Mouth and several others have sent me the link to this blog post by the film academician David Bordwell. (Unfortunately he never mentions Seagal in there, so I can’t call him ‘fellow Seagalogist’ or ‘my esteemed colleague.’ And I’m not familiar enough with his work to call him ‘Dave.’)
It’s a good one and I figure it oughta be on the reading list. Basically he does a shot-by-shot analysis (with screen grabs) of a fight scene from the Pierce Brosnan James Bond movie TOMORROW NEVER DIES and one from the Jackie Chan movie RIGHTING WRONGS. He shows how in the Bond scene the hits or even the enemies are often off screen, and shows how the Chan scene is designed to show fluid and clear movement. He also makes a good point about how the Chan scene is able to use very quick shots and still be understandable, which proves that the problem with that Michael Bay style is more than just the editing.
There’s a new version of THE PHANTOM out on DVD that tries to be BATMAN-BEGINS-realistic instead of old-fashioned-serial-goofy. It uses the same concept of the Walker family and associates passing down the name and methods of The Ghost Who Walks, but in the context of the modern world. You know, computers and internet and shit. The new Phantom can do acrobatics and what not but not because of jungle training. He does it because he’s a parkour dude. I actually thought that was a good way to explain it. I just didn’t like the dad saying, “None of this parkay stuff” and the kid whines “Daaa-aad, it’s called parkour!”
You know what movie gets a bad rap, or unfairly ignored? Well, you probly already guessed it’s gonna be the one I wrote the title of above and then there’s a picture of it to the left. Maybe this is not the best format for a guessing game of this type, now that I think about it. If that’s your answer then you are correct, THE PHANTOM from 1996 starring Billy Zane gets a bad rap or is unfairly ignored.
You guys ever heard of this one?
You know when you got a relative who thinks you’re into, say, motorcycle races or whatever, so every time they find a newspaper article that has a motorcycle in it they clip it out and send it to you? And you don’t really feel like you need to read about “Motorcycle Trail raises money for scholarships” or “Harley-Riding Lawyer Part of Biker Group That Helps Abused Pets,” but it’s kind of sweet anyway? Well, that’s gonna be me right now, I am that relative for you guys.
I don’t really do these columns anymore, but what the hell. Here is a column I want to write. You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. It’s a free country.
I’m starting to think the underground fighting movie is to modern DTV what the western was to b-movies in the ’50s. They just never stop coming and yet somehow they’re not all terrible, in fact a few of them are great. You got BLOOD AND BONE of course, you got UNDISPUTED II-III (unless you consider prison fighting a separate genre), DAMAGE with Stone Cold Steve Austin was surprisingly good, and there’s even a good theatrically released one, FIGHTING. I’d recommend all of those above PIT FIGHTER, but I’ll be damned, here’s another pretty enjoyable and distinctively different take on this same type of storyline. 
THE LOST MAN is a 1969 Sidney Poitier heist movie, a pretty obscure one, never released on DVD. Maybe if it was better known then Tony Scott and Denzel would do a juiced up remake. But actually it’s already sort of a remake, based on a novel that was made as ODD MAN OUT in ’47, but that version had James Mason as an IRA type, this has Poitier as a Black Panther type. 
It’s weird how the secret to a good movie idea sometimes is just to think of a really limited location and then figure out everything that could happen inside there. Like there’s that movie coming out where Ryan Reynolds is buried alive, and there was the one where Colin Farrell couldn’t leave the phone booth. There’s the building in 
