Great Martial Arts Films
Bruce Lee in a still from Enter the Dragon, his most famous film that also featured Jackie Chan as a stuntman and extra. The last twenty minutes of the film, directed by Jackie Chan, is the finest set-piece be water my friend in the history of martial arts cinema as Wong Fei Hung fights a series of increasingly more dangerous foes through a factory, like a kung-fu Charlie Chaplin in a martial arts version of Modern Times.
This is the film where Bruce Lee truly arrived in a fully formed state, and if there's a precise moment when that happens, it's the classic dojo fight where Chen shows up at the Japanese training facility and absolutely goes to town on everyone inside.
Born in the southern Chinese city Foshan, Ip Man (1893-1972) settled in Hong Kong after the Communist takeover of 1949 and devoted his life to the practice and popularization of the Wing Chun fighting style, known for its explosive, close-range strikes.
Lotus is told early on that her life is about pretty much nothing except taking revenge on the men that killed her father and mother, and that fulfills about all of the background story any of us needed for this 90-plus minute film that isn't so much about plot complexity as it is about us the audience watching the main character just wail on some dudes.
As people will read over and over again to different articles regarding Martial Artists who made it big, who became champions at the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship), the Olympic Gold medal list in the different countries who have won it and the people who have been champions in the different tournaments they have ever joined, there is only one secret to it, "Power of the Mind".
Kelly's stardom (for example, Black Belt Jones, 1974) and many low-budget co-productions with Hong Kong studios featuring black and Asian stars (the career of actor Ron Van Clief as "the Black Dragon" is exemplary) show the appeal of kung fu films to black audiences—audiences who would very much help the future careers of white stars like Cynthia Rothrock (whose career began in Hong Kong) and Steven Seagal beginning in the late 1980s.
Largely resonating with such a trend of asserting the legitimate role of Chinese culture in constructing a new global vision on the basis of a Chinese transnationalism, an artistic reconfiguration of tianxia also provides strategies by which Zhang reinvents the marital arts film as a way to invigorate Chinese cinema in the international film market.
Martial arts films first gained popularity in the U.S. during the 1970s with movies that featured stars like Bruce Lee and Sonny Chiba However, this action-driven genre can trace its history to the days of silent cinema with classics like The Burning of the Red Lotus Monastary.
Known for his role in producing hits like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny and the documentary Jackie Chan: My Story, locally based Logan has built a notable career in the film industry since he first stepped foot on Hong Kong soil more than two decades ago.