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The DC-Slash Con 2022 vid show, held last night (July 30, 2022), was truly a well-assembled collection of high-quality vids: kudos for Aaron for the terrific selection! SO many great vids, including several that made me want to start watching the show they were based on right now.

I had some favorites I'd like to mention--I'll write up something more comprehensive later, but I want to get some first impressions down now.

N.B. AARGH, I am going through the list and in order to keep this post reasonably doable tonight, I am skipping SO MANY EXCELLENT vids!!! These are not necessarily the best--they're the ones that made a big impression on me.

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And there were many more wonderful vids that I hope to cover in a longer report someday soon!!!

Nineteen vids! A wealth of enjoyment! ( Read more... )

Somewhere or other we acquired a boxed set of 50 "classic" sci-fi movies on DVD. We figured it was a treasure trove of really bad movies, and we were right! Laser Mission is actually one of the more recent flicks included, but oh, it's BAD. It's also fun - it's the kind of bad movie that's good with popcorn and laughter.

The hero and heroine were pretty annoying. Brandon Lee didn't get to fight enough or in enough different ways (he got to use one type of kick over and over), and Debi Monahan's character, also supposed to be a good fighter, sadly overlooked a devastating opportunity to use a stiletto heel against a bad guy. The rest of the cast were obviously having a lot of fun, especially the real bad guys and the comic-relief sorta-bad-guys. Most of the film looks very low budget, but they have some gorgeous desert scenery from somewhere and a lot of great explosions.

Taking a short break from grading to catch up on describing some movies we've watched over the last few weeks!

( no spoilers )

Fluffy popcorn flick, lots of chases, special effects, etc. One major source of frustration: the whole movie seems to be building up to a big martial-arts confrontation between Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh, which is really a dream battle for aficionadoes. There is one, and it's gorgeous, but it lasts about two minutes. Bah!

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.

Le Pacte des Loups, a.k.a. Brotherhood of the Wolf, was a pretty cool movie, though about an hour too long IMHO. TODS had seen the first twenty minutes on the plane to France and then they didn't have it on the plane on the way back, so we made a point of renting it. We watched it in French with English subtitles.

The hero reminded me of Stephen Maturin from the Patrick O'Brian books - not physically, but in his scientific approach to things. His Iroquois sidekick suffered from some "noble savage" stereotyping but in the fight scenes, he was poetry in motion. Mm, mm, mm. The plot didn't make a lot of sense, but it was fun to watch. There was an interesting inversion of the usual association of chaos/evil with wilderness and cosmos/good with civilization, and a very peculiar perspective on the Revolution (the film takes place about one generation before).

I really appreciate the answers to the questions in my last post! Thanks to everyone for taking the time.

It seems only fair that I give you my answers as well.

The positive impressions I had before I started martial arts:

I was attracted to the philosophy (as most of you know, it's my profession), and I had gotten the impression from shows like Kung Fu and movies like Karate Kid that martial arts ideally integrated the philosophy with the physical training. I've always found Oriental culture fascinating as well. And I was looking for a physical activity, if not to lose weight, at least to gain health.

The negative impressions that I had:

I thought people like Master Po and Mr. Miyagi were the exception rather than the norm, and that I would never be lucky enough to find such an inspirational teacher. I also thought that martial arts were for younger people in better physical shape than I was. And as for ninjutsu, all I'd ever heard of ninjas was that they were sneaky mercenary assassins.

What positive impression finally got me into it?

Well, I enrolled my son in martial arts because he needed a physical activity and soccer was SO not working out, and because he has ADHD and I'd heard that martial arts is good for that. (It is.)I was also positively inclined toward it on his behalf for the aforementioned reasons - interest in the philosophy, exposure to Oriental culture, etc., which I figured would be good for him - and although the only school in the area whose times were compatible with his schedule was a ninja school, I figured they wouldn't teach a ten-year-old to be an assassin. While watching his lessons, I came to realize that the training was adapted to all different ages and levels of physical capability; that ninjas are not what I thought they were; that the training at this school integrated philosophy in just the way I had always dreamed of finding; that the head instructor was the kind of inspirational teacher I thought I would never be lucky enough to find (and a Trekkie! yay!); and that it looked like FUN. So I signed up, and I've been enjoying it ever since! I'm still a pudgy person, but I'm a much more flexible, coordinated, healthy, and confident pudgy person.

In fact, I test for my black belt at the end of this month - wish me luck, y'all!