Project Stallone: "Victory"

Victory
By Peter John Gardner

I've noticed that the two main "interests" that parents forcibly put their kids into during their formative years are sports and religion. As far as religion is concerned, I lucked out. While my parents were both religious (Mom is Catholic, Dad's a Lutheran), they felt it was wrong to shove it down my throat as a kid, so they preferred to let me research things and discover it on my own. I eventually grew into being an atheist. Instead, they enrolled me in various sports in order to keep me busy as a child. I played basketball, baseball, and soccer, and I rocked at all three of them. In baseball, I held the title for most stolen bases in the league for three years in a row, and my team was first place in our division for two years. As a goalie in soccer, I won the MVP award in the league one year, and we usually placed second or third in our division.

As time passed and all of the kids started to grow up, the coaches and leagues started to place more stress on the competitive aspect of the sports rather than the usual, "Let's just go out there and have fun!" attitude. This turned me off, big time. I just liked to play the game; I didn't give a fuck either which way whether or not we won. The older I got, the harder the coaches would be on the team when we weren't winning, and I hated that as a kid. So, when school finished up one year (I think this was around 6th or 7th grade), and my mom asked me if I wanted to sign up for baseball that summer, I told her no, and gave her the same answer when the new seasons for basketball and soccer started up. I was tired of competition. I just liked to play. To me, it was a hobby. I didn't see anything to gain from winning other than a cheap trophy and the right to say, "Yeah! We kicked the CRAP out of those 12 year olds! Whoooo!!!"

Rocky and a few other films aside (Field of Dreams, Major League, Rudy, etc.), I never really cared for sports movies which stemmed from the bad taste that I had acquired from my last days playing. So, I went into Stallone's 1981 film Victory ready to bored and stumped as to what I was going to get out of a movie like this.

The film is set at a Nazi POW camp during WWII. This camp is filled with mostly British and American prisoners, so in order to comply with Geneva Convention, the prisoners here actually have it quite good. Other than somebody getting shot to death trying to escape the camp in the opening scene of the movie, the camp seems like Club Med compared to concentration camps that non-POWS (i.e. Jews) were put into . This place seems less like Auschwitz and more like Camp Nowhere. Hell, in this movie, the Nazs seem like pretty nice guys. They never really talk down to the prisoners, feed and dress them well, let them roam around the camp freely, and even make an offer to the prisoners for a game of football (better known as soccer to us fat Americans). So, the head Nazi leader makes an offer to one of the POWs who happens to be an ex-football pro, played by the always charming Michael Caine. Caine's character agrees providing that he gets to choose his own team and that the Nazis provide proper equipment for the players.

Stallone plays Capt. Robert Hatch, an American POW that barges his way onto the team using the same nagging tactics that Stallone normally uses to woo women in previous films ("Hey, yo. Can I be on your team? Hey, yo, I'm pretty good, ya know? You see that kick? I can do that all the time? Am I the team yet? Yo. Hey, ya know, why are you ignoring me?"). Hatch not only wants to play the game, but he also has ulterior motives. Stallone wants to escape the camp, and he sees the soccer match as his ticket out. The rest of the film follows typical sports movie formula. The team sucks at first, they acquire some new players, including, I shit you not, the legendary Pele. The team gets better, Hatch "hatches" a plan to escape during the final match, and we get to the final game where everything follows according to formula. OUr heroes start off winning, then the Nazis start kicking their ass, and just when we're supposed to think that the POWs are finished, they make a huge, and unrealistic, comeback. Hatch and company escape and everything is hunky dory.

Watching the last act of the movie gave me an epiphany. Because I always rejected the competitive aspect of sports, I started to reject any kind of competitive traits my personality was trying to develop. I think this eventually hurt me in life, in many different areas. Too many times in my life, I have not tried for something because I always had a mindset of, "Why compete? They'll probably find someone better anyway". The thrill of winning something was too far gone from my life that I forgot what it felt like. Not winning anything helped sink my self esteem as I grew up.

Opportunities for promotion at various jobs I've worked at were always ignored by me because I would think, "Eh, they'll find somebody more deserving". Many times a girl would show interest in me, I would pull back sometimes with the thought of, "Why bother? She'll eventually find somebody better than me".

I think I ignored competition because deep down inside, I never felt like anything was at stake. Watching Victory with an analytical mindset made me realize that A LOT was at stake during all of the times I ignored competition for windows of opportunity. The lack of a drive to win has hurt my chances at life, and I think that had I felt like I was worth something while those windows were open, I would've jumped through without looking, and maybe, just maybe, I would be standing in a different place in my life right now. If I had competed more, maybe I could've "won". Maybe that would've made me feel like, "Well, I can do this really well, and others seem to agree", and I would've had more progress throughout life.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to say that winning is the most important part of sports or any other competitive situation. I still believe that having fun is what's most important. But rejecting the competition that life had to offer left me little opportunity to actually win anything at all, and that affected my decision making later on in life.

I need to take more chances in life and stop selling myself short. Having low self esteem not only hurts myself, but brings others down as well. I need to stop reflecting on what I never did and instead focus on what I could do. As far as the things I don't think I can do, who else but myself says I can't do them? Fuck that. While Orlando isn't exactly a Nazi POW camp, I'm never going to make it out of here a success if I don't try. I must stop being my own worst critic and leave it up for others to decide.

Project Stallone: "Nighthawks"

Nighthawks
By Peter John Gardner

Lando Calrissian. Just the mere mention of that name simultaneously brings about arguments amongst Star Wars fans over whether or not he was a better pilot than Han while the rest of the world collectively rolls their eyes and continue to get laid.

I’ve always been indifferent towards Lando. When I was a kid, I didn’t think he was as exciting as Luke, Han, or anyone else in the Star Wars universe. As an adult, I can see that while his character is crucial to The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, I kinda think that the fact that he’s little more than a Han clone weakens his character.

But, I digress. You come here for Stallone, not Star Wars.

I only mention Lando because Stallone's co-star in this political fueled thriller is none other than Lando himself, Billy Dee Williams. Lando and Stallone star as two New York City undercover cops that routinely clean up the criminal trash permiating the seedy bowels of pre-Giuliani NYC. When I say "undercover", I'm not fucking around. You see Sylvester Stallone in a blond wig in the first 10 minutes of the movie. Stallone in a blond wig and Lando Calrissian in the same movie? How can that not be great?

Well, as with most of these movies, it's not. If this movie were made in this day and age, I wonder how it would be received by the public. The plot centers around Rutger Hauer's character, Wulfgar, who is a terrorist bomber, back before everybody associated terrorism with Al-Qaeda. When the feds find out that Wulfgar has come to America and is ready to fuck shit up (his motivations aren't explained that well), the government decides to enlist the best cops that NYC has to offer.

The moment where the plot kicks into gear is where I found myself identifying most with Stallone's character. At a briefing regarding Wulfgar and ways to prevent terrorist activity, Stallone keeps asking the lead investigator questions like, "Hey, yo. Why are we still in this room? Why, uh, why aren't we out catching this guy?" and most importantly, "What do you want out of us?"

What do you want out of us...I find myself asking that everytime the government mentions terrorism. I've been casually following the race for the White House and of course, terrorism is a big talking point. Giuliani and most of the other Republicans seem to be taking the same stance that the Bush administration has, that being, "Vote for us or else we're going to get attacked again! Holy shit!", while the Democrats seem to dance around the issue without really offering any clear solutions.

It's been six years since 9/11. We haven't had a major terrorist attack since then, and who knows if anyone out there is responsible for preventing them since (like our president would have you believe, but he hasn't been a reliable source of information) or if another big attack just hasn't happened yet. It's not like we get attacked by terrorists all the time. If you recall, the previous foreign terrorist attack on US soil was at WTC in the early 90s. It's not like these things happen every few weeks.

Still, candidates from both sides of the spectrum like to hang the terrorist card over our heads as a political tool. But I quote Stallone when I ask, "Well, what the hell are we supposed to do?" Really, in the six years since 9/11, has your life changed drastically? Do you do anything different in your daily life? Other than airports being more of a pain in the ass than before, I haven't detected much change in my life. When the government warns me about terrorism, what are average people like you and me supposed to do? When they raise the terror alert, do we stay inside for the night or sit outside holding shotguns? No. I'm not trying to belittle the threat. We lost many of our brothers and sisters on that day, and I've complied with the bumper stickers that littered pickup trucks in the aftermath that told me to never forget. It's the "Vote for me and I will protect you" mentality that I don't understand. It's the fear tactic that I'm tired of seeing politicians use. I'm not going to go overboard and say that's the kind of shit that leads to a dictatorship, but I would like to point out that through the use of fear, the Bush admistration has gained more powers than any previous administration.

'Hey, yo. What are we supposed to do?" My opinion? Nothing, really. Living in fear is no way to live. Other countries out there, such as Northern Ireland, face terrorist attacks on their soil every month. Do their citizens cower in fear and refuse to go outside? No. They just go on with their business. Yeah, things are getting blown up, people are dying, and we all feel remorseful, but what can one do about it?

Terrorism and the war in Iraq are both major issues, but there is other shit that I wish the candidates would talk more about instead of focusing like on those like we did in 2004. What about our cracked educational system? What about our ginormous deficit? Our healthcare system? The environment? Terrorism is something we should be conscious and aware of, but it shouldn't be the only thing that we should be thinking about. The world is full of other things to be afraid of as well, like Stallone in a blond wig and dress. That's the kind of shit that keeps me up at night.