Overthinking It has hosted some posts of late debating pop-cultural parodies, like Starship Troopers and Steel Panther. These posts have generated some contentious yet rewarding discussions. In these posts, and the discussions that follow, a common question has emerged: does the fact of being a parody excuse the parody from being offensive? Is “I’m Just Kidding, Guys” a sufficient defense?
Movie critic A. O. Scott has what appears to be a new series of retrospective video reviews of his favorite movies on the New York Times website, and much to my surprise, his latest entry is an independent art film from 1985 called Rambo: First Blood Part II.
Why my surprise? Find out after the jump.
[Every now and again, when we are on the verge of vomiting up the crap Hollywood is shoveling down our throats, this weekly series by Matthew Belinkie reminds us to keep things in perspective. —Ed.]
The Movie: Cliffhanger
Why It Strains Credulity:
Lithgow looks precisely like the Harvard-educated Fullbright scholar that he is. And Stallone looks exactly like the HGH-abetted manimal that he is. Bottom line: if Ivan Drago couldn’t do it, there’s no way the bad guy from Footloose is going to defeat the Italian Stallion.
No sooner did I finish my weeklong series on Rambo than I came across this little corner of the blogosphere, and I think it, as much as anything else, helps me clarify why I bothered to do a weeklong series on Rambo.
This week, I’ve delved into the True Meaning of Rambo in preparation for his (brief) return from irrelevance. Today, I’ll close the series out with a quick look at two great characters Mr. Stallone originated — one has his own statue, and the other languished in condemnation for 20 years. We celebrate the one who feeds us dreams, and we condemn the one who shows us ourselves.
Above all else, America is dedicated to the proposition that “what happened to other countries isn’t going to happen to us.” As such, our variations on the tragic hero struggle to buck free of their core restrictions, often with startling results.
John Rambo (the movie hero and cultural icon, inseparable from Sly Stallone) is an example of one such effort — The Reverse Tragic Hero.
Our old buddy Rambo’s got the best poster for a new movie I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a pretty good work of graphic design (I love how Rambo’s mullet forms the drips of a hasty paint job), but more importantly, its manufactured message blunders its way close to honesty, which is something we rarely get from movie posters.
