John Hostetter | Through the Shattered Lens

The year is 1983 and things are looking bad for the Second Marine Division of the U.S. Marine Corps. The officers are almost all college graduates like Major Powers (Everett McGill) and Lt. Ring (Boyd Gaines), men who have never served in combat but who are convinced that they know what it means to be a Marine in the 80s. Convinced that they will never have to actually fight in a war, the latest batch of recruits is growing soft and weak. All of the slackers have been put in the Recon Platoon, where they are so undisciplined that they think that wannabe rock star Cpl. Jones (Mario Van Peebles) is a good Marine. MARIO VAN PEEBLES!

They haven’t met Sgt. Highway yet.

Gunnery Sgt. Thomas Highway (Clint Eastwood) has seen combat, in both Korea and Vietnam. He drinks too much. He fights too much. He has chased away his wife (Marsha Mason), despite his attempts to understand her by reading Cosmo and Ladies Home Journal. Major Powers may think that Highway is a relic but Highway knows better than to worry about what a college boy thinks. The Recon Platoon may think that they can defy him but that haven’t seen Highway throw a punch yet. Everyone may think it’s a waste of time to learn how to fight but little do they know that America is about to invade Grenada.

Heartbreak Ridge is all about Clint Eastwood. Without Clint Eastwood, it would just be another basic training film. With Clint Eastwood, it is a minor masterpiece and a tribute to America’s fighting spirit. In 1986, no one was better at glaring at a young punk or glowering at a clueless superior officer than Clint Eastwood. Even the running joke of Highway reading women’s magazines works because it is impossible not to laugh at Clint Eastwood intently studying an issue of Cosmo. Clint may have been 56 when he directed and starred in Heartbreak Ridge but he was still believable beating up men who were less than half his age. (Mario Van Peebles thinks he’s going to be able to stand up to Clint Eastwood? Get outta here!) There is never any question that Highway is going to able to whip everyone into shape. The only question is how many terse one-liners are going to be delivered in the process. By the time Highway and his platoon reach Grenada, everyone is ready to watch Clint put the communists in their place and Clint does not disappoint.

Reportedly, the U.S. Marine Corps. initially supported Heartbreak Ridge but, in case of life imitating art, disowned the finished picture, feeling that the film’s portrayal of The Corps was inaccurate and the sergeant’s “training” methods were too old-fashioned to actually be effective.

Thomas Highway would disagree.

One final note: Bo Svenson has a small role as the man trying to steal Marsha Mason away from Clint. If you have ever wanted to see Dirty Harry and Buford Pusser fight over the Goodbye Girl, here’s your chance.

Back in the 90s when I was a kid I would occasionally be up late watching whatever was on cable. Sometimes it was one of those late night cable movies I review and other times it was some adult themed show I wasn’t going to see on network television. In this case there was a very short lived animated series called Spicy City on HBO that was created by Ralph Bakshi of American Pop and Fritz The Cat fame. Each episode would have a character named Raven, voiced by Michelle Phillips, who would introduce us to some story that took place in it’s cartoon film noir Blade Runner type future. I thought I would revisit this show for the fun of it.

This episode opens up as a severely overweight man with a robotic arm is thrown out of the bar Raven is at. She goes into a side room where there are some booths that allow you jack into a virtual world. She enters it, and we enter the story.

This is our main character (I say that cause I really didn’t pick up his name in the episode) who enters the virtual world and because they are only working with about a half hour here, he immediately meets a girl that he falls for.

But before this goes anywhere, there’s a knock on her door and she leaves the virtual world. This is when we are introduced to Alice (Mary Mara) and her scuzzbucket boyfriend Jake (John Hostetter).

She’s hot and sad while he’s a sleaze and would love it if he could get rid of the “bitch inside”, but keep the body. Alice and our hero meet up again briefly that way they can tell us how the episode is going to end. He mentions he has something called a “brain scan” so that she never has to leave the virtual world.

Jake decides to visit the best virtual investigator around, which happens to be our hero. He says his wife died recently, but a virtual avatar she made to keep him company while he is on the net won’t leave him alone. He wants her deleted. He warns Jake that could kill someone if they are real, but a little money flashed his way gets him jacked in.

Of course Jake’s avatar is a shark. In no time they run across Alice, and Jake reveals his true colors. They jack out and Jake takes the software that can be used to delete Alice. Now he has to go back in to try and stop her from being killed, but Jake is already getting to work on destroying her soul.

They wind up in a place where the virtual world deletes unneeded things. He keeps begging her to jack out, but she won’t because she doesn’t want to go back. She ends up on the conveyor belt to death as she screams for help.

Jake shows up and sends both him and our hero to a boxing ring. Jake proceeds to beat the crap out of him. That is until he gets a little love boost…

After stopping Jake in the ring, he returns to the belt, decompresses her, and they fall to their death/deletion..sort of. Jake comes in and finds that “the bitch is gone, but the party’s still on.” Well, sort of.

She crumbles into a pile of dust. Don’t worry about Jake cause he just calls up some other girl to use. Meanwhile, the brain scan our hero turned on at the last minute worked and to borrow from Brazil: Love Conquers All.

Then we cut back to Raven next to the guy she went inside with.

Well, it’s nice to know that Raven and this random guy were going at it while we were being told the story of two people who killed themselves to be together. A story that when they are seconds away from falling to their deletion still manages to get me choked up. I’m very weird about what things will and won’t make me emotional. Apparently, the first episode of Spicy City does it for me.