Chuck Norris vs Communism

Anyone see this excellent documentary on Netflix? I suggest you guys do if you have Netflix.

It's an interesting look back at the 1980s in Communist Romania and the forbidden world of Western films (not just Chuck Norris and not just action). Ceaușescu's regime was very much opposed to this form of "Western propaganda" (he called them "imperialist films") and cracked down on the dubbing (into Romanian) and distribution of these films. The documentary looks at the Romanian woman who dubbed practically every film (and every character in the film) that came out of the West at that time. It also looks at the folks who watched these films and were affected by them.

This influx of Western films on dubbed (and often re-recorded many times over) VHS tapes began around 1985. In this documentary you will see a typical 80s Romanian apartment building (we lived in one like it in Ukraine) where a room is packed full of people who are huddled together to see the latest CANNON film from the U.S.A. They are doing something they could possibly get arrested for and yet they are risking it - for a CANNON film!  Watching it in the dark on a fairly small TV set from a dubbed VHS tape which was probably copied over quite a few times from the original. No one worries about resolution or pixels or widescreen or HD - no one knows what these things are. Yet everyone - old and young alike (kids especially!) - watches with baited breath as the CANNON logo appears. They savor every image, every sound, every morsel that comes out of that small TV set, out of that grainy image. People couldn't get enough of this stuff. It's that "forbidden fruit" - the more forbidden it is, the more you want to see it. These films were smuggled into the country and for many folks behind the Iron Curtain this was their window to the West.

What really left an impression on me after seeing this documentary is how spoiled we are these days. We're just too damn smart for our own good. We talk about cinematography, the score, the plot, the writing, the acting, the editing, the sound design, etc. We talk about our screen resolutions, pixels, and other tech-y stuff. We see plot holes and missteps and bad writing and bad acting and forced character arcs and other such junk. Yet these folks who are being interviewed about these films that they grew up with don't give a crap about the acting or the script or any of that stuff. Because, as one of them describes it, ingrained in their memory forever is the image of Chuck Norris hanging upside down with a sack over his head and then when said sack is removed they see a dead rat in Chuck's mouth. For many of them that was just about the coolest and most badass thing they ever saw - imagine seeing it as a kid and imagine perhaps that being your first American movie. Of course you're not ever likely to forget it. Heck, I recall the first Chuck Norris movie I ever saw (this was actually here in the states, I hadn't seen any American films back home) and it was BRADDOCK: MISSING IN ACTION III and I couldn't get the film out of my head for days. I thought it was just the most incredible thing I had ever seen. Then I saw RED HEAT and that became the second most incredible thing I had ever seen. It makes me long for those days where every new thing you saw was just nothing short of incredible. As opposed to nowadays where we're so jaded that we nitpick everything we see. I suppose overexposure and oversaturation will do that. Nothing new out there anymore. We've seen it all.

I remember the scene in MISSING IN ACTION II: THE BEGINNING (where the aforementioned rat scene is from) where Chuck is hiding from his Viet Cong pursuers under water in some swamp and he's using a piece of reed to breathe through. Little did I know at the time that 007 already did this 23 years earlier. But to me that was such a "wow" moment! I mean how cool is that??!!

So folks can bash Chuck and CANNON and 80s action films in general all they want but we should remember that there was a whole world out there which waited with baited breath for a glimpse of the latest actioner from the West. And no one cared that the director was Joseph Zito or Lance Hool or Menahem Golan. They did care, however, that they were about to see some rarely seen escapist heroics that were never seen on state-run Romanian television.

Connery, Moore, and Brosnan! Accept NO substitutes!