Movie: Balls of Fury

[amedia]

The trailer for this martial-arts parody was laugh-out-loud, wet-your-pants hilarious.

Alas, when you take that same number of laughs and spread them out over a ninety-minute movie, it wears thin pretty quickly.

Yes, it's one of those - all the best moments were already in the trailer!

Christopher Walken seems to be having a good time, and James Hong is a hoot as the trainer. George Lopez, whom I have seen primarily as a comedian, was very solid playing mostly a straight man (I mean, the person who sets up the jokes), which I understand is much harder than being the funny one. Aisha Tyler is awfully good as a Bond-style henchwoman. The rest of the supporting cast does their best. But the actor who played the central character just wasn't that great, and the material, while sporadically brilliant, was mostly just not very funny.

But when it was funny? OMG.

Comments

[bulleteyes.livejournal.com]

I wasn't impressed with the lead actor either. Walken and Hong made the pic for me. I've been watching James Hong since the beginning of time and it was so much fun to watch him be allowed to strut his stuff! Walken is so damn strange that I always feel like I am peering through zoo glass when I see him.

I have found it amusing how DeNiro and Walken tend towards things that are silly and don't require a high level of intensity now. They worked so hard to be "serious actors" for so long and most of their films were critically acclaimed while not doing good box office. Now they are in comedies that make tons of money (Click-Walken, Meet the Parents-DeNiro) and bring them big box office percentage points as well as big paychecks. The boys have decided to let go of the *intense* roles and go for the goofball, have fun and take the money and run.

It works for me. They are very funny guys! I did not care for the nail biting, grit your teeth, body parts and blood flying kinds of parts anyway. Now I get to watch them and have fun with them.

Cool.

[amedia.livejournal.com]

They are very funny guys! I did not care for the nail biting, grit your teeth, body parts and blood flying kinds of parts anyway. Now I get to watch them and have fun with them.

I agree!

And of course, we get to watch them in these movies knowing who they were and where they've been. But I still remember coming home bedazzled from seeing the first Star Wars movie (I mean, the REALLY first, the one when I was in high school), and my mom telling me about Alec Guinness in "Our Man in Havana" and "The Man in the White Suit," which I managed to catch on TV, and "Kind Hearts and Coronets," which was the first pro VHS tape I *ever* bought. (Rewatched it recently with the SIL, who is a huge SW and movies-in-general fan, and she LOVED it.)

[bulleteyes.livejournal.com]

I saw Star Wars in a theatre that had been improvised from an airplane hangar. It was so enormous you had to turn your head to see from one side of the screen to another.

I'd been to a Con a year before it was released and someone there had a bootleg of scene snippets. They showed it every 15 minutes the entire weekend. People would go racing down the hall, see they were going to zoom past the room where it was being shown (it was constantly filled to overflowing) and execute moves most roller derby professionals would have admired. I can still hear the ear-shattering sneaker screeches as people put on their brakes ;)

I figured I was just a bit prepared for Star Wars when it premiered.

First I will digress:

In those days husband and I would stand in line for certain premieres. The comradeship of geeks in those lines was breathtaking. We all participated in one long multi-faceted conversation that would roll up the line, make a turn and roll back down with a thousand other topics. Geeks had few places to find one another in those days so when we did our obsessive love of all things geeky freaked anyone who was a tag-along just there to see a film. Ever see the film Annie Hall? Remember the brilliant Marshall McLuan cameo? We always had one of those guys in a line.

Back again:

When that freaking huge ship came off the screen and seemingly over our heads in full blasting experimental Dolby sound and we all had to turn our heads to see the full width of it the entire place let out a collective, "shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitttttttt". It was an amazing moment.