as much as i love movies about teenagers i love movies about superheroes. i haven’t figured out exactly what the connection is between the two, but there’s definitely something similar about characters that experience everything in extreme.
last night i watched blood and chocolate and realized something that i’d already noticed happening in casino royale: the application of parkour into the “superhero’s” arsenal of moves. the weird thing about this is that parkour (also known as free running) is not something that was created using any kind of special effects–well, at least not the digital kind of special effects, anyway. it’s a totally real philosophy of movement that hollywood is starting to use to define a larger-than-life character. in blood and chocolate it was particularly appropriate, since the characters are werewolves, though in casino royale it’s definitely done on a much more intense scale. either way, it verges so close to magic that it’s hard to believe it’s something that evolved and can exist entirely outside of an action sequence choreography.
in fact, what’s really interesting is that after movies like the matrix and crouching tiger/hidden dragon and hero all acclimated us to this kind of movement being a wholly fabricated, cgi, bungee-harnessed, soundstage fairy tale, it’s now getting applied back into movies in a way that presents it as completely within the scope of biological human achievement as it is in real life. stunning not for man’s rule over pixels, but for the sense of his mastery over the laws of physics and physicality themselves.
it’s a peculiar cycle of life imitating art imitating life. the original superhero access to the realm beyond the physically-possible was through kung fu. and undoubtedly there’s an influence of the martial arts movie legacy in the genetic structure of parkour–after all, the artform is based on martial arts. so in the same way that fashion trends influence fashion trends, do movement trends influence movement trends? just how far can we stretch the canvas of our physical bodies once given the creative inspiration of a new possibility? and mind-over-matter stylie, could the unprecedented access to witnessing exponential evolutions in motion actually take us to places we could not have gone before?
some real-life superhero tour guides:
brice (cuz we need a wonderwoman up in this piece):
krump comes as a team rather than solitary heroes (like the fantastic four):
sidenote: i just heard that a coupla free runners up from santa barbara are coming down to audition for lucent dossier today!! damn–how rad would that be?!