Eastern is a film genre, which the German part of the Wikipedia knows by this name, but the English part doesn’t. The English part knows ostern instead, derived from the German word Osten, which means east. But osterns are Soviet productions, which imitate the style of the westerns and place only the action in a frame and background found in Soviet countries instead of the wild west. Easterns exclude the osterns, but are similar because they are also influenced by the western genre, but placed in an Asian frame and background. The easterns are very much the same as kung-fu movies. Both genres overlap at least widely. Easterns and westerns are both influencing each other. Some German tv broadcasters had decided that Easter is the time to show easterns because of the similarity of these names. This trend seems to be over now. I noticed only two kung-fu movies last Easter and both didn’t play in Asia.

One of these was “Birth of the Dragon”, which is a biographic movie telling about an important time in the life of Bruce Lee. He was afraid that he should be punished for teaching white people when the Shàolín monk Wong Jack Man came to San Francisco, where Bruce Lee was teaching. While Bruce Lee is already a name made for easy pronunciation for Americans, Wong Jack Man was always called Jackman in the movie. He should of course be named Wong Man for the Chinese and because the Chinese know that Americans will never understand the Chinese name Man, so he chose the name Jack, so that non-Chinese could call him Jack Wong. But why respect this effort? Besides this and also besides the fighting scenes, the movie was surprisingly good. It brought much martial arts philosophy. If Bruce Lee is known for anything among martial artists, then for his philosophy. He knew everything, which got ever written until his time on the martial arts.

The other kung-fu movie was “The One”. This is an already older movie, which I already knew and I’m not going to watch it again. Only very few movies are great enough for deserving to be watched again. But “The One” features only a great beginning and deteriorates quickly then. “The One” is on the whole an extremely bad movie, definitely not worth to be watched at all. You can easily notice how an author wanted to tell an old Chinese legend in a modern setting, but then other people butted in and turned the movie into showing only some gunfights in the typically unrealistic Hollywood manner and that is already everything left. The only way to repair this movie would have been to end it after the first ten minutes. Telling the old legends would certainly result in really great movies.