Stay Hungry

Stay Hungry – 1976, Bob Rafelson

Did you know Schwarzenegger won a Golden Globe?
Hard to believe, but having seen his uniquely humble performance in Stay Hungry, I can dig it. By this point in his career Arnold had been in a couple of films where he either said nothing or was entirely dubbed, but in this forgotten gem he holds his own along side a young Jeff Bridges.

I stuck this on my LoveFilm list for the sake of Schwarzenegger completionism but I was pleasantly surprised. Jeff plays a young blue blooded Alabamian who’s got time and money to spare, Arnold plays...a bodybuilder. Not exactly a stretch, but watching him in this film it’s amazing to see him play an intelligent and sensitive young hulk, revelling in the hospitality of the Deep South, opposite Bridges’ equally young yet jaded local.

Jeff and Arnold were only born a couple of years apart and from this scene it’s like they could have been brothers (if one of the brothers had become Mr Universe).



‘You can’t grow without burning’. Truer words never spoken. Sally Field is also in this as the love interest that the two studs are kind of fighting over.

The guys who make Family Guy clearly don’t think much of her, but she never looked better than here. Little know actor R G Armstrong gives an excellent performance as the strange gym owner ‘Thor’. You’ll recognise Armstrong as General Phillips from Predator:



The film ends in drama and farce as Thor’s self destructive tendencies come to a head amid a comedy shambles typical of films of this period. This is a serious film, but it has the same joyful vibe as films like Smokey and The Bandit and Every Which Way But Loose, the poster for which I feature purely for it’s awesomeness:

Class of '82

1982 was a vintage year for films, these are a few of my favourites;

Tron – Stephen Lisberger
All Pixar slapstick humour comes from here.
That’s quite a statement but it’s clearly evident from a particular sequence about half way through Tron in which Jeff Bridge is trying to fly the broken down space invader thing. He is accompanied by a ‘byte’, a floating spark/ball thing that can only say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Jeff comically flies the ship through the Tron landscape crashing into things, having a funny back and forth with his little sidekick, until he ultimately breaks his ship into pieces. It’s a well timed comedy sequence with the perfect rhythm that seems to be facilitated by the medium of 3D animation. Timing, like scaling, is easier in 3D than 2D. The speed at which something is animated can be timed perfectly in 3D animation; physical comedy can be easily animated to the millisecond before the final rendering of the image is created. A gag can be viewed from multiple angles and the funniest one chosen whereas traditional 2D animation relies on the director making the right choice to begin with. Looking forward to the sequel.

The Dark Crystal – Jim Henson and Frank Oz
The Dark Crystal is an amazing achievement. I’m tempted to say it’s on the same level as Peter Jackson’s Lord of The Rings trilogy and Avatar as far as the creation of a wholly realised ‘other world’ goes. Of course the most impressive thing is that it was made in the pre-digital age that I’m always harping on about; the cast is made up entirely of puppets, who occupy a detailed and ‘believable’ planet that was painstakingly created. I’m sure there were budgetary restrictions but it’s hard to tell, which is testament to the skill and ingenuity of the people who made it. Watching a childhood favourite again as an adult can often be disappointing, but when I saw it recently I was able to appreciate all the details that I missed as a child. In particular the villains of the film are incredibly compelling; they are more interesting and ‘fleshed out’ than the protagonist or any of the other good guys. I hope they get round to making a sequel, or even a remake.

Conan The Barbarian – John Millius
It took me a while to realise it but this is one of my favourite films. I must have watched it least once a year for the last ten years, not because I decided to it, but because whenever it’s on TV, I can’t help but watch. By far one of the most quotable of Arnie’s films, but some of the best lines belong to James Earl Jones. James camps it up to the max in his ridiculous wig, but he adds incredible dramatic weight to the film. He’s one of the few actors to portray a worthy nemesis to the big Austrian.

This was Schwarzenegger’s seventh film but his career basically started here. It’s as though the Conan creation story (as presented in this cinematic adaptation) is a metaphor for the life of Arnold himself; born into a poor family who lived in great hardship, perhaps in the wake of a great war, Conan’s youth is stolen from him as he is forced by a seemingly uncaring authority to become greater than his peers in every way. Conan embraces this life and eventually achieves physical greatness unparalleled by any man. Conan’s body becomes his life and livelihood, until he is freed, possibly against his will, and forced to flee to a far off land to take what he can from life. He is reduced to a petty thief, but eventually becomes the biggest thief there is (in every respect) before he finally settled into a position of power, ruler of a great land, feared and respected in equal measure.

Rocky III – Sylvester Stallone
I live my life by the mantra of Clubber Lang: ‘I train alone, and I fight alone, and I win alone’ Hard words from a hard man. In my eyes there is no debate as to which is the best Rocky film (Rocky IV), but the ground was laid with number III; Fight, Training Montage, Fight. Rocky III has a greater legacy than most give it credit for. The Karate Kid and all it’s imitators follow in III’s footsteps. Far from taking the great Rocky and dragging him through the mud, Stallone achieved a kind of cinematic purity with III and IV. Like Stallone’s physique, these films were trimmed of all fat and honed to perfection.

First Blood – Ted Kotcheff
Ditto.
Stallone made his big comeback with The Expendables, which I enjoyed, but it was far too experienced, it lacked the joyful rage of the Rambo films. I suppose after taking us to a darker place with John Rambo (Rambo IV) Sly wanted to make a more complete and contemporary picture. The Expendables would have benefited from having a simpler story with less emphasis on character development. In fact, if I could create my dream cinematic pairing it would be Stallone directed by Terrence Mallick. Screw conventional narrative and dialogued, all we need is to be able to tell basically what’s going on and watch incredible scenes of Stallone destroying the landscape. Such a film would truly be thunderous and stately.

Predator

Predator - 1987, John McTeirnan

When people ask me to name my favourite film, I often pause before saying ‘The Big Lebowski’, when the honest answer is really ‘Predator and The Big Lebowski equally’.

Lots of people turns their nose up at Predator, but pointing out that it was directed by John ‘Die Hard’ McTeirnan is enough to bring most of them round.

Predator can be appreciated for the same reasons as Die Hard, but it generally isn’t. Schwarzenegger and all the other meatheads in Predator put the discerning viewer off. Arnie takes his shirt off and fights an alien in the jungle. It’s far less embarrassing to watch Bruce Willis take his shoes off and fight Alan Rickman in a skyscraper. The problem is that watching a lot of crap action films is a prerequisite to appreciating Predator, and who the hell can be arsed to do that (apart from me)?

Predator gets right all the things that can go unnoticed in a film; pacing, structure, casting and cinematography. Predator, like most action films, sticks rigidly to conventional three act structure:

Act I: 33 minutes. Ends with 10 minute action set piece where they attack the enemy base.

Act II: 44 minutes. Concludes with 18 minute sequence that begins with the team setting traps for the Predator and ends with Arnold getting covered in mud and becoming invisible to the Predator.

Act III: 22 minutes. Schwarzenegger vs Predator.

Predator was only McTeirnan’s second film so he wasn’t going to try anything radical, and the studio would have never let him try to be too clever anyway, but few other films have pacing as good as Predator. A lot of the first two acts are taken up by Schwarzenegger and his team trekking through the jungle, which could easily become boring, but there is a high enough frequency of events to keep it interesting. This is helped by the cast, who hold the audience’s attention just by the way they creep through the leaves. Bill Duke, Jesse Ventura, Sonny Landham, Carl Weathers. All bad mothers. That guy who wrote Lethal Weapon ain’t such a badass, but he tells a couple of pussy jokes to lighten the mood, and the short guy was a genuine Vietnam vet, so there.

The cinematography of Predator is vastly underrated. When people think of good cinematography they thing of epic films featuring incredible landscapes. Films that appear claustrophobic aren’t impressive. It’s difficult to make a film shot in a jungle look good. In Predator the horizon often ends a few feet away from the camera, other than the actors, all that is in each shot are leaves, yet it still looks exciting and it fits the story perfectly. The Predator spends the first two thirds of the film as a camouflaged blur in the jungle, but then, everything is camouflaged. The entire pallet of the film is green and brown, but green and brown have never looked better on film.

Equally impressive are the visual effects. They may look dated now, but I think they still stand up to a lot of modern efforts. What you have bear in mind is that they are pre-digital. Every shot of the Predator in camouflage or of its heat vision was laboriously created by shooting on film with a beam splitter and a thermal camera, then creating the effect using traditional editing techniques.

On the surface, it’s a film about Schwarzenegger and his huge guns wandering around a forest flexing and looking greasy, but there is so much more depth than that. If another actor had played the lead, and the ending had been a bit cleverer, Predator may have been given the respect that the first two Alien films were given. Then again, without Schwarzenegger it would never have been made. Arnold was the second choice to play the Terminator, but only he can take on the Predator single handily and win.