The movie is so fucking bad that it is good.
And is like 10*E^10000000000000000000 better than SF: The Legend of Chun Li
Plus it has Raul Julia as Bison
First it takes a look at a Hollywood mainstream action piece (007: Tomorrow Never Dies), complete with frame-by-frame breakdowns. Then it turns the same analytical method upon the utterly fantastic Police Story, featuring pre-Hollywood Jackie Chan.
That was a great fucking read. Thank you for linking it. I am more filmmakingly-enlightened.
Are there similar articles analyzing gunplay/shootouts and car chases between Hollywood and non-Hollywood movies? One thing I’ll give Hollywood credit for are chase scenes. Terminator 2 immediately comes to mind. Discounting war films, gunplay is around even I think. On one hand you have Heat’s bank shootout and The Matrix lobby scene. On the other you have Hard Boiled’s hospital shootout.
The SF movie is a ground-breaking piece of modern cinema that should be watched by all audiences.
The phrase “You got paid?” inspired an entire generation of budding young comical geniuses.
I’m pretty sure I remember one or two. I’ll try to dig some up.
One time, I started doing a shot-by-shot breakdown of one of the chase scenes from the Gone In 60 Seconds remake–which is not well done–but I gave up about 30 seconds in. It’s pretty tedious to keep doing such a thing well after your point has been made.
In the meantime, this critic contends that the strung-together bits of film in many of today’s movies can no longer be appropriately called “shots”, because “shot” implies a sense of composition and directional purpose within a sequence that these movies do not have. He offers the alternative, more pejorative term “snatch” to describe these bits–and yes, he does sneak in a stealth pun or two.
Wunderbar. This video presentation is by Jim Emerson, the former film reviewer, current blog critic and Roger Ebert’s editor. He touches on a number of movies in this one, but the main focus is on Bullitt, specifically the action scenes.
SF2’s story was developed as well as MK’s, especially with SF2’s insane popularity at the time. I mean, the movie has the Super characters, and SSF2 basically canonized the more popular manga storylines. If anything, there might not have been the opportunity to get the assistance from Capcom that SF2 the Animated Movie had (were there any US community managers back then?). But yeah that sounds like you’re making excuses for SFTM that you don’t want to make for MK.
If there were supplemental materials out at the time that fleshed out the background of SF prior to the advent of the Alpha series, I was unaware of them at the time and the people making the movie probably were, too.
Not that it matters. As I said, the choices work within the context of the movie, so it’s not worth crying over unless you’re so attached to the idea that Zangief is supposed to be a Russian bear wrestler that it affects your enjoyment of the movie. (For me, it’s irrelevant.)
Don’t have to go so far as Alpha’s nonsense. There was plenty of story established in vanilla Super to base the movie on. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a legitimate SF adaptation if they bothered to use the license. Especially since we’re picking nits. They could have just as easily dropped the license and spent more time making fun of JCVD and his contemporaries.
FWIW, SFTM is more entertaining than SFTAM for completely different reasons, though SFTAM is the better production.
Well, then we get into a gray area of adaptation, which is that a movie might depart enough from its source material to be considered an original work (e.g. The Shining), but it’s much easier to market to an audience that has built-in familiarity with something that already exists. It’s basically a form of brand recognition.
SFTAM carries the unintentional comedy label much more accurately than SFTM, though the action is definitely superior. Actually some of the best depictions of (somewhat) fantastical martial arts that I’ve seen in animation.
Did you see the horrendous animated Mortal Kombat movie they did as a tie-in to the feature film?
No, just the shitty USA cartoon and the live action series that looked like a late night 1-900 commercial.
EDIT: In your example of The Shining and others, “In name only” adaptations more often than not annoy the crap out of the creators/owners as well as fans.
The USA cartoon is divine ambrosia compared to this ugly beast.
EDIT:
YouTube to the rescue.
[media=youtube]WjdmOeLJP1I[/media]
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s not go nuts and speak ill of MK Conquest. That was a legit tv series.
just rewathced bits of mortal kombat on yhoutube
its best movie ever
best one liners efver
“THOSE SHADES COST 500$ asshole”
“THIS IS THE PART WHERE U FALL DOWN”
“FLAWLESS VICTORY”
anyone who cannot appreicate it does not appreciate demolitoin man for the same reasons. mortal kombat is the best movie ever. followed in distant second by SF the movie
^ Only one of those one-liners that is funny to anyone other than cocaine-addicted movie executives is the first one.
And it’s “Those were $500 sunglasses, asshole.” Christ. You people.
Johnny Cage and Raiden try to liven the movie up. I’ll give them that.
It wasn’t even close. Between MK and MK2, they touched on separate dimensions, Gods, different species/races, and everyone knew exactly what Shang Tsung and Shao Kahn wanted. With SF2, all anyone knew about Bison was that he was a mysteriously powerful crime lord that wanted to rule the world. The story didn’t start to flesh out until Alpha 1 dropped in '95.
We didn’t know shit about these muthafuckas. We just knew Ryu had an obsessive disorder with fighting, Sagat had an obsessive disorder with fighting Ryu, Bison killed Chun-Li’s dad, Honda was fat, and Blanka loved his momma.
They definitely didn’t have much character story to work with at the time, but that’s no excuse for what they did with Dee Jay, Honda, Chun… etc.
I don’t recommend this because of it’s cliffhanger ending. Fans have been begging to see what would happen after…I don’t want to spoil it. It’s an incomplete story.
SO I MISQUOTED SOMETHING AT 4 AM IN THE MORNING WHILE COMPLETELY WASTED
WELL EXCUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUSE ME PRINCESS
/best movie evar
I saw it with my dad and friend in the theatres when it came out.
Still love it to this day. Never saw the hate. It’s very entertaining.