Some unrelated stuff

There was a martial arts movie craze back in the '80's, My friends and I would watch these things and back then, we were annoyed if they used editing tricks for the fight scenes. I suppose it was an arbitrary thing, but we wanted to see the guys do their martial arts in single takes, to show that they could really do it.

The worst one was a cheap movie made in Hong Kong. It had the old English guy from Enter the Dragon in it, but it's star apparently couldn't do a fight scene. We'd seem him start to do something martial artsy, then there'd he a cut to him standing in a vaguely karate-like pose over the crumpled body of the person he just did something to. They didn't even try.

But now this editing stuff is the norm. That Irish guy, Mark Cousins, in The Story of Film: An Odyssey, seemed to think the lack of fast cutting in the old kung fu movies was a weakness. He contrasted Enter the Dragon with a more recent martial arts movie from Hong Kong.

Someone somewhere commenting on this, probably on Cracked.com, mentioned someone, probably Matt Damon, in a karate fight in an elevator which would have been impressive if it had been done in one shot. In the publicity for the movie they talked about all the training Matt Damon did for the fight scenes, but why did they bother? It was all in the editing. He didn't need to be able to do anything.

The Soviet movie White Sun of the Desert, a "western" set in Kazakstan in the 1920's, was a huge hit with the public but looked down upon by people in the Soviet movie industry because it only had a couple of fairly easy stunts in it. The action scenes were all done through editing. 

It's a little like the sitcoms like Family Ties. They had a four-year-old join the cast. They'd do whole scenes in medium shot until the four-year-old had a line, then they'd cut to a close-up. It probably didn't matter. The audience knew he wasn't some kind of prodigy who could act out a scene in one shot. In fact. that pre-schooler who can act on Modern Family is a little disturbing to watch.

Like there used to be a TV commercial with a toddler who could talk. It appeared to be her actual mother in the commercial with her. She didn't say very much. Just enough to be impressive but still a little disturbing.

Usually they try to humiliate genuinely precocious child actors. There was a commercial where---well, I don't want to go into it, but a mother says something rather cruel to her preschool son who was pleasantly enthusing to the camera over a brand of air freshener.

And there was poor Mason Reese who had to compare the wide range of items you could make using Underwood Deviled Ham to a Smorgasbord. They had to trick him into saying "Borgasmord". The director convinced him this was actually a word, then, when the said it, we hear people laughing off camera and one of them corrects him and Mason looked embarrassed. 

And watching old B movies from the '30's, they would film scenes in one shot as much as possible to save time and therefore money. Most westerns used real cowhands in lieu of actors had to break scenes up into shots when the actors couldn't handle the stress of more than the briefest exchange of dialog.

Now, on the other hand, I watched a dangerous but unimpressive stunt in a zero budget science fiction movie. Shot on VHS for a couple thousand dollars back in the days before Hi8 or SVHS. A man has to pick a tied-up teenager boy up off the floor (he was SAVING him, not doing something horrible), carried him over his shoulder to a loading dock, sets him down on the concrete floor and loads him into a van. The director realized it was dangerous so he acted as a stunt double for the kid. He said it was extremely disorienting being carried and laid down this way. And it was no picnic for the guy doing the carrying, either, He appeared to be in his 50's and he was obviously in better shape than he appeared but I don't think he should have been lifting a grown man. They couldn't cut away for the couple of brief moments when he might have gotten a hernia or the stunt double might have gotten a skull fracture?