The Supreme Swordsman (1984)

Tagline: 99 have fallen. One remains.

Curiosity: It’s been a while since I really obsessed over a kung-fu movie, and I heard good things about the Shaw Brothers.

Plot: This guy with a mustache is trying to collect 100 swords. But instead of buying them, he wants to kill dudes and take their swords. He’s building a house out of swords, you see. But when he goes to collect on his one hundredth sword, he gets defeated by this other guy. Other Guy lets Mustache Guy live, but Mustache Guy is so pissed off about it, especially when he finds out that his sensei didn’t teach him a super secret black magic fighting move. So, Mustache Guy kills his sensei and some guy’s dad, stealing both the fighting move and the most amazing sword ever in the process. It’s up to Some Guy to beat Mustache Guy, to both avenge his father’s death and to end Mustache Guy’s reign of facial hairy terror.

Thoughts: Even though it’s only 100 minutes long, Supreme Swordsman is kind of awkward to watch. Part of that is because of the subtitles. There are plenty of weird word choices – people always refer to their elders as “senior,” for example. But the movie also just jumps off halfway through and starts up an entirely other movie.

Not to get all spoilery, but most of the movie is concerned with Mustache Guy’s rise to power and Some Guy’s quest for revenge. But when it segues into Some Guy’s training, it becomes all about his misadventures, in which he takes strange Chinese herbs and tries to save a lady and even goes to hell for a bit. It’s an entirely different movie, and while it’s more satisfying than a Western training montage would have been, it still comes out of nowhere and goes on a little too long.

Then again, I didn’t buy Supreme Swordsman for the plot. I wanted to see kung-fu ‘n’ sword fights, and I got both in abundance. While the choreography is a little too clean (I prefer the primal beat downs of Bruce Lee and Tony Jaa), it still satisfied my thirst for dude-smashin’.

Reflection: Holy shit, Shaw Brothers Studio put out so many kung-fu movies.

Drive, He Said (1971)

Tagline: The disenchantment of an all-American jock.

Curiosity: It sprang from the mind of Jack Nicholson after he knocked out the excellent films Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces.

Plot: While star basketball player Hector (William Tepper) debates if he wants to A) play in the NBA and/or B) keeping getting freaky with his college professor’s wife Olive (Karen Black), his asshole roommate Gabriel (Michael Margotta) tries to dodge the draft. At various points, director Nicholson parades what he calls “a symphony of dicks.”

Thoughts: There were some great existentialist films from the ’70s, like Two-Lane Blacktop, Easy Rider, and Five Easy Pieces. While sparse in story, they captured a growing melancholy in the American consciousness, melded with a need to live in the now.

Drive, He Said is not that kind of movie, but it wants to be quiet badly. It tries to pose Big Life Questions, like “Why are we in Vietnam?” and “Why do we participate in consumerism?” Those questions are important, and still relevant in 2011, but since Gabriel the madman is the one posing them, they fall flat.

Gabriel is meant to represent the dark side of freedom, the unrepentant, angry, disaffected kind, and he does, but not the way filmmakers intended. Within the context of the story, he’s supposed to be a charming revolutionary who’s gonna rage against the man. His quest to fight the draft results in him munching psychotropic drugs in an attempt to be declared insane, which works, but it also causes him to sexually assault an unrelated character for no reason. The RAINN rep in me was repulsed by that scene, and all I could think was, “This guy’s a prick.” And he’s a prick through the whole got-damn movie. At no point does the movie offer any reason for anyone to like Gabriel, yet he scores loyal followers and sexual partners constantly. He’s meant to be a tragic character, but he’s so unlikable that my sympathy dissipates.

Same goes for Hector. Dude has an easy job, gets laid all the time, and whines about it. Sorry baby boomers, but thems first world problems.

Reflection: For a guy with that much body hair, you’d think Hector would be more thankful for the attention women give him.

The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

Tagline: Fight for your fate.

Curiosity: My fiancée has a crush on Emily Blunt.

Plot: A mysterious shadow agency tries to stop Matt Damon from fucking Emily Blunt.

Thoughts: It makes me feel good to know that my fiancée occasionally picks shitty movies too. She might question my taste and sanity, but she’s picked some clunkers just like me. The Adjustment Bureau is one of those clunkers. An adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story, the film’s sole saving grace is the chemistry between leads Damon and Blunt, by which I mean I could see Damon legitimately wanting to hump Blunt. The two show real fireworks, and I’m honestly not sure who’s more charming.

But the movie that’s built around them is lame-o. A secret organization called the Adjustment Bureau uses a guide for planning out all of civilization. While humans can control small decisions, like what to watch on TV, the big choices – who to marry, where to work – are handled by the Bureau. Free will, when it matters, does not exist in this society. And that’s a cool Orwellian sort of idea, except that it doesn’t add up to much here. For Damon, the tagline of fighting for one’s fate adds up to trying to get naked time with Blunt. That’s it.

Granted, the Adjustment Bureau doesn’t come off as nefarious, so it’s not like Damon’s character has much inkling to rage against the machine (That would probably reek too much of The Matrix anyway. Or maybe Robot Holocaust?). But the resulting plot of obtaining sloppy make-outs feels too small. The Bureau, in turn, feels too vaguely defined to build tension. They start off slightly intimidating, until you realize they’re a sci-fi riff on Judeo-Christian ideology. But I just didn’t feel like there was much at stake. The film also breaks an important science fiction rule: Never double up suspension of disbelief. I can accept that there’s a group who secretly controls the world. But they’re given a weakness near the end of the film that exists simply to create a happy ending. It smacks of bad writing.

Reflection: Emily Blunt does seem pretty cool though.