Great film duels - Duel Two

Leonardo vs Raphael (TMNT)

If you’re an 80s kid, and you had the privilege of watching cartoons and reading comics, you'd know about the four mutant ninja turtles of New York. I never really got into the TV series, but Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s comics made quite an impression on my pre-teen mind. I still prefer the more edgy look of the Turtles in the early comics over the ‘cute’ TV versions with their colour coded headbands and pads, alphabet belt buckles and baby eyes.

When the first live-action Turtles movie came out in 1990, I remember being amazed by how real the Turtle costumes looked. Although they kept the coloured headbands (for obvious identification purposes), the Turtles’ character design harked back to the grittier comics I loved. It didn’t hurt that the movie’s plot was partly based on a particular Mirage Studios comic that remains til this day the only Turtle story I remember with any clarity (it’s the one where Raphael gets ambushed by the Foot Clan and is badly beaten up).

Like a lot of other cool cartoons I grew up with, the Turtles eventually fell off the pop culture radar. I know that in the intervening years there was a revamped TV series plus new comics, toys and merchandise. But my propensity for nostalgia kept me from giving the new stuff a lookover.

Then in 2007, a fully computer animated Turtles movie was released. And boy, did it look good.

The Turtles got a design update, looking sleeker and meaner, and they could now pull off moves that were impossible for an actor in a rubber suit to do. It was like the Turtles of my childhood comics had been given the breath of life and were now able to run, leap, backflip, somersault, skate and fight like elite ninja dudes. Awesome.

This duel between Leonardo and Raphael is one of the highlights of the film. What makes it special (apart from the gorgeous animation and rendering) is its emotional aspect – Leo and Raph are arguably the more complex characters out of the four brothers. They are in many ways diametrically opposed; Leo is calm, rational and idealistic, while Raph is hot-tempered and impetuous but also more pragmatic than his older brother. This fight is a demonstration of their differences, perhaps even caused by those very differences.

There’s a lot to analyse about the fight. Raph has greater protection with his armour, and even appears stronger than Leo (I don’t know if it’s in the TMNT canon that Raph is the ‘bruiser’ of the team, but it kinda looks that way here). Leo is lighter on his feet and outmanouvers Raph a few times, though whether that’s down to his superior skill or because Raph is encumbered by his armour is up for speculation. I’ll say it’s due to Leo’s skill and Raph’s lack of discipline, but I’m biased.




24.5.11

Great film duels - Duel One

I recently watched several K-1 kickboxing fights on YouTube, a sport that until then I had only the slightest familiarity with. Being a fan of martial arts films, I was struck by how different real life hand-to-hand combat is from the stylised action seen on screen. The real thing is far more inelegant; strikes are erratic and tend to come in staccato bursts in between periods of cautious feints and footwork. When a punch or kick does connect, it looks – and sounds – rather underwhelming. There is no exaggerated ‘thwack’ courtesy of the sound effects department to emphasise the blow’s impact. Strikes rarely land clean and sharp; they glance, slide, wobble, buckle and bounce. There’s a lot more sweat.

Real fighters also tend to avoid executing fancy moves. It’s a strategic choice – complicated techniques have a higher risk of failure, which can expose a fighter to a counterattack, and they are tiring when used too often. Real life bouts can be rather conservative affairs, especially when compared with their spectacular counterparts in movies.

For all their simulated violence, movie fights are more akin to dancing artforms than combat sports. For one thing, they’re choreographed, just like ballet or theatrical dance routines. There is an emphasis on rhythm, music, aesthetic appeal and narrative. Since the audience knows that no one is actually getting hurt, movie fights can be viewed with the same expectations as one would have of, for example, a ballet performance. The beauty of the fight and the storytelling purpose it serves take precedence over questions of who is the better fighter.

With this in mind, I’m starting a series of posts celebrating the artform of film fights, specifically duels. I chose duels because there’s something primal about one-on-one combat, and also because duels serve as a comparison with combat sports. I have chosen duels featuring weapons, because, well, they’re cooler.

Of course, my selection is a purely subjective exercise in martial arts film geekery. No doubt there are some who will question my choices. I’m aware of the many jaw-dropping quality swordfights in cinema, but since I don’t intend to post several hundred entries on film duels, I’m going to limit myself to just five examples. Each is taken from a specific genre: A swords-and-sandals film, a full CGI film, a sci-fi film, an anime, and a kung-fu (or rather wuxia) film. All five duels represent, for me, some of the best film combat choreography in the history of the moving picture. I hope you enjoy their artistry as much as I do.


Achilles vs Hector (Troy)

The film had mixed reviews, but I was (and still am) impressed with the costume designs and fight choreography. Brad Pitt’s Achilles really conveyed the martial prowess of the fabled warrior, cutting down Trojans with grace, agility and a terrifying ferocity. Much to the wrath of Iliad purists, the screenwriters and choreographers took creative liberties with the depiction of Achilles’s legendary duel with the Trojan prince Hector. I prefer to appreciate the film duel on its own merits, canonical or not.

Achilles’s agility and haughtiness are on show in the fight. This duel contains, to my knowledge, a rare example of non-Asian spear fighting. It’s interesting to see how the choreographers interpreted the way a Greek spear was wielded in single combat. That and the large shields give this duel a distinctive flavour.

The best fight scenes have an element of character exposition. We read in the body language of Achilles his contempt for Hector. We glimpse the not unremarkable skill of Hector when he manages to cut the hitherto untouchable Achilles. We feel that Hector was truly a great warrior – both in arm and heart – and thus consider it an injustice that a mere man, no matter his skill, was matched against a virtual god of war. Brave Hector stood no chance against the dancing, dodging Achilles.




24.5.11

Baptist minister’s attack on secularism = FAIL

Looks like The Age’s ‘militant secularist’ coverage of the Access Ministries scandal has ruffled Baptist minister Nicholas Tuohy. This man of God believes that The Age and “its buddies at the Humanist Society” are mounting an “unjustified and unfair attack on Christian Religious Education (CRE) in schools and chaplaincy.” Conveniently for me, Tuohy has structured his peevish outburst in a numbered point-by-point format, so I’ll just shoot down his fallacious arguments in exactly the same order he has made them.

~

Firstly, why shouldn’t children have the right to learn about Jesus and, if they so want, become a follower or, ready for it, a Christian? One example in The Age article refers to a child who ended up taking herself and her parents off to the local church after having CRE classes. Shock horror, call in the troops! A family heading off to church together? The Age thinks this is somehow sinister.

Sorry to burn down your strawman Tuohy, but no one, not The Age, not their ‘buddies at the Humanist Society’, not the Australian Education Union, not even baby-eating ‘militant’ atheists like me are denying anyone, children or adults, the right to learn about Jesus / Mohammad / Krishna / Satan’s friend Buddha / Odin All-Father / Gandalf the White. The issue here is about the state funding of personal religious ideology. Public schools are no place for religious indoctrination. Places dedicated to such ‘instruction’ already exist. I believe the public venue for the Christian variety has the technical designation of ‘church’, while the private one is commonly referred to as ‘home’. Go mess with people’s heads there.

Remember kids, Buddha is Satan’s friend

A Christian organisation that supplies chaplains to Victorian schools under Australia’s National Schools Chaplaincy Program (NSCP) has been caught breaching the program’s guidelines by calling for students to be made ‘disciples’ of the Christian faith. Surprise surprise. The CEO of Access Ministries, Evonne Paddison, has explicitly told a church conference in 2008 that they have a “God-given open door”, courtesy of both state and federal governments, which allows them to “take the Christian faith into our schools and share it”. Paddison made it clear that it is the duty of Christians in general and Access Ministries in particular to win converts for their faith. “We need to go and make disciples.”

Expecting evangelical Christians to abide by secular laws is only one of the foolish mistakes made by the Howard government when it created the chaplaincy program in 2006. The following is taken from the Stop the National Schools Chaplaincy Program website:

The National Schools Chaplaincy Program (NSCP) was announced in October 2006 by the Howard government. It provided $90 million of Commonwealth funding over three years for school chaplains which was subsequently increased to $165 million. The Rudd government announced that it would honour these funding commitments and that the program would be reviewed and expanded to include secular counsellors, but only if a suitable religious chaplain could not be found by the schools. As it currently stands the Commonwealth is committed to funding religious chaplains in around 2600 schools across Australia.

“Science is not a tradition”

Harold Camping is one of the latest in a noble line of doomsday prophets stretching back to antiquity. The evangelical Christian broadcaster has announced, reportedly with a straight face, that the end of the world is nigh – on May 21 to be exact. At least the Almighty, in His infinite compassion, has allowed us to catch the Eurovision finals on the 14th before enacting the Rapture.

The Washington Post caught wind of this somber news and proceeded to ask none other than Richard ‘The God Delusion’ Dawkins what his thoughts were on this clearly consequential matter. Dawkins promptly replied:

Why is a serious newspaper like the Washington Post giving space to a raving loon? I suppose the answer must be that, unlike the average loon, this one has managed to raise enough money to launch a radio station and pay for billboards. I don’t know where he gets the money, but it would be no surprise to discover that it is contributed by gullible followers – gullible enough, we may guess, to go along with him when he will inevitably explain, on May 22nd, that there must have been some error in the calculation, the rapture is postponed to . . . and please send more money to pay for updated billboards.

So, the question becomes, why are there so many well-heeled, gullible idiots out there? Why is it that an idea can be as nuts as you like and still con enough backers to finance its advertising to acquire yet more backers . . . until eventually a national newspaper notices and makes it into a silly season filler?

The esteemed professor sure gave the Post a good slapping. Can’t say they didn’t deserve it.

In the question posed to Dawkins, there was this phrase: ‘What does your tradition teach about the end of the world?’ Dawkins took issue with its implication that science is merely a ‘tradition’, a product of customs and beliefs handed down through time. He set the record straight:

Science is not a tradition, it is the organized use of evidence from the real world to make inferences about the real world.

Precisely. We can thank sloppy thinking and the postmodernist assault on knowledge for the annoying refrain that science is just another religion/ideology/cultural construct/power structure/tradition. Sorry relativists, it isn’t. Science is a process, and a bloody effective one at that. Calling science a tradition is like calling the act of putting fuel in your car to make it run a ritual.

Skepticblog’s Donald Prothero has written about science’s unique truth-finding and knowledge-producing characteristics, which can be summarised as follows:

1. It works.
2. It is self-policing.
3. It tells us inconvenient truths.

No tradition does all that.




12.5.11