The Deer Hunter is an actual movie, story and drama.
Stallone films are to movies like comic books are to fine literature.
Have you seen “First Blood”? If not, you may be missing the point of the thread.
Nitpick: In the airport scene at the beginning they’re selling the drugs. For most of the trip all they have in the secret gas tank tube is money.
But, yeah, the movie hasn’t aged very well.
I’ve never seen First Blood or Rocky, or any of the entries in either series. I had always heard how good the first Rocky was but I never heard anyone say anything good about First Blood. I guess I’ll have to give them a chance. I didn’t realize that they were different from the rest of the series in such profound ways.
Understatement of the year. Oye.
Back when it came out, I was just a kid that wanted a dirt bike. I made my dad take me to the movie so he would see how great motorcycles where. [sub]oops.[/sub]
Dad did end up caving, and I got my Yamaha LT2.
Still, can’t really argue that the movie isn’t about a Viet-Nam vet flipping his lid. And while nobody gets killed during his M-60 rampage… he still *goes *on an M-60 rampage :o (and eventually tops himself. Or would have if Hollywood scripts weren’t written by focus groups.)
true enough. But Ranger Jeff’s post seemed to imply that the trope was the whole package of “a psychotic Nam vet flipping out and killing people”
I have no problem with movies that are sad and depressing. I don’t even have problems with movies that are long - as long as the length is justified. But The Deer Hunter is a great 100 minute movie spread out over 183 minutes. Cimino is a classic case of a director who falls in love with the footage he’s shot and can’t bear to leave any of it out of the final cut.
Magnum PI was partway through its third season before First Blood hit theaters.
I just wanted to make us all feel old and point out that First Blood came out 33 years ago.
And yeah, the John Rambo character so quickly became such a caricature of himself, people forget how grounded***** the first movie was. It’s an action movie, sure, but the action flows logically***** from the situations the characters are in, and the situations themselves are pretty naturally constructed by the characters’ actions. It’s more of a character study than you’d expect, with Stallone’s traumatized, aimless vet who wants to be let alone, Dennehy’s small-town sheriff whose king-of-the-hill mentality both creates the situation and keeps him from understanding why he can’t get control of it, and Richard Crenna’s army colonel, Rambo’s former CO, who arrives on the scene and tries in vain to illustrate to the sheriff the differences between a law-enforcement mentality and a warfare-by-attrition mentality. Nobody’s really good, nobody’s really bad, and everyone’s motivations are understandable. Only one person dies, by accident*****, and Rambo consistently measures his responses throughout. The movie ends with an emotional breakdown, fer crissakes.
***** - mostly
Making it the longest film of all time, because
IT’S NOT OVER!!! NOTHING IS OVER!!!
I never really liked the Rambo series, because I’d read the book first and Rambo died in it, and knowing that I could never accept the franchise.
It’s a big deal, isn’t it? Even as good as the first film was, it was a complete betrayal of the spirit of the book. And the series that resulted - which helped define the 80s-90s action genre - was nothing more than an expansion and amplification of that betrayal. And it got more and more stupid until the recent fourth film.
I sometimes feel as though the entire 85-95 action film genre, which generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, more or less grew out of adapting First Blood, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, and abandoning the questions and lessons of those books in favor of action porn.
Yeah, this is precisely what Cimino did with his next film, the infamous* Heaven’s Gate*. It got savaged by the critics primarily for its interminably long running time. When it was re-cut & re-released Roger Ebert said it was actually a pretty good film then, but it was too late. Killed Cimino’s career.
Rambo was based on a book?!? Holy flurking shnit! :eek:
I read an article by the author, David Morrell. He had never sold movie rights before, so he ran the contract past his lawyer, who suggested that he retain ownership to ancillary products like action figures. They added a couple of sentences for that, and he said those two sentences alone made him millions of dollars because Rambo dolls took off. He said he never in his wildest imagination thought that anyone would ever want a Rambo doll, let alone millions of kids.
Color me dumb, but did that become a thing? I know they made more Rambo movies, but were the action figures big?
I’m pretty sure that I saw both Rambo II and III when I was a kid (8-9 years old). Perhaps my parents were weird, but I don’t think so. I could see a lot of kids ending up with Rambo action figures.
I saw First Blood in the theater. When Rambo was undressing in the jail cell and he turned around everybody gasped at how small Stallone got his waist for that scene.
Just stop before you get to Deer Hunter IV: Deer in Space.
There was a Rambo cartoon series that had its own line of toys. The video games were moderately successful But form what I remember, it was the toy knives and guns with the Rambo label that were really big.