Ash is Purest White's Cmaerawork and Lead Performance Make Good Use of The Passage of Time

YMCA is a go-to music staple in movies, but it's usually used for comedic purposes, like as a way to close out Despicable Me 2 with a requisite animated movie dance party. I totally wasn't expecting it to show up in a dark drama like Ash is Purest White but not only does it make an appearance here, it's utilized in a very thought-provoking manner. At first, it's simply used as a tune playing in a club that the corrupt lead characters are partying at, just a familiar jaunty song for the main players of Ash is Purest White to dance to. But then portions of the song are played over footage of ragged-looking citizens in despair. YMCA is a song about the downtrodden having "...a place you can go..." when you have nothing else, so to have this peppy tune play over these shots of the marginalized in such dehumanizing conditions proves to be appropriately unsettling.

One Child Nation Emphasizes the Human Cost of Blindly Following a National Policy

For people like myself who were only vaguely aware of China's One-Child Policy that was implemented in the country from 1979 to 2015, the new documentary One Child Nation will prove to be highly informative and fascinating experience. Directed by Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang, the feature follows Wang returning to her home country of China to uncover more answers regarding this policy. Now that she's a mother herself, the idea of living in a country where the Government controls how many kids you can and cannot have is one that unnerves her. At first interviewing her relatives and individuals tasked with implementing this policy, Wang and Zhang's documentary gradually uncovers a whole slew of deeper sinister conspiracies within this policy in a timely tale of the human cost of dangerous blinding loyalty to nationalism.

Wolf Warrior II Improves On The Action Of Its Predecessor But Still Remains Too Generic

For my American readers, it's likely you haven't even heard of Wolf Warrior II, but if you're a resident of China, well, the odds are good you're very much acquainted with this motion picture due to the massive box office success it's experienced in China. Breaking box office records left and right in its home country of China, Wolf Warrior II has become the biggest movie of all-time in China and has amassed the second largest box office sum ever accumulated by one movie in one country, only behind the $936 million grossed by Star Wars: The Force Awakens in the U.S. in 2015. Already one of the ten biggest movies of the year at the worldwide box office, Wolf Warriors II is a phenomenon.

Wolf Warriors Comes Off Like The Chinese Equivalent To A Peter Berg Movie

Currently, the big Chinese box office juggernaut is Wolf Warriors 2, an action motion picture that just overtook Stephen Chow's The Mermaid to become the biggest movie of all-time in the country. It's nowhere near done with its massive box office run either and it looks like it'll likely crack $750 million at the Chinese box office, a massively impressive sum. You might be wondering if the box office performance of the first Wolf Warriors was big enough to serve as, with the power of retrospect, some kind of harbinger of the its successor huge success, but in fact, the first Wolf Warriors made a solid but not humongous $80.9 million that made it the 27th biggest movie of China.

Rock Dog Is A Bad Boy

Are the various animation studios now just playing Mad Libs with these computer-animated movies? Inspired by the success of Ratatouille and Kung Fu Panda a decade ago, are they just now taking random animal names and random occupations that would juxtapose against the aforementioned animal and just calling that a plot? We've seen this phenomenon with the likes of Turbo and Norm Of The North and now a plot device intended to drum up an underdog story (that can be used well in the right circumstances it should be noted) that's easy to get invested in just feels stale at this point. The newest entry in this trend is Rock Dog, which is, as the title suggests, about a dog who wishes to be a rock musician.

Good Wall Hunting

For those hoping The Great Wall turned out to be a big-budget misfire diamond in the rough ala the highly underappreciated John Carter, alas, it is not. For those curious if The Great Wall is a big budget colossal failure like Batman v. Superman: Dawn Of Justice or The Last Airbender, it is also not fitting of that description. Instead, what we get here is a mostly boring result of being merely a forgettable motion picture with decent production value found in the myriad of colorful costumes and some actually decently well-designed monsters while its scattershot script lets those positive elements down big time.

Summer Movie Memories: The Fourth Transformers Movie Ambition Is Only Outmatched By Its Idiocy

My reaction to Trans4mers

Up until Labor Day, I'll be looking at seven different summer movies from Summer 2014 and analyzing what really made them stand out this summer, for reasons both good and bad. Obviously, SPOILERS for Transformers: Age of Extinction lie ahead.