Straight to DVD: Original “Karate Kid” on Blu-ray

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 10:14:00 +0000

"Hey, it's the 80s," says Daniel Larusso, aka Daniel-san (Ralph Macchio), as he hands his car keys to his girlfriend Ali (Elizabeth Shue) in the original 1984 version of "The Karate Kid." And it is the '80s, all right. Daniel-san wears a headband throughout the last half of the movie, his mom is nearly crushed under the burden of enormous shoulder pads and even the evil sensei has feathered hair. When you add a soundtrack populated with cuts by Survivor, Bananarama and Gang of Four (!), you've got a real time-capsule movie on your hands. You can cram "The Karate Kid" into an indestructible canister along with beta tapes of "Top Gun," "The Breakfast Club" and a couple of episodes of "The A-Team" and just wait for civilization to end, knowing that future generations will get what the '80s were all about (providing they can find a working Sony Betamax).

Does the world need another “Karate Kid”?

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:20:00 +0000

In an age when we think of bullying as something that happens on Facebook, director Harald Zwart's reimagining of the '80s teen classic "The Karate Kid" seems almost old-fashioned. In this world, kids don't carry cellphones, they don't talk smack on each other's MySpace pages — they just beat the living hell out of each other.

This suspension of technological disbelief is abetted by the fact that the action takes place in Beijing, where 12-year-old Dre Parker (Jaden Smith, filling the role that made Ralph Macchio a star) and his widowed mom have moved to start a new life. On his first day in town, Dre chats up a pretty classmate and manages to piss off the wrong gang of thugs from the Show No Mercy Academy for Young Psychopaths. And the hits just keep coming. In the film's slow-building early scenes, Dre alternates between stoic misery, genuine terror and pitching tantrums to his mom like the child he still is. It's only after his building's grumpy super Mr. Han (Jackie Chan) jumps into the fray while he's receiving a particularly brutal pummeling that Dre begins to bloom. If that weird old guy can manage those cool moves, how hard can it be?

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Straight to DVD: Original “Karate Kid” on Blu-ray

Does the world need another “Karate Kid”?