old-school beatdown

Michael Jai White, one of my favorite martial artists, delivers a classic, old-school beatdown in a prison scene in the 2009 movie "Blood and Bone":

White's background involves nine martial arts, including Korean taekwondo and dangsudo,* which is mostly what you see in this scene: the wide, solid stances and powerful kicks are a big hint that you're looking at Korean martial arts. Taekwondo is probably not the most effective "street" martial art, especially in tight spaces, but it can be brutal, and you don't want to get in the way of a well-executed TKD kick. Joe Rogan, before he went into Brazilian jiujitsu, began with TKD, and no less a luminary than MMA fighter Georges Saint-Pierre (a.k.a. GSP) said that, if you ever got hit by one of Rogan's kicks, you'd be going down.

I reviewed White's "Black Dynamite" here. The man has comic chops.

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*When to italicize a martial art's name? If the martial art is so familiar as to be a household name, then it's effectively part of the regular English lexicon. No italics needed, as is true with most foreign words that enter English and become commonplace over time. Taekwondo has achieved that status; so has jiujitsu (as well as its variants: jujitsu, jujutsu, and jiujutsu). Dangsudo, meanwhile, has not, despite the fact that it's been around (in the US, I mean) for a long time. This rule of thumb applies to foreign words in general, so I'll never write that I ate two tacos and one big chimichanga yesterday.