Word: rambo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sigourney Weaver gives a terrific performance as the film's lead. No Rambo-esque musclebound bozo here, mowing down aliens for the sheer brute pleasure of it. Weaver breathes life into the age-old comic book conflict between wicked scientists and valiant humanist. Ripley, her character, manages to realistically combine the gutsy woman stereotype with a caring gentle femininity. A strong and maternal heroine is an innovation...
...from the religious Right, some militants rejected the commission's first 36 recommendations, which call for stronger antiobscenity measures. Other feminists consider porn a symptom of sexism, not a cause. Says Nan Hunter: "Sexual abuse is not caused by violent sexual movies any more than war is caused by Rambo." But many agree with the commission that porn is linked to sexual assault. NOW President Eleanor Smeal says that feminist work with rape victims and battered wives points up "the influence of violent pornography firsthand." But, she adds, "we don't want to suppress sexually explicit material that...
Critic Greil Marcus finds himself defending even dumb pop. "If a Swedish director wanted to make a Rambo," says Marcus, "it wouldn't be very convincing. Only Americans are arrogant, vulgar and moronic enough to make a fantasy like that credible. But I'll put our vulgar moronism versus their refined elitism any day. I'm not saying Chuck Berry is better than Flaubert. But I also don't want to live in a world where there's only one or the other...
...Peru, play mainly American pop music. In Nairobi last week, ten of the 16 movies playing were American, and in a record store at the Sarit Centre shopping mall, a poster of Joe Piscopo, of all people, is on the wall -- not far from the ubiquitous Sly Stallone. The Rambo prototype, First Blood, was a big hit last year in Peking. The A-Team has been the most popular series in Argentina for three years running, beaten only by the Oscar telecast, always the highest-rated show...
...other hand, consuming American pop is not necessarily a kind of pro- Americanism. The Rambo look is all the rage among guerrillas in Beirut. The Sandinistas are American baseball nuts. Says Peruvian Writer Augusto Ortiz de Zevallos: "You see Marxist-Leninists with T shirts that say COCA-COLA." In the view of Marc Pachter, a historian at the Smithsonian Institution, foreigners may turn to the left precisely because they like American pop so much. At least in Europe, argues Pachter, youthful political anti-Americanism is a way of "justifying their enormous thirst for American pop culture. As long as they...