terminator salvation: alas

My favorite scene in Terminator Salvation is about ten seconds long. Blair (Moon Bloodgood) is chained up in solitary for springing Marcus (Sam Worthington). John Connor (Christian Bale) comes in and says, "Why did you do it?" She says, "I saw a man, not a machine." They look at each other for a long second, then John Connor pounds on the metal door to be let out. While the door is opening from the outside, he asks, "How's that leg?" and she says, "I'll live." As he's leaving, he barks (he barks a lot in this movie), "Let her go."

I love that scene. I watched it over about ten times. Bale brings an urgency to it, and an uncluttered intelligence, that is wretchedly lacking in most of the film, in spite of all the yelling and loudness and clattering around that goes on pretty much continually and which I assume is standing in for a true sense of urgency. Bloodgood and Worthington both hold up their ends of the bargain (assuming an actor's part of the bargain is to act well) for the bulk of the shebang; Bryce Dallas Howard is dreadful in the lame-assed role of John Connor's visibly pregnant doctor-girlfriend; Bale's skills kick in and out. You remember the scandal when he freaked onset and threw down on a crew member? Once you've watched the film you understand why: my guess is it was just sinking in that he'd signed several years of his life away (how many sequels did he sign on for? eight? twelve?) in which he's going to live in a hell of badly written, badly directed green-screen sequences.

Someone wrote that sitting through this is less like watching a movie than being stuck inside a video game that someone else is playing, and that's it in a nutshell; that's exactly it. You know the tepid pieces of dialogue that get wedged in between bouts of action in video games? The guy who writes those wrote this. There are plot points that are so flaccid that you have to groan out loud, and the world itself, which resembles what's come before in various incarnations of the Terminator mythos, has nonetheless lost that sense of cohesion it had found by the (sadly lamented and premature) end of the Sarah Connor Chronicles. There is some talk of fuel being scarce, but there's certainly no evidence of it. These supposedly beleaguered troops jet around in armored trucks, helicopters, jet fighters, on submarines, and most of these transports get blown to hell every time someone takes one into battle, yet they seem to have an endless supply of sturdy and high-speed vehicles in this post-apocalyptic future. It makes one long for the verisimilitude of the Road Warrior, and, frankly, the suspense of it. What a magnificent piece of low-key adventure cinema that was. And it had moments of grim humour! Those were the days. Don't look for humour in this, my friend, not grim or otherwise.

In fact, the best way to watch it, and I mean this in all seriousness, is to rent the Sarah Connor Chronicles, any disc of which will begin with the Salvation trailer, and, in case you're living on a distant planet and somehow missed it in the heavy year's push they gave it before the film was released, the trailer is really magnificent. I used to watch THAT over and over again, too. It is truly a thing of beauty, largely due to the genius of Trent Reznor and that incredible song (the elusive "green mix" of "the Day the World Went Away", originally on NIN's the Fragile CD), but I also have to kneel in awe and send out flowery encomia to whoever strung it together. It lovingly snuffles out and gathers up all the best things from this loopy, forlorn mess of explosions and chase scenes and makes it seem actually compelling, actually as if it's going to excite true emotion in the hearts of you, its viewers, with that wonderfully Frankensteinish bit in which Marcus realizes with horror his true nature, and with both Connor's and Marcus' lovely and soft-spoken voiceovers, complete with the sultry slurred sibilants every time they say "machinezh" or "Marcush". By the time the tyrannosaur drums kick in (go, Trent!), you'll be convinced that this is going to be the movie event of the year.

After that, the trick is to avoid actually watching the movie.

what i've been watching: january 2010

Scream of Fear: (1961. dir: Seth Holt) Totally satisfying b&w Hitchcockian Hammer film. Starts slowly, but sometimes slow is good, and this is one of those times. There's a girl in a wheelchair (Susan Strasberg), a missing father, and apparently nefarious intentions afoot. Is the stepmother wicked (the wonderful Ann Todd in a later role)? Is she in league with the very suspicious doctor (Christopher Lee)? The acting is good, the photography is very good, the ending is most satisfying. And there's high strangeness, as in the scene where the chauffeur dives into a plant-filled pool to search for a hypothetical body.



Perfect Getaway: (2009. dir: David Twohy) This is one of those movies that I thoroughly enjoyed but cannot in good conscience wholeheartedly recommend, partly because I'm a big Twohy fan and apt to enjoy his stuff no matter what, and partly because it's kind of a cheat. When the secret comes out, I mean. Not a HUGE cheat, not like Fincher's the Game or something, where there are so many "don't-asks" involved that the ending is utterly preposterous and you sit there, furious, hyperventilating, wanting very badly to throw your television out the window because it was the unclean vessel through which Fincher communicated his ha-ha-you-trusted-me-and-I-fooled-you piece of crap. Not like that. Just a little. And, because it's Twohy and he cares very much about story, once the secret is out he takes great care to go back and show us how it really does KIND of work, so I'm willing to go with it. Plus, and this is a big plus, this troupe of actors (Kiele Sanchez, Timothy Olyphant, Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich) are so damn much fun to hang out with that I'm willing to forgive a lot. It's WAY more fun than most couple-on-vacation-gets-terrorized movies, and both writing and acting are exponentially better than in most. This Kiele Sanchez is a revelation; Olyphant I love (yes, yes, because of Deadwood, of course, but I love him from other things, too), and what kind of a crazy person doesn't love Steve Zahn?



Of Time and the City: (2008. dir: Terence Davies) Davies snarks on the Queen, the Beatles, Catholics, and modern football goal celebrations. What does he prefer? Wrestling and Mahler, apparently. Big gay English snob. That aside, this tribute to Liverpool in all its complexity succeeds in making it look like the last city in the world where you'd want to send a Spanish footballer who's grown up with the scent of orange blossoms wafting in through his windows. So maybe, although it breaks my heart to say it, it's not a bad thing that Liverpool FC might have to sell Fernando Torres this year.

As far as the movie goes, the pace is slow, regal, from another era. Davies narrates in that old-school toffee-nosed posh voice you used to hear from everybody on the BBC in, well, another era. Lots of poetry: pieces of Housman, pieces of Shelley, over good old footage of Liverpool backstreets and housing developments. Ultimately depressing, as, I imagine, is Liverpool itself (outside of the Anfield practice pitch, that is, and ever since Xabi Alonso left, even that fantastical place may be a little weary and bedraggled).

drag me to hell: or, on second thought, don't

Sam Raimi is so gross, I swear to God. It's a good thing he's fun to hang out with. Otherwise he'd be that kid on the playground that nobody even wants to look at because he's always flinging boogers and lighting his farts on fire.

And he's a master of his craft, Raimi, without room for a sliver of doubt, a master. The care he takes with camera movement, lighting, editing, effects, it's all extraordinary. Personally, I was happily floored by the brilliance of his color palette in this one.

But here's the rub. You can (kind of; OK, I'm simplifying) split his CV down the middle: the mainstream films, exemplified by the Spiderman trilogy (which are under no circumstances to be dismissed. The mainstream films have things like emphasis on story and character development added into his mix of talents, and I'm a huge fan of those things); then there are what I think of as the Real Sam Raimi films, les projets de son coeur, if you will, exemplified by the Evil Dead trilogy. Drag Me To Hell falls into this latter category, which are not so much stories told as sequences of running gags that startle you then make you laugh and go "Eeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwww!" Please note that I did not choose a random number of "e"s and "w"s in that "ew". They were carefully counted and placed, since the "this is gross, but you're gonna laugh" factor is upped exponentially in every subsequent Raimi outing. The question is, can a series of gross-out gags make a worthwhile movie? And, like every question posed about movies, the answer is that magic is always possible on the silver screen, even from the gutter, the trench, or the water-filled grave of a maggot-eaten corpse.

The first two Evil Dead movies were not great but seemed fantastically ground-breaking at the time (although after watching Michael Reeves' She-Beast, I was astonished at the Sam-Raiminess of it, a full fifteen years before Evil Dead), and the third, Army of Darkness, was plain good fun, as was Raimi's homage to the Spaghetti Western, the Quick and the Dead, my personal favorite. The characters in all of these undergo tortures and tribulations, it's part of the drill, but in Drag Me To Hell we cross a peculiar line. Maybe it's because the previous heroes seemed stronger. You don't worry much about Bruce Campbell or Sharon Stone; you're fair certain they can take their share of punches (or gunshots or demon-ravagings or whatever is the violence du jour), even if it, well, drags them into hell. But this hero is a sweet little farmgirl trying to make it in the city (staunchly played by Alison Lohman in the face of near-constant batterings and blood-spewings and getting gnawed upon by toothless gypsies), and Raimi makes her run a gauntlet not just of physical violence (which would be alright. My God, will you listen to this? what have I become?) but of social and public humiliations as well. In the end, it just feels like sadism.

It has about as much story as would fill a decent episode of Amazing Stories, and the characters round out a little more fully, but not much. Their personalities are indicated for the most part through pat conversational pieces and comic-book-shallow actions. The only time there is any real glimpse of three-dimensional interaction is at a dinner party when our heroine is meeting her boyfriend's parents and the mother unexpectedly warms to her, but that single moment of humanity is cut short by another crushing moment of humiliation. >SPOILER ALERT< The worst part, I guess, is that I saw what the ending would be while it was still a mile off down the track. That doesn't always ruin a film for me, but it did this one. I couldn't enjoy her hard-fought triumphs because I knew that they were going to be snatched away from her by the chuckling man behind the camera (do you remember Muttley? He was a cartoon dog when I was a kid, and he always sniggered wheezingly into his paw whenever some bad thing befell his master, Dick Dastardly. That's how I picture Sam Raimi shooting the end of the film).

I suspect it'd have been funnier in the theatre. These things are easier to enjoy when there's a group dynamic involved, and you're jumping and screeching and laughing along with other folks. As it was, in the privacy of my own living room, there were some funny things, particularly at the seance: the lamia-possessed man dancing his manic sailor's hornpipe over the fire, and who can resist laughing once the sacrificial goat starts a-cussin'?

I'm glad that Raimi still has a blast directing these things. I'm very happy that he has kept hold of his childlike enjoyment even after all these years in the purportedly soul-killing hell-dimension that is Hollywood (that's all hearsay, actually, and I may be wrong about it. It might be a very nice place). I sincerely hope he keeps working forever. One of my favorite things in the world (second only to the face of a footballer about to take a free kick) is a director with a powerful vision, and he is absolutely that. But is there a reason you must not miss this? None that I can think of, unless you're a Raimi completist... which I whole-heartedly encourage you to become, if you think you'd have a talent for it. If not, it shouldn't be difficult to find more compelling journeys into hell at your corner video store.