The Michael Bay one is pretty excellent, I'm glad I checked out his channel!

You know, if one were to start liking Michael Bay movies ironically right about now they'd be way ahead of the hipster curve.

Look for a VHS rip if possible. The versions posted on Youtube cut out many of the best scenes, including the intro sequence, in which Japanese Nazis capture Abraham Lincoln, as he and some Second World War generals try to assemble a team of commandos (including Rocky Balboa and Snake Plissken) to help defend Canada.

Yeah I think the one I had inserted footage from other Jackie Chan films since he was barely in the original, but every VCD stand in Chinatown was milking Chan's American popularity. Much like Godfrey Ho, it was clearly a different movie with more Chan spliced in from time to time.

I think Chan's scenes in FMF were filmed specifically for that movie, but he's only in it for about fifteen minutes, and the director was definitely trying to capitalize on Jackie's growing fame.

The rest of the movie was spliced together, though. The director, Chu Yen-ping, was well-known for using spliced footage; I remember reading once that there was an official genre for spliced-together slapstick/martial arts films, but the name of it escapes me.

James Gunn's an indie director though, not an action one, like most people directing Comic movies. You could make the same argument that Asian disaster movies don't have the same Michael Bay impact because the budget's not as high.

He didn't really shit on GOTG, he just pointed out the division between action and comedy in that film. Its a great film with its own merits, they just don't handle action and comedy the way Jackie Chan does. GOTG is an excellent film. It has a 91% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is #213 on the IMDB's top 250 greatest films of all time list. You are a fool for hating it, I'm sure you only pretend to hate it in a contrived attempt at looking edgy. Well you failed!

Cena on point!

He definitely wasn't shitting on GotG. This guy doesn't even shit on Michael Bay! He used GotG to illustrate a different style of filmmaking - one that split action and comedy into two distinct channels. Jackie Chan blends the two.

Speaking of which...

Hey Cena! Who's your favorite martial arts film star, and why?

Think about this Fabio, Guardians of the Galaxy is one of the top 10 grossing superhero films of all time, yet before the film it was a rather obscure Marvel property. It made more money than Fantastic 4, Batman, Superman, X-men, Iron Man, Hulk, etc, because it was such a good film. It didn't have the hype of a legendary name. Like its heroes the film was an underdog.

Definitely Jackie Chan. He's just so much fun to watch. Jean Claude Van Damme is my second favorite. So many of his films are terribly overrated like Time Cop and Hard Target. He was also the only man tough enough to portray the all American badass Guile on film.

Interesting that you say Hard Target, because you could pretty much replace "John Woo" with "Jackie Chan" and have the same dissertation!

And besides Dave Bautista, I don't believe any of the primary cast in GotG had any formal training, so that's pretty much how John Woo makes John Travolta do a backflip while firing two guns.

Overrated, or underrated?

Van Damme is pretty good, but his portrayal of Guile was terrible. His hair was wrong, his branch of service/ MOS was wrong, he didn't know any of Guile's moves, he was way too scrawny, and of course he's French, when they should have given the part to an American.

Was Bootista in GotG, IZ? I never saw the movie, but from what I've heard it sounds like fun.

Whoops, I meant underrated.
Nationality shouldn't be an indicator as to what roles a person can play. Hugh Laurie is a Brit, but he's phenomenal as the American Dr. House. Van Damme did his job well, you couldn't even tell he's Belgian in Street Fighter. The writers messed up the other parts of Guile's story.
Batista was surprisingly awesome in GotG. He really owned the role.

GotG is a shitty movie though, at least in my opinion. A pissweak paint-by-numbers action comedy that is neither funny nor exciting. At best it's a competently assembled design-by-committee movie which hits enough of the right notes hard enough to impress people who don't know any better. Now go watch Doomsday.

What is wrong with you film snobs? Its a freakin' popcorn superhero flick, what do you expect? As far as a popcorn action films go, it's one of the best. Go back to film school and jerk off to Kurasawa and Godot.

Nationality isn't always an indicator; I'd be fine with Chris Jericho playing Guile, even though he's a Canadian, or maybe even The Rock, who comes from some weird country, like Florida or something. But getting a Frencher to play the All-American Street Fighter?! That's just plain disrespectful. It's the equivalent of casting some blue-eyed, blonde haired Germanic girl as Anne Franke.

Batista strikes me as being very much like The Rock - good on camera, crap in the ring. Perhaps they will film a whole bunch of GotG sequels and reboots, so Batista can go concentrate on that?

I think you'd like GotG. One of the "perks" of my work is going to see lots of summer blockbusters with my clients, so eventually I see almost all of them, but I'm at work so I'm not really paying attention to the film itself vs. when I see a movie for myself with a six pack of piss beer in my backpack (this summer it was only Mad Max and What We Do in the Shadows), but GotG was good enough that I went again to see it on my own time.

I think RLM said it best in their review where they're like "from the director of the movie where Juno rapes Dwight from the Office comes Disney's.." so I might recommend Super (a fairly low budget "superhero" movie similar to Kick-Ass also directed by Gunn) first. There's some really solid filmmaking going on and then over-CGI'd fights, but the whole thing's accompanied by a great soundtrack and nods to Gunn's Troma past, one in particular that references Troma's Doggie Tale Vol 1.

Speaking of Guile, everyone remembers Chan's Chun Li in City Hunter, but his short-lived Guile in the same fight scene was pretty much perfect.

I also did not like GotG. It was incoherent when it wasn't cloying, the fight scenes didn't thrill me, and the stakes didn't interest me. (Something about a rock? Something about a black guy with a fleet of ships?) It had a couple creative moments of sheer whimsy, and I laughed at a cum joke. So cudos for that Mr. Hollywood Movie Director.

And I promise I wasn't disliking it "on principle" or whatever accusations the internet levels at people with storytelling standards. I've enjoyed other Marvel movies, I've enjoyed space operas, and the movie came recommended by a bunch of friends. I was well-positioned to eat it up, but in the darkness of the theatre I kept thinking, "Hoo boy, Marvel's got a huge flop on their hands." Then I emerged to a world I no longer understood.

It all comes down to comedy styles, I guess. It would be a great movie if seeing a man dancing or the words Kevin Bacon make you auto-giggle.

Oh, stars for this video about why Jackie Chan is so great. I found the bit about setting up the staircase stunt in the previous shot really interesting. I never notice stuff like that.

Its stuff I never really noticed, but I've certainly noticed when a fight scene is horribly filmed. I've seen ones with nothing but closeups and tons of cuts, and its usually cause the actors don't know any real martial arts.

Yeah, some of the stuff was pretty obvious to me, particularly the stuff which had to do with acting and the storyline - such as Jackie's ability to sell physical comedy with his facial expressions, and how he never makes his heroes invincible - but I'm not a film student, and some of the more technical observations were things that I'd never really thought of before - such as the way editing can destroy the operatic rhythm of Jackie's choreography, or how adding just a half-second of repeated footage will make hits look much, much harder.

I love Jackie, but I've never been a big fan of the American films he's starred in. I knew the fight sequences never really worked, but beyond obvious stuff - like Chris Tucker being a terrible actor with no martial arts training, or later, using wires - I was never able to articulate precisely *WHY* they didn't work.

At times, I started to wonder if maybe *I* was the problem; like, what if the American films looked crappy to me simply because I was a hipster? So I'm glad to learn that there are actual, cinematographic reasons why the Hong Kong guys are great action film directors, and Brett Ratner, not so much.

Yeah Netflix has some good ones, like Project A/A2 and both Operation Condor and the sequel, but it's sadly missing my favorite, Police Story 1, which has the best cargasm in cinema.

/beardstroke