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[)Vi) THE BRUCE LEE 30TH
ANNIVERSARY COMMEMORATIVE BOX SET
All (18) (Hong Kong Legends) £49.99
‘Don't think: feel. It's like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don‘t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all the heavenly glory.’ Bruce Lee 1974 Enter the Dragon.
What goes around comes around. Twenty-five years after dispossessed kids ran home from karate classes, itching in heavy white towelling, eager to show their parents the plastic trophy they had been awarded, the world has once again gone kung fu crazy. It all started with the release of Ang Lee’s remarkable Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It took a Taiwanese aesthete to open the box on a certain Generation X sentimentalism for those classic low-budget fight movies. Bruce Lee and the handful of movies he made between 1972 and 1979 are indeed a gift from a greater power. If you don't own any of these babies then get down, boy, and give me 20 hours of meditation.
This 30th anniversary box set is one of three fantastic new releases. The other two, The Way of the Dragon Platinum Edition and a single disc, double-bill presentation of two acclaimed documentaries, were unfortunately unavailable for reviewing purposes. So we stuck with this collection of six DVDs and attendant extras, which is not such a bad place to be stuck.
There is no Enter the Dragon for obvious marketing reasons, but there is just about everything else in the Lee canon, so let’s take things chronologically. First up is Fist of Fury (1972) 000. /extras 0.. . The story of the pupil avenging the death of his teacher still holds up as one of Lee’s most inspired and studied moments. The film is steeped in the portentousness of eastern mysticism but not enough to detract from its controlled chop sockery. The extras include interviews with co- stars and friends and a long and winding - but not unpleasant - commentary from marshal arts expert, Bey Logan.
Lee takes on the drug dealers of Thailand in
0.... Excellent 0... Recommended .0. Good
.0 Flawed
0 Poor
2 Shopping
1 1O Bling bling, Nail bars
Food
1 12 French food
Trave
1 1 4 Transylvania
Country boy comedy in The Way of the Dragon l
If you don’t own any of these babies then get down and give me 20 hours of meditation
The Big Boss (1972) O... /extras 0. . This is the one that really struck a chord with his domestic Hong King audience, a year before Enter the Dragon did the same to the rest of the world. Still a lot of fun, it looks great on DVD, but the extras are uninspired.
Perhaps the most iconic of his films is The Way of the Dragon (1973) 0000 / 0..
Written, produced and directed by Lee, it was the first of a series he planned in which he would play Tan Lung, a country boy strong arm who sorts out mob trouble.
It was the first in which Lee introduced comedy. This film’s influence on the work of Jackie Chan and a whole host of funny little men with big kicks is unquantifiable. The extras are
worth having for the almost unbearably cheesy original trailer.
Derided by the hardcore because it was posthumously re-edited, Game Of Death (1979) O... I...” is here shown in all its full, uncut original glory. The additional missing 40- minute pagoda fight makes this easily the most cherishible of the lot. The missing sequence was designed to show the subtler flexibility of Jeet Kune Do, the sophisticated fight form Lee was developing before his untimely death. This amazing footage was lost for over two decades in the vaults of Golden Harvest Studios. Praise be to Bruce Lee. (Paul Dale and Eddie Felson) I The Bruce fee Commemorative Box set «2mm on Mon 74 Jui.
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