Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-LOL!!!!!!!!

I was going to do a quick review round-up to take care of a slew of movies I've seen recently, but after some reflection, I decided that a movie with the caliber that Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li has warrants it's own separate review. I mean Street Fighter was an institution during my childhood, I couldn't just gloss over it.

I don't remember the plot exactly, but as I recall, it was a revenge story. Chun-Li, a musician turned martial arts expert, is after M. Bison, an evildoer Irish crime boss who was adopted at birth by Thai people. Somehow he was able to embody himself with pure evil as he injected the pure goodness in him to his daughter. Anyhow, Chun-Li is after Bison for the kidnapping and eventual killing of her father.

This movie was no good. The fighting was okay and it was unintentionally funny likely because the acting was so bad. Those are the only two reasons I could come up with for not falling asleep during the movie. At least the '94 Van Damme version was so shitacular, that somehow it became cheesy good for its campiness.

One of the strange things was that we see Chun-Li in the beginning as a little oriental girl, but through the quick martial-arts training montage, we see she eventually evolves into a eurasian girl. Weird? I thought it was strange that she turned eurasian, and then they revealed that the mother was of some sort of european descent. So I guess it wouldn't have been a problem except that through some miraculous birth, she was born a chinese. Another peculiar thing is that somehow Chun-Li is able to grow up in China and have the worst possible chinese accent yet at the same time have a completely fluent english accent. I'm no expert of the Mandarin language (cantonese is my first language), but even I could tell that she was butchering the language. On the brightside though, it caused intense laughter for me. I guess for someone who is totally unfamiliar with the language, this wouldn't phase them at all though.

There's also a supporting crew of other Street Fighter characters, but other than through name, none of them really seem like their video game counterpart (okay, except for Vega who had a mask). The worst was Charlie Nash, played by Chris Klein of American Pie fame. There was a lot of bad acting in the movie, but his was the worst! I had no idea what he was trying to do or go for.

The movie is out now for DVD if for some reason you want to see it. There's nothing I can recommend about this movie unless you relish in self-torture. I will say that this movie was bad, but it was slightly more entertaining than Dragon Ball Evolution which is the bottom of the barrel bad (alliteration!).

You know, we're halfway through the year and I'm finding that it's easier to compose a worse 10 movies of the year rather than the best (which only has 2 titles so far). Here's hoping for the next 6 months. I leave you with one of my favourite cinematic moments of all time. Later geeks!

The League of Denial (2013)

The topic of concussions in sports is a dialogue that’s been growing the past number of years. Do a search on ‘concussions’ and ‘football’ and you’ll get several thousand hits on the controversy that’s surrounded the sport. It’s a challenging topic as the research is all relatively new, and the topic itself challenges the mentality and philosophy adopted by football loving Americans. Now, I’m not a fan of football or NFL but when I saw this book lying at the local bookstore, my interest was piqued. Although I’m not a fan of football, those that know me know that I’m an unabashed fan of prowrestling. Talks about concussions are also quite a hot topic even within the prowrestling sub-culture. Earlier this year, one of the hottest wrestlers of the current era, Daniel Bryan, retired early at the age of 34 due to a history of concussion related issues. Interestingly, he was not permitted to return to the ring due to the disapproval by WWE’s medic...

Finally, the Xbox 360!!

So as I mentioned in a previous post, I received an Xbox 360 for Christmas from my dad. A great present it was! I've had 3 weeks to enjoy it so I guess I can give you my impressions of it now. First the controller. In truth, I haven't felt a controller this comfortable in my gaming life before. As a child who grew up on the 8-bit generation, with just a directional pad and 2 buttons, there was quite a learning curve getting used to using two analog sticks at the same time. You might say, "Hey Lam, how bout the PS2? You have that machine, and that has analog sticks". True, but of the twenty or so games I have for that, all of them used either only 1 analog stick, or allowed the option to switch on to the directional pad. Using 2 sticks at the same time was at first just uncomfortable. This made for all sorts of trouble as I was playing Gears of War . Luckily for me, I had computer controlled teammates that watched my back. I love the Media Center capabilities...

MAX PAYNE was oh so PAYNEFUL!!!

What a failure this was. An EPIC FAILURE~! And I'll tell you why. This movie had everything going for it which was why it made the failure seem so huge. It had star power. It had a very competent director. The visual style was there. It had a simple storyline... a storyline that was basically fuck-proof because it's so basic. The effects (when there were any) were also pretty great. So where did they go wrong? Pacing. If the first two-thirds of the film was like the last third, I think it would have been a fine film. Not great by any means, but fine. I mean, there was hardly any action in the first hour. It was all talk and build up. Every 5 minutes I was saying to myself, "okay, something cool is gonna happen now". But it never came. I think had they added 2 or 3 big action sequences during that hour, that it would have helped the film breathe and flow better. I mean, didn't they realize that the source material was an action game? Max Payne is ba...

The Billionty-Oneth Geek: Older Than 8 Since 1991

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