Spinning - the first three Funkadelic albums. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard them, but I never spent alot of time with them before. They’re great. I really would have gone nuts over them if I’d gotten then when I was in college.

The Seven Samurai is one of the greatest and most entertaining movies ever made, IMHO. BD is right that Hidden Fortress is always cited as the bigger influence on Star War. I see the influence, the the pre-occupation with the impact these movies had on Star Wars sells these movies short.

I’ve been a fan of Japan’s historical genre films for a long time, but this weekend I swam the pond, as they say in Asia, to check out some of the foundational Wuxia movies (kung fu movies set before the modern era).

Come Drink With Me - The first great Shaw Brothers action movie (so I’ve been told). It stars ballerina-turned-action-star Cheng Pei-pei, who I think was the first female Hong Kong action star, but I’ve never seen any Wuxia made before this one so maybe I’m wrong.
For big action scenes involving over a dozen people, this is the most impressive of these movies. And it has a great musical number too! There are some problems with the storytelling though. It basically switches main characters a ways into the movie, and that doesn’t really work. We’re also supposed to accept Cheng Pei-pei using a bunch of soldiers as cannon fodder to rescue her brother, but we’re not really told why he’s important enough for all these people to die for him.

Dragon Inn - Maybe the action isn’t quite as impressive here, but it’s still great, and the movie as a whole is more well put together. Great location photography and use of the Inn as set to build most of the action around. This was my favorite movie of the bunch. Both this and Come Drink With Me were directed by King Hu. I’ll probably watch his supposed masterpiece, A Touch of Zen, next weekend.

One Armed Swordsman - Both this and the next one are directed by Chang Cheh, who made a million of these movies. Unlike the King Hu movies, the two Cheh movies I watched use sound stages and focus on smaller scale action scenes. This one is about a guy who’s dad dies defending a Kung Fu Master, who then adopts him. But his jerkass step-siblings accidentally cut his arm off when they’re fucking with him, so then he moves in with a common girl, becomes a one-armed swordman, and ends up having to save his former family’s asses. This is the most character oriented of these movies, with a plot that would have been standard stuff in Japan at the time. I don’t know if its skepticism about warrior culture was unusually transgressive for Hong Kong at the time, but this movie was historically important in general.

Crippled Avengers - A kung fu master’s enemies kill his wife and cut his sons arms off. Then he has metal hands made for his son and you think he’s going to grow up to be a hero, but he really grows up to be a think-skinned asshole. Then he and his dad go around maiming people that offend them, and four of those people team up to overcome their disabilities and kill the guy with metal hands and his dad in a series of spectacular kung fu battles. These action scenes make up most of the movie, but as a story this is pretty dumb. One of the heroes has brain damage that is supposed to render him “simple minded,” which is supposed to be funny but is really just cringy and annoying. Too bad this wasn’t a successfully Hawskian buddy-action movie, but the characters are pretty flat and some of this is really goofy in a bad way. The fight scenes still rule the world though. Hopefully Cheh made something this spectacular that is at least pretty good in the story/character department.

and I also watched a big Babble favorite

Crumb - This was more gripping than any of those four action movies. It’s hard to believe these people are real. With all the misogyny and racial stereotypes, I feel like if this came out now it would have resulted in Crumb being burned at the stake. Especially that scene of him laughing at his brother’s story about pulling a woman’s pants down at a checkout counter. The scenes with his other, shut in brother were disturbing and I was not surprised with the closing text informing us that he’s taken his own life.
I wonder if any of the women he’s talking about in the scene where he shows us the drawings of his secret high school crushes saw this.
Is anyone here really familiar with his comics?