And between that and the rap group there’s this important movie:
Shaolin and Wu Tang (1983)
> The film is about the rivalry between the Shaolin (East Asian Mahayana) and Wu-Tang (Taoist Religion) martial arts schools. […]
> East Coast hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan has cited the film as an early inspiration. The film is one of Wu-Tang Clan founder RZA's favorite films of all time. Founders RZA and Ol' Dirty Bastard first saw the film in 1992 in a grindhouse cinema on Manhattan's 42nd Street and would found the group shortly after with GZA. The group would release its debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), featuring samples from the film's English dub; the album's namesake is an amalgamation of Enter the Dragon (1973), Shaolin and Wu Tang, and The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978).
Enter the Dragon was playing a theater near me recently, and for some reason never having seen a single Bruce Lee film, I figured I'd check it out. It was awesome and I ended up down a rabbit hole of reading about Bruce's life and accomplishments. There are some really great interviews with him on YouTube too.
It's really irritating that the first thing many younger people will think about Bruce Lee is the near-libelous portrayal of him in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
I saw "Enter the Dragon" as a teen and liked it a lot. I rewatched it recently and had a hard time thinking of anything good about it :-/
I've turned into my dad. As a teen, I begged him to see a movie I thought was great. We went to see it, and on the way out I was like "well? what do you think?" He thought for a while, and came up with a rather lame compliment he'd obviously struggled to come up with.
> It is steeped in symbolism, deep metaphysics and calm, meditative, photography. All attributes that have been essentially banned from the fast food production/consumption chain that has conditioned audiences.
Whoa... this is a bold claim. I can think of western films that use techniques like this: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Thin Red Line, Breathless, anything by Bergman, and The Royal Tenenbaums, for example, and many more that employ some of those traits. Additionally, implicit in the suggestion that not having those things somehow makes it "fast food production" (and thus of low quality), is rather unfair to the many western and non-western artists who have honed they're storytelling craft in a variety of styles. I love Tarkovsky and Solaris remains one of my favorite films, but I also like suspense films like Alien or action movies like Enter the Dragon, and many others which are frenetic, scary, fun or exciting.
Many of those premises sound fine though. Jean Claude Va Damme mad three different movies with the plot of Bloodsport, which in the first place wasn't much different from Enter the Dragon. Plenty of people enjoyed them.
On the other hand, Rampage seems like something that's hard to work into a movie.
So many video game movie projects are missing the simple question, "why?" So many of these games are inspired by movies in the first place, and their stories are mostly just cliches based on their source material. It's fine in the context of the game, because the player is doing something, but when you put that into a non-interactive medium, the flaws become obvious.
If you take Indiana Jones, turn it into a game with a sexy woman as the main character[1], and then try to make a movie out of it, then of course the critical reaction is going to be "Indiana Jones but not as good." Mortal Kombat is basically Enter the Dragon with a simpler storyline, so why would you decide to turn it into a movie?
It's an issue that comes up in most adaptation, whether it be a book, or a comic, or even a song. There needs to be some reason to do it. Some idea that the source material does that hasn't already been done to death in film. "This game/movie/book is popular" isn't a good enough reason. It might get a movie greenlit, and it might even make money. Heck, it might even make a TON of money, but it won't make the movie good.
[1] Later iterations of Tomb Raider have been much more feminist, but the original concept was entirely based on sex appeal
Hacker Cinema
8 comments on Hacker News
> Watch any film before 1980 and you'll start to see a pattern that the pacing and evolution of the narrative is generally very, very slow.
Star Wars, Enter the Dragon, Game of Death, Mad Max, and many Bond films are fun counterexamples.
Enter the Dragon would have been amazing if it had been filmed at 144 Hz.
The technical limitations of the past century should not define what constitutes a film.
And between that and the rap group there’s this important movie:
Shaolin and Wu Tang (1983)
> The film is about the rivalry between the Shaolin (East Asian Mahayana) and Wu-Tang (Taoist Religion) martial arts schools. […]
> East Coast hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan has cited the film as an early inspiration. The film is one of Wu-Tang Clan founder RZA's favorite films of all time. Founders RZA and Ol' Dirty Bastard first saw the film in 1992 in a grindhouse cinema on Manhattan's 42nd Street and would found the group shortly after with GZA. The group would release its debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), featuring samples from the film's English dub; the album's namesake is an amalgamation of Enter the Dragon (1973), Shaolin and Wu Tang, and The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaolin_and_Wu_Tang
Enter the Dragon was playing a theater near me recently, and for some reason never having seen a single Bruce Lee film, I figured I'd check it out. It was awesome and I ended up down a rabbit hole of reading about Bruce's life and accomplishments. There are some really great interviews with him on YouTube too.
It's really irritating that the first thing many younger people will think about Bruce Lee is the near-libelous portrayal of him in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
I saw "Enter the Dragon" as a teen and liked it a lot. I rewatched it recently and had a hard time thinking of anything good about it :-/
I've turned into my dad. As a teen, I begged him to see a movie I thought was great. We went to see it, and on the way out I was like "well? what do you think?" He thought for a while, and came up with a rather lame compliment he'd obviously struggled to come up with.
Watching that movie today, I agreed with him.
> It is steeped in symbolism, deep metaphysics and calm, meditative, photography. All attributes that have been essentially banned from the fast food production/consumption chain that has conditioned audiences.
Whoa... this is a bold claim. I can think of western films that use techniques like this: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Thin Red Line, Breathless, anything by Bergman, and The Royal Tenenbaums, for example, and many more that employ some of those traits. Additionally, implicit in the suggestion that not having those things somehow makes it "fast food production" (and thus of low quality), is rather unfair to the many western and non-western artists who have honed they're storytelling craft in a variety of styles. I love Tarkovsky and Solaris remains one of my favorite films, but I also like suspense films like Alien or action movies like Enter the Dragon, and many others which are frenetic, scary, fun or exciting.
Many of those premises sound fine though. Jean Claude Va Damme mad three different movies with the plot of Bloodsport, which in the first place wasn't much different from Enter the Dragon. Plenty of people enjoyed them.
On the other hand, Rampage seems like something that's hard to work into a movie.
So many video game movie projects are missing the simple question, "why?" So many of these games are inspired by movies in the first place, and their stories are mostly just cliches based on their source material. It's fine in the context of the game, because the player is doing something, but when you put that into a non-interactive medium, the flaws become obvious.
If you take Indiana Jones, turn it into a game with a sexy woman as the main character[1], and then try to make a movie out of it, then of course the critical reaction is going to be "Indiana Jones but not as good." Mortal Kombat is basically Enter the Dragon with a simpler storyline, so why would you decide to turn it into a movie?
It's an issue that comes up in most adaptation, whether it be a book, or a comic, or even a song. There needs to be some reason to do it. Some idea that the source material does that hasn't already been done to death in film. "This game/movie/book is popular" isn't a good enough reason. It might get a movie greenlit, and it might even make money. Heck, it might even make a TON of money, but it won't make the movie good.
[1] Later iterations of Tomb Raider have been much more feminist, but the original concept was entirely based on sex appeal