Day: August 19, 2010

MasterChugs Theater: ‘Red Cliff’

John Woo has set himself a new challenge in Red Cliff, and that’s to be as old-fashioned as possible. Returning to his roots after a stint in Hollywood, Woo has made the most expensive film in mainland Chinese history, a pleasantly traditional picture that marks a new direction for one of the world’s premier action maestros.

Woo’s classic Hong Kong films with tough-guy titles like Bullet in the Head and Hard Boiled featured intense, focused, almost balletic contemporary gangster shootouts that seemed to redefine what these kinds of movies could do.

Though it stars Woo regular Tony Leung, Red Cliff, by contrast, is a both throwback and change of pace, a massive historical epic that used four writers, three editors, two directors of photography, 300 horses and a cast and crew that came close to 2,000. And oh, how it is epic. Continue reading MasterChugs Theater: ‘Red Cliff’

Liberals are from Venus, conservatives from France

One of the biggest ongoing political debates in this country is that of immigrants, their legal status and whether they are responsible for crime.

The side portrayed by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and her supporters is that illegal Mexicans and other illegal Latin American immigrants have turned her state into “the gateway to America for drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and crime.”

In response, it’s time to crack down on anyone suspicious, whether they worship a funny invisible god with an aversion to caricature artists, or they refuse to wear their immigration papers on their necks with their rabies licenses.

After all, when you’re in America, you better damn well act like a French president?

The best robberies are the worst ones

It’s hard to fit a whole lot of stupid into one package. Nonetheless, some people manage to exceed our expectations. And for that, we must thank you.

Kimberly Ramirez is being charged with robbing more than eleven grand from a Chicago-land bank. That’s fairly normal enough, if you don’t account for her being captured just forty minutes later. It turns out that she left her debit card at the scene of the crime. Whoops.

Oh, and the demand note was written on the back of a prescription note made out in her name. Double whoops.

And we can’t forget that when the police found her at her apartment, she had managed to lock herself out of it. Triple whoops.

Some people just make it easy.

Bearijuana

The animals have been used to attack us, now they’re being used to protect substances that inhibit us. No folks, these animals weren’t making whiskey, in fact, we’d cut them slack if they did. No, Canadian bears (the worst kind, eh?) were found protecting a marijuana crop in Vancouver.

When reached for comments the bears just smiled, spoke like a Californian and asked us for our pic-a-nic basket.

We’re gonna need more handcuffs

Sure, everyone’s worried about sharks because they are at the beach this time of year, but there’s one threat that never goes away: bees.

They’re small, they travel in numbers too great for humans to compete with, they sting, and they have zero respect for the law. In North Carolina, bees swarmed around a sheriff’s deputy’s car, keeping him contained in the vehicle for over three hours. The deputy found a disabled truck carrying bees, and they escaped (the bees, I mean). The insects wasted no time going after the cruiser. Eventually beekeepers smoked them off.