Movie and Television Reviews

youtube trailer.

Today, Hollywood released another movie about a raping, massacring, and generally atrocitizing army. This time, however, that army isn't the American one; it's the Tatmadaw led by its non-Spaghetti monster-believing, secular junta (Alert Christopher Hitchens). Not only that: The good guys are Christians!

Shocking un-PC aside, Rambo is a taught 90 minute thriller that accomplishes its mission with flair. Rambo's tasks:

1. Create a hate-worthy enemy. The raping, drug addicted, peasant-slaughtering Myanmarese army fits the bill quite nicely. Check.

2. Get its acts strait. Rambo begins with a Burma teach-in and an introduction to the hermetic Rambo, a professional snake-handler in Thailand. The problem necessitating Rambo's skills is sufficiently harrowing. The middle mission, an extraction, leads to a prolonged escape that climaxes in an impressive fight. Check.

3. Something a little different from the other Rambo movies. Some mercs accompany Rambo this time. Check.

Add to that the best modern-combat scenes since Saving Private Ryan, some poignant flashbacks, a sweet ending, and you have the best Rambo movie to date.

Saving Private Ryan (Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition)

The effectiveness of the combat, by the way, has to do with the way the film-makers dramatize the damage caused by heavy caliber weapons. People in the Army would often tell me how a M-2 (50 Cal) gunner “cut people in half.” Well, in Rambo, .5 human beings are everywhere. We also see what land mines and explosive ordinance do to human flesh. Most impressive of all, from a special-effects point of view, is the shock wave from an unexploded bomb that Rambo happens to find between him and a Tatmadaw squad.

Blackhawk Down continues to be the only war movie that realistically deals with hearing loss caused by weapons fire.

M-2 "MA Deuce" 50 cal machine gun.

Browning Machine Gun, Caliber.50, HB, M2: Basic Field Manual by United States War Department

Politics/ Message:

Rambo's message is twofold:

1. It's good to act on behalf of the oppressed (...or, die for something...snarl)
2. Sometimes that action requires a man of Rambo's unique abilities.

Members of the Association of Critics who Don't Get It (ACWDGI) have complained that Rambo doesn't have snappy dialog. Guilty as charged: It's mostly Rambo's understated grunty cynicism and some stridently naive Christianity. Weirdly, this same critic, a Ms. Claudia Puig, mentioned Bourne Ultimatum as an example of an intelligent movie (Quick! What's the wittiest line in The Bourne Ultimatum?).

The Bourne Ultimatum (Widescreen Edition)

Allow me to translate: Rambo fights real bad people instead of the U.S. Government. That review and the general negativity towards Rambo from professional critics got me to thinking. Here's the result:

Most movie critics are liberals. The left loves violence as much as any other group, but only when it's nihilistic and meaningless like in Quentin Tarantino films and this years' Oscar nominees or the villain is somebody whom they consider to be the real "bad guys" like Puig's “smart” Bourne Ultimatum, Redacted, et al. Wouldn't want to be jingoistic now, would we?

Or, I could just have bad taste.

Lastly, there's a pederasty scene (man-boy child molesting) between one of the Myanmarese generals and a villager. Everybody- gay and strait- can agree that such behavior is reprehensible. Some still might think, however, that the scene's inclusion is a slap at gays. I think that the writers only include the scene to deepen the atmosphere of chaotic evil and that it does. It doesn't suggest that it's something that gay people do. Rather, it says that the Myanmarese army is capable of the most heinous acts whether it's the rape of women or children. Whenever somebody has wanted to attack the Catholic Church-not gays- they've always brought up (not wholly unearned), clerical sexual impropriety.

Kill Bill, Volume 1

Grindhouse Presents, Death Proof - Extended and Unrated (Two-Disc Special Edition)