Bruce Lee

As mentioned earlier, some time ago I took aikido classes at a school in Burke, up until fall of 1999.  To my knowledge the school has now closed.  I took the classes for several years and worked my way up to first degree black belt.  The tests involved fending off attacks from opponents.   We cross-trained in tae kwon do, but did not have to do all the forms which TKD students are required to do.  I learned punches and a variety of kicks.  Aikido is mainly defensive, turning an opponent’s attack against himself by redirecting the momentum or twisting arms or legs in the wrong direction. 

The most famous martial artist associated with aikido is Steven Seagal, and while watching his films I recognized the various moves we did in class.  By now I’ve seen most of his earlier movies, but I zoned out when he drifted into a personality who was overly mystical and friendly with Putin.  From 1988 (Above the Law) until now (Attrition) he has done 53 movies, with “Above the Law 2” and “Under Siege 3” in development. 

Before Steven Seagal, there was – BRUCE LEE.

I’d seen “Enter the Dragon” a few times before and even had it on DVD.  But up until now I hadn’t bothered to watch his other films.   Cue Robin Leach: “I don’t know WHY.”  Anyhow, after watching “The Last Dragon”, I decided to rectify that oversight and watched these films.

Born November 27, 1940 in San Francisco, but grew up in Hong Kong.  His family brought him back to the US to avoid problems and he went to college in Seattle.  He spoke fluent English and seemed to understand both Chinese culture back in Hong Kong as well as US culture, at least on the West Coast.  He died of a stroke complicated by negative interactions with a drug given to him to cure the condition – neither misadventure nor negligence on his part, nor anything like his son Brandon’s death in the process of making the movie he was working on at the time. 

Jeet Kune Do.  His martial arts style of “no style”.   I’ve never been to a JKD school nor do I know anyone else who has.  I can’t claim enough familiarity with the various styles to offer any coherent analysis of this, so I’ll leave it at that. 

The Green Hornet.   He played the title character’s sidekick, Kato, for one season.   No US studio, either for TV or movie, would give Lee a starring role as the main character. 

The Big Boss.  His first movie, a wholly Chinese (Hong Kong) affair.  The bad guys are Chinese gangsters using an ice factory as a front for a drug smuggling operation.   [NOTE:  some sources equate this with “Fist of Fury”.  They are two completely separate movies.]   Nora Miao, who has more substantial roles in later films, starts off here as a cute ice cream girl. 

Everything starts off ok, until various workers notice that the ice has drugs in it, and “bring this to the boss’ attention”.  Then they disappear.  Their co-workers wonder where they went.  Big boss makes excuses which initially satisfy them but eventually fall short.  Eventually it’s up to Lee’s character to take on a series of bad guys, each more important, until the final showdown with the head bad guy, and of course Lee’s guy wins.  Note: as with all these films, I recognize tae kwon do and judo moves but little or nothing in the way of aikido.

Fist of Fury.  This takes place in Shanghai and the Japanese are bad guys, though outright war doesn’t seem to be going on, so it must be before 1937.  The Head of a martial arts school, who had been old but in good health, mysteriously dies.  The top student, Chen (Lee) suspects foul play, and he’s right:  the Japanese (twirling mustaches diabolically) poisoned Old Man.  Chen sets out to avenge the Old Man’s death.   There’s a Cute Asian Chick (Nora Miao), a burly Russian martial artist, Petrov (Robert Wall), a collaborating Chinese interpreter consistently mistreated by the Japanese (“crawl for us like the Chinese dog you are!”) and disliked by his fellow Chinese, a few geishas (one goes full nude, which is interesting) and of course plenty of martial arts.  The top bad guys are Japanese, and a samurai sword enters the equation.  Naturally, Lee wins. 

Way of the Dragon.  This is the next one, taking place in Rome.  The local Chinese are being bullied and oppressed by the Mob.  BL, visiting from Hong Kong, of course does something about it.  Cute Chick Nora Miao is back, as are many of the other actors, including Robert Wall, again playing a goon, though not as prominent and not Russian.  Ultimately the bad guys send for Colt (Chuck Norris), who faces off against Lee, appropriately enough at the Coliseum itself.  [It turns out that Norris’ appearance in “Game of Death” is actually scenes from this film spliced in to that one, not a new appearance.]  In any case, this Lee vs. Norris battle is what makes this film a must-see for Lee & Norris fans alike, and in that regard make it competitive with “Enter the Dragon”.

Enter the Dragon.  His most famous, with John Saxon and Jim Kelly; Jackie Chan supposedly appears as a nameless opponent he summarily dispatches, but I was unable to recognize him.  He starts off in Hong Kong, of all places, and winds up at a martial arts tournament at a secluded island, run by the bad guy, a Shaolin monk who went the wrong way.  Actually both the Shaolins and an unnamed intelligence agency sent him:  the former to avenge themselves from this man who is corrupting their “faith”, and the latter because they believe he’s been running criminal operations from his island but no one has been able to infiltrate the island to prove it – they lost contact with their prior agent.  Eventually he dispatches the bad guy, whose hand is gone and replaced by various nasty weapons. 

Game of Death.  He started making this before “Enter The Dragon” and picked up again after, but was cut short when his death made it difficult for him to do much more.   So they got a stand-in to replace him, and spliced in footage of him already shot to try to make a coherent whole of the entire thing, with mixed results.  I’d say it works remarkably well given the circumstances but still doesn’t match “Enter the Dragon”.  The highlights are donning the yellow, black striped one piece track suit while taking down various enemy motorcyclists in a warehouse, followed by his successive defeat of various martial arts masters in a tower, going up floor after floor and finally dispatching the Boss Level Man, played by none other than the insanely tall Kareem Abdul Jabbar, aka Roger Murdock. 

Martial Arts & Porn.   I noticed a similarity in the format:  each type of film is oriented towards physical interaction, of clearly different types.  The dialogue is not particularly brilliant, the plot is fairly simple, there are no twists and eventually you wind up with the… physical interaction.  On the other hand, I don’t really see porn as a main “actor” screwing his/her way up a series of partners until finally taking on the big boss one for one gigantic simultaneous orgasm, so the analogy isn’t entirely fair to martial arts films.  

The Heart of Darkness at Noon

Just the other day, inspired by numerous mentions of “#1” in Darkness At Noon, by Arthur Koestler, I printed out and posted on the wall a picture of #1 himself, Josef Stalin.  No one in my office recognized him, so I wrote this off as “today’s unsolicited history lesson”.  A few hours later I finished reading the book itself.  And few weeks earlier I had completed Conrad’s book with a conveniently similar name.

Heart of Darkness (1899), by Joseph Conrad.  Despite having been aware of this short novel ages ago when the Vietnam war movie came out, I only read it recently.  Marlow, the narrator, is charged with delving deep into the jungle on a river boat to retrieve Kurtz, the manager of an ivory station with whom they have lost contact.  As he ventures further down the river he plunges deeper into a dark place and further away from the light of civilization, e.g. London, where he started out and later finished the story – in fact, from where he narrates the story himself to his fictional audience and the reader himself (or herself).

 

Marlow does in fact find Kurtz and takes him back on the steamer.  Sadly, Kurtz dies on the way back, his last words being “the horror, the horror”.  Back in London, Marlow is dissatisfied at how things turned out and gives Kurtz’s fiancé some other story.  The big deal is the contrast between “civilized” London and the heart of the jungle, the heart of darkness, with Marlow unconvinced the contrast is actually as substantial as the civilized world would like to believe. 

Apocalypse Now (1979).  Remarkably, the most substantial movie adaptation of this story is this movie, with which we’re almost all familiar.  The story is transposed from the Congo to Vietnam, Kurtz turns into a Green Beret (US Special Forces) colonel (Marlon Brando) who went nuts and set up his own personal kingdom deep in the jungle.  It’s up to Marlow – er, Willard (Martin Sheen) – to go up the river and take care of the matter, in fact to kill Kurtz, which he does.  Along the way we experience a full scale attack, with Duvall’s “napalm” remark, a USO show featuring hot chicks, a tiger (!), and overall a surrealistic journey away from civilized Saigon and into the primordial jungle.  In essence the movie is faithful to the basic plot.

Having seen the movie multiple times and finally read the book, sadly I’d say reading the book was a waste of time.  It really gives us nothing more than an alternate context for the same story, and the movie was very well done – with all the extra elements which make the movie more interesting but do not compromise the basic plot.  As a practical matter, reading the book itself doesn’t give you much more than you would enjoy than watching the movie.  I did so out of compulsion to seek the source material, which in most cases gives you something more.  Hell, A Scanner Darkly, the book, even had a few things the movie left out, and I find – as noted – reading the book is worthwhile.  But not here. 

By the way, a few items about this movie I’d like to address before I move on.  First, there’s now an extended cut version of the film, “Apocalypse Now REDUX”, which I have on DVD.  It adds more footage.   This footage is mainly two extended scenes.  First, the boat crew, amidst heavy rain, come across the Playboy chopper and its "mates", and trade fuel for some intimate companionship with the girls.  Second, they come across an isolated plantation of French who somehow stayed after the French officially left in 1954.  They are heavily armed (mostly with M1 carbines), and provide an official funeral for Clean (Larry Fishburne).  The head of the plantation talks about Dien Bien Phu, while Willard enjoys opium and nude fun with the owner's widowed sister.     

The second concerns the circumstances in which I first saw it – not in a movie theater (we were in Paris at the time) but actually at the US Embassy in Paris.  What later became the commercial library was earlier (late 70s, early 80s) a huge, empty room.  They showed movies there, including this one.  We all sat down to watch this, and the opening riffs of “The End” played as the chopper flew across the jungle.  Then BIZLKDFLIT!   The film crapped out.  “Technical difficulties, folks” turned into postponement – many angry and frustrated noises.  Sometime later, maybe a week or two, we all sat down again to see it.  Robby Krieger’s guitar droning again, chopper across the jungle, and BIZLKDFLIT! Again.   Now the natives were truly restless.  The projectionist narrowly avoided a spear impaling him.  Fortunately this time around the technical difficulties were overcome and we were able to see the entire film.  “And there was much rejoicing….”

Darkness at Noon (1941).  Although actual names of places or historical figures are omitted, it takes little imagination to figure out:  Old Leader is Lenin, #1 is Stalin, and “the dictatorship” is Nazi Germany.  The main character, Rubashov, is a veteran Bolshevik who served in the Russian Revolution (1917), the Russian Civil War (1918-22), and eventually winds up on the wrong side of the power struggle which put Stalin in power.  The NKVD arrested him and put him in jail.  His neighbor, with whom he communicates by tapping in morse code on the wall, is a Czarist officer. 

Part of the story is flashbacks to Rubashov’s assignments in Belgium, but mostly it concerns his current incarceration and extended interrogation.  First he’s interrogated by Ivanov, an old colleague from the Revolution who is likewise an intellectual type, somewhat cynical, but they are kindred souls whose positions could easily have been reversed had things worked out differently.  Ivanov is replaced by Gletkin, a newer officer in the NKVD who was too young to have fought in the Russian Civil War.  He has no sense of humor, no cynicism, nor any compassion or humanity, and is brutal in his ideology.  Rubashov refers to his type as “Neanderthal”, and with the older Bolsheviks gradually purged, they become the only surviving type of communists in the regime.  They may as well be robots. 

Eventually Rubashov realizes he’s wrong, confesses completely and participates in a “show trial” in which he accepts guilt for his crimes, or at least the crimes for which he knows he’s guilty, which are substantial enough; these are ideological rather than specific acts.   Needless to say he does not survive.   Much of the discussion is of the nature of the dictatorship, particularly the Soviet dictatorship.   

In particular, Ivanov articulates something Ayn Rand later articulated.   She argued that the differences between Nazism and communism were insubstantial, relative to the difference both had with capitalism.  Under the latter, individuals have primacy and the government’s purpose is to protect individual rights.  The collective does NOT have the right to sacrifice individuals to the “common good”, however that might be defined.  But the former do enslave individuals to the collective, and individuals’ rights exist only at the convenience of the state as representative of the people.   If this means not merely individuals perishing one by one in jails, but millions dying of famine or starvation, or from genocide, public policies with obviously horrendous body counts, well, too bad.  The collective triumphs over the individual.  That is the value judgment of the statist regime, be it Nazi or communist, run by Hitler or Stalin. 

Note that Nazi Germany was the sole totalitarian dictatorship which was NOT communist.  The other right wing dictatorships were authoritarian rather than totalitarian; the regime demanded full political cooperation and tolerated no dissent, political dissidents perished in jails and camps run by a secret police force, but beyond that the regime did not seek to control everyone’s lives literally from birth until death.

There is also this business of the conflict between those advocating world revolution vs. those who assert that the Soviet experiment must survive above all else.  Stalin, and those allied with him, decided that the world was not ripe for world revolution and that the Soviet version must fight to survive in a capitalist world intent on destroying it.  Everything must be oriented towards defending Soviet interests – even if it meant betraying former communist allies to the Nazis, and shutting down any and all attempts to begin revolutions overseas.  The USSR could and would deal with the capitalist countries and even Nazi Germany.  Once that decision had been made, any such efforts at world revolution worked at cross purposes to Soviet interests and thus became considered, de facto counter-revolutionary or reactionary.  Rubashov’s “crime” was to belong to the latter category, despite his impeccable credentials as an old school Bolshevik and veteran of both the Revolution and the Civil War.  He refers to old photos of the Bolshevik comrades during the revolution, who are identified with numbers superimposed above their heads, each of whom could identify the others.  He and Ivanov were both that old school style of communists.    

Koestler wrote this based on his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, and it’s not hard to ascertain why.   As with other countries, Spain was considered by Stalin not yet ripe for proletarian revolution, rather it needed to fully develop capitalism.  This is why the PSUC supported the capitalist-democratic regime of Spain and treated POUM and the anarchists as enemies, almost as much as Franco and his minions.  In any case, anyone remotely interested in communism, labor camps, interrogation, the subtle nuances of world revolution vs. let’s just focus on Russia for now, and old school Bolsheviks vs. the new hipster millennials running the NKVD, may be well advised to enjoy this.  I can say I did. 

The Conspirator

Yes, another movie.   Nay, far be it from me to review literally every moving picture I witness, as a matter of principle.  Indeed, just days before I witnessed a decidedly mediocre film, “Stay Hungry”, whose sole distinction is simply a remarkable collection of actors, to-wit:  Arnold Schwarzenegger, basically playing himself, Jeff Bridges, in an early role of his, Sally Field, a year before accompanying Burt Reynolds in a black Trans Am across the southern highways pursued by a vengeful would-be father-in-law, and the infamous Freddie Kruger himself, Robert Englund, minus his fingernails, striped sweater, fedora, or nightmare body count.

Nay, this film is far more impressive and far more worthy of my description and my valued readers’ attention:  “The Conspirator”, a 2010 film directed by none other than the Sundance Kid & Bob Woodward himself, Robert Redford.   It concerns the trial of Mary Suratt, the mother of John Suratt, one of the (alleged) co-conspirators along with John Wilkes Booth, in the plot to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865. 

The Young Professor Xavier, James McAvoy, plays Frederick Aiken, an attorney who up to recently had been a Union officer in the just-completed Civil War.   He’s assigned the task of defending Mary Suratt by Reverdy Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), Mary herself played by Claire Underwood, aka Robin Wright – who also accompanied Forrest Gump (mom played by Sally Field, mentioned above) and acted as the Princess Bride, some centuries ago in a galaxy far, far away. 

As it was, Booth himself was killed in the process of capture, and three of his male co-conspirators were caught, including one played by Norman Reedus, who we might recognize from “The Boondock Saints” and “Walking Dead”.  Justice demands not merely that these men hang from the gallows, but surely Mary herself must do so as well.  Her daughter Anna, played by Evan Rachel Wood – who we’ve seen as Dolores in “Westworld” – debates defending her mother or her brother, which appears to be mutually exclusive. 

Milton, from “Office Space” (Stephen Root), acts here as a deceitful tavern owner induced by the prosecutor – Danny Huston, who recruited Logan (Wolverine) and faced off against Wonder Woman as Ludendorff, albeit without a mustache – to give false testimony.   Aiken’s war buddies are played by James Badge Dale – in one of the Iron Man films – and Justin Long, who hasn’t hawked Apple computers in some time.  The war tribunal includes Colm Meaney, likewise far away from ST/NG.

But never mind the cast.   The story itself is compelling in its own right.   Aiken, once he’s assured himself that John, not Mary, is the one who should be on trial, sets to acquit the woman, to the best of his ability.   He manages to damage the credibility of some of the prosecution witnesses and persuades the sister to return from Westworld to defend her mother.  This convinces the tribunal, all Union officers who were heretofore committed to finding her guilty, to reconsider that verdict. 

Alas, not everything works out, and Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War – a scarcely recognizable Kevin Kline – and the off-camera President Johnson, himself from Tennessee, undermine Captain Aiken’s good work at convincing a judge to grant  a writ of habeas corpus, which would give Mary Suratt a new trial in a civilian court.  Sadly, Mary Suratt joins the three men on the gallows.  Nonetheless, job well done, counsel.  

So we have Civil War subject matter + courtroom drama + stellar cast = movie worth watching AND blogging about.   Available from Netflix.    

Rick & Morty

As promised, here’s my R&M blog.

With food, I like things simple.   No Big Mac or Whopper, with their cacophony of discordant tastes, including mayonnaise:  just the burger, the bun, and ketchup.  Pizza?  Plain.  Subs?  Just steak or chicken, provolone, and the bun.  When I went to Egypt, I just ate pita bread.   When it comes to food, I have zero tolerance for weird shit.  Well, my preference for ghost peppers and habaneros might be a little weird – make that LOW tolerance for weird shit, in the food department.

When it comes to many other things, like music and TV, I’m the opposite:  count me as High Tolerance for Weird Shit.  Woohoo!

Case in point: Rick & Morty, a three season animated TV series.  It began loosely based on Doc & Marty from “Back to the Future” and rapidly generated into something far stranger.   Rick Sanchez, the Mad Scientist, is Morty’s grandfather, the father of Morty’s mother Beth and often a nemesis to Morty’s father, his son-in-law, Jerry, while Morty has an older sister Summer who is fairly normal.  I only watched it recently, initially turned off by the crude animation – which had originally turned me off South Park as well.  Like South Park, once you get past that you can actually enjoy it. 

Rick is usually involved in some bizarre scheme for which he drafts Morty.   Time travel, other worlds, dimensions, you name it.  Nothing is too weird or bizarre.  In fact, you can count on it.  An entire dimension full of nothing but Ricks and Mortys?  Gotcha.  Meet up with Ice-T himself (the rapper)?  Yes. 

South Park criticized The Family Guy as having its joke pattern be diversions into irrelevant tangents – and even went so far as to elaborately speculate on exactly how those tangents are developed (hint: manatees).   R&M has its own pattern, which is Rick being able to have a normal conversation or discuss mundane issues, or to hold that conversation, with whoever, while all sorts of bizarre stuff is going on.  Not quite the same, but I’d say equally entertaining.  Another amusing feature is that Beth, Jerry and Summer frequently wind up participating – usually less than enthusiastically – in Rick’s adventures to other dimensions.   

It was originally on Adult Swim, from 2013 to 2017, consisting of three seasons of 10 episodes each, with more coming up in the distant future – 70, which implies 7 more seasons.   If you share my High Tolerance for Weird Shit, you may well be advised to see what I see and enjoy it yourself.