The summer of 1977 gave us Star Wars, but later that year TV ads started cropping up for something else entirely — something involving UFOs, with a “first,” “second,” and “third kind” terminology I wasn’t familiar with. What the hell is this? I wondered. A documentary? Or one of those cheesy “Schick Sunn Classic Pictures” pseudo-documentaries about Noah’s Ark or Bigfoot?
It turned out that in the realm of 1977 sci-fi blockbusters, Star Wars was not alone.
Sometimes a key actor can’t — or won’t — return for a sequel, so the filmmakers decide to write his or her character out of the series. Maybe they’ll reduce it to a phone conversation in which you can’t see or hear the actor, or perhaps they’ll resort to letting us know that the character died sometime between the sequel you’re watching now and the previous installment. Or perhaps they killed off a character in the original film without knowing how popular that character would become, so for the sequel the writer has to figure out some kind of ludicrous way to bring him or her back. Perchance the writers think they’re really clever, they’ll play this card: “The events in the first film were only the beginning — there’s much deeper stuff going on here that you never knew about (neither did we, of course).” In the world of television it’s called “jumping the shark,” but in cinema I call it a Lame Sequel Premise. (The following article contains many spoilers, so proceed with caution.)
Alien³ (1992): Newt and Hicks died in hypersleep.
Had anyone told me that the director of this mess (also known as “Alien 3,” or “Alien Cubed,” or whatever else you want to call it) would end up being one of my favorite filmmakers, I would’ve laughed in their face. Granted, David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac) lost creative control while making the movie and now virtually disowns it, but still, the opening of Alien³ is beyond unforgivable: we find out that Rebecca “Newt” Jorden (Carrie Henn) and Corporal Dwayne Hicks (Michael Biehn), two beloved characters from the previous installment, 1986’s Aliens, died during hypersleep. Aliens’s director, James Cameron, reportedly called this plot development “a slap in the face” of the franchise’s fans, and that’s precisely what it felt like to this fan. As far as I’m concerned, the series consists of Ridley Scott’s original Alien (1979) and Cameron’s sequel and that’s where it ends. I’m not even going to get into the lame “Ripley was cloned” business that made 1997’s Alien: Resurrection possible.
Off-Screen Character Death Lame-o-meter Rating: Should’ve Quit While They Were Ahead.
Let me begin by stating that 1988’s Die Hard was my choice for Best Picture that year (with all due apologies to Rain Man — a great film, but not as great as Die Hard). The fact that it wasn’t even nominated is yet another example in the endless line of Oscar fuckups, if you ask me. When I got my first laserdisc player in ‘89, the very first disc I bought was Fox’s “special widescreen edition” of the film.
I saw Die Hard on opening weekend at San Francisco’s Coronet theater, which is sadly no more. I was so pumped after it was over that I decided to walk the entire 20 blocks back home. A friend even offered me a ride, but I didn’t take it. I was on one of those “good movie” highs: my adrenaline was jacked up, and I needed to take in what I’d just seen and walk it all off.
It’s funny, because I went into Die Hard thinking it wasn’t going to be that great — the “It’ll blow you through the back wall of the theater” tagline was a little on the lame side (even though it turned out to be accurate), plus Bruce Willis was good on Moonlighting, but somehow it was difficult for me to picture him in a feature film as an action hero.
Shows how much I knew. And it occurred to me once, while watching the old laserdisc, that the first 17 minutes of Die Hard are so good, it would still be a great film even if Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) and company didn’t show up.
One of the things I really enjoy about watching my favorite films over and over again is that I’m always noticing things I hadn’t noticed before, especially as my own personal perspective on life evolves over time. The movies on this list are all films I’ve seen many times over the years and it seems like every time I come back to them, there’s something I didn’t pick up on before. Your mileage may vary, but chances are many of you have seen these at one point, either when they first came out or maybe later on video. Perhaps you remember them for one particular thing but not necessarily for all of the other things that makes them great movies. If so, maybe it’s time to give them another go.
All the President’s Men (1976). You probably remember lots of brightly lit newsroom scenes and someone meeting that Deep Throat guy in the garage. Worth a second look because of the damn near overwhelming amount of information, the details of the investigation, the absolutely riveting suspense that comes from almost nothing but conversation and because great investigative journalism like this is quite possibly on its way out. Look how much tension is created in this scene which plays out as a slow push-in on Robert Redford as he follows a lead on the telephone.
There are, as far as I know, four films from the ’80s that claim to be the first to use computer-generated imagery: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Tron (1982), The Last Starfighter (1984), and Young Sherlock Holmes (1985). However, the use of computer animation goes as far back as 1973’s Westworld, in which the point of view of Yul Brynner’s robot gunslinger was achieved through computer graphics, and other films in the ’70s had scenes featuring computer-generated images displayed on video monitors, including the simulated Death Star trench run in Star Wars (1977) and the landing sequence in Alien (1979).
Star Trek II was the first true milestone. Dr. Carol Marcus’s (Bibi Besch) demo of the simulated formation of the Genesis planet is entirely computer generated. Again, the images are seen on a computer monitor, but for a good 40 seconds the monitor is featured in full close-up without an edit, then once again for another 20 seconds. (An edited version of the scene can be viewed below.) Since the demo was a computer simulation, it wasn’t required to be photorealistic, but it was the closest anyone had come to achieving photorealism with computers up to that point in a movie.
“Hey, roll it, ’cause I’ll tell ya, you know, you’re listening to a guy who learned a lot about ripping off movies from watching laserdiscs with director commentary.” —Paul Thomas Anderson, from the Boogie Nights audio commentary
Okay, so I’m an audio commentary junkie. Sometimes I’ll buy a movie I don’t particularly like all that much just because it has a commentary track or other cool extras. It seems like I’m always repurchasing some movie I already own simply because the new version has extra features.
In the laserdisc days there was Criterion. The very first audio commentary track was done by film historian Ronald Haver on the 1984 Criterion laserdisc of King Kong (1933). Unfortunately, many of those Criterion tracks still haven’t made it to DVD, including Martin Scorsese’s commentaries for Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, and Terry Gilliam’s for The Fisher King (all worth checking out, provided you can find a working laserdisc player).
Boogie Nights (1997; director Paul Thomas Anderson). This is pretty much everything I look for in a commentary track, so it’s really too bad Anderson doesn’t seem to want to record them anymore (to date, this is the last one he’s done). There’s a lot of cool information here, including many anecdotes about the production of the film, but the real fun for me is hearing Anderson talk excitedly about how much he loves to write material for certain actors.
ANDERSON (on actor William H. Macy): And you know, everything you write, you better know what you’ve written, because he is going to say every single word exactly as you’ve written it. And he’ll sort of look at the punctuation, find out what it means. A dash means this, an ellipses means that. You know, this is in quotes, this has been underlined, this has been italicized … He’s all about finding out what the writer means, you know, and he studies the script clearly so well that as a director you don’t really have to do shit. You just have to watch him, because I feel like I did my job as a writer, so being a director was just being a fan.
A few months back, I sat in a crowded theater on opening night of My Bloody Valentine 3D. As I was sitting there waiting for the movie to start, it occurred to me that I was the only one in the audience who was old enough to have seen the original in the theater. All of this reminded me how I felt about slasher films as a teenager, which is basically the same way I feel about them now: I love them — and yet I hate them, because there are far too few good ones. I went to these movies hoping to be scared but the TV ads usually frightened me more than the actual movies. The aforementioned original My Bloody Valentine (1981) turned out to be kind of lame. Even the ultimate ’80s slasher movie Friday the 13th (1980) didn’t scare me all that much. Sure, I jumped at the end like everyone else when Jason’s corpse came out of the water, but the ending still made no sense whatsoever.
The problem for most of these movies is that the bar had been set tremendously high by John Carpenter in 1978 with Halloween. Shot on a reported $320,000 budget, Halloween raked in $70 million worldwide and spawned a wave of slasher film imitators that lasted most of the ’80s.
Previous to Halloween, Carpenter had made Dark Star (1974) and Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). Dark Star began as a USC film school project shot on 16mm, a very funny black comedy sci-fi tale about hippies in space who are on a mission to destroy unstable planets. Assault on Precinct 13 is a tense low-budget action flick about a police precinct under siege by a street gang seeking retribution, in which cops and prisoners have no choice but to fight side-by-side to fend off the attack.
So what makes Halloween succeed on a level that its later imitators could never quite match? To be fair, Halloween was in many ways the first of its kind so many elements that would later become cliché (such as camerawork from the POV of the killer, teenagers being murdered after having sex or a “boogeyman” killer that won’t seem to ever die) weren’t cliché yet. But the true reason for its success is the level of filmmaking. (more…)
With all this talk about remakes in various stages of production, from rumored to released, I’ve received a couple of suggestions that I do a list of needless remakes. But because (to sort-of quote Robert Stack in Airplane!) “That’s just what they’re expecting me to do,” I decided to flip it around and do a list of great remakes. Because let’s face it, none of us want these movies to turn out bad — we’d all rather they be good. When I hear of a remake in the works, such as 2008’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, when I’m finished rolling my eyes there is a gullible part of me that thinks “wait a minute, Keanu Reeves is an interesting casting choice and the themes of the original are still relevant today — this might work!” But then the movie gets released and the reviews are so universally awful, I decide to skip it. That’s typically what happens, but there is always a twinge of hope that the remake will be good.
So what constitutes a great remake? I’d define it as a movie that takes the original premise, makes it its own and in no way tarnishes the memory of the original. Here are ten films that I feel do exactly that. I know it’s sacrilege to say, but some of these I think are even better movies than their inspirations.
The Thing (1982). From the very opening, with the desolate shots of the Antarctic and the Norwegian helicopter pilot trying desperately to kill a dog running in the snow, we can tell we’re in for a different ride than the 1951 Howard Hawks original The Thing from Another World. Director John Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Lancaster take the story in a more psychological direction — as the men become infected by the “thing” they show no outward signs and the paranoia grows as they begin to point fingers at each other. The good old early 80’s makeup effects by Rob Bottin still hold up beautifully, especially that defibrillator gag. The great cast includes Kurt Russell, Richard Dysart, Wilfred “I’m all better now” Brimley and Donald “I’d rather not spend the rest of this winter tied to this fucking couch” Moffat. By the way, John Carpenter has had good luck remaking Howard Hawks’ films — if his 1976 Assault on Precinct 13 had “officially” been a remake of Hawks’ 1959 Rio Bravo, I would have included it on this list. (Now if only people would have luck remaking Carpenter’s own films!) (more…)
In 1983 I was going through a strange phase — I liked sitting in the front row at movies.
I guess I figured that if the screen filled my entire field of vision, that meant I was getting some kind of IMAX experience. The only one of my friends who shared this insane idea was my old Boy Scout buddy Zant Burdine. To think we were the first in line for the very first showing of Return of the Jedi at the Stamm theater, and when they opened the doors we headed straight for the front row. Yeah, good thing we got there early for those primo seats!
One of those 1983 front-row-center experiences was WarGames. Up to that point, director John Badham was best known for directing Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Blue Thunder, which opened about a month prior to WarGames. He went on to do the highly entertaining Stakeout (1987) in addition to some not-so-great stuff like Bird on a Wire (1990). At some point his films started using the vanity credit “A John Badham Movie,” as opposed to “A John Badham Film”; it made me wonder if he was making the statement that movies are meant to be fun entertainment while films are potentially more pretentious. (Directors Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson routinely use the word “picture” in their vanity credits.)
For me, WarGames is Badham’s best movie. It’s certainly both fun and entertaining, but also quite intelligent as well, thanks to a superb screenplay by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes, who went on to write another great movie together, 1992’s Sneakers. (After that Parkes turned exclusively to producing, often working with Steven Spielberg.) The riveting opening scene features Michael Madsen and John Spencer as two U.S. Air Force officers in a missile silo who receive a launch order. Both are required to turn each of their keys at the same time to launch the missile, but at the last minute Spencer can’t do it, leaving Madsen to pull a gun on his partner: “Turn your key, sir!”
Brilliantly, the scene turns out to be a drill — a test to see just how many people would actually be willing to launch a nuclear missile with only an order from a computer and no telephone confirmation. This scene establishes early on the conflict within the military: Dr. McKittrick (Dabney Coleman), the man behind NORAD’s WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) supercomputer, believes all officers should be taken out of the loop, while General Beringer (Barry Corbin) is extremely uncomfortable with the idea of leaving mankind’s fate in the hands of computers.
If you’re like me, when you see a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger in shades, a certain five-note rhythm comes to mind. There’s no denying composer Brad Fiedel kicks things off in James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) with a great main title, letting us know we’re building to something awesome here.
In the late ’70s and early ’80s, there was a wave of low-budget films hitting theaters, but they didn’t feel low-budget — they all had the aura of expensive blockbusters. I’m talking about flicks like The Howling, Scanners, and Escape From New York (all 1981), and directors like Joe Dante, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, and of course Cameron — directors who knew enough about the craft of filmmaking to stretch their shoestring budgets and create cool-looking movies.
Carpenter’s Escape From New York is a good example. The dilemma: how to make New York City look like a maximum-security prison in the near future with very little money? The early establishing shot of the Manhattan skyline is a matte painting. But more important is the way Carpenter pans up from the set — created in Sepulveda Basin, California — to the night sky, then cuts from blackness to the matte shot, perfectly matching the lighting and camera movement so it appears to be one continuous shot.
Cameron served as a matte painter and special-effects cameraman on Escape From New York, but before that, he was a model builder who was quickly promoted to art director on Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), produced by Roger Corman. Cameron literally stapled empty egg cartons to the back wall of one of his alien-spaceship sets because it was cheap and he thought it would look cool. It was around this time that he met Gale Anne Hurd, who served as an assistant production manager on the film. A few years later, when Cameron started developing his idea about a cyborg assassin from the future, he brought Hurd on board to cowrite and produce.
