It's back, but it's mutated. “Things I learned from watching television last week”/“Things I learned from television last week”/“Things I learnt from last week's television” (style guide? What style guide?) has returned - but in a different guise (as promised). After a brief experiment last week, it has now emerged from the pupa of my brain into something hopefully more butterfly-like than the original caterpillars.
Here goes: this week's question(s) - which I throw open to the floor to answer, whether you've seen the show or not - and realisation(s) - for which I also invite comment - come from having watched the rather good finale of Burn Notice on Friday.
Question
Why is Michael Weston the only 'goodie' allowed to kill people on the show?
There is a scene (I won't spoil it for you with any more details if you haven't seen it) where his 'trigger happy' ex-girlfriend has a sniper rifer and clear shots, so clear she can shoot at railings and anything else if she feels like it with extreme accuracy. Yet, she doesn't. It would have been extremely advantageous if she had, but she doesn't. Yet 'hero' Michael gets to shoot people willy nilly. Why is this? Is it the show's rating? Is it gender politics? Anyone have a better idea?
Realisation
Fight scenes on TV shows are getting so much better these days
I provide the YouTube video at the top of this entry as evidence. Okay, it's not The Bourne Ultimatum and there are a fair few clunky bits. But that's pretty impressive, no? Compare that to the Captain Kirk fights of the 60s, and the really rubbish fights in Kung Fu in the 70s (or even the 90s), and you'll note that even the lowliest TV show can have good fight scenes these days.
Why should this be?
I have theories. There's the far greater availability of martial arts training and the far greater availability of stunt men trained in martial arts from early ages. Then there's the fact the actors are far more likely to be trained in martial arts themselves: Battlestar Galactica's infamous boxing episode still had notably good fight scenes because Tahmoh Penikett is a keen boxer and mixed martial artist (and one of the extras was a Canadian mixed martial arts champion).
Plus the choice of martial arts used in movies and television is changing. Go back to the 60s and 70s and, bar anything with Bruce Lee in it, you were almost guaranteed to see only judo and certain forms of traditional karate (although ITC shows tended to use jiu jitsu, since the main stunt choreography was a former paratrooper). Even Kung Fu only had kung fu in the pilot episode and the third season - it was judo and a bit of flailing all the way for the first two seasons, bar one episode with some really bad capoeira. None of those styles looked desperately good on film.
Now, you can't move for the diverse ranges of martial arts in TV and film: Alias was the home of some rather prosaic kickboxing; the Bourne films use Kali, which is a Philippine style; Batman Begins uses a completely new, made-up style, The Keysi Fighting Method, based on Bruce Lee's own invented style, Jeet Kune Do; Equilibrium invented its own gun-based martial art, gun kata; Andromeda was end-to-end wu shu; if you squint hard enough, you can see Kristanna Loken doing Israel's Krav Maga during some of her films and TV work. The list goes on.*
Of course, there's a world of difference between real martial arts and film martial arts. Watching Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon these days, it's notable how bad the martial arts look, even though, if you know what you're looking for, it's clear that most of the people involved really know what they're doing, even John Saxon. But Hong Kong cinema has spent decades refining how best to make fights look good on film and television. But shows now allot a decent amount of time to stunt fight preparation - these aren't the days when Gerald Harper would turn up on the set of Adam Adamant! and be expected to learn the entire fight and do it in a couple of takes. Now dedicated fight choreographers take their time to arrange fights, knowing they can't get away with the things they used to do in the 60s - we expect better and have seen better, now.
So, it's notable that the lowliest show can now do decent fight scenes, even if the rest of it is rubbish (The Outsiders - I'm looking at you here and here on YouTube). That's my realisation this week. Hopefully next time's will be less anal.
* Actually, though, you could see a certain amount of variety in some 70s films, with the slightly spoofy Doc Savage: Man of Bronze, for example, quite authentically deploying a variety of styles - with a little caption at the bottom of the screen to let you know which style was being used. But the general principle holds true, that despite a little flirtation with different styles during the Kung Fu boom of the early 70s, things settled down by the 80s, before improving again in the 90s.
September 23, 2007 | Reply
That fight scene in the brig did bring to mind the close-quarters fighting between Bourne and Desh in the third Bourne film. Lighting was just right so that they could have easily tossed in a stunt man or two and I for one didn't notice.
Referring to that scene with Fiona's marksmanship, I wondered the same thing. It felt like the old days of shows like A-Team or MacGyver, where everything but the bad guys were shot and yet they still were defeated.
Now, this next part is a bit spoilery, so avert your eyes if you don't want to know!
Here goes:
But what really bothered me was the earlier scene on the bridge. Being rushed from both sides, she eventually choose the right maneuver... BUT SHE TOSSED HER GUN DOWN AND TRIED TO RUN FIRST! Maybe the dictates of broadcast policy mandated that she not shoot her attackers all to hell, but it was really out of character for her.
Maybe thinking about that scene caused me to notice a similar situation in the "Utopia" episode of 'Doctor Who' which just aired here in the US. I didn't notice it the last time I watched it a few months back, but the Doctor forbids Jack from firing into the mob of Futurekind who are about to overwhelm them and basically eat them. Yet as Jack noted, the Doctor had no problem with the base guards doing so. I couldn't catch the Doc's splainin, but I'm sure it must have been weak.
They were at the end of Time anyway, it's not like Jack would have been futzing the future!
Sorry for being long-winded on these topics, but this new "Questions & Realizations" (sorry, I'm a Yank!) inspired me!
September 24, 2007 | Reply
I seem to recall that the Doctor reckoned he had responsibility for Jack, but not for the guards. I think he Jack could see the flaws with that.
-ize suffices come from the Greek verbs from which most of the English verbs come; -ise is an import from modern(ish) French. Technically, the US spelling is more accurate, so I'm not fussed!