An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn

I suppose on some level I should have known better. An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn is a mockumentary about a terrible film. The risk that it was itself a terrible film should have been apparent, especially after I’d watched the horrendous Not Another Not Another Movie, which has a similar root premise and format. And its reception on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes certainly wasn’t setting the world on fire. But I thought it might still be worth watching. After all, it could simply have been too avant garde for most people; hey, it’s possible, and it’s certainly not a mainstream premise, after all. And it starred Eric Idle, who I’ve usually liked in films. And unlike Not Another Not Another Movie it wasn’t lying about its stars; it really does star Eric Idle in the title role as Alan Smithee. The potential was there. But, alas, it seems that movies about bad movies are themselves bad movies.

The Legend of Drunken Master

I watched the original Drunken Master a little over a year ago, and found it reasonably amusing, if not a film that actually sticks with me all that much. So when I had the opportunity to watch Jackie Chan reprise his role as Wong Fei-Hung in 1994′s The Legend of the Drunken Master (originally released in Hong Kong as Drunken Master II), I thought I would see what impact the actor’s increased experience had.

The film was directed primarily by Chia-Liang Liu, but IMDb indicates that Chan himself took over in the end, due to conflicts with the director. Among these conflicts was a desire on the part of the director that Chan use the Huen-Gar style of fighting instead of drunken boxing, which puts me firmly in Chan’s camp on this and makes me wonder precisely what movie Chia-Liang Liu thought he was making.