Category: movies

Chop Socky

I caught Chop Socky: Cinema Hong Kong on IFC a while ago. I thought it might be fun to put together a list of some of the classic kung-fu movies mentioned in this documentary, along with links to reviews and such.

  • The Magic Blade (1976)
  • Come Drink With Me (1966)
  • The Valiant Ones (1975)
  • Golden Swallow (1968)
  • The One-Armed Swordsman (1967)
  • The Assassin (1967)
  • Vengeance (1970)
  • Heroic Ones (1970)
  • The Flying Guillotine (1974)
  • New One-Armed Swordsman (1971)
  • Dirty Ho (1979)
  • The Thirty-Sixth Chamber of Shaolin (1977)
  • Disciples of Shaolin (1975)
  • Spiritual Boxer (1975)
  • Drunken Master (1978)

    • Cartoon Musicals II

    Lincoln Center will be running part two of their Cartoon Musicals program from Dec 28 – Jan 4. I caught a number of the features from the first part of this series, and there was some great stuff shown. Part two seems to feature even more obscure and esoteric stuff. Plus a couple of showings of the South Park movie, which is certainly not a bad thing.

    Superman Returns

    Seeing the Superman Returns trailer yesterday brought back fond memories of the original Superman movie soundtrack. They used the original theme in the trailer; I’m not sure if they’ll be using the original John Williams music in the actual movie or not, but it would sure be nice if they did.

    There’s a version of the soundtrack on iTunes by the Royal Scottish Orchestra instead of the LSO, by the way. I haven’t listened to enough of it to know if it’s better or worse than the original LSO version.

    Star Wars

    I went to see Revenge of the Sith yesterday morning. I couldn’t quite bring myself to go to the midnight showing Wednesday night. I’m just getting too old for that. I did enjoy the movie, and it was a good crowd. I went to the Ziegfeld in NYC. Lots of enthusiastic folks in costume, kids with toy lightsabers, and the usual contingent of NYC weirdos.

    Dreamworks Animation

    I went to a Dreamworks Animation presentation in NYC today. It was pretty impressive: lots of celebrities, lots of clips, lots of fun. It was hosted by Al Roker. They brought in Jerry Seinfeld, Mike Myers, Chris Rock, and Justin Timberlake, among others. Seinfeld is working on a movie about bees. Chris Rock is in Madagascar. And of course Mike Myers is working on the next Shrek movie. Unfortunately, so is Justin Timberlake — he’s going to play King Arthur. That might not turn out to be as bad as it sounds. We’ll see.

    We also got to see Nick Park and some stuff from the upcoming Wallace and Gromit movie. It looks to be at least as good as the various shorts. We also got to see some stuff from Aardman’s first computer-animated movie. They didn’t show much, but it looked interesting. The style is similar to W&G, just done in computer animation instead of clay.

    I still like Pixar a lot more than Dreamworks, but hey, they’re trying. And anyone who’ll pay for a W&G movie can’t be all bad.

    Oh, and through what I can only imagine was a clerical error, we ended up in the second row. So I could see right up Chris Rock’s nose. Cool.