Episode 264 Topics Include:
- Rian's vacation
- The hottest 3-week-old SDCC news
- What we've been watching
- Featured Review: Street Fighter
Running Time: 2 hours, 12 minutes
Episode Songs:
Patagonia - Palms
Shortwave Radio - Palms
This Podcast May Include Some Explicit Language
...It Also Most Likely Contains Some Spoilers
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i'm a huge Vin Diesel fan, as you guys probably know, and him being in the next Avengers movie is making me infinitely more interested in these Marvel movies than i'd otherwise be. Babylon AD sure did blow, though, i'm interested to see that behind the scenes thing...
ReplyDeletei'm not a huge Van Damme fan, either, he doesn't have the same charisma for me as most of the other big name action people. i've come to appreciate him more in the past couple years, though. another movie where he played 2 parts like Double Impact, is Replicant, where he stars as a clone of himself. and Michael Rooker is his sidekick and there's a scene where Van Damme staggers out of a brothel after having prematurely ejaculated all over himself.
Rian, i've been in your corner before about other movies that nobody else likes (Rocky 5, Hulk, etc.), but i gotta side with Jesse about the Street Fighter movie, sorry man, haha. Jesse, i do think you're needlessly getting hung up on the (in your view) lack of fighting and what SF is "supposed" to be, because there ARE adaptations (or remakes or whatever) that have nothing to do with the source material that are still great on their own terms, the execution is everything. there COULD be an awesome Street Fighter movie with zero fighting, it just needs to be good on its own terms, but this movie just isn't it, haha. the Street Fighter movie isn't bad because of its lack of fighting or its lack of faithfulness to the games, it's got other problems that are specific to it as a film in and of itself.
i guess a good example using movies i know you like, are the new JJ Abrams Star Trek movies, which in my opinion have hardly anything to do with the source Star Trek material that they're based on, but they're still valid as their own thing and people dig them and everything. i can compare and contrast or just plain old complain, but i can't legitimately justify any criticism of them by saying "it does something different than the source material so therefore it's bad/a failure!" you know what i mean?
i've seen the SF movie a couple times and i found it pretty boring both times, i gotta say, regardless of how close or not close it was to the games. just as a movie itself it kinda sucks. SORRY, RIAN! ;D
Ross -
ReplyDeleteI'm going to disagree about my complaint about Street Fighter. If you are comparing it to Star Trek it would be like if JJ made the new series with all the characters from the original but they never went into space. All the Street Fighter characters are there but there is almost no fighting. I just think that is lame. Maybe if they made an entertaining movie I could look past the lack of fighting but since the movie is soooo boring I thought it was a pretty glaring omission to leave out some cool fights.
yeah, you're right, my thing was probably too broad a comparison/analogy. i guess space and fighting are the most basic elements of Star Trek and Street Fighter, heh.
DeleteSince I've been watching more Van Damme movies lately, I've been getting into him more. I never used to care much for him because I didn't watch as much of his stuff as Schwarzenegger or Jackie Chan, but then again, I never watched many Stallone movies as a youngster either and I've gotten into his movies in a big way over the last few years. I'm not sure if Van Damme himself is the thing I like though, or if it's just that comfort zone of mediocre action movies that I love so much.
DeleteI never said that Street Fighter is a great movie or anything, but rather that upon this most recent viewing I enjoyed it a lot. Part of the reason for this is probably my enjoyment of bad action movies that I just mentioned when talking specifically about Van Damme, but I really do think SF is fun. The thing that seriously blows my mind is that both of you guys have described the film as "boring". When I watched it I felt like it was constantly moving around at a brisk pace and the plot was always progressing. "Slow" and "boring" aren't words that I'd use to describe it. There wasn't always fighting, but short of sitting down with a stopwatch and counting out how many minutes of the runtime were focused on fisticuffs, I also have to reiterate that I felt there was plenty of action to keep me busy. Literal "street fighting"? No. But chases, shootouts, some actual fighting, and general conflict? I felt that there was tons of it.
I really thought that if anyone would be in my corner on Street Fighter it'd be you, Ross. I guess the cheese stands alone in this instance.
As for the Star Trek comparison, I think you make a valid point Ross, and that Jesse is still being a bit too hard and firm on his literal interpretation of the term "Street Fighter". My sticking point remains that Street Fighter is a pretty shallow video game franchise with (from my point of view) little to no story. That leaves a film adaptation open to lots of different interpretations and directions. Star Trek isn't all about space, but also the characters and lots of other things. There's a lot more depth to the Star Trek universe than the Street Fighter "universe". I'll also restate that I know there are more involved SF games, comics, animated movies, etc out these days that give the franchise more of a back story, but back in 1993/1994 when they were filming the Van Damme movie, little to no of that existed and only 2 or 3 of the simple older games had been released.
When all is said and done, a movie like Street Fighter just comes down to whether you enjoyed what you got, and I did. I'm aware of it's shortcomings, but they don't affect how I view the film.