A young Taiwanese woman finds a message in a bottle and decides to track down the author in Hong Kong only to discover he’s gay. Then she randomly meets a rich trader (played by Jackie Chan) and the romantic comedy with a man twice her age ensues. There is also a plot about the rivalry between Chan and his brother that has to be resolved with fighting a short American kickboxer. The fights are well executed but ultimately pointless and shoehorned in. The rest of the movie is spent cringing at the May/December romance.

You play as John Marston, a reformed cowboy outlaw whose family is being held hostage in order to get him to kill his old gang partners. There’s not much more to it than that. Kill the first guy and then there’s another boss to hunt down. This all plays out in a massive open-world with tons of desert scruff to explore.

The problem I have with the Rockstar Games’ open-world formula is that, despite the freedom you are given, you are pinned into playing the missions exactly as designed. This is as opposed to a game like Fallout where you can approach obstacles with violence, stealth or intelligence. In essence, this is a middling movie western story in which you perform tasks just to see the next cutscene.

While there is an “honor” system, the story almost demands you play as the good guy. I was less inclined to just instigate mayhem like I would in GTA. Even though you are forced to align with obviously corrupt characters and kill peasants, etc., you remain the virtuous hero trying to save his family.

Yet, despite all my criticisms, I enjoyed the various shootouts and the simple bullet-time gun mechanics. The world is big and beautiful and exactly the environment you’d see in a classic western. Much of the side challenges amount to collectable quests or gambling simulations. Each is fun for a while, but I didn’t have the time or energy to go through the game 100%. I’m wondering if the sequel offers more depth.

With its wall-to-wall kung-fu and monster effects, I would have loved this film if I saw it when I was eleven years old. There isn’t any depth to the characters and it’s mostly heroes go from action set piece A to action set piece B. Everything looks great and it’s still fun to watch and that’s about all you need.

RSPK (Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis) is a parapsychological term for “poltergeist” activity, describing the involuntary, repeated movement of objects or noises attributed to the unconscious mental influence of a living person. It is usually tied to rebellious teenagers or disgruntled employees. So, yes, it’s complete nonsense.

The most stomach churning thing about this Italian thriller is the mid-seventies fashion and hairstyles. A couple of models have gone missing and a journalist arrives on the scene to do nothing. The wheelchair-bound, afro-luxe photographer has found a way to photograph people’s minds and then solves the crime. The end. There’s about thirty minutes of movie here and the rest is boring filler.

So, yes, Reservoir Dogs shares a lot with this movie. And by a lot I mean the last ten minutes. The remaining ninety minutes are more about police tactics and Chow Yun Fat’s relationship troubles. It all flows together nicely, but doesn’t feel as imminently re-watchable as a John Woo film from the same era.

The opening five minutes are great: Cynthia Rothrock killing a bunch of ninjas. Then it becomes a lame Police Academy wannabe film about female recruits. The jokes suck, there’s no action, and it all just falls flat. The predictable final sequence offers no thrills and there is no payoff after the hour or so of training sequences.

Stranglehold is the video game sequel to John Woo’s Hard-boiled. What it actually is is a Max Payne clone. That’s not all that bad because Max Payne’s bullet-time mechanic was one of the most fun innovations in gaming and it was itself a rip-off of everything John Woo. What’s missing is the themes of brotherhood and honor that permeated all of Woo’s gun-fu masterpieces. Instead we get a forgettable “rescue the damsel in distress” plot. That said, the action mechanics were enough to hold me through the relatively short single player campaign.

Turns out that people recounting their UFO sightings is not terribly interesting reading. Much of this book is dedicated to such accounts without any visual proof. Fortunately there is a bit more here than that. You do get a pretty detailed history of the various government departments charged with researching these stories.

The final disc in the Years of Lead box set is not so much a poliziotteschi as it is a noir film or even a giallo. The plot is as follows: an average, middle class guy who witnesses a murder. The murderer is a revered intellectual and he goes to the police first to accuse our hero of the crime. The rest of the movie is the hero bumbling around and trying to cover up for a murder he didn’t commit. The lead is played in a comic/tragic way in which you are both rooting for him and angered by his stupid decisions. Unfortunately, the producers forced a “happy” ending which kinda ruins everything. On the disc the original, ambiguous ending is included which I wish they kept. Highly recommended.

Add this one to the growing list of Italian movies about middle-aged men whose lives are reinvigorated by cheating on their wives with women half their age. The soundtrack to this movie is one of Ennio Morricone’s best and I’ve been seeking this out for quite some time. The story is about a rich factory owner who begins to empathize with his striking workers after having an affair with the wife of a killed striker. He ends up in between the two sides and yadda yadda, love story, boom, dead. This is just thinly veiled commie gobbledygook and, worse than that, it’s dull.

The brutality of this Italian crime thriller is way up there. At the same time, it has some of the fakest looking effects ever captured on screen. They did such awful things to that Silly Putty. Henry Silva is a gangster returning to Sicily from America to clean the underworld of drug smugglers who use children’s bodies to transport heroin. He spends most of the movie sweating up his powder blue leisure suit and kicking ass. I would have liked to root for him but then he goes and assaults women the most horrendous ways imaginable. I’ll never look at Chili’s Baby Back Ribs the same way again.

This was one of the better Phillip Marlowe books that I would have ranked higher if not for the overly-long denouement.

I’m getting the impression that Tsui Hark was a much better producer than he was a director. His films come close to being great there’s always something tonally off. Peking Opera Blues does have its moments. I think the final rooftop fight is well executed, as are the scenes of the actual opera performances. Everything else is either too goofy or too poorly written.

The titular She Beast is a really great monster design. Unfortunately she is always filmed in blaring sunlight. Even the night scenes are shot with some of the least dark day-for-night cinematography I have ever seen. If hidden with a little shadow, the She Beast would have been an extremely effective movie monster. There is a little bit of gore and the attacks are definitely horrific but ultimately the tone of the movie is more deliberately comic than scary. That said, the characters are all fairly likable and, besides a five minute car chase, stays relatively entertaining until the end.