the groundhog day project

Reported in 1987 (so, in regards to Rambo III ) in Forbes : Stallone was so shocked by the negative critical and listless box office reception for his latest movie, Over the Top, that he is rewriting the next Rambo to be more philosophical, in the vein of Oscar winner Platoon. Such talk elicits quick denials from Andrew Vajna and Mario Kassar, the industry veterans who own 87% of Carolco. They insist that Stallone cannot turn the movie into a talky-thinky film punctuated with a little machine gun fire. "Rambo is an action/adventure film, so if you take out the action," says Vajna, "you don't have a film." (p. 88) Reading this now, I find it actually more interesting than when I referenced this passage in one of my Rambo speeches back in 2009. See, now I've seen some of James Cameron's comments on the script for the second film. I haven't seen the draft [edit: just as I was about to post this entry, I found Cameron's draft online, so I will re...

(There's a whole lot to be said about Rambo and masculinity and hegemony and everything I talked about yesterday , but I want to cover something else before I get back to that... for two reasons: 1) to not be too repetitive and 2) to give myself a little time to look over a whole lot of new research in between some bits of homework I've got to do tomorrow. For tonight, this may come mostly from me, but beware: in addition to several things found in new research earlier tonight, I've got a stack of sources from 2009 when I did two speeches on Rambo, so the entries for the rest of this week may be dense. Then, a fifth movie this month, but only for 6 days, so that I can watch Groundhog Day on Groundhog Day. Now, on with Rambo .) Right from the start, this movie tells us a couple things. The opening shot: an explosion, not fiery but still an explosion. We're in for something big. Then we get to see our location a little better: a prison. Most of the prisoners: black. ...

(Before I get to Rambo tonight, there's this: earlier tonight in Media Theory and Criticism class, I got to talk about Groundhog Day . Went down a list of what our instructor calls Classic Hollywood Cinema criteria, matched up Groundhog Day to each one. Then, there were some followup questions--is it a Marxist film? is it a feminist film? something about Freudian psychoanalysis, something about class... and a few others--and the answers were easy. I told my instructor about this blog (or the first year of it, anyway) after class. He wants to read some entries. I'll have to figure out some good ones. Anyway, that's one more class I've included Groundhog Day in.) In Rambo and the Dalai Lama , Gordon Fellman (1998) calls Rambo "the personalization of war, the reduction of it to its pure elements of men facing each other in all their anger, toughness, power, confusion, and fear" (p. 108). Fellman, in writing about First Blood , details the scene in which Ram...

Context: it's still 1985, but we're a few months earlier than we were yesterday. The ex-special ops guy is John Rambo rather than John Matrix. And, he doesn't start in a mountain cabin but in prison. (I wonder, offhand, who the other two men whose names came up for this mission were? James Braddock? John Matrix? Martin Riggs? All of these movies take place in the same reality, right?) So, it's 1985, I'm 9. Beverly Hills Cop has been doing well at the box office for a few months, now. Amadeus as well. I've already seen Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment and Witness and Code of Silence . There's a few other movies in theaters I wouldn't see until they show up on cable: Gotcha! , Mask , Desperately Seeking Susan , Just One of the Guys , Ladyhawke (though, I remember really wanting to see that one when it came out in theaters). New movies this weekend are A View to a Kill , the latest Roger Moore James Bond movie. Gotta see that opening weeken...