the movie once upon a time in hollywood
i think disrespects bruce lee
im not a fan of bruce lee or anything, i really dont care about bruce lee at all lol
but i think is disrespectful towards bruce lee
that scene kinda disgusted me
The movie is meant not to be taken totally realistically though. This is not the real Bruce Lee in the real 60s. The movie takes place in a world where without trying to spoil the ending, but something happens that is totally in a different universe compared to real history, so I think it's pretty clear that it's not true history.
The movie Amadeus makes Antonio Salieri look like a poor composer compared to real life, but was it bad to do that?
The thing about that scene is that it's told from Cliff Booth's perspective and is meant to be an unreliable account that exaggerates details in a tall tale fashion - at one point, he throws Lee into a car hard enough to break the door yet Lee is able to keep fighting as if nothing had happened. As ScannerDarkly notes, it's also unbelievable that Booth is a better fighter than Lee (though it arguably establishes that he's such a capable fighter to fend off the Manson family members at the end). As for Lee, his portrayal in Cliff's flashback is contrasted by Sharon Tate having her own flashback to when he trains her to fight as a friendly mentor so that mitigates the idea of this being a disrespectful portrayal even further.
the movie once upon a time in hollywood i think disrespects bruce lee
im not a fan of bruce lee or anything, i really dont care about bruce lee at all lol but i think is disrespectful towards bruce lee that scene kinda disgusted me
ENTER THE CHATBOT
If you have ever seen Bruce Lee interviewed, he did carry himself in a way that some would see as a bit "self-inflated."
Bruce's mythos, right or wrong, is also a bit inflated. He died like Dean/Monroe at the peak of his intrigue, so he became the apotheosis of martial badassery in the 70's and 80's. I remember being in a Taekwan-Do dojo in the 80's where the Sensei was mocking his students for hero-worship with a faux-prayer, "Spirit of Bruce Lee, come to me!!!". A lot of Bullsheet-Do martial arts magazines would sell copy by feeding the myth, inflating Bruce Lee to the point where his abilities started to sound more like propaganda stories about North Korean dictators.
He basically became Batman or One-Punch Man. Unbeatable. 141 pounds of fury. And if need be, his final form could achieve 160 unstoppable pounds, as if Bruce would have no problem giving up one hundred pounds, reach, and height to any other skilled fighter in the world. And all this without world titles in any sport, without any tournament record to speak of, with scant video documentation of anything resembling a real fight. What we know about Bruce is on-screen (which is choreographed and predetermined in outcome) and from anecdotes offered by people who may be suspected of slipping into nostalgia, and puffery (especially those making money off his memory).
By all accounts of those who knew him, he was a highly skilled fighter. These accounts include those of skilled fighters who do have legit bona fides. But it's still pretty much all talk. Moreover, holding up anyone to be the ultimate unbeatable bad ass is living in a child's fantasy ("My dad could beat up your dad"). In the real world, weight classes exist for a reason. The Gracie family would have (respectfully) tied Bruce into a pretzel a few times and Bruce probably would have set about to learning BJJ in a different timeline.
In the movie we meet a cocky Bruce Lee (which doesn't look too far off the mark) and another person (Cliff) who has a chip and doesn't mind mixing things up. This film punctures the mythos of Bruce Lee (in the sense that he had to be the bestest ever) in the same way that it punctures the mythos of tragedy (Manson was a mastermind, his clan of followers were spooky unstoppable evil minions). Cliff is not overly impressed with either. Quentin's hero is the Fall Guy, the unknown stuntman who makes Eastwood look so fine -- the real guy who works behind the scenes, takes the hits, and recognizes bulls**t.
Cliff expresses Quentin Tarantino's contempt for a deeply deterministic/fatalistic take on history (it had to happen that way, it was unavoidable). He offers the audience catharsis in alterity, the idea that it didn't have to happen that way and the only reason why it did is because some people made choices in a world filled with contingency and the cookie took a bad crumble on that day. If someone else had been there, if someone would have stood up, the world could have been and would have been different. Someone could have killed Hitler. The war could have ended sooner. This take on history is one that historians cotton to more these days than the "it had to happen" view of deterministic forces (e.g., economic) which required a particular outcome.
Hope requires having a certain contempt for your heroes and villains, because it requires having a contempt for the notion of causal/criterial absolutes which cannot be challenged. God (Bruce) and the Devil (Manson) have their mythos punctured and deflated in this film to create a fantasy space where the Manson Murders never happened.
Bruce Lee was just a guy. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is punching holes in the iconography of this man who has a larger than life image, one that has mostly been perpetuated by fictional films. I'm pretty sure we should be allowed to tear down such myths without it dealing some grievous injury to the reputation of the actual Bruce Lee. Especially when it is a part of a clearly clearly clearly fictional universe.
Anyway, I understand why Lee's family would be upset, but I have a hard time getting offended by Tarantino's film personally, given that an entire genre exists to exploit Lee (and his death) in significantly less tasteful ways than Tarantino can be accused of.
I really like Bruce Lee: I've been to his grave and I found it surprisingly emotional. He's a testament to the power of both hard work and innovation. His work and life bring me a lot of joy to think about.
That said, there's plenty of reasons to think he was a little high on his own legend at times (or pretended to be for marketing reasons), and more than a little vain after achieving stardom. There are some rumors about the cause of his death that relate it to purely cosmetic/unusual plastic surgery, though I won't pretend to know if that's true.
So, even as someone who mostly really likes Bruce Lee, I'm not too bothered by someone kind of referencing those ideas, especially from a director all about exaggeration, in a movie with "Hollywood" literally in the title.
Look at it this way: the movie takes place in an alternate universe, like Inglorious Basterds did. In real life Sharon Tate and three others were killed by Manson's followers. In Once Upon a Time it never happens. So one could infer that the Bruce Lee in this universe is different than the one from our universe.
Look at it this way: the movie takes place in an alternate universe, like Inglorious Basterds did. In real life Sharon Tate and three others were killed by Manson's followers. In Once Upon a Time it never happens. So one could infer that the Bruce Lee in this universe is different than the one from our universe.
The real question is whether it exists in the same universe as The Dragon Lives Again. If Bruce Lee could beat up Dracula, James Bond and The Man With No Name, does that mean that Cliff Booth could too?
Ah, true, I never even connected those two things.
They pulled this stunt too many times on Star Trek TNG. Beating up Worf establishes a real physical threat, but when Worf is always getting owned, he starts to look like a punk.
There’s actually a story out there about how a stunt man put Lee in a headlock because he was being too rough on the other stunt men, which was frowned upon.
So there’s a precedent, albeit not as extreme as the one depicted in OUaTiH
There’s actually a story out there about how a stunt man put Lee in a headlock because he was being too rough on the other stunt men, which was frowned upon.
So there’s a precedent, albeit not as extreme as the one depicted in OUaTiH
I don't believe it's a headlock but something more like a bear hug. He was carrying Lee around while Lee screamed "put me down or I'll kill you!" and the stuntman said "but if I put you down you'll kill me."
Apparently that diffused the tension and he became Lee's go-to American stuntman.
The stuntman commented on OUATIH and took issue with it's depiction of Lee but I don't recall specifically why. I think it was how he depicted Lee specifically praising himself.
But there's also a ton of precedence to disregard Lee as humble (see: the entirety of Way of the Dragon), so given that we're dealing with a Tarantino flick, I think what it says about the myth of Lee has a lot of truth even if none of it is real.
the movie once upon a time in hollywood
i think disrespects bruce lee
im not a fan of bruce lee or anything, i really dont care about bruce lee at all lol
but i think is disrespectful towards bruce lee
that scene kinda disgusted me
I understand that point of view but I really thought that Tarantino was using the character Bruce Lee to make a fun and interesting scene for one of his main characters and not to portray the man, Bruce Lee, in a negative light. I didn't care all that much for the movie nor am I much of a fan of Tarantino's work after Death Proof, but I think I understood that his intention was not disrespectful and the scene didn't bother me.
One thing about Bruce Lee I noticed that in his movies (although I have only seen two), he never gets beat up or gets close to loosing. He is always unstoppable, and the villains are not that much of a challenge.
Where as say Jackie Chan or Jean-Claude Van Damme, get beat up pretty bad in their movies before they overcome the villains, so maybe this adds to a mythos of Bruce Lee in a way perhaps?
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