Feb
20
Conservatives Pretend to Know Something About Movies
Filed Under Blockbusters, Culture, Movies, Political Films | Leave a Comment
One thing I like about movies is how subjective they are. It’s the reason why I usually don’t really jump on someone’s case if they feel differently about a film than I do. People bring their own sensibilities with them when they walk into an auditorium, and once the lights go down, the experience is unique to each audience member. Sure, we’ll laugh together, we’ll scream together, we’ll cry together, but in the end, we’ll leave the theater with individual interpretations of what just happened.
And if you’re a Conservative, well, you’ll probably not get it at all.
This evening I stumbled upon a list of the “25 Best Conservative Movies” on National Review Online. I’ll admit that I didn’t read all the reviews, but boy, do they love war movies. “Forrest Gump,” “300,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “Braveheart,” “Red Dawn,” “Master and Commander,” “We Were Soldiers,” and “Heartbreak Ridge” are all on the list. The Cons have a real hard-on for war, so long as someone else is doing all the fighting, not them! Heavens, no!
Cons bring a lot of interesting baggage with them when the go to the movies. They openly hate “liberal Hollywood,” and by extension, any movie that’s challenging or doesn’t have a happy ending. This is the crowd that says they want to be “entertained” by movies. As such, their definition of entertainment is extremely narrow. Basically, they want their belief system to be reinforced by orgiastic violence and phony sentimentality — the only two things in this world they get a kick out of. That mentality has caused them to misread several films on their list. So let’s have a little fun at their expense. God knows they’ve been having lots of fun at ours.
Cons have latched on to “The Dark Knight” as some sort of pro-Bush treatise. This is a bit of nonsense I’ve been reading for months now, and I’m finally going to kill this theory once and for all. For one thing, Batman captures the Joker at the end of the movie. Batman does not use the Joker as a boogeyman to literally scare up enough votes to get himself reelected so he can try to privatize Social Security. Yes, Batman invents some weird sonar thingie that taps into every Gothamite’s cell phone and probably violates a civil liberty or two. But he does not decide that the real threat to Gotham City is actually Lex Luthor and invade Metropolis. I’m frankly sick of neocons equating Batman with Bush. It’s a glaring misinterpretation of the film. Batman’s a much more heroic fascist and sociopath than the former president could ever wish to be.
Seeing “Juno” on the list is also quite hysterical. Indeed, the title character chooses to bring her unborn child to term, but she still leaves her newborn baby in the care of Jennifer Garner’s character at the end. Oh, and this is after she inadvertently breaks up the marriage between Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman’s characters, leaving the former to raise the child alone. And Cons are supposed to be all about two-parent households! Juno’s not only irresponsible, she’s a homewrecker. What’s more, Juno gets her life back — consequence-free — having only been inconvenienced for about 9 months by the whole pregnancy thing. I was definitely surprised to see this movie win the Best Original Screenplay Oscar last year. It’s a pretty dark film with nothing redeeming to say about today’s youth other than they talk funny.
What the stink is “Ghostbusters” doing on this list? Oh, right, there’s a guy from the EPA in the flick. He represents the intrusion of Big Government into private enterprise and is apparently mistaken for the central villain of the piece. The critic must’ve fallen asleep before Gozer shows up at the film’s climax. Walter Peck is simply a functionary character, designed to bring about the film’s “apparent defeat” when all the ghosts are released from the containment unit. Never mind that the Ghostbusters later ask the New York City mayor — a somewhat more powerful governmental official than an EPA stooge — for help in saving his constituents from “a disaster of biblical proprotions.” The Ghostbusters essentially prevent the Rapture! They even do it by putting all their faith in a scientific theory (“crossing the streams”). How could Cons possibly find anything to like about this movie?!
Ah, “Team America: World Police” is also on the list. They’ve really gone off the deep end. The movie does satirize left-wing celebrities who came out against the war in Iraq. But it doesn’t pull any punches when taking shots at the neocons’ approach to foreign policy, either. The heroes are part of a jingoistic paramilitary unit that’s not bound by any sort of rules of engagement. Team America blithely brings the War on Terror to the terrorists’ doorstep — in Paris, Cairo and Pyongyang — leaving nothing but destruction in their wake, and only exacerbating the threat of international terrorism. They even fail to capture the terrorist leader, Kim Jong Il, at the end! This movie doesn’t take a side in the foreign policy debate. As far as it’s concerned, both sides are wrong. That all the characters are puppets only enhances the phoniness of pro- and anti-war activists alike, whose strings are clearly being pulled by someone else.
“Gran Torino” is the last one I’ll go after. It’s no wonder why Cons would absolutely fall in love with this film. The hero is outspokenly bigoted. Cons are nothing if not hateful of people of other ethnicities. So Clint Eastwood’s character Walt Kowalski doubtless filled their little heads with all sorts of racial slurs that they can direct at folks who don’t look like them. In adding new epithets to their vocabularies, the Cons missed the point of the film: characters like Walt are a dying breed, completely dislocated in contemporary society. What’s more, Walt can only bring about positive change in his community (i.e. making it liveable for his Hmong neighbors) by becoming the victim of violent crime himself. The film is in stark contrast to Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” movies, in which violence has to be met by more violence; even I found this to be jarring when I first saw the film. But I can’t see Walt’s solution as anything the Cons would find remotely acceptable.
Another thing that’s great about this list is how important it is for the Cons to point out that a particular movie won (or was nominated for) Academy Awards, unless it wasn’t. Then it doesn’t matter because the movie was too good for the Academy to even acknowledge! But what else do you expect from people who honestly think George W. Bush kept our country safe…so long as you don’t count the events of September 11th? After that, we were totally safe. Never mind how they kept reminding us we weren’t. We were!
Noticably absent from the list is “1984,” a movie that I’d imagine Cons would wholeheartedly enjoy. It’s a feel good story about a weak-kneed liberal who ultimately grows to love conservatism after being tortured endlessly. All the ingredients are there for it to be a hit among that crowd: perpetual warfare, chest-thumping jingoism, sexual repression, a permanent underclass, constant government surveillance, and of course, torture, torture, torture. There’s also the Orwellian concept of double-think, a belief system that allows for two wildly divergent ideas to both be true simultaneously, like “freedom isn’t free.”
Double-think certainly informs the Cons’ understanding of cinema. But to their credit, at least the Cons don’t turn their brains off at the movies. No, they only do that in the voting booths.
-Brad Lohan
Nov
23
“Frost/Nixon” Review
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Last Friday, I received an invitation to an advanced screening of “Frost/Nixon” at the ArcLight Hollywood. I boogied over there after work, reminding myself that the commute from Santa Monica to that neck of the woods is an absolute pisser. But I made it with time to spare and found a pretty good seat in the auditorium. ArcLight even provided free popcorn and drinks!
“Frost/Nixon” is a film about the disgraced president’s post-resignation interviews with a lightweight British TV personality. Imagine if George W. Bush sat down with Ryan Seacrest. Frank Langella plays — or rather, disappears into — the role of Nixon, and Michael Sheen imbues Frost with a camera-ready charisma as well as an undercurrent of sadness and vulnerability when he realizes he’s in way over his head. This is a real David and Goliath story. The final interview, concerning the Watergate scandal, is as engaging as any action sequence I’ve seen this year.
Directed by Ron Howard, the film is by far his best effort to date. Finally he’s not saddled by a passable script by the hackneyed Akiva Goldsman — a man who deserves the Best Screenplay Oscar about as much as I deserve the Nobel Prize for Literature for my review of “Masters of the Universe.” Instead, the script was written by Peter Morgan, based on his play. Howard and Morgan did an hour-long Q&A after the film. Fun fact: Ron Howard voted for Nixon in ‘72!
I’m absolutely certain that the right-wing pundits will mercilessly attack this film and brand it leftist prattle. Of course, they won’t actually see the movie, since these shaved apes will doubtless be too busy hunching over their computers, watching the Guitar Hero TV spot with Heidi Klum for the umpteeth time. It always amazes me that people won’t give a film a look before labeling it one thing or the other; that said, I sometimes even amaze myself. Unfortunately, I think some folks will be missing out on same towering performances because they let their insipid personal politics get in the way of their better judgment. But that’s sort of a day in the life for your average Republican — zing!
Kevin Bacon’s character, Jack Brennan, embodies that sort of mentality. A Nixon loyalist to the bitter end, Brennan halts one of the taping sessions during a rare moment when Frost has Nixon over a barrel. Though I clearly part ways with Brennan’s politics, I was still fascinated by his character. Brennan is at once protecting Nixon from himself, and what’s more, Brennan doesn’t want to be confronted with the reality that his friend and mentor is a flawed human being who made some really bad political decisions. Liberals don’t have a problem with throwing each other under the bus. And by that token, Republicans don’t have problem with throwing liberals under the bus, either. But they’ll never turn on one another.
All that being said, “Frost/Nixon” isn’t a one-sided liberal treatise. Langella gives Nixon a charm, a sense of humor, and a pathos that almost makes young people like me comprehend why voters would turn out for the curmudgeon twice. Frost isn’t entirely a hero, either, but rather a wide-eyed outsider who doesn’t understand the gravity of the situation until he’s bungling the first interview.
In the wake of Obama’s election, “Frost/Nixon” seems like a film that kicks Republicans while they’re down, but it doesn’t exactly. It’s a political film to be sure. Yet I think both sides can for once come together and enjoy a well-made picture, one that doesn’t have Heidi Klum in the millionth uninspired riff on that dumb little scene from “Risky Business.”
-Brad Lohan
Oct
7
“Religulous” Reviewulous
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I didn’t have much in the way of a religious upbringing, thank God. I’ve never read the Bible, but I did see “The Passion of the Christ” because I heard it was a gorefest. I think religion can be of some value to people who seem to have a much easier time believing in a fairy story than in themselves. Okay, now I’m starting to sound smug. I’m starting to sound like Bill Maher.
But Maher’s smugness is part of what’s great about “Religulous,” Larry Charles’ documentary about faith and the faithful. Like Michael Moore, Maher inserts himself in the proceedings, interviewing various and sundry religious leaders, followers and even a few non-believers. He’s not afraid of calling people on the myriad paradoxes and contradictions that are couched in their belief systems. A couple of times, I thought he was going to get punched in the nose. But he gets some priceless responses (like the politician who tells him you don’t need an IQ test to be in the Senate), and Charles has directed a movie that’s every bit as hysterical as his previous film, “Borat.”
Maher was never a comedian or social critic I’d followed with much enthusiasm, so he was a bit of a revelation for me in this film. That he knows more about religion than some of the people preaching the gospels makes for some spirited discussions. Most of the interviewees come across as folks who honestly don’t seem to have given very much thought as to why they so passionately have faith in the first place. Their grasp of Ancient Egyptian history is also a bit spotty. In about 1200 B.C., a fellow named Horus took the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?” quite literally in that his story is virtually identical to Christ’s. I wonder if that’s what the “H” in Jesus H. Christ stands for: Horus. I used to think it was Hussein.
Unfortunately, I feel this film will preach to the [un]converted, like most documentaries. The fundies are no fun at all and don’t have much of a sense of humor about religion. They’d rather put a saddle on an anamatroic triceratops in a Christian theme park, suggesting dinosaurs co-existed with ancient man several millennia ago, rather than acknowledge the Bible left out several bajillion years of prehistory before Adam and Eve came onto the scene. Trying to reconcile modern science with a 2,000 year old religious text isn’t going to wash. We as a culture need to rethink our approach to religion, to not take the passages quite so literally.
Now I’m starting to sound preachy. Maher takes this approach as well in the film’s final moments. But he does have a point. Our world is definitely falling into a state of disrepair and it’s not because our deeply religious elected officials have chosen to be like those super-nice Mormons who go door to door, selling the word of God like it’s a vacuum cleaner. No, Bush stole the election in 2000 because God wanted him to be president. Our country is fighting in Iraq endlessly because people like Sarah Palin think it’s a mission from God. Banning gay marriage is up for a vote in the state of California because of that goddamn bit of nonsense in Leviticus. Are these goofballs serious? It’s okay to steal and to kill, but not to allow people basic human rights? Yeah, I’ve gone off on a tangent here, I know. I’m trying to show the hypocrisy.
I’m asking the most basic religious question, “What the hell?!”
-Brad Lohan
Jul
17
Who Watches the “Watchmen” Trailer? (Updated With 100% More Trailer)
Filed Under Comics, Movies, Political Films | 1 Comment
If you haven’t read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ doubleplusgood graphic novel, the trailer for the film version of “Watchmen” might seem a little esoteric. The book in and of itself is just so loaded with ideas and imagination, squeezing selected images from it into a two-minute trailer simply doesn’t do the story justice. That isn’t to say the trailer comes across as a hollow exercise in style-over-substance, like director Zach Snyder’s previous film, “300.” I get a real sense of reverence for the source material in watching this trailer play out, in seeing the characters from the mini-series living and breathing against the backdrop of an alternate 1985.
The trailer’s front-loaded before prints of “The Dark Knight.” Expect a collective love-explosion among hardcore geeks at the midnight screenings tonight. The “Watchmen” trailer couldn’t be a better appetizer for Nolan’s potential Bat-masterpiece. With the pre-release hype at critical mass, I almost expect the experience of seeing “TDK” to be like attending a mega-church.
I’ve definitely warmed up to Snyder’s “Watchmen,” and the trailer has compounded my interest. I’m even thinking of cracking open the graphic novel again this weekend. It’s been a few years. In the meantime, I can’t wait to watch the Watchmen, however briefly, on the big screen.
“The world will look up and shout, ‘Save us!’ and I’ll whisper, ‘No.’” Bad. Ass.
UPDATE: Empire had it up for a blink the other day. It’s back again.
-Brad Lohan
Jul
15
Who Cast “Swing Vote?”
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What’s more incredible than believing that one man’s vote can make all the difference in an election — not with the Electoral College, Diebold voting machines and the Supreme Court, not by a longshot — is that Kevin Costner is still considered a leading man. Now, it’s not like he’s being offered A-material these days. His latest, “Swing Vote,” is just the kind of middle-of-the-road pap that seeps out of studios every once in awhile, movies that seem to have no audience (i.e. movies made for the over-35 crowd) but simply satisfy some producer’s term deal.
So what the happened to Kevin Costner? Well, I think Kevin Costner happened to Kevin Costner. His notorious ego ballooned the budget of 1995’s “WaterWorld” to then-unheard of levels — $175 million. I understand some of this money went into using CGI to fix his receding hairline. Whatever the money was spent on, it’s irrelevant. The bloated budget buzz was enough to convince people before the movie even dropped that it was a dud. I’m still of the opinion that it’s not a bad film in the least. “WaterWorld” has some of the best setpieces of any film of the ’90s, four years before “The Matrix” reinvented the genre and made everyone fanatical about obvious-looking wire work. Costner does something unusual in the film, too, playing a character for a change. His otherwise nameless Mariner is a post-apocalyptic half-fish jerkstore. He softens up by film’s end, but isn’t afraid of being unlikeable for much of the runtime. That approach worked for me because I never really liked Costner to begin with.
“WaterWorld” was the penultimate nail in the coffin of Costner’s A-movie career. 1997’s “The Postman” was the last time he was allowed anywhere near a $100 million budget. I don’t remember the film well enough to be able to speak to its badness. But a 3-hour movie about a guy restoring the American spirit to a dystopia by delivering people’s mail is a hard sell even to the most hardcore genre — or Costner — fan.
Ever since, Coster’s floundered. He’s taken a few stabs at a comeback (like that Sam Raimi baseball movie), but to no avail. Now he’s just the guy you cast when your first, second and third choices have all turned down the role.
I can’t imagine the “Swing Vote” filmmakers gathered together for an early development meeting and all unanimously agreed, “This project has Kevin Costner written all over it!” But what kind of movie is “Swing Vote” anyway? It looks like a softball political satire, a microcosm of what goes on in presidential elections: some rube is torn between the candidates for both parties, candidates that care more about winning than keeping the promises they’re making. Bo-ring. I’m fairly certain that Costner’s character will learn that there’s fundamentally not a dime’s worth of difference when it comes to the two rich, old white men running for office and realize that true change should take place within himself… I’m sorry I nodded off while typing that. Where was I?
Now, it’d be pretty awesome if his character in the movie winds up voting for the more right-leaning candidate, one that would continue removing environmental restrictions and submerging us beneath our melting polar ice caps. “Swing Vote” would then basically serve as a prequel to “WaterWorld” with the Mariner character in the latter being a descendant of the fence-sitting loser from the former. But I imagine the filmmakers elected to do something different with the material.
-Brad Lohan
Jun
15
“War, Inc.” Review
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Last year, John Cusack starred in “Grace is Gone,” an indie film about a father whose wife was recently killed in Iraq, and he can’t find a way to tell his two daughters. So he takes them on an impromptu road trip, trying to avoid the issue altogether. I thought it was a very effective and original anti-war film. Of course the movie was largely ignored, even on the art house circuit. After all the movie was about something. American audiences don’t like that. Movies that have some artistic value interrupt people’s text-messaging.
Cusack’s latest film — another anti-war piece, this time a satire called “War, Inc.” — opened in extremely limited release in New York and L.A. a few weeks ago. But this one has “legs,” as people in the know call it, and it’s quietly been finding an audience and expanding to additional cities amid all the sound and fury of the major summer releases. I finally caught it this afternoon and thought it was great.
No one plays an introspective, black-clad hitman quite like Cusack. In “War, Inc.,” we’re first introduced to his character Hauser while he’s doing a job in the Arctic Circle. When he’s not blowing people away, he drinks shots of tabasco sauce and has deep, meaningful conversations with his GPS system. These little nuances are what Cusack often brings to the table and makes them work brilliantly. At any rate, after a successful hit in the Great White North, Hauser sells his services to the ex-Veep (Dan Aykroyd playing Dick Cheney even better than Dick Cheney) and goes to the occupied country of Turaqistan, where he’s to assassinate an uncooperative oil baron.
Hauser poses as a trade show coordinator (the ongoing conflict in Turaqistan has been completely privatized), tasked with organizing the wedding of Middle Eastern songstress Yonica Babyyeah (Hilary Duff). Left-wing journo Natalie Hegalhuzen (Marisa Tomei) catches his interest, real-life sister Joan Cusack plays his high-strung liaison Marsha Dillon, and Ben Kingsley with a southern drawl and Bush’s odd gesticulations appears as Hauser’s former CIA boss.
This is sort of the “Airplane!” of anti-war films. Reporters are herded into a motion simulator theme park ride instead of being allowed outside the Green Zone to experience real combat; the “Viceroy” is personified by a giant, Big Brother-style screen with shifting images of American icons from Babe Ruth to John Wayne to Pam Anderson; military vehicles are covered with corporate logos like they’re something out of NASCAR. But these touches are organic, not at all like the bonk-on-the-head gags in the witless “Scary Movie” clones. As weird as things have gotten over the past eight years or so, “War, Inc.” doesn’t feel that far removed from our own reality. And that is what makes it so tragically funny.
I’m pleased that “War, Inc.” is showing some staying power on the art house circuit. It’s angry, and it’s clever, and it’s designed to piss off all the Right[-wing] people. I think it connects better with audiences than “Grace is Gone” because it’s a comedy. Audiences would rather laugh at our bass ackwards foreign policy than be made to feel all sad and crummy. I don’t know what that says about them, but as long as the movie gets people to use that lump of tissue between their ears, the filmmakers can declare mission accomplished…and mean it.
-Brad Lohan
Jun
15
“Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead” Review
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I first discovered Troma movies when I was about 13. I’d recorded all three “Toxic Avenger” films when they were shown on the USA Network — in reverse-order for whatever reason — and watched them in one marathon, commercial-heavy, edited-for-TV sitting. Without the overabundance of nudity and graphic violence, they’re not quite as entertaining as the versions I now own on DVD. But they had an impact on me nonetheless.
The cheapo effects and criminally bad acting and clunky camerawork are enough to challenge the average movie-goer’s suspension of disbelief. But that’s sort of the point. Troma movies are intentionally god-awful. That they can be so craptacular and still entertain is the magic behind Lloyd Kaufman’s ouerve.
But not all Troma movies are gems of the grindhouse circuit. The ones I have are almost all exclusively produced in-house. Their negative pickups — with the exception of “Cannibal: The Musical” (directed by Trey Parker!) and “Bloodsucking Freaks” — are movies that aren’t films you watch, but power through. You think you’ve seen some bad movies? Pfft. I’ve seen some bad movies.
At any rate, “Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead” is not a bad movie. It’s not a bad movie in the sense that I found a lot to like about it. Judging the film by its visual treatment, its performances, and its plot is what elitist film critics would do. They’d be missing the point. Director (and Troma co-founder) Lloyd Kaufman has a style all his own. He rejects the overly polished and focus group-approved conventions of today’s big-budget films. There’s a quick and dirty charm here, a true wit at play.
The film’s about a fast food restaurant called American Chicken Bunker that opens on an old Indian burial ground for deceased poultry. Protesters outside the establishment aren’t happy about this new fast food franchise desecrating the graves of dead chickens. High school grad Arbie (Jason Yachanin) decides to put in for a job at the establishment to get back at his ex-girlfriend Wendy (Kate Graham), a protester who went off to college and came back with a girlfriend of her own. Contaminated food begins to mutate the restaurant patrons and protesters alike. Arbie and Wendy quickly find themselves in the fight for their lives against man-eating, beak-mouthed chicken zombies.
And it’s a musical.
I’d always wanted to see a musical in which the actors can’t really sing, the choreography looks like it was made up as they went along and an entire number is done topless. Apparently so did Lloyd Kaufman. After watching the tired and unimaginative “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” last Christmas, I was happy to see a horror movie musical that actually had fun with the songs. They didn’t treat them like something they had to get through to move on to the next scene.
The movie also gives Kaufman 90 minutes to put as many sacred cows through a meat grinder as he can. Troma has never been easy on Corporate America, and “Poultrygeist” stays true to Tromatic form. Fast food franchises and the military industrial complex are the film’s biggest targets. But where Morgan Spurlock couldn’t shut down the McDonald’s, and Michael Moore couldn’t bring an end to the Bush Administration and by extension the Iraq War, Kaufman’s learned to stop worrying and love our screwed up society. It’s his muse. If we lived in a Utopia, there’d be no Troma films. And who’d want to live in one then? Well, most people, probably. But I wouldn’t be among you.
-Brad Lohan
Jun
4
“Dirty Harry” DVD Review
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Warner Bros. has double-dipped the Dirty Harry franchise and released a new boxed set yesterday with all five films, a documentary about Clint Eastwood and an Inspector Harry Callahan police badge, should you be interested in emulating his style of policework in your off-hours; his .44 Magnum that could “blow your head clean off” is not included. I haven’t had a chance to go through all the content in the collection, but I did watch the first film last night.
Last week, I discussed at length the myth of the Western hero in regards to the latest Rambo film. Those same heroic attributes are just as easily applicable to Insp. Callahan, only now in the context of the detective genre. Dirty Harry operates simultaneously inside and outside of the law. He’s part of a bureaucracy that’s at its wit’s end in trying to apprehend the serial killer Scorpio, but he is every inch a vigilante, just one with a badge.
There have been so many copycats in the 37 years since the release of “Dirty Harry,” that it’s almost difficult to imagine the film was ever controversial in its depiction of police brutality. For more than a generation, cop movies have aped Dirty Harry’s unique brand of justice. The “Lethal Weapon” series turned vigilante cops into a thing of comedy. “RoboCop” brought Dirty Harry into the future. “Training Day” won Denzel Washington a long-deserved Academy Award for Best Actor.
How many films since “Dirty Harry” have ended with the policeman hero throwing away his badge? “Point Break” and “The Fast and the Furious” immediately spring to mind. Dirty Harry’s badge, however, is really just a “Get Out of Jail Free” card, his license to kill. Cops like Callahan are driven by some other force to dispense justice, one that’s not symbolized by a gold shield or a police manual or the Constitution.
“Dirty Harry” and the movies it spawned have always appealed to my reptile brain. As human beings, our thirst for balance and order amid the chaos is always satisfied by a lawman who shows the lawless a thing or two about what lawlessness really is.
-Brad Lohan
May
30
“Rambo” DVD Review
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The Western is a dead genre. Every year or two or three, a straight Western might make it to theaters, but the genre’s played itself out insofar as movies about cowboys and Indians go. Elements of the Western myth have since been appropriated by action/adventure, science fiction and comic book films — the lone hero who restores order to a lawless community by confronting “the other.” Did you see that one? It’s fascinating — if you’re a film geek anyway — to explore how the key components of the Western genre have been contemporized. Cowboys are now cops, stargazers or meta-humans. Indians are now mobsters, aliens or supervillains. The small town out West that’s beset by bureaucracy, corruption and some external threat personified by outlaws or savages is now a major metropolitan city, a galaxy or — ahem — another major metropolitan city. Justice is, as always, meted out by a hero who’s an outsider, someone who doesn’t operate within the law or “by the book.” The system is broken. In order to repair it, one must create new parameters for bringing about utopia.
By that definition, the Rambo movies are all Westerns at their core. The fourth chapter, economically titled “Rambo,” takes the fight to Myanmar (nee Burma), where Sylvester Stallone’s reluctant war machine goes on a rescue mission to save some Christian do-gooders from the country’s brutal military junta. And it’s a helluva flick. At 91 minutes, the film briskly builds to a crescendo of .50 caliber chain gun violence that rivals the final act of Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch.”
The carnage in the film is not like the toothless slapfighting in last summer’s PG-13 “Live Free or Die Hard.” I hate when filmmakers cop-out and “leave it up to the audience’s imagination” when it comes to screen violence. Why doesn’t the director just read me the script then? That’ll really give my imagination a workout. No, “Rambo” doesn’t leave anything up to your imagination. You’re shown every bullet hit, every exploded head, every dismembered body– almost all executed (zing!) with surprisingly effective CGI trickery. Yet the violence isn’t as gratuitous as it’s cathartic. The junta jerkstores’ idea of fun is making innocent villagers run across a mine field. You really find yourself hating these guys and wanting Rambo to reduce them to puddles of goo.
Stallone — who co-wrote and directed — hasn’t made a pure comic book like “Rambo: First Blood Part II.” Granted, there is an element of absurdity to the proceedings. Stallone’s in his 60s, in peak physical condition and nearly invincible; he takes a bullet to the shoulder, but it seems to do more damage to his shirt than to him. He’s also able to outrun the bomb blast from a WWII blockbuster that’s been sitting the jungle for six decades. Still, that’s all part of the myth of the Western hero. If anybody could do what Rambo can do, well, there wouldn’t be any need for Rambo.
I’m terrible about watching all the special features on DVDs. I used to do it religiously, but after the one millionth canned, EPK interview, I got a little burned out. The only featurette I watched on the disc was “It’s a Long Road: Resurrection of an Icon.” The film’s been in development for as long as Indy 4, but they didn’t spend too much time on the different incarnations that had been proposed over the years. No mention was made at all of the Rambo vs. Osama bin Laden concept. Stallone did discuss a potential idea that would’ve sent Rambo to Mexico to rescue a kidnapped girl…not nearly as compelling as taking on bin Laden though.
When it comes to hellholes with rat-bastard regimes, Burma works quite nicely as a shooting gallery for John Rambo. That being said, watching a mythical Western hero — in any genre — achieve what cannot be done in real life never loses its appeal.
-Brad Lohan
May
9
This October…Prepare…To Get…Bush!
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A few weeks ago, I read a script review on Slate.com for Oliver Stone’s upcoming Bush 43 biopic, “W,” and felt a twinge of disappointment in regards to screenwriter Stanely Weiser’s approach to the material. George W. Bush’s presidency is more or less a self-parody to begin with. A parody of a parody isn’t funny. And from what I gathered in reading the review, which isn’t terribly well-written (I couldn’t care less which page something happens on, Ms. Lapidos), the script seems to emphasize Bush’s alcoholism, war mongering and daddy issues with all the subtlety of a Wayans Brothers film. I don’t like Bush. I don’t want to have a beer with him, and not just because he’s an untreated alcoholic. But I’d be more enthusiastic about the film if it had a little nuance.
Stone’s rushing “W” into production and hopes to have it in theaters by October, just weeks before the election. Why this is so important to him is anyone’s guess. Bush is ineligible for a third presidential term, so it’s not like the movie could hurt him politically. I think the film would be better suited for a January release, like the weekend before Inauguration Day. Dumping the movie in October will simply confuse audiences into thinking it’s a horror film or one of those pieces of potential Oscar bait that a studio doesn’t believe in enough to roll out around Christmas; think of last year’s “Lions for Lambs.”
As an actor, Josh Brolin won me over last year with his roles in “Grindhouse,” “American Gangster” and “No Country for Old Men.” I think he’s a little young to be playing Bush in his early-60s; he’d be better suited for Indiana Jones if Spielberg and Lucas were inclined to do a prequel or two or three, but I digress. Still, Brolin’s on the cusp of establishing himself as a solid character actor as well as a leading man. I’m sure he’ll make the most of the role, capturing the wildly inconsistent cadence and word-mangling that have made Bush’s speech patterns such a cottage industry for people who make desk calendars and publish books of Bush quotes. But if the film fails, I hope the blame falls solely on Stone and not him. After I saw “World Trade Center” in ‘05, I realized that Stone had finally proven himself as a very talented director of toothless made-for-TV movies.
Who knows? I’m speculating at this point. The movie could be brilliant and the review I read in Slate might have completely — ahem — misunderestimated the script’s finer qualities. Maybe this will be an October Surprise of a different sort.
-Brad Lohan