Dangerious P. Cats said:
I know I'm going to get in trouble for this but I dispute that realistic fighting technique makes for bad fight scenes, in fact I'd go so far as to say the tread away from having authentic techniques in films had degraded them highly. First off I am going to note that not all realistic fighting works as a visual medium. Grappling is really hard to make work. I'm actually quite surprised that UFC/MMA is more popular than boxing, especially with a great many people that aren't martial artists, but there you go. Many of the best martial arts movies come from people trained in and employing real martial arts. Bruce Lee is one of the most defining figures in modern martial arts and his films where visionary for their time, heavily influencing the action genre as a whole. Compare the work of people like Jet Li or Jackie Chan who have trained in Martial Arts and utilise real techniques to action stars with little actual martial arts training, like Matt Damon in the Bourn movies. O.K that's a bit a straw man argument because we've established that we hate shaky cam, but I want bash shaky cam some more and I think this makes my point. Shaky cam seems to have risen in popularity after the trend of having actors train intensively in Kung Fu so that they look half decent at it went into decline (ignoring the wirework most of what is done in Kung Fu movies is real Kung Fu). My theory is that much of this was because not all actors were in sufficient physical condition to do the training and so measures needed to be taken to conceal their lack of skill. Kurosawa needed to do similar things in some of his movies since not all actors were trained in Japanese Swordsmanship (most were, and it made the movies awesome). The few times shaky cam has worked it's because you're not meant to see what's going on. In Batman begins you hardly see batman fight, but that's kind of the point since the scenes are meant to communicate that Batman is stealth incarnate. Likewise in the Bourne Identity the bits where the shaky cam worked were bits where we are introduced to Bourse's fighting ability by being shown that he moves too fast to be seen. In both cases the flighty bits of the scene are over very quickly, to the extent where I wouldn't call then an action sequence. When shaky cam is used in actual action sequences it's annoying and confusing, and if you ever see a making of, much of the time the actor look uncoordinated. I really think that film would benefit from greater authenticity in martial arts, one of my favourite fight scenes of all time is the opening fight from Fearless because it showcases the martial arts ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRMKMGhwWxo ). Beyond the obvious Jet Li, Anthony De Longis (the sabre fencer) is a very capable fencer in real life ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7VBxc8WsXc ) and his fencing work in the scene is both compelling and accurate, as is the German Pike work (German systems tend to be quite aggressive). The bare knuckle boxing is not so accurate, but I have a soft spot for fencing so can overlook it. The Kung Fu episode of Human Weapon does go some way to detailing the links between real and film Kung Fu http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MWIrSS_sYQ
