Stallone Again, Naturally

Back from a pretty good 3-day weekend. (I took Monday off as a comp day from work). It was a fairly busy three days. The highlights included:

- Touring a local preschool and put Keeley on the waiting list. (I’ll discuss this tom’w).
- Cleaning up our laundry room, which lately has become a dumping ground for items we don’t want to keep in our house proper but which we haven’t managed to stick in the metal storage shed in our back yard.
- Having a bacon cheeseburger at Tops, which is a local fast-food joint with generous portions of artery-clogging delights. (This is a treat for Mr. Tries to Eat Healthy).
- Going to a matinee (alone!) of RAMBO.


As a male child of the 80s, I got my fair share of exposure to Stallone, Ah-nold, Seagal, VanDamme and their ass-kicking colleagues. And when I heard that Sly was doing a new Rambo flick, I couldn’t wait. My appetite was whetted even further when I watched an uncensored trailer on YouTube a few months ago.

Well, I loved the new movie. It was so graphically violent, it made the first 3 movies look positively G-rated by comparison. I don’t mean to spoil the movie for you, but in this one Rambo kills about a thousand evil Burmese soldiers almost singlehandedly.

My cinematic bloodlust was tempered a little at one point, though, due to my status as a parent. There’s a scene in the middle of the movie where the evil soldiers massacre an entire village, using bullets, mortars, flamethrowers, machetes, bayonets and anything else they can get their hands on. No one is spared, not even children. In fact, there are close-ups of children being shot at point-blank range, bayoneted, and even taken from their moms and thrown into flaming huts.

It was hard to watch, even if the killings reinforced my eagerness (as if I needed help) to see Rambo literally take the bad guys apart in the climax. It’s not that I enjoy seeing innocent people slaughtered even in a movie, but before I became a parent I just shrugged it off. But now I find myself always thinking about the human toll. And I couldn’t help but envision myself and my family being assaulted the way countless people in the world are even as I write this. As I left the theatre, I had horrible morbid thoughts of my tiny daughter being thrown into a flaming hut to be burned alive.

Arg. I can’t think about it any more. I still enjoyed RAMBO, but I think I need to watch ZOOLANDER again to get back to my happy place.