Watched Fist of Fury again. Since I already knew the plot, I ignored the subtitles, which were so distracting the first time around that I couldn't even properly see Bruce Lee. This movie is crudely made but has good camera work. The action is swift and the narrative engaging, set in a society and a time in which students were loyal to their teachers for life. (In Metro Manila the teacher-student arrangement is usually register-sit in-take notes-entertain me or I say goodbye.) Crudeness aside, that four-note music theme was parsimonious but haunting.

I chose to re-view this movie because its images of Bruce Lee were clearly those that Figuarts based its 1/12 figure on. So was the Enterbay Black Label, though that is not immediately apparent because that figure is wearing denims, orange sneakers, and a gold medallion--its blazing eyes, however, are the giveaway.

So far there are two sculptural problems that Bruce Lee figure creators have not transcended:

1) The hair is usually rendered in long strands, as oily, and as ratty, the sculptors apparently having no knowledge of the soft, shampooed, layered, and razored style of the 1970s known as the "apple haircut". Bruce Lee was very fastidious with his hair even during fight scenes.

2) The fact is that Bruce Lee's face is hard to capture and encapsulate in a non-moving portrait because, on-screen, he looks pale, extremely boyish, and, let us face it, quite feminine (I have always perceived his wife, Linda, as the masculine half of the married couple), and it is hard to reconcile all of that with his body and the warrior personas of different figures without deliberately introducing overmasculinization and some artificial maturity, such as a coarse complexion, a slight ruddiness, facial elongation, and hints of shaven facial hair. Ironically, the most successful is really the 1/12 Figuarts, especially when it is lighted well. Also ironically, the worst figure to me is that huge, brass-finish monument IN CHINA; it reminds me of the bulky, monstrous, slapdash bust of John F. Kennedy in the lobby of the Kennedy Center in DC.

3) Though Chinese, his eyes were not stereotype-chinky. He had very prominent eyelids.

I guess I can't have everything.