WARNING: SPOILERS
About a week ago, Bruce Lee’s daughter came out and complained about the way her late father was portrayed in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood:
“He comes across as an arrogant asshole who was full of hot air, and not someone who had to fight triple as hard as any of those people did to accomplish what was naturally given to so many others.”
Oh, snap… Bruce Lee wasn’t naturally gifted. He had to overcome obstacles!
I’m guessing she’s whining about the moment where the character of Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) challenged Lee to a fight and throws the diminutive martial artist into a car door.
“I understand that the two characters are antiheroes and this is sort of like a rage fantasy of what would happen… and they’re portraying a period of time that clearly had a lot of racism and exclusion.”
Jesus… “rage fantasy”… and of course, it’s somehow racist. Well, not explicitly racist on Tarantino’s part, I’m assuming.
“I understand they want to make the Brad Pitt character this super bad-ass who could beat up Bruce Lee. But they didn’t need to treat him in the way that white Hollywood did when he was alive.”
Haha! Yes, it is explicitly racist on behalf of not only Tarantino but Brad Pitt as well!
Society seems to be experiencing a mass psychosis that sees all of reality through the lens of assumed discrimination, historical or otherwise. Maybe the only way they can get attention for their cause or their concern is to make it racially-based because journos know that kind of controversy drives clicks?
Luckily, the director was there to telling everyone that a person like Bruce Lee’s daughter should shut her face.
“Could Cliff beat up Bruce Lee? Brad would not be able to beat up Bruce Lee, but Cliff maybe could,” Tarantino said. “If you ask me the question, ‘Who would win in a fight: Bruce Lee or Dracula?’ It’s the same question. It’s a fictional character. If I say Cliff can beat Bruce Lee up, he’s a fictional character so he could beat Bruce Lee up. The reality of the situation is this: Cliff is a Green Beret. He has killed many men in WWII in hand to hand combat.
What Bruce Lee is talking about in the whole thing is that he admires warriors. He admires combat, and boxing is a closer approximation of combat as a sport. Cliff is not part of the sport that is like combat, he is a warrior. He is a combat person.”
Tarantino summed up the fight by adding, “If Cliff were fighting Bruce Lee in a martial arts tournament in Madison Square Garden, Bruce would kill him. But if Cliff and Bruce were fighting in the jungles of the Philippines in a hand-to-hand combat fight Cliff would kill him.”
That all makes perfect sense to me.
Quentin also went on to counter the claim by Bruce Lee’s protégé Dan Inosanto who said that his master “would have never said anything derogatory about Muhammad Ali because he worshiped the ground Muhammad Ali walked on.”
“Bruce Lee was kind of an arrogant guy,” Tarantino told press about depicting the actor in such a cocky manner. “The way he was talking, I didn’t just make a lot of that up. I heard him say things like that to that effect. If people are saying, ‘Well he never said he could beat up Mohammad Ali,’ well yeah he did. Alright? Not only did he say that but his wife, Linda Lee, said that in her first biography I ever read. She absolutely said that.”
Did I read that right? Did QT say “I heard him say things like that?” Is he talking about hearing him on television or is Tarantino claiming that he hung out with Lee?
