When Taxi Driver came out in 1976, most people were really disturbed by the climactic shootout featuring a mohawk-haired Robert De Niro pulling out a variety of guns to graphically murder a bunch of pimps and pushers in a psychotically misguided attempt to save Jodie Foster. A small number of filmmakers who saw this film obviously had a different reaction. It got them thinking about how that sort of violence might play in a fun action movie. And thus, a decade later, the gun-fu genre was born in Hong Kong with the release of John Woo‘s A Better Tomorrow in 1986. Soon after that, extreme gunplay became an accepted standard of the modern action movie all over the world.

The same sort of thing may have just happened again. I saw it coming when Saving Private Ryan was released in 1998. As disturbing and horrific as the Omaha Beach sequence of the film was (so much so, post-traumatic-stress counselors were present to tend to some of the D-Day veterans who came to the premiere), I knew some sick bastard would see that film and think, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if a dumb action movie were allowed to be this unbelievably gory and violent?” Well, a decade later, we have arrived. And the sick bastard who sat in theatres ten years ago turns out to have been Sylvester Stallone.

In the past year, Stallone has revived two of his iconic long-running characters for new outings in theatres. Rocky Balboa proved to be a surprisingly low-key and mature final note to cap off his series of Rocky movies that ranged from heart-felt Oscar-winners to silly cartoons. Rambo, on the other hand, has proved to be something else entirely.

I’ve seen a lot of Stallone movies over the years, but the beast in this film is barely recognizable as Stallone. He’s been so altered by cosmetic surgery and human growth hormone, he looks like some Frankenstein monster hybrid of himself, sewn together from bits and pieces of Sly, a gorilla, and whatever the fuck Tetsuo turned into at the end of Akira. Even Stallone seems to realize how scary he looks now, because for the first time in a Rambo film, he never takes his shirt off. It’s like he’s afraid his crazy man boobs might leap off his chest and devour the camera operator if they’re exposed to the light.

The film catches up with Rambo twenty years since last we saw him. The thin plot involves him getting talked into ferrying some missionaries into Burma and, after they inevitably get into trouble, going back to rescue them. The female lead is Julie Benz, so you never have to worry too much about her fate. You know right from the start that even if Rambo fails to save her, Dexter will come and kill everybody on her behalf. Julie does bewitch the psychopaths.

What ensues promises to be a cornerstone in the next generation of American action movies. Rambo doesn’t kill his enemies in this one. He liquefies them. No, no, not liquidates — liquefies. Thanks to the same sort of computer-enhanced imagery we saw in Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, we’re treated to splatter effects that play out like the grand finale of a fireworks competition. Only here, it’s not played as camp or comedy, it’s dead serious. The end of the film (and I really don’t think this qualifies as a spoiler because it involves neither plot nor a twist) has Rambo manning a huge machine gun on the back of a truck and turning an entire company of Burmese soldiers into pudding. Despite the mass-scale relentless slaughter that eats up about seven solid minutes of screen time, you may be left expecting additional Rambo-style action following this sequence. Something that would display his legendary Green Beret skills better than being the first guy to commandeer The Big Gun. But no. Stallone is a little too old to get himself mixed up in any hand-to-hand action more involved than a quick beheading or disemboweling with his orc sword (no really, his orc sword). The best we can expect is to witness him unsportingly mowing down his enemies from range before his bursitis acts up.

The movie isn’t actually good or entertaining. It’s more pointless and only perversely amusing. I’m sure plenty of people will try to write it off as dumb fun, a popcorn flick, a black comedy about violence. But there’s something more disturbing going on here. Rambo is so earnest in its dark, brooding tone, it chooses to inject some highly wrongheaded political content. The Rambo series has always had a strange political agenda that, in each entry, was meant to be topical and, in retrospect, proved to be absurd. Who can forget Rambo III, with John Rambo hanging out with his buddies in the Mujahideen, helping them kill nasty Ruskies who, as Richard Crenna quipped, were experiencing their very own Viet Nam? Oh, how times change. Oh, how history alternately repeats and reverses itself.

This time, the political subtext is all about what’s going on in Myanmar. Rambo, much like the leaders of the free world, refuses to acknowledge the political reality of Myanmar and insists on calling the country Burma throughout the proceedings. In an attempt to edjamacate all of us dumbass moviegoers, the film opens with actual documentary footage of atrocities in Myanmar that would be more appropriate in a Faces of Death video than a Rambo flick. It’s one thing to try to ground your silly action movie in the real world, it’s another to exploit actual dead and dying people as stock footage before your hero starts plucking arrows into bad guys. It’s kinda like watching a Saw movie that has Jigsaw subjecting people to deadly traps because he’s pissed off about the genocide in Darfur. It’s not a comfortable mix.

Now, I know it’s important in every action movie to establish that the evil doers are really super-duper evil so that we can feel all pleased with ourselves when the hero mercilessly slaughters them. But the massacre that happens in a peasant village to set up this fact goes rather above and beyond the call of duty. It’s okay for the villains to shoot some civilians to illustrate to us that these are indeed bad bad men. But here we show them shooting kids, standing on the head of a child and bayoneting him, and tossing a baby into a burning building. All as part of a general chaos of murder and mayhem so extreme, even I, aficionado as I am, can’t immediately come up with any parallel examples in the entirety of exploitation cinema history. Ok, Sly, we get it. They’re bad guys. But it’s a Rambo movie for fuck’s sake, not Schindler’s List. Let’s dial the war crimes down a notch, shall we? I came here to have some fun, now I just feel dirty.

With no Richard Crenna around, there’s not even a hint of the usual fleeting humour left in this entry to make it anything more than relentlessly bleak and dreary. The increasingly irrelevant MPAA rated this movie R, which is generous considering it’s easily the most violent American action movie ever made. This is the organization that used to demand edits whenever someone got a paper cut. Now, it seems, no act of violence is too extreme to earn an NC-17. That rating is reserved solely for when characters put their weapons down and get busy making some sweet love. Heaven forefend American children see any of that. They might get it into their heads that sex is a good thing and perhaps more amusing than shooting total strangers in the head with a howitzer. We can only hope that this unexplainable R rating will open the floodgates to other, hopefully better, shoot-em-ups that will hit the same fever pitch of violence and gore without neglecting superfluous bells and whistles like plot, character and nuance. It’ll never happen, of course, but let’s keep hope alive just for the hell of it.

Work is wrapping up on my latest two cartoon shows, Kid vs. Kat and Racer Dogs, and I’ve noticed a trend. Since my days of writing very adult material concerning a bunch of Irish mobsters doing a lot of killing and screwing, the target demographic of my subsequent shows has gotten young and younger. This may be a natural byproduct of writing a lot of animation, but it seems my scripts are getting increasingly infantile. And I don’t just mean in the potty humour department. Whereas Kid vs. Kat was geared primarily for kids, Racer Dogs is aimed at even younger children. Now I have my agent running around trying to get me work on a new show designed for pre-schoolers. If I get that gig, I expect my following project will have me writing for third trimester fetuses. After that, I was thinking about jerking off into a cup and focus grouping my sperm.

Much as I like warping the minds of future generations with subversive subtext layered into my episodes, I really need to write some new material for actual grownups. Or at least people who know their ABCs and don’t wear jammies with stocking feet to their 8:00 pm bedtime. The problem with writing for children’s television is that it doesn’t help you improve your craft. In fact, it does damage to it. There are some excellent examples of brilliant storytelling aimed at children out there. None of them are on TV though. The television industry is already full of suits whose job is to cock-block quality from getting on the airwaves. When it comes to kids shows, the problem is further compounded by the standards-and-practices directives designed to protect children from anything that might upset, confuse, inspire, challenge or endanger them. Broadcasters live in terror that something they air may encourage some kid somewhere to do something that might cause some harm — thus inviting a big fat lawsuit. Therefore, children’s shows are increasingly designed to be the entertainment equivalent of a padded cell. No sharp edges for the kiddies — they might put an eye out on the wrong idea.

As a writer, this means I’m often asked to cut things from my scripts like conflict, irony or, indeed, proper narrative. And, obviously, any props that might cause physical damage to a child have to go. Sticks and stones and nasty sharp objects are the sort of things that usually get targeted by broadcaster notes. But all too often they’ll let their meagre imaginations run wild and come up some truly paranoid ideas about what might maim or kill one of the kids watching out there in TV-land. On past occasions, I’ve been told to remove such innocuous items as (I shit you not) sleeping bags, tiddlywinks, and ice cream.

As far as I’m concerned, if some kid gets a stupid idea in his head because he watched a TV show and then goes out and gets himself killed, that’s just Darwinism, pure and simple. Clearly, they were peeing in the shallow end of our gene pool, and they’re much better off being naturally selected to vacate the general swimming area. Hell, I grew up watching the Looney Tunes shotgunning each other in the face, and I always knew better than to play with guns. Or anvils or dynamite or rocket-skates for that matter. What sort of morons are we raising if we can’t trust them to base their understanding of reality on something more practical than a goddamn cartoon?

No, I never went out and harmed myself or others based on what I saw on one of the many ultra-violent kids shows of my youth. The one that fucked me up was The Friendly Giant — surely among the most tender, inoffensive, sweet-hearted children’s programs ever devised by man. Nevertheless, I let it inspire me to do something truly stupid. It was thanks to one episode when Jerome the giraffe mentioned a skiing accident he once had. Never mind what a giraffe was doing on skis. For whatever reason, I got it into my head that having a skiing accident would be a really interesting experience. Perhaps I’d have known better if Sonny Bono had already put his head through a tree on a Lake Tahoe ski slope, but back then he was still singing “I Got You Babe” with Cher.

I didn’t ski, but I did go tobogganing regularly. So on one of my next runs down a local snowy hill, I purposely threw myself off my red plastic sled and wiped out hard. And it bloody hurt. The thing is, I didn’t go blaming The Friendly Giant, or Jerome, or that creepy rooster-in-a-bag, Rusty. I blamed myself for being such a moron that I let a dumb TV show inspire me to do anything more dangerous than change the channel. I learned, I moved forward, my DNA remained viable. That’s how it should work.

These days, however, we’re so determined to keep all the stupid little kids alive, we’ll hamstring anything that might be entertaining to the smart ones. What’s more, we can’t even come clean and tell the slow ones that they’re stupid because it might hurt their precious feelings. I once had a producer come to me and tell me I could never have my characters call each other names like “moron” or “idiot” because these were actual scientifically defined terms based on I.Q. tests, and it might prove offensive to viewers.

“It’s not like they’re going to write in and complain,” I protested. “They’re idiots!”

“No, they won’t write” said the producer, shaking his head sadly, “Their parents will.”

It always comes down to the parents. They’re so determined to childproof the world, they’re hell-bent to fuck it up for the rest of us. The dumbasses survive childhood only to have more dumb children of their own. That’s how we end up with a world that has warning labels on coffee cautioning that it’s hot, or instructions on industrial high-pressure air hoses that tell us, “Do not insert in anus.” Really. Those are out there.

Well I say it’s up to the parents to protect their own children. They’re the ones who need to communicate to their kids that the world is full of hard, pointy, dangerous things. Things that will maim them, or poison them, or kill them, or hurt their delicate feelings. It’s up to moms and dads to pass down basic survival skills to their offspring. It shouldn’t fall on kiddie shows to pretend nothing in this world can possibly hurt them. Most kids will get it, understand, and thrive.

As for the others… Maybe, in the better interests of the species, responsible parents can take a less-evolved cue from the animal kingdom and eat their young.

It’s week two. I guess I should weigh in on the writers strike before it’s all over. Which may only be in another thirty weeks or so.

No, I’m not on strike. It’s the Writers Guild of America that’s on strike. I’m in the Writers Guild of Canada. And much as I’d rather be out in the fresh air picketing, I’m stuck inside working on a couple of more cartoon shows. The various writers guilds are all affiliated, which means I’m not permitted to work for American productions at the moment, but that currently has no impact on my income whatsoever.

And why would I ever want to work for Americans anyway? Their money ain’t worth shit. One American greenback equals about one Canadian nickel these days, right? Something like that. Ah, how times change. Go on, you American smartasses. Let’s hear you make fun of our rainbow-coloured money with the Queen and forgotten Prime Ministers all over it now. Aren’t you sad you used your leftover Canadian cash for toilet paper and kindling after the last time you drove up to Montreal to drink beer and go to tittie bars at the perfectly legal age of 18 to 20? Maybe if you held onto a few bucks as souvenirs, you might be able to afford that liver transplant your HMO won’t cover. Suckers.

Anyway.

The guild dispute, if you care to follow these sorts of things, mostly concerns new media royalties for screenwriters. DVD has exploded over the last ten years, and TV shows and movies are being downloaded over the web in massive quantities -– some of it even legitimately. It’s only a matter of time before the studios commit fully to offering downloads of their libraries for anyone with a computer and an ISP. It’s the future, and there’s boatloads of cash to be made by embracing the technology and making it easier for the consumers to get what they want, rather than fighting the pirates and trying to shut down every fly-by-night bittorrent site out there. The writers obviously want a cut. The studios don’t want to give them a cut because they claim they don’t know how much money stands to be made. Of course they don’t know. The profits will probably be beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. All they know for sure is that whatever they might end up making is better off in their pockets than the pockets of the sniveling little hacks they hired to write their hit television show years ago. Who wants to continue to dole out cash to writers for their past successes that continue to generate income to this day? They should just shut up, take whatever they were paid when they first wrote their scripts, and get busy drinking themselves to death in a timely fashion. You know, like proper writers.

How long this strike will go on is anybody’s guess, but it’s already hitting the industry hard. Hopefully there will be a positive resolution for my brothers and sisters in arms in the near future. This is my fond wish, mostly because I know the exact same crap is going to come up next time the Writers Guild of Canada has to renegotiate our deal. If the WGA sets a precedent on the issue, we’ll be in a better position to get the same thing. Or at least have a shorter strike before we get the same thing. Or at least have the right to bitch and complain when our strike fails to get us the same thing.

I know it will be tough going without your favourite TV shows for a while, or having the current season end prematurely, or missing out on yet another Saw movie come next Halloween. But rest assured it’s for the greater good.

What? This just in! The stage hand union has gone on strike? Broadway is all but shut down! Theatre patrons are disappointed as dozens of shows close their doors! Theatre patrons are doubly disappointed as Xanadu stays open!

But I was going to New York to see Spamalot this week. I go there, like, once a decade and now Broadway is closed for business? Stupid unions! Stupid fucking fucking stupid unions! Where are the club-wielding strike breakers when you need them? I thought the Republicans were still running things down there.

Better pay? Improved working conditions? What a buncha commie pinko claptrap. They should be grateful to have jobs in show business. Hell, they should be paying the producers for the privilege of working in show business. I have the constitutional right to be entertained, and I want to be entertained now Now NOW!

Shit. I guess I’ll stay home and watch TV instead.

Oh wait…