The Last Action Heroes
The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood's Kings of Carnage
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5,0 • 1 beoordeling
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'A blast' - Ian Rankin
'A lively celebration of 1980s action stars' - The Times
'Hugely entertaining' - Edgar Wright
Now with BONUS MATERIAL, from the editor of Empire magazine this is the behind-the-scenes story of the golden age of the action movie, the stars who ruled 80s and 90s Hollywood and the beloved films – from Die Hard to The Terminator – that made them famous.
Charting Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s carnage-packed journey from enmity to friendship against the backdrop of Reagan’s America and the Cold War. It also reveals the untold stories of the colourful characters, from Steven Seagal to Bruce Willis, who ascended in their wake. These invincible action heroes used muscle, martial arts or the perfect weapon to save the day, becoming pop-culture titans.
Drawing on candid interviews with the action stars themselves, plus their collaborators, friends and foes, Nick de Semlyen' s The Last Action Heroes chronicles how, as the 1990s rolled in, the glory days of these macho men began to fade, but how the mayhem they wrought on screen and off excites us still.
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De Semlyen (Wild and Crazy Guys), editor of Empire magazine, delivers a testosterone-fueled ode to action movies of the 1980s and '90s. He goes behind the scenes of the biggest hits of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Jean-Claude Van Damme, among others, telling, for example, how Jackie Chan saw 1983's Project A as his attempt to achieve in the U.S. the stardom he already had back in China, and how tensions brewed on the set of Die Hard (1988) when Bruce Willis refused to follow the director's blocking because he feared it would reveal his hair was thinning. Becoming an action hero takes hard work, as demonstrated by the punishing workouts Arnold Schwarzenegger followed to bulk up, but de Semlyen suggests the era's hypermasculinity had a dark side, with Steven Seagal facing numerous sexual assault allegations throughout his career. Still, the author shows plenty of love for the high-adrenaline classics he discusses, and fans of Reagan-era blockbusters will eat up tales from the sets of Conan the Barbarian, Rocky IV, and Predator. Additionally, de Semlyen's astute analysis takes this up a notch (he suggests that '80s action films satisfied audiences' appetite for moral simplicity and "a renewed sense of purpose" after the disillusionment of Watergate and the Vietnam War). This packs a punch.
