#013 - jiu jitsu (2020)
hello and welcome to my weblog. last night i watched jiu jitsu (2020)
currently, if i type “nicholas cage” into the search bar in netflix, i get twenty or so results, mostly action movies, almost none of which star nicholas cage. he appears to actually be in only one movie currently on netflix: jiu jitsu (2020). while i understand on a certain level that netflix has been focusing on producing their own original material as it becomes less cost-competitive for them to license content from other studios, i am willfully choosing to believe that nic cage’s almost total absence from the platform is actually the result of some weird beef reed hastings has with him.
not long into the film, there is a long fight sequence which goes for minutes without cuts and it seems like the steadicam operator is running right behind the fight’s protagonist, going so far as doing parkour-like movements too. the shot is kept tight and because the people the fight’s protagonist is beating up are wearing masks or neck gators, the film is able to have the same handful of stunt performers jump into frame and get jiu jitsu performed on them. it kinda reminded me of oldboy and i thought it was very impressive but later in the sequence it became confusing as the camera apparently became the point of view of another character. this character would be on screen, in view, and then fall behind the camera. suddenly, without the camera cutting, arms and legs would start swinging and the camera was now fighting. this continues for a couple minutes when, again without any cut, the character reappears in front of the camera and the camera itself stops fighting. i had to rewatch the scene to try to understand what was happening. this does not happen again during any of the later fight scenes.
in this movie, nic cage is an angry man living in a hole in the ground. he tells the main character, who has amnesia, that he is him from the future. he goes on to say that jiu jitsu was a gift from aliens. he says that his hobby is making newspaper hats, which he says is an art that demands great skill, and then grabs one from a shelf and puts it on as proof. this entire conversation happens during a fight scene. it is unclear why they are fighting. in a subsequent scene, nic cage explains that an alien comes to earth every six years to spar with the nine best jiu jitsu practitioners on earth and if all nine do not spar with this alien, the alien will kill all life on earth. an hour of alien fights follows, culminating in the main character depositing two hand grenades in the chest cavity of the alien and then jump-kicking the alien into a wormhole.