Big Hollywood » Bruce Lee

Morning Call Sheet: Bruce Lee, Bruce Campbell, John Malkovich, and the Fall of the Movie Soundtrack

John Nolte — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 16:04:55 +0000

–SILLY HEADLINE: ”AUCTION OF BRUCE LEE ITEMS EXCEEDS EXPECTATIONS”–

Of course it “exceeds expectations.” We’re talking about The Mighty Bruce Lee. If I had the money I’d buy everything in the world associated with Bruce Lee and put it all in a giant warehouse and live in it like a happy hoarder and if anyone tried to take it away from me or get me any kind of psychological help I would claw them with my razorblade hand.

–SOUNDTRACK SALES PLUMMET 40% OVER LAST FOUR YEARS–

Soundtracks are all about reliving the movie experience through music. For years, I purchased more soundtracks than any other kind of music. But over the past decade the thought hasn’t even crossed my mind — probably for a few reasons. First off, the music industry doesn’t have much of anything new to offer these days. Very few new artists break out with the kinds of songs that capture the imagination. If there are no new songs worth purchasing, that means that the only good songs on soundtracks are those we already own.

Another reason to purchase a film’s soundtrack was for the actual score, but when’s the last time a movie score so moved you, you just had to own it? There was a time when scores from films such as “Dances with Wolves,” “Last of the Mohicans,” and “Legends of the Fall” were must-owns. You didn’t even have to fall in love with the film in order to fall in love with the score. You just don’t hear those kinds of scores anymore.

Finally, for the last decade, Hollywood hasn’t been making the kinds of films we want to relive again and again. This is part of the reason DVD sales have collapsed and probably why soundtrack sales have followed suit.

If you think about it, it’s something of a vicious cycle. If movie scores were better, movies would be better –which means DVD and soundtrack sales would improve. Hollywood’s answer: “Bring on “Green Lantern 2.”

—–

LAST NIGHT’S SCREENING

Red (2011): Entertaining but immediately forgettable. John Malkovich’s performance is the only thing to recommend. Someone should give that character his own movie.

——-

TODAY’S QUICK HITS

Christian Toto reviews something called “Another Earth“

“Rise of Apes” takes in $77M worldwide

Underappreciated gems produced by Steven Spielberg

It was difficult to imagine this sitting on some shelf in the prop department

If you want to know how Charlie Sheen’s “Men” character dies … click here

Awful: Anthony Quinn’s 48 year-old son, Francesco, dead of a heart attack at 48

Who should lead The Avengers? Captain America? Thor? Iron Man?

Sam Raimi’s Oz: The Great and Powerful gets Bruce Campbell!

Wow. A normal Hollywood baby name

—–

CLASSIC PICK FOR TUESDAY AUGUST 9, 2011

TCM:

8:00 PM EST: Scarface (1932) – A murderous thug shoots his way to the top of the mobs while trying to protect his sister from the criminal life. Dir: Howard Hawks Cast: Paul Muni, Ann Dvorak, Karen Morley. BW-94 mins, TV-PG, CC.

All these years later, The Mighty Paul Muni’s epic gangster tales holds its potent power thanks to a number of mature themes (including incest) that still resonate. You’ll be surprised at how closely Al Pacino’s remake stuck to its predecessor when it came to the basics of the story and character. But while the 80’s classic was famous for its over-the-top violence and language, the original is just as disturbing — but in ways that have nothing to do with chainsaws.

Today’s audiences like to think they’re more sophisticated because they can “handle” graphic sex and violence, when just the opposite is true. In the past, filmgoers didn’t need everything spelled out for them. They were able to pick up on themes and subtext using their own intelligence and life experience.

Funny how we define “sophisticated” these days, isn’t it?

–Please send tips/suggestions/requests to jnolte@breitbart.com

Thanks to ScottDS for some of today’s tips.

For Conservative Movie Lovers: Buster Keaton and ‘The Cameraman’ Part 4

Leo Grin — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 14:43:10 +0000

Much has been made about James Agee’s affectionate judgment of Buster Keaton: “Keaton worked strictly for laughs, but his work came from so far inside a curious and original spirit that he achieved a great deal besides, especially in his feature-length comedies. . . he was the only major comedian who kept sentiment almost entirely out of his work, and he brought pure physical comedy to its greatest heights.”

As for me, I agree more with another critic, Roger Ebert, who once wrote that Keaton’s movies, “seen as a group, are like a sustained act of optimism in the face of adversity; surprising how, without asking, he earns our admiration and tenderness.” Marshaling all of the critical gumption he’s earned over the years, Ebert also calls Keaton, “the greatest actor-director in the history of the cinema, and that includes Orson Welles.”

Keaton chalked up a large part of his success to changes undertaken while maturing out of his early, vaudeville-inspired shorts with Fatty Arbuckle (a subject we’ll address in a future FCML series). When first making features, their longer length dictated fundamental adjustments in the way his comedy and cinema interacted. “One of the first decisions I made,” Keaton wrote in his autobiography, “was to cut out custard pie throwing. . . no pie was ever thrown in a Buster Keaton feature. We also discontinued what we called impossible gags or cartoon gags. . . I realized that my feature comedies would succeed best when the audience took the plot seriously enough to root for me as I indomitably worked my way out of mounting perils.”

That quiet indomitable spirit, what Ebert calls his “sustained act of optimism,” separates Buster Keaton’s stone-faced everyman from the other great comedic characters of the age. Take Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp — at base a hobo, petty thief, and conniving opportunist, his humor derived from his boundless ingenuity in skirting the law, and his pathos came from being an oppressed victim of a cruel society. Late in life, Keaton remembered…

…a night away back in 1920 when Charlie and I were drinking beer in my kitchen. He was going on at a great rate about something new called communism which he had just heard about. He said that communism was going to change everything, abolish poverty. The well would help the sick, the rich would help the poor. . . .

I myself have gone through life almost unaware of politics, and I only wish my old friend had done the same. He must know by now that communism, wherever it has been practiced, bears not the slightest resemblance to the benign system he described to me forty years ago.

That sort of ordinary common sense shines through in Buster Keaton movies like The Cameraman. Meanwhile, as communism became a faddish preoccupation of liberals in the 1920s and ’30s, Chaplin’s movies became increasingly politicized and culturally rebellious, culminating in Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a subversive serial-killer comedy that Chaplin considered “the cleverest and most brilliant film of my career” even as ordinary Americans fled from it in droves, leaving it to flop catastrophically at the box office. Based off a script by Orson Welles and championed by critics like the selfsame James Agee who praised the work of Keaton’s silents, it nevertheless repulsed American theatergoers. The elderly serial killers of Arsenic and Old Lace at least were portrayed as crazy — Chaplin’s sardonic wife-murderer justifies himself by pooh-poohing his comparatively meager killings when set against the much greater casualties of war.

By the end, the guy who had started by wagging a cane and walking funny fancied himself one of the greatest artistes of the age, whereas Keaton judged his own career far more humbly, seeing himself as a mere gag man and entertainer. With feet (and ego) firmly on the ground, he was thus able to see Chaplin’s preening leftism for what it was: “I do not really think Charlie knows much more about politics, history, or economics than I do, Like myself he was hit by a make-up towel almost before he was out of diapers. Neither of us had time while growing up to study anything but show business.” It’s to Keaton’s credit that he realized this, and wasn’t seduced by the pretty lies being sprinkled throughout Hollywood by commies in those decades.

Keaton saw the core difference between Chaplin’s artistry and his own as a moral one. “Charlie’s tramp was a bum with a bum’s philosophy,” he wrote. “Lovable as he was, he would steal if he got the chance. My little fellow was a workingman and honest.” During The Cameraman, for instance, we see Buster’s character celebrating America’s favorite pastime, working hard to get ahead, courting his girl in a decent way, and continually acting honorably whenever a moral choice presents itself. By the picture’s conclusion, he’s become more than the butt of jokes, more than a thinly veiled political message, and more than a pouting beggar soliciting other people’s pity. He’s become a hero, by virtue of his actions being grounded in the same basic morality of the country in which he grew up and found fame. This came easy and natural for Keaton, with no guru or faddish ideology necessary — after all, he spent decades entertaining average Americans sitting a few feet away from the stage, and he served honorably with our troops in France during World War I.

If Buster Keaton has a single artistic disciple in modern times, it’s the Hong Kong martial artist Jackie Chan (another guy we’ll be studying in more detail later on in FCML). Like the elder comedian, Chan found himself entertaining on the stage from a young age as an acrobat, and later parlayed the skills gained in that endeavor into the most inventive and astounding physical comedy of his era. Eschewing the herd of stars attempting to ape Bruce Lee, he chose instead to embrace the style of the American silent comedians of old, particularly Keaton. It’s a perfect example of someone in our day taking an art form declared dead for fifty years and finding a way to make it relevant again.

It’s no mistake that, like Keaton before him, Jackie Chan became one of the most popular movie stars of his time. Like James Agee wrote those many years ago, we haven’t lost or outgrown our craving for “laughter as violent and steady and deafening as standing under a waterfall,” the kind that only true physical comedy induces. Even in this age of special effects and CGI fight scenes, when geniuses like Jackie Chan bring it alive again au naturel, audiences respond.

I think it’s a tragedy that Buster Keaton died of cancer at the age of seventy in 1966, and hence didn’t live long enough to view movies like Project A (1983) and Police Story (1985). If he did, he would have seen in Jackie Chan a true kindred spirit rekindling fires that seemingly died out for good with The Cameraman in 1928. When asked about his influences, Chan routinely puts Keaton at the top of the list, going so far as to say, “I just want that one day, when I retire, that people still remember me like they remember Buster. I really want someone to respect me the way they respect Buster.”

If The Great Stone Face were still with us, even he would have to crack a smile upon hearing that.

This concludes our look at silent comedy great Buster Keaton and his final masterpiece, The Cameraman (1928).

Previous posts in the series “Buster Keaton and The Cameraman”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

For Conservative Movie Lovers: Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and ‘Goldfinger’ Part 4

Leo Grin — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 14:03:02 +0000

In 1964, little-known actor Michael Caine was being evicted — again — and needed a place to stay — again. His friend Sean Connery, starting out in similar circumstances, had reached the pinnacle of the acting world as James Bond. But here Caine was, unable to pay the rent.

In desperation, he temporarily moved in with his pal John Barry, the music composer for the Bond series. Barry was a regular patron of London’s tony clubs and discotheques, and so Caine fully expected to have some good times while staying over as a guest. What he got instead was being kept up night after night by a strange tune Barry was tinkering with: two blaring notes in the key of F major, followed by a trailing melody in D flat, repeated over and over like a villainous echo:

Decades later, music critic Terry Walstrom would marvel at how this famous introduction “arrests the attention and stuns the ear,” with the unorthodox key transition being akin to “opening a carton of fat-free milk and pouring out a glass of vodka. Entirely without precedent.”

Unknowingly just a few months away from his own stardom courtesy of 1964’s Zulu (another film scored by Barry), Michael Caine lay in the dark listening to the haunting melody of “Goldfinger,” little guessing that the song would one day be judged one of the finest of the last fifty years, with its young composer becoming the greatest British purveyor of movie music in the twentieth century.

John Barry Prendergast was the great-grandson of famous bare-knuckled boxing champ Jack Sullivan, but no hint of “the sweet science” filtered down through the family tree to him. Born in 1933, his father owned a chain of cinemas and his mother was a concert pianist. Barry took piano lessons from the age of nine (with one teacher whacking his fingers with a ruler whenever he missed a key), and fell in love with movies while working in the projection booths of his Dad’s theaters. Soon he had every intention of becoming a classically trained film composer.

Then, as Barry tells it, “When I was fifteen, I met totally different music. My brother was crazy about swing: Goodman, Ellington, Herman, the Dorseys, Harry James and the rest. I was horrified. Then, secretly fascinated. Then openly fascinated.” Against all common sense given his film aspirations, Barry found himself forgoing his piano studies to learn the trumpet, while devouring every jazz record he could find. “I was a big, big fan of Stan Kenton’s,” he says.

I wanted to listen to the early Kenton stuff — that brass sound was predominant, both the high brass (they said he had five trumpets, five trombones) and also the low brass sound, a rich, low sound. I think the genesis of the Bond sound was most certainly that Kentonesque, sharp attack; extreme ranges, top Cs and beyond, and on the low end you’d go right down to the low Fs and below, so you’d have a wall of sound. The typical thing, that Bond thing, is very much this brass sound.

Managing military bands during his compulsory national service convinced Barry that bandleader was the greatest job in the world. Problem was, the big swing bands were on their way out — too big, too expensive, too old-style. They were being replaced by rock ‘n’ roll groups featuring a smaller mix of brass, percussion, and newfangled instruments like electric guitars.

Barry took advantage of this changing of the guard by recruiting some ex-Army buddies and local musicians into a new group he called The John Barry Seven. Instead of Benny Goodman it was Bill Haley who inspired these kids. Decked out in matching light-grey suits and sporting practiced dance steps to go along with the music, they soon were a regular feature in British music halls and on TV.

In 1957, the respected UK pop-music newspaper Record Mirror said that the John Barry Seven were “mainly on a rock kick, but if you can stand that, then the act is excellent. They are faultlessly turned out, perform with slickness, precision and abandon. An act produced with professional thoroughness, an object lesson to the youngsters in the business.” Barry and his band toured with Paul Anka, jump-started the career of British teen idol Adam Faith, and played in the first Royal Variety Show in 1960. Perhaps the high point of that early period was Faith’s 1959 breakthrough hit, “What Do You Want?”

As the Fifties gave way to the swinging Sixties, Barry began scoring films as a side-gig. His first was 1960’s hilariously bad contribution to the teen-rebellion genre, Beat Girl. But even as he wrote music for a schlocky picture with lines like “My mother was a stripper. . . I wanna be a stripper too!”, he was still pining to graduate to his first love: serious composition for cinema. “You knew he had another agenda,” Adam Faith later remembered about his early collaborations with Barry. “He used pop music as a platform — a jumping off platform. Almost from the first day that I met him, John’s ambition went beyond making a few pop records.”

Barry began recording orchestral demos for his budding film-scoring career, and his arrangements became progressively grander in scale. One Friday in June 1962 he got a call from Noel Rogers, the head of music publishing at United Artists in London. There was a movie rushing into theaters, a picture based on the famous James Bond books, and the producers weren’t happy with the main theme. Would Barry consider reworking the existing melody into something hotter and hipper?

The composer knew vaguely of James Bond but had never read a single line of Ian Fleming’s prose, nor did the producers have time to let him screen a rough cut of the picture. It was a rush job: he was offered two-hundred pounds, given the basic melody as written by Dr. No composer Monty Norman, and ordered to turn in an updated arrangement of the main theme by the following Wednesday. Knowing only that the Bond series featured spies, gunplay and girls, Barry decided to use Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” and Nelson Riddle’s “Untouchables” theme as primary models for his own effort. “It was very Dizzy Gillespie,” Barry said later in an interview. “The bridge of the James Bond theme — it’s totally be-bop. It was this crazy mixture of stuff. . . really a ragbag of ideas.”

Gathering together the current incarnation of his John Barry Seven, he padded them out with additional players until he had a streamlined, lean-and-mean “orchestra.” There were nine pieces of brass (five saxes, plus trumpets and trombones), a bit of percussion for rhythm, and no strings at all aside from the ones attached to the sinister, growling electric guitar of Vic Flick, a young impresario who had joined the Seven in 1959. It was Flick who suggested creating “a more ominous feel” by playing his bit an octave lower, starting on the sixth string rather than the fourth. “We tried it,” says Flick, “and it turned out to be very effective.” Have a listen and judge for yourself:

The film’s producers liked the theme so much that they added it not only to the main titles, but to a number of other scenes in Dr. No as well. When released as a single later that year, “The James Bond Theme” became a huge hit on the radio, cementing the character of James Bond in the popular culture. “The Bond Sound is made up of two different elements,” Barry says, “the pop guitar sound plus influences from people like Bill Russo and Stan Kenton. The pop side made it very accessible, and the jazz side gave it a size and feel that was different. Fred Astaire said, ‘Make it big, give it style, and give it class,’ and that’s the bible on which I worked.”

Right on the heels of Dr. No’s success came the first Bond sequel, From Russia, With Love. Previously limited to rearranging Dr. No’s title track, Barry was hired this time to score the entire film, with one crucial exception: the movie’s theme song, written by Lionel Bart and crooned by Matt Munro. For a second time, therefore, he found himself in the somewhat unenviable position of giving someone else’s preexisting melody his own jazzy, brassy “Bond Sound.”

But once again, the producers liked what he turned in so much that they made the decision to track one of Barry’s instrumentals over the opening credits, relegating the vocalized version of the theme to the end of the film:

Barry also used From Russia, With Love to introduce an all-new, multi-purpose Bond action theme called simply “007.” It proved popular with fans, and ultimately was used again and again throughout the series:

It wasn’t until Goldfinger in 1964 that Barry was entrusted with penning his first Bond theme song, complete with lyrics and a vocalist of his choosing, and he was determined to make the most of it. One of his favorite Sixties haunts, The Pickwick Club, was owned by the lyricist Leslie Bricusse. Barry asked him and fellow song-smith Anthony Newly to provide lyrics for the tune, but when they first heard it they were astounded by how unconventional it was. “What the hell do I do with it?” Newly asked.

“It’s ‘Mack the Knife,’” Barry replied. “A song about a villain.”

That was the key, and from there Bricusse and Newly were able to find words that lived up to the brazen, audacious, subtly creepy melody:

Goldfinger!
He’s the man.
The man with the Midas touch.
A spider’s touch. . . .
Such. . .
a cold finger.
Beckons you
to enter his web of sin.
But don’t. . . go. . . in. . . .

Tony Newly, an accomplished singer in his own right, recorded a version of “Goldfinger” that ultimately went unused in the film, but which focuses the mind on the exquisite silkiness of the lyrics, freed as they are here from the wailing brass of the “James Bond sound”:

Once the music was on paper, and while Bricusse and Newly were still penning the words, Barry went on a hunt for a singer capable of doing justice to the sheer outlandishness of the piece. He settled on a beautiful, full-throated pop diva of mixed African/English heritage named Shirley Bassey, who heralded from Wales. As soon as she swung by the studio and listened to Barry’s haunting melodies, she was entranced. “Just hearing the opening bars convinced me that this was no ordinary song,” Bassey later gushed, “and I told him ‘I don’t care what the lyrics are like — I’ll do it!’”

Bassey’s incomparable voice was the final necessary ingredient in the potent “Goldfinger” musical brew. “She just whammed it out with so much conviction,” Barry later marveled. “[Her voice] was feminine but she had a metallic quality in her voice. An absolute metallic edge. So the whole thing worked. It wouldn’t had been what it was had Shirley not sang it.” At one concert with Barry in 1964, Bassey hit a high note so powerfully that, as she tells it, “my dress strap broke and out popped my left boob! I didn’t miss a beat as I kept my hand there and. . . finished the song still holding on.”

Small wonder she’s never been invited to sing at the Super Bowl. . . .

While the movie was growing into a cultural phenomenon, the soundtrack album for Goldfinger went on a rampage of its own, knocking The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night out of the top spot of the US charts, and ultimately hanging around on the list for seventy weeks. Two million copies were sold in just the first six months, and the title song became a #1 hit as far away as Japan. “The end result worked just perfectly,” says the composer with pride.

John Barry’s involvement with James Bond stretched over a quarter-century, until by 1987’s The Living Daylights he felt he had “exhausted all my ideas, rung all the changes possible. It was a formula that had run its course. The best had been done as far as I was concerned.” Goldfinger remains his favorite Bond score, a magic convergence of talent and execution that comes along maybe once or twice in a lifetime.

By no means is Barry only known for Bond. He has won five Academy Awards during his long career, bringing his stately, elegant, and lush compositions to bear on films as varied as Born Free (1967), The Lion in Winter (1969), Midnight Cowboy (1969), King Kong (1976), The Deep (1977), Bruce Lee’s Game of Death (1978), Disney’s The Black Hole (1979), Somewhere in Time (1980), Body Heat (1981), Out of Africa (1986), and his magnificent crowning achievement, Dances with Wolves (1991). But it’s the pulsing, soaring, jazz-and-brass Bond efforts for which he’ll be remembered best. And among that group of scores, Goldfinger reigns supreme.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, a look at the amazing production design of Goldfinger, and the endlessly inventive man who dreamt up the larger-than-life look of Bond’s world.

Previous posts in the series “Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and Goldfinger”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Movies We Like: ‘Enter the Dragon’ (1973)

John Nolte — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 15:29:39 +0000

“…but when I became a man, I did away with childish things.”

Uhm, no. The whole point of becoming an adult is not to do away with childish things but to get away with childish things. Yeah, sure, in my balding middle-age I’ve given up a few childish things like immunizations and optimism, but other than that most of my free time is dedicated to junk food, sitting too close to the TV and watching “things that are bad for me.”

And Bruce Lee movies. A regular rotation of Bruce Lee movies. Especially “Enter the Dragon.”

In the mid-to-late ‘70s this eleven year old would pack a lunch, grab his allowance, lie to his parents about going to the museum and jump on a downtown bus for a full day of losing himself in whatever schlocky, R-rated grinder was playing that Saturday afternoon. It was a glorious rotation of cheesy horror, kick-ass blacksploitation, urban actioners, and poorly dubbed kung-fu genre flicks, and before my family would move far away from the bus lines, the two best years of bang-for-the-buck movie-going I would ever experience.

The audience was half the fun and didn’t care that these were second, third and fourth run films they’d seen so many times before. Like me, most were underage but also there for an immersive good time. In the back rows the alcoholics slept one off and make-out artists practiced their art, while dead in the middle of the action I’d sit quietly munching peanut butter sandwiches lost in the wonder of it all. When the movies sucked – which was most of the time – the audience became the entertainment, but when the audience was quiet – enraptured — that meant more than any critics’ thumbs up … and never do I remember more silence than during these four minutes:

–

No wire work, no shaky-cam, no hyper-editing, nothing speeded up in post… Other than sound-effects and rehearsal this is the real deal — all Bruce Lee – pulling off what for my money ranks as the greatest fight scene of its kind. I love how the camera stays on Lee; how he holds his ground as the faceless henchmen come to him; how Lee’s eyes focus on nothing so they can focus on everything; and oh how I love those nun chucks.

Most of all, I love that thirty-years on “Enter the Dragon” still thrills.

Don’t think. FEEL. It is like a finger pointing away to the moon. Do not concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.

The villain is Han (Kien Shah), a renegade Shaolin Monk who’s now the crime lord of his own private island where he traffics in drug-addicted sex slaves and holds a tri-annual martial arts tournament. To avenge his sister and restore honor to the Shaolin Temple Han disgraced, Lee (Bruce Lee) agrees to work with the authorities and enter the tournament undercover in order to gain access to the island and collect evidence.

Bruce Lee and John Saxon

The contestants are taken by water taxi to the island. Through flashback we learn that Roper (John Saxon) is a gambling addict with the mob looking to punch his ticket and Williams (Jim Kelly) is a wanted man after getting into a racial scuffle with a couple of racist cops. Both served in Vietnam together. Both hope a tournament win might mean a second chance.

It is difficult to associate these horrors with the proud civilizations that created them: Sparta, Rome, The Knights of Europe, the Samurai… They worshipped strength, because it is strength that makes all other values possible. Nothing survives without it. Who knows what delicate wonders have died out of the world, for want of the strength to survive.

To put these plot points into place, 45 minutes will pass before the tournament gets under way – about twice the time a modern actioner might take – but well worth it.

Jim Kelly talking to “Mr. Han-Man!”

Lee’s charisma and incredible fight choreography are why you watch, but the subplot involving Roper and Williams is the heart of the picture, the love story if you will, and why “Dragon” endures even more than Lee’s other films. Everything comes down to a point where Saxon’s desperate and somewhat sordid character is offered all he’s ever wanted and he’s ready to go for it until a particular moment arises when he’s asked to look the other way. His decision is the film’s one major turning point and a very satisfying one

Boards don’t hit back.

At sixty years of age and sporting a fierce widow’s peak, our villain Han isn’t what you expect. I’m unaware of any evidence that might back this, but I’ve always believed Han was meant to be a stand-in for then President Nixon. This was 1973 and most B-grinders came with a hearty dose of “social consciousness.” Going after The Man (and in the early ‘70s Nixon was The Man’s Man) not only appealed to audiences but served as a fig leaf of social importance for all the sex and violence.

Bruce Lee was never a great actor but on Oscar night you could set off the fire sprinklers in the Kodak Theatre and not wet half the charisma Lee carried so effortlessly. Lee was pure movie star with a one-of-a-kind screen presence. Forget the action scenes. Watch him move. Watch him cross a room. The cult of personality that grew up around his death might be bullshit, but Lee wasn’t. There’s never been anyone like him, and as a fight choreographer he is unequaled.

A good fight should be like a small play but, played seriously. When the opponent expands, I contract. When he contracts, I expand. And when the opportunity presents itself, I do not hit. It hits all by itself.

With some exceptions like “The Matrix,” showy stunts, effects and editing only serve to undermine fight sequences. The key to a successful screen brawl is plausibility and this requires precise choreography, a lot of rehearsal and the camera staying the hell out of the way. No matter how big or numerous his opponents, whether it was a single kick or the iconic mirrored climax, Lee’s incredible skills as a performer (he was an accomplished martial artist in real life) and choreographer sold it like few others.

“Enter the Dragon” is Bruce Lee’s masterpiece and while he would live to see the finished film he died of a cerebral edema before it made him the international screen star he worked so hard to become.

He was 32.

My Secret Life as a Conservative Republican

John T. Simpson — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:36:48 +0000

I’m tired of hiding it. Everybody knows anyway. So it’s time to come clean, just like the Klan hoods I’ve got spinning in the dryer as we speak. It’s time for the Neanderthal knuckle-dragging, open mouth-breathing, racist, sexist, Klan and Timothy McVeigh-loving Montana militia member gun nut conservative Republican religious zealot in me to be set free. Repression is a bitch, and so am I.

I go to bed full of hate and wake up the same. I hate blacks, Hispanics, gays, women, abortion doctors, liberals, Lefties, Democrats, you name ‘em, I hate ‘em if they’re not like me. I especially hate President Obama for being black. Just ask Janeane Garofalo, although being a Stalinist Socialist doesn’t help Obama’s cause any with me. Fact is, Obama could be a GOP Michael Steele Uncle Tom, and I’d still hate him even more than liberals hate Steele. Skin color trumps all. Thank God I was born the right color, or I’d probably kill myself. Wait, the hoods are dry! Be right back.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Joe is my hero and role model, Archie Bunker a distant second, Ted Nugent a close third. I have posters of all of them lining my walls, alongside such conservative Republican heroes as Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Adolf Hitler and Darth Vader.

I used to have one of Robert C. Byrd, but he lost me when he left the Klan and became the Conscience of the Senate. Whatever that means. Didn’t know the Senate had one. But I never understood that. How can a white guy in good conscience leave the Klan? But I digress.

I have a mega-gun collection and a huge stockpile of hollow-point Teflon-coated ammo that’s just itching to be used. Haven’t decided yet on which abortion doctor I’m going to target next. Maybe I’ll just go down to the border and shoot brownskins for sport. dHs, sToP mE BefORe I KilL aGAiN!

And though I really hate homos like the Good Book says I should, I spend a lot of my free time cruising aiport rest rooms and tapping footsies like Larry Craig. If I’m lucky, I’ll get some real teabagging in. If not, I’ll try to get some in at my local Tea Party. Of course, my shotgun wedding Handmaid’s Tale wife with the nice tooth doesn’t know about any of this. She’s usually home watching Jerry Falwell and the “700 Club” most of the day, and role-plays being Sarah Palin for me at night. Is that kinky or what? God, I love my wife! Would never be unfaithful to her with another woman.

As to being with other men, well, nobody in the GOP’s perfect. But it beats being a liberal! Except for the part where they get away with murder, and we get stoned for jaywalking.

Our favorite day is Sunday, named after our favorite radical fire-and-brimstone preacher Billy Sunday. We sing hymns like ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and wash ourselves clean in the Lord. Really necessary for me. A conservative Republican can get real dirty during the GOP workweek. Good thing my wife’s family is rich. Her toothless redneck dad gave us a beat up ‘78 Ford pickup with NASCAR and confederate flag bumper stickers and an Easy Rider rifle rack. Pride of the Bayou!

I want war. Lots of it. Want the economy to get a boost? Works every time! Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran! Of course, in the interest of disclosure, I must confess to being a consultant for Blackwater, Halliburton, the Carlyle Group and Big Oil. And so what if we all staged 9/11? Made a ton of dough and dusted enough Islamist ragheads to fill the new Yankee Stadium, didn’t we?

Liberals are such pussies! And screw Global Warming! I WANT the world to burn! Only then can Jesus bring Paradise to earth. Speaking of which, where’s that landing strip for Christ in Yosemite National Park James Watt put on order? Days are gettin’ short! And don’t forget, Jesus is white, and might is right. I’m sorry, what was the problem with slavery again?

Actually, I have to confess yet again. All the above is only what I aspire to be, i.e. the best GOPer Repug Nazi I can be. Like most mortals, I fall far short of my goals and dreams. I don’t even own a gun or hollow-point Teflon-coated ammo, but I support the Second Amendment, which is just as bad. May as well be a co-conspirator with Scott Roeder and James von Brunn.

I detest the corrupt Mengele-like genocidal statutory rape-hiding abortion industry that needs reform even more than Iran’s government, but support a woman’s LEGAL right to choose. It’s the law. Until and unless it’s overturned, what can you do? Shoot up clinics? Ya, in my Rethug dreams!

I’m really not a bathroom footsie player, or like cock and hairy ass in general. But gay marriage is legal in my home state of New Hampshire and I haven’t been sodomized yet, so live and let live. What can I say, I’m weak. And even though as a six-year veteran I believe in General Douglas MacArthur’s axiom that “no one hates war more than the soldier,” sometimes they just gotta be fought if civilization as we know it must survive. Be it a cold war with the Russians or hot ones with Hitler and bin Laden, the dirty deeds must be done. And without quarter until victory is complete.

Fight a war to the end or don’t fight it. You can’t do both. One way assures victory, the other defeat. The Art of Fighting Without Fighting doesn’t work with the abu Musab al-Zarqawis of this world.

Worst of all? I was born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now THAT’S a confession! How can I ever face my conservative redneck Republican sister-banging moonshine-guzzling Zionist drinking buddies at the NRSC and AIPAC again?

I put it all on the table, people. Now, if only liberal Democrat lefties would freely admit to all the world that they’re all hypocritical, mentally disordered, drug-addled, tree-hugging, America-hating, nihilist anarchist recruiting office-bombing, terrorist and dictator-loving, tinfoil hat, limp-wrist pansy spoiled brat full-grown trust fund Stalinist toddlers who couldn’t get gangbanged by the Green Bay Packers hard or fast enough (practice squads included), maybe we’ll get somewhere in this country.

I seek progress, not perfection. We can all sit down together and have one big ideological circle jerk. Get it out of our systems, you know? Hey, we’re all Americans here! Confession is good for the soul. Or your metaphysical, Pagan or Wiccan existential plane of being, depending on your religious or non-religious proclivities and inclinations.

God, I feel so good now. Got it all out. Okay, let’s hear it in the comments section now. No holding back. That includes you, Unrighteous Bubba and Cognitive Dissonant. Tell us about all the kinky things you like to do with tinfoil, Vaseline and vacuum cleaners while watching sick online German porn in your mothers’ basements