Bruce Lee - The Master Collection

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Legend of the Dragon, a brand new 80-minute overview of Lee’s career by film critic and historian Tony Rayns

Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits | The Criterion Collection

Newly translated optional English subtitles, plus subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing on the English dubs Bruce Lee is at his most awe-inspiringly ferocious in this blistering follow-up to his star-making performance in The Big Boss, which turned out to be an even greater success than its predecessor. Set in 1910s Shanghai, Fist of Fury casts Lee as a martial-arts student who, after his revered master is murdered by a rival dojo of Japanese imperialists, sets out to defend the honor of both his school and the Chinese people, with his fatal fists as his weapon of choice. Elevating Lee to a hero of near folkloric proportions, this historical revenge fantasy blends its stunning action set pieces with a strong anticolonialist statement and a potent dose of the fierce cultural pride that the actor embodied.

The third disc houses The Way of the Dragon, which, like the previous two titles, also offers some alternate opening credits (one using the alternate title Return of the Dragon) along with a collection of trailers and a radio spot. There are also a collection of interviews including one for Jon T. Benn, who talks about his role in the film. The best feature on here is Legacy of the Dragon, a 47-minute documentary on Bruce Lee’s life that ends up getting into a great amount of detail around Game of Death, the film he was working on after The Way of the Dragon before going off to Hollywood to do Enter the Dragon. The theatrical version of Enter the Dragon is then found on disc four, and this is the only disc of the first five to not sport an audio commentary. It does feature the 30-minute making-of Blood and Steel that was initially produced for Warner’s 2-disc special edition DVD in 2004. It gathers together a number of people around the film’s production (along with James Coburn) to talk about the film and Lee. The disc also features a couple of other Warner features, including 16-minutes’ worth of interviews with widow Linda Lee Cadwell, a 7-minute EPK featurette, and the 19-minute Bruce Lee: In His Own Words, which showcases archival footage of Lee talking about his philosophies before closing on a montage accompanied by an incredibly cheesy song. There are then a collection of trailers, TV spots, and a radio spot. Criterion also includes a 2-minute archival interview with actor Tung Wai, who plays the young student at the beginning (this interview was found in some of the Shout! releases for the other Lee films). Sadly, Criterion was not able to carry over the lengthier documentaries found on some of the previous Warner editions, Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey and The Curse of the Dragon. Released five years after Bruce Lee’s death, this eccentrically entertaining kung-fu curio combines footage from an unfinished project directed by and starring Lee with original material shot by Enter the Dragon director Robert Clouse to create an entirely new work that testifies to the actor’s enduring place in the pop-culture imagination. Using stand-ins, doubles, and archival footage to compensate for Lee’s absence, Game of Death follows a martial-arts movie star who, when he is threatened by a cutthroat crime syndicate intent on controlling his career, must take his skills from the soundstage to the streets. It all builds to an exhilarating climax that is pure Lee: a tour de force of martial-arts mastery in which the legend himself, clad in an iconic yellow jumpsuit, fights his way up a multilevel pagoda, with the towering Kareem Abdul-Jabbar among his formidable opponents.

Bruce Lee to Get Definitive Criterion Collection Blu-ray Box Set

Brand new 4K restorations of The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, The Way of the Dragon and Game of Death and brand new 2K restoration of Game of Death II Disc one, featuring The Big Boss, presents a collection of alternate footage for the film, ranging between alternate opening titles (a couple using the alternate Fists of Fury title), some extended scenes, and an alternate ending, basically excising the last few seconds. Also found here is an archival interview with martial arts instructor Gene LeBell, a short 2-minute essay by Bentley covering the western score created for the film by composer Peter Thomas, along with a collection of trailers and TV spots. Multiple programs and documentaries about Lee’s life and philosophies, including Bruce Lee: The Man and the Legend (1973) and Bruce Lee: In His Own Words (1998)

Interviews with Linda Lee Cadwell, Lee’s widow, and many of Lee’s collaborators and admirers, including actors Jon T. Benn, Riki Hashimoto, Nora Miao, Robert Wall, Yuen Wah, and Simon Yam and directors Clarence Fok, Sammo Hung, and Wong Jing

Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits Review :: Criterion Forum

Game of Death Redux, a new presentation of Lee’s original Game of Death footage, produced by Alan CanvanSix audio commentaries: on The Big Boss by Bruce Lee expert Brandon Bentley; on The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, The Way of the Dragon, and Game of Death by Hong Kong–film expert Mike Leeder; and on the special-edition version of Enter the Dragon by producer Paul Heller High Definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentations of the Hong Kong cut of Game of Death, Game of Death II, Bruce Lee: The Man & The Legend and Bruce Lee: The Legend New interview with author Grady Hendrix about the “Bruceploitation” subgenre that followed Lee’s death, and a selection of Bruceploitation trailers Disc two holds Fist of Fury, which also comes with its own set of alternate opening credits, which either present different titles (like the alternate The Chinese Connection title) or a slightly different opening, like the Japanese version (which seems to try to lessen the anti-Japanese sentiment found in the film through the opening title card). This disc also features interviews actors Nora Miao, Riki Hashimoto, Jun Katsumura, and Yuen Wah. It closes with four theatrical trailers. New program about English-language dubbing, featuring performers Michael Kaye (the English-speaking voice of Lee’s Chen Zhen in Fist of Fury) and Vaughan Savidge

Arrow Video announces world exclusive definitive Bruce Lee

The Criterion Collection presents their 7-disc Blu-ray box set, Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits, which, for the first time ever, brings together Lee’s five feature films The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, The Way of the Dragon, the theatrical version of Enter the Dragon, and Game of Death. Each film is presented in the aspect ratio of 2.35:1 and appear on their own respective Blu-ray discs. This set also includes the Special Edition version of Enter the Dragon, and Game of Death II, each of which appear over the last two supplement discs. The theatrical version of Enter the Dragon comes from a new 2K restoration, taken from the 35mm interpositive. The other four films are sourced from 4K restorations, with The Big Boss and most of Fist of Fury scanned from the 35mm original camera negative (the opening credits for Fist of Fury come from the 35mm interpositive) and the other two films sourced from 35mm internegatives. All five films are presented with 1080p/24hz high-definition encodes. Following this are a few interviews. Andre Morgan talks about the impact Golden Harvest had on the Hong Kong film business, while Grady Hendrix talks about the “Bruceploitation” genre that exploded after Lee’s death (which he considers Game of Death to be a part of). This is accompanied by a collection of trailers for a few notable films in the genre, though only a radio spot for Bruce Lee: His Last Game of Death. Another interesting interview segment called Match the Lips features professional dubbers Michael Kaye and Vaughan Savage talking about the art of dubbing. The disc then closes with The Grandmaster & the Dragon, which features Wing Chun Grandmaster William Cheung talking about Lee.

The Final Game of Death, a brand new feature-length video essay by Arrow Films on Lee’s original vision for The Game of Death, featuring a new 2K restoration of the footage directed by Lee in 1972 Considering Game of Death’s unorthodox production (made after Lee died to make use of footage he had begun shooting for a film of the same name) it should be no surprise that this disc, disc five, ends up offering some of the more interesting features in the set. The big one would be Game of Death Redux, which is a new edit (Shout! included something similar on their releases) of the footage Lee shot, running 34-minutes. It’s an impressive edit, expertly dubbing in dialogue and making excellent use of John Barry’s score. But what’s most impressive about it is that it does feel like, at the very least, a complete section of a film. The context is missing, obviously, as it only shows three of the five planned fight scenes and is only able to explain the basic plot through a text intro, but it’s well put together all the same. The Limited Edition UHD/Blu-ray Collection includes brand new 4K restorations of The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, The Way of the Dragon and Game of Death and a brand new 2K restoration of Game of Death II.