Then in the ’90s he did FORREST GUMP, which must’ve been his biggest hit and it won best picture and all that. It was a beloved commercial smash, but it rubbed some of us the wrong way. On the surface it’s fine but if you think about the subtext it kind of seems like it’s saying don’t worry, don’t think about anything, don’t have an opinion, don’t rebel, just do what your mama says and you’ll achieve all of your dreams, unless you ever did drugs or hung out with the Black Panthers. And your girlfriend will die from AIDS because she was a hippie.

Because of that I know people who still rant about Zemeckis being a “propagandist.” And then there are some who accuse him of being kind of an anti or reverse propagandist, deliberately pussyfooting around the politics to trick people of all stripes into thinking the movie’s on their side. The example of that is in GUMP when he makes a speech at the Vietnam protest in Washington. Somebody told me that in the book he actually makes an anti-war speech, but in the movie there’s microphone problems and you don’t hear what he says. So you just assume you agree with him, whatever your opinion is. You figure you and that retarded guy are on the exact same page politically.

But there was a time just a couple years before GUMP when, probly by accident, a movie that Zemeckis and his partner Bob Gale wrote wasn’t just nostalgic and feel-good, it was almost kinda relevant. It was directed by Walter Hill from an older Zemeckis/Gale script, it’s basically a b-movie with Bills Paxton and Sadler fighting Ices Cube and T, but it happens to be a real good time capsule of what was going on culturally right at that time.

TRESPASS was released on Christmas Day, 1992. That’s less than 2 years after Rodney King got beat by those cops, and less than 8 months after the riots. It was originally supposed to be called LOOTERS but for some reason that was a sensitive topic with the riots being so recent. Maybe a better reflection of where the country was at is that TRESPASS came out a week and a half after Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic”, and about a month after Ice Cube’s “The Predator,” but the best selling album of the year was a pop country album by Hannah Montana’s dad, Billy Ray Cyrus. The culture was on the verge of a major shift or split, and this story takes place right in the middle.

Paxton and Sadler play firefighters from Arkansas who, while fighting a fire, find themselves in possession of what they figure out is a map to some hidden gold. So one weekend they get in a pickup truck and go find this abandoned building in East St. Louis where the treasure is supposedly stashed. To Paxton it’s just a fun adventure, an exciting thing to do with his buddy, like being a kid again. But to Sadler it’s a way to pay off his debts and maybe have enough left over to be rich. So Paxton brings a metal detector, Sadler brings a gun. Could turn out to be a problem.

(Man, Paxton was always chasing after treasure. There was this one, there was TITANIC, there was A SIMPLE PLAN if a suitcase full of money counts as treasure, there was TWISTER if a twister counts as treasure.)

They got some bad fuckin luck too because at the exact time their plan comes together there also happens to be some gang members on top of the building tossing a traitor through a skylight. When the gangsters see the looters and realize they witnessed the murder it turns into a tense stand-off. The looters take Ice-T’s younger brother hostage and try to figure a way out of there without getting killed and, if at all possible, with the gold.

When this movie came out the hip hop influenced movie was a fairly new phenomenon. Ice-T had recently been in NEW JACK CITY and RICOCHET (after bit parts in hip hop movies like BREAKIN’ and RAPPIN’). Cube had only made BOYZ N THE HOOD. The soundtrack isn’t a classic or anything but it has a pretty impressive lineup including songs by Public Enemy, Gang Starr, Black Sheep and an Ice-T/Ice Cube team up.

Back then (and I think even still) people who weren’t into their music liked to say they couldn’t tell the difference between Ice-T and Ice Cube, but they’re actually very different from each other. Even in this movie, where they’re in the same gang, they’re always at odds. T is King James, the leader and a smooth professional type dresser (he even wears suspenders). Cube is Savon, the scowling, complaining underling who wears one of those puffy velvet hats that were okay to wear in the ’90s.

Also in the gang is Glen Plummer, who I consider a 90s staple since he was in MENACE II SOCIETY, SPEED, SHOWGIRLS (her friend and choreographer), STRANGE DAYS (the murdered rapper) and THE SUBSTITUTE (the other teacher who becomes friends with Berenger).

One element that’s pretty dated: there’s a character named “Video” who carries a camcorder around and videotapes everything, and it occasionally switches to the video point of view. It doesn’t have much of a story point, and even then I think it was an annoying cliche to have a character with a camera just so you can make a bold statement about our voyeuristic media-obsessed society or save money on film developing or whatever. People were so fascinated with that camcorder shit, it took forever for them to get sick of it and now we start all over with digital cameras, god damn it. Anyway, the DVD has some deleted scenes where you learn that in the longer cut Cube wanted the video as evidence that he wasn’t the murderer. I wish they left that in because not only would it make the Video character more useful, it would be a good irony for this post-riot story. After Rodney King people talked about camcorders as the only defense against bad cops, but of course that didn’t end up working for King.

I gotta mention that I’m not sure I buy these gangsters listening to Sir Mix-a-lot in the car. But maybe. He was a little harder back then, before the Grammy winning ass song. Man, people in Seattle were really into those first two Mix-a-lot albums back then, you shoulda seen it. I got a buddy who moved here from Austin, he was shocked to find out that all the places discussed in “My Posse’s On Broadway” were real locations in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, and for my part I was shocked to learn that a guy from Austin knew the song “My Posse’s On Broadway.” How the hell did that get past the state border?

Anyway, like the best b-movies TRESPASS has a bunch of clever gimmicks and touches. For example Tiny Lister plays “Cletus,” but I thought they were calling him “Cleats,” which is what he wears. All the better to stomp your face in with. Personally I wouldn’t want anybody to stomp my face in with baseball cleats, but it’s gonna be even worse when it’s a big motherfucker like Lister. So that’s a cool weapon (have cleats ever been used in a kung fu movie?) but it has another use because the looters here the sound of his steps upstairs and then start using the metal detector on the ceiling to figure out where he’s standing.

One really original suspense sequence happens when Sadler wants to kill his junkie hostage and Paxton convinces him to just dope him up instead. So, while tied up, the junkie gives them instructions for preparing his heroin and then they have to try to shoot him up.

Because these guys are firemen it sets up some of their abilities: rappelling, chopping through floors and walls, escaping burning buildings, carrying people. I think all of these (and the cleats) could’ve been used a little more than they are, but I appreciate that they’re there.

King James does alot of ranting about “the white man” selling him drugs and then coming after him for re-selling them (as if there is only one white man doing all this). It’s not all that subversive, it was a pretty common type of philosophy to spit back then, but at least it makes his character a little more dimensional seeing how he tries to justify what he does.

What works best in the movie is the racial tension. The white guys aren’t blatant racists, they would never say any racial slurs I don’t think, and wouldn’t consider themselves racist. But they have a recognizable contempt and lack of understanding of the black characters. A truly enlightened white individual could have a color blind confrontation with King James and his men, they wouldn’t have to throw in a sarcastic “homey” here and there, but that’s the type of guy Sadler is – the sarcastic “homey” type.

You could justify talking like that to the criminals, but there’s also a homeless man (Art Evans) who stays in the building, and they decide to tie him up so he doesn’t get in the way of the gold. I like the dynamic – Paxton doesn’t want to tie him up, but doesn’t stop Sadler from doing it. Whenever they need his help they try to act like they’re his buddy and ask him some question about the layout of the building or something, and he’ll usually say “FUCK YOU!” When they finally do untie him they expect an automatic let-bygones-be-bygones policy, even though they’re the motherfuckers that just tied him to a chair for hours! And they’re oblivious to the fact that they’re asking for too much forgiveness. Not a bad depiction of race relations circa 1992. The guy is kind of an angry asshole, but jesus, I would be too if I were him.

I also like this theme of everybody claiming ownership of the building and the gold. I personally believe the homeless guy has the strongest claim to it, because it’s a building that he at least has used as shelter for some time. King James and his men consider it their territory, because it’s within the neighborhood where they kill people and sell drugs. The firemen consider it theirs because they’re the ones who were given the map. But the guy who gave them the map stole the gold anyway. None of these people here owns the land or what’s on it. All the claims are on a made up time-passage basis. Well, whoever owns this building hasn’t used it in a long time, who ever owned this gold hasn’t seen it in a long time.

When you think about it it kind of shows that the whole idea of ownership is kind of a crock of shit. But these guys want the gold because they’re materialists. They’re not following some Native American idea of the land belonging to Mother Earth.

So there you have it. Clearly a commercial movie, a small but solidly entertaining one. But also it’s America circa 1992 in disc form, and I bet it plays better now than it did back then. Good job Walter.

[ratings]

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]