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| The new Rambo and Terminator movies are both excellent. by Brody Wilder 04/01/2020, 4:07am PDT | ||||
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| Rambo: Last Blood is a Lifetime movie starring Jason Voorhees. The first 45 minutes or so are spent catching up with Rambo and how he's living now. It's really sweet, the kind of Rambo movie your grandma would enjoy, and fully justified my decision to watch the extended cut (the theatrical cut was 12 minutes shorter, I have to figure they all came out of this part). Rambo's shacked up with a visibly post-menopausal hispanic lady; it's the first time I can remember seeing Sly with an age appropriate love interest since Dolly Parton in Rhinestone. Sadly, there's nothing romantic going on between them - I think the implication is that his penis doesn't work anymore so he has to fuck people with knives - but they still have a nice rapport.
It can't last. Rambo's surrogate daughter gets Taken and he spends the second act learning facts from a pamphlet about sex trafficking in between butchering Mexicans with his big fuck off knife. Then the third act is just shots of Rambo illuminated by various kinds of muzzle flashes intercut with shots of brown bodies falling apart gruesomely. Don't let your grandma watch this part unless you want her voting Rambo in November. I'd hoped that along the way, Rambo would be forced to reexamine some of the whoring he and his dead buddies (who he's literally still crying about 50 years later) got up to back in 'Nam, when Thailand's entire economy reoriented itself around servicing GIs with drugs and girls. Instead I think it tries to draw a parallel with how his own body was used by his country, only to be treated like trash when he came home traumatized and sexually dysfunctional. It's offensively stupid but that's Rambo for you. Quick guide to telling Rocky and Rambo apart: both are socially awkward - presumably drawing from Stallone's own struggle with his speech impediment growing up - but Rocky's awkward because he's dumb, and Rambo's awkward because he's scared. Look at the scene where the two hot-blooded latina women in his life are arguing to see a man using every steroid and camera trick in the book to make himself look big, while simultaneously using every acting muscle in his body to make himself look small. I'll keep watching these movies as long as he keeps trying that hard. Terminator: Dark Fate isn't the Terminator movie anybody wanted. It's a story about three strong women written by a half-dozen card carrying members of Hollywood's old boys club. The editing is rough, sometimes for what look like understandable budgetary reasons - car chases are expensive! I read somewhere Arnold had to kick in his own money for the ridiculous one with the crane in Terminator 3 - and other times for what looks like pure incompetence - there's no explanation for a scene with three women chatting in front of a greenscreen (which is half the scenes in the movie) having paragraphs of ADR coming from off camera, except they accidentally filmed a garbage script in the first place. That being said, I still loved it, because it's three women on a robot-killing roadtrip and I've never seen that before. Linda Hamilton is back and she's great. She's got a Duke Nukem voice and a Duke Nukem face, I could listen to her say FUCK all day. Mackenzie Davis is tall and nude and knows how to use a shotgun. Nobody in Hollywood knows how to use a shotgun! They try to rack it one-handed because they saw Linda doing it at the end of T2. Davis keeps the stock on her cheek and empties the tube in a couple seconds of aggressive pumping. The third girl is whatever, but you need three people in a story like this to get that Jaws dynamic of Quint, Brody, and Hooper, where they bond in unexpected ways (Quint and Brody think Hooper's a clown, Hooper and Quint think Brody's a landlubber, Brody and Hooper think Quint's insane). DON'T EXPECT JAWS. It's not that good. In fact, at points it's downright terrible. There's a girl power scene with Linda and Davis teaching the other one to shoot a gun that never should've seen the light of day. You don't need a girl power scene when the whole fucking movie's about girl power! That's actually the best thing about it. It's not three women against a world of men, it's three women against a world where everybody else of importance is inexplicably also a woman and it's no big deal. They meet shitty lady cops, shitty lady soldiers, a shitty lady doctor - the men just kind of stand around trying not to get dragged into it, like real men would in those situations. Like Rambo would in those situations. One thing both of these movies made me think about is just what an anomaly it was to put a car on a trailer and drive it around real roads to film a car scene. For decades before that, car scenes would be filmed on a soundstage with rear projection, and for the foreseeable future it looks like they're going to be filmed on a soundstage in front of a greenscreen. Rambo in the back of a cop car getting run out of Hope, BC, and the Terminator cruising around LA scanning his head back and forth like a security camera are two sights that could only exist in that brief window of outdoor moviemaking. When I was a kid I thought that shit would be around forever, like rock and roll! Nobody listens to rock and roll anymore. |
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I'm going to use this thread to talk about really good movies I've seen lately. by 02/28/2020, 3:01am PST  Have you seen Wind Across The Everglades NT by 02/28/2020, 7:07am PST Not yet, but it's going on my list. Any good? NT by 02/29/2020, 9:30am PST It's supposed to be, another swamp pitcher by 02/29/2020, 10:28am PST The new Rambo and Terminator movies are both excellent. by 04/01/2020, 4:07am PDT I have to talk about a movie I hated to get to one I loved. Spoilers for both! by 04/23/2020, 6:25pm PDT |
