bruce lee Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Every once in a while you come across a piece of movie news that leaves you feeling a little conflicted. On one hand, the mind reels at the thought of somebody trying to replace Bruce Lee in a remake of the legendary martial arts flick, Enter the Dragon. But on the other hand, I'm not about to turn down the chance to stare at Korean pop star Rain for two hours -- I mean, have you seen the abs on this guy? So lustful thoughts aside, it's about time I got to the news, isn't it? Latino Review is reporting that their sources have confirmed that the singer/actor is the front-runner to star in an update of the 1973 classic.

The original film was the first kung fu flick to be produced by a major studio, and starred Lee as a Shaolin martial artist sent undercover to a hidden island in a fight to the death. The film is infamous for being Lee's last before his untimely death at the age of 33, but was also a passion project for Lee who wanted to celebrate Chinese culture and make a kick-ass action flick. I think we can all agree that he succeeded.

On Friday, Spoiler TV posted casting call information for the role of Kato in The Green Hornet, Seth Rogen's long-struggling feature based on the iconic radio and television hero. Prior to the call, Kung Fu Hustle star, writer and director Stephen Chow was attached to play the role, and it would have been one immaculately suited for the longtime fan of Bruce Lee, who originated the role on TV. But now it appears that Chow has another feature he would like to do, and the ongoing scheduling problems the film has suffered appear to have resulted in him bowing out of the project. Thankfully, the filmmakers are maintaining only the highest and most specific standards in their search for a replacement:

"[KATO] ALL ASIAN ETHNICITIES, Male, 20's - early 40's. Brit Reid's manservant/chauffeur by day and Green Hornet's martial arts-skilled sidekick by night. Actor doesn't have to have Martial Arts experience."

According to the IMDB, Chow has moved on to CJ7 2, the sequel to his answer to E.T., which was released in 2007 (and, in the interest of full disclosure, a film for which I contributed the quote "a sweet, funny family fantasy film"). Meanwhile, Rogen is without his ass-kicking sidekick, begging the question: who do you think they should cast as Kato? Suffice it to say there are countless working Asian and Asian-American actors who could handle the role's physical demands, but given what one presumes will be a slightly more comedic bent to the characters' mythology, who would you suggest strap on Kato's black mask and share the screen with Rogen's hirsute Hornet?

Johnny To's Exiled grabbed me from its very first musical cue. The twang of a Spaghetti Western guitar reverberates, echoing through the empty streets outside a small home in Macau. Men with murder in mind have come to call on an old colleague. You just know that bullets will fly and blood will flow. As Scott Weinberg wrote, it's a "fast-paced and surprisingly amusing piece from a stunningly prolific Hong Kong moviemaker who really knows his genre stuff." The DVD hits shelves this week from Magnolia, with "making of" and "behind the scenes" features.

The great Bruce Lee made only a few films as an adult before his untimely and way too early death. His first celluloid outings came when he was just a sapling. The Kid features 10-year-old Lee as an orphan who is taken under the wings of a petty thief. A kindly factory owner, played by Lee's real-life father, tries to help him onto the path of the straight and narrow. Peter Nepstad of The Illuminated Lantern (a wonderful site) called it "a great example of early Cantonese cinema, a showcase of a little boy who grows up to become a huge star ... a movie not to be missed." The DVD comes courtesy of Cinema Epoch, though no feature details have surfaced.

Long before Samuel L. Jackson had his fateful encounter with hundreds of slithering reptiles, The Killer Snakes were crawling around cinemas. John Charles of Hong Kong Digital (another great site) described this 1974 Shaw Brothers production as an "incredibly sordid HK thriller [that] mixes gruesome horror, perverse sex, and animal cruelty into a most unsavory brew. ... Even almost 30 years after it was produced, this remains one potent and disturbing little picture." (He wrote his review of the Region 3 DVD several years ago.) Perhaps needless to say, no CGI was used. The newly-released Region 1 DVD from Image Entertainment contains a stills gallery and a collection of Shaw Brothers trailers.

In Finishing the Game, director Justin Lin (Better Luck Tomorrow, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift) went back -- both in time and to his indie roots. Shot in 19 days with begged and borrowed equipment and props, Finishing the Game is a mock-documentary set in a never-was 1973 where, after the tragic early death of Bruce Lee, the producers behind Game of Death go on the hunt for a suitable replacement so they can wrap the film and make a few dollars. Finishing the Game doesn't just look at the representation of Asian Americans in film; it's also a sharp satire of the delusions and denials that come from both sides of the camera in movie making. Lin's no stranger to big-money Hollywood -- he recently signed on to direct a reunited Vin Diesel and Paul Walker in the fourth Fast and the Furious film -- but Finishing the Game is clearly a low-budget labor of love. Lin spoke with Cinematical in San Francisco about bad '70s kung-fu cinema, Vin Diesel's D&D game, how he said 'no' to big-studio backers to keep his vision for Finishing the Game, the pros and cons of studio movie making, why he's looking forward to the fourth Fast and the Furious and Asian representation in mass media from Bruce Lee to the here-and-now. You can download the entire interview right here.

The premise of Finishing the Game is irresistable for a certain type of film geek: a comedy fictionalization of the search for "the next Bruce Lee." The mockumentary doesn't quite live up to the potential of this premise, but it has enough hilarious moments to distract you from its inconsistencies.

The movie is based on a real-life event: When Bruce Lee died in 1973, he left a significant amount of footage for the film Game of Death -- enough footage that producers wanted to complete the film and promote it heavily as Lee's last movie. But they needed a stand-in who resembled Lee, to finish production on Game of Death. Finishing the Game is an imagining of how the search for Lee's replacement might have gone, filmed in documentary format. The movie focuses on several contenders for Lee's stand-in, most of whom don't look a thing like Lee: a bearded medical doctor named Raja (Mousa Kraish), small-town Alabama actor Cole Kim (Sung Kang), the extremely white Tarrick Tyler (McCaleb Burnett) and my favorite, Z-movie actor Breeze Loo (Roger Fan), star of Fists of Fuehrer, who claims Lee has had no effect on his career. Novice director Ronny Kirschenbaum (Jake Sandvig) and his jaded casting director Eloise Gazdag (Meredith Scott Lynn) have to pick among these and other Lee wanna-bes.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, IFC Films is going to release two new star-driven movies in theaters and On Demand on the same day. The films will be released by First Take, the "day-and-date" division of IFC. Previous attempts at day-and-date films have been extremely controversial with theater owners, who often refuse to book the movies, claiming, perhaps rightfully so, "Why would anyone leave the house and come to our theater if they can get the movie in the comfort of their own home?" Currently, Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban's Landmark Theaters are one of the few chains who will book day-and-date films, and even have their own day-and-date program, Sneak Preview. I'll stop saying day-and-date, I promise. You can read genius Cinematical writer Patrick Walsh's report on Steven Soderbergh's adventures with the distribution practice here, and Ryan's interview with Cuban right here.

What are the two new films? The crime drama Savage Grace, directed by Tom Kalin (his first feature-length film since 1992's Leopold and Loeb story Swoon) stars Julianne Moore and Hugh Dancy. Grace tells the "true story of socialite Barbara Daly Baekeland's 1972 murder," and was a $5 million production. Finishing the Game, a Bruce Lee mockumentary, was directed by Justin Lin (the very cool Better Luck Tomorrow, Fast and the Furious 2: Tokyo Drift). Game features cameos by James Franco and...uh...MC Hammer (how'd they get Hammer to sign on? Offer him a hot meal?), and "imagines the recasting of Lee's final role in Game of Death before filming was completed." You can read Scott's generally positive Sundance review of Death here. Grace will premiere in theaters and on IFC next year; Death next month.

There is another Bruce Lee film in the works, one that is a bit more manageable in scope than the utterly ginormous 40-part series I told you about in April. The CBC is reporting that Fruit Chan, the Chinese filmmaker responsible for flicks like Made in Hong Kong and Durian Durian, is going to head the biopic, titled Kowloon City. The film already has a pretty big production name behind it -- Terence Chang, the producer of films like Face/Off, Mission: Impossible II and Bulletproof Monk. Set in Hong Kong in the 1950's, the movie will feature Lee as a child, after his family moved back to China from San Francisco. It's looking to be sort of a buddy drama, as the film will focus not only on Lee, but a fellow kung fu student. How far this film will follow the boys is yet to be determined.

If you want more than tiny tyke Lee action, this isn't the only feature in the works (besides the huge series). On the biographical side of things, Hong Kong helmer Stanley Kwan is trying to negotiate with Lee's family to detail how the action star was influenced by the absence of his father. On the fictional side of things, Enter the Dragon is getting remade. With all these in the works, I wouldn't be surprised if we get something about Bruce Lee's later life, if you can call 33 "later," soon enough.

This is how you remake a film: update it; change the name; make it just unrecognizable enough to not ruin the original while still retaining the basic storyline. The formula worked in the golden age of Hollywood -- yes there were plenty of remakes then, too -- and it could work for Warner Independent Pictures, the studio behind a planned redo of Enter the Dragon. The new version will be modernized, retitled Awaken the Dragon and it will barely appear to be connected with the Kung Fu classic starring Bruce Lee. Like Enter, Awaken will deal with underground fighting clubs, but other than featuring martial arts it seems totally different -- in an appreciably fresh way. Rather than focusing on an undercover fighter, Awake will follow an FBI agent on the trail of a rogue Shaolin monk. It's now basically a noir film set in the world of Kung Fu. Maybe they should extend the title to Awaken the Dragon from the Big Sleep.

To write and direct the semi-remake, WIP has hired Kurt Sutter, who claims to be a huge film noir fan. So far we haven't seen any feature work from the guy, but fans of TV's The Shield may be fans of his work. He's a co-executive producer of the show and he's written plenty of episodes, directed one as well. He also has another TV project coming soon to the FX channel, a dramatic series about outlaw motorcycle clubs. As far as feature scripts, he's worked on The Punisher 2 (or whatever it's called, since it isn't a sequel), a thriller for Warner Bros. called The Unforgettable and Inland Saints, which is being directed by Joel Schumacher. Awaken the Dragon will be Sutter's feature directorial debut, and he says he's going to make it "more Raging Bull than Crouching Tiger [Hidden Dragon]" -- at least in terms of the "viciousness" of its fight sequences. Instead of casting a known martial arts star for the role of the rogue monk, Sutter will be looking to discover someone new. The FBI agent, however, will be played by an American star.

And on this lovely day:

• If you're finding moviegoing a little drab lately, and are wanting an animated taste of the past, you should head over to Cartoon Brew. They've got a rare short film -- Look Who's Driving -- up for viewing. It's not a crappy talking kid movie with John Travolta, but one of those funky films from the 50's. Rocky and Bullwinkle director Bill Hurtz directed it, and Magoo designer Bob Dranko well, designed it. Unfortunately, not everything on the Internet is free, but the cost to see this short isn't too bad -- $2.00 right over at the Brew. Ah, the good ol' days.
  
• And, if you're in the mood for a little live action, instead of animation, you might be interested in the news that's coming out of Japan. It seems that Gatchaman, the 5-member team of superheroes, is got one hell of a fever pitch going at the moment. First, there is the CGI version from Kevin Munroe that we've already posted about. Now, before the other is even made or released, there is word of a live action adaptation. According to Variety Asia, the Nikkatsu studio in Tokyo has the adaptation as one of the two films leading their 2007-2008 lineup, the other being YatterMan. The latter has grabbed Takashi Miike to direct, but Gatchaman is nothing more than a vision right now. I can't help but wonder if this will lead to us getting animated superhero movies along with our live action ones. [via Twitch]
• But we've even got real-life heroes getting media treatment. According to Reuters, China state television is putting together a 40-part series about Bruce Lee. That's not a typo. The report says it will have FORTY parts. Now, the only thing that I can figure is that it will be a series of tiny shorts because, for cripes sake, the man died at 32, so that would be eight more parts than the man had years in his life. The kung fu legend will be played by Chan Kwok-kwan, who says: "I'm nervous and also excited, but I will do my best."

When Bruce Lee died, tragically and way too young in 1973, he'd only logged about 20-some minutes of material for his film Game of Death ... so the opportunistic producers opted to hire a stand-in to replace the legendary martial artist in order to complete the film. A tacky move, to be sure, and one that's caused much consternation among Lee's fans for the past several decades. And now comes a mockumentary that takes careful aim on that unseemly decision ... and it makes for a pretty funny little diversion.

A confident and consistently amusing comedy from Justin Lin, who directed the very fine Better Luck Tomorrow before "going Hollywood" with the empty-headed The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and the nigh-unwatchable Annapolis, Finishing the Game works as sort of a Spinal Tap of the mid-'70s kung fu set. Completely fabricated and admirably on target, Finishing the Game takes square aim at the ways in which Asian performers spent decades pigeonholed into "delivery boy" roles, full-bore "chop socky" caricatures -- and pretty much nothing else, really.