This one’s about the pilots who dump the red stuff on forest fires, and the Tom Cruise of red-stuff-dumpers is former shark expert and Close Encounterer Richard Dreyfus. The Anthony Edwards is John Goodman and the Kelly McGillis is Holly Hunter. Actually, Dreyfus looks kinda like Paul Newman in this one, strutting around in aviators, leather jacket, baseball cap and grey mustache. The point is he thinks he’s awesome, and everybody else agrees. His girl seems to have when are we gonna settle down? type issues, but he makes her happy by buying her a nice dress, something you don’t see around the base much because she’s the only woman there.

There’s a constant wackiness in the movie that’s pretty grating. Goodman does things like drink a Twinkie with a straw or not notice that he shook hands with a guy covered in oil and then find six different ways to unknowingly rub it all over his face. Painfully contrived. The first section reminds me of other movies that glorify the blue collar workers of a specialized type of firefighting – specifically ON DEADLY GROUND and FIRESTORM – except everybody has a wiseass grin on their face. It tries to pull you into their world by sticking you in the middle of all their camaraderie and in-jokes.

But it also gets into some serious stuff. There’s something really true to life about the way the night rolls lazily from good times to serious talk and possible breakup. Hunter can’t live with the fear anymore of her guy dying, putting his life on the line to save trees. And he can’t believe she wants him to quit the one thing he loves, the one thing that makes him awesome, that earned him the right to wear the shades/mustache/hat combo.

I dare somebody to have this airbrushed on the side of their van.

I was glad I managed to watch this forgetting what it was gonna actually be about, so I’ll put a SPOILER WARNING here. I was surprised when Hunter rushed to the runway to tell him she loved him before he took off, and then he tried to tell her he loved her for the first time ever but she didn’t hear him over the engines. I was like oh shit, he’s gonna die? Is this a PSYCHO move, it’s gonna be about somebody else now? Well, not really. After he dies heroically he gets to come back to earth to inspire a young pilot (Brad Johnson). He’s invisible like Patrick Swayze but he speaks to him and plants ideas in his subconscious. He also gets to see his old friends.

Call me an old softie, but some of this emotional shit worked on me a little. It’s a nice idea from both directions – nice to think you might get to stick around and tie up loose threads after you bite it, and nice to think that your deceased loved ones and dead homiez are literally there with you giving you support and inspiration and you just don’t know it.

And then, this being a Spielberg movie, it manages to combine that with a thrilling action climax. Good flying and fire effects and a tense scene where all kinds of emotional business gets to be worked out: the girl getting to be the one to risk herself, the fire fighters getting to heroically save lives instead of just trees, him getting to tell her he loves her and also being able to leave her behind so she can live her own life while he goes off to less earthly ghostly duties like trying to kill Pac-Man or whatever.

Kinda odd that this is such a minor Spielberg – obviously not one of the greats, but not notorious like 1941 or HOOK or anything. Just one of the okay forgotten ones. The reason it’s odd is because it was kind of a dream project for Spielberg. It’s a remake of a 1943 movie called A GUY NAMED JOE which apparently he and Dreyfuss quoted all the time on the set of JAWS, and he put it on the TV in POLTERGEIST.

Spielberg didn’t write it though. Wikipedia says the script was started by Diane Thomas, a waitress who had pitched ROMANCING THE STONE to Michael Douglas one day when he was a customer. She had been promoted to writing the RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK sequel when she died in a car accident in 1985. ALWAYS was finished by Jerry Belson, whose other credits include EVIL ROY SLADE and SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT II.

Spielberg bungles some of the comedy I think, but for the most part he directs the shit out of it and makes it way better than some Joe Johnston or somebody would’ve. He gives the characters gravity with the way he shoots them, he heightens the drama with the scary firefighting sequences.

I like Goodman in this too. He does that thing he did on Roseanne where he’s a goofball most of the time and then all the sudden you start noticing the serious undertones. He’s not only a loyal bud but turns out to be a really caring and supportive friend to Hunter after his buddy’s dead. It’s real sweet. In fact now that I think about it, Holly Hunter and Laurie Metcalf have always kind of reminded me of each other. Probly because of this:

And that’s almost the same relationship Goodman’s Dan had with Metcalf’s Jackie on Roseanne. Except without ever having had a thing for her. He’s such a good friend to her that he encourages her to see another, younger dude. He doesn’t try keep a manly loyalty to the dead guy or anything. He’s realistic about it. Life goes on. Always.

That’s kind of a dumb name. Fits the movie though. Pretty corny. I liked it though.

(I recommend playing those at the same time.)

chapter 4

released May 25th, 2001

WARNING: contains spoilers for PEARL HARBOR and World War II

After three financially successful action movies in a row (BAD BOYS, THE ROCK, ARMAGEDDON), Michael Bay got a once-in-his-career itch to make An Important Movie. He probly had SAVING PRIVATE RYAN on the brain, and definitely TITANIC.

Ever since James Cameron’s movie broke all box office records studios had been threatening to make asses of themselves by blatantly trying to catch more lightning in that same melodramatic-love-story-during-historic-disaster bottle. Jan de Bont almost did a love-story-on-the-Hindenburg movie, for example. PEARL HARBOR wasn’t as obvious of a copycat as that because 1) it was a love story set against a war movie as much as a disaster and 2) the love song on the end credits was by Faith Hill instead of Celine Dion. Totally different.

Ben Affleck plays Rafe, a functionally illiterate pilot; Josh Hartnett plays Danny, his best friend since childhood and fellow pilot; Kate Beckinsale plays Evelyn, the nurse that Rafe falls in love with and then immediately abandons to fight with the RAF Eagle Squadron. Of course he crashes his plane, so he’s reported dead, Danny has to tell Evelyn the bad news, they spend some time together, a few months later they’re making beautifully-lit, camera-rotating love in the parachute hangar.

I mean obviously they have really conflicted feelings about this, they both feel guilty but also they really love each other and maybe it’s Danny’s duty to give his best friend’s girl the happiest life she can have after this tragedy. But they both resist and take time but it just kind of happens, and who is to say this is not what was meant to happen? Maybe a tragedy has opened the window for a small miracle. In fact, Evelyn has been vomiting in the morning.

So wouldn’t you know it turns out Rafe is still alive, and when he gets back he doesn’t take kindly to the new arrangement. This could get complicated. The truth is that nobody really is wrong or right here, they all just reacted honestly to their understanding of events and unfortunately what should be good news has opened up rifts in a life-long friendship and two love affairs, and covered them in layers of guilt, envy and resentment. Oh yeah, also there’s a subplot about how military intelligence (Dan Aykroyd) is noticing alot of odd data but not in time to figure out that the Japanese (Mako, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) are planning and executing the attack on Pearl Harbor that took 2,350 lives and pulled the U.S. into WWII.

It follows the typical war movie formula. You got the young naive individuals and the reasons why they get into it, how they have fun together getting into mischief, going to the social events, falling for the girls. But meanwhile shit is getting real. Even if they knew it somewhere in their heads they didn’t fully comprehend that the war would happen and that they’d be there. And like any movie we follow this group of friends as they go through it all together. What’s not 100% believable in my opinion is that this group of friends all stays intact. This clique of soldiers are all together with a matching clique of nurses and when the day that still lives in infamy happens they get in a car together and drive to an airfield where they can find shotguns and planes to fight off the third wave.

Ewan Bremner plays a stuttering soldier from their group of friends. Instead of redoing his performance from JULIEN DONKEY-BOY he does it more like “Simple Jack” from TROPIC THUNDER. In the point-of-view of this movie one of the great tragedies of WWII is that a retarded guy landed a super-hot wife but then she got killed.

For racial diversity or something Cuba Gooding Jr. has a brief guest appearance as Dorie Miller, in real life the cook who performed bravely during the attack and therefore became the first black man awarded the Navy Cross. He’s introduced a good way into the movie in a boxing match against the guy who would play Leatherface in the shitty remake of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE if such a movie were to exist, which fortunately it does not, never did and never will. This scene has a weird feel because we see pretty much all the whites rooting for the white guy and all the blacks rooting for the black guy but going by the dialogue there’s no racial component to this at all, it’s because the sailors and cooks have animosity toward each other.

After the fight Dorie goes to be nursed by Evelyn, and luckily they have time to go for a quiet walk together so Dorie can tell her his life story and how sad he is that he signed up for his country and hasn’t even been allowed to fire a gun.

Finally we see him during the attack and he’s able to man a gun, shoot down a plane and yell a whole bunch. (in real life there’s no evidence he shot down a plane. Not sure if the yelling can be verified either.)

Obviously I skipped this at the time, but reading up on it it’s clear that it didn’t go over well. Alot of people seemed to agree there was something shitty about making a movie like this out of this particular historical event. It does so much to simplify, glamourize and sensationalize an event that is pretty sacred to Americans (and I’m sure Japanese) because of the huge ramifications it had for human lives, for our countries, for history. I know I found it ridiculously tacky when I saw Michael Bay go on the MTV Movie Awards and accept his popcorn shaped “Best Action Sequence” prize. That put “Japanese attack scene” in the books next to “Motorcycle chase” from M:I 2, “Truck drives through farm equipment” from TWISTER and “Mel Gibson’s motorcycle crash” from LETHAL WEAPON 3.

But I gotta admit, if it’s at all possible to set aside that huge matter of taste, PEARL HARBOR is technically better than most of the other Michael Bay movies, for two main reasons:

1. Not as much bad comedy, although there’s one wacky dog reaction shot in Alec Baldwin’s office at the beginning

2. The action scenes are pretty well staged for the most part

The whole thing is beautifully shot. I bet the clouds didn’t look quite that gorgeous during the real attack, but the vivid look of the movie makes it kind of feel like you’re really there. There are some excellent special effects, because most of them don’t look like special effects. I even think the show-offy stuff like following a bomb as it drops on a ship work pretty well. I think some people took exception to it, like it was making a rollercoaster ride out of the deaths of real people. True, but in a smarter movie it could probly work as an audacious way to shove your face into the horror of what’s going on.

This is the Bay movie that seems the most like an AT&T commercial. He delights in creating idyllic scenes to be interupted by the surreal sight of Japanese bombers. A little league kid’s baseball game, a woman hanging up her laundry, an astronaut eating a slice of applie pie off of a Bible.

In fairness to Bay, it should be noted that the battle is scored with TITANIC-y sad music, acknowledging that this is a horrible tragedy unfolding and not an awesome, award worthy action sequence like “Bus escape/Airplane explosion” from SPEED or “L.A. freeway scene” from T2. At one point I was thinking it was trying to be “TITANIC with flags,” and then sure enough there was a shot from underwater with a crowd of shipwreck victims struggling to stay afloat and an American flag floating in the middle of them. It really does look like a shot lifted from TITANIC with digitally added flag. My heart will go on, like a proud eagle.

The attack scenes are upsetting, even in the non-gory PG-13 version I watched. Seeing all the nurses running like hell and getting shot at is brutal. But it would be nice if everything that came before wasn’t so laughable. It has lines like “I’m not anxious to die, sir. Just anxious to matter!” And “We thought you were dead, Rafe, and it gutted us both.” I mean I kinda like Josh Hartnett, but there’s a limit to what he can pull off verbally, and it stops before “it gutted us both.”

If there was some depth to this thing it would be praise-worthy that it follows the nurses a little bit. That’s not a story we’ve seen in much detail, or at least I haven’t. They spend the whole movie being pretty and then during the attack they use their lipstick to mark patients and their nylons to tie tourniquettes. Nice symbolism, but it would be better if they got characterization instead, or also.

The silliest thing about the movie in my opinion is the convenient way the love triangle works out. She falls in love with Rafe, then with Danny when she thinks Rafe is dead, then Danny really does die, so she gets to go back to Rafe, but with Danny’s child. The best of both worlds, no tough decisions required. (But maybe if there’s a part 2 it’ll turn out Danny’s alive and he’ll come back and the tables will re-turn.)

I have to say I was thankful to watch it on DVD and be able to take some breaks. At one point I was checking the timer on the player to see how much was left, I thought “Oh, this isn’t really that long, I’m not sure what everybody was complaining about.” Then at some point I realized there wasn’t enough time left for the end credits to fit. Sure enough I had fallen for the old “insert disc 2″ deal. Then there was another hour left.

For the purposes of this study (and my own sanity) I watched the theatrical version. But then my buddy convinced me I had to listen to Bay’s commentary track on the director’s cut. Bay starts out very serious because he was recording it “250 hours after” 9-11, but he almost immediately jumps into complaining about the “tight budget” he had to work on. It was greenlit at $135, the highest ever intentionally approved by a studio at that time, but Bay thinks that wasn’t enough money for the subject matter. To be fair it is true that nobody had ever made a movie about World War II, the Ten Commandments or even Cleopatra.

In conversation with his proud Wesleyan professor Jeanine Basinger, Bay also brags about singling out a kid in front of 500 other extras and chewing him out for screwing up a shot. He doesn’t tell the story like it’s funny or awkward, but like it’s something that we’ll be really impressed by. Good job millionaire director of Victoria’s Secret commercials. You really showed that kid who couldn’t keep a straight face in the background of your universally despised movie. I hope you made him cry.

* * *

Of all the movies that came out in the summer of 2001 this is the one where coming out shortly before 9-11 is most significant. Shortly after the World Trade Center was attacked a Pearl Harbor (the historical event, not the movie) comparison started to get thrown around very liberally in the media. Pearl Harbor was considered the last attack on American soil (previous terrorist attacks didn’t count) and both the conventional wisdom and the propaganda had it that 9-11 was the wake up call to pull America into a world war.

The movie shows Americans attacked, killed, wounded, running for cover. It shows the attempts to interpret data about an attack but failing to predict or prepare properly. It shows care free young people suddenly transformed and wanting to be sent off to war to get revenge or make things right. When PEARL HARBOR (the movie this time) came out it was trying to introduce these concepts to young people, but they’d all become familiar again a few months later.

I can’t help but wonder if this exact movie had come out one summer later if it would’ve been a massive hit. Of course then it would seem like shameless knee-jerk propaganda, but the country’s mood at the time might’ve led us to pay less attention to the characters, acting, etc. and more to the flags and the heroism. Around that time the miniature flags attached to every pickup truck in the country were beginning to rot, but they were still waving. People might’ve been inspired by the closing narration: “America suffered, but America grew stronger. It was not inevitable. The times tried our souls… and through the trial, we overcame.”

But maybe not. 2002 was a summer of fantasy and escape. Affleck actually starred in THE SUM OF ALL FEARS, a Tom Clancy terrorism thriller, and that did pretty good but was overshadowed by SPIDER-MAN and ATTACK OF THE CLONES. And coincidentally (since it was filmed before 9-11) they had changed it from the Tom Clancy book so the terrorists weren’t Arabs anymore.

People enjoy Indiana Jones melting greedy Nazis, or Brad Pitt blowing up Hitler. Enough time has passed that you might even be able to do some kind of fictionalized thriller tying into the real historical events of the attack on Pearl Harbor. But Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer making old timey TOP GUN and then presenting it as a representation of the real event… that’s not gonna go over well. So no, maybe there wasn’t a good time for PEARL HARBOR to come out. No matter when they did it it still would’ve been fucking PEARL HARBOR.

* * *

legacy: Like almost all of Michael Bay’s movies it made some money, but if Bay was looking for respect he’s gonna have to keep snooping around for it. It has 27% on Rotten Tomatoes and its biggest mark on pop culture was in the song in TEAM AMERICA that compares the strength of a character’s love to the suckiness of PEARL HARBOR. Bay hasn’t tried for respectability since.

This was somewhere in the middle of Affleck’s process of burning through the public’s good will toward him as an actor (it was a couple years after PHANTOMS and a couple before GIGLI) but he has since become a respectable director.

datedness: Being a period piece and being well executed visually it doesn’t seem dated to 2001 at all.

2001-2011 connections: Ten summers ago Bay tried to graduate to more mature material. This summer he’s doing his third toy adaptation in a row (and in 3D this time). That’s probly a better idea for him.

Durbin gives a pretty interesting performance because she seems so stiff and lifeless as she’s introduced singing this song, it’s kind of creepy. But when she meets him and starts telling her story we go to a flashback where she seems normal and human, expressing emotions, etc. And you realize that she’s just miserable now and her face can’t hide it. It’s kind of like what Naomi Watts did in MULHOLLAND DRIVE, actually. At first I honestly thought she was bad in the role but then when things switched up and I realized what was going on all along I realized she was brilliant in it.

The Lieutenant seems to be going along with it just to humor the drunk and kill some time, but maybe he has some illusions of filling that new opening on his dance card. If so there are several points where he should have realized it was time to say he had to take a shit and then climb out the restroom window and never come back.

1. When she said she changed her name from Abigail to Jackie because “I thought it would be best after the trial.”

2. Right after that when she explained that her husband is in Angola for murder.

3. When he goes to church with her anyway and then she just starts bawling and doesn’t stop for the entire service.

On the other hand, within the flashback story she has a long list of reasons to run like hell before marrying her husband, including when he brings her for “one last time” to hang out where he meets with his bookies, but especially when her future mother-in-law tells her “Between us we will make him strong.” Whuh?

There’s alot of music in the movie. She sings at the club a couple times, there’s the music in church, and they go to a symphony. They also attempt to dance together, but the Lieutenant cuts it off and says he’s not a very good dancer. This is interesting because we know from the poster that Jackie’s incarcerated husband is played by Gene Kelly. Not to be too controversial here, but in my opinion Gene Kelly was known as a pretty good dancer. So when her substitute man-friend is not a good dancer this is kind of a joke. In fact, it’s what we now would call a meta joke, isn’t it, because the joke only has to do with our outside knowledge of the actors in the movie and not anything that takes place within the movie? Everybody considers this meta business to only exist now, but here it is in ‘44. It’s pre-postmodern-postmodern.

Gene Kelly doesn’t dance, but he does make a decent bad guy. His character is a smooth-talker and a desperate guy who can’t help but constantly dig himself into holes he can’t climb out of (except for Angola, which it turns out he is able to escape from). For most of the movie he just seems like a shitty husband, but when he returns as a jealous, possessive fugitive he’s actually pretty threatening.

But really this is more of a tragedy than anything else. She really loves the guy, and he doesn’t get it. Just like the Lieutenant and his ex-fiancee.

The movie has a pretty impressive pedigree. The director is Robert Siodmak, who did the ‘46 version of THE KILLERS as well as SON OF DRACULA. We film loving individuals would probly talk about him more if we were confident in our pronunciation of his name. This one’s based on a book by W. Somerset Maugham (THE RAZOR’S EDGE and all that) and adapted by Herman J. Mankiewicz, who worked on a few fairly well known movies like THE WIZARD OF OZ and CITIZEN KANE, things like that.

I have to say though, my reason for watching it was as a Christmas crime movie, and you do get a little bit of crime, but not a whole lot of Christmas. It does take place then but it’s not all that crucial to the plot which holiday he has a break for, and it doesn’t have alot of Christmas imagery or music in it. So you could watch it at other times of year, if you wanted to, it wouldn’t bother you that much.

HEROES OF THE EAST is a really top notch Shaw Brothers production that’s half all-time classic martial arts movie, half romantic comedy. There are cultural differences that separate it from a Katherine Heigl movie besides just martial arts, the main one being arranged marriage. In a Heigl picture she’s forced to be with a guy she initially hates because of a baby, here it’s because of powerful Chinese and Japanese business families trying to expand their reach by making their kids marry each other.

Gordon Liu is Ah To, the Chinese son. It’s a real different character from the monks he plays in 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN and 8-DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER. He’s much more priveleged, he has servants, he has hair. And it’s the modern world, he wears a tie sometimes.

Anyway Kung Zi (Yuka Mizuno) is his Japanese bride, and there’s a little misunderstanding where his servant – I feel weird saying that, let’s call it his assistant – hears her behind closed doors practicing karate and thinks he’s beating her. Don’t worry, the assistant takes it seriously and reports it to Ah To’s father, which causes some embarrassment. But when the truth comes out it becomes a household battle between karate and kung fu, Japan and China. She keeps breaking everything in the backyard with her kicks and chops so they move her into the practice hall, but she has all the Chinese weapons moved out and replaced with Japanese ones.

At first I sided with the wife. The husband seems real uptight and sexist. He gets real upset about her boobs showing when she wears her gi. He also shows her a kung fu style for women to use so that their legs stay closed. It’s completely ridiculous, it looks like he has to piss real bad. So I felt like I understood why she was fighting with this guy and trying to piss him off. But then she just keeps pushing him and she starts to seem like she’s taking it too far and I go back to his side.

The argument escalates to sparring, next thing you know they’re throwing hidden knives and darts at each other to demonstrate the superiority of their respective nations’ traditional weaponry. It’s a funny kung fu WAR OF THE ROSES but the argument comes to a head when she brags about ninjitsu and he says of course Chinese people could use that type of trickery, but they don’t believe in it, they believe in honorable fights and think that ninja shit is only for “treacherous villains.”

And that point causes a serious bump in the marriage. Remember when your parents would fight and your mom would pack a suitcase and not say which motel she was going to? Kung Zi does the exact same thing as your mom, assuming your mom went back to Japan to complete her ninja training with a handsome ninja she’s likely to fall in love with because she grew up very close to him and he’s played by Yasuaki Kurata, the old Japanese master in that classic earn-each-other’s-respect fight in FIST OF LEGEND.

Of course this is when Ah To realizes how much he cares about her, so romantic comedy tradition dictates that he must perform some sort of trickery to deceive her into interacting with him so he can get her to love him again. Not necessarily pull a full-on Mrs. Doubtfire, but he’s gotta somehow lie to her so that he can straighten it out at the end, right? Well, his assistant has a good one: send her a challenge letter. Her pride will force her to come home for a duel and then he can say no baby, come on, I don’t really want to have a sword fight, we belong together, etc.

The only problem is she’s training with the five greatest masters of each major Japanese martial art, so they read the letter like What the fuck!? This guy thinks China is better than Japan? And he’s gonna prove it by beating up his wife? No fucking way. We’re going. So this letter that was supposed to win him his wife back instead forces him to fight five masters. That’s the second half of the movie: one fight per day until he beats them all. Kung Zi actually feels bad about it so she joins him as his interpreter as he tries to defeat them all.

The director is Chia-Liang Liu, who also did the aforementioned 36TH CHAMBER and 8-DIAGRAM, and like those it finds excuses for Gordon Liu to fight in a whole bunch of different styles and with a whole bunch of different weapons. He does get to use the 3-section staff again (against nunchakas – his opponent announces that H To wins because his weapon is longer). There’s a kitana vs. a Chinese double-edged long sword, there’s karate vs. drunken kung fu, etc.

Every one of the fights is great and different from the last. He’s supposed to be kind of pushing it, cramming to master each of the Chinese styles before each duel, but we know he’s Gordon Liu so we don’t believe he doesn’t already know it. But he has to use cunning (or trickery) in some of these things. One that seems like almost a cheat is when the Japanese grappler is kicking his ass but Ah To’s assistant lubes him up with peanut oil so the guy can’t get a grip on him. That trick is still used to this day though in mixed martial arts.

The sword fight is a classic, but I think my favorite is the climactic ninja duel. They use all the techniques: disguises, decoy dummies, padded clothing, throwing stars, sleeve arrows, back darts, throwing knives, smoke bombs, spiderhole, underwater stealth, spitting poison, faking death, and more.

Somebody recommended this one to me, I wasn’t sure if it was gonna be up my alley, but I absolutely loved it. You could say we were in an arranged marriage and fell in love. Okay, I can’t really relate to that part of the story in my culture. You know what Disney’s ALADDIN said about arranged marriage. It’s against it. Despite that the themes in the movie are universal. It’s about stubbornness in relationships between men and women, and between countries. They never stop and listen to each other, they’re so insistent on proving their own points. I know it has too many titles already, but another good one would be DUEL OF THE SHOW-OFFS. Because of their egos they’re not gonna just talk things out if it prevents them from busting out a couple more weapons and showing them off.

Because they refuse to be diplomatic they cause an international incident, and because they don’t take the time to learn each other’s customs they make it even worse. There’s a great turn of events where the samurai offers him his sword as a sign of respect but he doesn’t pick up on it at all and manages to completely insult him and make the masters even more pissed. His wife explains to him later that if he would’ve taken it he would’ve squashed the whole beef. No such luck.

But the thing is, Ah To & Kung Zi and Ah To & the masters obviously love showing each other their different techniques. They do a move or a style or pull out a weapon and they announce what it is, sometimes they offer a little explanation. In their minds they’re competing but in a sense they’re also doing show and tell. They’re sharing their cultures with each other, they just don’t realize it.

This is gonna be a SPOILINGS, but another reason why I love this movie is that it’s one of these stories where they angrily fight each other but end up accidentally bonding. There are plenty of kung fu movies, including classics like FIST OF FURY, that come across very nationalistic. This one shoots that kind of thinking down. Nobody kills each other and at the end they’re all friends. It’s a romantic, feel good, ass-kicking kung fu and karate masterpiece. SHAOLIN LOVES AND RESPECTS NINJA.

Really, I’m surprised you guys haven’t heard of this. It was a pretty big deal at the time from what I remember.

I’d seen TITANIC exactly once before watching it again recently, and it was pretty much how I remembered. This is the worst writing Cameron has done (including his emails to Harry) and his most one-dimensional characters since Sarah Connor’s roommate in THE TERMINATOR. They’re all one-sided coins. Rose is practically a Disney Princess – feisty rich girl who ruffles the collars of her uptight mother and society friends by questioning their prim and proper lifestyle and not wanting to marry the asshole businessman (Billy Zane, SNIPER) she seems to be arranged to marry. Jack (DiCaprio) is the perfect dream boy fling for her: funny, brave, sensitive, an artist, a world traveler, a peasant, possibly a beat poet. He makes the hobo lifestyle sound thrilling and romantic, free of bad teeth or the smell of urine.

And they both find themselves talking constantly about their lifestyles. Jack is downright evangelical about his, he believes you have to have fun all the time, go where the wind takes you. You need to enjoy your life now, not later, because you never know what’s gonna happen. I mean you really, really never know. Absolutely anything could happen. You’re never safe, even on a boat like this where people are always commenting on how unsinkable it is. I mean, I can’t imagine that anything bad would happen on this particular trip obviously, but in general, after they get off the boat, they gotta appreciate every day like it’s the last day before they crash into an iceberg and freeze to death in the water.

But I don’t know, for some reason I forgive some of that aggressive corniness in a romantic melodrama/boat-destruction extravaganza like this. I have a harder time with Billy Zane’s character. This is a movie where the boat everybody’s on sinks – you don’t need to have an evil bad guy. The iceberg seems sympathetic compared to this prick. He spends the whole movie proving what a dick he is: making classist comments, bragging about being an important businessman, bossing Rose around, saying that Picasso sucks and will never amount to anything, trying to bribe his way onto a lifeboat, even snatching a kid and pretending to be her parent when the bribe doesn’t work. Everything short of building a diabolical machine that turns peasants into delicious bon bons.

There’s a moment after Rose has re-boarded the sinking ship to be with Jack, and Zane looks heartbroken. You have about 2 seconds to think “Maybe he’s human after all” before he pulls out a gun and it turns into a chase and shootout. This is a terrible character. Poor Billy Zane. I know Tom Berenger taught him better than this.

And man, all the heavy-handed irony in this movie! Always nudging us about it’s gonna sink. All the rich people splashing a bunch of hubris around, saying stupid shit about the Titanic being unsinkable and why would you need life boats anyway and we’ll never die and definitely not in the water and there really is no such thing as icebergs anyway it’s just a ghost story that poor people tell. Okay some of that doesn’t happen in the movie, but they do have Rose notice and comment on there not being enough life boats. And she happens to become friends with the designer of the boat so we can hear what he has to say about various things. And they gotta focus on every detail from their research, the exact time when so-and-so made such-and-such fatal call. James Cameron loves the Titanic disaster like Zack Snyder loves the Watchmen comic book.

But still, I’m not questioning the phenomenon of this movie, because I kind of like it. Somehow, despite all that the story pulls me in. Maybe in some way it captures what young love feels like. When you’re that age and you fall head over heels for somebody every dumb moment seems like the most important thing that ever happened. There’s an endless list of legitimate grounds to criticize this movie on, but I always kind of felt people who hated it were a little too hard on it just for appealing to teenage girls. What, they’re not allowed to have movies? I haven’t seen TWILIGHT yet but I bet this is better.

Anyway, for those of us who aren’t teenage girls the main thing is that this is an incredible spectacle, and it seems better and better the more disaster movies Roland Emmerich makes. Cameron had already had alot of practice with water disaster action in THE ABYSS, now he returns with digital technology, an even more gigantic budget and an obsessive drive to recreate every last detail of what happened. So he builds this world of opulence, fancy clothes and pretty sunsets, then he bashes it, snaps it in half and leaves it to freeze to death. You can’t really deny how fascinating it is to watch. I gotta admit I never got bored.

Three hours, twenty minutes and he still doesn’t find much time for subtlety. But he finds some a couple times. My favorite section of the movie is when the band, having been playing through all this panic, says their goodbyes and split up. But the violinist keeps playing. The others hear it and can’t help but come back and join him for one more song. Maybe they’re even thinking it’s the last song they’ll ever play. Definitely the last they’ll play together.

Then as they play the song it shows the designer of the boat and the captain in their own private hells. I think it’s a different scene though where a woman is asking the captain for help. He doesn’t answer, just stumbles away, dazed, into his flooded quarters. For once Cameron knows not to explain it to us. We can imagine what he’s thinking. There he is, that’s the James Cameron I love, the one who knew that Ripley glaring at space marines talking about alien pussy in the messhall said everything we needed to know about her opinion of macho assholes.

You know who gets screwed in this movie? Fabrizio. That’s Jack’s buddy he gets on the boat with. They check into a room together but I think after Jack meets Rose he ditches him. They run into each other while the boat’s sinking, and they hug like old childhood friends running into each other years later. There’s no time to explain that he stopped a rich girl from committing suicide, borrowed a tux, went to dinner, taught her to spit loogies, drew her naked and fucked her in the back of somebody’s car. Jack convinced Fabrizio to come with him, then left him alone and I think he dies, although I could be wrong.

You know, people always joke about TITANIC sequels. Maybe there’s your answer. Maybe Fabrizio had an incredibly romantic escapade of his own. Show the whole thing from his perspective, you get some Leo cameos – this could work.

Another steerage passenger who gets a raw deal is Shine. They don’t even show him. They got the Unsinkable Molly Brown and a Rockefeller but not Shine. I looked and didn’t even see any black people working in the engine room. Dolemite must’ve been pissed when he saw this movie.

Anyway, I get it. Corny as hell, but I gotta admit it’s captiving. It’s harder to understand how it became the unbeatable biggest movie ever. Now when a movie comes along that’s a huge cultural phenomenon and mainstream moneymaker – like DARK KNIGHT, let’s say – it might clean up, but it’s never gonna get close to TITANIC. Why is that? Why this one? I don’t know man, it was just a must-see event. It seemed grownup because it’s sort of based in history, and real life tragedy, so it brought in all those older individuals who only see movies in the theater once or twice a year. But it was also exactly the time when young girls swooned for Leonardo Dicaprio, so it brought in those teenage girls like they were 25 years olds watching Star Wars. And it also had this curiosity factor with all the press about being overbudget and over schedule, most expensive movie ever, groundbreaking special effects, etc. etc. It played for months and months. Most movies these days the theater-to-DVD window is much shorter than just the theatrical run of TITANIC. Everybody had to see it and some had to see it over and over again. Weird.

Also, this is when PG-13 still included boobs, you don’t see that too often anymore. Violence, but not boobs.

In the end though it all comes down to Bill Paxton, and America’s love of stories about sea exploration. That’s just where the zeitgeist was at in ‘97. They love those stories about dudes watching monitors with blurry footage of shipwrecks.

On one of the DVDs there’s a much longer ending where Paxton confronts old Rose as she’s about to dump the diamond off the boat, and she ends up letting him touch it before throwing it over and he has learned that there’s more to life than treasure. On the optional audio commentary Cameron explains that when they watched the whole movie with this ending they realized they didn’t care what happened to this character – so if we don’t care about him at the end, why do you think we care about him at the beginning? But actually watching it this time I appreciated the Paxton scenes more. I used to think they were gratuitous overindulgence of Cameron’s sea exploration fetish, but maybe not. Showing Rose in the modern world looking back kind of puts the story in a different context than if it just ended after the crash and gave us some text about what happened to her. It shows her as a woman who lived a whole life instead of just somebody on the Titanic with a corny backstory.

I do have some questions about that ending though. You can interpret it different ways, but it seems most likely to represent her dying and going to a Heaven where everybody from the movie TITANIC is waiting for her triumphant return. So they all spend eternity on the fucking cruise ship? Is this by choice or by law? I mean I guess it’s like living in luxury, and after this long and not being mortal they don’t get too bummed out by the memory of what happened there.

But what about Rose’s husband? That poor sucker is off in some other Heaven thinking he’s waiting for Rose, she goes to Titanic Heaven to be with Jack, some boy she knew for a couple days one time. None of her family knows about him, and I’m not sure they even knew she was on the Titanic judging from her granddaughter’s confusion when she’s interested in a story about the Titanic on TV. This is just a shocking twist. But maybe it’s just because it’s fresh on her mind? What if Bill Paxton hadn’t got her nostalgic about this right before she died, would she have gone off to the afterlife with her husband?

I mean how long would that Jack-Rose relationship have lasted anyway? How long would she have wanted to be dragged along with him, jumping on the back of trains and sleeping under bridges? Once they were familiar with each other’s lifestyles what would they talk about? He better have more in his repertoire than all that seize the day shit. It’s real exciting when she’s pissing off her mom and he’s imploring her to follow her dreams, but what does that relationship look like after they’ve been together a couple years?

I guess they’ll find out now because they’re on the fucking Titanic forever. Maybe that’s what TITANIC 2 should be about, actually: the ghosts of Jack and Rose trying to escape the eternal Titanic. How far can they swim away before the dark spirits swallow them down to Hell? Bill Paxton plays a paranormal investigator. Think about it, Cameron. The technology is ready.

[ratings]

And then a 10 year old boy (the kid from X-Men 3 [playing a different character {I think I will stop mentioning what other movies they've been in}]) shows up at your apartment and tells you that he’s your dead husband Sean. Hopefully this hasn’t happened to most of you, so just try to imagine what it would be like.

At first you might laugh it off and not want to embarrass the poor kid, he may be emotionally fragile or something. But he keeps showing up and seems to know things. So you go to his parents to tell them to do something about it. And they yell at him but he refuses to say he’ll leave you (Nicole) alone. And then he faints.

So then you feel sorry for him again and invite him over so your family can quiz him and sort of prove to him that he’s not who he says he is. But he keeps passing all the tests.
I mean what the fuck are you gonna do? Is this an uncomfortable situation or what? Aren’t you gonna get creeped out? Not that you are gonna believe this kid is your dead husband reincarnated, but what would possess a kid to pull some shit like this? And how could he do such a good job? I mean jesus. The rational explanation is actually scarier than the supernatural one.

Shit, even if he thought he was your LIVING husband that would be creepy. Or if he thought he was your cousin Jeffrey. Or your former co-worker from when you drove a delivery truck. I don’t care who he thinks he is, a little boy following you around making spurious claims is fucked up. I’m against it.

When I saw this premise explained in the trailer for BIRTH I thought it was about the most asinine thing I ever heard of. But when I saw it unfold on screen in the actual movie, I thought it was absolutely brilliant. This is a completely original and beautifully directed thriller that haunts you for days. It haunts you like a little kid who thinks he’s your dead husband.

And this is definitely a song in the key of Kubrick. Almost as if the director, Jonathan Glazer, has shown up at your penthouse apartment claiming to be your dead favorite director. And he knows things only your dead favorite director would know, like how to open a movie with an awesome tracking shot of a guy jogging through snow forever until he suddenly collapses and dies. I guess since Nicole Kidman is in there, and it’s this antiseptic world of rich New Yorkers, you definitely think of EYES WIDE SHUT. But the whole movie feels like Kubrick in general – the use of classical music, the deliberate pacing, the serious tone with just a hint of dark humor in its uncomfortableness, the confidence to tell a story you’ve never seen in a movie before, and to leave the audience never sure where the hell this is all going.

It doesn’t look or sound like a normal thriller and it never turns into one. It wraps things up with inevitability instead of a crazy twist. It leaves enough ambiguity that you might question your conclusions about what happened. And it asks you some uncomfortable questions, like what if the love of your life really did die and come back in a different body, should you be with them again? Or was it not meant to be? And aren’t you glad this isn’t gonna come up? And it gets even worse because for poor Nicole it not only pours salt on her old emotional wounds, it brings up secrets that she didn’t know about and probaly shouldn’t have. So mostly the movie leaves you feeling for Nicole Kidman’s character. It’s more emotional than your standard Morgan Freeman/Ashley Judd type thriller.

I recommend everybody check this movie out but afterwards, under no circumstances should you read what the chuckleheads on the IMDb message boards are saying about it. I mean I’m used to disagreeing with people on the internet but reading that this great movie is the worst movie somebody ever saw is a shitty way to come down from the high of discovering an amazing under-the-radar movie like this.

[ratings]

“…I’ve loved your site for almost a decade now, but my one complaint is the almost complete lack of reviews for Westerns.

The Western is the most bad-ass genre out there and it’s a huge hole in your ‘reviewography.’

How can a guy calling himself ‘Outlaw’ Vern not represent the genre that the term ‘outlaw’ comes from?”

You got me, David. I knew he was right so I pledged to “at least review RIO BRAVO or something,” and he gave me a variety of other suggestions that could come in handy if I am to strive for this particular type of excellence.

You guys probaly all saw it already but just in case: RIO BRAVO is Howard Hawks’s 1959, 2 hour and 40 minute “last great western.” The opening 5 minutes or so is done with no dialogue, but with musical cues any time somebody gets punched or shot, so it kind of seems like a musical pantomime or something. It’s goofy but it’s a great opening because it establishes the basics about the three main characters. First you got Dean Martin as Dude, a pathetic unshaven drunk trying to get a drink at the saloon. Then you have Claude Akins as Joe Burdette, the asshole who throws a coin into the spittoon so that poor Dude will have to reach into a pound of spit if he wants his drink. And then John Wayne as Sheriff John T. Chance, who kicks over the spittoon before Dude reaches in, to save him some dignity.

The first shot of John Wayne is looking up at him from the ground, so even though this is a traditional western and not as gritty as the revisionist ones I prefer, you are definitely gonna get some badass in here. The spittoon incident turns into a fight. Chance gets in Burdette’s face, Dude hits Chance over the head with a board, Burdette is gonna shoot Dude, but some dude tries to calm him down so he shoots that guy instead. Then he goes to another bar.

The scene ends with Chance, back on his feet with blood dripping down his head, coming in to arrest Burdette for the murder in the other bar. And Dude comes in behind him to back him up. As the story unfolds we learn that Dude was Chance’s trusty deputy until he left town with a girl who came in on a stagecoach. When that relationship went sour he started drinking and he’s been washed up ever since. But he’s gonna help Chance bring Joe Burdette in and try to straighten up his life. Starting now.

And the movie is about them being outnumbered, under siege, trying to keep this prisoner. It’s just Chance, his drunk deputy and “an old cripple” named Stumpy, who kind of bothers me becausee talks exactly like an old gal who used to ride the same bus as me and would never shut up. Other people offer help but Chance usually turns them down for their own safety, and Burdette’s rich brother still pays off thugs to shoot them. He does eventually get help from babyfaced Ricky Nelson as Colorado Ryan.

I always heard about this being the inspiration for ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, and it does have sort of the same setup, but it’s not really the same kind of movie. For one thing it’s not as confined. Chance does get to walk around to the saloons and to the hotel. There are always people standing around watching him. The threat is obviously there, but it’s more of a “we’re watching you” and not a “if you poke your head out we will play Whack-a-mole.” There is definitely tension but it’s not grabbing your intestine and squeezing it. Even in the climactic guns and dynamite battle our heroes are pretty light hearted, joking around with each other.

What the movie is more about is these characters and their relationships, the camaraderie. The way Chance’s friendship brings out the best in Dude, the way Dude redeems himself to help his friend, the way ol’ Stumpy shows up and helps even though Chance forbids him to. There’s also a love story with Angie Dickinson as a character called Feathers, who becomes smitten with Chance when he does a nice thing for her (basically getting her taken off the western equivalent of the no–fly list). So you get to see this big ol’ middle aged lug with the stupid old hat hit the jackpot.

To be honest though I gotta say, as attractive as Feathers is, there’s no fuckin way this relationship turns out good for Chance. That woman is crazy. During the movie he knows her for a couple days and she already has about fifteen to twenty dramas. She wants him to show her affection and he does, but not in the specific ways she wants him to, and she will not tell him that this is the problem, so instead she throws a fit about something else. It’s supposed to be cute but come on Sheriff, just you wait until the novelty wears off. When you’ve been together for a long time and she’s not quite as young and fit, tell me how cute that’s gonna be then. This kind of drama queen behavior is trouble later on in a relationship, and here you are starting out on that page. Sorry, John. You’re fucked. Get out while you can. It’s not worth it. You’re a good guy, people like you (except the Burdettes), you got a respectable job, there’s lots of stagecoaches coming through. You can do better.

Anyway, this is a real good movie even for those of us not as versed in the westerns. All the characters are great but the MVP is undoubtedly Dean Martin as Dude. Martin didn’t get a chance, or didn’t bother, to do very many serious roles like this. But he does a great job, I was very surprised.

[ratings]

John McTiernan’s loose remake takes care of those problems, while introducing other ones. While I’m much more fond of Steve McQueen, Pierce Brosnan is a way better choice to play this character. He’s smooth, he’s handsome, he looks kind of like Fred MacMurray but more girly, he has an accent. And there’s no way to imagine him working with his hands or having dirt on him or his hair unkempt. He IS Thomas Crown.

And in this version Crown is more than just the mastermind, he also does the stealing himself. In this one he’s an art thief, and the art he steals is his own, almost. He owns a museum, but his company has been forced into a merger. On the very day he signs the contract a team of European mercenaries busts in to steal Crown’s favorite Monet from the gallery. But we soon realize that the mercenaries have been anonymously hired by Crown himself. He doublecrosses them, gets the painting himself and leaves them to take the blame.

And then the story itself is like the original: Renee Russo is an insurance investigator who quickly figures out that Crown did it and tries to prove it. Meanwhile they are courting each other, toying with each other, possibly in love and not sure where their or each other’s loyalties lie. A cat and mouse game, if the cat and mouse were fucking each other in about ten different positions and pouring liquor on each other and shit.

One problem I had is that Renee Russo is really annoying. Yes, it’s nice to see a female sex symbol out of her twenties, and offering the brief nudity and what not. I’m all for that. But her whole soda-swilling eccentric intense intimidating woman of power shtick is obnoxious. She’s just not cool. I bet Thomas Crown could find somebody more appealing to fly around to different islands with.

By the way, Faye Dunaway (love interest in the original) plays Crown’s therapist.

Another problem is the music. Whatsisdick of ROCKY fame did the score and it starts out real classy, with piano tinkering and a nice use of Nina Simone music. Then when the robbery starts it turns into a DTV Wesley Snipes vehicle or something, cheesy drum machines and guitars that are supposed to sound cool but for crying out loud NOBODY on earth thinks that type of music is cool. Nobody! Not children, not animals, nobody. Stop it, composers. You know what I’m talking about. Don’t make me play it back to you. Because I will do it.

I also missed the team element of the original. Sure, I complained about Crown taking all the credit, but I liked the team. A good heist movie usually has a team of people with different tasks and specialties to pull off the caper, so you have a bunch of interesting supporting characters. In this one he ditches the team before we even know their names. It becomes a one-man show except when he needs accomplices, and then they are either his company’s employees or nameless, personality-less people he presumably paid off to do certain tasks. The most likable character in this movie is actually the cop that’s after him, making this probaly the only movie in cinema history where Denis Leary is the most sympathetic character. I do think Thomas Crown is a good character, but since the whole movie is pretty much on his shoulders it’s hard to not start resenting him after a while. The guy is so rich and his idea of an entertaining movie is rubbing his lifestyle in your face. He’s so rich and we don’t see him work for it. The motive for his crimes is boredom. The only reason we like him is because he has some clever tricks and likes to fuck with people.

One time I called John McClane the working man’s James Bond. Well here we have DIE HARD’s John McT directing a guy who played James Bond. And this character is the total opposite of McClane. McClane is working class, Crown is super rich. McClane is a cop, Crown is a criminal. McClane is thrust into these fights by circumstance and would rather not be there, Crown instigates the fight himself and strings his adversaries along to entertain himself. McClane loses his wife, Crown gets the girl. McClane blows shit up and jumps off things, Crown rolls under a gate and puts a painting in his briefcase. McClane ends the movie covered in dirt and blood, Crown is not only clean but wearing a bowler hat.

So it’s very much no DIE HARD but it’s not too bad a movie. It’s well shot and put together by McT. They have some nods to the original like the scenes of Crown just driving around in vehicles for fun. He has a plane again, and a boat sits in for the duny buggy. There’s also a cheesy Sting version of “Windmills of Your Mind” on the end credits. But I missed the split screen from the original heist scene. Still, they did a good job of taking the cat-fucking-mouse kernel of the original and turning it into a new story. And it’s refreshing to see a “fun” movie aimed squarely at adults. We like that shit too, you know. Hollywood seems to forget that sometimes.

So we’ll put this one in the “pretty good” column for McT, to balance out for ROLLERBALL and keep him in the game. The reason I finally watched it is because Paul Verhoeven is supposed to be doing the sequel. So we’ll see what happens with two world class filmatists on one series. Will it be closed to Friedkin/Frankenheimer/FRENCH CONNECTION or De Palma/Woo/MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE? Or something alot weirder and more perverted? My guess is C, but only time will tell.

[ratings]

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Harry spends alot of his time being followed in a van by his woman-hating loyal manservant Tom Arnold (before he sidekicked for Jet Li or Steven Seagal) and his GGWATBOADSINR (good guy who appears to be of Arab descent so it’s not racist) Academy Award nominee for GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK Grant Heslov. But when he’s not trying to stop terrorists from getting nuclear weapons he faces the much bigger problem of relating to his wife Helen (Jamie Lee “I cut off Michael Meyers’s head” Curtis) who thinks he’s a boring computer salesman.

That’s the comedic part of the movie is that it’s more about the wacky home life than the spy shit. Harry always blows it and gets home late for work when an extended action sequence comes up, so his wife and kid (Eliza Dushku) think he’s a dirtbag. But we know he’s really a charmer because of the way he always apologizes to everybody as he rides a horse through a crowded hotel chasing a dude on a motorcycle.

The real gimmick sets in when Tasker accidentally catches his wife on the phone with some guy named Simon, who turns out to be Bill Paxton as a sleazy used car salesman who has convinced her he’s a secret agent and needs her help. Harry thinks she’s cheating on him so he uses our tax dollars to fund an elaborate stakeout (with helicopters). This is actually where the movie gets dicey and the reason why I hated it when I first saw it years ago. Tasker is a likable hero but he is a neglectful husband. You forgive him for that and you understand his anger (I laughed when his tight grip shattered a lens on his binoculars) but he crosses the line when he locks his poor wife up in an interrogation room and makes her think she’s been captured for aiding a spy and humiliates her in front of Tom Arnold. In my opinion that is no way to treat a woman. Take Tom Arnold out of the equation and it’s still questionable but definitely with him in there it’s over the line.

Harry realizes his wife wants adventure in her boring life so his way of adding spice to the marriage is to trick her into thinking she is being forced to pose as a hooker and do a striptease for some guy. The some guy is actually Tasker himself, but she doesn’t know this due to a magical face-covering shadow that unneccessarily stretches the credibility of the movie like it was made of taffy. (Couldn’t they just tell her the guy likes to wear a lucha libre mask or something? I’m sure there’s people that get off on that shit.)

Well I’m no expert but in my opinion this was a poor way to jumpstart the marriage. If they hadn’t both been kidnapped by actual terrorists right at the moment where it went sour I think he would’ve been looking at a divorce.

I used to think this movie was real racist because of its depiction of Middle Eastern terrorists. But my colleague in geocities badass theory Ryan Kenner has a good point that if it wasn’t Middle Eastern terrorists it would be Russian mafia or Triads or some other action movie stereotype. And of course there really are terrorists from that region who would like to use a nuclear weapon on the US, it’s not completely made up, we especially know that now. So I didn’t find it as offensive all these years later. But I still think it’s hilarious to see the filmatists and fans of the movie dance around logic to prove that it’s not offensive. They went out of their way not to reference religion in the dialogue so it wouldn’t be seen as anti-Muslim, and I’ve seen posts on IMDb where somebody says that people are crazy for thinking the terrorists are supposed to be Muslims because they never say they are Muslims or mention Allah at all. To which I have to say – Dude, they’re called Crimson Jihad. Also, we live in the real world and have seen terrorists from that part of the world and it’s pretty easy to guess what religion they claim. But since they don’t specifically mention Islam we’re supposed to assume these guys are non-denominational Arab terrorists? Are you for real?

The worst part involving these characters is the scene where some wacky terrorists die and it’s played as a joke. I have no problem with bad guy deaths getting laughs in action movies, but the way it’s done in this part is just stupid. You gotta do it with a straight face, they do it nudging your ribs and saying “Eh? Eh? Ya git it?” They have these cartoon middle eastern atheist terrorists accidentally fire a rocket launcher backwards and blow up their own truck, and then they make funny faces and get upset. They eventually end up dangling from a blown up bridge and they think they are balanced but a pelican lands on their truck and knocks it over. I know this movie is a comedy but you can’t treat it mostly serious and then all the sudden near the end have one scene that turns into Wile E. Coyote. Since they are such bumbling idiots and you’re supposed to laugh at their deaths it’s easy to think of it as racially degrading like those funny WWII Japanese guys with the buck teeth. But really it’s more offensive as a misjudged tonal shift. Like alot of action directors James Cameron is better at staging chase scenes than telling jokes.

Another TRUE LIES joke: they scare Bill Paxton so bad he wets his pants. Get it, he’s a sissy. And he pees. They liked that one so much they did it twice.

But this movie is really not as bad as I used to think it was. It was sad to see the guy behind such strong female characters as ALIENS Ripley and T2 Sarah Connor do a movie where the women get knocked around and manipulated and called “bitch” and everybody’s supposed to high five each other when Tom Arnold says “Women. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t kill ‘em.” But sadly after the advent of Michael Bay the hatred in this movie seems fairly tame. And as an action movie it actually works. Schwarzenegger is really good and likable. I really like his apologizing and the way his oneliners seem to be sincere more often than sarcastic. Like when he knocks two dobermans’ heads together and says “stay” I don’t think he’s trying to be funny.

And it’s a really big spectacle back when spectacles were still expected to have thrills. My favorite action scene is the horse vs. motorcycle through a hotel chase, which I suspect was the inspiration for the part in ADAPTATION where he says, “the cop’s after them on a motorcycle and it’s like a battle between motors and horses, like technology vs. horse.” There’s also a very good public restroom brawl which I’m sure partially inspired such later classic bathroom fights as the one in MERCENARY FOR JUSTICE and the one in TERMINATOR 3. I’m glad these kind of bathroom fights always happen in nice establishments (here I believe it’s a Marriott hotel) because if it was some normal place where they don’t clean the bathroom every two minutes it would be pretty disgusting. And I have never seen a cinematic bathroom fight where they wash their hands before they leave.

The battle on the bridge is pretty impressive too, especially the actual shot looking down on Jamie Lee Curtis as she dangles from the helicopter. She really did it so all that stuff you see below her, that’s really below her. The magic of actually doing shit, there’s something you don’t see in enough action movies these days.

And of course the most famous is when Tasker flies a Harrier jet in and attacks terrorists in a skyscraper. This probaly inspired the most ridiculous scene in LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD but for this one it wasn’t CGI, they used some actual Harriers as well as a life sized model of one on a crane. If TRUE LIES has left a negative legacy it is this – the introduction of the military-industrial-action-movie complex. T2 was a huge fucking movie with its truck chase and its groundbreaking liquid metal CGI, so the way Cameron chose to top himself was to get ahold of this advanced military vehicle that had never been in a movie before. To get a Harrier you have to win over the military and then to top TRUE LIES you have to win over the military even more and get them to give you something even more elusive and powerful than a Harrier, and this sort of thing still happens. Michael Bay for example got the military involved in TRANSFORMERS, said in interviews that it would be “a great recruiting tool,” and was able to use some stupid jet that had never been seen in a movie before, it had only been seen by poor people right before they died. Similarly, Schwarzenegger in real life saw the stupid Hummer cars that the military was using to roll over and die in in the desert. He got them to give him one and paved the way for civilian Hummers, rapper Hummers, Hummer limos and the flip-off-a-Hummer movement.

So TRUE LIES is by far the weakest of the James Cameron action movies, and the most harmful to the progression of the genre. I read somewhere that he got a divorce right before he did this one, and maybe it was a bad idea to take all his anger out in a romantic comedy. Maybe a horror movie next time, bud. And there will be a next time. But I would still have to say this movie is worth watching. It’s a real good Schwarzenegger role, some great action scenes and as silly as it is it’s action on a scale you don’t see very often. For the first time I’m actually wishing they would make that sequel.

[ratings]

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So of course I had to go back to the beginning, the smash debut, the one that started it all for director James Cameron. Orson Welles started out with CITIZEN KANE, James Cameron started out with PIRANHA PART TWO THE SPAWNING. What can you say, man, it was a different era.

It’s always mildly amusing to remind everybody that an oscar winning director started out making a b-movie sequel about flying killer fish, but honestly I’m just being a smartass, I actually think that’s cool. It’s something to be proud of, especially if you can later look back and see how that movie connects to their later ones, which is the case here. I saw this one a long time ago and I don’t remember thinking it was very interesting, but I changed my mind this time. In my opinion it’s actually kind of good. Seriously. No joke. The original PIRANHA is a little better because the premise lends itself better to the kind of dry humor that Joe Dante and John Sayles were going for than for actual drama. Early on there’s some painfully broad comedy and cheesy ’80s moments. There’s a stereotypical Jewish lady picking up a POLICE ACADEMY style nerd, there’s a “cool” ’80s girl rocking out on headphones, the precursor to Sarah Connor’s roommate in THE TERMINATOR. But it quickly settles in to a more serious James Camerony type of movie. Except with no money and it’s about flying super-piranhas.

Of course to guys like me James Cameron is important because of ALIENS and the TERMINATOR movies. And then it seemed like we lost him forever when he directed TITANIC and spent the next ten years pissing away his talents analyzing submarines and shipwrecks. But then I go back and watch this again and finally make the connection that he’s been obsessed with that deep sea shit since the first scene of his first movie. The best way to explain the marriage between James Cameron and PIRANHA is to say that P2 starts out with scuba divers going into a shipwreck to screw. Any director could figure out a way for a couple to screw in the woods or in a car or an evil hotel or an abandoned building or some haunted bushes, but only an elite few director/scuba divers would have an underwater sex/death scene. And James Cameron is the king of that world.

Not only is this an excellent opening, but the score sounds real dramatic and there is a cool optical effect over the credits that I bet former effects guy James Cameron figured out himself. You don’t come up with the T-1000 the first time out, first you gotta do a weird blue and red water ripple heatvision deal like this.

THE TERMINATOR was low budget but not compared to this. I noticed one scene where the part of an ambulance was played by a white van with “AMBULANCE” written on the side in electrical tape. Also a hand-written sign on a door makes it the morgue. But Cameron overcomes this by getting three good principles and getting them to take the whole thing very seriously.

The star is Tricia O’Neal, who looks alot like Adrienne Barbeau, but a little more feminine. To be honest I am kind of afraid of poor Ms. Barbeau but this TV movie version I thought was kinda hot. Anyway she plays a fish expert who gives diving tours to guests at some island resort. She lives with her teenage son (Ricky G. Paull) but not her husband, Police Chief Kimbrough played by none other than Lance god damn Henriksen.

I know I’ve sung his praises before but I gotta say, Lance Henriksen is one of my favorite actors. In some ways it seems like he can’t get a break (if I remember right it was the Newt Gingrich congress that passed legislation requiring him to say yes to any piece of crap movie he is offered) but even though he’s in alot of garbage I don’t think I’ve ever seen one he wasn’t good in. And he’s great at playing over-the-top bad guys (HARD TARGET, STONE COLD) but also sympathetic, sensitive heroes (ALIENS) and tough guys (this one). Here we have a young ruggedly handsome Henriksen, before he had those lines dripping down from his eyes and when he had a ‘c’ in his last name.

Without Lance Henriksen I probaly wouldn’t think much of this movie, but he is working on a higher level and the movie is tied to his back dangling just below that level. You might compare it to maybe a lesser Charles Bronson movie where the movie is made completely watchable by the presence of Charles Bronson. And as a matter of fact I was studying the IMDB and learned that Mr. Henriksen once played Bronson in a TV movie about Jill Ireland. So that would be a good comparison to make because then you could bring up that little bit of trivia there. But also it would be an accurate comparison, so it’s a double.

By the way, Henriksen is referred to as “that robot” at one point. In THE TERMINATOR, James Cameron almost cast him as a robot, but then changed him to a cop. Then in ALIENS he finally did make him a robot, which is one of his best known roles. But it all started with the guy calling him a robot in P2.

I like the somewhat complex and understated relationships here, that’s the best thing about the movie. A guy named Steve Marachuk plays a sort of obnoxious lothario dude who keeps hitting on Ms. Kimbrough and eventually succeeds. He gets more interesting halfway through when it turns out he is not who he says he is and actually knows what the deal is with the piranha attacks. The police chief walks in on this guy in bed with his wife and he is obviously mad but he doesn’t say anything. They don’t tell you why the husband and wife are separated and they don’t fight much. Everything you know about it comes from their performances and from little details like the fact that she calls him by his last name. But as they work together to stop the piranhas you can see their admiration for each other, not in any words but in the actor’s faces.

The very best part is at the end when Ms. Kimbrough and her boyfriend have detonated a bomb underwater and the Chief and his son are on the surface in a boat. And there is a dialogue free stretch where the two sit and you read their expressions as they face the fact that their wife or mother is most likely dead and all they can do is wait to find out. When she comes safely to the surface there is a three way hug and that ends the movie. So there is no official word of a reunion but clearly they have bonded through this experience. You can definitely see echoes of that type of strained relationship with Sarah and John Connor in T2 and the husband and wife in TRUE LIES who also are having marital difficults and become closer through adventuring.

Of course, the scenes with bloody piranha puppets are amusing and there is one badass action moment where the heroine swoops away from the explosives by hanging onto the anchor of a moving speed boat (for real) but the fact that the character relationships and acting performances are my favorite part of PIRANHA PART 2 THE SPAWNING are exactly why I think it is a worthwhile movie. I hope some day we get P2 SPECIAL EDITION DIRECTOR’S CUT.

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