Category — Lights, camera... action!

I’m getting a little tired of all the post-Matrix/post-Crouching Tiger chop-socky wire fu in films. It’s getting stale. But I’ll cut Bodyguards & Assassins some slack because it stars the super bad-ass Donnie Yen. Here’s an extended clip from the film, a fight scene with Strikeforce middleweight Cung Le, who is my excuse for posting this video.

I’m a huge fan of behind-the-scenes MMA videos/vlogs. I like seeing the training, of course, but more than that I like seeing the fighters outside of the cage and away from the carefully composed interviews typically used to promote events. I also like documentaries, like the Rickson Gracie one called Choke and the Renzo Gracie one called Legacy. Entertaining and enlightening stuff.

Well, I had a chance last week to sit down with Toronto filmmaker Steven Wong and his producer, James Hergott, who are making a 3-D documentary called The Striking Truth about friends and training partners Georges St. Pierre and David Loiseau. How cool could that be – GSP in 3-D? Wong also got Loiseau on the phone for me because it was actually his idea to make a movie about them. The full story is over here at the National Post.

No words. There are just no words. What do I say about this? It’s a clip from Death Warrior, which plays like a relic from Cannon Films circa 1983. Oh, and the guy that Rampage is fighting is also the screenwriter, so he should take some of the blame as well.

The cast of the A-Team movie in all their photoshopped glory looks like a bunch of guys dressing as the A-Team for Hallowe’en: Bradley Cooper as Templeton “Faceman” Peck, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson as BA Barracus, Sharlto Copley as “Howling Mad” Murdock and Liam Neeson as John “Hannibal” Smith.

I post this clip from the set of the A-Team movie so that I’ll have one more reason to make fun of Quinton “Rampage” Jackson. Although it is nice to see he’s got the full Mr. T mohawk glued to his head.

I’m not sure if this is a web series, a proposed TV series or what, but I’d be a regular viewer. A couple of young talented Gracie black belts living it up in Miami? What’s not to like? The Valente Brothers, Pedro and Gui, seem charismatic enough, and if they focus as much on the jiu-jitsu as they do on the nightclubs, I’m sold.

A couple of things, though: having Royce Gracie stop by might make a promotable selling point and lend the brothers some BJJ credibility, but the guy’s got all the charm of a mannequin. And I feel sorry for the poor sap in the jail sell who thinks he doesn’t have to worry about dropping the soap because he studied BJJ for two weeks. I hope the show is around long enough to do a followup with him a few months into his incarceration.

Former UFC light heavyweight champ Chuck Liddell was voted off of Dancing With The Stars on Tuesday night. Maybe his guilty feet ain’t got no rhythm. Kudos to the Iceman for taking the risk. It takes guts to dress like it’s cowboy night at Woody’s gay bar. We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.

I thought I posted this last week but it slipped through the cracks. I hate to judge a movie by its trailer but this feels exactly like the kind of B-grade action movies that were released in theatres in the ’80s but now go directly to DVD. The bad one-liners, bodies leaping ahead of explosions, cheesy bad guys with bad accents (which they even make fun of in the trailer). Even the sight of Dolph Lundgren going toe-to-toe with Jet Li isn’t enough to make me overlook the goofy raspberry berets (make your own Prince joke). I was really hoping this would be a hard-R, blood-and-guts, over-the-top (pun intended) Sly Stallone actioner like the deliriously entertaining Rambo. Oh yeah, and if you haven’t figured out why I’m posting this on FW, Randy Couture’s one of Stallone’s bad-asses.

Umm, one of these things does not belong here: among the cast for the reboot of the Predator movie franchise you’ll find Adrien Brody, Topher Grace and Oleg Taktarov. Now, I’m not saying Brody and Grace won’t make great alien killers but UFC and PRIDE FC vet Taktarov seems better-suited to the job of shooting up the jungle, not having time to bleed and getting to the choppah. Anyway, the film is shooting in Hawaii and the Russian dreadnought is hanging out with BJ Penn.