Raging Phoenix

Most of us here were pretty big fans of Chocolate, so the second starring vehicle for that actress (they should really settle on a name for her one of these days) has been on our radar for a while.
This is very much a movie of two halves. The first half is a highly entertaining plotless drunken capioera/break-dancing kung fu show reel, and the second half is the most embarrassing implosion into nightmarish suck since Dog Bite Dog.
They had a good thing going with the minimalist plot; after being targeted by kidnappers, a girl reinvents her ruin of a life by joining forces with a group of drunken fu dancers who are out for revenge. Had enough of a character arc on her to make us buy in; a touch of comedy, a touch of backstory for the guys, and a lot of really entertaining fighting.
Then the plot demons set in, and it turns out some women give off a pheromone so powerful it makes people obsessed with sex and the kidnappers have sniffers on the street to target women with this pheromone so they can make them really sad and harvest their tears to turn into perfume. Sex perfume.
Not content with jumping the shark the movie then gets eaten by the shark, in a dizzying whirlwind of CG brick slides, sets from National Treasure that make no sense and don't even work well as settings for increasingly boring and incomprehensible fu fights, and a villain doing her best Grace Jones imitation, in tights that make it painfully obvious when her stuntmen take hits for her.
At one point during the meltdown I yelled, "Fuck you, Thailand" at the screen, and meant it. Fuckers didn't even have the courtesy to include a god damn outtake reel.

Fuck it, let's just make the entire stunt team movie stars

Red Eagle

Remember Tears of the Black Tiger? Director has a new movie.

Ong Bak sequels

Ong Bak 2 is one of the most bafflingly bad films I have ever seen. I am the last person on earth to hate a kung fu film if it manages to have a sufficient quantity of great fight scenes, but Ong Bak 2 was just so fundamentally misconceived that it managed to undermine it's own action. Between having Tony Jaa's character played by a child actor for LITERALLY half the movie, and the Tinkerbell ending...
I should probably not be looking forward to the sequel.
But here's the trailer, and it looks like it at least knows how stupid it is; since they're clearly never letting Tony Jaa direct again, perhaps it won't be paced like mud trickling down the back of an elephant's corpse.

...and more elephants

I still haven't seen any Tony Jaa movies except the original Ong Bak, a situation I should probably correct, but blame the lack of Netflix streaming.

A new Raging Phoenix trailer already

Significantly crazier than the first.

Raging Phoenix trailer

New movie with the girl from Chocolate, however she's spelling her name this time.

"May the Force be with you."

Thailand is really coming along, eh? I mean, they're no Nigeria, but they are crankin' out a bunch of decent-to-excellent fu flicks, at the very least.

In the best fu movie tradition, Mercury Man's plot basically makes no sense. We get an explanation of the hero's super powers that totally fails to address the other superdude running around, a conflicting Engrished technobabble explanation that actually removed information from my mind, and then finally it takes the bad guys the entire movie to think of the most practical use for their magic amulet.

But who needs plot when you have spider fire magnetic arbitrary powers? This movie is heavily indebted to Spider-Man, and apparently they were really worried no one would notice the similar black outfit or the way he magnetically "web-slings" around town, so they make sure to explicitly reference him and his catchphrase in dialogue, and show TWO DIFFERENT pieces of "Hi Spidy" graffiti (a la the "Spielberg, Lucas, let's do it together!" set decor from Ong Bak).

However, MM is no Peter Parker. For one thing, he is completely irrelevant to the climax of the movie. If you're getting shown up by the comic relief character, you got some problems with your heroing, though this may have been foreshadowed when the elephants kung-fu double-teamed him.

Another sign that he may not be a very good hero is that he will straight up murder people. I'm not sure this is intentional, either on his part or the filmmakers', but as depicted, no one could survive the mangling he hands out to getaway cars, and we don't see anybody get out either.

So what I'm saying is, this movie isn't "good" by conventional human standards, but it's certainly watchable. If for nothing more than a cadre of Engrish-spouting villains and transsexual fashion designer "big sister" kung fu battle against frosted-hair mad scientist.

Need I repeat myself!?

Also, child labor laws are clearly OVERRATED.

Does Thailand exist entirely to fulfill my needs?

It even has parkour!

Taste the Chocolate Pain

The official US trailer basically adds a fucking awesomely terrible tag line. Midnight screenings February 6th in Seattle and a few other cities; DVD on Feb 10th - did they not think this would make money? I do not understand a world where that can be right.