CamelCamelCamel

I expected a clichéd Rocky-like ('underdog fights his way to the top against all odds!') melodrama from the plot description, and was very glad to discover that the Judo only holds a very marginal role in a movie that's driven by its characters. And to make it even more unique is a very cheeky sense of silliness - only once or twice does Throwdown take itself seriously, and, contrary to just about every other Hong Kong movie I've ever seen, the drama doesn't get confused (or overblown to the point of embarrassing melodrama) in the translation. At times it's very subtle (again, alien to most Hong Kong movies I've seen) and poignant, in addition to sometimes being very funny.

And as for the acting, I don't believe I'd seen Louis Koo act before, but I think this was a fine introduction. The same goes for Cherrie Ying, who nearly steals the show with her performance that's in tune with Faye Wong's in Chungking Express (read: so cute you just want to wear her as a hat). And Aaron Kwok, I believe I'll have to reevaluate my apparently unfair opinion of him. He was excellent -- both funny and intense, and fully convincing as a brawler (let's see an American pop singer get the same review).

Anyway, if you expect a somber action movie, I can see where you might be disappointed. Personally, I'm very pleased to know of a movie that's so relentlessly fun and charming.

I had The Cartoon Network on in the background while I was just sitting around, and this Tom and Jerry short caught my attention, obviously being relatively modern. Usually, of course, these attempts to revitalize or even just homage old franchises fails horribly, but this one caught me off guard -- it barely tried. In fact, I believe I counted three actual attempts at gags. The bulk of the cartoon seemed a showcase for those "wacky modern art backgrounds" where the fill colors are misaligned with the outline of objects, every sound effect the director could pull out of his library, and modern appliances (boringly enough).

Of course you might recall that the classic Tom and Jerry cartoons often involved household objects from ironing boards to steam presses to refrigerators. So apparently these references to everyday devices were what the creative team behind The Mansion Cat remembered most fondly, so instead of supplying us with the inventive slapstick of olde, they try to impress us with ice-makers, big-screen TVs, VCRs, coffee machines, riding lawnmowers, and wall-mounted fish aquariums. Frankly it looked more like a Sears ad than an attempt at humor.

This just compounds the fact that modern cartoons couldn't hold a candle to the old '40s and '50s cartoons pouring out of MGM, Disney, and Fleischer Studios. With the exception of Spongebob Squarepants and the older Dexter's Laboratory, you'd think modern creators aren't even trying, even though they've got the luxury of having an actual paradigm to follow (unlike the creators of the classics). I don't know where the funny cartoonists have gone, but they certainly didn't come anywhere near this one.

This was the first movie I'd seen with Kinski in a starring role, and unfortunately I had to see a bootleg copy as that was the only option available to me. And I don't know if it was the quality of the bootleg or maybe a lazy director of photography, but three fourths of this movie are as dark as a poorly-edited, moonless night!

Besides Kinski's charisma (that you can't even see in this movie anyway) and the cool way he's filmed in the beginning, with the camera roving and encircling and following him like he's a God himself, And God Said to Cain has nothing going for it. Story wise it plays all its cards right away, with the big confrontation/reveal being just about as quaint as anything you could imagine. Immediately our hero, "Gary", knows who his foe is and what he wants to do to him, and the entire movie is his monotonous advance toward doing it. There are some bad guys who stand around in the dark (at least I think they were guys; I'm not kidding about it being dark) who Gary shoots every once in a while, but mostly the movie consists of Gary taking half an hour to walk through a cave, and a priest being shot, then getting up and pounding on the organ, then getting shot, then getting up and pounding on the organ, then getting shot... at this point in the movie I was finding my fingernails pretty interesting (and well lit).

The atrocious lighting and boring story are the fundamental flaws, but there are pet peeves I have with it, too. "Gary" isn't exactly a mythical, awe-inspiring name. One of the big sub-plots is an impending tornado that everyone seems able to predict. "How long do you think we have before it gets here," Gary says to an old man who obnoxiously slurps every bite of his food LOUDLY, and for what seems like HOURS. Here, the director decided that pointing the camera directly at the sun might make a good contrast to the rest of the movie being filmed in the coat closet, but to me it didn't make any sense. "Say, where are you going with that mattress?" "Why, I'm taking it to the saloon, to cover the whiskey so it won't be destroyed by the tornado that's coming tonight!" Yep, an uncanny meteorological sense, even among the drunks.

I wanted to see it because it seemed obscure, I like what I've seen of Klaus Kinski, and "And God Said to Cain" is a really cool-sounding title. What it was, however, was a movie not only mundane and plodding, but frustrating in that you can't see what's happening. Oh, and there was also the slurping.