Rebecca ChapmanMartial Arts | Rebecca Chapman

Teamwork is not just a buzzword in The Forbidden Kingdom

rebecca — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:43:20 +0000

Teamwork is a huge buzzword in many corporations today. Uniqueness and individuality are often displaced or even scorned. People who are nonconformists are “not team players” and everything spirals downward from there. Once it starts getting quantified and measured, it’s entirely lost it’s meaning.

Below is my version of teamwork:

Video by forbiddenkingdom .

This video scene is part of the big Jet Li vs. Jackie Chan fight in The Forbidden Kingdom. This fight alone makes the movie worth watching.

In this movie, both of their characters are very passionate about what they wish to accomplish, and are also two very unique individuals, the Silent Monk, and the Drunken Immortal, who have very different ideas about how to reach their goals.

It wasn’t until near the end of this fight that they both realized that they were on the same mission and decided to work together.

As Jackie Chan’s character put it, “We’ll kill each other when it’s over.”

Once they started working together, did they suddenly begin agreeing with each other about everything, kowtowing to each other’s opinions, start toning down their individual points of view for the “good of the team,” and thus have no further conflicts or disagreements whatsoever until the prophesied return of the Monkey King?

Not at all.

Their diverse viewpoints and strengths complemented each other for the greater long-term success of their mission. Though they would have both been dinged for poor teamwork on the typical corporate performance review (just look at the destruction they caused in the temple!), their conflicts actually strengthened each other and the rest of their makeshift team of heroes.

Conflict is not automatically an enemy to teamwork. In fact, a degree of conflict may be very necessary to find the most innovative solutions to team problems. What do you think?

My review of Ninja (because ninjas are awesome)

rebecca — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 02:29:09 +0000

I first heard of this movie while reading the forums over at MartialTalk. Someone had found a preliminary trailer and so everyone was awaiting the movie and discussing whether or not it would be any good. I went ahead and stuck it in my Netflix queue and mostly forgot about it until it showed up in my mailbox last week.

I watched it over the weekend.

Okay, I admit. I really wanted to love this movie. It has ninjas in it for goodness’ sake. But at the end, I just felt “meh” about it. I didn’t dislike it, but it just didn’t grab me.

Some of the fight scenes were fun, and I enjoyed the beauty of the dojo scenes. I also loved the super cool ninja outfits.

But….

(Always a “but”)

The plot just seemed so contrived, but without the fun campiness of some of the old kung fu movies. The bad guy was too melodramatic in too short of a time, and the lead female annoyed me.

She’d lived in the dojo all of her life. Her father was even the Sensei. Although she could fight and would start off kicking bad guy butt, she ultimately had to be rescued every single time there was a fight that involved her. In fact, it seemed that her only purpose for being in the movie at all was as a love interest to the lead male. Bleah. Disappointing.

I’m glad I finally saw this movie, but it was just a bit too average for my liking and won’t go into my “to watch again” list anytime soon.

Thanks to ScottAdkinsFanz for uploading the trailer.

Settle for Spectacular

rebecca — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 02:56:12 +0000

Today I spent a good part of the afternoon in Everquest 2 on the Isle of Mara taking multiple screenshots of the scenery to use as a header for the character portfolio page I’m creating for this website. I wanted to capture the sky at just the right time, so I had to wait through at least one cycle of the night and part of the day, and took screenshots throughout those cycles.

I was reminded of the time I watched the extras on the DVD of Hero, one of my favorite movies. The director, Zhang Yimou, wanted to create a lasting impressions with audiences even if they forget everything that happened in the actual story. He created an emotional blend of color, sound, and mood, and wanted this blending to be perfect.

One example is in a blue water scene that took place in an obscure part of China. Zhang would only agree to shoot when the water was perfectly still, and it was only still within a window of two hours each day, between 10am and noon. Crews had to start setting up in preparation before 5am. It took 20 days to film this scene.

Another example is even more astounding. Zhang had a camera crew stationed at an oak field in Mongolia so that they could monitor the leaves changing color. When the leaves turned a precise shade of yellow, he raced everyone to that location so that they could gather and sort through all of the leaves. The leaves were blown past the cameras in front of the actors, and then they were gathered up once again, resorted, and individually cleaned so that they could be used in the next pass. Since the leaves only kept for three days, they had a very mininal timeframe to complete this scene.

Zhang thought that even if the audience forgot the story, they would remember two ladies in red in a sea of golden leaves.

While I wasn’t in the process of making an epic film like Hero, I could have easily just snapped a couple of screenshots and just used what I had at the time I entered the game, just like Zhang could have used whatever was in the oak forest at the time. The leaves were probably still beautiful just like Mara in Everquest 2 is still charming at any time of day.

But that perfectly still water and the perfectly golden leaves created a much more profound effect than just whatever was just good enough that day. It made the difference between what was just good and what was spectacular.