That should have some sort of effect on the sinuses.
People have tried to argue with me about how his whole internal system must be different (gills et al) but at the end of the day the guy comes onto land fairly regularly and breathes through a blowhole on the front of his face. Pretty much means he has a sinus cavity and mucous to protect it.
search tags: aquaman allergies batman superman
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Post #249 Trolling for a Troll
Recently to entertain myself I have been trying to get a troll over at HikanNinja to do an interview with me. The post was about a local guy who is pushing for celebrity status for himself. He promotes local festivals and whatnot and is pushing his own music career. Honestly it seems like mountain man is jealous of the mediocre celebrity this guy has managed to draw to himself, but the way he went about attacking him was so juvenile that I thought it would be a fun playdate.
You can see the entirety of his posts here.
So I tried directly looking at the quality of his comments and asking him to clarify each one. He barely could manage a coherent statement, then he challenged me and the subject of the initial interview to a two on one fight.
I pointed out that this was a one way trip to deportation in Japan, but since it was obviously never going to happen he was unfazed. What I really wanted was for my challenge to a sit down interview to embolden him to actually meet me.
I had two hopeful outcomes. 1) Get him to actually try and explain himself in a way that didn't include the word 'dick' and basically embarrass him when he was unable to do so since all I would have to do is stay calm and stay on topic or 2) get him to hit me and have one of my cohorts call the police. Getting a deportation on film would be really interesting.
There is actually a set of comments removed at the bottom since he wasn't going for the interview where he challenges myself, the interviewee and the interviewer to a 3 on 1 fight. We went and found his personal details and myspace page etc, he's a pretty big dude, which explains a lot of his bravado, but unless he is some kind of ninja there is no way he could take on three people at the same time and hope to win.
At that point I was tempted to arrange the fight and 1) get him to hit me and call the police or 2) arrange it at my judo club and make it fair. This was because I was feeling a lot of stress personally and wanted to take it out on someone, I quickly realized that as mouthy as this guy was on the internet, I doubt he would show up for an actual event. Certainly he could have attained his original goal of fighting me if he agreed to the interview because at least then we would be at the same place at the same time.
Since I deleted his last comment without a reaction I expect him to go away, but if he should come back we're going to take all the embarrassing stuff we found on him on the internet and do a profile.
search tags:internet troll hikanninja
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Post #248 MTV Cribs
I just watched my first episode of MTV cribs because of the jetlag I couldn't sleep and it was on at 5:30 in the morning.
I would really enjoy it if at the end of the episode someone asked "And how much money did you give to charity this year?"
search tags: tv mtv cribs charity
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Post #247 Re-Branding
The Pepsi re-branding was global news, although the actual bottle design is the same in Japan. I came to Canada few days ago and was really interested in seeing the actual results, although I have yet to actually drink one.
I was sort of interested in the reasoning behind the change because marketing is always talking about brand recognition.
A real surprise was the fact that all the newspapers and television channels have also gone through some re-branding. Hardly anything has the same name as when I left.
The major differences that I can see are that newspapers have changed fonts and that's it. I just watched a decade old episode of Seinfeld and Friends on a channel that was trying to convince me it was completely new.
search tags: tv re-branding pepsi newspaper
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Post #246 Robot Love
Peter Singer, the author of a new book on battlefield robotics, told LiveScience.com in May he had seen soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan grow so attached to their bomb-disposal robots that, in one case, the soldier risked 160 feet of enemy machine gun fire to retrieve his little buddy, and in another, a soldier brought his robot in for repairs with tears in his eyes over the "injury" to his beloved "Scooby-Doo." Several units, he said, had given their robots promotions, Purple Hearts, and even a military funeral. [LiveScience.com, 5-21-09]
search tags: love robot
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Post #245 Age
I have begun meeting, on a regular basis, people younger than my tattoo.
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Post #244 Dreams
I have had several dreams recently that I have actually remembered. This, in the last few years has been unusual for me.
The first, I have to pee, so I do, which is not unreasonable. The strange element is that I pee in the garbage can, or the sink, or pretty much any receptacle that is not a toilet. The toilet is available to me. I just don't use it.
I have looked online and found that this dream represents a sense that one has lost control of the events in their life, or that one is taking control of their life. Thanks internet.
The other dream I am wearing pants. These pants are too short and they are too tight in the butt. So either I push my pants down so they look long enough, or I pull them up and they squish my butt cheeks together. I have found no interpretation to this dream so I am opening the floor to all the amateur psycho analysts out there, what do you think these pants represent?
search tags: dreams
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Post #243 Gene Generation
I heard there was a movie with Bai Ling in it where she was an assassin in the future and she wears a lot of leather. Both of these statements are true, which meant that I was destined to watch this movie. I wasn't expecting much and I don't know if that qualifies as my expectations being fulfilled or not. I did get to see Bai Lings boobs (twice), which does sort of elevate the whole status of this whole project.
The question one must ask oneself when venturing into a film is this: “Are Bai Ling's boobs enough to carry a whole movie? Even if they are generally clad in leather and sprayed down?” Sadly, it depends more on the genre of the movie than the quality of visible boobage. Bai Ling manages to almost pull off her role. The supporting cast, on the other hand, was really not up to the task, which is surprising because some of them are recognizable actors who do well in the other roles they have appeared in.
There is the case of the little brother, who is supposed to be a rapscallion troublemaker who is always down on his luck and I think he's supposed to be comic relief we feel sympathy for. I cannot express how much I hated this character and for me one of the best scenes in the movie is when a guy puts a gun in his mouth causing him to throw up. The only way the scene would have been better is if he had pulled the trigger. This character also gets peed on, but that's just gross.
In total, this means that Bai Ling and her boobs are not enough to carry a whole film (at least in the cyber-futuristic-action genre). Nor can the writers of this film understand that despicable characters are not appealing. I think we all want to root for an underdog, but if the dog has the mange you just want to keep them away from you and as sad as it is to admit it, you are sort of relieved when they are dead.
Other than Bai Ling's boobs the big draw of the movie would be the futuristic landscape they produced, mainly with greenscreen and CG. The overcrowded city is walled in by a massive structure that I assume is supposed to keep the populace in.
The reasoning behind this is never really explained, which I am actually ok with since you can't make a whole new society and then explain every aspect in it while still carrying on a story.
The problem is the ending of the film is a big reveal about the cities of the world, which up to that point had just been a backdrop. There are some conversations by the bad guys about going to a different city where everything will be better, but that's as much significance as it's given.
Here's the big spoiler, if you haven't already figured it out. If you don't want to know skip this paragraph and jump to the end even though you should have figured out that a pretty cheap Sci Fi story that involves wanting to go somewhere else always has the same ending. All the cities are exactly the same. Shock and horror. They all seem to be on some burnt out planet. They also seem to have no way of sustaining themselves. None of this is explained in the film and to be honest, when it happens you may not have cared enough to notice.
I think Bai Ling could do a movie and be good if they made the character just a regular Chinese chick, in leather, then stuck her in a situation that required to act like a regular Chinese chick in unusual circumstances. Just don't spend too much time trying to get her to act.
The guy who plays the little brother...I hope he changes his hair.
search tags: movie gene generation review bai ling
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Post #242 5 Masters
The five masters movie has 3 fewer masters than the last movie I reviewed, but at the same time, it has 7 evil masters who round out the bad guys bringing this movie to a total of 12 masters, although 2 of those masters kind of suck, so I’m not sure it I should count them. Either way, there are a whole lot of masters in this movie.
The plot is pretty standard, the government burns down Shaolin temples (with the help of a spy) and kills all the Shaolin. Except 5. These 5 masters decide on revenge and a super annoying secret hand single that gets used way too often in the film in such an unsubtle way that any monkey would be able to figure out your signaling your association with a secret group of rebels out to upset the current order.
That said, the master spy, who really should have been noticed by the Shaolin masters from the temple as suffering from the spiritual problem of being “Something of a dick” which is a problem as it makes it impossible to attain any sort of level of spiritual clarity. You think you could beat that out of someone, but there are rare cases where it ends up making the dick stronger, and on top of that, angry, which is why he probably set about collaborating with the government and burning down the temples.
There is no distinctive stand out among the 5 masters, although they do follow the guy who can’t get the hand signals right in the first place, despite the fact that the hand signals are as simple as the ones you did with your friends in grade school.
The one dude who is too dumb to remember the one hand signal goes off to find out who the spy is, the others sort of break up and try to connect with other rebel types who are into causing trouble.
After a little of this and that, someone assassinates a guy to prove his loyalty and a guy gets captured and they send 500 guys to help him escape, the 5 masters decide they have to kill the 5 bad masters (along with the two lapdogs) but they aren’t skilled enough so they begin a harsh training montage.
They all decide that they will train in one style of kung-fu to beat a specific evil master. I am not what you would call an amazing strategist, but one of the problems with this plan was pretty apparent to me right from the get go. What if you don’t end up fighting your designated evil master guy? You spent a year training in this one style to defeat this one other style and then suddenly your fighting a different guy, what are you thinking to yourself? Damn, forward thinking and planning sure aren’t my strong points, too bad my crane style kung-fu absolutely sucks compared to this guys beat the crane style of kung-fu.
And what the fuck is it with one style of kung-fu being able to defeat a specific other style. Why not go for some sort of cross training like Tae-bo?
Not that this is a big issue, a lot of movies have included this faulty logic, because it makes it easier to understand, but it would be nice to see someone beat his opponent based on his well rounded skillset because there is always the chance that your opponent did something off the wall like train in a different style while you were training to defeat his original style and then he switches mid-fight and what are you going to do then?
Maybe I expect too much of my masters. You know, because there are 5 of them you might think one of them had the same idea as me. So they train for a year, it always takes exactly one year, which is starting to annoy me because it means I could, by now, know 35 different styles of kung-fu and be pretty darn awesome.
So they show up, line up and the 5 masters get the 5 anti-masters to break up, luckily they managed to get the exact masters they were planning on. They fight, surprisingly some of the good masters actually bite it, but they are heroes so they manage to take their opponents with them.
The final point I would like to make is that this movie has one of the most brutal cock-punch sequencesI have ever seen in a movie. Especially because the hero attacks the bad guys balls, like, 20 times in a row, and it kills him. He kills a guy by hitting him in the nuts.
search tags: movie kung fu 5 five masters review nutshot
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Post #241 8 Masters
This is about as classic as kung-fu cinema gets. Boys father is killed, there is some kind of challenge going around, which seems to be a big past time of all the kung-fu masters. Challenging people and killing or getting killed. Personally, I have always wondered why these challenges always seem to end up being to the death. It just isn’t really an efficient way to work. Basically every year your stable of masters gets cut in half. This could explain why all these movies happen a few hundred years ago because masters seem to be walking around all over the place, whereas now, not so much with the masters. The rule of diminishing returns would say that if the population of masters gets cut in half every year, pretty soon there would be hardly any masters at all. So dad is dead, what do we do? Put the kid in a shaolin monastery, otherwise they might kill the son as well. Sure, he’s only 8, but that makes him just a tasty treat after a hard day of killing. Also, this movie has some of the most classic music ever.
Now we come to a second demonstration of one of those things that I just never understood. The shaolin train the shit out of this guy. I mean literally they are teaching this guy to tear people apart with his teeth. Not like a week-end course either, if you watch his training montage starts 6 minutes into the film where he is 8 and progresses until he is in his early 20’s and ready to go. According to the montage he did little else so for about 10 years this guy was taught how to break people down into their component pieces. They don’t have moments of him socializing or praying or even eating, so fighting and nothing else, was the focus of his montage. Then they are getting ready to let him go and they basically tell him “Don’t fight with people.”
The only really appropriate response that I could think of was ‘Geh?’ Literally, what was the point of training this guy so thoroughly and then saying, you know what, don’t do any of the stuff you just spent years learning, cause that’ll learn ya.
Then the second irony, or the ironic 360, comes out in the test the guy has to pass if he wants to leave the temple, which is, of course, a massive series of fights. So they say to this guy, you gotta go, and once you go you can’t fight, but before you can go, you gotta beat the living shit out of some guys spray painted gold. Seriously, I am going to say that to you with a straight face.
Hero dude with thick neck then heads out into the world, where he will not fight, after beating the living shit out of the guy’s spray painted gold and picking up the big hot pot to burn a dragon into his arms, which sort of indicates you are a guy from Shaolin who totally throws down, but you can’t. He goes to town to get a snack.
Whoops, first mistake is to stop for food in a Kung-fu movie because some ruffian will eventually come around and start a fight, often they are the henchman of the movie’s antagonist.
So sitting down and trying to get a burger thick neck watches as some ruffians (whoa, surprise) come in and start ruffianing. They harass a guy but hero holds off, not getting involved and fighting. Then they start harassing the guys daughter an eventually it gets so bad that hero asks them to stop…and then whipping the shit out of them.
Looks like it took about an hour, or however long it took for the guy to be out on the road and get hungry, before he broke his promise not to fight. In fact, it was the very first thing he did, he didn’t even manage to eat his lunch.
So he goes home, meets his now blind mom and love interest. So, gotta get to the eight masters soon because at a couple of minutes each we have a 20 minute series of fights coming up somewhere.
Oh, here comes one of the eight masters now with a challenge. Hero refuses a bunch of times, runs away with his family to live in a house in a different place, the masters show up with a challenge again so they go and live in a cave. Seems sort of like it would have been a good idea not to leave the Shaolin temple at all. Guys mom was living comfortably with some chick. Sure she went blind and didn’t have her son with her, but she ate every day and people didn’t come around the house issuing challenges every day. Since her some came back, she now lives in a cave and then gets kidnapped by the 8 masters.
I am wondering at this point how difficult it would be to fake a loss and not die, since he is some kind of martial arts master himself. He should have the skills to get by, I assume. But that wouldn’t be much a heroic end, so the guy EVENTUALLY, and it takes a while, gives in and fights the 8 masters. It only took him a few minutes to give in at the beginning of the movie and beat the crap out of the rabble rousers in the restaurant.
So he beats down each master in turn, but before delivering a final death blow he gets a flashback to the beginning of the movie when the teacher gives him this line about not beating the shit out of anyone, but since he has already done that he decides the best course of action is to not kill his opponent.
The thing is, every time we watch a fight we have to watch a dramatic look and listen to the line again. Damn, that’s 8 times which is about 7 too many. After all this, guy decides to go back to the temple, so again, maybe it would have been better not to leave in the first place.
Dick.
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Post #240 Lady Iron Monkey
I had to watch this movie twice. And I mean HAD TO simply because I was left so confused by my feelings after the first viewing. It turned out to be something called nausea because I had eaten too much yogurt. The movie on the other hand also gave me feelings, such confused strange new feelings.
You know what every little girl in China dreams of being? The legendary Lady Iron Monkey. You think I’m kidding but there is no Mao Barbie fad going on, it’s all Monchichi style with the girls cutting their hair and gluing it to their faces and arms, then jumping around not even coming close to hitting their friends. At least it’s safe.
Or maybe I just made that up, you’ll never know, because China doesn’t really exist, but sadly the movie, Lady Iron Monkey, does. I have seen the Iron Monkey movies and they are considered classics by people who love kung fu movies. Not many people mention Lady Iron Monkey, they have never seen it despite the fact that it has been confirmed that this film has the best opening song ever.
The movie starts off as every great comedy has. With a large Chinese man and a Chinese midget. One thing Kung-fu movies rarely get right is comedy, and this movie is a mess of attempted humor. They are teased by the monkey woman and some kids in monkey pajamas.
This sort of begs the question of “What the fuck is going on?” The woman is supposed to be what? A missing link, a child abandoned by her parents because she was atavistic? A human living in the wild because she was adopted by monkeys? She is supposed to have a functional tail, but we don’t learn that until near the end of the film.
The kung-fu master shows up and catches her, says she has a brain, that she is human and so takes her back teach her the ways of kung-fu. She grows up in a short training montage and then we subjected to the travesty that is this movie’s first plot arc.
Firstly there is the ungainly hitting on town pretty girl by Fatty and the midget. I know you might be offended by my use of the term Fatty but that is the actual name this stock character is always given in these movies. So they fall over themselves and when our main character shows up (she isn’t given a proper name that I can remember) she gets in their way, although they had no chance at success, and they tell her how ugly she is.
LIM (Lady Iron Monkey) then decides to go out and see the world as some sort of teenage rebellion. She basically takes the place of a bride, this is a long painful comedy scene then she goes into town and crashes a kung-fu birthday party of sorts.
This is more than mid-way through the film and literally nothing has happened. I suppose what we were supposed to be watching was character development. It could be filler or comedic genius. There are a lot of things I don’t understand. Maybe this is like physics, it seems simple at first but the more you get into it the more confusing it gets, the more obscure. It might be a part of the Chinese mentality, the conflict between the desire to be beautiful and to have a tail.
So chick falls for the evil 14th prince of the emperor who uses her skills to fake his way into being next in line. Here we see the complexity of the movie... ah, who am I trying to kid. The depth of thought can be summed up with this line.
Evil 14th son of the emperor totally pimps LIM for a while and then she discovers him with his real lady and loses it. She goes back and does what anyone would do, finds strength in who she really is, becomes a better person and realizes that looks are unimportant.
But of course, that isn’t even close to being true. She takes a magical bath that gets rid of all the excess hair and she is suddenly pretty, because that is what is truly important. Although she doesn’t stay in the bath long enough to lose her tail.
Okay, so LIM has achieved her dream of being pretty and does what any sensible person would do, she returns to the service of the guy who dicked her over, oh, and there is some political intrigue.No surprise here at all, the new Emperor doesn’t keep any of his promises, he even tries to kill the people he made promises too and they go after him leading to a ridiculous foot chase. Isn’t this guy the emperor of all of China? Where are the freaking guards and how come the guys chooses to run? Couldn’t he at least get a horse or something.
So there is a final fight with some wicked thwack sounds and LIM gets her personal revenge, because again, that is what is important in life. Being pretty and getting revenge. At least that is what I learned from the film. Hell hath no fury like a monkey she bitch scorned.
What kind of pissed me off is she managed to do it using her secret kung-fu. So secret was this kung-fu that we, the audience weren't even let in on it. She does a kind of female monkey drunken style of kung-fu. The secret style of Kung-fu always seems to turn out to be drunken style, I just think we should see her train in it at least once, because somehow, despite the fact that we have spent most of the film watching a woman with hair taped to her arms and face, it's harder to believe if the wicked final move just comes out of no where.
Sorry, I guess harder to believe is totally irrelevant here.
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Post #239 American Samurai
This movie I downloaded just because I had watched all 5 American Ninja movies and still felt somehow…incomplete. I think it was because we all know that movies must come in trilogies. I don’t know what a quintualogy would be, so we can’t have one. Nope, we need two sets of three movies or the universe is somehow less stable. This movie has American in the title and Samurai, which is pretty close to Ninja because they are both Japanese and both had a penchant for head lopping offingism.
Surprisingly the overall story of this movie works better than the American Ninja movies simply because like all of the great martial arts movies it dispenses with any real story and instead gets the main character involved in a battle to the death tournament. It is really hard to go wrong with this plotline simply because it gives the fan what they have come to see. People fighting. The problem with scriptwriters in general is that they feel the need to give a reason for the main character to get into the tournament that doesn’t involve greed or the desire to kill a bunch of other people. This is the HERO after all. So the first 20 or 30 minutes of this film is taken up by the stupid stupid plot.
If I were going to write a movie it would be ‘Guy wakes up and then is thrust into the world of pitfighting because he went in the wrong door while looking for chili.’ You know what, it would fucking sell huge numbers. I would call it ‘Hot Chili, with moves so spicy, it’s deadly.’
I can accept the background on the main character, which is funny because it is almost identical to the back story to the original American Ninja film.
Kid gets lost on Japan, parents get killed (in this case through a plane crash) so kindly old Japanese warrior master figures he will raise the orphan in the tradition of his martial art, in this case, the samurai sword fighting. Despite the fact that Samurai would in most cases be totally against this, call it the Last Samurai syndrome where they figure teaching outsiders has suddenly become a good idea. There is a brother who I have labeled ‘Crazy Eyes’ who, of course, takes offense at the foreign kid learning the family traditions so he becomes a Yakuza killer dude. Way to stick it to your dad Crazy Eyes.
So plot and story happen. This involves dude, all growed up, who is a reporter, heading to Turkey with photographer love interest (they totally get it on in like a day despite hating each other the first few hours) where they are investigating a murder by ‘someone’ with a sword. If you guessed the killer rhymes with ‘lazy flies’ you would be right on. Also, dude’s family heirloom sword gets stolen, you know that’s ‘daisy guise’ again. I spent the next while wondering if they were ever going to get to it and then chick gets kidnapped and dude gets forced into the underground tournament where the fight is to the death and of course the last fight is going to be with his brother. He is allowed to use his sword and everyone in the tournament has a ‘distinct’ style. This sometimes translates into ‘totally gay’ style but at least for the rest of the movie people will be doing little more than dishing out the pain.
There isn’t much to say about the rest of the film, as it consists of a cast of clichés fighting. I wonder what it must be like signing onto a film like this and then finding out you are one of the guys who gets killed in the first fights. You are, in essence, cast as the loser to show off how tough the other guys are so when they fight main character dude it doesn’t look one sided.
I don’t think I could do it. I would have to last at least one fight. Maybe getting killed by the antagonist would be okay, but none of this getting wiped out shit. Looking over my screen captures will tell you the rest of the movie. They do a little more graphic cutting, but when the limbs come off it starts to feel like my time hasn’t been wasted.
I did find Conan guy pretty funny, I had hoped he would hang around for more than one fight, but he was done in by massive Australian who makes penis joke.
Uh, not much else to say, since everything you expect then happens.
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