Word: rambo
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...Hollywood movie. On Oscar night this spring, Czech-born Milos Forman (see box) walked away with a best-director statuette for his work on the laurel-laden Amadeus. This year's first surprise hit, Witness, was directed by Australian Peter Weir; this summer's runaway "Gook" buster, Rambo: First Blood Part II, was helmed by the Greek immigrant George Pan Cosmatos. Indeed, when America wants to cauterize its own psychology or psychopathy onscreen these days -- in Birdy or The Falcon and the Snowman, in The Killing Fields or Alamo Bay -- chances are it will call on a foreign director...
Even as the shells of warring factions continue to burst over the city, Sylvester Stallone's Rambo is breaking all box-office records in Beirut. During the ten years of almost nonstop civil war, at least 50,000 residents of Lebanon's capital have died. More than 100,000 have been dislocated. Street battles and car bombings are almost daily occurrences. Nonetheless, Beirutis manage to carry on a semblance of a daily routine: shopping, working and even indulging a taste for the blood and glory of escapist films...
Obviously the sight of this marvelous physical specimen cavorting through the jungles in a series of brutally effective, strikingly photographed action scenes is a big part of the movie's appeal, regardless of ideology. Rambo has echoes of half a dozen movie heroes of old, from Tarzan to Shane, and his Vietnamese and Soviet foes are updated versions of the malevolent Japanese and Germans from World War II films. The cheers that erupt in the theater as the body count soars are coming largely from young moviegoers whose only previous encounter with Viet Nam may have been a question...
...could help make military conflicts in Nicaragua or elsewhere more acceptable at home. Others argue that the film is serving a legitimate therapeutic function. "We're in the process of assimilating Viet Nam into our American experience," says Henry Graff, professor of history at Columbia University. "Pictures like Rambo allow us to think it through 20 years later without the pain of the casualty lists before us." Stallone is impatient with critics who call the film reactionary. "So it's a right-wing fantasy," he says. "Like Valley Forge. They did it their way, too, against the British...
...righter of past wrongs, an exorcist of guilt, a hero in an age painfully short of them, Rambo has not finished his cinematic job. Stallone is already committed to making Rambo III, and is looking for another "open wound" that Rambo can heal. It could be in Iran, or possibly Afghanistan, but he will be back. "Rambo," says Stallone, "is a war machine that can't be turned...