The Screengrab : ronald reagan

Morning Deal Report: The Butler Did It

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:30:00 GMT

America has elected its first African-American president, so what better time to bring the story of “A Butler Well-Served by This Election” to the screen? Sony snapped up the feature rights to this true story “a dozen days after the Washington Post published Wil Haygood's front-page report on Eugene Allen's 34 years at the White House. Allen worked for eight presidents, starting with Harry Truman in 1952 and ending in 1986 with Ronald Reagan,” Variety reports. Highlights of the story include Nixon’s controversial “breakfast in bed” request, which some claim led to the downfall of his administration.

Life is like a box of crayons. Or something like that. Rosie Perez, Craig Ferguson and Arsenio Hall will lend their voices to The Hero of Color City. Per The Hollywood Reporter, “Becky Bristow's film, which previously had signed on Christina Ricci to voice the lead, is an animated fable centering on a group of crayons that band together to stop a tyrant from robbing their world of color.” If we may make a casting suggestion: How about Burnt Sienna Miller?

Jonah Hex is searching for a new director. “Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor have dropped out as the directors of Jonah Hex, the DC Comics property that is expected to headline W. and Milk star Josh Brolin as a partly disfigured gunslinger and bounty hunter,” says Variety. “Neveldine and Taylor wrote the script, but their exit as directors was attributed to ‘creative differences.’” What else?

Related:
Dead-Eyed and Bushy-Tailed: Dubya in the Movies
Trailer Review: Milk

DVD Digest for November 11, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

You can always tell when it’s the holiday season, because the studios begin to clear out their coffers to release titles both new and classic, no matter whether they’ve already been released on DVD.

DVD of the Week: With thousands of titles (both theirs, MGM’s, and other studios’) in their library, no studio has more classic movies to draw from than Warner Bros. This week brings a goldmine of classic WB titles, but none of these is more appealing than the new box set Warner Bros. and the Homefront. Just in time for Veteran’s Day, the box set contains three of the studio’s best-known flag-waving entertainments, all of which are new to DVD. The most notable of the bunch was the 1943 hit Irving Berlin’s This Is The Army, starring future president Ronald Reagan along with the titular composer. The other films in the set are a pair of star-studded patriotic musicals, Thank Your Lucky Stars and Hollywood Canteen. In addition, Warner Bros. has dug into their massive collection of archival material in order to pair vintage short films, newsreels, trailers and cartoons with each of the films, including the semi-notorious Herr Meets Hare. So while some might claim that the films in the Homefront collection are disposable, the box set is anything but.

Warner will also be releasing two box sets for the holidays, Warner Bros. Holiday Collection Volume 1 and Volume 2. Volume 1 includes previously-released DVDs of Boys Town, A Christmas Carol, and Christmas in Connecticut, plus a bonus DVD of The Singing Nun. Volume 2 contains the new-to-DVD titles All Mine to Give, Holiday Affair, and It Happened on 5th Avenue (each sold separately), plus Blossoms in the Dust, available only in the box set. Paramount will be rereleasing three of their most beloved classics- Roman Holiday, Sabrina, and Sunset Blvd- in special “Centennial Editions” just in time for the studio’s 100th anniversary. Other classics coming to DVD this week include: JFK 3-Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray), Quo Vadis (Warner), and The Director’s Series: Roberto Rossellini (Lionsgate), which includes Escape By Night and Where Is Freedom?.

The highest-profile recent releases coming to DVD this week are Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Universal, also Blu-Ray) and Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Also this week: Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django (First Look, also Blu-Ray); the holiday-themed This Christmas (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Christophe Honore’s Love Songs (Genius Productions); the breakdancing doc Planet B-Boy (Arts Alliance America); and two titles who will have almost no audience members in common, Toby Keith in Beer For My Horses (Lionsgate) and the Flaming Lips in Christmas on Mars (WEA).

This week’s big TV on DVD news is the release of the massive The Sopranos: The Complete Series (HBO) box set. In addition, there’s also The Cosby Show: The Complete Series (First Look), as well as Scrubs Season 7 (Disney). And finally, the Blu-Ray only titles for this week are exclusively TV shows: Band of Brothers (Warner), Chuck Season 1 (Warner), Firefly: The Complete Series (Warner), and Supernatural Season 3 (Warner). So that’s cool, I guess.

Supply Side Film Criticism: How Travis Bickle Saved the Reagan Revolution

Phil Nugent — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver has long been seen as a controversial masterpiece, a searing time capsule of New York City scraping bottom, and a high point in the fashion history of Mohawk haircuts. Now it turns out that on top of all those things, it's also a stealth fighter in the battle to unleash the forces of free market capitalism. This comes from Columbia University economist and Nobel laureate Robert Mundell, who has revealed to the world a theory that might be called wildly speculative and more than a little tasteless--in a word, Screengrabian. It has to do with the infamous effects of the film on John Hinckley, who developed an obsession with Jodie Foster based on her performance in the movie and watched it over and over, immersing himself in the sight of Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle preparing to assassinate a presidential candidate before switching gears and turning his guns on the Foster character's exploiters. Eventually, in the spring of 1981, Hinckley himself shot Ronald Reagan, then less than two months into his presidency.

Here's where it gets good. Although many remember Reagan as having been supernaturally unstoppable during the early years of his presidency, he was already facing major opposition, both in Congress and from the public at large, to parts of his economic plan. But then Hinckley showed up. "According to Mundell," writes the Financial Times of London, "the wave of sympathy for Reagan that was engendered by the assassination attempt deterred Democrats in Congress from voting against his proposed tax cuts. Because of this accident of history, the US administered a big fiscal stimulus at the same time that Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve was administering tight money. This, for Mundell, was vital in creating the era of prosperity that followed." On the basis of this development, Mindell doesn't think that the movie's historical economic importance can be overstated. "Taxi Driver is the most important movie ever made from the standpoint of creating GDP," he's said. "It's the movie that made the Reagan revolution possible. That movie was indirectly responsible for adding between $5trn and $15trn of output to the US economy." At least we think it was indirect. Stay tuned for our next chapter, in which Oliver Stone arrives waving photos of Milton Friedman and Martin Scorsese performing script doctoring chores while crouching in the grassy knoll.

Forgotten Films: "Just Tell Me What You Want" (1980)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In his the most recent film of his incredibly long, checkered, impressive career, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (out on DVD next week), director Sidney Lumet played to his strengths: his rapport with his actors, and his ability to tap into an energy that can be exciting even when it turns scabrous. Lumet turned those qualities on his own show-business-industry set in his 1980 comedy Just Tell Me What You Want, which came out early in 1980, got appalled reviews, and vanished from sight. Like much of Lumet's work, the movie is uneven and feels patched-together in places, but the very qualities that seemed to gross out critics at the time are part of what makes it such a bold, distinctive entertainment, a romantic comedy without illusions. It's cynical without being judgemental, which is so unusual that some reviewers may have had trouble believing what they were seeing. (Lumet got great reviews for some of his duller '80s films that were eager to point fingers at their characters' moral defects.)

Its hero, and its target, is Max Herschel, a self-made corporate head (played by the stand-up comic Alan King) who sees everything, including his love life, as a succession of deals to be made. Max is married (to a drug-addled, bejewelled WASP goddess played by Dina Merrill), but he's been juggling a long-term affair with a TV producer (Ali MacGraw), and when she leaves him for a playwright (Peter Weller) who represents artistic purity and uncommercial values, Max freaks. What makes his decision to wage war on his ex-girlfriend, by wrecking her career while offering her writer-lover the chance to corrupt himself by adapting his own work to the movies, weirdly charming is that, like Cary Grant in His Girl Friday, he's trying to win her back by bringing her to her senses. He's right to think that she really belongs in the executive suite with him instead of blowing on her fingers in a cold hovel playing muse to some proud literary loser. And Alan King, in his only starring movie role, makes Max a hard man to dislike. (The large, lively cast also includes Myrna Loy, smooth as silk in her final screen role as Max's secretary.) Just Tell Me What You Want may have been a few years ahead of its time; a year after its release, Ronald Reagan was president, manipulative rich bastards were on their way to being redefined as glamorous "Masters of the Universe", and in People magazine and on TV series such as Dynasty, Americans were cheering on pushy, multimillionaire hustlers without a fraction of Max's charm. It might be the tragedy of Donald Trump's life that he had to settle for playing himself instead of staying home and letting Alan King do it for him.

The Ten Best Murderous Duos in Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The life of a killer can be a lonely one, whether pursued professionally or as a hobby. In last year's Mr. Brooks, Kevin Costner, who based on some of the stories about his on-the-set behavior that have hit the papers ought to have had some experience with having no one to play with, was so lonesome that he had to summon up an imaginary friend (William Hurt) to give him someone to talk to on those long nights of stalking and shooting. (In the course of the movie, a real person who knows about his secret life approaches him and asks if he can apprentice with him as an aspiring psycho, but since this asshole is played by Dane Cook, having to put him up with him just means Costner needs to lean on the nonexistent Hurt more than ever.) Michael Haneke's new English-language version of his 1996 Funny Games also underlines the need for a killer to bring along a spare, someone with whom he can trade wisecracks and rely on to keep an eye on the prey and one hand on the remote control. (If you haven't seen the movie, don't ask. And if you haven't seen the movie, also don't see the movie.) Then there's Pete and Sidney, who work for Joe Brody in the classic The Big Sleep. After Humphrey Bogart's Philip Marlowe meets them, he asks Brody about the weedier, goofier one: "Is he any good?" "Sidney?" replies Brody. "He's company for Pete." ("He kills me," says Pete, by way of an unsolicited testimonial.) These pairs kill us:

Henry (Michael Rooker) & Otis (Tom Towles), HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER (1990)

When watching a couple of characters prancing through a movie laying waste to half the cast, you might let your mind wander to the question of just how these folks met. Are there conventions? Classified ads? It's easier to understand why a serial killer would want another pair of hands than to envision how he'd go shopping for someone to supply them. There are any number of ways that such a conversation could go wrong. Not the least of Henry's virtues is that it addresses head on the issue of how a solo killer goes about trying to establish a franchise. Henry is already well into his serial-killing career when, after a good long stretch on Otis's couch, he concludes that his old friend might have the stuff to join him on his visits to the homes of strangers. For a while, it does look as if having the fun-loving Otis along has made it more rewarding to rampage around town performing random acts of dismemberment. But, as our nation has learned since 2000, being a good person with whom to have a beer is not the best qualification for a job requiring careful planning and precise execution. Careless and uncontrollable, Otis finally proves himself an unacceptable risk and winds up as one more load of filler weighing down a Hefty bag. Like Rick in Casablanca, Henry is forced to consider the possibility that he is destined to be one of life's romantic loners.

Mingo (Earl Holliman) & Fante (Lee Van Cleef), THE BIG COMBO (1955)

There’s a lot to love about Joseph H. Lewis’ nasty little noir: the gorgeously dark camerawork by John Alton, the snarling screenplay by Philip Yordan (its vicious snap most clearly evident in an early scene where the mob boss, played toothily by Richard Conte, chews out a losing boxer), the barely sublimated sex and the creative violence. It’s one of the best movies of its kind, and criminally underseen by audiences both today and when it was released. One of the most enjoyable bits of the movie, though, is the presence of Mingo and Fante. These two characters, with their bizarrely unlikely names, are the goons of Conte’s Mr. Brown, and they’re memorably played by the lunkheaded Earl Holliman and the domineering Lee Van Cleef, respectively. Alternately menacing, comical and even sympathetic, they’re two of the best-written minor characters in noir history, but one of the reasons that they’re fondly remembered by a handful of film buffs today (Joss Whedon named a couple of characters in his Firefly series after them) is because, predating Mr. Wint & Mr. Kidd in Diamonds Are Forever by a good twenty years, they are perhaps the first murderous duo on the big screen to be portrayed as gay. Of course, this being the ‘50s, neither Yordan or Lewis could come right out and say so, but it’s made plenty clear for anyone who’s paying attention: Fante and Mingo share a room together, sleep feet apart, bicker like a married couple, express a great deal of, er, manly fondness for one another, and even dine together. Which, in fact, leads to the movie’s big oh-what-a-giveaway line: holed up in a ratty dump waiting for the heat to die down from their latest killing, our gruesome twosome are reduced to dining on take-home lunchmeat, leading Mingo to lament, “I can’t swallow any more salami!” Even if the movie version of The Big Sleep had been allowed to be as explicit about the sexuality of Joel Cairo and Wilmer Cook as the book was, they wouldn’t have been this much fun.

Al (Charles McGraw) & Max (William Conrad), THE KILLERS (1946)

These guys have a special weapon: the dialogue from the classic original short story by Ernest Hemingway. In the story, two strangers walk into the small town diner where they plan to kill "the Swede" for reasons unspecified, and, feeling serenely untouchable in their big-city arrogance, proceed to taunt the rubes while they sit there and wait for their target to walk in. ("We’re killing him for a friend. Just to oblige a friend, bright boy.") The first fifteen or twenty minutes of this movie amount to probably the most faithful film adaptation that Hemingway ever got: McGraw, the star of the cult noir The Narrow Margin (and a man who looked as if he'd been carved out of granite and was royally pissed off about it) and Conrad (TV's Cannon and the narrator of the Bullwinkle cartoons) just play out their little scene together, and then the Heningway story runs out. The movie, which was co-written by Anthony Veiller and the uncredited John Huston and Richard Brooks, and which is not bad at all, proceeds to fill itself out to feature length by having an investigator, played by Edmond O'Brien, fill in the backstory of why the Swede — Burt Lancaster, in his film debut — had a price on his head. There was a sort-of remake in 1964, directed by Don Siegel, which is best remembered as Ronald Reagan's last film as an actor. (He plays the head villain and gets to slap Angie Dickinson around.) The remake, which hews closer to the Lancaster movie than to the Hemingway, eliminates the O'Brien-investigator figure and has the killers themselves — called Charlie and Lee, and played by old pro Lee Marvin and younger hepcat punk Clu Gulager — decide to find out why they'd been hired. This version lacks the crackle that the earlier one had, but it does have a scene where the title characters trap Norman Fell in a steam bath while Gulager mockingly wipes his sunglasses on Mr. Roper's head.

Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) & Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), LA CEREMONIE (1995)

Bonnaire and Huppert are two of France's greatest and most fearless actresses, and it's a wonder it took a director so long to put them together. But when Claude Chabrol finally did so in his masterful thriller, the result was quite possibly the finest psychotic duo in French cinema. Bonnaire plays Sophie, an illiterate yet hyper-competent young maid for a rich family, and Huppert is Jeanne, a nosy, gossipy postal clerk who becomes her friend. "What a pair," Sophie's employer (Jean-Pierre Cassel) exclaims. "One can't read and the other reads our mail!" It's clear that the two women need each other — Jeanne, with her playfully forceful personality, draws Sophie out of her shell, while Sophie gives Jeanne a sympathetic ear compared to the other townspeople who shun her for the accidental killing of her young daughter. Soon, the two of them are partners in crime, getting into all manner of mischief around town and at the charity where they volunteer. But after Sophie is fired for trying to blackmail the family's pregnant daughter, she and Jeanne sneak in one night to take revenge. The night begins innocently enough — some torn clothing here, some ruined bed sheets there — but quickly turns deadly once the girls see the shotguns hanging on the wall. Jeanne wants to have fun by scaring them, while Sophie insists on loading the guns, yet it's entirely possible that they hadn't planned to kill anyone until Cassel happens upon the gun-toting duo in his kitchen. Once they've killed him, they have no choice but to kill off the rest of the family as well. For all the big-screen psychopaths who plan their murders down to the last detail, cases like Sophie's and Jeanne's are arguably more chilling, as the killings aren't a premeditated act of vengeance but the climax of a prank gone horribly wrong. Funny games, indeed.

Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey) & Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet), HEAVENLY CREATURES (1994)

Like Sophie and Jeanne, Heavenly Creatures' heroines Pauline Parker (Lynskey) and Juliet Hulme (Winslet) are a pair who first bond over their shared outcast status. In their case, they both suffer from health problems, and as their classmates take exercise, they become fast friends. Together they rule over a lurid, elaborate fantasy world of their own creation. The pair are inseparable, spending every possible moment together, and they eventually their frenzied teenage hormones lead them to experiment with sex. But more than anything else, it's their fantasies that sustain them and help them to escape their difficult lives in 1950s New Zealand, but they also lead to their downfall. From the beginning, they look down on anyone else, and eventually this disdain turns to paranoia about those who would threaten their happiness together. Of all the perceived threats to the world they've created, the most threatening is Pauline's pragmatic, hardworking mother, so one day the girls decide to join her on a leisurely stroll, and when they're alone on a path, they bludgeon her to death. Heavenly Creatures was based on a real-life case, and while the facts might have lent themselves to a sensationalistic treatment, director Peter Jackson keeps us with his heroines all the way. The film follows Pauline and Juliet into their fantasies (rendered in loving detail by a pre-Lord of the Rings Jackson), mostly because it's the only way to truly understand what led them to carry out their hideous crime. Along the way, we grow to love the sinners even as we hate their sin, and it's because of this that the film's final scene, in which Pauline and Juliet are forced apart by the courts, is almost unbearably sad.

— Paul Clark; Phil Nugent; Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 2.

Not That Anyone Cares Now, but Rudy Giuliani Was the Tazmanian Devil

Phil Nugent — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Jeff Greenfield at Slate offers a timely new unified theory of American presidential politics based on the work of Chuck Jones. In a nutshell: American politicians are divided between those who remind voters of Bugs Bunny and those who remind them of Daffy Duck. "As shaped by genius animator Chuck Jones — he didn't create the Warner Bros. icons, but he gave them their later looks and personalities — Bugs and Daffy represent polar opposites in how to deal with the world. Bugs is at ease, laid back, secure, confident. His lidded eyes and sly smile suggest a sense that he knows the way things work. He's onto the cons of his adversaries... Bugs never raises his voice, never flails at his opponents or at the world. He is rarely an aggressor." JFK was a Bugs, Nixon a Daffy; Ronald Reagan, a Bugs, Jimmy Carter a Daffy (who, as if in some Biblical prophecy, prepared for the 1980 contest by being attacked by a rabbit.) Some partisans may detect cracks in the argument. Greenfield identifies the current incumbent as a "Bugs Bunny", but do either Al Gore or John Kerry match up with Daffy Duck, as described by Greenfield: "He fumes, he clenches his fists, his eyes bulge, and his entire body tenses with fury," responding to every setback with "a sibilant sneer"? (Personally, I always associated Kerry with Bullwinkle. But maybe dragging in characters from Jay Ward Productions would demand a whole other set of rules.) And while there may be something to the idea that George W. Bush seems more "at ease, laid back, secure, confident" than his adversaries, it will come as some news to the United Nations that "he never flails at his opponents or at the world" — and perhaps a bit of a belated shocker to everyone else that "he knows the way things work." (Me, I'd say that Bush was more like that manic little dog who used to follow Spike the bullddog around, looking like he was about to piss himself, babbling non-stop about how they were gonna find some cats and put the smackdown on them. Spike, of course, was Dick Cheney.)

In Greenfield's analysis — and he must be right, he does this for a living — Hillary Clinton is a Daffy, Barack Obama a Bugs. "When Clinton insisted that Obama not simply 'denounce' Louis Farrakhan but 'reject him,' Obama shrugged. Well, he said, I don't really see any difference, but if you think there is, I reject and denounce. Indeed, throughout the debate, Obama leaned back and asked for time with the flick of a finger, as if summoning a waiter for another bottle of wine. Clinton, meanwhile, leaned forward, pushing her points with grim determination." So that should give Obama an edge in the general election when he faces John McCain, who is as Daffy as they come. But if Clinton should prevail, then come November, we will have the awesome, perhaps scary spectacle of two Daffys locked in a winner-take-all battle for supremacy. Worlds will collide in a way that Chuck Jones never dared to imagine.

Alex Cox: Revisiting "Walker"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The director Alex Cox drove his career off the rails a while back, and he's kind of self-congratulatory about it, and a lot of his movies, well, suck, but he did make Repo Man, and there's something likable about him. Like John Sayles, Cox sets an admirable example as an ornery, self-supporting filmmaker even if you'd rather not watch at least half of his movies (and can't locate copies of the other half), and he makes for a better interview. Dennis Lim talks him up on the subject of his "Waterloo moment", Walker, on the occasion of that badly received movie's debut on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection. The film itself remains one of the strangest of all relics of the Reagan era. It was loosely inspired by the historical figure William Walker, a medical doctor, lawyer, newspaper editor and journalist, and soldier of fortune who, in 1853, briefly installed himself as president of part of Baja, California after he and a force of forty-five men "conquered" it from Mexico. After the Mexicans drove him off, Walker signed on with the rebel forces in Nicaragua, and in 1855 he took the capital of Grenada and installed himself as ruler of the country, first acting through a puppet leader and then having himself "elected" to the position of president. He was driven out of the country after a year and ultimately executed by firing squad while futzing about in Honduras.

When Cox encountered the story of Walker, he saw it as a chance to stage an action-adventure that would serve as an eerie parallel to the Reagan administration's then on-going proxy war to drive out the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. He actually managed to persuade the Sandinistas to let him shoot the movie on location in their beseiged country, and perhaps more remarkably, he got Universal to pay for the thing. (He also made the spaghetti Western parody Straight to Hell, featuring Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello and the Pogues, as a sort of warm-up, saying that he wanted to work on his action-filmmaking skills by staging a bunch of shoot-outs with his cast, which was largely made up of politically like-minded musicians who had the time on their hands because a planned tour of Nicaragua had just been scuttled.) Cox wanted a sort of Sergio Leone-Sam Peckinpah flavor for Walker, and to that end he hired Rudy Wurlitzer, who had written the script for Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid — though granted, when he first wrote it, he thought it was going to be for Monte Hellman — to whip up a screenplay. By the time that Cox, Wurlitzer, and a cast that included Strummer, Xander Berkeley, Rene Auberjonois, Alfonso Arau, Gerrit Graham, Miguel Sandoval, Sy Richardson, and Ed Harris as Walker, were shooting in Nicaragua, the Iran-Contra scandal had broken, Oliver North was a television star, and Nicaragua was bigger news in America than it had ever been. Lines such as Walker's ominous, taunting "You may think there will come a time when America will leave Nicaragua alone" would have had some special resonance. But when Walker opened in December of 1987, you could all but hear crickets chirping.

Twenty years ago, the conventional wisdom regarding the movie's commercial failure was that it was snide and self-congratulatory yet underbaked, unrealized, and disposable. Cox has other theories. As he sees it, he actually set out "to make a broadly popular film, which is why it's full of jokes and violence and beautiful women." He also clearly thinks that his sins were political, not aesthetic. Cox may have expected a bad reaction from conservatives, but he also thinks that lily-livered liberals such as Robert Redford were too soft and pious to appreciate his brand of audacity and the film's mix of gore and anachronistic sight gags (Walker appears on the cover of Time magazine and is choppered out of the collapsing country by an American helicopter) and random punk gestures (Marlee Matlin, whose role as Walker's deaf-mute fiancee was her first movie appearance after winning an Oscar for Children of a Lesser God, gets to sign "Go fuck a pig"). Weird thought this seems now, Walker was Cox's big one for an American study, and he says that "since 1988 I have not had one offer of work from any of the Hollywood studios. I've existed entirely independent of the studios. You make one political film, and that's it — blacklisted. But that's okay, it's a good film to be blacklisted for."

Stallone: What You Choose to Call Self-Serving Gibberish, He Calls an Interview

Phil Nugent — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

How does Sylvester Stallone answer charges that Rambo is excessively violent? With great indignation, which is of course the only way that his screen characters ever answer anything. "I don't think this film is horrific and bloody, because that's what war is. It's not gratuitous violence. Gratuitous violence is a guy dressed up in a fright wig with a meat cleaver, chasing teenagers around the woods for ten hours. This is war, and it's a civil war — which, as you know, is by far the most vicious of all wars." To hear Stallone tell it, he actually expects people to respect the fact — or at least, not fall down laughing hysterically at the idea — that he made this movie in order to call attention to how bad things are in Burma. "We did tons and tons of research. There's an unbelievable amount of material out there, literally hour by hour. It's almost a teletype of the horrendous things that are going on there. And it's hard to believe that it's publicised and nobody does anything about it." Far be it from us to suggest that one reason Stallone may have selected Burma, out of all the world's trouble spots, to turn Rambo loose in is that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of widespread public awareness of the atrocities being committed there, which means that he's not going to alienate a huge percentage of the international movie market by painting half the population as a bunch of wilde-eyed sadists hoping that the next plane in will bring them a blonde missionary to ravage. (And it goes without saying that, what with everyone running around decaptitating each other, Burma itself is not considered a prime movie market.) Twelve years ago, another movie about a Westerner who gets caught up trying to help the people of Burma, John Boorman's Beyond Rangoon, got little notice from audiences. (Slipping into pitchman's mode, Stallone has called Rambo "sort of like Beyond Rangoon, but with rocket launchers.")

It's optimistic to expect Stallone to realize that tying his self-glorifying action fantasies to an actual political situation actually makes his movie more offensive than it would be if he were fighting nameless killers in a made-up country, or gladiators from outer space, or some other deserving adversaries. It's not the gore that makes the Rambo movies so disgusting — you can like it or not like it, you can lap it up or hide your eyes, but in the end, it's only a movie. What's always made these movies splash down harder than most flicks of their ilk is the way that Stallone mixes cartoon heroics with "contemporary issues" in a way that touches real nerves. 1985's Rambo: First Blood, Part II would have just been a feature-length G. I. Joe toy commercial on steroids if Stallone hadn't had the instinct to exploit national guilt about having "abandoned" Vietnam vets and the desire to believe that M.I.A. soldiers were still over there, waiting to be rescued. What's debatable is Stallone's contention that this level of manipulation makes his movies more serious, and less sleazy, than the Friday the 13th pictures. It's trickier than it looks, I'll grant you that. When Stallone was kicking around the idea of making a fourth Rambo movie back in the early 1990s, before Rocky V bombed, he was reportedly thinking of making it about "the environment." That was before Republican politicians chose to make global warming not a scientific matter for serious study but an issue to be mocked and used to beat people like Al Gore over the head with; though it's a more pressing issue now than it was then, to have Rambo take it up would have meant possibly alienating a huge percentage of the audience that goes to the movies to see stuff get blown up. It stands to figure that Stallone wouldn't want to be burned again, after the disappointing reception to the 1988 Rambo III. The 1985 movie had ridden the wave of Reagan-era anti-Communist machismo; President Reagan had invoked Rambo's name in response to everything from a terrorist hijacking to tax reform, and in popular culture, the two figures became deeply connected people's minds. But Stallone now says that the third Rambo film, set in Afghanistan, died on the vine because Ronnie stabbed him in the back by letting the Cold War end ahead of schedule: "Two weeks before the film comes out Gorbachev comes over and gives Reagan a hug, kisses Nancy on the cheek and now I'm a Red-baiter!"

Morning Deal Report: Golden Globes Take a Fall

Peter Smith — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 16:05:00 GMT

Annnnd, the Golden Globes bite it. I'm all in favor of awards shows kerploding; the only concern is that the writers will get blamed for pooping the party, when they really have every reason to be striking. But this'll cost the studios a lot of money and promotion. Maybe it'd be easier to just pay the writers for their work? No?

Karyn Kusama (Girlfight. . . and Aeon Flux) will direct Jennifer's Body, ~~Brook Busey-Hunt's~~ Diablo Cody's follow-up to Juno.

Ridley Scott just never slows down, huh? His next project is The Reykjavik Summit, about Reagan and Gorbachev's '86 nuke talks. Ridley Scott made some of my favorite movies, but political acuity is not is strong suit. When this turns out to be a Reagan hagiography, I'm gonna barf.