Hmmm, that's good Brucespoiltation.
Nothing is better than The Ninja Strikes Back. Unapologetic, crass, despotic, gratuitous, illogical, pointless, plagiarizing, exploitative, and above all, proud to be all of these things without any compromises. From beginning to end, the most entertaining and funny movie I've seen in decades. A film my brother labeled as Brucespoiltation, with the one of the most well known Bruce Lee imitators of all, Bruce Le (who looks nothing like Bruce by the way, even taking into consideration of the stereotype that “all Asians look alike to whites” – oh, most Asians I know also think the same about white people – but Le is not even close to Lee); you have to love other cast, notably Chick Norris – yes, that’s “CHICK” Norris, not to be confused, well, they want you to mistake it with Chuck, and with Bolo Yueng (from Enter the Dragon fame – the big Chinese guy that fought John Saxon), and Harold Sakata (007 Odd Jobs fame – they even play the Bond theme when he graces the screen). The opening credits music is a composite mix of Lalo Schifrin Enter the Dragon theme – about 5 second worth – I guess to keep from getting sued – mixed with stylistic and sheik 70 themes that is interchangeable from action film to funky jazz music for porn.
Ninja doesn't waste time on logical set up of plots or witty dialogs, rather just focuses of chaos and violating, not only the laws of physics but the laws of logic and the laws of its own universe and existence which is the 1970s. Forget Boogie Nights, Dazed and Confused, or all of these retrospective films that tries to capture and dissect the social stratosphere of the 70s, Ninja Strikes Back is the quintessential 1970 movie, and it achieves this without even trying. Ninja will always be my argument for the importance of bad movies, for the duality in all things, greatness cannot exist without colossal failures, but there is value and beauty in failure. This is not to say parody movies are great by definitions, these movies making fun of multiple movies, Meet the Spartans, Date Movie, Epic Movie, etc., with the exception Airplane or films by the Zucker brothers and Abrahams including Top Secret and to a lesser extend Hot Shots (I liked Part Duex a lot more for the jokes are less obvious and more broader than Hot Shot which seems to be obvious and limited to mainly parodying Top Gun), because Airplane set the rules for the genre, as well as broke conventions of film narrative; however, these “frat boy” parodies (seriously, the writers of these movie, starting with Spy Hard, were frat boys sitting around watching Hot Shots thinking they can do better and had a friend in “the Biz” with connections, thus the rest is history, lesson #1 in Comedy humility, what you think is funny might not be funny to others) that cost nothing to make and if 100000 frat boys out there go to see these films (which if you look at the weekend box office takes, they do, and will probably continue to do so), that’s $10 a ticket 10x100000 that’s at least one million, and, apparently, there are a lot of frat boys or frat boys at heart people out there that continue their support for the Friedberg and Seltzer team, god help us all. But on a cost effective scale and when compared to Ninja Strikes Back, these frat boy parodies fail micro economics 101 (I would think most frat boys who spend most of their time going and enjoying films like Meet the Spartans wouldn’t last more than half a semester in any course requiring some logical); where Frat Boys re-shoot and then inject their humor, Ninja just out right steal and exploit. In a way; there are little to no compromising with Ninja, logic is a needless distraction, why even bother? That’s where the frat boys fail as filmmakers, even on a moronic P.O.V. it cannibalizes its own genre and narrative for empty laughs, freshmen humor, and infantile logic that even an eight year old would not accept. Not that I’m trying to find emotional reciprocity with these films, but there is nothing there, no wit, no charm, no timing, these are all the right components that existed in Airplane, Kentucky Fried Movie, Naked Gun, Top Secret, Hot Shots Part Deux. Frat Boys tells a joke and hangs on that joke to make sure you get it, I guess they are always used to having to explain everything to other frat boys around them, so this carries over to other aspects. So the digressive lesson here is it’s ok to watch bad movies, as long as it’s a bad movie with heart, regardless of what was the intended purpose might be, sometimes it’s easier to laugh at a tragic failure than a parody of tragic failures.
Labels: Digression: The Sunshine in the Cloudy Narrative
