The Asian ending is hard to watch, but I still prefer the Asian soundtrack. You get the classic Wong Fei Hung theme and you get Anita Mui's great award-winning performance.

God, I remember some idiot's uncomprehending review of the American release that was posted to rec.arts.movies.current-films in the 90s, back when I was first encountering Mike D'Angelo and Jim Beaver (neither of whom was the idiot) there. This fool didn't understand why everyone was rushing to crowd onto the train…

The scene where everyone hides from everyone else in Maggie's hotel room is genius, just a wonderful tribute to classic farce. And i love the way the pirates from the first movie are always following him around trying to help because he kicked their asses.

It's the rare post-DM2 Jackie film to have a great one-on-one fight.

One can argue that HERO deliberately undercuts its own apparent PRC-pleasing message. Look at the color schemes, and how everything is replaced with gray anonymity at the end. One definitely relates to the revolutionaries more than to the Emperor and his faceless legions, even when Tony decides the revolutionaries…

It's a wonderful sequence and she definitely risks life and limb to an an insane degree, but as I note above, neither she or anyone else really jumped the bike ONTO the train. As I say in my previous post, someone (probably Bruce Law) jumped OVER it and then Michelle rode a bike hanging from a crane that was dropped…

Even though it didn't get aUS homevideo relief until well after RUMBLE IN THE BRONX, POLICE STORY was the Chan's first film to really get the attention of mainstream US critics. I first heard of him when I read of films like FEARLESS HYENA and THE YOUNG MASTER in an article in BLACK BELT that was part of the US…

And absolutely magnificent in "Molasses to Rum to Slaves" in 1776. Can't find an actual movie clip, but here's the song.

Yeah, I've taken Orson Scott Card to task for that shit in the letter column of the local conservative rag he writes for. "Uncle Orson" would have us believe that nobody REALLY likes the films of Kubrick or Scorcese or the novels of Cormac McCarthy, and that they only claim they do to impress "cocktail party elites."…

Yes. We have been trained to think of, say, Fellini and Pasolini films as having naturalistic soundtracks, but of course they were all post-dubbed in Italian, and not always by the original Italian actors. We have different expectations for the "Toby Dammit" story in SPIRITS OF THE DEAD and Bava's KILL, BABY, KILL…

Yeoh was trained as a dancer (ballet and modern) in London rather than a martial artist, something true of the many of the impressive action heroines who got their start in the "Girls with Guns" subgenre in the late 80s. This was also true of Moon Lee and Cynthia Khan. One can argue that, as a Forms champion,…

WEIRD TALES' readership was at least 40% female and included both shopgirls and, in a LIFE magazine pictorial, showgirls. It had far more female writers than the SF pulps of its era did; Mary Elizabeth Counselman's much-reprinted "The Three Marked Pennies" was one of the two most popular stories the magazine ever…

I love Hammer films, but I'm well aware of their patriarchal anti-sex value system, in which old dour asexual men are Good and voluptuous young women are Evil (I realize they subverted this towards the end with the Karnstein films), and I don't get defensive when somebody is more troubled by their morality than I am. …

Indeed. That was another dumb line in a generally thoughtful review.

See, that's one I really like, and I like the novel despite its possibly sexist implications, that ALL women are witches and men just don't know it. Every film adaptation has left that part out.

I don't about that, but it's largely true that witch mania was a product of the Enlightenment and the Reformation, not the Middle Ages. Despite MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL, few witches were burned back then, and the Medieval worldview allowed that Merlin could be the son of a "daemon" of the Upper Earth, a…

As I've already said, more people have been killed for witchcraft since WW2 than were hanged or burned in 17th century Europe. Some (not all) modern films about witchcraft are like (almost all) recent films about demonic possession, in that they wrap themselves in in a cloak of "this really happened." A GIRL WALKS…

Burning (or hanging) witches usually requires belief in witches. Matthew Hopkins may have known that witchcraft was bullshit and tortured women because he liked doing so (it's pretty clear that Vincent Price's Hopkins in WITCHFINDER GENERAL thinks superstition is absurd and wants to rub filthy humanity's nose in it),…

Yeah, it's an unfortunate sentence, but the writing improves.

Yet it's not Ebert never had moral qualms about horror movies. Just like all of us, some things bothered him and some didn't.