She Did Not Turn (1974) by David Inshaw.
• “Pauline Kael compared Bruce Lee to Fred Astaire; I think the comparison works better with Rudolf Nureyev. Astaire had a besuited, playful grace, while Nureyev was shirtless, dramatic, and muscular. Astaire moved with athletic modesty, while Lee’s bravura dominated the screen.” Micah Nathan on 50 years of Enter the Dragon.
• New music: This Stolen Country Of Mine by Alva Noto, and Denshi Ongaku No Bigaku (The Aesthetics of Japanese Electronic Music) Vol.1 by Cosmocities Records.
• At Cartoon Brew: A profile of Sally Cruikshank. The spooky psychedelia of Face Like a Frog has long been a favourite round here.
• “My Life in a Hop, Skip and a Jump!” Clive Hicks-Jenkins answers a few questions about his art.
• At Public Domain Review: Hokusai’s Illustrated Warrior Vanguard of Japan and China (1836).
• More martial arts: Tom Wilmot on Bruce Lee’s greatest fight scenes at Golden Harvest.
• Submissions to the Astronomy Photographer of the Year Awards.
• At Dennis Cooper’s: Lucrecia Martel Day.
• RIP Jane Birkin.
• Enter The Dragon (1974) by The Upsetters | Dragon Power (A Tribute To Bruce Lee) (1978) by JKD Band | Edit The Dragon (1985) by Colourbox
This post features a revealing story about Bruce Lee:
https://chenghsin.com/2022/07/23/true-stories-of-fights-in-1970s-chinatown-san-francisco/
Interesting story but the dismissal of Lee’s films seems as pointless as complaining about the ronin in the Lone Wolf and Cub films defeating entire armies. You have to accept the fantastic premise or not watch at all.
We shouldn’t be too surprised when highly-trained martial artists are critical of fight scenes performed by their peers. The premise and tone of the scene is also important – for example, no-one is expected to take seriously the wonderfully absurd wine tasting scene in Dirty Ho (1979):
https://youtu.be/DnBqa_etKog?t=99
The final fight scene in The Eight-Diagram Pole Fighter (1984) is another doozy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLDJ2QteN7c
I think this counts for any special knowledge, you have to beware of being a “Well, actually…” bore simply because you can identify a train or a car or a type of weapon or whatever. The super-competent warrior is a generic type that you see in many different genres; Bruce Lee is unusual in that there wasn’t much difference between the reality and the fiction but Lee and “Lee” in Enter the Dragon shouldn’t be confused.
That pole fight is amazing! I prefer wuxia stories to more contemporary things, same with samurai films.
I’ve seen a handful of kung fu films but ~150 samurai films.
Samurai seem to translate better to the big screen than ninjas; perhaps the latter are too subtle. The only ninja films I recall enjoying are Shinobi No Mono (1962) and Castle of Owls (1963).