At The Movies with Bryan, the Wannabe Filmmaker

There is a legitimately great horror movie that could have been made about the K-pop industry (there could easily be body-horror film about what these girls put themselves through just to be accepted by the industry), but White: Melody of Death is content with being a passable horror movie – it often feels like a cross between Final Destination and The Ring. Indeed, the horror is the least interesting aspect of White ; the films more entertaining elements center around the behind-the-scenes drama that plagues many K-pop girl groups.   The movie is more interesting in how it eerily parallels the career of its star, Hahm Eun-jung. Granted, she wasn’t the victim of a vengeful ghost but of unfounded bullying accusations that were propped by up spiteful netizens.   Eun-jung was a member of the popular girl group, T-ara, and a year after White was released, the group would be accused of bullying former member, Ryu Hwayong. This was a scandal that haunted the group for nearly half a decad

Joysticks is the type of movie that will make have you asking: Is this the worst movie ever? It’s also a movie that modern audiences would label “problematic,” and rightfully so. While I tend to think that criticism of movies promoting “rape culture” can be overblown at times, it’s not entirely unfounded, and a movie like Joysticks completely validates such criticism.   It’s hard to talk about this movie without placing it in the context of the era it was made. In 1978, Animal House was a huge hit at the box office and, consequently, this resulted in endless rip-offs.   Flash forward to 1982 and Pac-Man was all the rage in the video game world. This is when a producer came up with the idea to combine the two. “People LOVED Animal House and they love Pac-Man, if I can combine the two, I will have a huge hit on my head.” The result was Joysticks – an extremely unwatchable sex comedy that serves two functions: 1) to display as much gratuitous nudity as possible and 2) to act as one long

  If you ever listened to modern day YouTubers and bloggers, you would think that the Girl Boss Film is a modern-day phenomenon.   Indeed, many online influencers genuinely believe that there were no strong female characters prior to 2016.    Of course, anyone who has watched 70s Hong Kong and Japanese Cinema know that those films featured a whole variety of Girl Bosses. The Japanese studio, Toei, had quite an impressive stable of kickass females, most notably:   Meiko Kaji (Female Prisoner Scorpion), Reiko Ike ( Sex and Fury, Queen Bee’s Challenge), Miki Sugimoto ( Girl Boss Revenge: Sukeban) and the star of today’s review, Etsuko Shihomi. In my review for the Female Prisoner Scorpion, I claimed that Meiko Kaji was the female equivalent to Clint Eastwood. Etsuko Shihomi is more on par with Bruce Lee than she is with Clint Eastwood.   In the Female Prisoner Scorpion series, Nami was a woman of a few words and always kept her cool, regardless of the situation. She was cold and a ca