Bruce Exploitation

What is Brucexploitation? That is simple…all these new film actors playing off of Bruce Lee, his style and movie mannerism.

Bruce Lee World: 

Bruce Lee truly is immortal. He’s been dead for 33 years and yet he stills receives the kind of publicity that most living celebrities would kill for. The scuttlebutt flooding news sites around the web recently is that Lee is going to get his very own theme park and make a miraculous comeback in a new feature film via digital editing.

Rob Cohen, director of DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY (1993) is set to helm RAGE AND FURY and this time, instead of getting an actor to play Lee in another biopic, Cohen is going to recreate Lee digitally and put him in a whole new movie. In an e-mail to LatinoReview.com Cohen said that the film will create onscreen “an entirely photo-realistic Bruce Lee with new, advanced digital technology.”

This might sound familiar. Back in 2001, Chul Shin, a South Korean filmmaker, had announced plans to put forth a fully digitalized Bruce Lee into a feature film titled DRAGON WARRIOR. As much as $30 million had been raised for the project, but nothing came of it. Chul had been planning to use stunt actors capable of replicating Lee’s moves with motion capture technology, which is widely used today in the video game industry and to a lesser degree in feature film.

Cohen is also planning to use the same technology to put a digital Bruce Lee into a new contemporary story, which at this point concerns the ghost of Lee mentoring a 15-year-old boy in Jeet Kune Do.

Dialogue from interviews and Lee’s past movies will be used to give voice to the digital Bruce Lee.

“I am doing this to further honor Bruce,” said Cohen. “It was one thing to make DRAGON but this will be the Man himself, alive for those of us that didn’t get enough and the new generations who should know what he was all about.”

DRAGON was a fair attempt at exploring the life of Bruce Lee from a Hollywood perspective. But all of Cohen’s films since have gotten bigger and dumber. Trying to be the first to put forth a fully digital actor who is no longer living is challenge enough, but an even tougher challenge will be convincing fans that this Bruce Lee is any better than the horde of Bruceploitation actors who once stood in for the real thing in countless B-movies.

If a digital Bruce Lee isn’t your thing, maybe the thought of visiting a theme park revolving around the late star is.

Wong Yiu-keung, the president of Hong Kong’s Bruce Lee Fan Club recently revealed plans for a Bruce Lee theme park, which is expected to cost more than $25 million and take three years to complete.

The park will contain a martial arts academy, conference center and statue. It will be located at Lee’s southern Chinese ancestral home of Shunde. The city is located near the coast, about half way between Vietnam and Taiwan.

There has been no mention of attractions such as “Bumper Cars of Fury,” “Way of the X-treme Dragon Roller Coaster,” “The Bruceploitation Pirate Cove,”or “Han’s House of Mirrors,” suggesting that this Bruce Lee theme park will be of a different variety than say, Six Flags. If true, it’s most definitely a missed opportunity. Hopefully, there will at least be an animatronic Bruce Lee or two flailing passersby with foam nunchaku or Chuck Norris chest hair sold in the gift shop. The possibilities (for more commercial exploitation of Bruce Lee) are endless.

courtesy of Mark Pollard

Justin Lin mocks “Game of Death”:

 

One of the more infamous examples of the “Bruceploitation” phenomenon that followed in the wake of Bruce Lee’s death in 1973 and led to the exploitation of the star’s image by look-alike actors in dozens of films is being turned into a comedy by THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT helmer Justin Lin. The director has returned to his indie roots by completing a self-financed comedy entitled FINISHING THE GAME, concerning the efforts of filmmakers to find a look-alike to complete Lee’s final martial arts film.

“Game” is a reference to THE GAME OF DEATH, the martial arts movie Bruce Lee had only begun filming before setting the project aside to star in Robert Clouse’s ENTER THE DRAGON. Lee’s death shortly before the premiere of ENTER THE DRAGON all but ensured that Lee’s pet project would die as well, despite the roughly 30 minutes of footage that had already been shot.

Then something peculiar happened. Legions of fans refused to let Bruce Lee go. Filmmakers in Hong Kong and Taiwan were quick to capitalize on this demand by searching for a new Bruce Lee (like miscasting a young Jackie Chan), making fictionalized documentaries that played up unsubstantiated rumors surrounding Lee’s death and in the most blatantly exploitive example, using actors who shared a likeness with Lee and a similar stage name in B-grade films ranging from the factually-challenged biopic BRUCE LEE: A DRAGON STORY starring Bruce Li to the Ed Wood-esque nonsense of THE CLONES OF BRUCE LEE starring Bruce Le.

This trend hit a new low when in 1978, the otherwise respectable Hong Kong studio Golden Harvest took roughly 12 minutes of Lee’s unfinished footage and teamed up with Robert Clouse to complete the film with a new script and an international cast. A Korean actor named Kim Tai-jung was tapped to stand in for Lee in newly shot scenes, while a variety of cheap editing tricks were used to recycle a variety of old footage of the real Bruce Lee. The final result was a hideous Frankenstein’s martial arts-fighting monster, a critical and commercial flop deservedly panned by fans as being perhaps the most exploitive and disrespectful of all the many Brucexploitation films released before or since.

Lee, a deep thinking student of philosophy as well as martial arts, had intended THE GAME OF DEATH to be his filmic thesis on martial arts and fluidity in thought and motion. Instead, his film had been warped by purely commercial interests and reduced to an embarrassingly desperate attempt by Lee’s former collaborators to milk a few minutes of his unreleased film footage for an audience still in mourning for one of cinema’s greatest icons.

Enter Justin Lin’s FINISHING THE GAME. The film, shot documentary style on a shoestring budget of roughly $500,000 goes behind-the-scenes on the making of THE GAME OF DEATH with a humorous and fictional take on the process of casting a Bruce Lee look-alike from 50 hopefuls.

“It doesn’t explain anything actually,” said Lin in reference to his take on THE GAME OF DEATH’s creation. “I made it all up.”

Lin’s real interest in telling this story is less an exploration of the Brucexploitation phenomenon and more a statement on his own struggles working in Hollywood and how that relates to Bruce Lee’s experience. “It’s really a comment on being Asian-American, you know. The best you can do is being able to just stand in.”

BETTER LUCK TOMORROW was the film that put Lin on the map back in 2002 when it was nominated for Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, followed by critical and box office success in 2003. Since then, Lin has turned out two big budget films including ANNAPOLIS and TOKYO DRIFT.

Many of the stars from Lin’s previous films are appearing in FINISHING THE GAME including Roger Fan, Sung Kang, McCaleb Burnett, and James Franco.

Stunt actor Don Tai, who previously worked with Lin in TOKYO DRIFT and has experience working with Jackie Chan’s stunt team, choreographed the stunts.

courtesy of Mark Pollard

There is alot more where this comes from. I personaly prefer the old movies…

Everyone laughs but there is something so natural about watching the mouth move but the words are almost 2 seconds behind. These are the best..

NO ONE and I mean NO ONE can truely impersonate the infamous Bruce Lee.

latter

-Nick

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