The loquacity of Joel's grappling with the Rambo franchise and its latest installment pushed my hand and I put down Season 5 of The Wire and instead rented Rambo so that my wife and I could sit and alternate between being bored and baffled for 80 minutes last night.
Why, dammit?
As noted, the film achieves an overkill with viscera being blasted onto the camera's lens, but with this nod to veracity, why are the mercenaries depicted walking in a cluster -- through the world's most densely sown fields of landmines? Is it possible that Christians - when bound and neglected (or fed to swine) in serial rain for a fortnight - can then sprint upon being freed from their tethers? As the opening sequence reveals, the Burmese military have been accused of using chemical agents again dissident populations. So -- what happened to, even, oh I don't know, a conventionally armed air force; perhaps it was their day off. My wife noted it was likely Sunday: praise Jesus.
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Though A.O. Scott does welcome Rambo back from the dustbin of mad magazine self-parody, the most artful term the venerable NYT can employ is "blockhead poetry."
Such induces reflection.
Isn't this really an episode of Grizzly Adams co-opted by Eli Roth?
You once spoke of a future George Lucas project where the esteemed kook would finally transcend the foibles of human actors and voices. This may have been the prelude to the Fall.
Sorry to bend your attentions away from further consumption of ghetto porn - if even for 80-odd minutes. But I ask, really? Really . . . the cry and hew of and for veracity comes from clumped mercenaries in the jungle? (But that Asian dude ended up being a bad-ass!) Don't forget that before her death Princess Di was hard at work in the clean-up of those beastly things in that part of the world. What air force? Whose air force? That of the Burmese? While they do have a nominally modern force (particularly for the region) are you suggesting it would (should) get called out for every skirmish - even a relatively substantial one involving a force of Karen rebels? As to whether missionaries stuck in high stress positions for some time would then have the physical wearwithall to actively partcipate in their own escape - again, is that what is at issue? I don't care to defend it, or Rambo, anymore than I already have - because I am not sure that I really defended such as to say that it/he/they have become a totemic figure of confused ambivalence. No concern for the hubris that is involved in those who wish to pretend that things are clean? That with the right weapons we can single out and deal appropriately with only the baddies, apparently now with "plausible deniability." That does not bother you? Perhaps you would like a little irony, perhaps just a bit more charm? I thought even the Wire pretended towards more nuance than that. All that noted, I can well concede the idea that such fodder could well be a pawn in the march towards doing away with the vicissitudes of actors in cinematic entertainment. However, it is still in the (rightly termed) "blockhead poetry" of the the film that we must look. It is messy and that I think is the point of the whole thing. But, yes, it might be Grizzly Adams though a Roth prism. But nothing for the Snowman, I am ashamed.
-fp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar_Air_Force
I'd say the slaughter of 120 soldiers, the loss of three trucks and an armored patrol boat would warrant some measure of intervention, not to say the rescue of a half dozen Western witnesses to war crimes.
If I were as pragmatic as you believe yourself to be being, I would say that the Western witnesses to war crimes and HRVs likely would not bother them one whit. The very (f)act of the real footage at the beginning of the film attests to the fact that plenty has been witnessed to little effect on the ruling regime. And if you are scabbing together half your forces by raiding villages and then driving frightened boys into fits of frenzy and rage by way of drugs, liqour, and sex/rape - what do you care about 120 soldiers. Equipment too can be gotten cheap from Korea or elsewhere. I'll stand-by the idea that the crescendo on screen was, sizeable for what it was perhaps, still nothing more than a mountain skirmish that the Burmese gov't forces have been engaged in since decolonization
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