#only now i'm thinking of stallone and I AM THE LAW

[godlessriffs]

They showed T2 on Comet this evening. There's something about it that I want very badly to talk about, but the subject has never come up in conversation, and even if it did I doubt if I could get any of my points made before getting interrupted and losing track of the discussion. So I'm posting it here.

The Terminator (1984) occupies an honored place in my Blu-ray collection. It's a great film, and the casting of a then relatively unknown Arnold Schwarzenegger as a ruthless killing machine was a stroke of genius.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1990) is considered one of the greatest sequels ever made, and I'm not here to argue that it's not. But I just haven't felt like adding it to my collection. If you love this film, that's cool, and I'm not trying to convince you not to, but I really don't think the screenwriter/director/et al thought the concept through well enough. In particular, there are three specific things about it that kind of ruin it for me.

Firstly, and probably of least importance,: nothing whatsoever against Arnold - I think he's an asset to whatever project he's involved with - but there should only ever have been one Terminator that looked like him. If Skynet was smart enough not to send the same kind of Terminator after John Connor than it did after Sarah Connor, you'd think it would be smart enough not to manufacture any two of the things to look exactly alike. Remember, Terminators are supposed to be infiltrators. If the targets are able to recognize one from a previous encounter, Skynet loses the element of surprise.

I think this is one of those instances of the realities of Hollywood casting and marketing working against the integrity of the movie's premise. After all, who in 1990 was going to go see a sequel to the Terminator without Arnie? Bloody nobody, that's who.

(A digression: another excellent example of the aforementioned phenomenon would be Judge Dredd [1995]. The way I understand it, it was only because of Sylvester Stallone's involvement that the picture got made in the first place. Now, one thing every fan of the comics knows is that Dredd never takes his helmet off where the reader can see. It's part of his mystique; when he says "I am the law" it's not just an expression. He is the physical personification of the law, and that's all we really need to know about him. Letting us know what he actually looks like under there would distract from that. I can think of only two instances in the comics where Joe Dredd appeared without his helmet. In one his head is swathed in bandages, and in the other he's wearing a disguise that makes him look like Rondo Hatton, of all people. Point is, we've never seen all of Judge Dredd's face. But you don't cast a star of Stallone's magnitude in the lead only to keep his face hidden. It just isn't done. That fact, combined with Sly's unique and unmistakable screen persona, guaranteed that he was never going to disappear into the role the way this particular role really needed. End of digression.)

My second bone of contention is rather more damning. According to Kyle Reese's testimony to Doctor Silberman in the first film, Skynet's defeat was a done deal. Reese had personally seen its central mainframe obliterated. (Remember, this was the mid-eighties. The personal computer hadn't really caught on yet and the plug-compatible mainframe was still the standard paradigm of computer systems used by the government, large businesses, research facilities, and other such institutions.) It was only afterwards that they discovered that Skynet had used an experimental time machine to send a Terminator to assassinate Sarah Connor before she could give birth to their leader. When could it have been able to send the second one?

Now, I'm aware that a later installment in the series tried to retcon this inconsistency by positing that Skynet actually sent several Terminators, each to a different part of the timeline. The problem I have with this, apart from the fact that it feels like the writers were moving the goal post in order to justify expanding the franchise, is the nature of the second Terminator itself.

The T-800 introduced in the first film is vat-grown organic flesh over a robotic skeleton. It's presented as the most advanced of Skynet's weapons. The T-1000 from T2 is something else altogether - liquid metal, capable of shaping itself into anyone or anything it has to to get the job done. Assuming such technology is even theoretically possible, it's way the hell more sophisticated than anything we see in the first film. On top of that, in order to send it back in time, Skynet would have to have solved the problem of transporting inorganic material without first covering it with living tissue. Those kinds of innovations take time, and I just don't see how Skynet could have had that time. For the sake of the initial premise I'm willing to accept that time travel is possible and that robots can be made to pass for human. But I'm not buying that this busted machine gets to roll the dice again after it's hail Mary attempt to save itself failed.

The subject of my third gripe isn't a plot hole; it's purely personal. Here's what we know at the end of the first film: a terrible war is coming. Most of humanity will not survive it, and the few who remain will endure a reign of terror unprecedented in human history. However...

Humanity will fight back and, ultimately, defeat their oppressor and take back their freedom. And it happens not merely because Skynet's last ditch attempt on Sarah Connor's life failed, but because her experience fighting for her life against the Terminator forged her into the sort of person who could literally become the mother of a revolution.

Now, that is the smartest blend of seventies downer and eighties fist-pump that I have ever seen committed to celluloid, and I really don't appreciate how the sequel just flat out replaced it with a run-of-the-mill happy (if bittersweet) ending straight out of a Spielberg movie.

[movienotesbyzawmer]

April 12: Rocky III

(previous notes: Rocky II)

Because now that Rocky has done the unthinkable and become The Champ, we want to see him tackle the next challenge… win AGAIN.

I remember seeing this in the theater with my buddy. I don't know if I liked it. I'm pretty sure I found Mr. T to be as charismatic and as terrifying as they wanted. I'm pretty sure when I bought the ticket I hesitated and asked the cashier, "hey, wait, we get to see him do some variation on the triumphant steps jogging moment, right? Otherwise never mind I'll go see Poltergeist again". If I'm paying good money for boxing sequels, I want to be assured that the formula has not been altered.

Okay let's go.

Once again, this is Un Film De Sylvester Stallone.

Slight variation on the fanfare with the title, now there's a close-up of the Important Belt Buckle Of Punchsport.

Then we see the climax of the previous movie, maybe edited slightly for time. But not very noticeably different.

That segues immediately to a montage of Rocky doing many successful beatup games, scored by the enormous pop hit "Eye of the Tiger". I suspect this isn't the last we'll hear of this number.

The montage morphs into a different story, one starring Mr. T! He's watching Rocky win stuff and he is not pleased. He can also fist-game, it seems. But the montage makes it clear that it is our hero Rocky who is the star of commercial endorsements and marriage love.

I mock but this visionary filmmaker has indeed opened this movie with energetically cinematic choices.

0:8:40 - Arcade games! Paulie goes to an arcade and it is like the arcades I went to when this movie was out and I see games that I played! But Paulie doesn't like the Rocky pinball machine. It seems he is a sore brother-in-law.

Rocky is now very dashing. Paulie is drunk and whiny about how Rocky is such a big shot now, but he has a point about how prettied up he has become.

Later that night Rocky and Adrian are in their bed and it has a rich person headboard. The director, also visibly present in front of the camera, clearly instructed the production designer to create a bed that would reflect the elite level of financial flexibility that the protagonist has reached.

So apparently Rocky has gotten himself into the strange situation where he has to do a charity boxing match against a wrestler played by the increasingly famous Hulk Hogan. I had forgotten that Hulk Hogan is in this movie. Mr. T is watching this match and he looks intensely the same way he only ever does.

Whoa Hulk Hogan is way taller than Sylvester Stallone. Is that allowed? The rules have changed! And this whole thing is not boxing it is wrestling and it is that silliness instead of boxing. This is a long scene that is the same as a typical Wrestlemania thing, all manufactured drama made to seem like fighting and true menace, but at the end we see that they are just professional coworkers and we have all learned a valuable lesson haven't we.

At a statue-unveiling, Rocky announces that he is maybe retiring. MAYBE. But then Mr. T shows up talking smack, and ladies and gentlemen we have ourselves an end-of-Act-One.

As Act Two begins, we have a scene that was an A+ homework assignment for the screenwriting teacher of Rocky III's screenwriter, who you will recall is the craftsman Sylvester Stallone. Burgess Meredith is like "I quit! I won't help you with this fight! Mr. T is too hard to beat!" But then they talk it out to advance past that scripted complication. And now Rocky and Mr. T are training for their fight in their separate worlds.

Speaking of worlds, in the World Of Rocky, the famous theme that was introduced in the score of the first movie is actually known to the characters in this movie as Rocky music. They play it for him publicly to celebrate their pride in his violence accomplishments.

Apollo Creed appears to be retired, but he is a commentator at this Rocky/T fight.

0:40:00 - They're about to do the fight, but Mr. T is so The Way He Is that the wants to fight on the way TO the fight. That results in some tumult that makes BM have health problems. It was vague what happened, it seemed like BM was shoved aside by all the mad/scared/fighting people, so then he has a conversation with Rocky in a back room where he's like, don't stop the fight even though I am suddenly vaguely frail. He sort of clutches his chest like maybe there's a heart attack but just one of those everyday ones. I have those every time I click send on a work email. My friends should not be discouraged from championship fisticuffs when that happens.

This is the first Rocky movie to be made after Raging Bull came out, and I detect some influence in the boxing footage, like with close-ups of Mr. T.

Rocky loses that fight pretty quickly, and maybe the problem is that he didn't do a pre-victory steps jog. But the movie is telling us that BM is dying on a table in the back room and that's the real problem.

BM dies and SS has done some pretty ambitious cry-acting. Then the funeral is in one of those indoor above-ground file-cabinet-style cemeteries, which is not the normal cinematic choice so nice job there.

I can already tell that we're going to have another thirty minutes of a bummed-out Rocky to fill out Act Two before it starts to look like the setup for a fulfilling climax can begin. It's what I would have told him to write if he were my student at the third-rate community college where I'm a part-time screenwriting teacher in this scenario.

Apollo Creed has shown up to try to pep-talk Rocky, and he keeps saying "eye of the tiger" because of marketing departments. But also, he is a more mature person than in the first two movies. Even though it's a character shift, I do kind of buy it. It seems like another side of the character we knew slightly.

0:59:00 - Another scene beginning with dialogue that sounds like it was improvised by people who don't know what real life is like. "Come on you're going to be late to the airport!" "Maybe you should have packed another sweater" "no in California it's not too cold". AHA THEY ARE GOING ON A TRIP TO CALIFORNIA I AM ON TO YOU ROCKY III

When they go to Los Angeles and show us people on the street and the people have been told to look and act super different so that the audience will be like, wow California is different, then, well, we are at this part of Rocky III did you know.

Although there was my earlier expectation that we were going to have a prolonged funereal story arc, but what's happened is that Apollo is invested in training Rocky so they're showing us that side of Apollo, and that's interesting. But also it's the template of "Rocky is training and he doesn't look like he's going to get there, but then inspiration will hit and he will look like he is going to get there". S. Stallone, noted filmmaker, is using montages and flashbacks to show how recent bad news moments for Rocky are haunting him. It is working.

Adrian performs a pep talk monologue for Rocky. I don't understand her point. It's like a box of those refrigerator poetry magnets jumbled up together and spoken as movie script lines. I guess the gist is "don't give up" and he starts to think maybe he shouldn't give up. Then it's a new training montage, and it's got the classic "running far now" Rocky theme so we know it's going well. The twist on the classic cheering-atop-stairs cadence is it's Rocky and Apollo on the beach, and Rocky is a little faster than Apollo and that is great news for them both.

Now we're right before the final fight, and we heard Mr. T tell a reporter that he "pity the fool". I didn't hear the rest of what he said, I was just so happy to hear him say "pity the fool".

Oh but shortly after that he is asked what his prediction is, and he looks at the camera, OUR camera, at US, and says "PAIN". Submitted without comment.

That face-to-face moment right before the fight starts, Mr. T says "imma bust you UP" and Rocky says "go for it". Advanced Scripted Dialogue with Professor Stallone.

The final fight happens, and it's mostly the same as how the other ones went except without a montage summarizing a whole bunch of rounds. I think this whole fight ended in three rounds. But it ends with the exact same music that I'm getting sick of….

BUT! There is a follow-up scene this time! It's some other day later on and Apollo and Rocky are just palling around at the gym. And THEN the movie ends. I feel that the producers must have implored Stallone, artisan that he is, to just end the movie on that climactic moment right after the fight ends, just like the other movies, but he said NO. That is not ENOUGH for a SYLVESTER STALLONE FILM. We will have an additional scene with INCONSEQUENTIAL BANTER. It will last OVER ONE MINUTE. And here we are. Rocky III: it's like Raging Bull, but better!!

I think Talia Shire is the only female actor with any lines in this movie.

One thing that's very much worth saying about this movie is that there is WAY more actual boxing in this movie. The other ones had almost no scenes where there were live boxing matches, but this one had lots. Plus that wrestling one! And as I observed, the directing style with this one also had a newfound sense of visual pop. But the story seems like it changed not at all from how it was described in the first studio board room meeting where jackass producers blurted out what Rocky III might be like.

(next: Rocky IV)