UNLEARNING THE TOP 10 CONSERVATIVE LESSONS OF ROCKY IV

Forget the politics, how are these two motherfuckers even in the same weight class?

I'm no stranger to banging the drums for weird, or even bad, movies. Two of the most enduringly popular posts in the history of this blog are the one consisting in large (and aesthetically central) part with advocating for Ocean's Twelve as the great unappreciated studio picture of our time, and the one where I discussed my lifelong love for the cinema of Chris Tucker. Tilting at windmills is shitloads of fun: Cervantes was on that hundreds of fucking years ago, and all he did was coin the phrase, not the concept. But the important thing to remember in all this is that down is not up, making an idiosyncratic critical argument requires a critical approach, and that assumptions are not facts. Not even that whole “come on, let's keep it real, we all know [x]” fallacy, where x = a simplistic generalization based on a cynical, pessimistic assumption masquerading as realism.

Also, we need to be careful to remember that movies are movies, not containers into which we can pour our political biases. This brings me to a post on the blog Big Hollywood, wherein the writer outlined the Top 10 Conservative Lessons of Rocky IV. It violates every single principle listed above. It posits that reality is something other than it is. It presents assumptions and opinions as facts, with plenty of “come on, we all know” bullshit. And nine of them are completely untrue.

Before breaking down the list, a bit of historical context is necessary. Rocky IV came out in 1985, the first year of Ronald Reagan's second term, which he won in one of the biggest electoral landslides in American history. There was no way of knowing that in only a couple years, Communism would collapse, and so popular culture was consumed with the Cold War and the Soviet threat. Not only the fight against Communism but money and cocaine as well pushed Hollywood rightward, and the industry cranked out movies where American supermen prevailed over all odds. Sometimes they explicitly fought Commies, sometimes proxies. But Rocky IV fell squarely within that trend, with Sly appropriating Rocky to, like his Rambo franchise, fight Commies. Considering Sly's success at the box office, and the theme, this may have been the easiest green light in the history of Hollywood (and, given the climate, getting the studio to sign off on the line “Hey, we don't keep our people behind a wall with machine guns” was not even a thing that needed to be done, so if the writer ever gets to ask Sly how he pulled that off, she should expect a blank stare). It was not a rebellious island in a sea of craven liberal capitulation to the Soviet beast. It was a conservative movie in multiple senses of the term. That understood, let us proceed:


“1—Communism (let me be succinct and find the right word here) sucks.”

We can skip the assertion that the assertion that Rocky IV is the greatest movie of all time is not an opinion but fact, because as much as I could get all bent out of shape about logical fallacies and the difference between opinion and fact, the writer was kidding, to a certain extent. And this is the one lesson that doesn't have a rebuttal. Communism, in every practical application, did suck. As a philosophy, it's like running the wrong operating system on a computer. Even though it's possible to split hairs and point out (as countless college freshmen have) that all of the ostensibly Communist regimes in history have been top-down dictatorships where ultimately one dude was in charge, and that “pure” Communism has never been implemented, pure Communism is completely untenable outside small, completely homogenous groups, because it's one of those things that sounds cool in theory but is completely antithetical to human nature in practice. Which is why everyone who wanted to try it made a couple strategic edits to the philosophy, and brought guns.

Problem is, a lot of anti-Communists didn't know when to leave well enough alone, and attributed every perfidious act by every person in every Communist regime to Communism as a philosophy. The writer mentions the Russians cheating and shooting Dolph up with drugs, which Sly didn't just pull out of his ass. The Soviets and other Eastern Bloc countries did that shit all the time. But it had nothing to do with Marx. It had to do with people living in a system that was simultaneously fundamentally broken and obsessed with the glory of the state. That desperation backed people into corners where they had to make the choice between being unethical or facing pretty severe consequences. This isn't exactly a contradiction of the drugged-up Dolph point, it's more that when you imagine Dolph as existing in a real world, he's someone to be pitied rather than loathed. That said, the assumption that, in the 80s, he'd be on his way to a Siberian labor camp just for losing to Rocky is faulty. He might not have even been sent to Siberia for his outburst of cartoonish individualism—I mean, if he'd pulled that shit during the Stalin era someone would have shot him in the head in the ring, but then again, if it was the Stalin era, Rocky wouldn't have been allowed into Russia in the first place—either. Nothing terribly fun would have happened to him. Dolph's life would have sucked til Communism fell, but the likelihood of it sucking somewhere relatively near Moscow or Leningrad was better than you'd think.

One final point about lesson 1: the assumption of knowledge of Brigitte Nielsen's character's inner life is entirely without merit. You'd need to perform feats of rhetorical alchemy to convince me that her character had an inner life at all, let alone that her leaving Dolph was a fait accompli. Assumption, not fact.


“2—There are wealthy people who are also (gasp!) perfectly good people.”

This is where the lessons devolve into silliness. It's easier to count mainstream Hollywood movies without wealthy or well-off protagonists than it is ones with same. Just about the entire romantic comedy genre is either about rich women trying to find love or not necessarily rich women trying to find love with rich guys. The default state for protagonists, in any mainstream genre, unless the plot requires otherwise, is to be middle class. Sure, middle class people aren't rich, but they are privileged. Material success is portrayed in Hollywood as either matter of fact, or aspirational. To assert otherwise requires a lot of cherry-picking, carefully ignoring almost every movie released by a major studio.

I'm not going to touch the literal reading of this assertion, that there are wealthy people who are perfect at being good. That would be excessive shit-starting. Also, all evil white guys in suits jokes aside, it is theoretically possible that there is a wealthy person out there who is perfectly good. But I highly doubt s/he would vote Republican.


“3—Traditional family values are beautiful.”

They're also a myth. Concocted by Hollywood. The mythical 1950s-ish world to which conservatives want to “return” never existed. Getting married and being loyal to your spouse is good, but it is not the most important thing in the world. And there is no conflict whatsoever between straight people getting married to each other and gay people getting married to each other. Marriage is an affirmation of the strength of one's bond with one's partner. Note the absence of gender pronouns there.

Also, Rocky is a guy who punches people. The reason why he's the avatar of the American way in Rocky IV is because Sly wrote a script where Rocky is the avatar of the American way, and Sly did so because Sly was going to be directing Sly in the lead role. He has a wife because his relationship with Adrian generated audience sympathy in the first movie. The reason she's in the fourth movie is because she was in the first three. She does not help Rocky punch people.


“4—Patriotism.”

All fine and good. America's pretty rad, no argument there. But . . . wait a minute, what comes next?

“Three words: APOLLO 'effing CREED.”

Oh, boy. This is followed by a whole bunch of bullshit about how awesome it is that Apollo Creed loves his country and drives liberals crazy because he's wearing red, white, and blue. That didn't really bug me, but I'm not a “liberal,” which must explain that. What's telling is the writer going on and on about Apollo Creed being “[o]ne of cinematic history's greatest characters, period” because he doesn't care about racism, ignoring a couple important points, first that he's not a real person, and second, that he's a fictional character written by a white guy. Apollo Creed not feeling like he's the victim of racism is because a white guy doesn't feel like Apollo Creed is a victim of racism. This lessens the impact of Apollo's patriotism a bit, and makes the next lesson—


“5—Color-blind race relations are the way to go.”

—even more ridiculous, which is impressive considering how stupid the last one was. This whole “color-blind” fallacy is not unique to conservatives, but conservatives have massive boners for it. For a bunch of purportedly grounded realists, claiming that ignoring race is, ipso facto, eradicating racism is like sticking your fingers in your ears and going “LALALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU RACISM LOOK I SHUT MY EYES TOO SO I CAN'T SEE YOU SO YOU AREN'T THERE LALALALALA.” The worst part is, none of the accompanying text with this lesson in any way refutes the existence of institutional racism. Apollo training Rocky to beat Clubber Lang doesn't refute shit. Clubber Lang was a fucking asshole. But was he a fucking asshole inherently, or was he made that way experientially by a country that hated him on principle from birth? Would Apollo Creed have still chosen to be a boxer if he'd known there were other options? Muhammad Ali became a boxer basically because he had to, and Muhammad Ali was the basis for Apollo Creed in the first movie, which was inspired by the 1975 fight in which Chuck Wepner took Ali 15 rounds. It should be noted that Muhammad Ali never subsequently trained Chuck Wepner, and until Parkinson's robbed him of his ability to speak as freely as he once did, he was as outspoken a critic of institutional racism as ever existed in American public life. Turning Muhammad Ali into Apollo Creed and writing him further and further into compliant, apolitical impotence as Sly did over the course of the Rocky series is borderline sinister (writing it off to intellectual laziness, which I do, is extremely generous), and then killing him off to get the audience on Rocky's side is sickeningly fucking gratuitous.


“6—There is no room for moral relativism.”

Well, sure. It's propaganda. Actually what I think the writer might mean is: “There is no room to disagree with what I'm saying.” But this is also clearly not the case. What have I been doing thus far?


“7—Faith in God is paramount.”

No, faith in God is Warner Bros. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA oh man am I the best or am I the best. Seriously, though, Rocky is a guy who punches people. God doesn't punch anyone in this movie. And the writer clearly hasn't seen Warrior if she thinks fighters praying before a fight would be edited out today. Wait, bad example, no one saw Warrior. But she mentions Tim Tebow, and all you need to know about Tim Tebow and atheists is, I started that fuckin guy on my fantasy team all the way to the playoff finals, when I second-guessed myself and started Mike Vick instead because I thought Tebow had a bad matchup. I mean, I still would have lost even if I'd started Tebow because my opponent had Aaron Rodgers, who is better at football than Tim Tebow, but I'm not burning copies of the Bible because I lost. These things happen when one guy is better at something than another guy.

The conclusion to this thought—“Judeo-Christian beliefs are as American as apple pie”—only requires a reminder that what originally united the various states of America was a philosophy based almost entirely in Enlightenment thinking. Some of the Founding Fathers identified as Christians. Others, like Thomas Jefferson, did not (he was a Deist, and famously owned a copy of the Bible with all references to the divinity of Jesus Christ excised). The government was specifically designed to be separate from any institutional religious influences. But then again, apple pie came from Europe, so the writer may be indulging in the pleasure of the non sequitur.


“8—Manliness personified.”

While I'm certainly not going to criticize the author for liking butch guys, being a man means having a dick. That's it.


“9—Think for yourself rather than going with the tides.”

On the surface, not a bad piece of advice at all, until the punchline, which makes it clear that supporting Barack Obama is being equated with not thinking for oneself, presented without any correlation and with a bit of a sneer. The last Rocky movie came out in 2006, which means Rocky has never existed in a world in which Barack Obama would have been on his radar (of course, assuming that any presidential candidate would ever be on Rocky's radar, which is a stretch.) Also, Rocky is a guy who punches people, not a politician or a pundit. Who he supports for president has nothing to do with anything.


“10—If you apply yourself and work hard, success is attainable i.e. the very essence of capitalism.”

The big finish! Though what capitalism has to do with Rocky is unclear, when at the beginning of the series of movies, Rocky is working hard and not getting anywhere until by an enormous coincidence he's selected at the whim of Apollo Creed to fight in what Apollo basically regards as an exhibition. Which is straight-up Horatio Alger: in Ragged Dick, the protagonist is hustling for his subsistence until a series of rich people all go “why, look at that lovable scamp, I'm going to rain opportunities and the luxuries of privilege on him.” That has nothing to do with applying yourself and working hard. That's people being handed success. I mean, shit, if you're going to advocate the importance of focused diligence, why not use the example of someone who actually succeeded due to focusing and being diligent?

It is true, though, that the American system affords victors a whole lotta fuckin' spoils. For all that's wrong with it, America does rock when you're in position to take advantage of what it has to offer. But, as in all things, there's a catch. It really, really helps to be a healthy white heterosexual male who belongs to a Protestant Christian denomination and whose family has money. With each qualifier removed, the likelihood of success diminishes, as each removed qualifier is replaced by institutional barriers. That is reality. That is the way things are on Earth. The reference to the Occupy movement is ridiculous, as no one in Zuccotti Park or any other Occupied space, is asking to be given anything. Ironically, what the Occupiers are after is a system in which applying oneself and working hard actually are rewarded proportional to the work done. Also, it bears mentioning yet again that Rocky's participation in the capitalist system is entirely to the extent that people pay him to punch people.


The author concludes by calling Rocky IV “the greatest unintentionally-conservative film ever made, and not coincidentally, a cultural masterpiece.” I'll leave the latter assertion alone for a minute, but Rocky IV is most certainly conservative absolutely on purpose. Even without all the shit the author projects onto the movie, it absolutely serves a conservative purpose: the Russians are BAD! The Americans are GOOD! Sly is the EMBODIMENT OF VIRTUE! Dolph is REIFIED PERFIDY! It's a morally black-and-white bit of “fuck the Commies” propaganda.

And yet, here's the thing. The Rocky movies are completely successful at doing what they do. As much as the unintentional (cutting Sly massive amounts of slack) racism bugs me, the first picture in particular and the sequels to diminishing degrees are marvels of cinematic button-pushing. Putting everything else aside, the primary criteria for judging whether a movie is good or bad are first determining what the movie is setting out to do, and second determining how well the movie succeeded in doing that thing. You don't compare Rocky to Citizen Kane. They're different pictures made for different purposes. Rocky set out to make American white people feel good. Rocky made a lot of American white people feel good. Thus, Rocky is a successful movie, and a successful franchise. This is born out in the massive amounts of money each picture made (even the Tommy Morrison one made lots of money). But let's cool it with the cultural masterpiece bullshit. The aesthetic goals of the Rocky series, especially by the time we get to Rocky IV, even though met are extremely modest, and one simply cannot walk in the room with the amount of racial politics swept under the rug. Rocky IV is a crystalline cultural artifact of its time, the preoccupations of that time, and it has a bitchin' montage, but give me a fucking break. And pick 10 things that actually have something to do with the movie next time.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH NETFLIX, VOL. 7: THE EXPENDABLES

In the summer of 2010, the NBA was thrown for a loop when LeBron James, by any measure one of the two or three best basketball players in the world, and an athlete of astonishing and brutal grace, joined fellow All-Star Chris Bosh in signing with their mutual friend and fellow superstar Dwyane Wade on Wade's Miami Heat. It was widely considered that the teaming of three of the NBA's ten best players (evaluating Bosh generously) and two of the top five essentially made Miami the favorite to win the next several league championships. Wade, after all, had already won one. With such an array of talent in a league that, more than any other team sport, is a league of stars (phrase © FreeDarko), how could they not?

Though they've had some spectacular moments, reality proved a little more complicated. My beloved and long-suffering New York Knicks left a sizable testicle print on Miami's collective forehead on Oscar night, and Miami's current five-game losing streak is the top trending topic on Twitter as of this writing. Merely assembling big stars has not translated into instant success. You still, as the poet said, have to play the games. And this leads us, naturally, to The Expendables.

Long-time readers of this blog—I love all five of you dearly—will remember the odd mention here and there of The Expendables last summer and early fall. When it finally came out, life and finances prevented me from seeing it, and the generally lukewarm reviews made me not particularly care. Still, it's not as though I wasn't going to see it, it simply became the sort of thing I waited to receive in a little red envelope.

Much like the 2010-11 Miami Heat, The Expendables subscribed to the philosophy that one could achieve dominance through the collection of stars. Sly Stallone, a man whose very name conjures fond memories of explosions and violent death in the mind of the sophisticated cineaste, co-wrote, directed, and starred. Sly decided to take advantage of being Sly to call as many large and/or muscular practitioners of the fine art of ownage as he could think of, the idea being that an all-star team of swaggering fucking badasses could win the movie equivalent of a championship, which is to say, that it would own that much more, by the strength in numbers theory.

There are two flaws that present themselves even before we get to the movie. The first is, in Sly's desire to get EVERYBODY, he failed to convince two very important members of the genus “everybody,” namely Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal, to participate. Van Damme, hilariously, declined the role he was offered because he felt the picture lacked significant redeeming social value—which is why Jean-Claude Van Damme is so goddamn fucking fascinating, the man is so sublimely strange—and Seagal, also tellingly, passed because of a beef with the producer. It wasn't as though as Sly wasn't in charge of this shit; if he'd been thinking, he'd have shitcanned the producer in favor of Seagal and rewritten Van Damme's character so that he was running a Boys and Girls Club in Watts or some such.

Flaw 1a, while we're on about casting laziness, not securing Danny Trejo immediately and irrevocably disqualified The Expendables from being the kind of movie it aspired to be. Stupid action movies where shit blows up have Danny Trejo in them. He was in fucking xXx, for shit's sake.

But even if you take flaws 1 and 1a as subjective and unfair—which they are—there's still flaw 2, which is the identical problem the Heat find themselves having this season: you still have to play the games. You can get Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lungren, Randy Couture, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Terry Crews, you can get Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger to make cameos, Eric Roberts and Mickey Rourke for non-ownage scenes, and the underrated David Zayas to ham it up in the Danny Trejo role (it's to Zayas' credit that he even comes close to Trejo-level awesomeness), and sure, hey, that's enough testosterone to make any shit you need blown up officially on its way to kingdom come. But you still have to play the games. In this case, write a script that makes sense, and point the camera in the right direction so that the ownage is captured on camera.

These two qualifiers are not, to put it mildly, fucking rocket science. Writing a screenplay isn't as easy as it looks, but writing a screenplay for a stupid action movie is easier than a lot of genres. Sly, don't forget, has been nominated for an Oscar for screenwriting (for Rocky), so it's not unreasonable to expect him to know how to do stuff like creating characters and map out beats and create something at least coherent. As for the directing, that's an iffier proposition, but you would think Sly had at least been part of enough successful action movies, and movies in general, to know that the whole point of a movie is that you see what the fuck is going on.

You would, if you thought that, be wrong. The Expendables fails on every conceivable level on which a movie can fail. Even the most cursory glance at the rest of this blog should make it perfectly clear that I'm not pulling some snooty film critic bullshit. I damn well know better than to expect thought-provoking works of sensitivity out of Sly. But I don't think I'm amiss—especially as an ardent defender of the staggeringly fucktarded yet unfailingly entertaining Tango & Cash—in expecting Sly to at least deliver a presentable action picture. WHERE YOU CAN FUCKING SEE WHAT'S GOING ON.

This is the most puzzling and infuriating aspect of The Expendables. You can't fucking see anything. I was restlessly screwing around on Twitter while the movie was on, trying to regulate my breathing and not break shit. Here's how it went:

I think I'm going to watch The Expendables tonight. Whether it sucks or rules, it should still be fun to tweet/blog about.

All right, Sly, don't suck, or it's straight to your room with no steroids.

Things, however, went downhill quickly:

The Expendables is like a Dogme 95 picture shot on location in Sly's subconscious: badly lit, simplistic, and not as good as you'd think.

If the whole picture is this underlit I seriously might stalk Sly and ram a light meter up his ass.

My friend Abe chimed in at this point, informing me that there was going to be a fight scene between Jet Li and Dolph Lungren that would set a new standard for visual incoherence and editing; “watching it is like rolling down a hill.” Since we weren't there yet, I continued slogging through:

There's nothing wrong with The Expendables a good writer, director, camera crew, and editor couldn't fix.

I think Sly let his plastic surgeon edit this movie: "Hey, it's called Final Cut, he'll know how it works mumblemumble."

Hey, another one of those explosions that only kills people who don't have speaking parts! (Ed. Note: you know shit is fucked up when I—I, for fuck's sake—am complaining about explosions)

Damn shame Statham's trapped in this piece of shit. In a real movie, the scene where he owned all those guys on the ball court woulda ruled.

This whole movie, David Zayas is grumbling to himself "if I was still on OZ, I woulda killed the shit out of Eric Roberts in the 1st scene."

Another really bad sign: Mickey Rourke isn't the biggest plastic surgery casualty. WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU, SLY????

Christ, what fucking bullshit. Jet Li does NOT need Sly to save him from Dolph Lundgren. Jet wipes the floor with any of these guys.

(At that point, I replied to Abe's thing about the Li/Lundgren fight, which was even worse than he'd said: “I think the editing in the Li/Lundgren fight took five years off my life”)

Podcaster, and fellow sophisticated cineaste, Asim Burney then, rightly, pointed out: “more importantly what's up with Eric Roberts' teeth?” A damn fine question. Eric Roberts' teeth are certainly fucking bizarre in The Expendables. My theory: “Must have fucked them up chewing on scenery.”

By this point, we were past the point of no return anyway (by which I also mean that The Expendables is worse than Point of No Return, that stupid Bridget Fonda remake of La Femme Nikita):

So....I guess we never find out whether Sly or Stone Cold won that fight. Woulda been nice to know, in an action movie. (Ed. Note: if that fight was resolved in any fashion whatsoever, I have no idea; all I know is Stone Cold was beating the fucking fuck out of Sly, and then I blinked and Sly was running away and we never saw Stone Cold again. I swear, I was paying attention. I was totally squinting at the screen trying to figure out what the fuck was going on with the lousy lighting and the shitty editing, and I have no idea what happened to Stone Cold. This is not good.)

Sly makes Michael Bay look like Yasujiro Ozu. (Boosh, motherfucker. What has two thumbs and knows how to name-drop? This guy, madames et monsieurs)

Sly spent $85 mil on this shit and forgot to bring a tripod and lights. (Ed. Note: actually $80 mil, but the point still stands)

Wow. The Expendables really sucks THAT bad. You'd have to replace the Ghostbusters twinkie with a dick to really get a sense of the scale.

Which is basically all you need to know about The Expendables. It sucks a dick of a size that took Harold fucking Ramis' intellect to calculate.

I'm really kind of stunned by just how bad The Expendables actually is. It wasn't even like I was expecting it to be good. My standards for this kind of picture are not ambiguous, nor are they exacting. I want to see men with muscles deal violent death. I want large explosions; in certain cases one well-executed and well-timed explosion will suffice. And in the intervals between violent death and explosions, I want the men with muscles to be cool. For this last, you don't even need to write dialogue for the motherfuckers. Better yet, shut the fuck up. Michael Dudikoff didn't talk a lot, and he was cool (I don't want to hear any shit out of any of you, American Ninja 1 & 2 were both quality entertainment, and Avenging Force rocked). Danny Trejo doesn't flap his yap. Hell, even Alain Delon managed to hide the fact that he was kind of a shitty actor by shutting the fuck up, and Alain Delon rode that clever bit of strategy to status as one of the great icons of international cinema.

No one in The Expendables knows when to shut the fuck up. They bicker like retards. Jason Statham has this whole underdeveloped subplot with this woman—because no matter how bad a movie The Expendables is, it's not so divorced from reality that it would ignore the fact that Jason Statham has not gone an hour and forty minutes without having sex since his movie debut 12+ years ago—and Jet Li has this laboriously dwelt-on, and ultimately false, backstory about needing money for his family. Now, I know Statham has to get laid because he's Statham and Statham gets laid, but we didn't need to torture Jet with long dialogue scenes when we all know goddamn well his ingles isn't that great if it doesn't have any fucking point. Look, when I'm telling you you talk too goddamn much, it's time to take stock of your entire existence because holy shit. That's like Julie Taymor cracking on you for wasting money.

Sly's central fuck-up—I was about to say “original sin” but the movie wasn't that bad—is his failure to understand that language, be it verbal or cinematic, has meaning. His characters' idle, pointless chatter undermines their status as badasses, and he waves his camera around in an equally idle and pointless fashion. Even if he did hold his camera still, there's about five minutes total in the entire fucking movie that's lit well enough to even see. And even if he'd lit properly, the action is cut so that it is literally impossible to see who is doing what to whom at almost any point. That tweet about Sly making Michael Bay look as restrained and elegant as Ozu (famous for his long takes and exquisite compositions), that's only barely an exaggeration. At least in Michael Bay movies, the compositions are legible enough for you to realize, oh, yes, that's Megan Fox's ass. That whole fucking stunningly awful fight between Jet and Dolph, you never see Jet complete a single move. It's like Sly let a four-year-old with a severe cognitive impairment edit the entire picture.

In the wrong sort of mood, I'd interpret the fact that Sly's making a sequel to The Expendables as a sign that he was personally trying to get me to start taking heroin. But making sequels is what Sly does. And, shitty as The Expendables is, it made $200 mil. So, sure, it can exist. But fuck if you're gonna get me to sit through it unless Sly stops off at Home Depot for some clip lights and gets an editor who isn't tweaking his tits off while having a seizure on rollerskates (EDIT: Looks like, per Total Film, someone other than Sly will be making that call, as he won't be writing or directing! I HAVE INFLUENCE, PEOPLE! Ha ha HA!!!).

Remember. It takes more than stars to make a movie. It takes enlightenment. Heh heh heh . . .

ZOMG U GUISE! EXISTENTIAL CRISIS!

Normally, trying to predict box-office results is a gigantic waste of time. The only way it's not is if you actually are a movie studio. Ordinarily, I would completely dismiss the whole enterprise—the only reason I care about how much money a picture makes is its career implications for my favorite directors—except for the fact that occasionally, audiences will be like “Oh, I don't want to go to this picture, it's flopping,” like when Fight Club was in theaters and despite being both wildly entertaining and having something interesting to say politically, people bought into Joe Lieberman's whole Columbine-inspired crusade to cut Hollywood's balls off and the picture would have flopped (and David Fincher would have been through) if it hadn't miraculously turned a profit on DVD.

Columbine was already awful enough. The two jerkoffs responsible ended up trivializing a very real problem in American culture—the relentless bullying of those who do not fit by those who do—and gave people a new reason to harass weirdos, thereby exacerbating the problem. But, because politicians do not understand outsider culture (because the only people who have ever or will ever win elected office are insiders to some degree or other), the way they decided to fix this problem was by making the entertainment industry “police itself” or something. Since Hollywood is a market-driven business, a whole lot of fretting ensued, and the fact that interesting, transgressive pictures had been making healthy profits for the entire decade went out the window in a scared desire to prove to Middle America that “hey, we're not sick and depraved! And those Columbine psychos, it was their fault!”

A decade later, the movie business is in its usual state: neither unacceptably awful nor incongruously awesome. This year in particular has been an interesting one, featuring any number of sequels, cash-ins, and the usual exasperating bullshit, but the odd really interesting picture (like Inception, and a couple kinda cool things at the art houses). This coming weekend, something that used to happen a lot but that I honestly cannot remember the last time it did is looming: two pictures I really want to see are coming out at the same time.

This raises an interesting question: when did Hollywood studios stop competing with each other? Counter-programming—putting out a “chick” picture the same weekend as a “dude” picture—is fucking retarded because it assumes that no chicks want to see dude pictures and no dudes want to see chick pictures; granted the former is a lot more common than the latter, but still. This coming weekend's head-to-head seems like counter-programming, and it's probably a mark of my otherness that I feel like either could have been made personally for me. But let's look at the situation a little more carefully:


Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: dir. Edgar Wright, starring Michael Cera, a couple cute girls, and a bunch of handsome dickheads.

Wherein Scott Pilgrim (Cera) has a fairly mundane problem—dealing with his new girlfriend's dating history—turn comic-book epic end-of-the-world life-or-death on him, as he has to battle her Seven Evil Exes, who are all better looking and more confident than he is, all of whom can beat the living shit out of him unless he musters some inner strength or something. I don't know, I haven't seen the picture yet.

While the premise certainly isn't irredeemable or anything, the main attractions here are Edgar Wright and Michael Cera, both of whom are nerd gods. Edgar Wright's resume is short and to the point: Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz. He knows nerds. He is a nerd. He's a very talented director with a rare ability to balance subtlety with over the top orgasmic geek-out. Scott Pilgrim marks his first foray into a world where Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are no longer there to be awesome, though Michael Cera is definitely of that phylum.

And Michael Cera, despite teetering on the brink of overexposure from having seemingly done the same picture where he shyly romances the cute hipster girl about twenty-five times in a row (even though it's really only three), is finally breaking out of the mold in a very smart way, since he's still shyly romancing the cute hipster girl, except now instead of a bunch of twee faggots with acoustic guitars on the soundtrack providing the only dramatic tension, he faces the threat of people like Chris Evans frat-douche-ily stomping the shit out of him. This bodes well, and the inevitable triumphant third-act table-turning when Michael Cera grows a pair and kicks ass cannot but be one of the funniest fucking things you or I will ever see.

Therein lies the appeal for me. A picture where the nerds get one over on the handsome douchebags who get all the girls is one that will always have an audience of at least yours truly. Even though, fortunately, I'm no longer as awkward as I was in high school (and, let's be real, college, and, let's be more real, my mid 20s) part of me will always identify with the underdog nerd. Although Michael Cera, as the skinny, stuffed-into-locker variety of nerd, is of a slightly different stripe than my hulking and brooding, he's still my people. And I thus support any enterprise that involves Michael Cera hooking up with hot girls. It'll take some of the sting out of never getting to nail Maeby Fünke.


The Expendables: dir. Sly, starring Sly and just about everybody with balls except Danny Trejo.

Of course, this has an entirely different appeal. Back in the 80s when men were men and extras were filled with holes, action movies were not something “real” actors did in between Oscar-bait roles as gay retards with leukemia. Action movies were something you did if you were the personal trainer for one of those “real” actors and had a shapely, steroidal figure.

I've always respected Sly more than I actually like most of his pictures; my favorite things he's done are the sort of things his big fans tend to hate, like Tango & Cash and Demolition Man. I've never seen any of the Rambo movies and only the first Rocky movie, and swear up and down til I'm blue in the face that the best picture he ever did was Nighthawks, which in spite of having Billy Dee Williams and Rutger Hauer (and Joe Spinell!) in it somehow managed to slip through the cracks of history.

This, though, is different. The Expendables has one of the most impressive arrays of large, gruff voiced dudes ever. There's Sly, as the head of a team of ass-kickers for hire or something, who has a summit with Arnold and Bruce Willis which results in Sly and retinue going out and blowing shit up. Who needs details? It's Sly, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Terry Crews, Steve Austin, Randy Couture, and ericrobertsandmickeyrourke *cough cough*.

Now, of course, I want to see this, but I'm resisting for a couple reasons. One is that big-budget homages to low-budget movies (lookin at you, Grindhouse) tend to miss the point and, by the very fact of having more than $1.50 are a totally different kind of picture. Real low-budget action movies have the one guy on steroids in the lead, the one girl no one's ever heard of before who's kind of cute but can't act, the one drunk character actor phoning it in and hamming it up as the villain for that fall's rent, the one other big muscular dude as the villain's number one henchman, and a wise-cracking sidekick (who was sometimes also muscular).

The second reason is that the example I'm about to use of the aesthetic purity of that template is not in The Expendables: Jean-Claude Van Damme. As readers of the Bordeaux, France/Seattle, WA based zine Louis Liard are aware, I am the world's foremost authority on Jean-Claude Van Damme, the king of kings in low-budget action cinema. Genetic engineering could not have produced a better low-budget action star than Jean-Claude Van Damme. He had very large muscles. His near-complete inability to speak English made his acting seem shitty (though, as we discovered in the brilliant, revelatory JCVD, he actually can act). And he kept it simple. Let us take, as an example, Double Impact:

1---Leading man on steroids? Check, times two: Van Damme plays twins
2---Girl no one's ever heard of who's kind of cute but can't act? Meh, the blond can't act but she isn't attractive, ditto the “lesbian” working for the villain.
3---Drunk character phoning it in/hamming it up? Again, slight departure; Geoffrey Lewis isn't the villain, but he sure is drunk and screwing around. Philip Chan, though, HOLY SHIT is he hamming it up, and you can smell the Remy Martin on that dude's breath.
4---Other big muscular dude? Bolo motherfuckin Yeung. The only reason this dude wasn't the biggest fucking superstar in the fucking world was racism; it was always barely plausible that Van Damme could kick his ass. I submit Bolo could have killed Arnold. Yes, that's right, and I'll say it again so there's no ambiguity. Bolo could have fucking killed Arnold. And, don't get me wrong, I love Jean-Claude Van Damme, I love Arnold, but why can't a Chinese guy be big, muscular, not be able to speak English and star in a movie? Huh? Riddle me that, Menachem Golan.
5---Wisecracking sidekick? Not applicable, but let's take Bloodsport as an example—Ogre was fucking great in that as Jean-Claude's wisecracking sidekick, who multitasked as a big muscular dude, and the crippled/dead friend JC has to avenge, only being Ogre he's enough of a badass that he recovers from Bolo crushing his skull within days and is drinking beer like nothing ever happened. Completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand, but Ogre was fucking awesome in Bloodsport.

Now, Sly isn't a retard. In fact, in the discussions here regarding Tango & Cash and Victory, I reiterated several times that Sly is, to the contrary, rather intelligent. Sly offered Jean-Claude Van Damme a part in The Expendables. But Jean-Claude Van Damme turned it down, I guess out of an ascetic loyalty to the purity of low-budget action cinema or something (JC is fuckin weird), thereby putting Sly in the awkward position of, due to circumstances completely beyond his control, being unable to perfectly make the all-star team kind of picture he wanted to. Of course, holding that against him would be ridiculous, and I won't do it.

Sly's mistake that he didn't have to make, and that I will hold against him, is cutting Danny Trejo out of the picture (AFTER PUTTING HIM ON THE MOTHERFUCKING POSTER). It's very simple. You cannot make any kind of definitive cinematic statement about anything male without Danny Trejo being involved. Anything testicular with which Danny Trejo is not involved needs to be compared to Danny Trejo. Those stupid Dos Equis ads would be awesome if Danny Trejo were in them, because he is that guy. So what the fuck, Sly? First you cast Danny Trejo, then you decide to merge his character with either Eric Roberts or Mickey Rourke (I forget which)? This is utterly unacceptable, and should have been decided with a bare-knuckle boxing match, which prison boxing champion Danny Trejo would have won, and ended up playing both Eric Roberts' and Mickey Rourke's roles. Sure, Eric Roberts matured into a pretty cool reptile, but Mickey Rourke has looked like fuckin Rocky Dennis for about 20 years now, and the whole point to Mickey Rourke was that he was good-looking. Even in his prime, a half-asleep Danny Trejo with one leg chainsawed off by Mickey Rourke's wisecracking sidekick would fucking destroy him.

But, still. Even if it's imperfect and exempt from the grand tabulation of Statements on Masculinity due to one annoying violation of the statutes, it should be a hell of a lot of fun. Thus presenting the dilemma: The Expendables or Scott Pilgrim? For me, the answer is moot, since I'm going to be spending the weekend reviewing plays for nytheatre.com and trying to have production meetings for a movie I'm directing the end of the month (many self-indulgent plugs to come). But if I were to go to something this weekend, it would probably end up being The Expendables, even if it came down to a coin flip. I have the feeling Scott Pilgrim will benefit from a DVD-and-a-joint viewing at home more than a see-it-in-the-theater-completely-straight experience. Of course, I could be wrong, and probably am.

And, for the biggest question, the one I care the least about: which will be #1 at the box office? Neither. Eat, Pray, Love is going to gross $40 mil. (EDIT: 40 million rubles, maybe. See what I mean about box office predictions being fucking stupid?)

LOVING CUP

In honor of Sly's upcoming picture The Expendables—
—and the 2010 World Cup, today we discuss Victory (aka Escape to Victory outside the US). A late-period John Huston picture, a middle-period Michael Caine picture, and a way way early Sly picture (he'd only done the first two Rockys and Nighthawks at that point, not even any Rambos yet), Victory is one of those movies that stacks the deck against itself by doing a lot of really dumb and lazy things and yet still ends up being a lot of fun.

As cool as John Huston, Michael Caine, and Sly can be separately, the meeting of these three particular minds are not the main attraction in Victory. Coming as it did at the tail-end of the last time America briefly tried to get into association football, a very respectable roster of real-life footballers were cast—Bobby Moore, captain of the fabled 1966 England World Cup champions; Argentine Osvaldo Ardiles, member of the 1978 World Cup champion side; spectacularly talented Polish midfielder Kazimerz Deyna; Belgian Paul Van Himst; a whole bunch of dudes from the then-successful Ipswich Town F.C.; and, last but certainly not least, arguably the most talented but inarguably the most stylish player in the history of the sport, Edison Arantes do Nascimento, nom de guerre Pelé. Watching these dudes ball is the coolest thing about Victory, and the editing is skillful enough that the actors don't get too embarrassed (Michael Caine actually looks pretty good, but boy, if Sly was in goal in a real game with actual players, his side would get fucked by like 12).

The plot is pretty simple. It's WWII. A bunch of guys in a POW camp get roped into playing an exhibition game against a Nazi all-star squad. Michael Caine, who had played for West Ham before the war, assumes the role of player-manager, and dumbass American POW Sly tries to get on the team, except he's so fucking bad they want nothing to do with him. Also, for some reason, this POW camp has the highest all-time great footballer/regular guy ratio like ever, so their team kinda fucking rules, to the point where the Germans have to cheat and deliberately injure them to stay in the game. Meanwhile, nice-guy Nazi camp commandant Max von Sydow (for real? The nice-guy Nazi? Again? Fucking the only thing that's missing is when Sly makes contact with the French Resistance he doesn't meet a hooker with a heart of gold and a lovable scamp of an orphan) is a man of culture and honor and a fanatic football fan, and cuts the footballers slack whenever he can, most notably when a trainload of emaciated dudes show up from a really fucked up Ukranian camp, and Michael Caine and Sly say “they're on our team” even though they can barely walk, because the guys on the team get hot meals and blankets and stuff.

Sly gets his way onto the team because he's been in contact with the French Resistance (who want to bust everyone out at halftime of the big game), and so they break the arm of the actually good goalkeeper and Sly miraculously gets to the point where he can actually stop the occasional goal. They thus go into the match, only to find that the Nazis are cheating like motherfuckers and have the refs totally on their side. At this point, our heroes all collectively go “hey, wait, we're all international football stars, these assholes are just a bunch of fucking Nazis.” They create a strategy every bit as revolutionary as the beautiful “Total Football” introduced by the Dutch international side in the 70s, this one revolutionary in its simplicity. I call it “Totally Rad Football,” since it consists entirely of lobbing passes over the middle for Pelé to do slow-motion bicycle kicks (taking advantage of the Nazis being so racist that they don't want to get anywhere near a black guy, thus giving him the space to do a bicycle kick) and plays where the keeper gives Pelé the ball right at the box and then Pelé dribbles the ball the length of the field, weaving in and out of the entire Nazi defense, and concluding with Pelé blasting a goal past the final hapless Nazi dipshit. It's basically the equivalent of the offense the Cavs have been running the past few years with Lebron: give Lebron the basketball, get out video camera, do Zen exercise to prevent skull from exploding.

It's not really a spoiler to say the good guys win the game in the end of Victory. I mean, look at the fucking team they're rolling out on the field. Even a past-his-prime Pelé was a bad motherfucker (when he joined the New York Cosmos in the 70s he—and to a slightly lesser extent, fellow gods Carlos Alberto, Franz Beckenbauer, and Giorgio Chinaglia—was good enough to make Americans briefly care about soccer, no mean feat), not to mention the other dudes on the team. The Nazis had to cheat to have any kind of advantage. However, the fact that they stuck around to finish the game when La Resistance was going to break them out at halftime kind of is, but everyone went so apeshit when they won that they were able to escape anyway, with a smiling Max von Sydow tacitly giving permission.

Speaking of which, let us now address the two main flaws with this movie, both listed in the above paragraph:


What the fuck is wrong with these assholes? La Resistance went to all that trouble to break them out at halftime. Do you really want to waste the one time a French person made a plan that actually worked?

Well. This is a tricky question, because it doesn't have an answer that's backed up by logic or reason, but it does nonetheless have an irrefutable answer. Why did they stick around to finish the game and risk getting chucked back in the POW camp? BECAUSE THAT IS HOW MEN DO THINGS. Men do things the hard way because occasionally, as a man, you need to flex your nuts, do something really fucking stupid, get away with it, and spend the rest of your life raising a pint and telling your friends “Remember when [feat of testicular grandeur] happened? That fuckin' ruled.” BECAUSE THIS IS THE WAY OF MEN. And anyway, Sly was the one cookin' up the plan with La Resistance, and he looked so fuckin' stupid in a beret with his shirt on (a travesty he soon corrected with the Rambo cycle) that one can hardly be faulted for doubting him.


Seriously, what the fuck is it with movies and the so-called “good Nazi?” This archetype is yucky, apocryphal, and lets a bunch of pussies who wouldn't openly stand up for what was right off the hook.

This is a much better question. Now and then there are stories about cats who would subvert from within (if Tom Cruise's Valkyrie thing actually existed—which I firmly deny; that movie was an acid flashback I had while watching the History Channel—it would count as one of these) and who were kind of all right. I always take those with a big grain of salt; actually, of all people, Quentin Tarantino nailed the reality of the “Good Nazi” in Inglourious Basterds—when Christoph Waltz gives up Hitler and the whole high command to Brad Pitt and BJ Novak, his motivations are so oily, and he himself is revealed to be such a fucking choad about it that the ends (truth, justice, American way, et al) do not justify the means (some Nazi cunt backstabbing his friends). If you were such a good guy, when Adolf and company came to you and said, “Hey, we want you to be a Nazi, and if you don't go for it we'll fucking kill you,” you would reply, “Kill me then, you swine, for yours is not a world in which I care to live,” BECAUSE THAT IS HOW MEN so on and so forth. Unfair? Sure, dying probably sucks, but when your only other choice is being a Nazi, it's the only acceptable option.

Now, with all that being said, the logical follow-up question is, “Why are you letting Victory and Max von Sydow off the hook, considering that this is one of the dumbest examples of the Good Nazi character in the history of cinema?” The answer is the Max von Sydow Corollary, to wit: Max von Sydow is so awesome he can get away with literally anything. One of the things about the Hollywood New Wave of the 70s was that all the young egomaniac cokeheads running around with cameras all had a great respect for European cinema, and Max von Sydow was one of the icons of same.

When Americans started bringing him over here to be in movies, it was almost like Max von Sydow told them, “Give me only the dumbest, most underwritten roles. Give me the generic European villain. Cast me as an ethnicity only Helen Keller could think I really was. No matter what the difficulty curve, I will fucking own that shit because I am fucking Max von Sydow. I played chess with Death. Recognize, mortals.” This theory is borne out by his role in Three Days of the Condor, where he shows up, says like two words the whole movie, the only explanation of who he is is like two lines about “the Alsatian gentleman” (an awesome character name, by the by), lets Robert Redford live almost as a fuck you, and splits. And holy FUCK is Max von Sydow awesome in Three Days of the Condor. It's all him. None of it is in the script.

For a more modern example, take Minority Report. Minority Report is a damn fine entertainment and an SF movie to be reckoned with, although it completely derails in the third act, but it does have one weird touch—Max von Sydow plays a government bureaucrat named Lamar Burgess. Now, you might think, hmm, a government bureaucrat named Lamar Burgess, that sounds like a Fred Dalton Thompson part . . . wow, did Max von Sydow learn how to do a Southern accent? Well, maybe, if his accent was southern Sweden. Yeah, Max von Sydow is swaggering around that whole fuckin' picture not even bothering to pretend to be an American, which turns out to be an exercise in Hollywood semiotics much like in The Fugitive, with the Euro accent being the signifier of villainy. Did it matter? Hell no. As stated above, Max von Sydow can do whatever the fuck he wants and he's still awesome. He's so awesome he was fucking married to Barbara Hershey in Hannah and Her Sisters, back when Barbara Hershey was one of the two or three hottest women who ever existed. He was sullen, and old, but still so fuckin' cool that she doesn't even leave him til like the end of the picture.

Which brings us to Victory. Max von Sydow is the one person in the universe who can get away with this dumb “oh, I'm from the old aristocracy, and I'm cultured, but man I love football and through my love of football I'll be revealed to be an all right guy” character, whose entire sympathy shroud unravels if you start pulling at the “Yeah, but what about all that 'Wir messen die Juden auschrotten' business?” thread. His ability to pull this role off has nothing to do with moral justification. It has to do with being Max von fucking Sydow. I like to think he took this role because it was so stupid. And maybe so he could hang out on set while all those awesome football scenes were being shot.

Other movies to watch in the agonizing hours between World Cup matches:

Mean Machine, Vinnie Jones' football remake of handegg classic The Longest Yard.

Bend it Like Beckham, which is cute and fun and has pretty girls in it.

Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos, for the real-life story of arguably the most talent-loaded team in the history of sports.

Offside, about a bunch of Iranian girls who get thrown in jail for trying to watch football (not as much of a bummer as it sounds).

Rudo y Cursi, for your Gael García Bernal/Diego Luna/Alfonso & Carlos Cuarón fix.


All right, y'all. Time to get back to Australia/Germany, and figure out how the fuck we drew with England yesterday (that goal the English keeper let in . . . wow . . .) I leave you with this:

"SUCH A SHAMEFUL FALL FROM GLORY."

Stevie Wonder is 60 today!

God DAMN that song is good. In honor of this momentous occasion, let's examine a small but illustrious subgenre in cinema: the action movie where someone's shitty driving leads someone else (or themselves) to attribute same to Stevie Wonder having been his instructor. You see, because Stevie's blind. Ya know.

It's kind of a lazy joke but can be made to work in the right circumstances. Two examples:

Eddie Murphy in Delirious, having a hypothetical conversation with Stevie, while Eddie's miming driving a car: “The piano and the singing . . . I told you how I feel about the singing. I ain't impressed. You want to impress me? Take the wheel for a while, motherfucker.”

Bruce Willis in Die Hard, watching Reginald Veljohnson doing a very leisurely donut outside the Nakatomi building while Alan Rickman, Alexander Gudonov, et al are ripping shit up inside: “Who's driving this thing, Stevie Wonder?”

The first, while not from an action movie, is nonetheless from Eddie Murphy, and it
works because he's Eddie. The second works because John McClane is a regular dude, not a hetero Oscar Wilde with a badge, and he's gonna make a normal dumb guy joke.
Now, there are countless examples of stupid action movies using this joke out of sheer laziness, but rather than catalog them all, let's take an example from what may be the single stupidest action movie ever made:

Sly: “Who taught you to drive?”
Kurt Russell: “Steve Wonder!”

I speak, of course, and with proper reverence, of Tango & Cash. When we first saw this, in 1989, my mom said, as we walked out of the Duffield Theater, former jewel of downtown Brooklyn (closed after someone got shot there during a screening of New Jack City), with a huge smile on her face and a tinge of awe in her voice, “That might be the stupidest movie of the year.” I nodded and said yeah, a smile just as huge on my own face. And make no mistake, my mom and I saw some stupid fucking shit at that theater. We saw Firewalker there and multiple Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. In fact I think the only thing I saw there that wasn't stupid was when my dad and I saw Aliens. But Tango & Cash will always stand out among all those worthies.

Let us make a fine distinction here. “Stupid” and “Entertaining” are not mutually exclusive conditions, obviously. Tango & Cash offers the versatile cineaste heights of glee rarely—extremely rarely—approached in the history of movies. It stars Sly playing against type as a yuppie narcotics cop who spends the time when he's not out getting into car chases and shootouts talking about margin calls with his stockbroker, and Kurt Russell playing his arch-rival in the department, who gets into just as many car chases and shootouts, but clearly spends all the rest of his time at the hairdresser maintaining that glorious mullet. They have nothing in common except an ability to kick ass and blow stuff up. And by the end of the picture, they're the best of buddies. Awww.

We open with some loud, pounding music and Sly driving really fast in the desert. He's chasing two scumbags driving a tanker truck, but soon tires of this and drives way the hell ahead, in spite of being reminded that he's out of his jurisdiction via radio. Sly ignores this (being Sly) and parks in the middle of the road, right in front of the tanker truck. As the truck pulls within view, Sly puts a couple shots through the windshield. This spooks the scumbags, so much so that rather than just run Sly over (they are, after all, in a very large truck), they jam on the breaks and go flying through the windshield.

Sly (tossing them handcuffs): “You boys like jewelry?”
Big-jawed scumbag: “Fuck you.”
Sly: “I prefer blondes.”

Hurr hurr hurr, cuz he used to be married to Brigitte Nielsen! Because that's . . . funny . . . heh. Ahem. The baddies now under arrest, a bunch of redneck cops come up and yell at Sly for being out of his jurisdiction again, but Sly will hear none of it; he's been after these guys for months. (The question of how it took him months to catch two guys so retarded that they didn't just run him over and keep on truckin' is left unanswered). One of the rednecks says, “He thinks he's Rambo.” Sly turns on him, cool as can be, and says “Rambo . . . is a pussy.” BWAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!! Because, get it? SLY ALSO PLAYED RAMBO! (Actually, I shouldn't make fun, Sly's sense of humor about himself is one of this movie's saving graces.)

We then have a question of the contents of the truck. The rednecks are finding only gasoline. Sly, however, thinks otherwise, and fires a bullet into the side of the truck. Everybody's like fuck we're gonna die . . . but some white powder starts flowing out. Sly has a taste.

Sly: “Anybody wanna get high?”

Sly, I'm already high.

So, just so we're clear: firing your gun through someone's windshield and putting a round through the side of a tank that has gas in it, all good as long as you find some blow. We all good? Okay, let's continue.

We then meet Kurt Russell, scruffier and prole-ier. He ganks someone's copy of the LA Times, where he sees a story about Sly above the fold, and one about himself under the fold. Pleased with himself, he swaggers into his apartment, where a Vietnamese guy busts a couple shots at him. Kurt Russell takes them in his vest (movie vests are awesome; when you get shot you take a nap for anywhere from thirty seconds to five minutes and wake up all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed) and appears to be down for the count, until he suddenly shoots a gun out of his boot . . . wait . . . his boot is the gun. Hmm, okay. The Vietnamese guy runs for it, Kurt Russell pursues, they get in cars and end up in a parking garage where they destroy every car in the place, and some random Russian guy bellows in a Yakov Smirnoff accent about why the fuck Kurt Russell just destroyed his car, but Kurt Russell doesn't let this bother him as he busts the Vietnamese guy.

At the station, Kurt Russell brags on his exploits, and finds that someone fucked with his gun. (OR DID THEY? Could it not be the same gun? NO!) Sly is visited by his sister, a very young and decorative Teri Hatcher, who is reassuring him that her “dance tour” will not be non-stop debauchery. Both Sly and Kurt Russell are given a tip that some shit is going down . . . at the same address. Hmmm.

Meanwhile, Jack Palance explains to his two lackeys—who are thought to be the two biggest crimelords in LA—that he's setting Sly and Kurt Russell up. When asked by James Hong, in one of his more lucid and reasonable screen moments, Why don't you just kill them? Jack Palance has a delicious answer:

“Where would be the fun in that?”

Man, you gotta love villains who aren't just interested in being evil, but in being evil with style. One love, Jack Palance, one love, baby.

So our heroes walk right into a setup and get totally fuckin' railroaded by the system. The prosecution's entire case is basically handed to them by Jack Palance, through his right-hand man, a red-headed, pony-tailed, hilariously “English” accented Brion James. Sly and Kurt Russell bicker a bit, and get sent to prison together . . . only it's not the minimum security golf prison they were promised, it's a Movie Prison.

Movie Prison is an interesting construct, populated entirely with colorful eccentrics who spend their entire time bribing guards, having gladiator fights, and fucking new guys in the ass. Depending on the quality of the movie, these tendencies are either subdued, or over-the-top baroque. Tango & Cash is not a good movie. You know what that means. The inmates are throwing shit that's on fire. They're basically rioting in their cells. And the guards ain't doin' shit.

Sly gets put in a cell with Clint Howard. Kurt Russell gets to experience Negro Terror with his cellmate. Their first night, the whole fucking prison gets let out their cells by Brion James to take Sly and Kurt Russell down to the laundry room to be electrocuted, leading to two questions you probably shouldn't ask:

(1) Why don't they just kill Sly and Kurt Russell?
(2) Why doesn't everybody in the prison just escape, if Jack Palance has the power to just waltz in and do whatever the fuck he wants?

Again, don't ask shit like this in this kind of movie. An old buddy of Kurt Russell's who's the one hack at the prison Jack Palance hasn't bought, intervenes (why the inmates all just scatter instead of just killing him, especially since they do just a couple minutes later, another thing not to ask) and cooks up a scheme to bust Kurt Russell and Sly out. Sly's reluctant, and accepts his fate to eventually be tortured to death with an impressive serenity, but when Kurt Russell goes to escape by himself—and finds his hack buddy dead—Sly intervenes at just the right moment to save Kurt Russell's ass.

The prison escape is a pretty fuckin good example of action filmmaking. The camerawork's dark and sinister, the editing's tight, and if two motherfuckers know how to acquit themselves in an action sequence, it's John Rambo/Marion Cobretti and Snake Plissken/Jack Burton. They eventually electrocute the guy with the big jaw, slide down high tension lines, and get their asses out, but not before Sly, in response to Kurt Russell saying something sarcastic about “coffee and danish,” gets off the classic quip “I hate Danish.” BECAUSE OF BIRGITTE NIELSEN! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Sly tells Kurt Russell if he ever needs help, to go to Teri Hatcher's club and ask for her. In short order, Kurt Russell does need help, so he goes to Teri Hatcher's club and asks for her, and when introduced immediately falls head over heels (understandable, considering how hot she was back then and how nice a person she is in this), but the fuzz are closing in, which leads to one of the movie's dumbest (and, since the dumb in this movie exists symbiotically with the funny, most hilarious) moments—Kurt Russell sneaking out of the club in drag to the strains of “Harlem Nocturne” with Teri Hatcher posing as his lesbian biker girlfriend. The world's single stupidest cop takes one look at Kurt Russell and Teri Hatcher and says “Any chance of a threeway?” They fire their cigarettes at him in unison (throwing lit cigarettes at a cop is assaulting a police officer . . . wait, you don't give a shit either? Oh okay, moving on) and ride off into the night.

Sly comes by Teri Hatcher's house as she's giving Kurt Russell a backrub to fix the slight back injury he suffered bustin out of the hoosegow, and naturally thinks they're having sex (this is actually an intentionally funny scene). Sly, pissed though he is, is willing to suffer in silence until he sees someone outside the house, whereupon he grabs a wooden duck and springs into action, ending up totally scaring the shit out of his commanding officer, who's come by to warn Sly and Kurt Russell that they've got “48 hours” to clear their names (how the fuck he arrives at this figure when every cop in the universe except him is trying to arrest them anyway is as much a mystery as whatever happened to Walt), and so our heroes decide to get proactive.

They track down Michael Jeter, the sound geek who doctored the tape that basically single-handedly got them sent to the joint. Eventually, the road leads to Brion James, who our heroes manage to corner, and try the time-honored “hang the guy by his ankles off the top of a building” interrogation technique, but Brion James doesn't crack. Sly thinks of something, though, the slightly more radical “duct tape a grenade to the dude's face” interrogation technique, which causes Brion James to both piss his pants and inform our heroes of Jack Palance's existence and role in the larger affair. This is one of Sly and Kurt Russell's key bonding moments.

So some other dumb shit happens and Teri Hatcher gets kidnapped by the bad guys. Sly and Kurt Russell drop by Michael J. Pollard's to get some gadgets. This is one of my favorite dumb things in this movie—the LAPD has enough of a budget to afford to keep Q on staff? Awesome. The fact that it's Michael J. Pollard just makes it all the more awesome. Take a bow, sir.

And now, the final action sequence. Our heroes acquire a heavily armed SUV from Michael J. Pollard and storm Jack Palance's desert compound, guns blazing, explosions left and right, Kurt Russell's Stevie Wonder joke, etc etc. Fairly standard stuff, but well-staged. They kill everybody—Brion James with a grenade down the pants like before, but this one explodes—and finally corner Jack Palance, who's holding a gun to Teri Hatcher's head, in a room full of mirrors so you can't tell which one of him is real.

This climax, ironically, features one of the movie's only moments of intelligence: Sly and Kurt Russell separately figure out which Jack Palance is real, for two wholly different reasons, and shoot him, freeing Teri Hatcher. But there's still a bomb set to go off (ah, forget it, nothing else in this picture makes any fucking sense) and our heroes and the girl they both love have to flee the explosion with the requisite slow-motion face-first leap forward. Sly gives Kurt Russell and Teri Hatcher his blessing (grudgingly, but generously) and everyone lives happily ever after.

In the parlance of Tropic Thunder, the ultimate thing that saves Tango & Cash is that it never goes full retard. Ultimately, after extensive rewrites (done by Sly), a fired DP, a fired editor, a fired director, and a fired co-star (Kurt Russell was supposed to be played by Patrick Swayze . . . I love Swayze, but he ain't Kurt Russell) the picture comes out being exactly what it's supposed to be: loud, fast, and stupid. But as dumb as it is, there's an element of self-awareness about how stupid it is, and the credit for this has to go to Sly. Sly is a very smart guy who knows exactly what the fuck he's doing. He knew when he wrote Rocky to become a star, that if he wrote a simplistic screenplay that catered to a lot of the audience's worst and most sentimental impulses, and performed it like he meant it, that he'd be a big star. It also helped that a large part of him really did mean it. Every single other choice he made in the prime of his career, and even afterward (fuck it, I'm going to see his new picture that everybody's in) has been spot on, and the man is seriously, seriously rich.

And this brings us back to that Stevie Wonder joke. A throwaway line in the movie, to be sure, and it's kind of sad that Stevie is more known for the jokes than his tunes nowadays, but nobody held a gun to his head and forced him to write “I Just Called To Say I Love You.” Anyway. Instead of dwelling on the jokes and stuff, let's close with another great Stevie vid. Happy birthday, sir.