platothelapdog's reviews
This page compiles all reviews platothelapdog has written, sharing their detailed thoughts about movies, TV shows, and more.
8 reviews
Other then the addition of an extra character to the movies script, (that played by Mark Walberg) this movie is in essence the very same plot and story as the movie it was taken from..... Infernal Affairs. That movie too won best picture of the year in it's respected country of China and starred local Chinese stars as well. Now don't let me sway you from this great movie. If you don't like foreign movies then you'll never watch the original and this is all you need to watch for a great thriller. But if you don't mind subtitles the better of the two comes from China. Check it out at : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338564/
"A story between a mole in the police department and an undercover cop. Their objectives are the same: to find out who is the mole, and who is the cop."
"A story between a mole in the police department and an undercover cop. Their objectives are the same: to find out who is the mole, and who is the cop."
Since I decided that I had to do that in order to have the people wonder why with all the 9+ votes out there someone must have disliked this movie. Well in fact, I did not. I just wanted to catch your attention and say like the others here I think this movie is a fantastic, I give it an actual 8.5 out of 10, and maybe 10 out of 10 after a second viewing since it did not lose any of it's appeal.
Caio!
Oh more then 10 lines... ! What jerks, I know you need content, but here is some filler!
Since I decided that I had to do that in order to have the people wonder why with all the 9+ votes out there someone must have disliked this movie. Well in fact, I did not. I just wanted to catch your attention and say like the others here I think this movie is a fantastic, I give it an actual 8.5 out of 10, and maybe 10 out of 10 after a second viewing since it did not lose any of it's appeal.
Caio!
Caio!
Oh more then 10 lines... ! What jerks, I know you need content, but here is some filler!
Since I decided that I had to do that in order to have the people wonder why with all the 9+ votes out there someone must have disliked this movie. Well in fact, I did not. I just wanted to catch your attention and say like the others here I think this movie is a fantastic, I give it an actual 8.5 out of 10, and maybe 10 out of 10 after a second viewing since it did not lose any of it's appeal.
Caio!
The makers take "The Crow" premise, add some crappy special effects and a next to impossible story line(...yes even after having seen part 2 of Ong Bak,)and mashes it into a big fat fail of epic martial arts portions. This from a person who watches b-grade movies, and any movie that has to do with martial arts. If Mystery Science Theater 3000 ever wanted to start over this would be first to show case.
Fights were good when in the movie, but not worth the time. The legend of Ong Bak 3 begins with Tien captured and tortured. Tien is brought back to health with the help from some Monk dude and villagers. He learns how to meditate and from there gets epic kick butt fighting skills. His talents are put to the test again when his rivals (a group of baddies who support the Emperor), and the black mysterious Crow like dude, have a final massive showdown.
Stay away unless your in Lesbians with Tony Jaa.
Fights were good when in the movie, but not worth the time. The legend of Ong Bak 3 begins with Tien captured and tortured. Tien is brought back to health with the help from some Monk dude and villagers. He learns how to meditate and from there gets epic kick butt fighting skills. His talents are put to the test again when his rivals (a group of baddies who support the Emperor), and the black mysterious Crow like dude, have a final massive showdown.
Stay away unless your in Lesbians with Tony Jaa.
Everything about this movie screamed for me to despise it. Yet this movie is like meeting a person whose appearance is ugly, yet whose inner beauty is unseen unless given a chance to shine. Dark.... nasty work with cuts of beauty. It just flows out in both directions, this movie got a 9 out of 10 from me.
Basically an ex-cop (Josh H.)named Kline who has seen and been overtaken by evil( a serial killer drives him insane over his investigation into this 24 mutilation killings then tortures Kline during a meeting,) is given the task of finding a lost son of a billionaire who turns out to be a new Christ figure, a saint. Which of these two meetings will have the most impact on Kline? Deep, slow and gory but oh so beautiful in a very disturbing way.
Basically an ex-cop (Josh H.)named Kline who has seen and been overtaken by evil( a serial killer drives him insane over his investigation into this 24 mutilation killings then tortures Kline during a meeting,) is given the task of finding a lost son of a billionaire who turns out to be a new Christ figure, a saint. Which of these two meetings will have the most impact on Kline? Deep, slow and gory but oh so beautiful in a very disturbing way.
Director Taku Shinjo spins this rural drama about ancient taboos and encroaching modernity. Takamine (Gitan Otsuru) is a big-city workaholic sent to a small remote island to seal a business deal. His predecessor almost managed to convince the island's 17 inhabitants to sell their stake and make way for a resort hotel -- that is, before he died under dubious circumstances. Takamine finds the islanders polite and kind but unwilling to discuss business; instead, they tell him to become an islander. So the city-slicker stuffed shirt loses his tie and starts to help the women plant and the men fish. He soon makes his acquaintance with Takako (Mitsuko Baisho), the widowed daughter of the island's chief. She lives alone with her crazed son who is kept Jane Eyre-style chained to a stake. One moon-lit night, their mutual attraction boils over, resulting in a naked, passionate roll on the beach. Soon the village elders are worried that Takako might abandon her significant ritual duties at the island's shrine in favor of the rakish newcomer. Meanwhile, as the village prepares for its annual secret ceremony, a flock of outsiders and TV crews descend on the island. The tension between the islanders and their unwelcome guests erupts into violence resulting in a beating and a rape. As secrets unfold, the islanders and Takamine soon come to a head over the islands future, it's hidden past and the reason for the festival.
In only the year and a half since exploding on to the feature film scene with his shocking portrait of alienated youth, Helpless (1996), the prolific Aoyama Shinji has already turned out three more movies, including his new one, An Obsession. At a time when young directors are lucky to shoot one film every few years, if at all, the fact all four are outstanding works is testimony to Aoyama's amazing craftsmanship as a filmmaker.
Working in the gangster and action genres has helped find him work, but like the best of the 1950s American B-movie directors, Aoyama has consistently presented a personal vision between the de rigeur action scenes, one which has made him one of the most promising filmmakers today. His touch has ranged from the disturbingly cold in the violent Helpless to the comically grandiose in Wild Life. But in all his films, he has focused on the alienation of his own generation--youths without a secure sense of identity or moral values who are engaged in a desperate search for meaningful contact with others.
An Obsession is Aoyama's remake for the 1990s of Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog ("Nora inu," 1949). The basic plot situation is the same: a cop, after losing his gun to a killer, sets out on a search for the criminal who in the end is all too disturbingly similar to the hero. Under Kurosawa's humanistic world view, Stray Dog presented the fundamentally shared nature of Japanese suffering amidst the Occupation and postwar poverty. An Obsession, however, is different.
The film begins with a fin-de-siecle, apocalyptic sense of insanity which Kurosawa's humanism could never tolerate: The detective Saga (Ishibashi Ryo) doesn't merely have his gun stolen (as in Stray Dog)--he is first shot by an assassin who had just killed an Aum-like cult leader--and then loses his gun to Shimano (Suzuki Kazuma), a nihilistic genius who is terminally ill and begins offing people not to survive, but as part of his own disturbing design.
Saga's search for Shimano is doubled by the search for human contact that both men share. After he is shot, Saga's wife, Rie (Nagashima Eiko), divorces the workaholic husband who basically never gave her a care, leaving Saga to wonder about the meaning of personal relationships. His doubts over whether two people can really come together in love are deepened through conversations with Shimano's ex-girlfriend Kimiko (Toyama Kyoko), who tells him of Shimano's conviction that love can only be proved in death.
It is these two couples, more than Saga's obsessive pursuit of Shimano, which occupy the film's philosophical center. Shimano and Kyoko represent a young generation with no place to go and no values to call their own--the only certainty they can find is in a love solely verified by the mutual decision to die. Death permeates their world and that of the streets of their town as eerie death squads dressed in anti-radiation gear travel around and execute people at the edges of the film's frame.
Aoyama sympathizes with the young couple's nihilistic lack of direction, but as in all his films, it is the confrontation with death that prompts his heroes eventually to choose life and their own moral basis for living. In the end Saga and Rie present the grim and hard, but still hopeful reality of human contact. This could be called Aoyama's humanism, the nitty-gritty fact of being fallibly human that he so brilliantly evoked in Two Punks ("Chinpira," 1996). It is not, however, the universalistic humanism of Kurosawa. In Aoyama's world, we all begin alone and must create our own morals through confrontation with death and the need for human relationships.
Aoyama thus presents in An Obsession a message both personal and generationally relevant. But if one were to find fault with this film, the least strong of the four so far, it is precisely in its philosophically schematic nature. Aoyama has a strongly allegorical side--which is is often abstract and unrealistic. He is at his best when that tendency is tempered by the grim humanity of his characters. In An Obsession, however, symbols like the death squads stand out too much as symbols, conflicting in their nature with the realism of relationships like that of Saga and Rie. An Obsession being his first original screenplay since Helpless, one wonders if Aoyama wouldn't be better served working with stories or screenplays written by a third party (as in Chinpira and Wild Life) to help tone down the allegory, and work out his own cinematic contact with the Other.
Working in the gangster and action genres has helped find him work, but like the best of the 1950s American B-movie directors, Aoyama has consistently presented a personal vision between the de rigeur action scenes, one which has made him one of the most promising filmmakers today. His touch has ranged from the disturbingly cold in the violent Helpless to the comically grandiose in Wild Life. But in all his films, he has focused on the alienation of his own generation--youths without a secure sense of identity or moral values who are engaged in a desperate search for meaningful contact with others.
An Obsession is Aoyama's remake for the 1990s of Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog ("Nora inu," 1949). The basic plot situation is the same: a cop, after losing his gun to a killer, sets out on a search for the criminal who in the end is all too disturbingly similar to the hero. Under Kurosawa's humanistic world view, Stray Dog presented the fundamentally shared nature of Japanese suffering amidst the Occupation and postwar poverty. An Obsession, however, is different.
The film begins with a fin-de-siecle, apocalyptic sense of insanity which Kurosawa's humanism could never tolerate: The detective Saga (Ishibashi Ryo) doesn't merely have his gun stolen (as in Stray Dog)--he is first shot by an assassin who had just killed an Aum-like cult leader--and then loses his gun to Shimano (Suzuki Kazuma), a nihilistic genius who is terminally ill and begins offing people not to survive, but as part of his own disturbing design.
Saga's search for Shimano is doubled by the search for human contact that both men share. After he is shot, Saga's wife, Rie (Nagashima Eiko), divorces the workaholic husband who basically never gave her a care, leaving Saga to wonder about the meaning of personal relationships. His doubts over whether two people can really come together in love are deepened through conversations with Shimano's ex-girlfriend Kimiko (Toyama Kyoko), who tells him of Shimano's conviction that love can only be proved in death.
It is these two couples, more than Saga's obsessive pursuit of Shimano, which occupy the film's philosophical center. Shimano and Kyoko represent a young generation with no place to go and no values to call their own--the only certainty they can find is in a love solely verified by the mutual decision to die. Death permeates their world and that of the streets of their town as eerie death squads dressed in anti-radiation gear travel around and execute people at the edges of the film's frame.
Aoyama sympathizes with the young couple's nihilistic lack of direction, but as in all his films, it is the confrontation with death that prompts his heroes eventually to choose life and their own moral basis for living. In the end Saga and Rie present the grim and hard, but still hopeful reality of human contact. This could be called Aoyama's humanism, the nitty-gritty fact of being fallibly human that he so brilliantly evoked in Two Punks ("Chinpira," 1996). It is not, however, the universalistic humanism of Kurosawa. In Aoyama's world, we all begin alone and must create our own morals through confrontation with death and the need for human relationships.
Aoyama thus presents in An Obsession a message both personal and generationally relevant. But if one were to find fault with this film, the least strong of the four so far, it is precisely in its philosophically schematic nature. Aoyama has a strongly allegorical side--which is is often abstract and unrealistic. He is at his best when that tendency is tempered by the grim humanity of his characters. In An Obsession, however, symbols like the death squads stand out too much as symbols, conflicting in their nature with the realism of relationships like that of Saga and Rie. An Obsession being his first original screenplay since Helpless, one wonders if Aoyama wouldn't be better served working with stories or screenplays written by a third party (as in Chinpira and Wild Life) to help tone down the allegory, and work out his own cinematic contact with the Other.