mixed martial arts Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Before you continue bad mouthing George Lucas for what he's done to your childhood, first with the Star Wars prequels and now with the disappointing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, you might want to worry that he'll send his daughter after you. Wait, what? Yeah, that's George's daughter, Amanda "Powerhouse" Lucas, in the image on the right. She's a member of an American all-female MMA (mixed martial arts) fight team, and she's seen here duking it out with a Kiwi kickboxer during a recent Auckland, New Zealand-set event titled Princesses of Pain. And according to Stuff.co.nz, footage of the bout may be featured in a planned reality series about the formation of a women's international fighting league as well as on the news program 20/20.

27-year-old "Powerhouse" Lucas appeared in all three of her father's Star Wars prequels, portraying the dancer "Diva Funquita" in The Phantom Menace, "Adnama, patron of the Outlander Club" in Attack of the Clones and "Senator Terr Taneel" in Revenge of the Sith. She also voiced a separate character in The Phantom Menace, Neimoidian communications officer "Tey How" (she was credited under the pseudonym Tyger). Outside of the Star Wars films, she's worked as a hip-hop teacher and has spent years training in multiple martial arts, including kickboxing, Muay Thai and Brazilian ju-jitsu. According to New Zealand's TV3, Lucas lost her debut bout, but she did win a medal for "gutsiest fighter," and according to the Princesses of Pain website, the whole match ended in a tie between Team America and Team Australasia, each winning 3 bouts.

One of the challenges of being a great artist is that not all of your art is going to be great. The Beatles wrote several songs that lesser acts would have turned into careers, but that nonetheless lack the power of "Yesterday" or the joy of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand"; George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier is an excellent work of journalism, but not nearly as good as Homage to Catalonia. Redbelt, the latest film from writer-director David Mamet, is not as impressive or thought-provoking as some of his other dramatic works, like Glengarry Glen Ross or House of Games or Oleanna; at the same time, it's an exciting, engaging mix of drama and action supported by an immensely appealing lead performance by Chiwetel Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things, Children of Men).

Redbelt's subject and setting may make it seem incongruous -- Why is one of America's greatest playwrights making a film about mixed martial arts and Jiu-jitsu? -- but it's actually in keeping with Mamet's other recent entertainments like Spartan, his work as a co-creator of The Unit and his pseudonymous work on the screenplay for Ronin. Redbelt fits in with these projects: They have a kind of heroic stoicism under them; they're stories of honorable men in a dishonorable world. They've all got a kind of muscular poetry, too, a hard-bitten nobility that's still a little sad about the edges.

For all of the traditional complaints lodged against film critics -- too pointy-headed, too snooty, unable to enjoy a movie on the level of the simple pleasures it may present -- I worry that what I'm about to say may harm my standing in the field; namely, I liked Never Back Down. No, it's not The Battle of Algiers or Jules et Jim; it's a movie where good-looking 20-somethings playing good-looking teens offer American moviegoers the exciting prospect of Mixed Martial Arts action without the daunting possibility they might have to read subtitles. It's far below the fights-and-fury quality of Donnie Yen's Flash Point, another MMA action flick opening in limited release as Never Back Down splashes up on movie screens across America. And yet, Never Back Down seems to know what it is, and executes the rote and required moments in a film like this -- a template set by movies like The Karate Kid and Rocky and a dozen others -- with a certain amount of style and exuberance. Never Back Down revolves around good-looking people beating the holy hell out of each other; it doesn't pretend to be much more than that, and while the pleasures it offers are modest, it nonetheless delivers them.

The best possible signpost to what kind of movie you're in for comes early in Flash Point, when Donnie Yen's hard-bitten cop Jun Ma is standing before the equivalent of Internal Affairs or some other review board. Apparently, one of Jun's more recent busts resulted in a perp with " ... three fractured ribs, a broken hip ... and anosmia. ..." It only took a second to translate the subtitled medical jargon and have it sink in: Donnie Yen hits melonfarmers so hard he slaps the very sense of smell out of their heads.

And after seeing Yen in action, you believe that; hell, you're amazed anyone he slugs even has a nervous system left. Yen choreographed the action in Flash Point for director Wilson Yip, and the Toronto Midnight Madness premier of Flash Point saw Midnight Madness program head Colin Geddes reading an e-mailed manifesto from Yen about how he's enthusiastically moving towards using 'Mixed Martial Arts" for better, stronger, faster fight scenes. I don't know what, exactly, 'Mixed Martial Arts" means, but having seen it, I know I like it. A lot.

Yen's one of a group of cops trying to take down a bloodthirsty band of Vietnamese 'brothers' led by crazy-mean Tony (Colin Chow) with the brutal-crazy Tiger (Xing Yu) as their enforcer in pre-handover Hong Kong; his partner Wilson (Louis Koo) is undercover with the group already. And the fun of Flash Point isn't in the plot, which is just a return to the classic Hong Kong action Woo-niverse of cops and crooks and conflicted undercover agents. It's in the fighting.