Sunday, March 30, 2003
TRAILER OF THE WEEK
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - This one's been online for a couple months or so, but I wanted to comment on it. I've been following it for quite allow just because it sounds so dad-gum cool--based on a graphic novel about a sci-fi alternate Victorian universe and a band of literature turned superheroes, Tom Sawyer, the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll, Cpt. Nemo, and starring Sean Connery, Jason Flemyng (Lock Stock and 2 Smoking Barrels) and Stuart Townsend (notorious to movie geeks as the guy Peter Jackson fired as Aragorn). I was excited to finally see there was a trailer, but I'm not sure how I feel about it. The effects look mighty nice, and while the sets look moody, it looks like a soundstage. Maybe it's just me. It's directed by the guy who did Blade, which was the bloodiest movie I ever saw, but also had about the coolest style. Maybe my doubts will give room for it to impress me. The art direction reminds me of Dark City
http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/lxg/
TO BE OR NOT TO BE (1942)
This flick is currently #199 on IMDb's top 250. It's a comedy set in Warsaw just before and after Hitler's invasion. It stars Jack Benny and Carole Lombard as part of a Polish drama troupe that matches wits with the Nazis. Check out that release date again. I want to say the Nazi invasion of Poland was 1939, so this is current events. America had only been in the War for a year. The film was directed by Ernst Lubitsch, who himself was a German born filmmaker who immigrated to Hollywood. Like Life Is Beautiful, To Be or Not To Be teeters on the edge of comedy and horror. Especially in light of the current events in Iraq, finding humor in war is a bit unnerving. Lubitsch's parody of the Nazi party is insightful mocking its absolute absurdity. And still... I don't know. I have to wonder what art will be inspired by the current situation. How many films and stories will Saddam inspire? Just a couple of concrete knocks: The ending of the movie turns into a spy thriller, the objective of which is never really spelled out. And that voice over opening was just plain annoying.
TERMINATOR (1984)
"A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. The woman fled into the desert to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days" (Revelation 12:1-6)
Now, I'm pretty disappointed in myself that I never saw the religious symbolism in Cameron's Terminator series before, for all the times I saw T2. Maybe I was too young, maybe the action is more attention-grabbing in the second one, maybe it's all the similar elements in the Matrix, I don't know. But there it is in black and white, or red. T-1 is far from a perfect, but it makes a good prelude to the second. While T2 can stand on its own as a story, the info from the first one provides a bigger picture. It had a tiny budget, and looks it. The special effects are corny and the acting and dialogue are worse. The violence is shockingly brutal in this post-Columbine world. (Arnold shoots a housewife in her home at point blank, and later storms a police station with an Uzi in one arm and shotgun in the other). And the gratuitious sex is unnecessary. But, this is 1984, and of the sci-action films of the 80s, this is the only one that still stands. (Anyone remember Solar Babies?) The Terminator is the definitive man versus machine struggle. Its the story here that makes it timeless. In the future, man is enslaved by machines. When mankind turns the tide in the war, the machines send one of there own back in time to terminate the mother of mankind's savior. And so mankind then sends back in time a human to protect her from the Terminator. No surprises if you've seen T2. But if you can through out what you know, the first half of the movie is pretty mesmerizing. The way Cameron structures his sceenplay (while the dialogue is lame), is perfect because, other than a brief subtitle at the beginning, he doesn't give the exposition until about 45 minutes into it, so you're left wondering, "What's up with the naked guys and the lightning?" Sarah Connor is a bit of a cypher of a character. We see her as a downtrodden waitress as an introduction, but other than that there is no sense of her identity, who she is, where she comes from. She becomes just a fish out of water. But then again, the point of the movie isn't characterization; it's stuff gettin' blowed up. I never really saw John Connor as a messiah-figure in T2, but that aspect to him is emphasized much more in this film, as the one man who rose up to teach the others to fight against the machines. While he's never seen onscreen, his presence weighs heavily as the savior and only hope for mankind. The cast is filled with Cameron regulars: Michael Biehn (Aliens, The Abyss) is Future Man bodyguard Kyle Reese, Bill Paxton (Aliens, Titanic) is a mowhawked punk whose demise provides the Terminator with his leather outfit, Lance Henriksen (the AI character in Aliens) is a police detective. Moreso in this film, then T2, but perhaps akin to his later Aliens, Cameron captures the nightmarish horror of helplessness against a seemingly unstoppable evil. The dark settings (there's only a handful of daylight scenes) work wonders on that mood. My one complaint is the plot hole the size of the future itself that is summed up in one of Sarah's final lines to her unborn John: "Should I tell you about your father? God, a person could go crazy thinking about that." It's the textbook scenario I remember seeing in a video in my 9th grade science class explaining why time travel is not possible. You can't go back in time and interfere with your parents because then you don't exist, but then you don't exist to interfere, so you will exist, and its just a mind-numbing cycle. And if the machines are so smart, why don't they go back and kill Sarah's parents, why wait every 10 years to take out the adolescent John Connor? Which is why T3 is a terrible idea. One sequel works because you could introduce John, flip the character of Sarah and reverse the role of the Terminator. But honestly, now, please tell me, is T3 nothing more than a cash cow to revive the dying career of Arnold? But enough cynicism, one thing that makes me wonder is the man versus machine struggle. Certainly, it's not a creative idea by Cameron. He was sued by Harlan Ellison after Terminator's release. The plot device of mankind enslaved by his own creation has been a staple of sci-fi literature since the inception of the genre. Terminator was the first (at least popular) cinematic manifestation. The e-generation has seen done better with the Matrix. But what draws us to imagine a world where we are conquered by our creation? Where we fantasize about the struggle between creator and creation? Is it because we are ourselves slaves to sin, the result of our own doing, with but one Savior to lead us to victory? I think so.