Turbo the Movie (2009)

http://www.turbothemovie.com/
A friend of mine that likes really stupid videos sent me this. You can watch this piece of shit at that link if you want. I actually suggest you just skip through it to see if you can piece together the story from little evenly distributed 2 second snippets because it's better that way. Let me tell you, this production is an embarrassment. Name any evaluational metric for a movie, be it acting skill, special effects quality, or story writing, and you will find that Turbo (the movie) fails at them all.

One of the recent trends I've noticed on the internet is a niche of Asian style made-for-asians-by-asian-american movies. I watched a few of these and they've all been fairly lousy. For some reason, Asian people just don't know how to produce movies (unless you're from Hong Kong which pretty much guarantees that you're a brilliant filmmaker). Asian Americans in California frequently complain about having to work harder than everyone else. Well I say that when it comes to movies, they're not working nearly hard enough. The fact that an asian kid beats a white kid at sports in your story doesn't make it a good movie.

Rating: 10%

Shinjuku Incident (2009)

After I saw the trailer for this I was fixed on it. Could this really be a movie with Jackie Chan that wasn't retarded? Could this actually be a movie about Chinese-Japanese relations that didn't involve rage filled arguments about contemporary history? Yes it had all of those things and more. I guess when Jackie Chan doesn't get a shitty writer his acting can really shine. He plays a poor Chinese peasant that immigrates illegally to Japan in the 90s. The Chinese are to Japan as Mexicans are to California. Impoverished, loud, and a public nuisance, they're constantly begging for work or being harried by police.

Japanese society fosters high levels of racism to the Chinese. Both local gangs and police officials give them lots of trouble so they must band together to form their own gangs to help them survive and compete in their new environment. Above all, Jackie wants to do things honestly. His virtuosity takes him very far among the big players in Tokyo. He brings his fellow Chinese the security and prosperity they crave but upsets the established order of Yakuza and Taiwanese gangs. This is where Jackie's acting is at it's best. His character is simplistic but not stubborn, impressive but not exaggerated.

Jackie Chan is normally such a carefree guy that it's very disturbing to see him take part in this much brutality.
Rating: 100%