I think that Jackie Chan movies are better than Bruce Lee movies, but IRL, Bruce Lee would win a fight.[/quote
Sorry about professing martial arts nerddom, but....no....way...
Bruce Lee is the most over-hyped martial artist of all time. It just happened that he was the 1st kung fu practitioner to be discovered by the west, and so everyone thinks he is the greatest ever. Not to say that he wasn't good - he had a very impressive run of challenge fights, and he was fantastic at taking styles from other cultures and merging them into his own. It's really a misconception that he was called a 'kung fu' fighter - he liked to still refer to his style as kung fu due to his Chinese origins, but by his peak his kicking was a combination of 2/3 french savate and 1/3 taekwondo, his handwork was massively influenced by boxing (about halfway between boxing and wing chung) and as he often said his footwork was from western fencing rather than any asian martial art. Now that is certainly impressive, but....:
- he never fought any of the best kung fu fighters of his time: none of the Chow Le Fat guys, none of the Yit Man school - most of the guys he fought were chumps. Similarly he never fought any of the great boxers from his era (the Mohammed Ali rumour is crap - has been confirmed as such by Bruce Lee's surviving friends, and there is no way that Ali would keep quiet about a fight like that. I'd have more faith in the rumour that one of the extras on Enter the Dragon (forget his name - one of those many 'Hung' someones, was a Hung Gar practitioner, semi-famous in his own right) pounded Bruce Lee's head to the ground during a social sparring match after filming;
- he never did the training of Jackie Chan. Not knocking Bruce Lee's workload - if you read his diary you'll see that he was always struggling to fit all his training in the day (trying to constantly work at making things more efficient so he could fit more training in), but he was never part of Yit Man's inner training circle. Bruce learnt commercial kung fu training, which at that time was ever bid as rigid and unreaslistic as Bruce Lee said when he broke away to form his own style. This was because Bruce Lee's father was German and Yit Man was a racist b***** who wouldn't teach anyone properly unless they were full-blood Chinese.
- even out of the 'movie-star' guys he simply wasn't the best of his era. Compare him to the hung-kong films of the era with Gordon Lao and Chi Chi Ling. Those guys were better then and are absolutely amazing now that they're in their 70s (see Gordon Lao in Kill Bill for him as an old man still moving like crazy, Drunken Master 2 in his middle age, or about 50 different hong kong films when he was younger, eg 36th Chamber, Shaolin Temple etc, mostly Shaw Brothers stuff but some are good). Gordon Lao was the guy who the Chinese government first approached when they wanted someone to reintroduce kung fu to china (after it was almost wiped out during the cultural revolution) - he got major cred for telling them to take their sack of money and piss off, but it was also an indication that the guy was one of the best of that era. I'd rate 36th Chamber over Enter the Dragon any day. Chi Chi Ling has never looked that great in movies, but kind of Wing Lam his best stuff is on his purely kung fu demonstration videos, there's lots around and - unlike Wing Lam - he's a rather humble guy who even responds to emails asking about videos etc.
- In his last 12 months of life he had a MAJOR epiphany, when he finally realised that he wasn't as good as he thought he was, and that he wasn't as good as the best of the Yit Man school. Lee BEGGED Yit Man to take him back as a student, and at first Yit Man told him to come back when he was humble. One of the great tragedies of Lee's death was that shortly before he died he had finally convinced Yit Man that he had regained his humility and Yit Man had allowed him to rejoin the school as an ordinary student.
But more importantly, Jackie Chan is the most impressive of any martial artist to go on video in the past 50 years. Don't be fooled by the guy's humility - he'll talk up how much better Bruce Lee was and how he's just an opera school graduate, but don't listen to that. The opera schools aren't like western opera schools - in those days they were orphanages that you went when you're about 5 to be beaten and tortured into becoming brilliant martial artists and performers. They were actually the last truly brilliant place to learn kung fu the 'hard' way: by training ridiculous hours from childhood and being beaten until you get it right - no modern school can compare to that. That's why Chan did stuff which the newer guys simply have no chance of doing - the 3 story fall of course is the most famous, but he was also the last guy to film stuff 'old-school hong kong' style where to include a stunt in the film it has to be one you can actually DO - you know, rope tricks are for jumping only, and you only get 2 or 3 takes if you stuff up. Onlike Ong Bak where every stunt was rehearsed so much that my grandma could have done it. Seriously, you get anyone with real ring-fighting experience in kung fu to watch Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee, and Jackie Chan is the most skilled.
Not to mention that many people are rightly of the suspicion that Bruce Lee would have faded like western fighters. In taking up boxing etc as his training and a large part of his style he also had the increasing body-damage that such training gives, rather than the ability to train til 70+ that most decent kung fu fighters can do. A lot of people say that indirectly, that's what killed him (forget that crap about kung fu traditionalists poisoning him for revealing kung fu mysteries - he only knew southern styles, which have never been afraid to show off their stuff, even traditionally they did shows for entertaiment, its the northern styles who were secretive - and he was making up his own style anyway). Anyway, I'm not saying Lee was crap - I'll save that for pre-2000 Jet Li (Jet 'stuntdouble' Lee) - I've read most of his work and a lot of what he says is right. But he wasn't the best of his time, and he's certainly not the best of the 20th century.
