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Thread: Remake Enter the Dragon???say it aint so scooby!

  1. #61
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    Ratner's remake

    Brett Ratner Is Trying To Remake ENTER THE DRAGON
    Published at: March 21, 2015, 4 p.m. CST by mrbeaks



    Jeremy here...

    Let's look on the bright side here: a world-class ass-kicker gets invited to participate in a martial arts tournament on the island of a reclusive drug lord, and is subsequently recruited by British Intelligence to infiltrate said drug lord's operation. That's a good premise for an action movie, right? I'd watch that.

    So perhaps Brett Ratner isn't travestying cinema history by considering a remake of the most well-known Bruce Lee movie, ENTER THE DRAGON. Ratner briefly mentioned his idea at last night's screening of RUSH HOUR at the New Beverly, and, according to a few attendees I've spoken to, he reassured the audience that he wasn't trying to find the next Bruce Lee or anything crazy like that. Evidently, he only brought up the remake after professing his love for Lalo Schifrin's amazing score, and seemed to indicate that his film would be a reimagining of Robert Clouse's iconic showcase for Lee's talents. Would Ratner consider casting Scott Adkins in the Lee role? Ronda Rousey? Maybe go with Jackie Chan as the nefarious Han? He wouldn't get into specifics.

    There's no shortage of great movie martial artists kicking around today, so Ratner could easily recruit a big-screen fighting force of extraordinary magnitude. At best, I think Ratner is capable of slopping his way into an entertaining movie. If he gets top-flight fight choreographers and stunt coordinators, he could end up with a pretty fun flick. And I wouldn't mind terribly because ENTER THE DRAGON, while obviously significant, ranks behind FIST OF FURY and THE BIG BOSS on my list of favorite Lee movies.
    I need a facepalm icon.
    Gene Ching
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  2. #62
    Quote Originally Posted by Jimbo View Post
    What I can't understand is, why does everything need to be remade these days? The remakes are (IMO) never up to the standards of the originals, and when you "modernize" things, you make it into something it isn't. So why can't they think of something that's actually original?

    Enter the Dragon (ETD) was the success it was because of mainly two things: The time period when it was filmed/released; and Bruce Lee.

    These days, a guy like Han would be picked off easily with all the technology of offing someone at a distance. Plus, part of the movie's charm is the fact that it's so dated. Almost all the henchmen look like 98-pound kids, and now it seems kinda funny when Bolo flexes his muscles and struts around killing the 4 (comparatively) weak little guards. Even Bolo himself isn't that big by today's standards. But it's one of those movies that many have seen so many times you know the script and each scene by heart.

    The basic concept has already been done to death, mainly in Van Damme's older films. And the film itself was based on the James Bond film Dr. No.
    All the original ideas are used up ?

    They can remake it but I doubt they will find anyone that could do what Lee could. Something will be lacking. The film may actually be a better movie. But, there was only one Bruce Lee.

    How about steal from Jurassic Park. On another island. For the last 40 years the same thing has been happening without anyone's knowledge. But that is to be expected since Geoffrey Weeks it seems only ever made that one film. He was the only guy with the intel regarding Han's Island(s).

  3. #63
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    David Leitch

    As much as I respect Leitch's work, this project just seems doomed to failure by comparison.

    Remake Of Bruce Lee’s ‘Enter The Dragon’ Has ‘Deadpool 2’s David Leitch In Talks
    by Mike Fleming Jr
    July 23, 2018 10:45am


    REX/Shutterstock

    EXCLUSIVE: Hot off Deadpool 2, David Leitch is in early talks to direct Enter the Dragon, the remake of the 1973 martial arts classic that cemented Bruce Lee’s iconic status. The original was a global hit out of Hong Kong, but its release was marked with tragedy as it came right after Lee’s death. The 45th anniversary of his death on July 20, 1973 was last Friday. They will now set a writer.


    Warner Bros

    In Enter the Dragon, a Shaolin martial artist is pressed to enter a karate tournament on the island owned by the secretive Han, who is suspected of using the gathering as a way to smuggle drugs around the world. The protagonist has his own motivation: revenge. He learns that his sister fought for her life and ultimately killed herself on Han’s island, rather than succumb to rape by a group of Han’s thugs.


    Warner Bros

    John Saxon and martial artists Jim Kelly, Bob Wall and Bolo Yeung lent validity to the fighting scenes, and Kien Shih made a formidable villain in Han. Adding some of the sweep that existed in global thriller franchises like 007, the film expanded the template for martial arts movies of the period and it was a shame Lee wasn’t around to embrace it and the groundbreaking strides he made for actors of Asian descent, and continue a movie career that already bloomed in Hong Kong but was only just getting started in Hollywood.


    Warner Bros

    As it was, karate schools opened across the U.S. in the wake of the film’s release and saw a slew of movies with actors who looked like Lee but didn’t have anything close to his magnetism.


    Warner Bros

    Warner Bros has been trying to figure out a way to recapture the magic of the Robert Clouse-directed film for years, with filmmakers like Spike Lee and Brett Ratner developing versions of the Golden Harvest release. Leitch is an intriguing choice.



    Aside from being — as the opening credits boast in Deadpool 2–one of the guys who killed John Wick’s dog, the John Wick co-director helmed the Charlize Theron actioner Atomic Blonde and was second unit director on such films as Jurassic World and Captain America: Civil War. The WME-repped Leitch is also a former stuntman and was action unit director who understands the requirement for making the action look real. Still, he is stepping onto hallowed ground here. Doubt me? Have a look at the original trailer for the film:
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
    Author of Shaolin Trips
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  4. #64
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    Good Op-Ed piece in THE WEEK

    Rivera is spot on with this.

    The ghoulish insensitivity of an Enter the Dragon reboot
    Joshua Rivera


    Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon | Warner Bros
    July 25, 2018

    As you read this, something is being rebooted. Maybe it's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Roseanne. (Or Roseanne without Roseanne.) Reboots are a regular part of the entertainment business now, the natural result of a pop cultural landscape flooded with too many shows, movies, and video games. When chances are slim that anyone will pay attention at all, the logic goes, who wouldn't use a familiar name to juice the odds a bit?

    It's foolish to make blanket statements about reboots being good or bad. All reboots aren't equal, and some are more suspect than others — like the potential Enter the Dragon reboot from Warner Bros.

    On Monday, news broke that the studio was in talks with David Leitch, who most recently directed Deadpool 2, to helm a reboot of the martial arts classic. It's the latest in a long line of overtures Warner Bros. has made towards a remake, stretching back over a decade, when Kurt Sutter of Sons of Anarchy fame first developed a neo-noir take called Awaken the Dragon.

    But rebooting Enter the Dragon — whether in 2007 or 2018 — is a uniquely fraught prospect. It's not even a matter of canon, despite the movie's status as the first martial arts film produced by Hollywood. Because while Enter the Dragon is historic for many reasons, what it is more than anything is synonymous with a person: Bruce Lee.

    And so the very notion of rebooting Enter the Dragon is implicitly asking a question no modern reboot has really asked before — can you reboot a legacy? Or cash in on one in good taste?

    This isn't like Solo, where an iconic character tied to an iconic actor was recast and we find it strange and uncomfortable but otherwise permissible — because Han Solo is a character owned by a company, and corporate-owned characters will always outlive their creators or the artists who made them famous. This is about a real person.

    Enter the Dragon isn't famous because its premise of a Hong Kong martial artist conscripted by British intelligence to bring down a trafficking ring is the stuff of cinema legend (good as that hook may be); it's famous because it was a showcase for the man the world knew as Bruce Lee, the Hong Kong movie star and martial arts phenomenon. Enter the Dragon was a watershed moment in Hollywood, a movie that starred an Asian man as its hero and marked what could have been the beginning of a new chapter in a successful career if not for Lee's untimely death.

    It's telling that Lee's character is just named "Lee" in the film — a tacit admission that Lee is what the movie was selling and what people wanted to buy. While it's true that Enter the Dragon was directed by Robert Clouse, a white man, its legacy and fame are unquestionably synonymous with its star.

    And so any potential Enter the Dragon remake can't help but feel ghoulish right from the start. Given these circumstances, it only makes sense to approach it with a lot of sensitivity, which makes it that much stranger to see that the first name potentially attached to it is David Leitch, a white director. Especially in 2018, a year where the push for representation in front of and behind the camera is stronger than ever, the failure to appear to at least consider a director of color reads as hopelessly tone deaf.
    Gene Ching
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  5. #65
    No straight remake, but let's retell the story from Bolo's point of view.

  6. #66
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    Odd postulation

    Remake of Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon could get complete overhaul in post-Black Panther world
    Gautam Chintamani Aug,27 2018 19:37:56 IST

    Remember the time you first saw a Bruce Lee film and how for the rest of the week you walked around feeling like the martial arts legend, looking for scores to settle. Well, for some actor, that childhood fantasy is about to come true. A proposed remake of the 1973 Bruce Lee classic Enter the Dragon is all set to take off and while David Leitch, the director of Deadpool 2, is to helm the film, the search for who would be the next 'Bruce Lee' is still on. The cult classic that forever enshrined Lee in the pantheon of the biggest stars in the world released a few months after Lee’s death at the age of 32 under mysterious circumstances and had tragedy not struck, Lee would have gone on to become much bigger than anyone could have ever imagined.


    Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. Image via FacebookBruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. Image via Facebook

    Usually, the thought of revisiting any backlist, and especially when it comes to the likes of runaway hits, is thrown up every time a major studio witnesses a change at the highest levels. But a film such as Enter the Dragon is the kind of shark that keeps lurking in shallow waters waiting to pop up at the right time. The idea of reinterpreting Enter the Dragon, too, has been in the pipeline for many years. The first time an Enter the Dragon remake made headlines was in 2014 when it was announced that Spike Lee would be working on a new version. On the face of it, Lee sounds like the weirdest choice to remake Enter the Dragon but considering the way the idea was first pitched to him, anything is possible. Rumour has it that Bob Weinstein told Spike Lee that, “Your name is Lee. And Bruce Lee’s name is Lee! It’s meant to be," and in his own words, Spike Lee was “bowled over."

    This was also around the same time as Lee was remaking the Park Chan-wook’s Old Boy (2003) in English and despite the lukewarm response that his version got, Lee was convinced that people found his film better than the Korean original. Lee also went to the extent of assuring that when it came to the Dragon remake, he would "direct the hell of it" and with Ken Yeong of the Hangover series as the lead, his film would be greater. Lee never got to make his great film, of course, and neither did Brett Ratner, who post-Rush Hour, was also trying to remake Enter the Dragon. In fact, the reason Ratner got Lalo Schifrin to score Rush Hour (1998) was his fascination with Enter the Dragon, which was also scored by Schifrin.

    Some films are sacrosanct that ought to be left untouched and for many, Enter the Dragon falls into that category. Despite the purists’ argument that both Fist of Fury (1973) or The Big Boss (1971) probably have better character arcs or narrative, it’s unquestionably Enter the Dragon that brings greater joy. A large part of the audiences’ connection with Enter the Dragon is essentially emotional as this was the film that Lee never lived to see. Irrespective, a remake of the film might ultimately not be as controversial as ‘who would play Lee’s character’ in it. Although Leitch or the studio have not dropped any hints about who would fill the rather big boots of the greatest martial artist the world ever saw, the chances of someone from Asia making the cut would be slim.

    In a post-Black Panther world, the Enter the Dragon remake possibly getting completely overhauled cannot be ruled out. Even when originally pitched in the 1970s, the film was supposed to be titled “Blood and Steel” and in the book, Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen from World War II to the Present author Brain Locke writes how it was also one of the first mainstream martial arts films that was multi-cultural with an Asian, white and black heroic protagonists as the producers felt that would appeal to the widest possible international audiences. But as this remake would be a typical summer release, the studio might not be too keen on letting some relatively little known Asian to ‘shoulder’ a big tent-pole movie.

    In this respect, Leitch’s association with Ryan Reynolds thanks to Deadpool 2 could intrigue the actor to play the lead in Enter the Dragon or who knows it could be Keanu Reeves, who featured as the lead in the slick action franchise John Wick, the first of which was written by Leitch. Reeves, too, has a connection with martial arts where he directed his friend and stuntman Tiger Chen in Man of Tai Chi (2013), which was praised for its “old-school kinetic action.” As far as the prospects of the male lead go there is also Ryan Gosling as a possibility thanks to some experience of playing a somewhat Bruce Lee inspired character in Only God Forgives. In fact, Gosling’s portrayal of latent anger in Drive, too, might come in handy if he is cast in Enter the Dragon.

    Updated Date: Aug 27, 2018 19:37 PM
    The real overhaul this project needs is to be terminated.
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
    Author of Shaolin Trips
    Support our forum by getting your gear at MartialArtSmart

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