Archive for the ‘Martial Arts’ Category
Monday, June 26th, 2006
The third and final entry in the Oyama trilogy starts out in pretty much the most badass way possible. A narrator explains that at this point in his life, Oyama liked to go around to different dojos and make challenges to prove the power of his karate.
So he struts into this dojo wearing his karate clothes, but also with his white gangster coat draped over his shoulders for extra style points. When the students ask who the hell he is he explains that he’s come to challenge their sensei.
I think this sensei is the same guy he’s been feuding with all throughout the series. At any rate, the guy pretty much tells Oyama that he’s an asshole for going around picking fights, because that’s against the whole idea of karate. And it’s a good point. Still, the sensei agrees to a fight, sort of. He’ll fight Oyama, but first Oyama will have to fight 100 of his students. Ha ha ha. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: karate, Sonny Chiba
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 21st, 2006
aka CHAMPION OF DEATH or FIGHTING KARATE-ULTIMATE TRUTH FIST
KARATE BULLFIGHTER is the first in a trilogy starring the great Sonny Chiba as his real life mentor Masutatsu Oyama. Apparently it’s based on a comic book called The Fanatical Karate Generation. Despite all the crazy titles this movie is really sort of a fictionalized biography of a visionary karate instructor who causes an outrage by rejecting the notions of the time. He pisses everybody off by saying that modern karate is just “a dance” and lamenting that he wasted his time by training for 3 years. He does win a big trophy in a tournament that supposedly means he’s the best karate man in Japan, but when a guy compliments him he gets all pissed off and throws it down some stairs.
It’s a real interesting story but let’s be honest, you’re not gonna watch it for an interesting story. You’re gonna watch it because it’s called Karate Bullfighter. This is because in the first half of the movie Sonny is practicing karate on the beach when suddenly he hears that a mad bull is loose. He figures maybe he should help so he saves a little girl from being gored and then wrestles the bull. He literally grabs the bull by the horns, then figuratively goes for the jugular by literally karate chopping the bull in the head until a beautiful shower of samurai movie/Dawn of the Dead style bright red blood sprays out. This is actually kind of creepy because they have a real bull for alot of shots and it looks like they somehow forced his mouth shut so he couldn’t bite. (Some of it is also clearly a fake bull.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: karate, Sonny Chiba
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | No Comments »
Friday, June 24th, 2005
BREAKING NEWS: ENTER THE DRAGON is a classic and it’s mainly because of Bruce Lee’s performance. More on this story as it develops.
Okay maybe that’s old news. He’d been trying for years to become a superstar in the US (he only went back to hong kong after being dissed one too many times by the white man). So it was a big deal for him to have his big american co-production. And in the movie he has so much screen presence that they had to build a special type of camera to film him, after going through six different regular cameras that broke because of his power.
Actually that’s complete bullshit, I just made that up. That woulda been cool though. Anyway anything you need to know about why Bruce Lee is such an icon is in this movie: the arrogant persona (his character is actually kind of a dick), the perfect physique, the powerful moves, the cool nunchucks, the occasional philosophy, the greatest theme song of all time (thank you Lalo Schifrin). But everybody knows that. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know if I talk about that. So let’s give some credit to the rest of the movie. For example, co-star John Saxon. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bolo Yeung, Bruce Lee, international co-productions, Jim Kelly, John Saxon, Robert Clouse, Sammo Hung
Posted in Martial Arts, Reviews | 49 Comments »
Friday, June 24th, 2005
aka SHAOLIN MASTER KILLER
So you got these fuckin Tartars goin around oppressing people, right? No surprise there. Humiliating people, publicly executing people, fucking with innocent people’s seafood shops and all that kind of crap. I mean let’s be honest here, we all know how these fuckin Tartars are. And in a Shaw Brothers classic like this, we know Gordon Liu is gonna do something about it.
There’s this classroom of kids (played by adults) and they’ve been learning about the importance of their country and standing up to their enemies but they can’t figure out why they’re learning this in the classroom and then watching the Tartars pull this kind of crap. Are those lessons just words or are they concepts they should really live by? They decide on the second one and when they try to stand up and make a difference, they are rewarded with a serious assbeating.
But Gordon gets away, and you know what he always does when he gets away. He finds his way to the Shaolin Temple where the monks patch him up, then he demands to stay and become a monk, and then he asks to learn kung fu. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Gordon Liu, Shaw Brothers
Posted in Martial Arts, Reviews | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, June 7th, 2005
Well when it comes to the classics of the kung fu genre, who the fuck knows where to start? Not me, but a recent browsing of the book THE WU-TANG MANUAL BOOK 1 by outlaw award winning composer RZA gave me some tips. In one chapter he tells about the three kung fu movies that most influenced him, and this one sounded the best. He tells a story about getting high and watching it late at night with a gentleman named “Ghostface” and some other buddies from the Stapleton projects. Supposedly they all started crying because of its messages of brotherhood. It would be interesting to know which scene got them going.
The movie comes from our friends the Shaw Brothers and it’s apparently considered one of their best. And god damn if it isn’t one of the best martial arts pictures that I’ve seen, anyway. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Gordon Liu, Shaw Brothers
Posted in Martial Arts, Reviews | 5 Comments »
Thursday, March 3rd, 2005
Two time Oscar winner Hilary Swank, hailing from Bellingham, Washington, stars in the explosive finale to the Karate Kid quadilogy. This one was Swank’s first starring role and came out in 1994, when movies were just as crappy but not quite as funny as their ’80s counterparts. The director is Christopher Cain, father of Dean Cain and director of The Amazing Panda Adventure.
Swank plays Julie, a pouty, sullen teenage girl who lives unhappily with her grandma after the death of her parents. Anything anybody says to Julie, she takes offense and throws a hissy fit. You know how old people are, they try to be nice but they don’t really understand where your teenage mind is coming from, so they offer you some lemon bars or something and you’re like “GOD DAMN IT WHY CAN’T YOU JUST LEAVE ME ALONE?!” and run out of the room crying. So then Julie goes in and stabs grandma to death in her sleep, while jerkin off. Or was that a different movie? I can’t remember. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christopher Cain, Hilary Swank, Michael Ironside, Pat Morita, Walton Goggins
Posted in Family, Martial Arts, Reviews | 3 Comments »
Sunday, September 19th, 2004
HERO is no surprise. I knew I was gonna like this movie. I heard enough to know this was gonna be a good one. I mean it’s got that acclaimed director who did all those movies I haven’t seen like THE ROAD HOME. But then instead of doing another movie like that, what he does, he gets Jet Li and Maggie Cheung and Donnie Yen and Zhang Yiyi and he says, let’s do an awesome fucking epic with kung fu and swords and about ten million arrows.
This movie has been making the rounds for years. It got nominated for the foreign film oscar, and it played the seattle international film festival, and it’s been on DVD in Asia forever which is no problem for a worldly dude like me, I’ve been free of the region code shackles for years. Region 2, region 3, bring it on motherfuckers, I go all the way up to region 4, region 5 on a good day. I could do region 10 if they threw it at me, region 11, I don’t give a fuck. Anything. But here in region 1 Miramax was supposed to release HERO in theaters. What they wanted to do was leave it on the shelf for years and finally put it out when there’s less interest. That worked so well with SHAOLIN SOCCER. Unfortunately HERO was sitting on the shelf but then it fell off the shelf and got stuck behind the desk and nobody knew it was there. Then I think Tarantino dropped a pencil back there or something, so he reached back there and he felt HERO. So he pulled it out and dusted it off and he was like, “You guys still have this? You should, like, release it in theaters, where people go to watch movies projected on a screen.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Donnie Yen, Jet Li, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Zhang Yimou, Ziyi Zhang
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 31st, 2004
What if I were to tell you that there was a movie based on a story by Bruce Lee (sort of based on his zen philosophy), starring David Carradine (in multiple roles) but also featuring Christopher Lee, Roddy McDowall and Eli Wallach? And maybe I would also say it takes place in a fantasy world and Carradine plays a flute that he also uses for a weapon, and let’s say that my man James Coburn – well, he’s not in it as an actor, but being a student of Bruce Lee maybe he helped write the story. And then the screenplay was written by Sterling Silophant who wrote THE TOWERING INFERNO and crap like that. But then the director was some guy named Richard Moore who only directed that one movie. But he was cinematographer for THE STONE KILLER with Charles Bronson. But also ANNIE.
Well let’s take the gloves off, you can forget about “what if” and come down to the world of reality because I’m about to tell you that I just saw EXACTLY THAT movie described above. (see above.) CIRCLE OF IRON starts out with a corny statement about Bruce Lee before going into a MORTAL KOMBAT type competition where half naked white dudes with mustaches do karate against each other as some type of a test. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bruce Lee, David Carradine, Jeff Cooper, Roddy McDowall, Stirling Silliphant
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 2 Comments »
Sunday, August 15th, 2004
(aka MUAY THAI WARRIOR)
You see, there’s this small town in Thailand somewhere (possibly called Ong-Bak, unless that is only the name of the buddha statue there, but the subtitles led me to believe it was the name of both). Anyway, there’s a young man there named Ting (played by Tony Jaa) who is working hard to prove himself as a master of Muay Thai Kickboxing, or Thai Fist. That’s quite enough bullshit for a young man to have on his mind but then some other asshole has to sneak in and cut off the head of their buddha statue so he can sell it. All the old ladies start crying that the town is not protected anymore so before you know it this little old country boy is headed for big bad Bangkok to get the shit back. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Prachya Pinkaew, Thai action, Tony Jaa
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | No Comments »
Friday, November 14th, 2003
Hey folks, Harry here… Vern, being one to only see the arty movies like the ones he mentions below is the perfect choice to review that hero of the Arthouses… I’m of course talking about Steven Seagal and his latest starring success… …ahem… Anyway, lest you get tired of reading about Seagal’s Private Investigator on Drudge-linked stories, now you get the skinny on the top man himself. And if you ever sit down with Seagal for lunch, play the… “How would you kill me” game, where you just continually ask him, once every 4 minutes or so how he would kill you. I hear this is amazingly entertaining as Seagal has an endless variety of ways to kill the annoying fuck sitting across from him. Go on, give it a try!
Vern reviews BELLY OF THE BEAST by Ching Siu-Tung
Boys –
I know you are fans of the hong kong cinema, martial arts, karate, and etc. So I bet you probaly know who Ching Siu-Tung is. Or maybe you know him as Siu-Tung Ching, or Siu-tung Chin, or Tony Tung Yee Ching, or Xiaodong Cheng, or Tony Ching Siu Tung, or just plain Tony Ching. I don’t know, the dude has lots of names. But the point is not what the dude’s name or names is, the point is what the dude does. He may not be as well known in the united states of america as your John Woos or your Yuen Woo Pings or your Tsui Harks. But I bet you’ve seen some of his works before. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ching Siu-Tung, DTV, international co-productions, Seagalogy, Steven Seagal
Posted in Action, AICN, Martial Arts, Reviews, Seagal | 4 Comments »
