28. Enter the Dragon by Mike Roote

This was another neat gift from my friend who can't stop going to the collectible store.  It's a pretty cool little collectible it turns out and I was proud to share it on twitter when somebody else had a different version.  I wasn't too keen to actually read it, though.  Enter the Dragon is one of my all-time favourite movies.  My mom took me and my friend Mike Tanaka to see it a special double bill with The Big Brawl at the Woodgrove theatre .  We were totally into martial arts and used to practice our moves on his trampoline.  We actually had to wait about a half-hour between the two movies while they drove the reels for Enter the Dragon over from Parksville where they had been screening it earlier.  It was a truly memorable cinematic experience and I was totally into Bruce Lee for years (still am).  I had an awesome poster in my bedroom of him with the 3 cuts across his stomach from Han's bladed hand.  Enter the Dragon holds up today on so many levels. It's so tragic that Bruce Lee died before it was released because it was the success he had dreamed of and can be considered probably the most important and influential martials arts movie for western action cinema.  

So anyhow, I wasn't too keen to read a movie adaptation, until I stumbled across this article about the author, who is actually a woman named Leonore Fletcher who wrote the book from the screenplay while on speed over a weekend.  She actually had quite a successful career doing movie tie-ins which were big business back in the day (this one was a bestseller). It's really worth reading the article.  I thought I should read the book as well.

It's a fast read and is basically a scene by scene copy of the movie.  There are some changes (Bolo is Turkish and the bully on the boat is Korean and no fight in the hall of mirrors, among others) and a little bit of suggested backstory thrown in, but honestly it lacked depth which I think would have made it much richer.  I mean why not throw in some more backstory for Lee and the connection between the Brits and the Shaolin temple in past espionage work?  It kind of felt like I was reading the movie for the most part (and some of the dialogue, especially that of Williams and Han is quite good on the page too) so not all that enjoyable.  But I guess pre-VCR this was all most fans could hope for to be reminded of the movie.

There was one big difference that was quite interesting.  In the fight scene between Han and Oharra, which is one of the greatest moments in cinema history on the screen, they just have a long fight and then Oharra pulls a blade from the crowd.  Lee forces him to stab himself with it.  The movie is very different, does an excellent and creative job of demonstrating both Lee's superiority and his fury.  I wonder if that choreography came from Bruce Lee himself?   It's also way more intense and dramatic.  Jesus this all makes me want to watch the movie again.

RIP Bruce Lee.