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Review: Kung Pow
This one should have worked. Oedekerk, writer and director of this mediocrity, is also the star. He uses digital film-editing techniques to insert himself into the older film as the new hero, a creative idea that in better hands could really have been funny.
The Chosen One saw his family killed by the evil Master Pain/Betty and was raised by rodents. He finds his way to Master Tang, then falls in love with Tang's daughter Ling, who speaks in a perpetual whine. The stop-action overdubs and hesitations are funny at first, but then are just headache-inducing. There are a few inspired moments -- I personally loved the karate brawl with the dairy cow -- but the movie derails as he comes closer and closer to his confrontation with Master Pain.
Don't be fooled by the trailers. Every funny scene is in them. There are few movies I can't sit through, but this one was a struggle. It really isn't worth much more discussion, and my best advice would be to skip it altogether.
the trailers were tantalizing
No, the trailers were terrible. How anyone could want to see a movie based on those trailers is beyond me. Yet another spoof on The Matrix, this time with a cow? A guy being distracted by a woman with big breasts? And these are the highlights? This was just another me-too addition to the new genre of 'genre parodies' to come out in the last few years, and obviously not an inspired newcomer.
...any movie I would want to see less, given the trailer. On the upside, I am guessing that if I did go see the movie, I wouldn't be disappointed; at least I KNOW it sucks, where these days often the trailer deceives me so......
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
If he really wants to do reviews of films that people might acually use, why doesn't he go see some movies that aren't massive blockbusters? In the past two months, he could have gone to see In The Bedroom, The Royal Tenenbaums, Brotherhood of the Wolf (though I didn't like it), Amelie (best movie of last year, bar none), or Monsters Ball, which are smaller movies that people might acually go see if they read a good review of them. Kung Pow and Orange County have been showing me trailers for two months and they've looked stupid the whole time. Come on, do we really need Katz to do a review of Lord of the Rings? Was anyone NOT going to see it?
Perhaps when people that normally find slapstick humor boring catch themselves laughing at these movies, they just have to invent the "subversive intellectual quality" as an excuse.
Point to that waste of bandwidth is, I paid for movies that were truly worth it or that I had to see, and I just found something else to do with the rest of my time (as another thread points out, sacrificing one movie pretty much pays for one month of a MMO game). Don't boycott, just be judicious in what you see, and be willing to defend yourself when others try to convince you. Were my friend so strong, I wouldn't have convinced him to see Scary Movie. I still don't think he's fully forgiven me for that night...
"You're never ready, just less unprepared."
Well, some of you warned me, and you were right.
So... you're saying that before you went to do this impartial review of the movie, you went and listened to how everyone else said it was really bad? Don't you think that might have clouded*cough* your judgement? I mean, people see what they expect to see, and if you were expecting crap, perhaps that's all you saw.
Personally, I haven't seen the movie. But what's the point of having the review at all if the first line of it simply says: I was very prejudiced against this movie before I even saw it, now here's my unbiased review. (Although, most of us recognise that Katz is rarely, if ever, approaching unbiased... but that's a small point).
Jake
Dating: while( 1 ){ call_girl(); get_rejected(); drink_40(); } return 0;
We're all supposedly intelligent people here. It is OBVIOUS from the ads that the film is sheer crap (and in fact the studio should be held accountable for the 30 seconds of my life lost to that ad). Why is Katz reviewing such SHEER AND UTTER CRAP? I guess he thinks he looks intelligent by methodically picking apart a bad film. Instead of pointing out the painfully obvious in the hopes of looking insightful, try coming up with some REAL insight on a REAL film.
I saw the Orange County review and wondered why it was posted - this one is a step further in solidifying my theory.
My $0.02 (Canadian)
Steve
That pretty much describes Slashdot.
Okay, now that you've had your laugh, that's not actually a bad thing. A good pundit will toss out themes and concepts for the general population to chew on and discuss. I know that in most threads on Slashdot that I get involved in, one of three things happen (usually a small amount of all three): I am moved to change my position, I am exposed to a different position with at least some validity, or in stating my existing position and being questioned, I build up my own existing beliefs and strengthen them.
Slashdot: A Million Pundits Arguing. Not all that bad a description, and not really that bad a thing. Of course, it's also nice to be in a forum where a Google search or peek into the online Brittanica or CIA World Fact Book can buttress your arguement. That eliminates all but the most pigheaded "But my uncle said Afgans are all rich" idiots.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
mrcranky gives better reviews than Jon Katz.
To wit:
Director Steve Oedekerk bought the rights to a little-known 1976 martial arts film called "Savage Killers" and has since spent his time splicing himself into the footage, reworking it, and dubbing in new dialogue to create a film that serves no purpose other than to remind us that "Saturday Night Live" isn't the only place where skits run too long.
Then again, this is the guy who also spent a lot of his time making little thumb people by putting his eyes and mouth digitally onto thumbs and creating movies like "Thumb Wars: The Phantom Cuticle," "Thumbtanic," and "The Blair Thumb." It's pretty safe to say that one thumb movie is enough, but Oedekerk doesn't think so and apparently will keep making them until somebody does something unpleasant with his thumbs.
In "Kung Pow: Enter the Fist," Oedekerk is "The Chosen One," a martial artist out to avenge his family's murder. The movie is filled with bad dialogue and low-rent computer effects. There's a fight between "The Chosen One" and a cow. There's a woman with one huge breast. The "love interest" whines like a gopher getting a cold thermometer shoved up its ass.
The film's relatively high amusement factor lasts about 15 minutes, after which any normal person starts wondering whether or not Oedekerk realizes that a 90-minute movie needs more material than he's got. Ironically, the most fun I had in the movie was watching the confused old people walk out after about five minutes, when they realized what they had gotten themselves into. It was kind of like watching nuns walking out of a porn film, not that I'd ever advocate slipping a reel of "Forrest Hump" into the training tapes over at the convent or anything.
This brings up an interesting issue for me: as a fan of HK cinema, things like Kung Pow only do huge harm to a film industry that, while it does churn out a lot of dross (but can anyone tell me that Hollywood *doesn't*?), also creates some true works of genius (and I'm *not* talking about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon here). HK films get a bad rap from things like Kung Pow, leading to the stereotype that all HK films have ultra-cheap effects, and are chockfull of stylised fight scenes. Remember that the chop socky films he's supposedly satirising were made in the *60s*, for gods' sakes. That's 40 years ago. Does anyone believe that HK films are *still* like that? And does anyone believe that the world's third largest film industry (Bollywood is second) makes *only* kung fu films, and cheap ones at that?
Whereas in fact, the HK film industry is moving in a lot of directions simultaneously: HK is home to the aforementioned Chiau Sing Chi, master of comedy (director and writer as well as actor, I might add), and Johnnie To, director of slick romantic comedies, dark futuristic fantasy, and rivetting drama/thriller. If you like odd horror-comedy, there's plenty make in HK. Ghost stories, exploitation flicks, human drama, comedies by the bucketload, triad and crime, quirky surprising indie films, anything you want.
Then, of course, there's Wong Kar Wai, arthouse director extraordinaire. Anyone daring to suggest that his films are simply cheap chop socky action would be on the receiving end of some not very nice words from Director Wong.
Honestly, who needs another unfunny satire that's at least 40 years out of date? Watch the real thing, and maybe get a surprise...
Sometime back in '96 (if memory serves), Steve Odekerk had a one-shot show on NBC, some kind of cyber-stand-up kind of a thing. (I'm a little sketchy on the details.) The name of the show was "steveodekerk.com." Being a mischevious young 2600-writing dork, I looked it up, and found that the domain wasn't registered. Naturally, I registered it. (This was in the heady days of no-cash-down-required domain name registrations.)
:)
A week passed. Nothing happened. Then something minor, but interesting, happened: they changed the name of the show. Now it was "steve.odekerk.com." They'd registered odekerk.com, lacking their own domain name.
That was one of the greatest achievements of my 18-year-old life: getting NBC to change the name of a show. I'm not saying that was a worthwhile endeavor, nor that it was a good or useful thing to do in retrospect, but it sure thrilled me at the time.
-Waldo Jaquith
Sure, the movie was no LOTR. It was childish, pretty dumb, and had a number of cliches.
However, the cliches were obviously intentional, there were a few jokes that really were quite funny and original, and there even was a (very rare) bit of brilliance there.
They did one hell of a job melding two old martial arts movies together with a fair bit of greenscreen and CGI to make it a reasonably cohesive whole. The thing is, if you are going to go see this, don't expect a standard movie with typical cut scenes, soundtracks and characterisations. Take it as it is and you'll probably enjoy it.
However, take it seriously and expect to come out of it with some sort of sense of purpose and you'll be disappointed. Go see it with Katz' typical pap of a review in mind and you'll be annoyed at the movie and at Katz.
TheGeek