Railroad Tigers - a Jackie Chan action movie with a little bit of a difference.  Jackie Chan doesn't play the lead.  He is a member of the Railway Tigers, a Resistance group in occupied China during WWII.  In December 1941, Japan expands the occupation of its neighbouring countries to Southeast Asia. The railway from Tianjin to Nanjing in East China became a key military transportation route, heavily guarded by Japanese soldiers. Railroad worker Ma Yuan (Jackie Chan) leads a team of freedom fighters. Using his deep knowledge of the train network, he and his men sabotage it, ambushing Japanese soldiers and stealing supplies to feed the starving Chinese. Although the freedom fighters have no weapons of their own, they employ whatever tools are at hand, including a hammer and shovels, loose railway track planks and diverted trains. The local Chinese call the unlikely heroes the “Railroad Tigers”. The freedom fighters find themselves on the wrong side of the tracks when the Japanese send reinforcements to Shandong. In an act of defiance, Ma Yuan launches his most dangerous mission yet, blowing up a heavily guarded railroad bridge. When the Japanese learn of the crippling plan, which will derail the war effort, the stakes are raised even higher. After many missed opportunities and missed shots, the bridge is blown up by the ragtag Chinese railroad tigers.  The usual load of Kung Fu action sequences and a spectacular train smash at the end.  They have some quite reasonable mockups of Japanese Tanks even if they had overlong barrels and internally are all mixed up.  About a 8 or 9 out of 10.  Well worth watching.

A Man Called Otto

A tad on the corny side and a little over-the-top on the tear-jerker scale but I enjoyed it.

Tom Hanks is always good.

Scream 6

I will spoil the movie for you. The killer(s) are involved in another butthurt revenge plot. If you liked Scream 5, you will be okay with this sequel.

The villains have absolutely no motivation for their killing spree. And if you wanted to revenge kill someone, you would not make a big spectacle about the whole ordeal. That is where the movie insults the audience. It is getting boring. And I have enough motivation to ditch my first 5 movies of this franchise, as this 6th movie has spoiled the whole theme.

Rating: C+

65

This seems like a time-travel movie at first. But, it seems like the storyline is that humans visited Earth 65 million years ago accidentally, through a crash landing. Adam Driver stars as "Mills" -- a pilot from a distant planet with an advanced human race. Mills takes on a job of transporting people to other regions of the universe, as a way of funding his daughter's treatment for some illness.

During a journey, Mills wakes up to his space ship hitting an asteroid field, disabling and splitting up his ship, and having to crash land on Earth... 65 million years ago. Thinking that he is the only survivor, he opts not to ask for a rescue. However, his idea of survival changes when one of the cryogenic chambers happens to have a survivor -- a girl called "Koa". Immediately, a language barrier is established as the two have to communicate as best as they can to make a journey to the other section of their crashed ship (15 km away).

The whole trouble with the planet Earth is the cretaceous period still has dinosaurs. Making their way to the section of the ship with the escape shuttle proves problematic with the carnivorous dinosaurs seemingly endlessly hunting the human prey. Mills has to use his advanced technology to survive the elements. Koa plays a decent support role, trying to get back to her parents, as well as helping Mills as best she could survive.

The chemistry of the two lead actors are quite impressive. Part of the story is Mills' absence for his daughter to suffer to her disease, whilst Mills is traversing the universe. Koa provides the substitute daughter figure of the story.

The visuals of the movie are quite impressive. The dinosaurs do look a bit cartoonish. But the animation of the computer generated imagery are quite strong. The only let down of this movie was that they could have come up with a better ending. I felt that the finality of the movie was a bit rushed.

Rating: B+

Very good.

Excellent cinematography.

Quite similar to 1917 but this time from the German viewpoint against the French.



The futility of war demonstrated yet again.

UnSubRocky wrote on Mar 20^th, 2023 at 3:24pm:


I've only seen short clips from that 1930s version. It looks pretty good for its day.

Captain Nemo wrote on Mar 21^st, 2023 at 9:00am:


It's excellent!

https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/67079/all-quiet-on-the-western-front#overview