Movies That Were Probably Made By a Spasm of Six Year-Olds on Acid: The Top 75 Action Films Poll Results Thread

Also, I didn't vote in this, but I would be surprised if Big Trouble in Little China didn't place. It would have been on my ballot, but I feel sorta weird about that too. Anyway, interesting after all the racism discussions of the last few weeks that people felt chill enough to vote for ToD.

Huh, I don't think of Big Trouble ... as racist. I think of it as pretty Chinese-forward, actually. Silly though it may be, Kurt Russell is definitely the comic relief buffoon, always out of his element and playing catch-up. How many fights begin with him immediately getting knocked out while his Chinese crew kicks ass?

Like, it's as if Kurt Russell were literally dropped in the middle of some crazy Chinese actioner, like Zu Warriors or something.

(Hmm, will Super Cop make the cut? Drunken Master 2? Any Hong Kong?)

Yeah, that was sorta the idea I forwarded in the LDD thread, but it's one of those things where I don't know if I'm being blind (see the billboards of Duluth).

My "weirdness" criteria being "would I feel comfortable suggesting to a Chinese friend that we watch this?" and my answer being "I hadn't thought of that before, but now it's bothering me."

Like, I certainly would feel like an ass suggesting to a South Asian friend that we watch Temple of Doom, for instance.

But Temple of Doom IS racist, quaintly, retro-y racist or no. Big Trouble essentially is a crazed wuxia film.

I don't know enough about Chinese cinema to be able to acknowledge or refute there. I totally assume that it was made with those intentions, and I love the movie. I'm just not sure how it comes off.

I would err on the side of defending it too. It's just I'm not confident.

shit forgot the other guys too

Apocalyptico is definitely pro-hick.

rewatching temple of doom like 5 years ago i really was blown away by how incredibly racist it was (and how it ended with the colonial british saving the day)

however, the fact that black hawk down can be compared to it, and that some ppl like that film, completely absolves it of course

We all know that the colonial British were about ending child labor abroad and returning property to the locals so ToD was historically accurate imho

I'll just let Armond take over, bye

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/wp-content/uploads/images/20/armond.jpg

Thanks, Doc. And now, my picks for more of the best action movies of all time.

It's been a while since I saw it, but I think Short Round even gets his own Asian-y John Williams motif.

so you're saying it's not an action movie it's a racist movie

It's most of an action-racist movie.

Action-racist-adventure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtvwFLIEkK0

i guess technically in TOD the plot IS resolved thru racism

contains mild yellow peril

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/etienne_saint/sincity.jpg

#65

SIN CITY

Robert Rodriguez & Frank Miller
2005
United States
(174 pints, 5 votes)

Guns & tittays & old cars & hot chicks & cool music & interior monologues & rear-projection & killer ninja hookers & more guns!

The pacing was off on a coupla places, but i thought the rest of the flick flowed quite well. Plus, it was hilarious to hear the "(Not Quite) Peter Gunn Theme" play thru-out.

― kingfish van pickles (Kingfish)

Everybody BUT me seemed to love it, and I was kind of sad that I couldn't feel the same way. When you take away the movie's relation/debt to its source material, it seemed like so much wank-fodder for the CRWs of this world. It was just adolescent in a really terrible way, and I say this as a married man in his mid-to-late 20s who has a stack of comic books on his nightstand and has spent most of the morning falling off of a skateboard.

I totally give credit for the film for getting that comic book interior monologue thing down, but yet this also made for an incredibly dull film. I just failed to find entertainment in being treated to image after image of ACTION paired with that utterly relentless voiceover. Any drama/tension in the film just seemed to come from the voiceover or occasionally an ironic interplay between voiceover and image that seemed very one-note after half an hour. I have just never felt so passive and fidgety while watching an action film, couldn't engage with it at all.

― Airtube (nordicskilla)

I was very torn by this movie. On the one hand: totally gorgeous looking, fantastically complete and immersive visual world, non-stop action, well edited, thoroughly "entertaining", fun fun fun. So it totally works at being what it's trying to be, which is a film adaptation of a comic book. So it's not as if it's a failure, and the reviews which allege that it is too violent clearly just don't get the horror/comic book context, nor do I buy the idea that it's ultimately "dull" because it's so focused. So on all those fronts, it's a great film as an experience for the eyes and ears. On the other hand: what we have is a film adapatation of a comic book adaptation of noir as a template, so this triple amplified chain of exaggerrating something that was an exaggerration of something that was already very crude becomes very dodgy in relation to gender and how "maleness" and "femaleness" get visually realized and scripted. I found it a kind of embarassing reductio ad absurdum of cartoon lovin' fanboy heterosexual male desire: hookers (with hearts of gold!) innocent wittle schoolgirls (that you get to watch grow up just enough so that you can fuck them! and when you do it's because THEY PUSH THEMSELVES ON YOU! yeah that happens ALL the time!) ie. there's this fucked up centrifugal engine at work in which women are desirable yet continually the objects of extremely sadistic violent energies- the plots try to resolve this thorugh splitting- there is the "evil psychopath" who incarnates the direct sexual sadism (the bad guys) and then there are the good guys who as vigilante figures outside the law etc. just go out and seek to do good in the name of the ladies they love (the absent "good" women who sit on the sidelines and suffer, and look awfully good as they suffer) which makes them laughably improbable and corny, and the whole thing, when viewed coldly and dispassionately, looks pretty sad, a pure distillation of adolescent flight from what sex is like, what interactions between men and women are like, the compromises and shadings of, um, actual human people. So yes the picture succeeds at being a gorgeous comic book, but in the process the intensely adult precision of its art direction and focus reveals very clearly that it was made by people who know that these plotlines and characters are utterly flat and clichéd which means that you have a creeping sensation of void or flight that washes over you.

To put it another way: The question for Rosario isn't "omg, you played a prostitute, that must have been hard, eh?" but "geeze isn't it corny that somebody is so out of touch with what an actual prostitute's life is like that they when they stage a gang of prostitutes they basically look like Tekken fighters as dressed by Hot Topic?". I know the knee jerk response is Dude, it's a comic book what do you expect? to which I would reply "the plot of your comic book makes the way you think about women and the way you think about yourself extremely obvious, and the relentless violence of that vision and the virgin/whore clichés that drive your fantasies seem really obvious and worn-out".

― Drew Daniel (Drew Daniel)

i've always enjoyed sin city comics in the same way i like chick comics, similar cartoonish bleakness, better art/design in sin city comics, better plots in chick comics. trying to say anything about comics or noir in general based on either is a bit ludicrous. i enjoyed the movie despite itself, except for some bad acting everything i didn't like i was familiar with from the comics and some things that were boring cliche in the comic were fun ridiculous cliche in the movie. the movie was much much more ridiculous (or at least the process of making it a movie, having people say what amster called on this thread or the other that 'looney tunes dialogue' out loud, brought the corniness/ridiculousness to the fore) than the comic, punctured the pofaced 'seriousness' of miller's schtick. i also really like that a movie with nudity in it is number one in america and really really really really like that a movie in which the hero kills a priest and a cardinal and the audience roots for it is number one the weekend the pope dies.

― j blount (papa la bas)

"amster" makes me sound like a light beer!

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist))

DUDE, SIN CITY WAS GREAT!

o god u guys

much like the comics, the marv segment is the only one i really dig.

kind of amazed anyone still remembers/thinks enough about this movie to vote for it

i felt weird enough voting for the matrix

"the plot of your comic book makes the way you think about women and the way you think about yourself extremely obvious, and the relentless violence of that vision and the virgin/whore clichés that drive your fantasies seem really obvious and worn-out"

But the short version of this is just "you are Frank Miller"

definitely did not vote for sin city, Pee-U

also ridic that this would place above temple of doom, as long as we're talking about TOD

(not that I'm suggesting "you know what you're getting" is any excuse at all for anyone voting for it)

Yeah I feel bad for all the previous movies now.

mickey rourke only reason to watch sin city imo

also drew d otm

i was astonished that SC was a huge hit. that was a big 'i guess i dont know what the public REALLY wants' moment

i will never forgive sin city for all of its gross copycats

and for the spirit

everything on this thread is coming thru a smeary haze of "got more points than Dirty Harry" right now. what the fuck is wrong with proper action movies with cops and real locations and totaly realistic gun battles ffs?

For me personally, what is wrong with them is the presence of cops and gun battles.

http://www.moviesonline.ca/movie-gallery/albums/userpics//SinCity19020502.jpg?0.4489767318514257

COOL DUDES

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/etienne_saint/infernalaffairs.jpg

#64

INFERNAL AFFAIRS

Wai-Keung Lau & Alan Mak
2002
Hong Kong
(179 points, 6 votes)

Infernal Affairs: slow burning, Hong Kong set cop thriller; (no kung-fu or much John Woo'esque gunplay, so "progressive"; interesting concept of police mole in gang/ gang mole in police / identity crisis; looks good; leads all very sexy; 6/10

― Nik (Nik)

Infernal Affairs was good, if confusing at times. wait, is he the undercover policeman or the criminal mole? does the one know about the other? oh, he didn't realise who it was because he could only see the back of his head...

― Koogy Yonderboy (koogs)

nothing cool about being in some wanky goth cartoon imo

the "both dudes discover each other" scene in IA is so, so good. departed kinda blew that part.

not many good comments on this one unfortch

i wonder what the literal translation of the title is

Warming to Sin City now Action Movie Rockism is a thing.

IA also has excellent "technology as magic" scene.

according to google the literal translation of 無間道 is "No secret passage"

infernal affairs > the departed

I really need to see IA.