Sometimes you run across a line of type announcing a pending movie and it lodges like a sweet, whispered promise in your brain. There have been times I've been so excited about seeing a film that I've had dreams about it before it opens. I remember dark dreams about An Awfully Big Adventure, for instance, that were nothing like the film itself but helped to make that cinematic experience even stranger than it would have been anyway. (You think Hugh Grant never did anything special? You must -- MUST -- see his turn as the petty, vain tyrant in charge of a regional theatre in WWII England. The scene in which he gives the opening-of-rehearsal speech with the closing night's vomit still clinging to his face is a piece of wicked greatness in which both he and the film itself revel.)
Some eight months ago I saw a mention of a new James Marsters project about a little mining town in the old West and WHAT HAPPENS THERE WHEN THE ALIENS INVADE. Sure, it seems obvious now, but why hasn't it been done a million times before? This movie was made for me. Specifically for me, as if someone reached inside my head, had a rummage around, and said, "Hmm. Old West. Aliens invade. And... yeah, James Marsters. That's a go." Brilliant. A Syfy special. I wrote the release date on my calendar and literally counted the days.
High Plains Invaders. It showed in August. And, alright, it's not perfect, but I taped it and I watch little pieces of it periodically. Marsters is great. Something's happened to him in the past year. Ever since he and Joss Whedon together managed to tap into some archetypal brilliance to co-create the character of Spike in the Buffyverse, I've been following his work with mostly scowling disappointment. Shadow Puppets? PS I Love You? Smallville? Grrrrr. Don't make me cranky. But in the last year there's been Moonshot, less a record of the first Apollo moon landing than a tribute to it, but still well-made, and Marsters shines as Buzz Aldrin (consider that Aldrin was in his thirties at the time, Marsters is pushing fifty now). And now this lovely little genre-mixing alien invasion piece, in which he's earnest and low-key and hits not a wrong note, in spite of the many sand-traps possible when you're firing six-shooters at big metallic insects with only a mediocre script to bear you up. Maybe it's that these days he's not trying so hard, as he seemed to be upon emerging from his eight-year stint working in Joss-world. He seems to have relaxed into himself. He's finally reached that age, too, when his pulchritude, which used to be almost insanely extreme, has softened into an easy, rugged, aging handsomeness.
The piece has more to it than Marsters. Most of the cast, -- and I find this often in Syfy originals, -- is better than its script, and the production design is inspired: faded, sort of sepia and autumnal feeling, cold and muddy, like the old West ought to be. The aliens look like they came straight out of War of the Worlds, which works for me. Now, of course, somebody's making a big-screen cowboys vs. aliens film, entitled, in fact, Cowboys Vs Aliens, and it happily re-teams Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr of Iron Man success. I'm right there in the front of the line for that one, as well. My firmly held belief is that EVERYONE should make a movie about cowboys and aliens, as I am an easy mark, an absolute fool, for a crossed-genre piece.
Another film I've had stored at the top of my Netflix queue, madly tapping my fingers and chewing my nails while waiting for it to be released, is a little British thing called the Haunted Airman that I first read about in the Fortean Times. Again, I'm suckered in by the crossing of genres: this time a war story crossed with a ghost story. Tenuously (apparently) based on horror-master Dennis Wheatley's novel the Haunting of Toby Jugg, it's a quietly eerie BBC-sponsored piece about a wheelchair-bound RAF bomber going crazy in a creepy hospital. I suppose it got wide release only because Robert Pattison has achieved megastardom among a certain demographic (not mine. I've skipped over the whole TWILIGHT thing, much as I skipped over the whole HARRY POTTER thing, knowing full well that I'd have dug right in there full speed ahead were I thirty years younger). Not that it's not worth seeing, but, intriguing as it is, it's one of those pieces of film that makes you think, "OK, now I'm going to read the book to find out what REALLY happened." Which is what I'm going to do. Julian Sands does what he does best, playing an enigmatic, possibly evil doctor. The flashbacks of the bombings seem strangely low-budget for the BBC and never seem to come together to form a specific point. In sum: I'm glad they made it. I'm glad I watched it. I'll let you know how good it is once I've read the original material.
And the third movie I've been waiting for: the spanking new remake of the old John Wayne film the Angel and the Badman. Yep. There ain't no accountin' for it, but there it is. Not the greatest movie the Duke ever made, it's the story of a gunfighter who falls in love with a Quaker girl and manages to lay down his arms without getting gunned down by the bad guy only through the intervention of a deus ex machina (in this case, an interfering marshall who's been dogging his footsteps).
Now that I think of it, we're crossing genres again: it looks like a Western, but it's really a romance. The remake has Lou Diamond Phillips and Deborah Kara Unger (the husky-voiced she of Cronenberg's Crash), both of them satisfyingly matured in their talents, but I was not surprised to see that it was originally made for Hallmark. It's one of those rare Western chick-flicks, like Naomi Watts' the Outsider (which is more satisfying as a chick-flick, incidentally, and, strangely, also about a Quaker falling in love with a gunslinger while nursing him back to health after a gunshot. Guess us chicks dig that), and it's gorgeously shot using color filters so every scene is far prettier than it would have been in real life.
It stays largely faithful to the original except in the one sense that made the original worth watching: because it had John Wayne in it! And you gotta love the Duke. (Yes, hush, you really do. If you think you don't love John Wayne, then there are two possibilities at work: either you don't love him YET, or you really do love him and you just don't realize it yet. I spent many years scoffing at Wayne's woodenness and what I perceived as lack of dynamic range. It was while I was watching They Were Expendable, a very somber John Ford piece released just after the war about PT boats in the Philippines, that I realized Wayne's genius. In this very wooden, stilted piece, Wayne was a breath of fresh air, with his huge physical presence and grace and sheer glorious enthusiasm. After that, I went back and watched Stagecoach again and, by God, you just try to take your eyes off that man. Just try it, and then come back and tell me he has no movie-star genius. Watch the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. You got Jimmy Stewart, Vera Miles, Lee Marvin, for God's sake! Andy Devine, Woody Strode, John Carradine, Strother Martin, Lee Van Cleef... Now look at the election scene in the saloon. The place is crowded with folks, all kinds of talking going on, much of it by Stewart and Marvin, no slouches when it comes to star-power. But who are you looking at? You're looking at the Duke, that's who, who's quietly sitting on the bar, doing little more than watching the proceedings. And, furthermore, you want to see a truly convincing portrayal of a macho man suffering heartbreak? Watch that scene, that terrible, lovely scene, in which Wayne drunkenly burns down his own house, the house he'd built for Vera Miles.)
And, yes, that's Luke Perry hiding half his face under that eye-patch.
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