The Movie:
Swordsman II is one of the classics of early 1990s Hong Kong cinema, a runaway box office success at home and one of the first films to feature Jet Li in a starring role. Perhaps its storied reputation led me expect more than I could ever get, but I found it to be not a great film but a just-okay one, one that exemplified many of the weaknesses as well as strengths of films of its time and place.

Blade-wielding wine enthusiast Ling (Jet Li) and his sister Kiddo (Michelle Reis) journey to a remote monastery where they will meet up with their eight brothers and retire from society. Unbeknownst to them, the place has been ransacked by imperial soldiers, its remaining inhabitants scattered. After they make this discovery, Ling and his siblings hit the countryside in search of the survivors, planning to regroup and strike back at the warlords who attacked them. In the mean...Read the entire review

The Movie
Kiarostami's Five Dedicated to Ozu is a series of short films, each one consisting of a single shot of a shoreline. There's no narrative per se in any of these, just a series of moments, attempts to capture life and the natural world as they occur. A small piece of wood is battered about by the waves; a bunch of senior citizens congregate for a few minutes and then disperse; in a particularly action-packed segment, a bunch of ducks noisily barrel through the bottom of the frame.

Its a sort of clich to describe Asian art-cinema style as slow: long takes, real-time unfolding of actions, nature scenes. Kiarostami and other Iranian directors have utilized these in these films, as have recent movies from Japan, China, South Korea and other parts of Southeast Asia. Five is sort of a compendium of those clich s, taken to some kind of extreme. Shorn of the moving and f...Read the entire review

Judgment Day 2007 aired May 20 at the Scottrade Center in St. Louis. Let's check out the matches, shall we?

Ric Falir vs. Carlito. This match is slow but not dull, as Carlito seems bent on winning via submission (he works on Flair's arm like its going out of style, and there seemed to me to be several moments where he could've gone for a pin and chose not to). Flair works his usual magic, spraying charisma all over the arena and eventually breaks out the figure-four leglock, much to the delight of the crowd. Nice opener.

Vince McMahon, Shane McMahon and Umaga vs. Bobby Lashley. I'm not a big fan of handicap matches, and I'm even less wild about the prospect of anyone whose last name is "McMahon" wrestling a match (I like Umaga, though). So imagine my delight when this ended after about two minutes. Hey, I'll take it.

CM Punk vs. Elijah Burke. A swell sh...Read the entire review

The Movie
Based on Michel Tournier's novel, Volker Schlondorff's The Ogre follows Abel (John Malkovich), a Frenchman whose adventures take him from a youth spend in a Catholic orphanage, to pre-war Paris, the army, a German POW camp and a succession of odd jobs with German officers through the war. As civilization crumbles all around him, Abel ignores the calls to battle and busies himself with the care of children and animals. He does this not out of some deep pacifist principle or high-minded love for humanity, but rather because of the sincere alienation he feels from most of human society. For reasons never fully explained, Abel finds only fear and contempt from his fellow adults; as a result, he's stumbles through humanity's greatest catastrophe without a care for patriotism or politics, preferring instead the company of a blind moose, or a young girl, or some decommissioned c...Read the entire review

Vengeance 2007 took place on June 24, 2007 in the Toyota Center in Houston. Chris Benoit had been booked to make an appearance on this show, but was too busy murdering his family to show up. The scandal broke the next day, generally burying any discussion of this show's merits (or lack thereof). Despite all that, its not a bad card at all, with the main events in particular as standout matches. But let's begin at the top.

The Hardys vs. Lance Cade & Trevor Murdoch. This was a good opener, a solid, Southern-styled tag match. Murdoch and Cade - the incoming champs - work together well as a team and have developed effective heel personas. The Hardys are their usual fun selves in this one, proving once again that they have more to offer than the suicidal acrobatics that they're known for.

Chavo Guererro vs. Jimmy Wang Yang. An okay but fairly pedestrian cruiserweigh...Read the entire review

What began as a one-off ECW show has become an official WWE pay-per-view, with "extreme rules" prevailing for the whole night. If you like gimmick matches, this will be like pornography for you. If you like good wrestling, however...well, let's just check out the matches.

Stretcher match: Randy Orton vs. Rob van Dam. As irritating as RVD's somewhat ostentatious acrobatics can be, when they're used well - as they are here - they can make for a fairly entertaining match. My only serious problems with this one is the over-reliance on dazed stumbling-around as a delaying tactic and the kind of goofy ending. All in all, this was just fine.

Tables match: Sandman, Tommy Dreamer & CM Punk vs. Elijah Burke, Matt Stryker & Marcus Cor Von. It's tough to say too much about this, as it was pretty much at a fever pitch of violence and mayhem for the whole time. But there are worse ...Read the entire review

The Movie
This box set is comprised of three films, Karate Bull Fighter, Karate Bear Fighter and Karate For Life, each one focusing on a different part of the life of Matsutatsu Oyama, a great practitioner and teacher of karate. He's played here by Sonny Chiba, himself a student of Oyama's. Each of the films in question are worth a look, and this set offers a great deal for anyone who is interested in the particular charms of Japanese martial arts films.

Karate Bull Fighter is the first film in the set. I suppose I should break the bad news to those of you who are unfamiliar with this movie: despite what the title implies, this is not about a professional bullfighter who uses martial arts to win his matches. There is, in fact, only one scene in which he fights a bull and it comes not at the climax but right square in the middle. The rest of the movie does...Read the entire review

The Movie
So much of the information about Iran in North America is purely political in nature; it is useful and heartening then to be reminded that actual people live there, people who write poetry and make films and smoke cigarettes and have regular, boring lives that, despite everything, are not defined by the stupid, anti-human dictates of their government. Those who wish to learn more about this, however, are advised to go avoid Facets's new DVD, The Mirror of the Soul. A collection of three short documentaries on the late, legendary Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad - The Green Cold, The Mirror of the Soul and The Summit of the Wave - these films are so unfocused and poorly made that I fear they would discourage anyone who might be interested in modern Iranian culture or Persian literature.

The worst of the bunch is the first entry, The Green Cold,...Read the entire review

The Movie
Just the Two of Us is the second (of two) new releases from Wolfe video spotlighting gay-themed exploitation films of the 1960s and 70s (the other one, That Tender Touch, is reviewed elsewhere on this site.)

Denise (Elizabeth Plumb) and Adria (Alisa Courtney) are two bored California housewives; both of them are married to men whose work - "for the government" - takes them out of town for long stretches of time. Out for lunch at a vaguely hippie-ish cafe, they spy a lesbian couple at the next table, cuddling and holding hands. Overcoming their initial feelings of discomfort, they come to admire the women for their lack of inhibition; Denise in particular sees in them a kind of affection that she feels is missing from her own life. One night, Denise confesses that she feels an attraction to her friend, which leads to a night of (softcore, fairly restrained) passion...Read the entire review

That Tender Touch, the new release from gay-themed Wolfe Video, is probably not meant for me. This late-60s drama of forbidden attraction between two middle-class women shows its age with an overwrought, play-to-the-peanut-gallery visual style, a somewhat blinkered view of same-sex desire and, most obviously, a mise-en-scene that exemplifies the worst excesses of the era. Wolfe seems to acknowledge these defects in their pitch to the target audience, calling it a "rediscovered camp gem" that is a "classic example of the lesbian exploitation genre, or what we like to call Dykesploitation!"

Terri (Sue Bernard, who you'll no doubt remember from Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) and Marsha (Bee Tompkins) are two young, single women living together in a small apartment. We barely make it through the opening credit sequence (over which is played the hilariously melodramatic title song) befor...Read the entire review

The Movie
For cinephiles of a certain bent, Something Weird Video is the best kind of reverse-prestige label, a kind of cretin's Criterion Collection. Where that justly celebrated imprint crams its packages with historically-minded, informative documentaries, commentary by renowned scholars and other bells and whistles, Something Weird chooses instead to re-package the experience of seeing its titles as their original patrons might have - in a double feature, interspersed with previews, ads, shorts, cartoons and any and all other manner of cinematic folderol. Head Weirdo Mike Vrany draws on what must be a mammoth personal collection of old films for this; the very least you can say about a SWV release is that it is always a heroic feat of research and preservation.

Alright, so their presentation isn't exactly novel, certainly not anymore. The 25 cent copy of Pick-Up Summer that...Read the entire review