Eh….No! That is not the point watching a Bruce Lee movie. It’s not about the story, it is not about how it is made, filmed or delivered… it is about one thing and one thing only… It is Bruce Lee!
He is the Man! His charisma, his fighting technique, his presence, a superb moviestar!
The story is even a little Bond like with a big villain on an island with a white cat
Plus the great score of Lalo Schifrin.
If you don’t like this, than you probably not like the other three he initially made solely for the Hong Kong market (The Big Boss, Fist of Fury and The Way of the Dragon) and the other one, Game of Death, which was released years after his death and he is only in for ten minutes (but the montage made from all the material recovered from 40 minutes of the pagode is well worth watching!).
As odd as it sounds, until ENTER THE DRAGON the only thing I’ve seen Lee in was that cameo as Chinese mob bruiser in MARLOWE. Lee’s films used to run and rerun at the kind of seedy train station cinemas where they didn’t ask for a driving licence/identity card when business was slow. But every time I gatecrashed into them some other stuff was shown (FRANKENSTEIN’S KUNG FU MONSTER, DAMNATION ALLEY - fond memories of both). And by the time I was old enough to get in there regularly I wasn’t interested any more.
I get that Lee had some screen presence, but with me that just never clicked, maybe because I’m not a big fan of martial arts films in general, be they simple bone crushers in the Van Damme tradition or the more refined artistic TIGER AND DRAGON style. I can appreciate the odd fight scene - would be odd if I didn’t as a Bond fan - but struggle when fighting/martial arts is supposed to carry an entire film.
An ageing director wants his daughter, a respected but troubled theatre actress, to star in his last film. Their broken relationship prohibits this, despite the sister‘s attempts to heal the family‘s many wounds. When the father casts a popular young actress instead the crisis worsens.
This year‘s Oscar winner is a well made film, but I found it at times too obvious, at times too subtle, and the navel gazing of people in show business makes the whole family drama seem like „white people‘s luxury problems“. Another profession would have helped, in my opinion.
This is another gap in my education, a film all and sundry talked about back in the day that I didn’t catch at the cinema, didn’t catch at the video store and missed for decades on its syndication runs across the private channels hacked to slices and sandwiched between sanitary pad commercials and 90s softpørn outtakes the broadcasters tried to keep their viewers busy with. By the time I read Morrell‘s novel* some years ago I still hadn’t seen more than perhaps half an hour of footage from this.
So now FIRST BLOOD for the first time start to finish. I used to think the rumoured Dustin Hoffman casting would have been a more intriguing option. But actually Stallone is doing a pretty decent job in playing an almost naïve, inoffensive veteran with what we‘d call ptsd today. Stallone supposedly also made his character less lethal, mostly avoiding to kill the assorted law enforcement of the Hicksville outback when in the book Rambo doesn’t hold back. I‘m in two minds now: FIRST BLOOD is indeed the perfect vehicle for what Stallone did with the character (and the franchise). But Hoffman might have been closer to the book, especially the post-KRAMER VS KRAMER Hoffman. But in the book Rambo dies in the finale and it was probably a genius move to alter this and open up a whole series of films for this character.
FIRST BLOOD is a perfect, nasty little action film of the early 80s, chase sequences with the usual trashed prowl cars, a manhunt in forbidding mountainous terrain and cold weather conditions, guns vs stakes and knives and a finale with plenty of explosions and weaponry out of 1970s manufacturers‘ surplus. By modern standards the film isn’t particularly gory and the few frames of splatter aren’t exploited the way they‘d be in a contemporary adaptation.
Stallone is very good - almost too good. I catch myself not buying his stubborn return to the town of Hope. Or perhaps I just don’t want him to run into what will surely turn out to be a nasty confrontation. (A Hoffman Rambo I can totally see doing this.)
Jack Starrett, Brian Dennehy, the whole cast are doing a fine job - with the exception of Richard Crenna. Since seeing him in WAIT UNTIL DARK it’s a foregone conclusion for me that he’s a duplicitous manipulator and traitor and I cannot believe anybody in their right mind would follow this arch-cad into a war zone. Or that the sheriff wouldn’t immediately suspect Rambo was alive when Colonel Trautman simply accepts he was supposedly blown to pieces by the National Guard platoon. I admit that this is a personal opinion of mine and Crenna‘s performance is in fact faultless.
Anyway, a surprisingly gripping 90 minutes that never felt boring. For good reason a classic of the genre.
*Which I only remember as very bleak; probably more my fault than Morrell‘s. I‘ve read a number of his books but never really connected with the tales.
I read the novel for the first time a year ago, and I was surprised how well it worked but also how well it was adapted.
And I agree, the younger Hoffman would have been interesting, especially if the novel‘s ending had been used. But with Stallone the breakdown at the end works even better: the muscular fighting machine becomes a little boy seeking comfort from his chosen father.
Amazing, I thought I was alone in not having seen this film for 40+ years. I finally got around to it a couple of weeks ago and liked it better than I expected to. I agree Stallone is great; also Dennehy manages to come across as likable in his way and not the out-and-out jerk I could easily imagine this character being in the hands of another performer. You can believe the sheriff thinks he’s the actual hero of the film, saving the town from Rambo.
I had my own issues with Crenna, who IMO seems to think he’s in a different film from everyone else. Everyone comes across as naturalistic except Crenna, whose delivery and mannerisms seem affected and theatrical to me. In particular he seems unable to deliver a line of dialog without shaking or wiggling his head, which drives me nuts. I have the same problem with George Clooney, especially in “Batman and Robin” where he’s always wiggling his head as Bruce Wayne or Batman, making me wonder how no one makes the connection. And with the big bat ears, the movement is even more exaggerated.
I understand First Blood would have been very different without Stallone’s input, as he supposedly asked to have most of his lines cut and especially a lot of “Arnold” type quips after all the action scenes. He and others involved in the film seem convinced it was 100% saved in the editing bay. If so, it’s not hard to see why Hoffman would’ve passed, had it been offered.
I’ve likewise never seen any of the sequels, and it’s sounding like I should keep it that way. Also I never saw any of Chuck Norris’ “Missing In Action” films, so I guess I missed out on the whole “Vietnam Vet As Avenging Force of Nature” fad. I also missed the “Mass Murder With Power Tools” horror fad. Which is to say, I seem to have largely slept through the 80s.
As an action film FIRST BLOOD is not yet making the most out of the genre iconography. Even Stallone is merely muscular without being anywhere near Schwarzenegger’s Conan bulk as he would be in later years. For large parts of the runtime we watch some poor washed up sod scrambling up and down those freezing hills in a makeshift tarpaulin tunic and down into that rat-infested, half-drowned mine, and at no time we get the feeling this guy would relish the fun he’s having.
The final twenty minutes are changing that dynamic somewhat, but even this is undercut by Rambo’s breakdown at the end. In a way FIRST BLOOD is maybe one of the last ‘honest’ action films that doesn’t simplify events and which uses its gory moments - the remains of Deputy Galt - to show this isn’t a ‘nice’ game. Countless films that came later wallowed in the splatter. Or, in The A-Team’s case, handled firearms like water guns.
FIRST BLOOD is probably not an anti-war film - but it’s certainly a film critical of our relationship with war and its fallout. Bizarre in light of what came after, a franchise that at least didn’t shrink away from exploiting war as mass entertainment, FIRST BLOOD’s underlying message is more serious than its explosions: You cannot switch off war - and if you try it’s going to bite you where it hurts.
If you watch all 5 films I at least give it to Stallone that he never played Rambo in a way where he exploits war as mass entertainment. Of course they went deeper into the action genre with RII and RIII, but I always felt that he tried to portrait Rambo as a victim of war and trying to show how ugly war is…
I was surprised how critical the film is about US intervention. Sure, Rambo becomes a super soldier in that film, but it also can be read as him transforming into his most lethal self when thrown back into a situation for which he was trained/programmed, and his superiors know that he is just expendable and that his mission is planned to be a failure, getting rid of him in the process.
But critics only saw a rah-rah patriotism in that film.
Kind of the response Bruce Springsteen got for „Born in the U.S.A.“ when the lyrics clearly were not about pride but the devestating effects of the war for the soldiers.
Never Let Me Go (2010 film starring Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield, based on the 2005 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro): I’d read Ishiguro’s novel last year, and while I liked it, I was surprised to find that I was not really drawn in (especially since it was written by the same author who wrote The Remains of the Day). I think that has to do with the characters’ extreme passivity (which becomes understandable once you realize the environment in which they’ve been raised).
However, the film drew me in emotionally, perhaps because it is a visual medium, and so the acting, music and scenery gave me a better foundation on which to relate to the characters.
Without giving too much away, in case someone hasn’t seen it and wants to, this is a dystopian story (reminding me of something Margaret Atwood might write) set in what appears to be a traditional English boarding school. But, as time passes, you begin to realize that things are not as they seem. And it’s only when the students, as young adults, gain a certain measure of freedom that they (and we) find out what’s really going on.
I have some quibbles with the final voice-over scene in the film, which wasn’t as impactful for me as it might have been. But the scenes leading up to the climax more than made up for it.
I had much the same initial reaction to the book, but once I thought about it I realised
Summary
they probably bred the clones from the start without any potential for violent conflict. They know what they are and what their ‘use’ is going to be. They actively support each other in their task. If they were regular humans at least a percentage of them would rather kill themselves, if only to spite their organ recipients. That was probably the first failsafe modification on the kids to have them quiet and cooperative over the long run of decades.
I just watched the 4K version of The Man Who Haunted Himself, which is a strange, a little creepy classic British cultmovie. Well better explain this: it begins as a normal classic almost tv show like movie but after a minute of twenty/ thirty it becomes stranger and stranger and it get all kind of strange and inovated camera angles and shots.
It is realy well done with probably not a huge budget, but who needs one, if you have a great team with a lot of good ideas?
It is Roger’s favorite movie and you can see why. He has a lot of good acting to do in this one. You can see how he change from a man with a good job to one who’s desperate trying to hold his life back together and who’s losing complete control over …well.. everything he cares about, his family, his wife, his children, his friends, his job… everything.
What is going on? Is he getting mad? Has he a nervous breakdown? Is there realy a doppelganger? Or…? You find out when you watch this gem of a movie.
There are a couple of interesting extra’s on this disc, like interviews of the crew, an interview with director Joe Dante (Piranha, Gremlins, The Howling) who realy admires this movie and I am now listening to a music suite from the score of the movie (over 30 minutes!) A lot of the extra’s were already on the blu ray, unfortunately the commentary of Roger and director Basil Dearden is missing.
This is one of the rare films I’ve been curious about since reading its title in Moore’s resume in one of the 1970s Bond reference books. THE MAN WHO HAUNTED HIMSELF only got a limited theatrical run in Germany in 1980 and didn’t find its way on German tv until 1982. Inexplicably, I missed both (while I watched CROSSPLOT and STREET PEOPLE whenever they ran on public tv; at least two or three times). Together with SHOUT AT THE DEVIL and SHERLOCK HOLMES IN NEW YORK it represents a major gap in my education. I blame my parents, the various schools I got thrown out and my wasted career options after joining the civil service…
There also happened a very creepy thing after filming this movie. Director Dearden past away a couple of years later by a car accident exactly on the same place on the same highway where there is a car accident in the beginning of the movie.
Sherlock Holmes in New York is not hard to find. Just look at the German Amazon and you see many versions. I have myself the German dvd and the English blu ray (with the huge close up of Roger). That is a very good one. You can see the movie in the original 4:3 format, but also in widescreen.
It is a some kind of original new story, but while watching you will notice that they used elements of classic stories like the red headed league etc. It is very well done and Roger is doing a good job. Moriarty is - surpisingly- played by director John Huston and he is a good match for Roger’s Holmes. Watson is played by Patrick Magnee, he is ok, but why he have to talk with a cracking voice the whole movie is beyond me.
Shout at the Devil… well… you already know all the downsides of that movie. Watch it for Sir Roger, but all the elephant shooting, some scene’s could be considered as racism and the movie is overlong, doesn’t make it a very nice watch, I am afraid. But there is good acting from Roger and Barbara Parkins. Marvin looks like half of the movie drunk and maybe he was and the African locations are beautiful. So you have to decide yourself if you want to see it.
Oh, God! (1977 film directed by Carl Reiner, starring George Burns and John Denver): I’ve watched this many times before, but hadn’t seen it in decades. We were channel-flipping last night, and TCM (Turner Classic Movies) was showing it. Just one of those “right place, right time” moments.
The courtroom special effects are dated, but that’s such a minor quibble. The gentle humor still lands, without beating us over the head with the message. George Burns’ deadpan-yet-genuine delivery as God still rings true. And who else but John Denver could have portrayed Jerry’s earnest conviction so convincingly?
Terri Garr seemed to be making a career of playing long-suffering, hapless wives or girlfriends. What made her so appealing then, and now, was her quirky sensitivity to baffling situations. And Paul Sorvino was devastatingly precise as the sleazy evangelist. If only the hucksters of today got theirs the way he did.
Roger Moore at his most smirkiest is an ad man getting thrown into a conspiracy involving a mysterious woman. Yes, it seems like a cross between North by Northwest and a late 60’s British comedy, and it’s light as a feather - but that’s not a bug, it’s a feature. And it is edited and shot so well, the pacing is excellent, fast enough and filled with so many incidents that I did not question the plot but just went along with it. Also, many, many great lines Moore expertly delivers with his one of a kind comic timing.