Don't Fuck With John Rambo

Certain heroes in our culture are destined to live forever. James Bond, Batman, those fucking cavemen from the car insurance commercials, and, finally, 80-year-old dudes who (apparently) hunt the native peoples of Burma for sport. In case you didn't know, there's a new Rambo coming out, and fuck, it's going to be badass, because now he's got a first name to go along with his millions of flesh-ripping bullets of freedom.

"After a variety of title (and storyline) changes, it seems that the soon to be shooting fourth film in Sylvester Stallone's Rambo series has yet another name. And this time it's a pared-down one: John Rambo."

It's a good thing that Rambo's title has a first name included, because if there's one thing that terrorists and people from Burma are scared of, it's American first names. And holy water, and not shitting in caves. But mostly the name part.

Sylvester Stallone Got His Ass Kicked

Sylvester Stallone recently admitted in an interview with rottentomatoes.com that he totally got his ass kicked for real while filming the soon-to-be-released Rocky Balboa:

"Rocky has always taken a beating and weathered through, but now Stallone is rethinking his classic cinematic device. 'The gloves were a little worked so they had a little extra padding, but it hurt because I got dropped at least three times badly. The second knockout when I’m trying to struggle to get up, that’s real. It is. Now I get it. I wanted Rocky to just bounce right up like, ‘Yeah, it didn’t hurt,’ and like the third time he knocked me down I went ‘Wow, now I get it, It’s called stunned.’ I was stunned. So there’s more realistic fighting in this.'

When the DVD comes out, you can hold Stallone to his word. 'We worked in the editing room that if you freeze frame anywhere you’ll see the contact. There’s none of that like the other films where you miss by [four inches]. No, this is on the money, unfortunately.'"

You would think someone would have stopped this before Sly got too badly hurt. There's always representatives for the ethical treatment of animals on movie sets, right? Shouldn't there be ethical treatment advocacy groups for the extremely elderly, too? No one would stand by if someone wheeled Dick Van Dyke out on set and propped him up somewhere so he could do his "realistic fight scene," would they?

Dick Van Dyke: W-w-what? What's this? Fight? Is this...is this the realization scene? Where's my mark?
Director: Here, sir, hold this baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. Okay, bring in the grizzlies.

You know, on second thought, Dick Van Dyke using a barbed wire baseball bat to fight off waves of grizzly bears sounds like the single coolest idea for a movie scene in the history of modern cinema.