Keanu Reeves Seeks to Break New Ground With His Directorial Debut

The Matrix still stands as one of the most revolutionary films of all time.  It brought the traditions of Hong Kong action cinema to western shores, and made them part of Hollywood’s filmmaking language.  Alas, that proved to be both a blessing and a curse.  Instead of prompting Hollywood filmmakers to step up their fight choreography game, they simply used CGI and other tricks to enhance otherwise lackluster fight scenes.  That tendency grew progressively worse over the past 13 years, leading to the glut of incoherent “chaos” filmmaking that now rules the multiplexes.  It is somewhat fitting that the star of the watershed film that helped usher in the current era of action cinema is now trying to take things back to a more classical approach.

Television Series Trailer: Black Dynamite: The Animated Series

Last August, the pilot episode for Black Dynamite: The Animated Series premiered on adultswim.com.  Some thought its brand of raunchy humor much too crude, and its zany tone over the top.  I found it to be aggressively faithful to the source material.  I’d even argue that it’s exactly what Michael Jai White and Scott Sanders would’ve done with the live-action film had he been given a larger budget.  I also figured that the pilot was merely a taste of the sheer insanity to come, seeing as how a full season of shows would only push farther in the same Looney direction.  As I suspected, the full trailer for Black Dynamite: The Animated Series indeed promises a walk down the wild side.