Similar to his initial defense of the scene, Tarantino doubled down on his point that Bruce lost to Cliff in a hand-to-hand combat fight. This style of fighting is Cliff's speciality. As Tarantino explained, "If Cliff fought Bruce Lee at a Madison Square Garden martial arts tournament, he would not stand a chance. But as a killer who has killed men before in a jungle, he would kill Bruce Lee. He'd fucking kill him! Bruce Lee is not a killer. He's actually facing a guy who could kill him, it's a different story. It's in the book, when Bruce realizes Cliff is taking a military combat stance, he realizes Cliff is a killer."
Granted, I say this as a practitioner of Jeet Kune Do, the martial art that Bruce created, but what bullshit! My teacher was a Navy Seal and we trained with plenty of others from the Seal teams and other Special Ops forces, such as Rangers. Most of them had killed people but the expert students, whether military or not, could still defeat the untrained Special Forces guys the vast majority of the time. They were incredibly tough and very athletic but the idea that people can fight just because they went to war isn't true. And what the fuck is a "military combat stance?" Special forces who served in Vietnam generally claimed that their hand-to-hand training was haphazard and inadequate back then and eventually the US adopted a great many elements from (you guessed it) JKD in order to make their soldiers better prepared.
Bruce Lee wasn't just a point or tournament fighter, the reason he developed JKD was to make something that rid itself of all the academy fluffery and worked in real life. He was relatively small, but multiple people have said he was tough as hell. Bringing up Gene Labell as a criticism against Bruce is a low blow, especially since Gene has written articles such as "Bruce Lee was the Best Martial Artist of His Time," in which he talks about how impressed he was with Bruce's ability to accept and incorporate other fighting forms into his own.
I liked the movie well enough, wasn't a fan of the scene but QT is being ridiculously obnoxious about justified criticism. Just because you read some things about Bruce doesn't mean you need to make him out to be an asshole and practically "show him up" from the grave.
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