The Lindsay Brothers

Author: tristanlindsay

  • Rambo: First Blood Part II

    Extraordinary
    Adventure
    81

    In the film Mary Poppins, Dick Van Dyke has a classic scene as a one-man band. He plays the drums and the accordion and the cymbals all by himself, and it comes out to a quaint little song. He charms the ladies and impresses the kiddies with his musical abilities and it almost seems possible that this could really be done.  Rambo II is just like that, except for instead of Dick Van Dyke, it’s Sylvester Stallone, and instead of drums, it’s rocket launchers. A few of us may remember First Blood and some will even argue that it is a better movie. That is not our business. Our business is adventure and taking that into account (if I could get a tad intellectual here) First Blood is wholly and completely pwned by Rambo: First Blood: Part Deux.

    Not many people want to accept the fact that Dick Van Dyke was an expert in guerilla warfare — a man who's the best, with guns, with knives, with his bare hands. A man who's been trained to ignore pain, ignore weather, to live off the land, to eat things that would make a billy goat puke. I mean literally part of the training was watching a billy goat puke and then eating whatever it was that made the goat do so.

    There was a lot of discussion in the 1980s about who was a better action star. In one corner you have Sylvester Stallone and in the other you have Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is maybe not complete luck that Arnold seems to have won, but the reason that there was a discussion at all is due almost entirely to Rambo. The Rocky films, good as they might be (and some of them are), are not the all-out bullet-eating fight fest that Rambo is. The thing about Stallone is that he always wanted to position himself as some sort of intellectual. Not without merit mind you. I remember my high school French teacher was sort of baffled when she learned that in France he has actually achieved the status of an intellectual. She said that she didn’t associate books and literature with … well with Rocky. Until I reminded her that Sylvester Stallone WROTE Rocky.

    Quite obviously this is a picture of Donald, Julie and two other people.

    Because he has a little bit more emotional depth, Stallone is probably better suited to Rambo 1 than Arnold. But truthfully either one of them could have done well with Rambo 2. That is because the real star of Rambo 2 is the action. And while it is actually true that Stallone wrote Rocky, it is also equally true that he did not write Rambo II. No, that honor goes to none other than James T. Cameron of Titanic fame. Now some of our younger readers might not know this, but before Cameron became a romance writer and the author of such sweeping tearjerker movies as Avatar and Titanic, he was actually pretty good at thinking up reasons to have things explode. There is a rumor (I suspect generated by Cameron himself) that he really only wrote the action and not the story for Rambo II. And I accept this rumor as fact because the action is by far the best part.

    Merely the goofiest picture of James Cameron I could find.

    Let me make this clear, though, because by now we have had a lot of gory stories make our list: I do not condone violence. Unless fictional people are pretending to be tortured by plastic knives in a movie from the eighties and Rambo is there and has the power to stop them. In which case I condone it. Besides, Rambo II only has a body count of 58. This is much lower than Rambo 4, which had 83.

    Next up … 80

  • The Most Dangerous Game

    Extraordinary
    Adventure
    83

    There is an interesting thing about school in that there are some teachers who will do anything they can to get you to read. They surmise that if the stories were shorter they might hold your interest. Also it makes them easier to teach because you only have to spend 1 or 2 class sessions on them. Thus begins every person’s quick flirtation with something known as “short stories.” They are called this because they are short. Why long stories are called “novels” and not “long stories” is the real question. “Long Stories” would actually be the more fitting term when you think about it. This is because a lot of times there is nothing technically new or original about “novels.” If you are not interested because the stories are now shorter, the next thing they try is assigning you sensationalist stories about ghosts or murder. This is how I came to be acquainted with The Most Dangerous Game.

    See kids doesn't this look fun? Not like other things you have to read in school at all.

    Actually it is a relatively long short story, but not quite on the level of a novella, which is longer than a short story but shorter than a long story. Keeping this straight? The game in the title refers not to a game that you play but the game that you hunt as in big game hunter or game preserve. Game here means “animal.” In high school, you see, it seemed like a great twist when you found out what the most dangerous game of the title actually was. Though this is probably because the other thing teachers like to assign in high school is meaningful literature and so you almost expect to have sympathy for the hunter or the hunted or both. Here you have little sympathy for either and you can probably guess just exactly what the Most Dangerous Game of the title is without me having to say it.

    It's People! The Most Dangerous Game is People!!!

    Fortunately for you the writer, Richard Connel, must’ve known that his audience would be able to see the twist coming because he writes the story in such a way that it is exciting even if you guess the twist.  His prose is almost a little bit too adventure-y especially when he speaks of the “blood-warm waters of the Caribbean sea.“ He also worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood for a while so it should come as no surprise that the characters are named things like “Sanger Rainsford,” and his nemesis “General Zaroff.”

    The poster is admittedly a little misleading. The giant floating evil eyes don't show up until the sequel.

    These touches are only slightly off-putting, the real thrill is the chase through the forest. Sanger Rainsford the celebrated hunter is now the prey of Zaroff and he uses such things as Mandalay Man Traps to avoid his pursuer. General Zaroff is described as a Cossack, which in the 1930s probably meant something, but these days, is a little hard to describe. Basically they were Russian mercenaries. He has captured lost sailors on his island and is training them so that he can chase them later. The story cuts around a bit, a lot like a Hollywood screenplay, but in the end it turns out that the teachers were right. The Most Dangerous Game succeeds precisely because it happens to be short and not because it happens to be particularly dangerous.

    Fireball: The Real Most Dangerous Game

    Read the story for yourself here.

    Next up … #82!

  • Braveheart

    Extraordinary
    Adventure
    85

    I’ll give number 85 this: It’s bloody. I’ll also give it this: It’s gory. Put ‘em together and what’ve you got? Bibbidi-bobbidi-Braveheart. Blood and gore is one thing of course, but Braveheart is much more. It’s sweeping, epic, romantic and swashbuckling, romantic and bloody and gory. Braveheart may actually make a list of top 100 movies of all time and I am a little bit embarrassed that it’s so far down the adventure list. There’s just not really much about torture that screams adventure, I guess. There are so many iconic film moments from Braveheart that it’s almost impossible to list them all, but seeing as that’s my job …

    Adventuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure!!

    Number one: Blue Face paint. I’m not sure how true to history the blue face paint is, but it looks fine and dandy on a poster and really pops on film. The movie’s general color scheme is kind of a muddy Middle Ages brown-out. It’s so full of Scottish clouds that it’s striking to see even this bit of color. I’m betting that’s intentional. It’s hard to find out who deserves the credit for thinking of it. Is it the make-up artist? Surely they just carried out the directors … er … directions. Is it the director? Did he come up with it himself? Maybe the costume director? Maybe the art director. I don’t know. I just know that as silly as it could’ve been, Mel actually manages to make it look menacing, which I think was the historical basis for it. To scare one’s opponents or intimidate them or something.

    William Wallace was later used in the government's "Avatar" program to spy on the indigenous people of the planet Pandora.

    Number two: The accent. There is a clever series on BBC America called the Accent of Evil whereby it is shown that all the best villains have British accents. It’s true also in this case except that pretty much everybody has an accent of some sort, not just the villains. As far as movie accents go Braveheart has some of the best. English, Scottish, French, all of them are fantastic and fun to quote! Yvery Mahn Dyies. Not Yvery Mahn trrruly Lyives. (Translation: Every man dies, not every man truly lives. Can YOU write in a Scottish brogue?) Anyway my point is that Mel more than holds his own on the accent front especially when you consider that he was originally from Australia. British are always whining about Americans doing their accents wrong but strangely I have not heard any of them whine about Gibson in Braveheart.

    Not his real nose … just thought I'd throw that in there.

    Number Three: Revenge, Betrayal, Swordsmanship, axemanship, rocksmanship, and flaming arrowmanship. Despite all its intimate romance, let’s face it Braveheart is really about the battles. When you consider how difficult it is to shoot these battle scenes you really have to hand it to Gibson here as a director. People are shot with arrows, limbs are lost, extras are stabbed through the chest, the whole scene looks chaotic but you can still tell what’s going on. This is especially important these days when so many directors try to make us feel the chaos and kinetics of battle by what’s known in Film School as “Shaking the camera.” Not once do you see the camera soar over hordes of digital extras. I’m told that Mel based the staging of his battle scenes on the foreign film Alexander Nevsky by Sergei Eisenstein. This is perhaps the only good thing one can say about Alexander Nevsky.

    Don't let this picture fool you, Alexander Nevsky is not in any way fun or interesting.

    Next up … 84