I can’t stand repetition. I certainly don’t like to repeat myself. But I put a lot of work into my thoughts on THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS, and I know that some people who follow me on Demon’s Resume might like to have alerts on when I write elsewhere, so I wanted y’all to know about my piece for Daily Grindhouse. I tried hard to make it worth your time!
R.I.P. Leo O’Brien. He played “Richie Green” in THE LAST DRAGON, maybe the best character in the movie. Definitely the one with all the best lines.
I don’t do irony well. I tend to take the movies I like in the spirit they were intended. If a movie feels genuine to me, then my affection for it is genuine. THE LAST DRAGON is a kid’s movie, but one of the few I will still watch from time to time because it’s guaranteed to lift my mood. If I’m being completely honest, I love this movie way more than I love most conventionally accepted “classic films.” Given the choice, I’d opt without hesitation to watch this movie over CITIZEN KANE, CASABLANCA, and even THE GODFATHER. There, it’s out. I said it.
I accept that no one will ever let me call this a good movie, but the rest of the world is going to have to accept my insistence that this is a one-of-a- kind genre occurrence, and for that alone it deserves respect. There aren’t two like it. As the story of young Leroy “Bruce Leroy” Green (Taimak) and his mission to defend popular VJ Laura Charles (Vanity) against evil arcade owner Eddie Arkadian (Chris Murney) and local bully The Shogun Of Harlem (Julius J. Carry III), THE LAST DRAGON stands alone in its genre — it’s the first, last, and only Motown-kung fu-action-romantic-comedy musical. There’s so much genuine goodness about THE LAST DRAGON. It encourages the mild-mannered to stand up for themselves. It teaches kids about Eastern philosophy. It teaches kids about Bruce Lee. It gave early-career employment to legendary character-actors Mike Starr, Chazz Palminteri, and William H. Macy. It has music from Willie Hutch, Stevie Wonder, and Vanity. It has a kid (Leo O’Brien) who’s been tied up by bad guys escaping capture by break-dancing out of the ropes.
This movie is a positive force for the universe. I watch it and I smile. It’s one of my few nostalgic indulgences – but it’s still fun to watch as an adult. I fear the potential remake, despite the involvement of Sam Jackson and the RZA and despite the personal assurance I’ve received from Taimak himself (!). THE LAST DRAGON was lightning in a bottle, and let’s face it, it’s not actually possible to catch lightning in a bottle… unless a genuine miracle is involved.
Today we celebrate a great American. Oh totally, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but also: John Carpenter, one of my very favorite filmmakers of all time. Here’s something I wrote on February 11th, 2009:
I recently received in the mail the limited edition 2-disc score album for John Carpenter’s Big Trouble In Little China. It’s a limited pressing: There are only 3000 of them. That means that, if you want one of your own, you had better get on it, and come back to read the rest of this essay afterwards.
Now to the remaining readers: What does my revelation that I now own this artifact mean?
Well, it means that I am a person who cares to own the soundtrack to Big Trouble In Little China, which will tell you either of two things: that I am a super-hip underground electronic music artist (to whom Carpenter’s scores are hugely, weirdly influential), or that I am just a person who loves the movie Big Trouble In Little China THAT much.
I won’t leave you hanging. It’s because I love the movie a lot. I get the sense that I’m not alone in the realm of the internet. I could qualify that love; I could add a postscript that I like to write to movie scores and instrumental music, or go on and on about the importance of John Carpenter’s work on the landscape of popular culture, but look, none of that is going to get me laid in time for Valentine’s Day Weekend. It’s what it is, and so shall it ever be.
John Carpenter’s most acknowledged classics are Halloween and The Thing, and possibly Escape From New York. Beyond that, the idea of where the rest of Carpenter’s movies fit within the realm of canon seems to be debated. Not by me, mind you – I firmly believe that the man’s filmmaking mojo was untouchable from at least the release of Assault On Precinct 13 (1976) to that of They Live (1988). That’s one hell of a run!
It hardly seems arguable to me that, as long as there is an auteur theory, John Carpenter should get his rightful due from the highbrow film establishment as one of the luminaries of the last thirty years. The reasons why he doesn’t get revered in the way that contemporaries like Spielberg and Scorsese do is because, like Michael Mann, Carpenter’s best-known work came a little later than theirs, and, unlike all of them, all of Carpenter’s work is in the less reputable genres of horror, action, and science fiction. Of course, the auteur theory is generally a flawed one: Carpenter’s films wouldn’t be what they are without the contributions of many writers, co-writers, actors, cinematographers, even other composers. All the same, here’s the test: Pick up on any sequence – even a single shot – from a John Carpenter film at random, and odds are it wouldn’t take long to identify it as a John Carpenter film. His films are united by a look, a sound, a vibe, that other movies could never have.
Of course, this perspective didn’t spring on me immediately. I was to formulate that grandiose opinion much later on in my movie-watching development. To follow a director that closely, you have to start with one movie, and for me, at first, there was Big Trouble In Little China. It started out as a “big brother” movie – you know, the ones you’re not supposed to watch as a kid, but finally get to anyway, when the right influence relents. My friend Jay Roberts and I slipped into the basement den where his older brother and his buddies were watching it, and we hid behind his chair, until he noticed us there, and actually let us watch the rest. I was ten. That was huge.
Carpenter has called the movie “an action-adventure-comedy Kung Fu ghost story monster movie,” which is not only accurate, but everything a ten-year-old boy with a big imagination wants from a movie. Also, its main character is a trucker, which is what I wanted to grow up to be. (Weird, true fact.) It’s the definition of a cult film – no one will ever classify or study Big Trouble In Little China as an important movie (yours truly excepted), but when pressed, many would admit that this is the kind of joint they’d much rather be watching on a Friday night.
Okay, so real quick for the few who haven’t yet had the pleasure:
Jack Burton (played by Kurt Russell, the DeNiro to Carpenter’s Scorsese, this time out doing a hit-and-miss John Wayne impersonation) is a trucker who is owed some gambling money by his old friend, San Francisco Chinatown restaurateur Wang Chi (played by Dennis Dun, very likable). Before paying up, Wang asks Jack if he will accompany him to the airport, where he is picking up his fiancée. At the airport, the girl is kidnapped by street thugs, since she is the rare Chinese girl who has green eyes. To rescue the girl, Jack and Wang have to venture into the Chinatownunderworld, and to face its overlord, David Lo Pan, played by the busy character actor James Hong in a seriously immortal performance. I’m not kidding, it’s unforgettable. If for no other reason, watch the movie for this guy.
In a shocking dual role, Lo Pan is a wizened old husk of a man, but also a hundreds-year-old ghost warlord demon who is cursed and who can only become flesh-and-blood again by marrying the girl with green eyes. In addition to a small army of fake cops, cheesy gang members, and kung fu warriors, Lo Pan has three supernatural enforcers, The Three Storms (Thunder, Rain, and Lightning), who will look familiar to anyone lucky enough to have seen Shogun Assassin. And he has a couple monsters too – The Guardian, which is a floating blob covered with eyeballs, and The Wild Man, which is basically a werewolf, only Asian (and therefore probably my favorite character in the entire movie). Wang brings in some allies too, best of all being the excellently named local wizard Egg Shen — played by Victor Wong, in the film’s other legendary performance. A post-Porky’s, pre-Sex In The City Kim Cattrall is in the movie too, but mostly just to run rapid neo-Hawks dialogue with Kurt Russell in a gratifyingly anti-romantic subplot. No kid wants to see Jack Burton ride off at the end with some lady riding shotgun in the Porkchop Express.
It’s a kitchen sink kind of a movie, obviously – or more accurately, a Chinese buffet of a movie. Which is some of the most fun you can have. Twenty-some years later, I can surely see where the corniness lives, most obviously in the unfortunate sculpting of most of the haircuts present. But overall, it still works for me, almost as much as it did when I was ten. I’m still struck by the energy of the thing. If I wanted to be halfway pretentious about it, I might make the assertion that Big Trouble In Little China was the first action movie of the video-game era (either that or its studiomate from 1986, the much better-received Aliens). It’s even structured like a video game, with the way the characters descend through several levels to meet their objective, squaring off with increasingly more dangerous enemies as they go. And there’s even a “reset” or a “do-over” – when they don’t rescue the girl on the initial try, they go back with more allies and bigger guns.
This is also an example of what could be called the cinema of escalation: A fantastical story that leads an audience towards buying into its most fantastical elements by starting out in the “real world”, and methodically ramping up the crazy situations and characters while never losing track, always healthily maintaining the suspension of disbelief. In that way, the closest cousin to Big Trouble In Little China that I can think of at the moment is probably Ghostbusters, which is never a bad comparison to be drawn. Hey, after all, Big Trouble In Little China has ghosts too. (Also it shares a visual effects supervisor, Richard Edlund.)
Now about that soundtrack, composed by John Carpenter “in association with” Alan Howarth.
The score is of a piece with the movie, which is to say that it’s incredibly entertaining, sometimes corny, extremely insane, and most importantly – propulsive. The score matches the editing, and it MOVES. It’s functional, which is frankly an unsung virtue of a good score. It also smartly delineates character, with its darkly regal Lo Pan orchestrations, its varying strains recurring during the appearances of the Storms, its eerie themes suggesting the ancient pseudo-mythology of the movie and even the driving rhythms under several of the action scenes which resemble nothing so much as an 18-wheeler idling, apropos for Jack Burton’s profession.
Like most of the scores from Carpenter’s movies, the music is almost entirely done on synthesizers. In the liner notes, Carpenter and Howarth discuss how much fidelity they paid to authentic Chinese music, which is to say, none. They went after sounds and themes that sounded Chinese to them, rather than working arduously to replicate realism. I actually respect this approach. I’m not sure it would’ve helped the movie to have that much attention to detail. Big Trouble In Little China is a tribute to the kung fu B-epics of the 1970s – it’s very Shaw Brothers. Reality is not this film’s ultimate aim. Some might say that such musical guesswork is the methodology of the Ugly American, but personally I’m more irritated by cultural imitations. Carpenter and Howarth are owning up to their lack of authoritative expertise in all things Chinese, and giving it a shot anyway, and in its own way, that’s charming. Besides, Dennis Dun’s character is more the traditional hero of Big Trouble In Little China. He’s the young, clean-cut lead out to rescue his lady love. Conversely, Kurt Russell’s character is the ultimate Ugly American (John Wayne bluster and all) – therefore, these cultural concerns are actually structured into the film. It’s all just a little bit subversive, though of course, not at all Important with the capital vowel bolded. It’s difficult to call racism or even exploitation (though some apparently tried, during the initial theatrical run) when the film in question is so silly, or more to the point, when the two most charismatic performances in the entire movie are from two elderly Chinese men. What other big-studio American action picture has given us that?
That’s the basic conclusion I’m drawing here, by talking about the score in specific and the movie overall – Big Trouble In Little China is an anomaly, a curiosity, and a legitimate original. This is why a cult has grown around this movie, and the cult is not giving signs of going away. Almost makes me wonder what else I was right about at ten years old. Cheers!
In recommending Black Dynamite, the temptation is to get caught up in the spirit and get silly. Let me go another way, keep it relatively serious, and promise that this is the funniest movie currently playing in any movie theater – that is, unless you’re heading to the multiplex this weekend to make fun of the Michael Jackson people. In that case, you got me. [Note: This piece was originally written the weekend This Was It was released.]
But Black Dynamite is just so consistently funny throughout its running time that I feel compelled to get the word out. I loved this movie. It’s true that my viewing history has somehow been steeped in blaxploitation movies from Shaft to Coffy to Truck Turner to Black Belt Jones, right back to Shaft’s Big Score! and Shaft In Africa – but I don’t think you need a doctorate in blaxploitation to get the jokes here. However, you probably do need an R-rated sense of humor, but you’ll figure that one out pretty quickly, since the first three sets of titties make their collective open-air appearance in the first ten minutes.
As if you needed a story, Black Dynamite is the tale of a real black kung-fu superhero named Black Dynamite (“Dyn-O-mite! Dyn-O-mite!”), created and played brilliantly by underrated action-movie presence Michael Jai White who deserves a skull-crushing franchise and a long career of shitkicking on the merits of this movie alone. Credit also goes to his co-writers Scott Sanders (who directed) and Byron Minns (who also plays Black Dynamite’s sidekick Bullhorn) and to the entire cast and crew who always keep the tricky tone balanced just right.
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Black Dynamite is by far the best blaxploitation parody/recreation since I’m Gonna Git You Sucka – appropriately, it finds a welcome return and a chest-burstingly funny role for In Living Color comedian Tommy Davidson as the elevator-shoes-wearing pimp Cream Corn – and it’s the best spoof of inept filmmaking that I can remember seeing.
For the record, though: Not all blaxploitation was as shoddily constructed and acted as Black Dynamite might lead you to believe – sure there were plenty of laughable mis-steps but the genre was often a training ground for some true talents. The jokes in Black Dynamite are funny enough, though, that it’s hardly good form to complain.
This movie is just so full of performances, dialogue, and gags that I completely love – from the pimp summit full of recognizable faces (oh, and “Captain Kangaroo Pimp”), to the secret origin of my favorite restaurant in all of Los Angeles, Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles, to the final kung fu fight with a anti-beloved national icon, to the delivery of this line: “But Black Dynamite, I sell drugs to the community”, and right back to those titties – that I could recount it for pages and pages and not get bored. But this is such an impressively-crafted, thoroughly enjoyable movie that I’d rather just stamp it with my highest possible recommendation to see with a crowd, and leave you with the trailer:
Story of Ricky is a rarely-screened Hong Kong kung fu movie, based on a super-violent comic series called Riki-Oh. The movie was first released in 1991 but I didn’t see it for the first time until 2008. After seeing it, I had four immediate thoughts:
1. Is…um… everybody okay over there?!?
2. It would be pretty damn interesting to see what Sam Raimi would do with a kung fu movie.
3. Isn’t it a little sad that my idea of expanding my cultural frame of reference tends more often towards midnight movies like Story of Ricky rather than acknowledged classics like Harakiri or Tokyo Story? (Seen ‘em both; both of them have far fewer exploding heads for one thing.)
4. Seriously, back to Thought #1: Asian cinema is capable of so much more transcendent weirdness than any of its Western counterparts could ever hope to touch. (Except maybe those creepy Germans and some of the unholy stuff they’re into. No offense meant. Okay, a little offense meant.)
Story of Ricky is about a young hero who is thrown into a maximum-security prison for reasons to be uncovered throughout the film. Yes, it’s the Shawshank Redemption of Hong Kong gore comedies. The story is set in the far-future of 2001, but none of that is the point.
The point is that Ricky has super-human strength [never explained] as part of his kung fu repertoire, so when the corrupt warden and the assistant warden and their henchmen – the super-powered boss prisoners – mess with Ricky, he can punch their guts out.
I mean literally, punch their guts out.
Not for the squeamish, this one ain’t. It’s so over-the-top and unrealistically cartoony that in my opinion it’s hardly upsetting, but when violence happens in this movie, it’s more violent than the entire run of Scorsese gangster movies put together. I haven’t seen a movie this gleefully gory since maybe Evil Dead 2.
Also, I haven’t seen a protagonist this androgynous in a movie since Corey Feldman in Dream A Little Dream.
Remember that movie? It was a late-’80s body-switch comedy co-starring (somewhat inexplicably) the great Jason Robards. Right? Remember Corey Feldman’s slightly disturbing Michael Jackson phase? Remember how cute Meredith Salenger was in that movie?
I’m getting off-topic again.
The point I was making is, half the hilarity of Story of Ricky is the fact that the absurdly muscular Ricky who can punch people’s heads off also looks exactly like a pouty-lipped girl. That’s cool with me. It makes the movie either more progressive, or more inadvertently hysterical.
The movie follows absolutely none of the tenuously-established rules of screenwriting, but probably more than a few of the non-existent rules of video games. Character allegiances and audience sympathies come and go as if on iPod shuffle setting. There is absolutely no moral or meaning. In short, this can’t be argued as a traditionally “good” movie, but would I rather watch this than anything Meryl Streep’s ever done in her life (excluding only Adaptation)? Yeah man.
You watch this thing, which is hysterically funny, and you wonder, how much of that humor is intentional. It’s dubbed over in English, and the dialogue that’s said is at least as funny and insane as what’s happening on screen, so it’s possible that this was once a straight-faced effort since been given the Mystery Science Theater treatment. I haven’t done any research on the thing so I don’t know. But I kind of doubt it. I wondered over this question almost the entire running time, until the warden does what he does and turns into what he turns into, and then the answer became clear. But I won’t go into that, because I hold out hope that you all get the chance to see this if you haven’t already, hopefully fresh like I did.
But again, be forewarned, and it bears repeating: This movie is violent. I’m talking about such relatively tame examples as the scene where Ricky faces the mighty Oscar, and Oscar cuts open his own stomach and tries to choke Ricky with his intestines. Then he wounds Ricky in the arm, and Ricky has to make a tourniquet with his own vein. That kind of violence. If you don’t think you can handle that, stay far, far away. (I hear Meryl Streep has a movie coming out soon… You lily-livered flowerpot you.)
I’m watching Fist Of Legend right now. Sadly, this is generally my idea of experiencing international cinema. Happily, Jet Li kicks a lot of guys across the room in this one. I do so enjoy that sort of thing. Here’s an example:
Here’s a longer piece I wrote on Fist Of Legend for DailyGrindhouse.com:
An answer track, in musical vernacular, is a response to a previously recorded and released song. The Ten Awesomest Movies About Fighting is a post by my great friend Zach Oat over at Television Without Pity (read his work daily!) to celebrate the release of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. (Read my review!) I thought it would be fun to add my own take on such a list, since my movie blog Slow-Motion Quick-Draw is all about this kind of flick.
I really can’t argue with the original list, since it either comes up with great movies I wouldn’t have considered, or it has a few that I would have surely added to my own list of 10 Awesomest Movies About Fighting. In particular, Enter The Dragon probably is the greatest “tournament” movie of all time, and unquestionably the finest cinematic showcase for the shitkicking talents of one Bruce Lee, without whom no list like this would be complete. Meanwhile, Fight Club is probably the funniest and the most perceptive movie ever made about why we male human beings are so innately driven to watch and participate in real-life fights.
So no arguments here. But here’s another batch of ten:
Master Of The Flying Guillotine
This movie is not very good, and it’s not always as fun to watch as its best moments. It’s not remotely as polished as Enter The Dragon, and the score is occasionally unbearable. We’re a long way from Lalo Schifrin here. Still, just try to resist the central idea, of a one-armed martial artist who is drafted into a lethal tournament where he must ultimately confront a blind wizard who wields the most beheading weapon of all time. Did you play Street Fighter 2 for hours and days in the 1990s? Do you know that this is where they lifted everything from? You’ve gotta see this movie to believe it – it’s worth it if only for the guy with the extending arms, among many other reasons.
The Wrestler
Part Marty and part Raging Bull, this is the most mournful and profound movie that pro wrestling is ever likely to get. (Although I also highly recommend the documentary Beyond The Mat.) When I last wrote about The Wrestler, I disputed that it’s a redemption story, and I still don’t think it is, not for its lead character. But it probably was for its star, Mickey Rourke, who seemed to have been training for two decades for the role, and all that that implies. As he states late in the movie, Randy “The Ram” looks like a banged-up piece of meat, and yeah, he almost literally resembles one of those battered sides of beef that Rocky wales on in Rocky 1. This movie is all ups and downs, all about the human cost and the liberation of the ring. It’s like life. With a better soundtrack.
Hard Times
If we’re talking about movies about fighting, we’re talking about movies about badass two-fisted men of action and adventure, and one of the foremost cinematic chroniclers of that breed is director Walter Hill. Hard Times is a somewhat-forgotten Walter Hill movie which stars Charles Bronson and James Coburn. Do you really need more? Bronson plays a street fighter who punches more than he talks, and Coburn is his motor-mouthed promoter. This is a really convincing period piece, and one of the better and more overlooked action flicks of the 1970s.
Emperor Of The North
Also known as Emperor Of The North Pole, this is another period piece from the ‘70s about down-n’-out drifters. This one stars Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine, which arguably makes Bronson and Coburn look like Clooney and Pitt. If you don’t want to watch a movie where Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine take swipes at each other on the roof of a moving train using chains and axes and their own giant fists, I hope you can track down the lady who swiped your balls from you. This is not only an underrated entry in the filmography of the underrated Robert Aldrich, but it’s also a movie about hobos. Find it and watch promptly.
Every Which Way But Loose
Did you really think I was going to attempt a list like this without including Clint? I suppose that Clint’s great movie about fighting, and the toll it takes, is arguably Million Dollar Baby. But that movie is pretty sad, and the main criteria here is awesomeness, which precludes moping around. Every Which Way But Loose and its sequel are [surprisingly] the only movies on Clint’s resume where he plays a hard-partying, free-roaming bare-knuckle brawler, and they’re the only two in which he costars with a farting orangutan, so that’s why I selected this one.
Eastern Promises
Some movies qualify on the basis of just one scene, and if you’ve seen Eastern Promises, you know which scene I’m talking about. And if you haven’t seen Eastern Promises, go fix that.
Jason & The Argonauts
Again, some movies get in the door just for one killer scene. This movie without a single doubt has one of the greatest scenes in all of cinema. Skeleton-on-human violence. The pinnacle of cinematic awesome.
King Kong
I don’t know that I could make a list of Awesome Movies About Fighting without including at least one movie about animal fights. King Kong is the original pioneer on that battlefield. You guys know all about this one: Giant gorilla fights tyrannosaurus rex; inspires one-hundred years of glorious filmed-and-faked animal fights. Later on he climbs up the Empire State Building and takes on the U.S. military. He doesn’t win, except he absolutely does.
Shogun Assassin
You could round out this list with any number of martial arts flicks, but I ultimately gave this one the nod. Why? This soundtrack. Shogun Assassin is the rare example of a cinematic remix – it’s the most violent scenes from a series of Lone Wolf & Cub films strung together and scored to a proto-electronica soundtrack. It’s deeply, profoundly ridiculous. It’s never been an easy movie to find, but if you can manage it, you goddamn better.
Team America: World Police
One of my top ten movies of the previous decade, Team America is one of the few American movies that manages to make a persuasive case for how stupid fighting really is. Fun to watch on screen, but those who aggressively pursue violence in real life are worthless, unless you count their worth as objects of ridicule and scorn. Also in this movie: Puppets fight housecats. Everybody benefits.
