A Karate Kid for Girls. Oh, but definitely for Mens.

Miyagi helps a troubled teen by teaching her karate – she’s got two humungous assets that Daniel-san could never have: a pet hawk, and acting talent. Oh, and for all you Men of Culture – she’s got those too.

Mr. Miyagi (Noriyuki “Pat” Morita) travels to Boston for the funeral of a war buddy. Consoling the widow, Miyagi meets her granddaughter Julie Pierce (Hilary Swank), who tells us via clunky exposition that both her parents are dead (Hollywood shorthand for “troubled teen”); thus, Julie is rebellious, an outcast at school, and has no friends. She’s basically just a trope with tits.

Julie takes care of a hawk with a broken wing that she is hiding on the school roof in a pigeon cage. Notwithstanding the dumb plot point of keeping the hawk where anyone who walks up to the roof will find it, the hawk’s presence is central to many plot points: it keeps her teenage angst high by clashing her with security; while feeding it, Julie encounters the school bullies, led by Michael Cavalieri as Ned (bullies? More like rapists), and gets suspended from school (yeh, I’m also wondering how the rapists became the victims); it enables her to meet the Cute Boy, who tails her to the cage (Chris Conrad as Eric); Julie asking Eric to feed the hawk while she is suspended brings them closer, and her badgering him not to tell anyone about it is an excuse to land her in his musclecar (“I’m not getting out of this car until you tell me whether you told about the hawk!” – well, that’s one way to get your itch scratched, hon). And of course, the hawk is a metaphor for Julie herself: damaged when we meet her, entrapped in a cage, until she doesn’t realize she is healed enough to fly…

By describing this hawk element driving the story, you might believe writer Mark Lee (no relation to Australia’s Mark Lee, who starred alongside Mel Gibson in GALLIPOLI) has improved on Robert Mark Kamen’s juvenile handling of these karate kids. You’d be wrong. Lee’s writing is as dull thud as all of Kamen’s entries, with dialogue for Swank that makes her sound as weaselly as Ralph Macchio. Sure, this is Swank pre-Oscars, and arguably her breakout role, and we do actually see many instances of her next-level acting prowess compared to Macchio, and I understand that Julie has to disbelieve Miyagi’s methods, so that she can arc to a fully-balanced karate kid, but the many times she is called upon to whine and babble like Daniel-san is obnoxious – it’s like Lee is trying to emulate the worst elements of Kamen’s scripts. And succeeding.

Another element lifted from Kamen’s childish ethos is the extremity of the villains. These are not world conquerors or even bank robbers, they are school bullies, led by their phys-ed teacher, Dugan (Michael Ironside, out-cheesing any Bond Villain), yet they commit more felonies in any given scene than any professional criminal, like constantly trying to rape Julie. With the full encouragement of Dugan! They’re not playfully slapping her books out of her hand or pulling her hair – Ned is grabbing her and promising that he’s going to have forced sex with her and that she’ll like it! And Dugan has the depth of a cardboard gunnery sergeant and the delivery of a Tourette’s spastic, barking the most insane murderous orders at his troupe of incel douchebags (which includes a very young Walton Goggins).

When Miyagi calmly asks Dugan where he can pick up Julie – basically, a parent asking a teacher where to find their child – Dugan, needlessly antagonistic, angrily shouts at Miyagi to get his trespassing ass off school grounds. Is this how Mark Lee thinks humans talk to each other?

Not only the school bullies – everyone wants to rape Julie! Miyagi and Julie walk into a diner and all the rednecks immediately surround her, sniffing fecund meat, and it takes Miyagi beating them down to quell their erections.

The contradiction here is that the filmmakers acknowledge Julie is so delicious that men can’t control their lust around her – yet no one notices her at school except the rapist bullies. No female friends, no male Just Friends, no fat hangers-on trying to break off a piece of her pheromones…

Men always be looking at my… achievements.

Gotta admit though, Hilary Swank has a body that would make a Real Doll jealous, although, not blessed with a classically attractive face – her nose like a boxer’s, chin masculine, lips way too Jagger – in theory, it should be a “butterface” (as in “great body, but-er-face…”), and yet, put it all in context, and it’s something that might launch a thousand ships from ancient Troy.

And for training, Miyagi takes this barely legal wet dream – to a MONASTERY. Yup, that’s what these celibate monks want to see: Julie’s crop top stretched achingly across her mounds of justice, jumping off rocks with a pearbottom as ripe as a baboon in estrus. Is Miyagi torturing the monks or rewarding them?

Julie tries to kill a cockroach at the monk’s dinner table, and all the monks pout. Miyagi tells her nothing within the monastery walls is killed (except the PLANTS, I guess, for you vegetarian assholes). “Respect all living things” (again, except the LIVING PLANTS that you compartmentalize are not worthy of respect). Julie is meant to be displaying her naivete in killing the cockroach, but the monks are displaying their provincial ignorance in adherence to their religion, reincarnation, and hypocrisy on what constitutes living things.

Directed by Christopher Cain (YOUNG GUNS) like a TV sitcom, the climax comes and goes senselessly, without any orchestra swell and hardly enough action to pay off the karate arc. After a prom, where the bullies bungee from the rafters (Reason? No reason!), they commit more felonies against Eric and Julie (I think because of Julie’s breast-hugging prom dress), until Julie beats down Ned (after changing into her crop top for maximum male gaze), and then Miyagi beats down Dugan, like a slow-motion Jackie Chan movie. Then the credits roll, and I think I might’ve woken up.

The movie’s message: to win karate, have hawk. Or D-cups, I dunno, I was too busy looking at Miyagi’s fine ass.

END

A Spock Chop to the Stupid Nerve.

THE KARATE KID PART III finds Daniel LaRusso conned into competing in a karate tournament, with a savage opponent who is no match for Daniel’s stunning mediocrity.

Daniel-san (Ralph Macchio) and Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita) return to LA from Japan, and proceed with their boring life in Reseda, Miyagi convincing Daniel not to participate in any more karate tournaments. That’s what the teens of 1989 came to see: an old guy and his ambiguously-fey student cleaning out a warehouse to sell bonsai trees…

Movie opens with flashbacks from the first two KARATE KID films, focusing on sensei Kreese (Martin Kove), who then appears in this film’s prelude, broke and defeated, visiting his rich friend Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith, actually trained in Tae Kwon Do, Kenpo and kickboxing), to hand over ownership of his Cobra Kai dojo. Instead, to repay Kreese for saving his butt in Viet Nam “more times than I can count,” Silver lets Kreese keep the dojo, sends him on an all-expenses trip to Tahiti, and plots revenge on the men who broke his bro’s spirit – Miyagi and Daniel.

The one-line plot-fixes come at breakneck pace in the first few minutes: Daniel’s mother is once again written out of the story by “taking care of Uncle Louie” in Somewhere Else USA, asking Miyagi to room her son; no talk of money to feed the growing boy (who is actually 28, still looking 14); Daniel’s love interest from the last film, Kumiko, is going on a dance tour instead of following him to LA. Considering she was his “Glory Of Love” chick, I suspect that Daniel taking her loss with such equanimity is less about him being happy about her following her destiny, and more about Macchio not possessing the acting muscles to portray the correct distraught emotion.

Miyagi is broke, so Daniel uses the money they won in Okinawa to lease a property for a bonsai store, “with enough left over for renovations” – jesus christ! How much did they win?! Wasn’t it just about $1200? Oh, I forget, this is the 80s, when rent and renovations came to about $4.60.

Daniel Meets Cute the literal girl-next-door (Robyn Lively as Jessica), and she immediately Friend Zones him, saying she has a boyfriend out-of-state, yet goes out with Daniel dancing, jogging, rock climbing – everything but fucking. She’s no Elisabeth Shue. And she’s no actor either. Her only reason for being here is to give Daniel something to talk to, so that he’s not expositing info to himself like a mental patient. And talk he does. (Bad decision giving the most lines to the guy who can’t act.) This gimp just won’t shut up, babbling constantly to Miyagi, to Jessica, to anyone who’ll listen to his monotone whine. No wonder everyone who meets him wants to beat the shit out of him.

But I really wonder why the filmmakers (once again, writer Robert Mark Kamen, and director John G. Avildsen) avoid giving Daniel a mature love interest. Jessica disappears before the finale (her kitty aching for some real man-love, which she was never gonna find around dork Daniel), so in the climactic orchestra swell after Daniel invariably wins the stupid karate tournament, there’s no one whose arms he can run into, except Miyagi’s, and he yells and carries on uncomfortably around the embarrassed Miyagi until the freeze frame.

Terry Silver, though an imposing 6’5” with formidable skills and an “I’m-an-asshole” ponytail, presents himself as a dutiful karate student to Miyagi and Daniel, playing a long con, insinuating himself into their confidence by apologizing on behalf of Kreese, whom he reports as “dead.” While unbeknownst to Miyagi and Daniel, Silver has simultaneously employed karate badboy, Mike Barnes (Sean Kanan) and his idiotboy sidekick Snake (director’s son, Jonathan Avildsen, who so wants to be Sean Astin – aim high, bro!) to terrorize Daniel into competing in the tournament. The screenwriting is so dumbfuck at this point, regarding the rules of the comp and an application that Daniel refuses to sign, that it’s best to just watch the rest of the movie on drugs.

Daniel and Jessica rappel down a seaside cliff to get a bonsai – why? Because apparently, it’s worth $10,000 and “could set Miyagi up for life”… $10,000 can set you up for life? Oh, I forgot – it’s the 80s. But this unnecessary little side quest was simply to get Daniel in a life-threatening situation where Barnes could blackmail him to sign the application, which he does. Whatever drugs you’re using to watch the rest of this movie, the ridiculous plotting tells us the screenwriter is on better shit.

Since Miyagi made it clear he turned his back on competitive karate, Daniel is driven into the tutelage of Silver, who puts Daniel through pain, psychologically and physically. The only flaw in Silver’s plan was banking on Miyagi refusing to train Daniel. If Miyagi saw through the ruse and started training Daniel, none of Silver’s pain would’ve transpired. The writers made Miyagi dumb for just this one plot point. (Whereas the writers themselves are actually dumb throughout the whole screenplay.)

Barnes and Snake attack Daniel many times, and for a guy who blabs so much, Daniel never says a word to Miyagi about the terrorist attacks – until Silver, Kreese and Barnes all jump Daniel in a dojo, laughing like cartoon hyenas, whereupon Miyagi’s stuntman kicks all their asses. After being beaten, THEY laugh at Miyagi like THEY won! And when Miyagi tells Daniel he will now train him to combat these hyenas, they laugh even more – What is the matter with you morons? The guy whose stuntman just kicked your asses is going to train his boy to fight your overacting jackass. If that doesn’t make you break out in a cold sweat, you need to stop with the drugs that are making you laugh like that.

If BACK TO THE FUTURE, THE GODFATHER and THE DARK KNIGHT are some of the best trilogies ever committed to film, then surely THE KARATE KID trilogy is one of the worst ever vomited onto celluloid. The 2018 resurrection of these characters in the excellent COBRA KAI series has garnered some retrospective love for the original films, but that doesn’t change these scripts that repeat themselves, meander and make no sense, or the dialogue that a 10-year-old might think is sophisticated, or the cartoon villains, one-dimensional heroes, and a lead actor that brings it all crashing down with his utter lack of acting ability!

The message is clear: the best way to win a karate tournament is to be Friend Zoned.

END

When Acting Happen, No Be There…

The doofus and his master travel to Japan, where they will encounter another karate master who wants them dead, another karate student who wants to maim Doofus, and another girl who falls for the willowy Doofus even through his atrocious acting, in the continuing adventures of THE KARATE KID PART II.

Back in the mid-80s, sequels aren’t what they are in the 2020s – filmmakers never went into every single project looking to create a franchise. KARATE KID grossing over $100 million and becoming one of the biggest sleeper hits of 1984 made a sequel viable, but no actors from the original film were locked into multi-picture deals, so though young Daniel (Ralph Macchio) and Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita) return for PART II, no one else from the first film is here, and movie has to hash its way through excuses as to why Ali-With-An-I (Elizabeth Shue) and Daniel’s mum are no longer onscreen.

It’s a pity, because Kreese (Martin Kove) and Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka), the villains from the previous film, were available, and open this film with a coda to the first film, showing us what happened directly after Daniel won the All-Valley Karate Tournament with his stupid and illegal crane kick to Johnny’s face – Johnny is attacked by Kreese for losing, and then Kreese is humiliated by Miyagi. (In retrospect, it would have been great to have had Johnny in another KARATE KID film, as only decades hence would we realize what a great actor Zabka is; I guess it needed the arc of time to make his hero’s journey so compelling in 2018’s COBRA KAI SEASON ONE. Also, the filmmakers redeemed him at the end of KK, so they probably felt there was nowhere to go with that character.)

The same crew return for the sequel: screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen, director John G. Avildsen (who did ROCKY), and music by Bill Conti (also ROCKY). But this ain’t ROCKY. More like DOOFY. With characters copied-and-pasted from the previous film. Except now they’re JAPANESE…

Pitch meeting: “Daniel and Miyagi go to Japan!” Thus the filmmakers had to brainstorm the biggest dumbest plot point of all: how to get a poverty-line kid a plane ticket to Okinawa, and why. Out of nowhere, they manufacture Miyagi’s father on his deathbed in Japan, which would yield a great B-story, as Miyagi’s father also mentored Miyagi’s best friend-turned-rival, both seeking the love of the same woman. (It’s weird imagining the elderly Miyagi having a father, but remember it was only the 1980s.) Now the writers have to scrape their minds for how and why to place doofus Daniel in this infinitely more compelling story.

Out of their arses, they pull Daniel’s dialogue, “I used my college fund” – you have a college fund? That you just stole to buy a ticket to Japan for no reason at all? “I want to be there for you, Mr. Miyagi, the way you’re always there for me!”… those million monkeys typing Shakespeare couldn’t come up with a more harebrained storyline.

In Japan, we meet Miyagi’s nemesis, Sato (Danny Kamekona), and the girl they both loved, Yukie (Nobu McCarthy, THE GEISHA BOY). Their tangled past relationship drives Sato to vow Miyagi’s death at his hands, no matter that their sensei – Miyagi’s dying father – wishes them to reconcile. This B-story would have singlehandedly saved the movie from the cringe antics and acting of beanstem Macchio – if only the filmmakers respected the Japanese culture and allowed them to communicate in their native tongue. Instead, all the Japanese characters speak to each other IN BROKEN ENGLISH! Even when two Japanese characters are alone in intimate moments (Yukie and Miyagi) they’re both speaking in broken English! I’d like a little Western hubris to go with my Hiroshima please.

With the all-new characters, the filmmakers desperately want US to experience everything as “new” again for Daniel – new love Kumiko (Tamlyn Tomita), new nemesis Chozen (Yuji Okumoto), who is Sato’s student – they’re trying to sell us the same old emotions in a new packaging. It might have worked – if Macchio had an ounce of acting talent. Every scene with Daniel and Kumiko is a cringe-flirt on their way to a non-chemistry relationship (with Peter Cetera’s Glory Of Love clouding the soundtrack); every scene with antagonist Chozen is a laughable lopsided display of Chozen chewing villain scenery and Daniel wondering if acting is a vocation he should be pursuing. Still, Macchio is perfect casting: a born victim – one look at that rail-thin cringey milksop and you wanna beat him to a pulp and take his lunch money.

Morita imbues his Miyagi with solemnity and humor, always ready with a wise aphorism (“Best way to avoid punch, no be there”) or a punchline (“Never been attacked by tree”). He’s also a candidate for singlehandedly saving the film, while alongside a numbnuts who insists on bringing it down to doofus level. And Miyagi gets to kick some serious ass (unfortunately, not Daniel’s, but some bullies). It’s like Yoda in ATTACK OF THE CLONES – suddenly seeing this diminutive, quiet man rupture spleens.

And is that a young BD Wong? Giving Kumiko and Daniel invitations to a sock-hop and a dino DNA mixer to follow…

The moving plight of Miyagi’s lost love who never married, and the touching B-story payoff of Miyagi saving Sato’s life by performing a superhuman feat to prove his superiority, is all subsumed under the casual racism of Broken English.

The actual climax is a half-baked bullshido skirmish between Daniel and Chozen, ramping the stakes up by having Chozen threatening to kill Kumiko if Daniel doesn’t fight him. As Miyagi says, “This not tournament. This real.” Which makes us care even less – because if Macchio is so emotionally removed due to his lack of acting prowess, why should WE go there in our heads and hearts? Daniel tries the stupid crane move, which Chozen easily blocks, sending Daniel into a tizzy of indecision and getting his ass kicked (I like this part of the film), until he remembers the new patented “swiveling drum” move – remembers it because, for some reason, everyone in the venue has one of those little drums and starts spinning it.

One of the reasons we can’t relate to Daniel: whenever he gets a new move, he tries it once or twice, and when he employs it for real, he’s a tenth-dan black belt at the move – no physical striving, no emotional struggle – which is strange, considering director Avildsen is renowned for creating one of the first “training montages” with ROCKY, to illustrate a hero’s journey in compressed time. Not so here, where everything comes to Daniel breezily whenever he needs to access it, like magic who cares fuck you.

The lesson being, the key to good karate is: Speak Engrish in Japanese Accent.

END

Midway between “average” and “annoying crap.”

MIDWAY opens with a title card: “This is the way it was. The story of the battle that was the turning point of the war in the Pacific. Told wherever possible with actual film shot in combat. It exemplifies the combination of planning, courage, error and pure chance by which great events are often decided.”

Translation: “This is the way jingoistic Americans perceived the battle that was the turning point of the war in the Pacific; so parochially that even the Japanese speak in swank American accents (and the ones whose accents were too… uh, “foreign,” were insultingly dubbed). Told wherever possible with actual film shot in combat because we were too cheap to create our own battle scenes, and too lazy to even match the models of the planes in combat footage with the same models we used in establishing shots. It exemplifies the combination of Fonda, Mitchum, Coburn and pure Heston by which great events are often decided.”

Henry Fonda narrated a 1942 documentary short called THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY. In this overwrought movie that often reads like a documentary, white-haired Fonda plays the commanding Admiral Nimitz behind the American forces at Midway. Robert Wagner is his young, smartly-combed aide. James Coburn cameos as a captain who tries to advise fogey Fonda and fails. Hal Holbrook is a kind of hippie intelligence officer who decodes the Japanese orders to attack Midway. (“Hippie” in those days meant wearing a bathrobe over your uniform and sipping tea arrogantly.) Charlton Heston is a captain, whose military training to be stoic, clinical and emotionless obviously didn’t affect his overacting; Robert Mitchum, who plays a bedridden admiral with itchy skin, also failed those same classes. Glenn Ford takes command of Mitchum’s aircraft carrier and they share a buddy-buddy scene in the hospital that I’m sure opened a new door for gay porno setups: “I wanna thank you for recommending me to take your task force to sea. Now I have a question for you: Did that itch go to your head?” Cue wocka-chicka music, as we insert new additional dialogue for Mitchum: “Well, why don’t you come over here and see for yourself, sailor!” or “Well, would you like to scratch it?” or “My task force is itching to be taken to sea, captain”…

Midway Island, as its name suggests, was a point midway between good roles for all these actors…

In June 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor’s “surprise” attack (Dec 1941), the Japanese set their sights on the strategic atoll of Midway, smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, trying to stage another attack which would really be a surprise. The surprise is that in this supposed action film, much of it is spent by the Americans and Japanese alike standing around map tables conjecturing over how many ships are where and how many planes can go attack them.

The same Japanese admiral who presided over Pearl Harbor’s attack leads Midway’s attack – Isoroku Yamamoto, played by the regal Toshiro Mifune, with a constant puss on his face. I don’t blame him. Not only was he set in his ways, having to sift through advice from his younger, more cautious officers who felt the Japanese forces were stretched too thin, but the mindless filmmakers dubbed his voice with Paul Frees, a guy famous for doing cartoon characters – so Kurosawa’s warhorse and one of the greatest living Japanese actors sounds like Boris Badenov.

Heston’s son (Edward Albert, son of GREEN ACRES Eddie) is a whipped prettyboy with a Japanese love interest (Christina Kokubo). So soon after Pearl Harbor, that sits about as well as a white woman announcing on September 12, 2001, that she is marrying a nice Arab man. This lachrymose love story is inserted sideways into the meat of MIDWAY and is more distracting than Pat Morita‘s American accent. Not only that, Kokubo is one of the worst actors in history, let alone in this movie. I especially like her line-read: “Dammit, I’m an American!”

High marks must go to the film for its dialogue-driven focus on the political and tactical struggles between all the belligerent brains on either side of the skirmish – and there are some interesting insights into the logistics of war, as when the low-on-fuel Japanese planes are returning to their carrier and the Admiral must make the decision on whether to let them land or sacrifice them to the sea to allow another squadron to immediately launch an attack on an American carrier – but when MIDWAY reverts to action, as moviegoers we expect to see something that will make our hot dogs fly into the bra of the lady next to us, not stock footage badly married to bad acting and editing.

Apparently, much of the combat footage is ripped from TORA! TORA! TORA! And they expect us to squint real hard when they’re trying to match their shots of planes in formation or on studio sets (with constant “clouds” drifting by) with the grainy action shots of planes in real war. Example: the Brits attack in planes that look like Hellcats; you don’t need to know the plane model, just observe their squared wing shape. When one of these Hellcats is shot down, we clearly see the characteristic rounded wings of a Spitfire going down. Later we see an American square-winged fighter squadron – suddenly in the midst of battle we see a gull-winged Corsair fighter– I mean, what the–? Do they even care?

Then there’s the problem of the Japanese fighter planes, the Zeroes. Stock footage of Zeroes going down must be rare because once again a lot of Spitfires take the fall for these Zeroes. Let’s hope no one notices. Especially not those military or naval viewers – hell! if they’re watching this movie at all, it means they’re back from the war and they’ve got PTSD anyway!

Amidst the Hellcats and Spitfires at Midway Island – suddenly a Flying Fortress lands on one wing-wheel. It’s an intense piece of action; it’s gritty, it’s heroic, it’s exciting. And it’s from TORA! TORA! TORA!. It has no connection to anything, no characters are affected by it, no plot line is involved. It’s just there. No context.

Director Jack Smight has a TV movie on his hands that he believes will be fleshed out by his “movie stars,” again underestimating the intelligence of his audience by thinking he could sell it as a feature film simply because Fonda has strode across the screen that way in so many classics and Chuck Heston is making those big screen constipation faces.

Funniest moment: Hero Chuck takes a plane out to go bomb the last Japanese carrier. Dabney Coleman is his backseat second. Their plane gets shot up in the process. Heston tries to land with the crippled plane onboard his friend Glenn Ford’s carrier, but crashes. During his “thrilling” approach, we never see Dabney’s reaction; he has just been excised from the movie while sitting in the seat behind Heston! It’s just closeups of Chuck battling the plane during a bout of constipation. And when the plane explodes on impact, no one seems to care that Dabney just fried as well. Now here’s the funniest moment: Upon seeing the fiery death of his friend, the look on Glenn Ford’s face is like he just ate some cheesecake too fast and needs to burp.

Coincidentally, after you watch MIDWAY, you’ll have that same look on your face.

END

Wax On, Whacks Off.

A bean stem moves to a new school in Los Angeles and proceeds to take regular beatings from the school bullies for sniffing around the head bully’s ex-girl. He takes karate lessons from that guy from HAPPY DAYS – karate not for philosophy or exercise or discipline but to beat up the bullies. Two wrongs make a right, kids. And here come de orchestra swell…

THE KARATE KID is yet another retelling of ROCKY. With a hero not so much Italian Stallion as Italian Ferret.

Bean stem is Daniel (Ralph Macchio, who can’t stop looking like Cha Chi), his Japanese karate mentor is Mr. Miyagi (Noriyuki “Pat” Morita aka Arnold from HAPPY DAYS). Daniel’s puppy love is Ali (lovely girl-next-door Elisabeth Shue, attired in sensual schoolgirl outfits most of the time (yum!), and displaying her penchant for pining after losers, which would lead directly to her hooker-falling-for-alcoholic Nic Cage in LEAVING LAS VEGAS, 1995).

Macchio shows us that he is almost as bad an actor as the extras and B-cast, and I can imagine Catholic priests lining up in droves to touch that smooth girl-face of his. Clint Eastwood has been known to complain that his son Kyle should’ve gotten the Karate Kid role over “that pussy Ralph Macchio,” but I disagree. Kyle Eastwood could never have pulled off the effeminate dorkmeisterism of Macchio – and for that, Clint should be eternally thankful.

Tae Kwon Poff

So Miyagi sets “Daniel-san” on a regimen of painting his fence (“up a-down, up a-down”) cleaning his cars (“wax on, right hand – wax off, left hand”), painting his house (“left a-right, left a-right”) and sanding his deck (“sand a-left, sand a-right”).When Miyagi eventually demonstrates to Daniel the practicality of all that waxing on and painting left and sanding right, we realize how amazing his training methods are – if Daniel were ever attacked by a Handyman. Or an opponent willing to hold all his punches in mid-air and wait for Daniel to block them. It makes no difference anyway, since Miyagi’s demonstration attack-punches do not actually extend to Daniel’s body, stopping about a foot in front of him. Because karate is all about honor – all you have to do is find an opponent honorable enough not to actually hit you.

The school bullies are led by Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) and all happen to be blond, Aryan jocks who study karate at the extremist Cobra Dojo (run by Martin Kove), whose peaceful slogan is STRIKE FIRST. STRIKE HARD. NO MERCY. You know, just like modern-day evangelical Christians.

Directed by John G. Avildsen (no coincidence he also directed ROCKY), with a soundtrack that is arguably the worst disco music of 1984, including You’re The Best by Joe Esposito), THE KARATE KID has been called “the sweetest surprise of 1984.” It’s a surprise all right: that people still believe the maddening fallacy that karate will help you in actual street situations. This very fallacy is proven by the movie itself: in the climactic karate competition showdown, the Cobra Dojo cheat – one of them is instructed to break Daniel’s leg, which he does quite easily – but if karate was such an effective defensive tool, shouldn’t Daniel have been able to block that actual strike?

The bully that broke Daniel’s leg is disqualified (apparently, if you really prove that karate has any dangerous utility, they penalize you for it) and Daniel then has to perform his last fight against Johnny Lawrence on the broken leg (which raises all sorts of health and safety questions about the Karate Organization running this show).

And Daniel adopts the now infamous crane posture and kicks the bully in the face, winning the competition. Which raises another question: When Daniel actually kicks Johnny – why isn’t he also disqualified for making lethal contact? We’d probably find out if the orchestra swell wasn’t so loud and embarrassing.

But let us not forget the lesson of the film: the key to good karate is carpentry.

END