the dolph lundgren the punisher: no, thank you, america

the punisher: '80's version starring dolph lundgren

i have been waiting to see this movie for a long long time.  the tom jane the punisher is one of my favorite movies ever--can't exactly explain why (something about its extreeem baroque aesthetic), but i love that movie.  and so naturally seeing one version of the punisher that makes one feel all fuzzy and violent inside makes one wish to see all versions of the punisher, and hopefully thereby achieve more fuzzy, violent feelings.  the ray stevenson version was, as far as i remember, okay--i mean, it was awesome*, but was it anything more than awesome**?  i don't know.  i think i was drunk.  i'll have to give it another shot.

the dolph lundgren version was...yeah.  it had all the elements.  the twisted moral platform, the racism against japan...the eyelid surgery by which dolph lundgren was made to look perpetually on psychotropics...  no, i really enjoyed it.  not as much as the tom jane version, but it was up there.  here's the thing: it was totally racist, but it was more than that too.  i mean, you can't just sell the mobsters' kids into white slavery, yakuza!  that is uncalled for!  BUT the pre-o-ren ishii female yakuza lesbian (?) boss (which just proves that quentin tarantino is a filter for everything that is cool) and her adopted mute (america's own deadly little miho) of a sidekick (who has next to nothing to do but is awesome nonetheless) in their ratted bangs and pleather are, like, really worth seeing.  in the same manner that the tom jane version is baroque in its execution--that is, filled with ornate, replete details, crafted in ways that do not augment but rather become the point (which details are, in some ways, the essence of action movies, but most action movies aren't up-front about this, and most action movies don't spend enough time to make the details that they're really actually about as complete as they need to be), so that this "outside stuff" actually sucks right back to the center of the movie and the whole thing turns into some kind of tone-poem with a beating singularity at its heart (i really like the tom jane the punisher)--the dolph lundgren version has an almost rococo approach to violence and human suffering. 

as opposed to sin city, which is much more italian rennaissance in its aesthetic.  or to kill bill, which is definitely an el greco.  WHAT?

what's the conclusion we draw here?  that all punisher movies are NEAT.  and that they should really re-release the dolph lundgren version on something other than videocassette.

and that die hard is attributed to peter bruegel but was probably actually a copy painted in the 1560's.  here is a poem about it:

Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spotWhere the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.


...and here is another (dub-cee williams, the filter for everything that is cool):

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was plowing
his field
the whole pageantry 

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning


the above is an example of the moveable foot.  the dolph lundgren the punisher, on the other hand, was an example of the kicking-ass foot.

*like hotdogs
**like, for example, a billion hotdogs