moriarty@fluke.UUCP (Jeff Meyer) (05/28/85)
Well, how did you celebrate Memorial Day? I didn't think about it
'till after I got out of the theatre, but I went to see _Rambo_ after
Gene & Roger said it was stupid but still watchable (less than 90
minutes -- at least, if you're going to have a dumb action picture,
have the good sense to have an editor who keeps it rolling along).
And I had the good sense to go see it at the Wonderful Coliseum
Theater, the only movie theater in Seattle that reminds you of
Times Square. In other words, you've got winos in front of you,
street kids behind you, guttural Spanish/Chinese/Arabian
languages all over the place, the smell of urine competing with
alcohol and pot vapors, and other such niceties. And the entire
audience wants just one thing: to see a bunch of really nasty people
blasted into itty-bitty bits. As you might have guessed, they ate
up _Rambo_ (they applauded at the end, which was a shock -- the
usual signs of approval are "Way to go!" and "Fuckin' A!").
Heck, you probably already heard this is one of those "Bring the
boys back home" pictures (or, as Gene and Roger call it, "This time
we Win"), and I have to agree that it fills the bill. The one thing is,
I don't think the crowd was watching it to see Americans beat
Vietnamese (or Russians -- yah, we got all those countries in this
one). They want to see characters outlined as total scum (and, by
George, that's what they got) and then wasted by the hero. Not a
lot of nationalism involved, really. Tends to follow the Dirty
Harry/Mack ("waging a one-man war against the Mafia") Bolan
philosophy where the hero says little, has all the people close to
him blown away, and then takes it out on the perpetrators with the
audience screaming for more. The little speech at the end seemed
to we doing a whitewash job for the rest of the picture (I noticed
that almost all of the P.O.W.'s brought home are white -- I seem to
remember that the majority of the people sent over were black).
Thumbs down on this one, though I will admit the action scenes
move smoothly...
"That's the biz, sweetheart"
Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer
John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc.
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