Game

Yesterday Mary Beth surprised me by making rhubarb soda and it was super-duper good. Gonna be drinkin' that a good bit in the coming days! We watched a little Better Off Ted and then Game of Death, finishing the Bruce Lee marathon, or at least the main movies (the box set does have two whole blu ray discs of just supplements, in addition to the supplements on all the discs with the movies). Anyway, Game of Death, as its reputation indicates, is not good. I mean, I had braced up for it being even worse and it could have been much worse, but it definitely wasn't good. They only kept as little of Bruce Lee's original footage as they could get away with (of course, that's the best part of the movie, and they'd only used about a third or a quarter of what they could have). Instead of constructing Game of Death around the original footage, they just came up with some random, dumb whole other movie to tack the footage onto. And the smart thing to do would have been to end with the original footage as that would at least leave the viewer in the highest possible state of having just seen Bruce Lee in action and stopping at the best fight scenes, but they add one more fight scene and then you're left with the meh feeling you'd felt watching the bulk of the movie. (What I'm saying is, they almost end on a high note and then tack on one more low note afterwards). And the whole bulk of the movie they constructed around it is kinda slow and boring and the fight scenes do not at all have the same feeling as Bruce Lee's work, they feel more like standard cheap hollywood fight scenes. And so much energy is put into having things center around the Bruce Lee stand-ins but then doing "clever" things to detract from the fact that it's not Bruce Lee, having him in shadows or always wearing big, dark sunglasses or beard disguises or bandages, or (and mostly) just filming the back of his head. I mean, it really only highlights the fact that the actor isn't who he's supposed to be when you spend an hour and a half of almost a whole movie looking at the back of the main character's head. I mean, it'd be better to just look at some dude that doesn't look like Bruce Lee and kinda get used to that as it went on rather than having all these badly done tricks accentuate the fact that even more. But of course, relying more on the original material and not putting everything into the dumb construct would have helped alleviate the need of having to rely SO MUCH on the back of someone's head. Anyway, that's my rant on Game of Death. I know the world probably doesn't need another critique of it, but whatever. And it's not the worst thing in the world, but just watching the things that make it back and shaking your head 'cuz it would have been much easier to not have even gone the extra mile to do more to make it worse. Anyway, one of the bonus features was the full 34 or so minutes of Bruce Lee's original footage, a fragment but a big fragment, what were to have been the last three fight scenes of the movie. Cool to see that. Anyway, I've rambled enough about this.