movies

Why Tai Chi never had its Patrick Swayze moment

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So, it turns out that they’re remaking the classic 1989 film Road House because, well, I guess some Hollywood executive has decided that it will make money. I can’t think of another reason why you’d want to remake one of the best-loved and enduring “fighty” films from the ’80s. The new version starts Jake Gyllenhaal as Dalton, and MMA superstar Conor McGregor as his nemesis, Knox. It’s combining more modern things like MMA into the mix, but it looks like it’s essentially the same plot. Trailer:

The original Road House is probably not classified as a martial arts film, because it mixed so many different film styles together, and didn’t really feature any famous “martial artists” in the cast, but Road House always felt like a classic martial arts film to me, just with more Western style fighting in the fight scenes.

It started Patrick Swayze as the bouncer of the aforementioned Road House, who has to deal with an onslaught of progressively worse ‘bad guys’ who are trying to bust up his bar, until he faces the final bad guy in a fight that remains forever legendary for its brutal throat ripping out scene, at least it’s legendary in my mind. It also had some great Blues music played ‘live‘ in the Road House, by the Jeff Healey Band.

Swayze was most famous for his role as a sexy dancing Butlins-entertainer in another classic ’80s film, Dirty Dancing. Casting him as a tough guy who could convincingly take out bad guys armed with knives and the like with his bare hands was a risky casting move, but he pulls it off with style and grace, perhaps proving once again that dancing is the best base for martial artists to emerge from (Bruce Lee was a Cha Cha dancer).

But what I liked most about Road House was the Tai Chi. When Dalton wanted to kick back and get away from the pressures of life he rocked up to the local lake shore and did some Tai Chi, (without his shirt on, obviously*.)

Ok, it wasn’t great, but at least it looked like Tai Chi. The implication was that Dalton was so good at fighting, and secretly enjoyed it so much, that he had to work hard to keep calming himself down otherwise his killing power would bubble up and overwhelm him, taking his humanity with it – kind of like the Hulk. He talks all the way through the film about not liking fighting, and how he does everything to avoid it. Eventually the bad guys push him too far and he unleashes the beast, resulting in the classic throat ripping scene.

I’ve always wondered why Tai Chi never had its Patrick Swayze moment. Wing Chun has been riding on the coat tails of Bruce Lee for half a century now, yet nobody really associates Tai Chi with Patrick Swayze, or this film. Perhaps if he’d gone on to make more Tai Chi or martial arts related films then things would have been different. Instead we got Ghost with Demi Moore and sexy pottery because his most associated activity!

Perhaps I’m being too hasty – when I started a Tai Chi class recently 4 women turned up asking if what they were going to learn was “like Patrick Swayze in Road House”? To be honest, I got the impression that they were more into shirtless Patrick than Tai Chi 🙂

But anyway, let me leave you with this compilation of the best lines from Road House.

Just remember: “I want you to be a nice…until it’s time to not be nice.”

“*” there was clearly a homoerotic subtext to the original Road House. While Swayze pratices shirtless Tai Chi he is gazed at by multiple men. Check out this exhaustive breakdown of Road House for more on that. Perhaps that’s another reason why Road House didn’t end up being a Tai Chi-promoting juggernaut?

Movie Kung Fu vs real Kung Fu

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I was alerted to a great post by Reddit User drkaczuz about the role of stunt men and women compared to the same scenes done by “real” martial artists who are not trained in movie-fu.

I’ll quote it here (I hope he doesn’t mind because it’s really interesting, and he makes some great points):

“Yeah, people very often misunderstand the role of stunt doubles, especially in fight scenes. It’s often not as much about skill, or risk as about production logistics. Even if you have a physically capable actor, with MA experience, you still want to use the stunt doubles, simply to squeeze the most out of pre-production time. You can’t lock the star of the show in a room with the stunt crew for a few weeks to rehearse the scene to perfection, they need to well, act. Learn their lines, prepare for their non-action scens, do marketing stuff, photoshoots, etc. What you CAN do is have the stunt double rehearse the entire choreography for months untill it’s buttery smooth and them tag them in on a moment’s notice.

Another thing with actors that have MA background is how different movie fighting is from real fighting – a lot of time real fighting skills and reflexes actually make on-screen fighting look worse.

I think Donnie Yen vs Mike Tyson is a good example showcasing a lot of issues when working with real athletes – we all know Mike is insanely fast, but in this clip he appears slow and sluggish, and you can’t really see the power behind the blows – further below I’ll try to explain why.

 BJ Penn and Rampage in this clusterfuck of a movie – in this case choreography, montage, lighting are absolute garbage, but you can still see that they seem weirdly uncoordinated and slow.

 Anderson Silva from the same flick, notice the kicks especially, also look at all Randy Couture scenes from Expendables – they’re a dark, shakycam mess, but a lot of shakycam and bad lighting is damage control to hide hits that didn’t sell well.

I am not saying that having actual martial artists on set is bad – but you have to manage them really well, have an action director that will guide them and communicate their vision clearly. In a lot of cases a director will oh so wrongly assume that if they have the star martial artist on set they can just tell them to do their thing and it’ll come together somehow. Also it’s not that being good at actual fighting is somehow a hinderance – all good stuntpeople will be at least competent in one or more actual combat sport or martial art. It’s just they have a LOT of additional knowledge on top, as well as the ability to turn some instincts on and off.

There’s more to this post, including links to good examples of well done fight choreography.

Cobra Kai and the TRUTH about the Karate Kid

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I really need (do I really?) to write something about this new Cobra Kai film coming out on YouTube Red (whatever that is – I think it’s just another way of saying, er, “YouTube you have to pay for”).

Here’s the trailer:

 

I’m picking up unusual levels of intelligence and self-awareness here. There has been a long-running fan theory that everybody got Karate Kid wrong – that Ralph Macchio’s character, Danny, the Karate Kid himself, wasn’t the hero of the film at all – he was the villain!

Check out the fan theory here:

It’s a good example of how you can view the same events from a different perspective and come up with a different version of “the truth”.

From watching the trailer, Cobra Kai seems well aware of this fan theory and is playing on it nicely. It seems that Daniel has grown up to be a bit of an asshole, his ego has become uncontrollable from his victory, while Johnny has kept it real, but fallen on hard times, his ego deflated by the ass-kicking he received in that infamous competition.

It looks like the two are heading for an inevitable rematch, but whose side do you feel like you belong on? There are 10 episodes planned, and I really hope there’s a schmaltzy ending where a digitally reconstructed hologram of Pat Morita comes back as some sort of Jedi force-ghost and whispers “Trust your feelings! Do the Crane kick!” in Danny’s ear.

Martial arts in video games: New Batman fight choreography

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Things have been getting a bit ‘academic’ lately on the blog, so let’s just have some fun. I just saw this fight choreography for Batman vs Bane in an upcoming computer game called Batman the Enemy Within. Check it out:

It’s interesting for a number of reasons – firstly, it’s really good! People putting this much work into fight sequences for a game surprised me. This isn’t motion capture – the sequence is a “visual reference for animators”. It would be really interesting to see how the final sequence looks when fully animated. You can see some examples of their animated work below:

Secondly, they’re using a woman as the Batman character. Partly I think this is to create a size difference between the two characters. Bane is meant to be bigger, and he can inject venom to “Hulk up” a bit when he needs to.

Finally, the fighting style used looks very jiu jitsu-based, of the “flying armbar” variety. At one stage in the movie franchise Batman moved towards a fighting style that was based more around Filipino arts.

Great work.