One A Week Review #8: Jay's Review: Possession

All these snow days are making for some fine movie-watchin' weather. This supernatural thriller I reviewed for dvdsnapshot will keep you in for a night! I liked this one enough I'd also like it to be my one-a-week review. The more I think about this one, I think I like the more downbeat and novelistic alternate ending better than the hopeful, movie-ish one they went with, but either way, it's an interesting flick.

POSESSION

OFFICIAL SYNOPSIS
Newlyweds Jess (Gellar) and Ryan (Landes) seem to have it all until a car accident renders both Ryan and his brother Roman (Pace) comatose. But things spin even more eerily out of control when Roman wakes up and tries to convince Jess that he is her husband. Beside herself with fear and grief, Jess grapples with the one question: Could the man before her actually be the man she lost ... or does something far more sinister await her in his arms?

OUR TAKE
Sarah Michelle Gellar, Lee Pace, and Michael Landes star in this remake of the Korean film Jungdok. Gellar plays a busy lawyer with a too-perfect sculptor husband who has rotten jailbird of a brother she has an unfortunate frisson with.. These yin-and-yang brothers, through contrived coincidence, wind up in a head-on collision and comatose in adjoining beds. When only her brother-in-law wakes up claiming to be her husband, she takes him home and has to discern if it's "right-one wrong-bod" or something else. Is it a con or a miracle? Is she just giving in to an attraction to a bad boy? What is the connection between the brothers? What's going on?

Gellar's somewhat brittle charms have never really translated well to the big screen. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she came off strong and personable thanks to the writing. It also made good use of her tendency to maintain a palpable distance from everyone else sharing a scene with her. That's a quality that serves her well here. Lee Pace charmed on TV in Pushing Daisies and Wonderfalls, but here he sells "confused nice guy" and is a very convincing bad boy as well.

Her standoffishness and his appeal keep Possession grounded. They spar instead of letting the story make an easy slide into either supernatural romance or horror. The story's even pacing and slow build means limited thrills but insures involvement. All the potential directions the story could go in almost make the third act's reveal disappointing as it starts limiting the options.

Evidently the distributor's financial problems have kept this on the shelf for two years, though this is a cut above most straight-to-video affairs. Also, some artful editing and excellent cinematography make it a good-looking film.  Possession is an engaging film, a "Whoisit" instead of a "Whodunnit."

SPECIAL FEATURES
Posession is presented on DVD in Widescreen format with English 5.1 Dolby Surround audio and English and Spanish subtitles. The extras include a short featurette, a handful of deleted and alternate scenes (including a thirty minute alternate ending!), and the theatrical trailer. There are trailers for S. Darko,  The Haunting of Molly Hartley, The Betrayed, and Seth McFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy.

CONCLUSION
85 minutes of supernatural "is he or isn't he" with little to scandalize any audience from teens up, Possession got cheated out of a theatrical run, but makes for a decent home screening. A possibly romantic, possibly supernatural guessing game that never goes (too) overboard and always looks good, it's mostly a slow-burn two-character piece that's an excellent showcase for Gellar and Pace.

I think in real life you'd shove a creepy in-law claiming to be your comatose husband away a heck of a lot harder than she does here, though.

OVERALL PICTURE
MOVIE: B
EXTRAS: B-

Psst, did you see what THEY said about YOU?

 Recently, film director Kevin Smith was booted off a Southwest Airlines flight for being "too fat to fly." Now while there's two sides to every story, Mister Smith made national headlines about the experience. Why? He told people. He told everybody.

It's something of an old saying that a happy customer will tell 4 or 5 people about their experience with a business but a dissatisfied customer will on average tell 8 to 16 about it. I'm not sure that's not true anymore in the age of social media. Nowadays, it's more that a happy customer will tweet about their experience once or twice. A dissatisfied one is tweeting it five or ten times. Southwest wound up with a black eye in the opinion of the on-line masses and they've done a terrific job of addressing the situation. It's an unfortunate, uncomfortable event for the company and the consumer, but it wound up being played out in the court of public opinion literally in front of millions of people.

Recently, I had a frustrating situation with a local business. Again, there are two sides, but mine involved something I believed to have been misrepresented to me. So I tweeted about it a good 5 or 6 times and had conversations on Twitter with 8 people about it that evening, one of whom told me they recently had an experience that disproved what the company told me. Would any of this happen if I wasn't operating under information the company gave me and then says was incorrect? Of course not.

Mind you, I have 1,041 followers on Twitter, of whom 265 are on my list of "Cincinnati People." I also have 371 Facebook friends, 56 identified in Cincinnati and another 9 in the surrounding region. This is not a lot of people. Most of these people however are exciting, well-connected, educated consumers. I have fantastic friends and talk to marvelous people online. We all bring something to the party and we see what other people post. They're in all walks of life and all sorts of professions. Someone like me goes out and tells over 1,000 people about their experience. Some, but not all of those people I tell are listening at that moment. Several of those people share their own opinions and experiences, and some of those who listened to the whole conversation will remember.

My opinion on if I should even bother to try some local places have been decided by the experiences of people I trust. Should I spend my precious time checking out a new locale if six close friends have already stated a variety of reasons they didn't like it which would also be concerns I had?  Should is actually a moot question. Will is the question and the answer is "no." That's not about letting others make decisions for you. It's simple pragmatism. I love to try out new places but there's so many to choose from and so many other things to do that trying them out is an occasional, special experience. If somethings get ruled out after being vetted by others, so be it. I also love all the sites out there, like cgyp.net, that you can search for other people's experiences with and opinions about businesses.

Does this mean I'm out to trash this company? Certainly not. The instant power of the internet means a customer has a megaphone to vent every impulse, good or bad, that they had. I'm not saying I was hot-headed, but I have all those people hearing about my experience and the information I received. If I wanted to slag off or exaggerate they'd hear that as well. It's an uphill battle for companies with all these opinion-makers and opinion-voicers out there. Likewise, t's a cyclone of information and opinions for us poor consumers to be barraged by and have to sort through. Thankfully, this company has a Twitter presence who's monitoring what is said about the company online. I'd interacted with them once before to great effect and I contacted them that evening about my issue. Anyone who's in business should be keeping an eye on what's on-line. Now that you can have fans of your brand on Facebook and Customer Service outreach on Twitter, there's little excuse to let a situation go by where you can interact with that customer. When I'm contacted like that, which another company did recently to great effect, I feel like I've been noticed and the company became aware of what was going on and left me feeling good about them. I also have a part-time job at a business where we took a look at our citysearch.com listing this weekend. We were appalled to find ourselves low in the rankings and looking at outdated information, but excited to see that we could take ownership of our listing there and make sure that information was corrected. That's taking the bull by the horns.

Be it my mom with 13 Facebook connections, a middling on-line presence like myself or, say, Kevin Smith with his 1,669,184 followers (at the time of this writing), it's always a good idea to keep an eye on who's saying what about your business and you online. Get on Twitter and Facebook and set up a Google Alert. SEO and Social Media Monitoring services are out there.You'll be glad you did. It'll probably make you green and ill with dread, but it's a whole new realm of opportunities. Get in front of potentially bad word of mouth that reaches 160 or 1,600 or 1.600,000-plus people instead of 16 and possibly even win over that one, lone voice who's talking about you. Most of those voicing issues aren't slagging off on you. They just want to be, to feel, heard by a person who can help address the issue.

A slight diversion...

The One-A-Week review for this week, number 8, along with a few other things, have been sidetracked by a some car repairs and some other technical difficulties. We'll be back on schedule momentarily... I promise.

Jay's Review: Jackie Chan Presents: Wushu

Don't be fooled by the box, this is a "Coming of age" film fit for the family. Here's my review for dvdsnapshot.com!

WUSHU

OFFICIAL SYNOPSIS
Upon arrival at an elite martial arts conservatory, a group of young boys swear allegiance to each other and form a gang. A decade later at graduation, they unexpectedly cross paths with an evil martial arts master and foil his kidnapping plan. Now, they must put their combat skills to the test in order to defeat this enemy and save their brotherhood.

OUR TAKE
In the US, Jackie Chan has become synonymous with lighthearted martial arts films that exhibit a sense of humor coupled with dazzling action choreography. Chan executive produced the Sammo Hung starring, family-friendly Wushu and it has that same flavor. From the beginning the action sequences defer to gentle humor as Hung plays widowed father to two sons who join a trio of kids at a "martial arts conservatory."

The box cover copy is misleading to sell this like a crime thriller. If anyhting the crime subplot is almost extraneous. Instead of being about defeating "the brotherhood," Wushu is a "learning and growing through athletics" film. More Karate Kid than Karate Kid II. In fact, the first fifteen minutes play like a children's film until a creative sequence showing the children turning into their older counterparts by turning flips. Wushu may be "the ancient art of fighting," but they're more students of gymnastics. Even during their first combat exhibition you expect them to break out those long, twirling ribbons on sticks. A throwdown with the Bring It On girls feels almost in the offing.

(The "group of young boys" is also misleading as the team's fifth member is a girl who's just as agile in combat as the boys are.)

This "Scooby Gang" (The "Jing Wu Men," derived from Bruce Lee's film Fists of Fury) have cute teen romance and visits to amusement parks and movie sets while they foil a team of nefarious child kidnappers. Even Kung Fu Film legend Hung gets in on the action and proves one can still be incredibly nimble even with a great deal of middle-aged spread. He's still a pro, even if it's clear they're making some cheats to help him sell what used to look effortless. The rest of the cast are graceful athletes that prove that, even with a little wire-work cheating, there's a great deal of beauty and dance in martial arts.

The last third of the film gets a little darker as our leads go from exhibition fighting to real combat, making the end, where they wrap up their athletic competitions in a time-worn fashion. You know who'll triumph, but the ride's still enjoyable.

SPECIAL FEATURES
Wushu is presented in a widescreen format with audio 5.1 Dolby Digital in both English dub and the original Mandarin. English and Spanish subtitles are available. The DVD's special features include a nearly 18 minute behind-the-scenes featurette featuring lots of fight choreography, a featurette on the film's Cannes premier, and trailers for Jackie Chan Presents Wushu, The Spy Next Door, The Forbidden Kingdom, and Lionsgate's Blu-Ray line.

CONCLUSION
PG-13 for action-violence but tame, the family-friendly, coming-of-age-thru-athletics comedy Wushu reminds that you can enjoy the gymnastic beauty of martial arts without much in the way of real violence. The humor is never saccharine sweet and there's genuine thrills in the action sequences... though be sure to warn the kids not to leap in front of roller coasters or giant, rolling drums.

All in all, Wushu is a pleasure.

(...though I kept picturing Nadia Comaneci wiping the floor with these kids.)

OVERALL PICTURE
MOVIE: B-
EXTRAS: B

Jay's Review: Fireball

Gettin' my bloodlust on with an amazing Thai "Basketball meets Kickboxing" movie I reviewed for dvdsnapshot.com!

FIREBALL

OFFICIAL SYNOPSIS
Just released from a juvenile detention center, Tai joins Fireball, an underground team playing ultraviolent basketball based on Muay Thai principles and hosted by criminal drug lords that he believes are responsible for putting his twin brother in a coma. No rules, no mercy, and only the strongest will survive.

OUR TAKE
Most movie plots are just a collection of interchangeable pieces, assembled like Legos. "One twin brother, newly out from jail, avenging the brutal assault of the other at the hands of the organized crime with the help of the twin's demure girlfriend who becomes slightly torn between the two" is a set of building blocks that's been used... well, "a few times" would be putting it gently. Subplots about one player trying to save his mom from eviction and another with a baby on the way are such old, hoary chestnuts they should be in black and white and from RKO. It's what you wrap around a movie's plot that sells it when it's an action genre picture.

In the case of Fireball, we get an undercover twin joining an underground game of basketball wrapped in Muai Thai Kickboxing. A solid martial arts b-picture creatively shot on video and filled with Thai atmosphere, most of the story plays second fiddle to the action, as it should.  The video look of hte film enhances the action scenes with it's realistic feel. When a body flies into the courts chain-link fence, you flinch back.

In Fireball the first team to score, or the team with the last man standing, wins. Avenging brother Tai and his team of merry misfits throw down some sweet action in the game scenes. A little CGI sweetens the pot and hides the wirework, but on the whole, Fireball is a kinetic, violent game that is, to its credit, shot in a manner where you can (mostly) follow the plays along with the punches. This game isn't shirts vs. skins, it's bleeds vs. breaks. The action scenes will bring you back to watch this one again and again, even if you're fast-forwarding through the boilerplate-plot to get to them.

SPECIAL FEATURES
Fireball is presented widescreen with options for both Thai and English 5.1 Dolby Digital Audio. Optional subtitles are available in English and Spanish. Trailers are included for a variety of Martial Arts and Ultimate Fighting films Wushu, Death Warrior, Four Dragons, Bodyguard: A New Beginning, Never Surrender and Fireball.  A nearly 12 minute behind-the-scenes featurette is included, and references the martial arts, wirework, boxing, and basketball that all got melded together in the film. All in all the typical, sturdy Lionsgate Package.


CONCLUSION
One to watch with your "Bros," Fireball mixes basketball with sweet martial arts action. 15 to 20 years ago this would star Jean Claude Van Damme or Don "The Dragon" Wilson, and be not nearly as enjoyable. This is a great mix of sports film and martial arts movie, and it's an energetic, satisfying, and bloodthirsty experience.

OVERALL PICTURE
MOVIE: B-
EXTRAS: B