Wednesday 10 October 2007

My war isn't over, Adrian...

Well, after finishing "A Bridge Too Far", I decided to re-visit the "Rambo" trilogy (soon to join the legion of "4th in the series of" sequels of recent times (the trailer looking awesome), and I have to say, the first movie is awesome. The 2nd and 3rd are good, but not awesome, nor shite...but not superb, although I get their reason for being - 2nd movie is Rambo returning to Vietnam, 3rd movie is Rambo's modern day Vietnam, after ending his personal war with Vietnam he needed a new war to fight, so it ended up being in Afghanistan ... although being thoroughly perplexed by Middle Eastern politics, I don't know where "Rambo 3" fits in with all the shite going on over there now.

All this talk of "Rambo" though, does remind me of the hilarious, yet fully justified, rant from the Angry Nintendo Nerd regarding film franchises and the titles - such as these films:

1) First Blood
2) Rambo: First Blood 2
3) Rambo 3
4) John Rambo

There's not the consistency of Stallone's other franchise, that is the utterly superb "Rocky" series - solid Roman Numberals all the way till the last one, which as we all should know is "Rocky Balboa" - although that is fully justified, it was such a long gap since "Rocky V", and it exists in a different time, whereas the previous films were all quite quick-fired out, or within the same range of time ... it's why I guess "Live Free or Die Hard/Die Hard 4.0" makes sense ... technically ... I say technically, because both those titles suck - just call THAT film "DIE HARD 4" and leave it be, but as Stallone is actually a Jack of several trades, he does inject his own soul into his heroes - particularly Rocky - so I think it makes complete sense of cap-off his two biggest characters by titling their final films after the protagonist.

I recently re-watched the second half of "Rocky II", recent as in yesterday morning when I was waiting to use the internet, and it just reminded me of how awesome those films are (well, the fifth is a bit tosh, but with all the Tommy Gun crap taken about, it's actually still pretty good, because it advances the story of Rocky Balboa onwards). Plus - the soundtrack is just awesome, I listened to the 'best of' compilation whilst doing some title sequence tests for "I Am Zombie Man 3", and considering the story of "IAZM3", whilst listening to the "Rocky" soundtrack, it just fit really well ... the vibes being somewhat similar.

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