Respond to these rapid questions in our Birth Of The Dragon quiz and we will tell you which Birth Of The Dragon character you are. Play it now.
When Brian Huskey appeared on the comedy podcast “Hollywood Handbook,” he and the other hosts created a fake screenplay called “Teen Pope,” which they then performed live on air. An ordinary suburban skateboarder named Jason Attitude takes on the role of Pope and indulges in every cliché from the ’80s party movie genre in his quest to become the Pope. If you can imagine such a film, complete with all of its clichés, all of its terrible, tone-deaf *cool*, and all of its horrifying tropes that are decades old, then you can imagine George Nolfi’s “Birth of the Dragon.”
Nolfi decides that the best way to get to know subjects is to direct them in a ridiculous screenwriting-for-dummies exercise directed with all the panache of a mid-’90s tourism video. Through the eyes of a bland white guy and his romantic difficulties, Bruce Lee and his legendary one-time rival Wong Jack Man are revealed. What you need to know is the important stuff. Because, unless there’s a constipated H&M catalog centerfold looking worried off to the side, who cares about two titanic forces of martial arts meeting to settle a mysterious score? In the absence of constant cutaways to an agonized white face, how on earth are you supposed to know how you’re supposed to feel?
Wong is introduced in “Dragon.” Jack Man (Yu Xia) is a Shaolin monk who fights on behalf of the order that he represents. Sadly for him, the match goes horribly wrong when he nearly kills his opponent from the Tai Chi school (Wang Xi’An), as we will learn later. In a short period of time after that, he arrives in San Francisco to serve as penance for his poor performance in the match by washing dishes at his cousin’s Chinese restaurant. It just so happens that Bruce Lee (Philip Ng) is also in attendance, instructing Kung Fu to both Americans and Chinese students at the school. When Wong comes to town, Lee is filled with arrogance, believing that he is there to challenge him on behalf of the martial arts masters he left behind in Hong Kong. Wong only wants to disappear, whereas Lee wants to make their match-up a sensation throughout the entire city. Not helping matters is the fact that their go-between, Steve McKee (Billy Magnussen), becomes embroiled in Triad politics when he meets and falls in love with a waitress who works for a local crime lord, further complicating matters (Xing Jin). How far are they willing to go to put aside their differences in order to see love blossom and perhaps learn something about themselves in the process?
But you shouldn’t waste any more time and start this Birth Of The Dragon quiz.
Lee became legendary several times over, thanks to his popular action films (which this film has the audacity to mock), his prowess as an artist, his early death in the 1970s, and the death of his only son, Brandon Lee, in the 1990s. Lee was born in the Philippines and raised in the United States. This film transforms him into a stereotypical jerk in need of a quick personality makeover, which Wong is more than happy to provide. It completely baffles me why anyone would want to take one of the few genuine superstars to visit this country and shoehorn him into a rote biopic. A greater mystery is why Nolfi believed he was up to the task of filming martial arts sequences worthy of Bruce Lee, which is even more perplexing. His fight scenes are designed to look like expensive camera demos, showcasing different frame rates and rapidly changing aperture effects as he fights his opponents. I’m confident they’ll look fantastic on a motion-smoothing television.
Birth Of The Dragon Quiz
But wait, there’s even more to come! In fact, the score does not waste any time in hammering every note too hard, whether it is a classically offensive “oriental” flute used to introduce Asian characters or a hard charging electric guitar used during fight scenes. Nobody involved with this movie is even remotely interested in pretending that it takes place in 1964; the fashion and acting styles are all far too contemporary. Lee’s films are described as “chopsocky” by an unnamed henchman, a term that would not be coined for another ten years after that. In reality, Lee would not begin making martial arts films in the United States for another six years, despite the fact that this film shows him directing them on the street with his students as extras. A simple Google search could have identified and corrected such factual errors, but who has the time? That kind of carelessness taints the entire endeavor. For example, Magnussen almost never takes off his (blatantly modern) leather jacket as a means of saving money on the cost of purchasing him more period appropriate clothing for the role. There are also jokes that you can see coming a mile away, but the film wants you to get excited about them, as if knowing joke structure is the same as writing a joke, which is not the case.
Also, you will find out which character are you in this Birth Of The Dragon quiz.
How does a film like this get made in the twenty-first century, when we are so far into it? One that relegates Bruce Lee to the role of a supporting character in a stale and tediously familiar star-crossed love story? There are entire books and countless articles written about the Wong Jack Man vs. Bruce Lee fight, and this film invents things at random to pad its running time? What kind of film does that? Why? Who could possibly care about fictitious Steve McKee and his quest to save an equally fictitious love interest from an even more fictitious crime boss, as the plot of the film suggests? Despite the fact that Bruce Lee’s films have never been out of widespread cultural circulation in this country, is it possible that an entire film about him will somehow contribute to box office poison?
About the quiz
“Technique is a trap,” Wong warns Lee at one point, while also saying that “style is a prison.” That was something that the filmmakers of “Birth of the Dragon” took to heart. There is no style or technique to become enslaved by in this place. To me, there is no better way to send him off than what the great critic David Cairns had to say about the abominable 2012 biopic “Hitchcock,” which he described as follows: “It appears that the mediocre despise the talented and will bide their time until they can avenge themselves.”Also, you must try to play this Birth Of The Dragon quiz.
For more personality quizzes check this: Beatriz At Dinner Quiz.
