Bruce Lee
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Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits, Hair and Wild Palms: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
It’s often hard for me to avoid using superlatives when writing about the work done by the Criterion Collection, and they’ve made it even more difficult with their new Blu-ray set Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits, a seven-disc package that ranks with the company’s best releases – which means it’s one of the best Blu-ray releases ever, period. The box contains the four features martial arts icon Lee made at the height of his powers (The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, Way of the Dragon, and Enter the Dragon) as well as two films cobbled together after his premature death […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jul 10, 2020 -
Fist of Fear, Touch of Death, The Great Texas Dynamite Chase and The Archer: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
When martial arts legend Bruce Lee died in 1973 just weeks before the release of Enter the Dragon, a bizarre subgenre of action cinema was born: “Bruceploitation.” The international success of Enter the Dragon created an appetite for new Bruce Lee movies, which intrepid producers tried to satisfy by scraping together whatever meager Lee footage they could find and building new films around it; when they couldn’t get their hands on discarded scenes from Lee’s work they tried to fool audiences with movies starring Lee imitators like “Bruce Li” and “Bruce Le.” One of the strangest Bruceploitation movies – which […]
by Jim Hemphill on May 1, 2020 -
“Don’t Go Through The System”: John Singleton Talks in Toronto
John Singleton was raised on silent movies. The 45-year-old director of Boyz in the Hood and the Shaft remake grew up next to the Century Drive-In in Inglewood, California. As a boy, he’d literally peek out his window and watch his heroes Bruce Lee and Billy Jack‘s Tom Laughlin battle on-screen without sound. “The first breast I saw was Pam Grier’s,” Singleton confessed to a rapt audience at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox Tuesday night, hosted by director Clement Virgo as part of the city’s Black History Month celebrations. “Every time I see Pam Grier I tell her, ‘You made me want […]
by Allan Tong on Feb 14, 2013
