Wednesday, April 16, 2008
The TV Guide: Kingdom Come
After a pretty hellacious day yesterday (which was very emotionally draining) I was looking for any way to keep my mind off my trubs and onto more positive things. Yesterday afternoon I was very lucky enough to get a face to face interview with author Christopher Rice (which I will be sharing with all y'all very soon) and last night, I met up with Darion for a preview screening of the new Lions Gate movie The Forbidden Kingdom which stars Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Michael Angarano and is based on the legend of the Monkey King. Let me tell you, this movie was just the thing to occupy my mind and allowed me to decompress from all my stress:
I'm generally not a fan of martial arts movies but I dig the new era of martial arts films that were make popular again by the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The Forbidden Kingdom is a great blend of the contemporary and the ancient which felt true to the martial arts movie genre without getting too much into the Karate Kid trap (altho, there is a training montage in the film which kinda reminded me a wee bit of KK). The fight scenes were really spectacular ... these sorts of movies always make martial arts look so easy, so seamless. The story was very entertaining and didn't involve that much suspended belief to get into it. Michael Angarano (Eliot from Will and Grace) was perfectly cast as the kid from Boston who gets sucked into this fairytale-like journey. He's a great actor ... I've loved him in everything I've seen him do. Jackie Chan and Jet Li are remarkable, as usual but the real star of the film for me is the setting and the landscape. The movie is just so beautifully shot ... all the credit goes to director Rob Minkoff (who also directed Disney's The Lion King). You want a movie that will wow you into forgetting your trubs, this is the movie for you. Depending on how big a martial arts movie fan you are, this movie may not require multiple watches but I really think that seeing it at least once is deffo worth the time.
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I'm generally not a fan of martial arts movies but I dig the new era of martial arts films that were make popular again by the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The Forbidden Kingdom is a great blend of the contemporary and the ancient which felt true to the martial arts movie genre without getting too much into the Karate Kid trap (altho, there is a training montage in the film which kinda reminded me a wee bit of KK). The fight scenes were really spectacular ... these sorts of movies always make martial arts look so easy, so seamless. The story was very entertaining and didn't involve that much suspended belief to get into it. Michael Angarano (Eliot from Will and Grace) was perfectly cast as the kid from Boston who gets sucked into this fairytale-like journey. He's a great actor ... I've loved him in everything I've seen him do. Jackie Chan and Jet Li are remarkable, as usual but the real star of the film for me is the setting and the landscape. The movie is just so beautifully shot ... all the credit goes to director Rob Minkoff (who also directed Disney's The Lion King). You want a movie that will wow you into forgetting your trubs, this is the movie for you. Depending on how big a martial arts movie fan you are, this movie may not require multiple watches but I really think that seeing it at least once is deffo worth the time.
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