Rated PG Newsletter - Issue 08

After taking a break for two weeks between entries, I do believe I have a good idea for how to continue this newsletter moving forward. Instead of weekly updates on the random films I’ve been watching or the games I’ve been playing, I want to turn it into a monthly feature about a certain film or game that struck me during the month. There is nothing on my mind right now, but we’re also in kind of a dead spot for major releases. Fall is gearing up and with every major game landing before Grand Theft Auto VI, I’m bound to find something to write about.

Film-wise, I do still want to write something about Operation Scorpio, which just received a fantastic Blu-ray from 88 Films. Overlooked for a long time, I was surprised by just how packed the disc is with special features. It’s miraculous that 88 tracked down Won Jin, but I’m more surprised to learn he contributed stunts to Squid Game. That makes a ton of sense, but I thought he basically vanished after his short stint in HK cinema.

Games These Past Two Weeks

So, gaming wise, I’ve mostly been finishing up Devil May Cry 5 and Splatoon Raiders, then dicking around with some other stuff. Very recently (as in yesterday), I started replaying the original Baldur’s Gate for the hell of it. I had begun a playthrough in Black Myth: Wukong, but that game is ass. People really need to get over their obsession with Soulslike design, because even the most basic and sloppy of Souls-ish games tends to get mega praise. Wukong isn’t a catastrophe or anything, but it’s so laggy, so over animated, and so dedicated to bland ass environments that I don’t know that I’ll even finish it.

The big release between the last newsletter entry was Quake: Dawn of the Machine. A shadow drop for Quakecon 2025 to celebrate Quake’s 30th anniversary, it’s a brand-new episode crafted by MachineGames that pushes Quake to its very limits. It’s also a full-length game, clocking in at around six and a half hours for my first playthrough on Hard. I thought it was great, mixing modern design sensibilities with punishing difficulty and some interesting pseudo-RPG mechanics. To me, Dawn of the Machine is almost like a realization of the original blueprint for Quake, which id Software had wanted to turn into an RPG. There’s a multitude of reasons why they didn’t (chief among them being John Carmack is an asshole), but there’s now a way to experience that which feels true to the original ethos of the game. I streamed my playthrough if you’re curious to see that.

Movies These Past Two Weeks

It would be easier to list the films I watched over the last 14 days rather than write nine paragraphs about everything. A decent chunk were rewatches anyway, so I don’t have much to add with regard to how I feel about those.

• Satin Steel (08/02)
• My Heart is That Eternal Rose (08/04)
• Nomad (08/06)
• Flash Point (08/07) – Rewatch
• Rise of the Legend (08/08)
• Kick-Ass (08/09) – Rewatch
• Army of Darkness (08/10) – Rewatch
• Life of Brian (08/12) – Rewatch
• Immaculate (08/13)
• Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (08/14)

Starting off with the good, My Heart is That Eternal Rose is definitely not spoken about enough in action cinema circles. Maybe it’s because the film isn’t specifically action, but director Patrick Tam was on the cusp of reforming the entire HK film industry with this. The direction is decidedly Western appealing, cribbing from Jean-Luc Godard’s oeuvre, but some early cinematography from Wong Kar-wai stalwart Christopher Doyle makes for an absolutely gorgeous film. If Johnnie To hadn’t made his own sendoff to “Heroic Bloodshed” movies some 15 years later, I would say this was the final word on the genre.

Kick-Ass I wanted to rewatch because of how some it has been since I originally saw it. I honestly can’t believe the film is approaching its 20th anniversary, but with how boring superhero movies have been getting, save for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, I wondered if it would hold up after all this time. I think in terms of style and tone, director Matthew Vaughn was onto something. We’ve seen a handful of R-rated superhero movies since, but Kick-Ass dove right into the grittiness inherent with the graphic novel. The action choreography is still fantastic, but some jokes and even the treatment of its female characters (save for Hit-Girl) come off as exceptionally outdated.

I also finally decided to sit down with Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, and I think I was right to give up on Tarantino’s movies some years ago. Don’t get me wrong: I still enjoy his earlier work. I was there for Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair last year, and I have the 4K discs of his first four movies, but something about how self-indulgent his writing has become over time has turned me off. Inglorious Basterds has a hell of an ending, but everything else about that movie bores the hell out of me. Once Upon a Time is similar to that, though it does feature some great character moments interspersed in its nearly three-hour runtime. I had a particular fondness for the exchange between DiCaprio and Julia Butters, which felt like it could have come from a much better movie about coming to terms with your fading success (and it might even be autobiographical, in some way). As it stands, I don’t think Tarantino even knows how to follow up his own success anymore, and I doubt his fabled “final” movie will change my mind on the matter.

Next Issue

As I stated above, the next installment of this newsletter will be dedicated to a single movie or game. It will be written like a deep dive into aspects of a work I find interesting or engaging. I’d like to make that a recurring feature on here to highlight my abilities. I haven’t written an essay for a film release in quite some time, and since the jobs seem to be drying up, I figured I’ll just make them myself. I used to contribute to a staff-wide feature at Flixist called “Deep Dive,” of which I wrote a 3,000-word essay on Jet Li’s Fearless.

Don’t think I have forgotten about the potential launch of the Times Square Kung Fu podcast. My good friend Frankie Balboa has been busy with different projects and hasn’t found the time to get on it. We had recorded a review, of sorts, for The Furious roughly two months back, but he wasn’t entirely satisfied with it. I’ll defer to his judgement, especially since we had a similar situation when recording our commentary for the 88 Films release of Fong Sai-Yuk 2. He tends to know best when it comes to that.