Project Stallone: "First Blood"

First Blood
By Peter John Gardner

I can't think of a single person that I know that doesn't support our troops over in Iraq. Even the staunchest opponents of the war still support our troops. How could you not? It's not like those that are against the war want our brothers and sisters to die horrible deaths over there (as a side note, I really hate it when pro-Iraq war people try to play this card. "You're against the war? That's not supporting our troops!!" Oh, go stick your dick in an electric outlet).

Ok, so we all say that we support the troops, but do we support our veterans? How many times have you seen a scraggly looking guy on the side of the road wearing an army jacket, possibly missing a limb, and holding a sign that says something to the effect of, "Vietnam Vet. Will work for food"? Life taught us to support our friends in the military, but it also taught us to not trust hitchhikers. So there's a 50/50 chance that the veteran without an arm leering at you while you anxiously await for the stoplight to turn green could either be a drifter that was never able to adjust back into normal life or an axe murderer waiting to chop off your reproductive organs and steal the twelve bucks in your wallet.

First Blood is about drifters like these. It's the first of the Rambo series, but it's not a one man vs. 239,764,567 Russians movie like the sequels turned out to be. John Rambo never really found his place in society when he returned from the Vietnam War, so he spends his days wandering around the country, hitching rides from strangers, and picking up a meal when someone is kind enough to offer one. The movie opens with him finding out that the last soldier in his team/squad/troop/whatever-the-fuck-you-call-it has passed away from cancer brought on upon by Agent Orange. Rambo is sad.

One of you graphic-design savvy people should make a Stallone sadface emoticon for me.

Rambo makes his way to a small town in the Pacific Northwest to collect his thoughts and possibly find a warm meal. Now, this is a nice town with nice people, and the police here don't take too kindly to "unsightly" drifters such as Rambo, so the sheriff tries to escort Rambo out of town. Rambo is frustrated.

He goes back into town in defiance because he just wants some food and a place to sleep for a while. The sheriff catches him again, and this time he takes Ramby Bamby downtown where the other officers have their way with him. I should clarify that. They don't rape him, but they each take turns beating the shit out of him. This triggers some POW flashbacks in Rambo's brain, and he goes APESHIT. Turns out that the drifter that they've been beating up used to be a Green Beret in Vietnam. Oops. After single handedly taking on four officers, Rambologna makes his way out of the police station and into the mountains. Rambo is pissed. The police are even more pissed.

And the adventure is on. The rest of the movie is a manhunt carried out by the entire county's sheriff's department, the FBI, and the local National Guard. Unlike the sequels, Rambone never directly kills anyone in this movie. He does set many traps and scares the shit out of anyone that crosses paths with him in the forest. Rambo doesn't take shit from anyone.

I wish I knew how to make a story like this relevant to my life and yours. The movie itself seems to be a protest against war, saying, "See what happens when we make killing machines out of these men and then return them to normal life?", but I don't want to write an anti-war piece (I'll save that for Rambo III or Spy Kids 3-D). Is the lesson here to pick up grungy vets on the side of the road because if you push them the wrong way, they might go all one man army against the town? I don't think so. Even though I'm sure that deep down, most of those vets you see are good hearted people that simply can't readjust and have become socially retarded. Yet, for my own safety, I really don't think I'd offer one a ride. If I had a business or something, I might offer a job.

I think what I'm getting at is the way we look at these people. We celebrate the vets that have come back from war and successfully reintegrated themselves back into the daily grind of life, yet we fear the ones who haven't. War is a scary thing, and I couldn't imagine not being fucked in the head after seeing some of the things that soldiers see every day. The movie itself seems to be a protest against war, saying, "See what happens when we make killing machines out of these men and then return them to normal life?" So why do we shy away from the ones that need a little extra help? Remember Frodo at the end of Lord of the Rings? Same thing. He couldn't readjust to normal life in the Shire, so he went to Valinor, but we all still loved him, right? Flimsy parallel, I know, but do you see what I'm getting at?

Maybe it's just the overall fear of hitchhikers that prevent us from helping out these vets. I'm one of the guilty ones, though. I'll give an extra dollar or two if I'm chatting with a drunk, homeless vet downtown or something, but I'm sure as hell not giving a ride to one of them. I value my testicles.

*Footnote: This dvd has some of the most hilariously useless special features I've ever seen. It boasts "groundbreaking military special operations survival mode features" which really just amount to a sniper scope appearing onscreen at different points during the film to let you know important information like what is happening right now. For example, Rambo is trying to make his way through an underground sewer filled with rats. The "survival mode" thingee pops up and tells you that, yes, those are indeed rats. Nothing about what went into making the scene, what kind of rats they might be, did Stallone get his nipples bit by one, etc. Nope. It just tells us that they're rats. Gee, thanks!

Project Stallone: "Rocky III"

Rocky III
By Peter John Gardner

"To all my love slaves out there: Thunderlips is here. In the flesh, baby. The ultimate male versus... the ultimate meatball."

So says Thunderlips, played by none other than Hulk Hogan, in the third installment in the Rocky series; a moment that I like to pinpoint as the exact moment where Stallone movies can't be taken seriously anymore. "The Party at Kitty and Stud's" aside, Stallone's repertoire up until this point consisted of movies, while still bad, where legit attempts at selling Stallone as a serious actor/writer/director. When you've got Hulk Hogan, Mr. T, and Burgess Meredith together in one movie, one can only mutter, "What the hell?", sit back, and revel in the awesomeness of this cornucopia of 80's pop culture.

Like all Rocky movies, Rocky III opens up with a recap of what went down in the previous film, that being Apollo Creed. What follows is a montage of Rocky beating the crap out of his subsequent opponents. Presumably, we're supposed to see Rocky becoming more cocky and overconfident during this montage, but it's hard to feel that when they've got the triumphant sounding Rocky theme playing.

You've probably seen this movie on a Sunday afternoon at some point in your life, so I'll spare you a lengthy summary of the film. Basically what happens is Mr. T wants a shot at Rocky's belt, Rock-o thinks his shit doesn't stink and doesn't take the challenge seriously, so Mr. T destroys him in the first match. Mr. Balboa wants the title back, but his confidence and will is destroyed. Only his ex-rival, Apollo Creed, can help He-Who-Says-"Yo" regain his confidence and hunger or his "eye of the tiger" as Creed calls it so we can have the Survivor song fit snugly into the film. The two boxers befriend each other in the second most repressed homosexual relationship in an 80's movie (the first being Top Gun, of course). Seriously, watch the token training montage late in the film where they're running on the beach together. You can't tell me those two don't want each other.

The term "eye of the tiger" would make a great euphamism for Stallone's urethra.

At this point, there are so many stupid one-liners and jokes that Rocky has become harder to relate to as a person and thus feels more like a cartoon character. Beneath the cheese of it all lies a theme (I think) of confidence. One cannot become too confident when they find success or else they run the risk of forgetting where they came from. Success can take away a person's drive to one-up themself and can provide a false feeling of invincibility. In Rocky's case, being too cocky led to a swift ass beating from Mr. T.

I've always tried to remain a humble person. Some would call it low self-esteem, but that's not how I look at it. I've achieved things in my life that I'm proud of, and want other people to be proud of, but I also know that I'm nothing in the grand scheme of things. I barely register on your radar. Always assuming that someone can do something better than me gives me a will to try my hardest. If I thought I was the shit, I would become lazy and think that no one could do better than me and not give it my all. I guess the lesson to learn from Rocky III is to know your strengths well, but be aware that if you become too arrogant, you'll wind up getting the shit beat out of you by Mr. T.

"Nothing is real if you don't believe in who you are!" Thanks for that nugget of wisdom, Rocky.

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.

Project Stallone: "Rocky II"

Rocky II
By Peter John Gardner

An paraphrased excerpt from a conversation I had last week with Kim:

"I'm thinking about abandoning Project Stallone."
"Why?!"
"I don't know. It's starting to bore me, nobody's really giving me any feedback, and I feel like I'm just repeating myself with a lot of these entries."
"You can't do that! I, for one, love reading them!"
"Yeah, but..."
"Stallone would keep pushing forward"
"Yeah, but..."
"What would Stallone do?"

Stallone would keep doing what he does best and with Rocky II, he does just that. In the first sequal to Rocky, Stallone returned to the character that he plays best after the dismal failure of his two post-Rocky forays into projects that were intended to sell him as a legitimate actor. Audiences didn't buy it. So here we see a pivotal moment in the career of Stallone in which Sly starts to play "safe" roles.

This installment picks up where the last one left off. Actually, it begins with the last ten minutes of the first one. We see the final fight between Rocky and Apollo Creed again (just in case you forgot the outcome), and the story picks up with Rocky's post-fight interviews and his trip to the hospital afterwards.

It turns out Rock-o might have suffered brain damage from being punched in the head one too many times. Kudos to Stallone (he wrote and directed this one) for actually providing an explanation as to why the character seems slightly retarded.

With that news in mind, Senor Balboa decides to retire from boxing and live the good life with Adrian. He buys a new car, that which he can't drive, some fancy-shmancy jewelry for Adrian, and a new house. As fate, or the plot, would have it, our hero does not know how to budget, and is forced to go to work in order to pay the bills. He works briefly at the meat processing plant where he used to beat the shit out of dead cows, and finally settles for a job as a grunt at Mick's boxing club.

Meanwhile, we find out that Adrian is pregnant. Not one to break tradition, Rocky still seems to be wooing her even after they've gotten hitched and gotten their groove on. "Yo, you like zoos? Yo, you know, I love the zoo. It smells so nice here when it snows. Yo. You know? You wanna hear a funny joke? I got tons of them. Yo."

Do lines like that work on women? Speak up, ladies.

Summing things up, Creed wants a rematch because even though the judges declared him the winner in the first fight, everyone else in the world felt the Rocky had won the fight. Creed is pissed. Meanwhile, at the boxing club, the young upstarts are harrassing Rock and calling him a coward and "The Italian Chicken" for staying out of the game and ignoring Creed's calls for a rematch.

It's not until Adrian has a near death experience while giving birth to Rocky Jr. that Rocky regains the urge to fight, and win, against Apollo Creed.

Like Rocky, I too felt disillusioned with not only Project Stallone, but other aspects of my life as well. I recently got rejected for journalist job with NLA, and it devastated me. I felt worthless. I felt like I had no marketable qualities, and I was destined to live the starving artist lifestyle for the rest of my life.

Then I watched this film last night.

Returning to what one does best may be repeating yourself in some aspects, but it's also playing to your strengths and selling yourself for what you do best. I'm sticking with Project Stallone even if it kills me, and it's definitely starting to hurt.

And so I got turned down for a higher paying job...so fucking what? It's not like that's the only one out there that fits my qualifications. Sure, I was bummed out for about a day, but Stallone has taught me to not give up. I'm not a scientist, preacher, dog whisperer, economist, doctor, or astronaut. I'm a writer, for better or worse, no matter how good or bad it may be. And just like how Rocky is a fighter and he "needs to be around it", I can't abandon things just because I get bored or uninterested.

I don't really have a satisfactory conclusion to this piece other than I am fucking ready to journey into what is now the downward spiral part of Stallone's career. From here on out, it's going to be the cheeseball action flicks, unnecessary sequels, and ill-advised comedies that have come to define our perception of Stallone. At the end of this odyssey, I will probably be just as beat up as Rocky is at the end of the climactic fight with Apollo Creed, but I will be calling out to you all, "YOOOO!! I DID IT!"

And then I will wrestle Hulk Hogan.

Project Stallone: "Paradise Alley"

Paradise Alley
By Peter John Gardner

Oh, the unforseen pleasures that awaited me in this film!

I knew I was in for a treat from the opening credits. "Paradise Alley" opens up with Cosmo (Stallone) and his two brothers, Victor and Lenny, having a race for cash across some rooftops in 1940's Brooklyn. As they are runing, the audience is treated to a freezeframe whenever a new credit appears on the screen. Stallone directed this film, and I assume he had some kind of say during the editing of this film, so I'm baffled as to why he chose some of the frames to freeze that he did. Most are unflattering stills of Stallone with a "YEEEEEEARGH!!!" expression on his face.

Ok, so I'm watching the opening credits, and I notice that the opening theme is bad. Not typical 70s B-movie bad...more like, "Is this a joke?" bad. At first the song sounded like something Trey Parker would sing in an episode of South Park, and then I thought it might have been a better-left-buried Tom Waits tune (more on him later). It turns out that the song is sung by none other than Sylvester Stallone himself. My new mission in life is to track down a copy of the soundtrack, whether it be on vinyl or mp3. This song is so gloriously bad that it must be celebrated.

The movie itself is sort of what would happen if "Rocky" and "Over the Top" mated. Cosmo, Lenny, and Victor are three Italian-American brothers living in Hell's Kitchen during the 1940s. After displaying raw strength and brute in local arm wrestling matches, Victor is egged on by his two brothers to enter the world of professional wrestling. Stallone's Cosmo is a fast talking, con artist type, and Stallone really doesn't fit in a part like this. His semi-retarded sounding diction doesn't fit into the used car salesman-like personality that Cosmo's character needed (this is a role that should've gone to whomever the Steve Buscemi of the era was). Stallone starts booking Victor in local wrestling matches with dreams that Vic will earn enough money for the brothers to move out of Hell's Kitchen. Cosmo in particular wants to live on a houseboat off the coast of New Jersey (huh?) with his new girlfriend.

And, yes, we do get yet another awkward Stallone wooing a girl scene. And it's the same as in his previous movies. If I didn't know any better, I would start to think that Sly wanted to make this some kind of trademark of his.

As the film progresses, the seemingly passive and quiet Lenny, played by Armand Assante, begins to dominate the proceedings when Cosmo expresses concern that they are exploiting Victor. Lenny becomes this aggressive bastard that just wants to use Victor to win him money, no matter how badly Victor gets hurt.

Upping the surrealness of this movie is the presence of Tom Waits in a small role as a local piano player aptly named "Mumbles". Seeing the great Tom Waits interact with Sylvester Stallone was something that I never thought I'd see, and it makes me wonder why the two never formed a friendship during the making of this film. Imagine how awesome "Rocky V" or "Demolition Man" would have been had Tom Waits done the soundtrack. Hell, maybe Stallone will read this and decide to have Tom Waits in Rambo IV. One can only hope.

To sum it up, the story is basically about how money and power can tear even the closest of brothers apart. Friends and family are a person's backbone, but as Lenny shows in the film, sometimes your friends and family have their moments of narrowmindedness. No matter how high of a regard one may hold your friends and family, they are still human. They will fuck up. They will piss you off more often than you'd like throughout life. What's important to love people despite their differences. The longer you know someone, the more apparent their flaws become, and it's a test to see if one can forgive another despite their flaws and love them anyway. My family has pissed me off many times. My closest friends are not perfect people by any means. Should I love them any less? Should I only surround myself with different company that are more in line with how I think?

The answer is no. My friends and family aren't perfect, and I love them all the more for it. These are the people that even though they might finish off the bottle of orange juice I was saving or make an occasional white lie that I can see through, would still be there for me no matter what. It's foolish to hold grudges against your friends and family over mundane things that can be resolved with a simple talk.

I love my friends. Stallone's "Paradise Alley" has driven me to write a thank you letter of sorts to you. I know that I'm not the greatest person in the world. I can be quiet and boring. I'm forgetful and at times oblivious to other's feelings. What I like about my friends is that you're still there for me, despite myself. I love you all for it, and I'll always be there for you.

Stallone has made me all mushy, warm, and fuzzy. That's a sentence that I'd never thought I'd write in this lifetime.

Project Stallone: "F.I.S.T."

F.I.S.T.
By Peter John Gardner

When I saw this title as the next movie on my Stallone queue, I was excited beyond all belief. At first, I thought that this was going to be Stallone's second foray into the world of pornography that somehow slipped under my radar. I thought it might've had a boxer theme to it in which Stallone punches rectums of different varieties until they're loose enough for his FIST.

Wrong.

Then I thought it could've been Stallone's first entry into the action genre. A name like "F.I.S.T." immediately conjures up repressed memories of a cheeseball martial arts movie that Jean Claude Van Damme would do.

Turns out that F.I.S.T. is an acronym for "Federation of Inter State Truckers", and what I got was a two and a half hour movie about union workers. Fresh off the success of Rocky, Stallone co-wrote another screenplay that tells the tale of Johnny Kovak. Johnny is a factory worker in 1930s Cleveland who becomes frustrated with his working conditions, wage, and unfair treatment. To make a really long fucking story short, Kovak rallies his fellow blue collar heroes together to form an organized labor union. Over the course of the film, Kovak's character gains more public recognition for his efforts, he also becomes entangled with the Cleveland mob after staging an unsuccessful strike. As we all know, getting involved with the mafia is a bad idea. As Stallone moves up the ladder, investigations ensue pertaining to F.I.S.T.'s alleged ties to the mob. "F.I.S.T." is basically a fictionalized version of the story of Jimmy Hoffa.

Interwoven throughout the movie is yet another awkward romance in a Stallone movie. As seen in his previous movies, Stallone's method of wooing a girl is to just follow her around and babble about random shit.

"Hey. Yo. You like birds? Hey, yo, I like birds too. Yo, I once had a bird named Larry, ya know? Hey, yo but he kept biting me, so I had to get rid of him, ya know? Hey, yo, you like going to the movies? Yo, slow down! Why you walkin' so fast, huh?"

I'm not going to use this film to bitch about my job or any past jobs that I've had. It would be too easy for me to compare the hyprocrisies of Kovac's company to my own, and that's not really what I got out of this movie anyway. What I asked myself after watching this cinematic version of some student's term paper for a political science course was how much I would be willing to "sell out" in order to set right what I think is wrong.

It's easy for someone to sit comfortably outside the system holding their picket signs at a university and protest to students that simply want to get to the library soon so that they can study for that calculus test that they've been worrying all week for. Doing so just results in unwinnable arguments with people that are either set in their beliefs or simply have other things in their life that they are more concerned about.

I've always felt that if you really want change, you have to be willing to compromise. You want to take down "the man"? Do it from the inside. When you get there, you'll realize that you have to start from rock bottom, just like Johnny Kovak did, to get to a position where you can change a company's policies to fit your own set of ideals. What you'll also find is that you'll have to do a lot of compromising. Not everyone holds the same beliefs and politics as you do and shoving them down someone else's throat is akin to doing the same with religious beliefs.

Standing around outside the system and bitching about things won't get you anywhere. If you want change, you have to be willing to agree to disagree. I also think that the best way to institute a change in your system is to do it from the inside.

Penetrate the system's butthole with your F.I.S.T.