Whitewall

Bail.  Terrible cinematography, bad acting, bad directing, and bad story.  I went 15 minutes into it only because I had nothing else: my wife had hijacked the Netflix queue and took my other two placements up with the latest Pirates deal and the latest Harry Potter deal...seriously, hasn't that kid graduated yet?

Kung Fu Hustle

Yeah, go ahead and watch it.  I get most of my movies from Netflix...okay all of them so you folks at Netflix, go ahead, rip me off and charge me an additional fee for something, ya got me.  Okay, so the thing about Netflix is that once you select a film, they load you with ones that might be similar and too, once you get the film, the previews before it starts will turn you onto other films in the same vein.   So here we are with another one of the Kung Fu types but at least the word "Panda" is not in this.

So a pair of misfits find themselves in the middle of a vendetta the Axe Gang has against this pit of a housing complex that houses about 3 dudes who completely dissed one of the Axe Gang's bosses.  Now the Axe Gang must find the best killers in the land to put a beat down on the 3 and the whole complex.  In the end, the Axe Gang thinks that they have found the world's best killer, but have they?????

The dialogue was amazingly unexpected and there was some funny goof comedy stuff as well.  It took several nights to finish, but yeah, see it.  The acting is good, the directing is good, the cinematography is a bit dark, but the dialogue is crazily unexpected and pretty funny.  Not the best film I have seen recently, but a hell of a lot better than most of the stuff you might come across.

Typhoon

This took me 4 nights to finish.  Okay, nothing wrong with the writing (which included plot), the acting, the directing and the cinematography, but this film really hit home with a 5th element of a movie...the soundtrack.  The soundtrack killed this. 

You have a man who, as a child, watched his family get shot by North Koreans as they tried to defect to the South.  To him, the blame rests on South Korea and for that, he is going to unleash a cloud of nuclear waste in the skies over South Korea and kill them all. 

The action was awesome, the acting was good, the effects were awesome, the locations were awesome, but the soundtrack, well the soundtrack...oh what is that word...oh yeah...sucked.  The music sucked.  It was so bad that it not only stood out as being bad but was so bad that it tainted the rest of the movie.

I have to pan this one as it is up there with all of the other big international drama movies and all, yet the soundtrack was just too bad.

9th Company

SEE THIS!

If you liked Stanley Kubrick's 1987 "Full Metal Jacket," SEE THIS.

If you liked 2001's "Band of Brothers," SEE THIS.

If you liked Sam Mendes' 2005 "Jarhead,"  SEE THIS

Heck, if you use your left foot approximately half of the time when you walk and eat breakfast once in awhile, see this!  Man, this was intense.  Released in 2005, "9th Company" is based on historical events and follows the travails of a group of Russian recruits as they make their way through boot camp and eventual deployment to Afghanistan.  This was so gripping to me as the recruits are similar to the stuff I watched in "Full Metal Jacket."  The momentaryy insanity that punctuated interminably long periods of boredom rivaled what I watched in "Jarhead."  The based on historical stuff that I saw in "Band of Brothers," was mirrored here.  Man this was good.

Why didn't the US watch this before going into that country?