moviemunchies

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The Witcher 2 (2011) | 𝕷𝖊𝖙𝖍𝖔 𝖔𝖋 𝕲𝖚𝖑𝖊𝖙

"Kill as many rulers as we could. Lay the blame on the sorceresses. Breed chaos... The North resembles a whorehouse on fire."

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The spice exists on only one planet in the entire Universe. A desolate, dry planet with vast deserts. Hidden away within the rocks of these deserts are a people known as the Fremen, who have long held a prophecy, that a man would come, a messiah, who would lead them to true freedom. The planet is Arrakis. Also known as Dune.

DUNE (1984) dir. David Lynch

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PARKS AND RECREATION | 4.04 (x)

Bonus:

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THE MUMMY (1999)

dir. Stephen Sommers

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STRAUME (FLOW) 2024 | dir. Gints Zilbalodis

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I wasn’t sure what to watch, so! What the heck! Let’s do a ridiculous, over-the-top action movie! Why not!

Set in a dystopian future city, Boy Kills World has our deaf and mute protagonist, Boy, raised and trained by the Shaman to kill Hilda Van Der Koy and her family, who murdered Boy’s family while ruling the city with an iron fist. So, upon completing his training, Boy, uh… he goes and does that? Along the way, he picks up allies, including the hallucination of his little sister, Mina.

The protagonist, Boy, doesn’t talk or hear. Which is an interesting conceit! His inner monologue is voiced by H. Jon Benjamin, who you may know as the voice of Sterling Archer or Bob Belcher. He doesn’t know what his voice would actually sound like, so he takes the one from an arcade game he played as a child. It’s funny, which it’s meant to be, though during the final conflict sequence, given that he doesn’t say anything there, it makes me wonder if maybe it feels out of place? That fight is more serious, but if the voiceover has been there the entire time, its absence there is notable.

I am also not sure if the lip-reading works for every scene, because there are bits where he clearly knows what other people are saying, when they turn away from him for bits of the conversation. I don’t mind too much, as it’s still entertaining, and it isn’t too breaking that he fills in gaps. The movie also does a hilarious thing where there’s one character he can’t lip-read, and all of his dialogue comes out as complete nonsense. That’s a nice touch.

One thing that was strange about the movie is the depiction of the men in the regime? It seems as if, until the final act, that the men in the Van Der Koy dynasty are all too happy to defect, being tired of the criminal nonsense that they’re involved in, but continue under pressure from the women. The women, on the other hand, are all for the dystopia, and are irredeemable. The last third doesn’t make this interpretation so cut-and-dry, though it’s so maybe I’m reading too much into it. Still, it is odd.

Even then, the amount of sympathy we get for characters turning on the regime, when it has apparently been oppressing innocents for years, is strange. There’s one example which we can’t discuss without spoiling the film, though it’s kind of a predictable twist.

Actually, yeah, let’s talk about that–there are a couple of twists in the final act of the film, which I don’t think are very out there. I pegged them from the first few minutes of the characters being on-screen. That doesn’t mean they’re bad, because seeing something coming doesn’t make a story bad. It just means that you shouldn’t expect to be surprised.

Which, is fine, because let’s be real here, you’re not watching a movie titled Boy Kills World with voiceover by H. Jon Benjamin because you’re waiting for a complex, meaningful Plot or deep worldbuilding. You want an exaggerated movie with awesome action scenes. And Boy Kills World delivers–there are great scenes of carnage and Boy beating the absolute crap of fascist stooges in all kinds of ridiculous sequences. 

Also, Andrew Koji is in this movie? I’ve been seeing him a lot lately–he’s the star in Warrior, and also appears in Black Doves on Netflix.

It’s a fairly shallow world that the movie takes place in, and I don’t think the Plot is anything other than ‘simple’, but as an action movie? Boy Kills World works. I don’t think it’s going to be one of the greats, but it’s fun, and it’s pretty much exactly what I wanted from the movie after I saw the trailer.

Now I want to find some macarons…

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Wicked (2024) dir. Jon M. Chu

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The Mask of Zorro (1998) directed by Martin Campbell

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FRANK CASTLE IN EVERY EPISODE 💀 THE PUNISHER | 2.08 My Brother's Keeper

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Flash Gordon (1980) dir. Mike Hodges

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I haven’t seen a lot of movies lately. So sue me.

Interior Chinatown tells the story of Willis Wu, a waiter in a restaurant in Chinatown in a busy, crime-ridden port city. Willis is dissatisfied with his unadventurous life, but he witnesses a crime. The gorgeous Detective Lana enters the restaurant, looking for answers, and Willis gets swept up in the investigation. Surprisingly, this also ties into the mystery of what happened to his long-lost elder brother.

What Willis doesn’t realize, however, is that he’s a background character in a police procedural show.

[Is that a spoiler? I don’t think so; the show itself treats it like it’s a bit of a twist, but the advertising material lays it out plainly.]

Putting another disclaimer that I am not familiar with the source material, which is a novel of the same name. I have heard that it differs from the novel to make it a better television adaptation, though I don’t know in what ways.

The whole thing about it, that it’s a specific genre, from the point of view of an unimportant background character reminded me very much of Redshirts by John Scalzi. This premise allows the writers to explore what doesn’t make sense about the genre–about how certain things don’t quite add up. For instance, Detective Turner starts to think about how many cases he and his partner have solved, apparently with no problem, and how weird that is.

In particular, this story isn’t just a criticism or parody of a genre in general, it’s an examination of how popular media treats Asians. Lana is a detective, but aside from her, just about all of the Asian-Americans are background characters. There’s one scene in which Willis is plainly invisible to the two detectives, despite standing right in front of them, so he has to tell Detective Lana what to tell her coworkers.

Asian-Americans are not well-presented, if ever at all, in our popular fiction, or in our television, even that television that’s meant to show mundane stories, like, say, crime in a big city.

Mind you, I didn’t always get quite what was being done with the television shenanigans. Most of it is understandable, but I struggled a bit with Episode Eight, “Ad Guy”. I understood the general gist of it, so I wasn’t hopelessly lost in the series, and it’s still a fairly enjoyable episode, but the meta-ness of the episode was a bit difficult at times. For me, at least. Maybe to other reviewers it was fairly simple.

Also! If you watch this series, and wondered what’s up with Fatty’s style of waiting tables: this is a real thing. Not only are there real-life restaurants that have rude waiters, his role is based off of a real man, a Chinese-American waiter named Edsel Ford Fong who was a minor celebrity for making his restaurant famous by being rude to the guests.

It’s something a little bit different, but I think it’s definitely a very interesting take on the genre of procedurals, the medium of television, and how pop culture depicts minorities. It’s worth trying out, at least.

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It's my 5 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

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Holiday Knights The New Batman Adventures

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Holiday Knights The New Batman Adventures

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Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Helena Bertinelli/Huntress in Birds of Prey | 2020