This week in class we watched some work from Kip Fullbeck. A short film called banana split, I guess kind of a journey through a life? I’m not sure if it was exactly his life or something similar. The story telling was really great, I haven’t seen many films like this before. The story seems to follow the life of someone beginning to question a lot of his life. Who he has dated, the difficulties he has had with interracial dating. This is the type of film I’d have to watch multiple times to really make connections, on the surface I can tell it question a lot of issues we face today.
We also watched a film, Birth of the Dragon, a film that’s supposed to be about Bruce Lee and his fight with Wong Jack Man. It turns out to be a blend of that and a romantic drama. Steve Mckee trying to free a women he meets while making a delivery who is enslaved until she can pay off the cost of traveling to America, which in most cases is never. Wong Jack Man comes to America for penance because of something he did back home. When he arrives Steve wants to meet him, he does and wants lessons from him. Eventually Steve convinces Wong Jack Man to fight Bruce Lee. At first it seems like he agrees because he wants to help free the girl Steve met, but later reveals that he is only fighting Bruce Lee to show him the flaw in his teachings. The film had really bad reviews, understandably so. One thing that stood out to me was the fact that it was supposed to be set in the 60’s but it felt so modern, I can’t really tell what it was, maybe the dialogue, I just kept forgetting that it was set in the 60s. It also was supposed to be about Bruce Lee but he wasn’t really the focus, there was a lot of focus on the love story of Steve Mckee. Overall I found the film to be more comical than anything else.