The Gun of Rambo: The Hopeless Film for our Terminal Phase of Terrestrial Life

When my buddy first handed me a DVD copy of this movie, I was already trying to map out how I was going to have to pretend I liked it just to be polite and not snobby. Half an hour into the movie, my suspicions of crappiness were confirmed, as it seemed like I was watching a badly written, badly acted movie that was making the sale of munitions look, well, kinda sexy. The offensivest of the offensive. I was, at this time, enjoying my moments with Ethan Hawke - who I still think should have been cast lead - but that was about all the enjoyment there was, I felt I was near stopping the movie midway through to watch an episode of The Prisoner from my new complete box set (thanks Marshall!).

Fortunately, the film kept me just barely interested enough to keep going, and then - bait and switch! It wasn't what we'd thought. The film, underneath some dark (very dark) comedy (very comedic) moments, started to exude a sense of deep sorrow. By the end, this is overt, and Cage, lo and behold, is not the hero, in what turns out to be a scathing and impressively thorough examination of the arms trade. Though it sometimes hits us over the head, the politics are, at worst, sound, and the whole Goodfellas-esque set-up at the beginning was an intentional test. It sets up certain expectations that somehow force us to look frankly at real world issues, because we weren't expecting them.

And here I was thinking Nicholas Cage (excepting certain Spike Jonze forays) demanded that a movie not be intelligent before signing the contract!

In any case, the acting is bad, and the writing is, let's say, mediocre. Worse still, the movie is as close to anti-hope as you can get. But what can you expect in 2006 right? When you really think about it, there are probably only a few organisms that have much chance of being able to survive on the earth in 200 years, and we should be trying to expand that number rather than trying to save ourselves, a hopeless goal at this point. In it's own way, Lord of War reminds us of this. So I guess what I'm saying is it's a great date movie to cuddle up to on Valentine's Day, with some cocoa and some nice warm Ugg boots on your feet.

...it was like the sky was the limit!

It's IFCs labor of love: three hours just to talk about the 1970s and its films. Extrememly Special Interest no doubt. If I had to hear another interviewee say "all of a sudden we could do anything" or "there was no limit to what we could do anymore" or some other such quote I would have turned the DVD played off right in the middle of another close up on Bruce Dern's face (star of such greats as The Burbs and apparently one hundred other movies in the seventies I've never seen).

I made notes to see MASH, The King of Marvin Gardens, Last Detail (and all Hal Ashby), and Roger Corman movies. My question is why directors were so obsessed in the 70s with two-lane asphalt who-knows-where America. That stuff bores the crap out of me. Then I started to think just how many movies in this decade fall victim to this weird obsession. Easy Rider, Fat City, Scarecrow, Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, Five Easy Peices, Deliverence, all those Westerns! The list goes on and on. I mean those are good movies, but I don't care who you are, you have to be able to endure some intense boredom to enjoy them. Maybe that's the nineties talking, but I don't feel the struggle with the American Dream so much. Did it take these movies to allows us to live in the ruins?

I conclude that everyone interviewed is pretty smart and worth listening to (except Bogdanovich - I mean seriously who is that guy kidding?!), but especially so with Altman and Lumet. Those guys are giants. Coppola is pretty excellent as well, like how he ADMITS he hasn't made a good movie since The Conversation(!). Did I hear him right?