khalil barnett
THE HIT LIST – May 4, 2015
Talk about down to the wire… this Hit List article was almost a no-show today as I was getting other things done in the process. Thankfully it IS here, and as alway, it’s choc-filled with goods from the web. Before I begin though, if you missed the trailer for the upcoming short, Temple, then please take a look at it. It’s poised for presentation to hopeful backers of a feature-length expansion and you only need to see the teaser once to be convinced why it deserves your attention and that of sales’ agents…
As for the Hit List, well…let’s get things started in here with a small grouping of stunt reels from folks like stuntwomen Janine Parkinson and Eileen Weisinger, and others from Omid Zader, Ogiwara Satoru, Johann Ofner, Sergei Dmitriev, John Sharpe, Jack Hansen and a fresh new, and Kombatastic reel from LBP Stunts Chicago!
As far as teasers and trailers go, there are a few more worth highlighting here, one from the Asians On Film YouTube channel for a new webseries titled Gun Girl from Asian Cinema Entertainment and In Yo Face Films featuring femme fatale character, “Diona Bran”, played by actress Rebecca Grant. Gorby Shih directs and it looks like it will premiere some time in July but I advise following the channel for more info just in case. The trailer below that is for a new shortfilm from the growing workload of the folks over at Fight Factory Stunt Team titled Deliver(ed) with Vaughndio Forbes and Oscar Leiva among its cast.
And now, we get fighting, and the first of our action finale in this chapter of our Hit List begins with Mathew Lorenceau‘s most recent working of the lends for a skeletal pre-viz lightsaber battle concept. The second is a good old-fashioned test fight to initiate performer Daniel Sim into the ranks with Leroy Nguyen over at Rising Tiger Films; both starred in Nguyen’s recently-celebrated short, Black Scar Blues which is still making the festival rounds so feel free to check out their channel for more info as well. Beneath that is the latest video from the fellas over at Beat Down Boogie titled Kung Fu Avengers, released days beforehand in celebration of the weekend U.S. premiere of Avengers: Age Of Ultron, while the other three come from Mikko Lopponen, Germany-based Noobtown Monkeys and Aracade Killers Cape Town, respectively, with Samurait Kalassatamassa, Girlfriend VS Boyfriend, and Mission Staircase.
And to finish, some slightly longer content, beginning with the usual comedic action styling of Fernando Jay Huerto in Tim And Michael Go To Canada, performing with Anthony Noceda, DL MacDonald and Alex Chung among others. The remaining two include a fresh new episode from the darkly-lit, comprehensive martial arts webseries drama, The Way: Fighters Twitch, and Joshua Zacharias’s latest Donnie Yen-flavored action short, Deception!
But before I go though…
The ‘Apocalypse’ is NEAR, so CLICK HERE to catch up!
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TO THE HASHI: The Problem With Invulnerable Heroes
I have a problem with invulnerable heroes. And I prefer Batman to Superman. Let’s go ahead and get that out of the way.
My reason, on the surface, is a simple one. But when we lay it out on the table, it’s much more existentially complex. The knowledge that a character can be harmed bears a direct relationship to how compelling their battles are. And even though we know, like in the case of Batman, that the hero likely will not die during the proceedings of the story, the foundation of their heroics can be measured by the quality of their risks. Put another way, we know they won’t die but we never question whether they can die, or whether they can be harmed in the process of not dying.
On the other hand, a hero that does not risk much, let alone his or her mortality, to do what she does will fall short in the departments of dramatic heft and empathy.
Let’s look at some of the film offerings of recent years and at what they have to say on the topic. On what they have to say about heroic archetypes in general. We’ll allow the definition of “hero” to extend to protagonist, or, in some, the human foil to the stories’ central characters. Take Transformers: Age of Extinction on the latter distinction, wherein we’re given a new set of human characters through which to experience the battle between the honorable Autobots and the duplicitous Decepticons. Where the Transformers themselves are concerned (since most of them, anyway, are treated as little more than busy sentient props), we’ve become intimately accustomed to their physical limitations and vulnerabilities. We see them die left and right in ways that would make even the most carnage-weary of human war veterans blush. But what about their human counterparts? Tour Lebouf in the first three films made a culture of ridiculous survivals, but while the soft reboot might have indeed kept its promise to up the robot drama, it evolved its handling of the human characters in stark contrast. Make no mistake; a guy gets incinerated in the film. But for the most part, the world of Transformers 4 can’t decide whether the human body is made of flesh and bone or Nerf foam and rubber.
Just take a gander at the scene where Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg)’s daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz), is fleeing from Galvatron with Optimus Prime. Not only does she go flying from a semi moving at breakneck speed, she also goes on a roll race with Prime on concrete as a wrestling match between two giant robots unfolds directly on top of her. Cade himself moments later drops onto his ass from a fall no less than 60 feet without even pulling a hamstring. (Full disclosure: I might have forgiven the scene if he’d at least pulled a goddamn hamstring.)
So at this point we have the problem of credibility in risk. We’re confused over whether we can really fear for the lives of the human protagonist set. When we see the autobots Globetrotting the humans around like basketballs during the fight scenes, the element of risk becomes….problematic. The same problem was presented, albeit to a lesser extent, in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles live action reboot. At one point the intrepid reporter April O’Neal magically becomes Spider-Man when the script needs her to survive a fall off of a skyscraper, and in another she and her colleague survive their own bout with a semi that, if he saw it, would presumably make Optimus Prime spill his energon. These scenes didn’t ruin the film, but they did dilute the impact of the characters’ survival. And the empathy felt for them.
Even though the robot physics are off, the human characters in 2013’s Pacific Rim are presented in believable danger. Also, none of them inexplicably float during hand to hand fights –so that’s a plus. (More on that later.)
Riddle me this. What’s the difference between the heroics on display in a great superhero film and an excellent martial arts actioner? In terms of the risk factor, not much. The Raid 2, sequel to Gareth Evans’ 2011 martial arts extravaganza, The Raid: Redemption, gave us a display of martial arts fighters skilled with abilities that, while essentially grounded in realism, pushed the boundaries of fighting prowess to near superhuman dimensions. However, the characters all experienced worlds of hurt that set the audience dancing in cringes. We felt every cut, punch, kick, body slam, and fall. We felt the characters’ mortality. And even though we were quite sure that the main protagonist would survive the movie, the experience of watching him get there was wrought with the adrenaline rush of vicarious risk.
In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, we take the journey with Steve Rodgers, a super soldier that is armed with abilities that make his fight prowess strong in comic book proportions and his body freakishly durable, and yet the heroics remain tempered by compatible augments in the risk factors he is surrounded by. We know he can still die, can get stabbed, shot –killed. And more importantly, he knows this as well and shows it.
John Wick, another action film from 2014, starred Keanu Reeves as the titular character, a retired elite assassin brought out of hibernation to exact righteous revenge on a crew of thugs. He is just a man, to be sure. But as the protagonist in an action film, his fight prowess and handgun marksmanship make him a character that could believably exist in the same universe as Captain America, and yet what he does in the film, or the world in which he does it, never traipses over into comic book movie conventions. We know that he can die (if he does, he will stay dead!), and at the beginning of the film it is even hinted that he just might. He gets stabbed, shot, beaten to a pulp. All credible and compelling, never sacrificing the empathy quotient.
Compare that to Tom Cruise in John Woo’s Mission: Impossible 2, where we’re essentially back on Cybertron: Land of Pliable Humans. The fights are cartoonish, the physics would piss off Thanos in the Marvel Universe, and Tom Cruise barely even messes his hair.
In Lucy (2014), the humans only use 10% of their brains trope is exploited as Scarlett Johansson grows into what can adequately be described as a living deity. Her powers include the awkward need of a gun toting human companion despite being able to freeze her enemies in time and make them float with her thoughts.
There’s that mention of floating again. Who remembers Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li? A show of hands. Well, that film is not unlike its ugly cousin, Dragonball: Evolution, in that it seemed to have been actively engaged in a grudge war with the martial arts genre. Neither of these count as wushu films, so there’s no excuse for the ridiculous floating. But both films give us cartoonish martial arts so silly looking that they bleed the scenes of their dramatic punch. The only danger the fighters are in is embarrassing themselves, so there is nothing to be gained from watching them survive and ultimately win. The further the element of realism is stretched, I think, the more important it is that a foundation of danger for the characters be stressed. If your villain can shoot energy blasts, you’d better have a hero that can be hurt by them.
I had a similar problem with 2003’s Daredevil. Admittedly, many of the fight and action scenes were sharp. And yes, the titular character is a superhero, one that exists in a universe with a guy that can kill a man by tossing a toothpick at him from across a room. But at no point are we ever provided evidence that a highly acrobatic blind man can feasibly throw himself into freefall from over a hundred feet and land down softly in a pounce like a cartoon cat without breaking some bones. Can’t we, like, get a cracked fibula?
There is a place for invulnerable heroes, however. Indeed, a story about one can provide for some interesting explorations in emotional conflict. But if we are to truly appreciate the physical dilemma of the archetype or experience explored, we need for there to be more at risk for him or her than a bad hair day and some dirty clothes.
Khalil Barnett is a martial arts practioner living in Florida, and is also a filmmaker, writer, producer and actor starring in the independent action drama series, The Way, still active in production. Visit the official Facebook page for more info.
Lead Photo: Hugh Jackman as Logan (a.k.a. Wolverine) in X2: X-Men United (2003) from 20th Century Fox
TO THE HASHI: Khalil’s Thoughts On Dreamworks’ GHOST IN THE SHELL
A friend of mine said, “Let’s talk about Ghost In The Shell”. Well. I heard recently that Scarlett Johansson is set to play the protagonist Motoko Kusanagi, an elite agent of Section 9, the fictional counter-cyberterrorist public security organization set in a futuristic mid 21st century Japan. The previous actress in talks for the role was Margot Robbie, an Australian thespian that appeared in the film, The Wolf Of Wall Street with Leonardo DiCaprio.
I am a big fan of Johansson’s, have been since her performance in Lost In Translation opposite Bill Murray as a recently graduated alumni on a trip to Japan. But what’s interesting about that film is that Johansson’s character was a young woman basically stranded in Tokyo, surrounded by a foreign place replete with alien customs and full of people who spoke a language she couldn’t understand. It’s interesting because this is exactly how I feel about her being cast as Mokoto in Ghost In The Shell, that the property is stranded with an inceptive vision that is remote and out of place. You’ll notice that neither Johansson nor Robbie, with apologies, look quite like women that could pass for Japanese in any place in the world, let alone a film set somewhere that can boast of very few blonde haired, blue eyed natives.
What this says then is that, short of some decidedly offensive choices made in the make up department, they’ll be planning to create an explanation for her being Caucasian to service the change to the story. Which is worse, one wonders; the cultural raping of Motoko’s origin story to appease an audience already well fed on Caucasian hero archetypes, or if the idea instead were to change the entire story and set it in America? Well. Perhaps that’s a question for another discussion, since what we have, by all current indications, is the former. So why a retcon of the story to fit Scarlett Johansson in it and not, say, cast Rina Takeda, real-life Ryukyu Shorin-ryu karate champion and martial arts film actress known for doing stunt work that would make Jackie Chan blush? Or Ziyi Zhang, a talented martial arts actress with a face and name well known to American audiences for her part in films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Rush Hour 2? Why not Rinko Kikuchi from Pacific Rim?
It can be argued that the change is made in order to allow the protagonist character to represent an American perspective. To acquiesce audiences to a foreign mythology, in the same way that we apparently needed Tom Cruise (The Last Samurai) in the driver seat in order for us masses of xenophobic cattle to appreciate the story of the fall of the samurai hierarchy. Or it can be said that it is to allow us a means to empathize with the protagonist’s journey. Kind of like 47 Ronin, that told us that the historical story of Kuranosuke Oishi, one still held in very high regard to this day in Japan as archetypical of the standards of honor, was not compelling enough to hold our attention without the love story of a demon half breed (read: white guy) shoehorned into it.
But even though these arguments can, have, and will be rendered, the official reason is the presumption that an Asian actress can’t sell this film in America. Money. Asians can’t make it. But we’ve no problem using the mystique of their culture to do it our way. Because Go ‘merica!
Recently we had an argument from Ridley Scott that for his film Exodus, a story set under the scorching sun of ancient Egypt, he had no choice but to ridiculously white-wash his entire cast in order to gain the budget he needed for his film. The only ethnic roles went to people playing slaves and servants, but I guess that’s just a coincidence.
We’ve learned from the hacking catastrophe at Sony Pictures that for the 2014 film, The Equalizer, producers were actually warned not to cast Denzel Washington, one of the most celebrated actors of our time, in the titular role because –I can’t make this up- he is a black man, and because of this unfortunate fact the movie wouldn’t make money.
I call bullshit on all of this though, son. And beg pardon but in 2015, we’re getting a little long in the tooth to still be celebrating systemic racism and calling it business. There is no shortage of Caucasian hero archetypes already dominating the public domain, to be sure. We needn’t keep supplanting that same image onto mythologies and stories that by their very existence have offered us a more diverse array and cultural representation. Art is meant to provoke, to challenge us and push us to the brink of our dimensions and beyond. It’s not meant to dwarf those dimensions by slavishly conforming to them. Film is the highest form of art. So much compromise is never without consequence in the collective unconscious.
Khalil Barnett is a martial arts practioner living in Florida, and is also a filmmaker, writer, producer and actor starring in the independent action drama series, The Way, still active in production. Visit the official Facebook page for more info.