Near Dark

(1987) **

Horrorthon ’09 is "officially" over (and I’ve already done my summation), so I don’t feel compelled to do a particularly circumspect job on this flick. I wasn’t even going to review it, except I’m a little bit irritated because I feel like every time I turn around these days I’m dealing with James Cameron, and damned if my experience with this vampire movie doesn’t fall right into that category.

I’ve been hearing about Near Dark since it came out (in the late ‘80s), always in glowing terms, with everyone insisting that I see it. As far as I can tell it’s a beloved, favorite example of the genre. But what I wasn’t quite picking up on was the telltale detail that it was directed by Kathryn Bigelow. And this turns out to be a real dealbreaker, not only because she’s terrible (take a look at Blue Steel or Strange Days if you don’t believe me) but because she’s a pure Cameron minion, who was making movies under his ham-handed, super-obvious, egomaniacal tutelage for several years (while being married to him). Everybody made a big deal about how she’s female and therefore it’s “interesting” that she directed the execrable Blue Steel (in which cop Jamie Lee Curtis has to shoot psycho lover Ron Silver) and especially “interesting” that she directed Point Break (“100% pure adrenaline!”) which I have not seen, but which I’m not exactly optimistic about. But it’s just not that interesting; it’s merely an excuse to give her credit for only half-knowing how to do anything. (I'm not saying female directors are inept, obviously; I'm saying that Bigelow is an inept director who gets undue credit simply because it's unusual for a woman to be directing action movies.) It’s more of Cameron’s ridiculous “feminist” posturing.

Earlier this year my friend Alex tried to induce me to go with him to see Hurt Locker, which, like the rest of Bigelow’s oeuvre, is supposed to be so brilliant, but once I saw her name as the director the jig was up and I demurred. He reported back that the movie was “well-intentioned but strangely disappointing,” which is exactly how I feel about Near Dark; after all the buildup it’s just an ineptly-told vampire story, with the same kind of leaden plotting and scenery-chewing acting as Strange Days (a truly horrible movie), and with what seems like most of the cast of husband-to-be Cameron’s Aliens (Lance Henrickson, Bill Paxton, Jeanette “Vasquez” Goldstein) reproducing their signature schtick. There’s even a theater playing Aliens in the background of one shot, just in case you miss the point.

The premise is suggestive, but the premise is always at least “suggestive” in Kathryn Bigelow movies. The concept of a group of vampires operating like an outlaw biker gang, moving around the American Southwest in search of their prey, is kind of cool, and their power structure and methodology is intriguing. But they’re pretty lame vampires; they don’t obey the standard vampire rules (since Bigelow doesn’t have the directing chops to create sequences where they’d be bats or flip sideways and disappear or suddenly have fangs, and she and her co-writer don’t care anyway) and they don’t seem supernatural at all. The actors who aren’t from Aliens (Adrian Pasdar as Caleb, the reluctant new recruit, and Jenny Wright as Mae, his undead tutor) are colorless and lame. The second act builds, not to a suspenseful or exciting sequence, but to a Cameron-style ridiculously-overblown shoot-out (with big vehicles colliding); some of the shots are in slow motion, Peckinpah style, but none of it has the balletic grace that Cameron himself can always supply. (There are ten-minute stretches of Terminator 2 Judgment Day and Aliens that are sheer kinetic perfection; Bigelow has no idea how to construct anything nearly so sublime.) Then the plot takes a truly ridiculous hard left turn, violating vampire principles nearly beyond recognition before climaxing with more truck collisions and gasoline fireballs and cowboy bullshit, and a final ending that (like all Cameron-esque stories) gets lost between macho nihilism and cornpone sentimentality.

I shouldn’t be so irritated by Near Dark except that I feel ripped off, and, worse, I feel ripped off by James Cameron, which is a sensation I’m just awfully tired of. Of course his lame girlfriend director has the same problems as he does (super-obviousness, pretentiousness, a nerd’s unquenchable desire to be “badass,” and a bizarre faith in Jeanette Goldstein’s acting ability). Of course there are legions of fanboys and fangirls going bananas over what turns out to be an artlessly violent comic strip of a movie. (I’ve got nothing against comic strips or movie violence, obviously, but there’s no other way to put it.) Bigelow is the kind of filmmaker who wants it both ways—who wants to be given credit for “playing with the boys” (in both senses, in Bigelow’s case) but simultaneously expects to be given special dispensation for inability to cover the bases, on the grounds that this “unconventional” approach is somehow preferable. It’s like Tim Burton sneering “I’m not interested in ‘what a great shot.’” (Convenient!) According to fans on IMDB, I’m supposed to be “impressed” that Near Dark has no effects shots, exactly the way I’m supposed to be “impressed” that M. Night Shyamalan disdains all optical/digital/visual trickery, since it would somehow compromise his “pure-film” vision. Sorry, no sale.

ADDENDUM: P. S. It's not scary.

New Post

"You should do what I do and write a whole new post," Octopunk said (in response to my response to his voluminous post below). So I figured he had a point. Here's my response again:

1) I wish my Patton Oswald post had "dominated the blog over the weekend." It only got three comments (and only one of those comments was actually about the posted clip itself); I assumed that everyone missed it.

2) The Emperor's lightning sound was, I believe, a reference to Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me.

3) I saw Lynch's Dune before I read the book, actually. So I kind of dug it. I had nothing to compare it to, so all I got from the movie was that it was an attempt at a genuinely different approach to epic sci-fi. Later (Junior Year of college, actually) I read the book and realized how badly they'd screwed it up. It was kind of like all those idiots who admired Francis Coppola's Dracula ("He added a sexual subtext...and a commentary on Victorian mores! Brilliant!" Jordan: "He didn't 'add' anything, you idiots") but with me, Jordan, as the idiot.

4) If I don't ignore your detours through Gibson and Phillip K. Dick, I'll never finish this comment!

5) You've hit on the basic conundrum of written sci-fi. A movie shows you several ideas at the same time, but a novel is only one sentence (and one word) at a time. (J.J. Abrams on the Star Trek commentary track, during the shot of Kirk and Bones on the Starfleet Campus discussing the upcoming Kobayashi Maru test: "I wanted to start with an establishing shot that was already a genuine story shot, with action and dialogue." Right, and he did it, but just try that in written prose! You can't.) So the trick of making a locale visible to the reader without interrupting the action is a constant struggle for the fiction writer (and I've got the empty Tylenol bottles to prove it). The problem is compounded in sci-fi, where nothing is taken for granted and every object could be some weird-o version that the reader can't picture properly unless the writer takes a sentence or two to clue you in. I like the way Larry Niven does it, personally. David Gerrold actually collaborated with Niven on a couple of books; they have (I think) similar approaches (at least based on your example). Ultimately, as a writer, I find the whole thing so tiresome that I've completely back-burnered any desire to try my hand at prose-based sci-fi. (Prose-based horror is much more approachable, and I'll be hitting the bookstore shelves with that shit in the first week of July.)

6) Above, I made it sound like the cinematic approach (discovering the environmental details around the edges of the story) is some kind of basic, obvious trick. But it's actually not, as any connoisseur of older sci-fi movies can tell you. It took Kubrick and Lucas to create that approach, where the story is the main focus and the gizmos and vehicles and floating platforms and crazy rooms are just there unremarked upon. David Gerrold discusses this in one of his Star Trek books, talking about how 1930s-1950s sci-fi was so damn "talky," with every machine being explained verbally and with ridiculously elaborate establishing shots conveying everything to you in the most laborious possible way. Lucas gets more credit than Kubrick for fixing this, because Lucas made it work in a colloquial action-adventure setting (rather than Kubrick's magisterially-paced cerebral sci-fi movie); all the stuff is just there, and the characters don't remark upon it at all.

7) Despite all this, I find myself reading less and less sci-fi, and losing my patience with older sci-fi movies more and more often. I have trouble sitting through the stuff when the visuals are so damn primitive, and I have trouble reading the newer stuff because of the cloying, overly-clever stylistic bullshit that takes the place of the traditional turgidness of older "classic" sci-fi. I'll probably change my mind, later. My friend Barney is watching first-season Star Trek and I repeated my claim that it's basically like Shakespeare (e.g. basically literary): the sets and props and effects and production values are so miserable that the entire story is carried by the writing and the acting. (Basically the opposite of Revenge of the Sith.)

8) Another interesting development in literary vs. cinematic sci-fi: Basically, everything used to follow what I think of as "Jordan's Rule" (and I will continue to think of it this way until it's demonstrated that somebody else said it): On paper, sci-fi is infinitely scaleable with no costs. In other words, a single giant robot destroying a house can become a single giant robot destroying a village or a group of giant robots destroying a city, or a thousand spaceships destroying an entire planet, with absolutely no cost overrun. The guy typing the book didn't have to spend another dime, and neither did the publisher. (It didn't cost me anything in terms of time, money or effort to escalate the scenario in my preceding example.) But with movies, it's completely different: just two people talking in a room in a sci-fi movie automatically costs five times as much as the same thing happening in a non-sci-fi movie. What are they wearing? What's the room look like? Is there a window showing the city? Etc. etc. etc. and already we've spent $600,000. This is the main reason cinematic sci-fi is so much more juvenile, by definition, than its written counterpart: youv'e got to pay for it, which means you need a huge audience to generate the box office to offset the costs. A sci-fi novel costs the same as a regular novel to publish, but once you film it, you're spending a fortune and if you can't draw in the kids, you lose. "Jordan's Law."

But what's amazing is that this is actually changing, thanks to advancing movie technology. I'm amazed at the sheer scale of what's presented in modern sci-fi movies (especially the expensive ones). For example, think about Star Trek (ironic example, given that they started with gypsum board sets in the '60s): Think through the movie. Not just the drill, but the aforementioned Starfleet Academy; that enormous Vulcan temple; the collapsing Vulcan landscape; the battle that destroys ten (!) starships completely; and of course Nero's ship. Any single one of these spectacles would be enough for an entire 70s or 80s sci-fi movie. It's such a big deal! But these days, it's approaching the freedom of the written word! "Ten thousand orcs"? Done. "Vulcan temple the size of a mountain, and it collapses?" Done. etc. etc. This means that we actually can have "boutique" cerebral space-movie projects like Soderbergh's Solaris which are totally adult and uncompromising, like good sci-fi novels, and yet are as well-made as any mainstream sci-fi and don't bankrupt the fucking studio if they flop (or don't do as well as Spider-Man). I think that's a really good development...Hollywood has actually found a way to break "Jordan's Law." And now I'll stop before I start getting depressed at the thought of how much I just wrote vs. how few people will read it.

The Decade's Ten Scariest Moments On Film

From cinemablend, It's been a great great decade for the world of the macabre. We saw the invention of the J-Horror import, remake mania, and even some really excellent original films armed to the teeth with scenes that would fill even a grown man's diaper. We've been deluged with horror franchises and remakes, bad guys and bad girls. Sometimes they're subtle, sometimes they're so insane and over the top that we lost all sense of control. These are the scenes from the past decade that made us scream more than any other. Prepare to be scared all over again.

See full list and descriptions of specific scares here

Frank Frazetta's son is a jerk

ALLENTOWN, Pa. -- A Pennsylvania man used a backhoe to break into a museum owned by his father -- the pioneering fantasy artist Frank Frazetta -- in an attempt to steal 90 paintings valued at $20 million, police said Thursday. State police charged Alfonso Frank Frazetta, 52, of Marshalls Creek, with theft, burglary and trespass after they say he was caught loading the artwork into his trailer and SUV.

The elder Frazetta, 81, is renowned for his work on characters including Conan the Barbarian, Tarzan and Vampirella. He was in Florida at the time of the theft. His son's motive may stem from a family feud over the master illustrator's assets, according to a law enforcement source who spoke on condition of anonymity because it is still early in the investigation. Frazetta was arraigned and sent to the Monroe County jail. Bail was set at $500,000. Officials didn't know whether he had a lawyer yet.

Police said that Frazetta and another man used the backhoe to enter the Frazetta Art Museum in the Pocono Mountains region on Wednesday afternoon, tripping a burglar alarm. A trooper who responded said Frazetta claimed he had been instructed by his father "to enter the museum by any means necessary to move all the paintings to a storage facility," according a police affidavit. The elder Frazetta told police that his son did not have permission to enter the museum or to remove any artwork. Frank Frazetta's attorney, Gerard Geiger, said the stolen paintings were insured for $20 million, according to court documents

The AVATAR reviews begin rolling in...

From variety, The King of the World sets his sights on creating another world entirely in "Avatar," and it's very much a place worth visiting. The most expensive and technically ambitious film ever made, James Cameron's long-gestating epic pitting Earthly despoilers against a forest-dwelling alien race delivers unique spectacle, breathtaking sights, narrative excitement and an overarching anti-imperialist, back-to-nature theme that will play very well around the world, and yet is rather ironic coming from such a technology-driven picture. Twelve years after "Titanic," which still stands as the all-time B.O. champ, Cameron delivers again with a film of universal appeal that just about everyone who ever goes to the movies will need to see.

Read the full Variety review here

From Hollywoodreporter, A dozen years later, James Cameron has proven his point: He is king of the world.

As commander-in-chief of an army of visual-effects technicians, creature designers, motion-capture mavens, stunt performers, dancers, actors and music and sound magicians, he brings science-fiction movies into the 21st century with the jaw-dropping wonder that is "Avatar." And he did it almost from scratch.

There is no underlying novel or myth to generate his story. He certainly draws deeply on Westerns, going back to "The Vanishing American" and, in particular, "Dances With Wolves." And the American tragedy in Vietnam informs much of his story. But then all great stories build on the past

Read full hollywoodreporter review, here

Two Davids

When I was looking through I Watch Stuff for a bigger version of that Jurassic Park map on Tuesday, I came across the first of what would eventually be two Lynch/Jedi posts. It included the video above, which is Lynch telling the story of a meeting with Lucas about maybe directing Jedi. He's amusing in his cranky way, though not as much as Patton Oswald in the Lucas sketch that dominated the blog over last weekend.

The IWS post also included this challenge: "Internet, you now have twelve hours to produce an edit of exactly what that insane combination would look like." A while later IWS posted an answer to the challenge, which JPX posted below.

I have to admit, there were twenty seconds or so when I thought they maybe had something. Darth Vader sounding like the yawning vents in Eraserhead was not only fitting but also exactly echoed a joke I had heard (or possibly made) years ago during a geek chat about the hypothetical Lynch-directed Jedi. The shot of Yoda disappearing was an excellent and appropriate choice. But in the end, it devolved into a one trick pony, i.e. bits of the actual movie with Julee Cruise music playing in the background. I feel like some footage from some other movies could have been worked in there somehow. But I guess twelve hours isn't very much time.

Anybody know what bit of Lynch was supposed to be referenced when the Emperor's lightning sounded like that? I have no idea.



Anyway, I was going to make this two posts; my second subject is that I picked up the above book on JPX's recommendation.* But HandsomeStan provided some unexpected connective tissue with his Dune discussion on the Awful Avatar Poster post yesterday.

I loved the novel Dune. Just loved it. I've read it at least three times, and thinking about it I probably could read it again. I didn't care for the sequels; I read the first two and found them very disappointing.

I was, as you would guess, extremely amped up about the movie version. Unfortunately our lovable crank (and dearly departed friend) Mike Cain saw exactly what was coming: "I don't trust him to do it right" he said, "He directed Eraserhead, that's no reason to think he can do a big sci-fi flick."

So right! Extremely disappointing. Watching it again later, having seen more of David Lynch's work, I was able to spot the similarities. Lots of impressionistic montages like Blue Velvet, but... who cares! Why are you wasting time on this when there's so much of the book you're skipping! I know Jedi has severe problems, problems that anticipated the prequels' problems, but I think we're all better off without the Lynch version. Anyway, Dune the novel provides my link... let's talk about science fiction and the written word.

* The recommendation I speak of occurred around 1983, when the book came out. You see, old friend? I do listen to you, it just takes a while. As I recall JPX and his dad had both gotten into this series and described it to me in glowing terms. David Gerrold is one of those guys who's been around forever; one of his claims to fame is "The Trouble with Tribbles" episode of original Star Trek.

I had no plans to pick it up, but I found a used bookstore I had never seen and did what I always do in used bookstores: look for first edition paperbacks of William Gibson's first three novels.

If you don't know who that is, here's a bit of Wiki: "Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in his short story "Burning Chrome" and later popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer (1984). In envisaging cyberspace, Gibson created an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s."

Over the years I've insisted that people read Gibson so much I keep giving away my copies of his books. So I'm always hunting for replacements, and I always want those same editions. I had no luck at this new store, but they did have the Gerrold book and I wanted something to read.

Now, I am a longtime lover of science fiction, but I've read very little of the prose that's out there. There's the old chestnut that these guys have groovy ideas but that doesn't mean they can write. That does account for some if it (although personally I also think most of Philip K. Dick's ideas were crap too, but that's another rant), but for me it's something more specific.

The reason I like Gibson so much is that he shows you everything. The bars, the hotel rooms, the fashions, the weapons, the streets, the shopfronts, the furniture -- everything gets enough deft bits of description to really ground you on what these places look like. Without cluttering up the words he manages to be cinematic, and I love that.

A Matter for Men, for example, takes place sometime in the 21st century, with some hints of advanced technology. But they're just hints, like "The handsome woman was in a lab coat and was carrying a clipboard. She switched it on while she waited and began reading through some notes." Okay, so in the future we switch on our clipboards, but what else ya got? In a Gibson book it would say "she carried one of the new Chanel clipboards, encased in deep green translucent plastic."

Or something like that. If you think about how much information bombards you every time you leave your house, you'll wonder why you'd want to visit a fictional world in which most of the same details are swept away. An essential part of what makes Blade Runner so good is all the brand names in neon (hated that book too, but... later). Details! I want details!

The trap my complaints fall into easily is this: I'm asking the authors to short circuit my own ability to visualize, or I'm saying they're leaving too much to the imagination because I'm lazy. Not so, I'm lucky to have a very good imagination. But in a book you travel landscapes of the mind, and if nobody bothers to mention what a room looks like, you can read the passage fully and it doesn't have to look like anything. And that lack of visual grounding means the cover artist can basically draw any damn thing and it's fine, like that foolish, skin-tight, sleeveless military uniform in the picture above. Fucking Boris Vallejo. Good painter, but does he really know what he's doing?

As far as I can tell, what I'm bitching about is a feature of a lot of what's out there. In 1997, anticipating Starship Troopers like a salivating dog, I got a copy of the book. I was kind of dismayed to find it was a really long civics text about the fictional progressive/facist society bookended by two too-short action scenes (the movie, however, did not disappoint). Ideas over images, yet again. I think that was my problem with Larry Niven's Ringworld, which I kind of liked although I wasn't inspired to check Niven out any further (Jordan's a big fan, and he later convinced me I should).

So there I am, reading Gerrold book. I Wikipedia The War Against the Chtorr books and find out the damn series isn't even finished yet, so I'm even more discouraged. I come upon a scene in which the main character listens to a famous professor guy pontificate at a party for pages and pages, my eyes droop. There are a few flashback chapters about the main character's high school civics class that are extremely remeniscent of stuff in the book Starship Troopers, and I start to get annoyed.

And then, the book turned around. The idea revealed itself to be very cool and very interesting (Earth is basically being invaded by an alien ecosystem. From an unknown source weird flora and fauna are showing up, more aggressive and able than the Earth critters in the same niche). Then the global political backstory got fleshed out and that was pretty cool, too. So I went back to the bookstore and got book number two, A Day for Damnation and another one besides. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. I read an installment of a graphic version of this in Heavy Metal or something like that, and the title always stuck with me.

So it looks like I'm on something of a sci-fi novel kick. Maybe I'll see if there's any Larry Niven tucked away on those shelves.

Discuss!

Another Iron Man 2 poster surfaces

James Cameron’s Next Sci-Fi Project at Fox is Fantastic Voyage 3D

From slashfilm [excerpt], The original film was released in 1966 and featured a Soviet scientist who discovers the key to miniaturizing things without danger of them reverting to their original size after a period of time. But an assassination attempt leaves him in a coma with a blood clot engangering his brain. A US team is miniaturized and sent into his bloodstream to destroy the clot and save his life. But they’re relying upon outmoded technology, and only have an hour to work before they begin to revert to original size, and are targeted by his immune system.

(As a kid, I always wanted to see the short version where the ship just instantly reverts to full size, exploding outward from the guy’s body.)

Because Cameron is reportedly producing this film, that leaves the gates open for speculation about his next directorial effort. It could still be the long-gestating Battle Angel, oceanic drama The Dive, or a segment for Heavy Metal, for which he’s been said to be a contributor. Or it could be something else entirely.

No more Flight of the Conchords

From ew, Sad day, PopWatchers. Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie have announced on the Flight of the Conchords website that there will be no season three of the show. The posting said, in part: “While the characters Bret and Jemaine will no longer be around, the real Bret and Jemaine will continue to exist.’” See, these guys are hilarious even when issuing statements. So I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of these two!

I'll believe it when I see it Part 2

From worstpreviews, "Star wars" is clearly here to stay. We've been hearing about a new TV series for a while and back in October a rumor started going around that George Lucas was working on a new "Star Wars" trilogy.

Now, Thomas Dolby, who co-authored George Lucas' "Howard the Duck" theme song, updated his blog with a few words about his visit to California, confirming that a new "Star Wars" movie is in the works.

"My host is friend and former collaborator Paul Sebastien, who over the years has worked for Xbox, Playstation, and now LucasArts," Dolby started. "Last night he was telling me a little about the forthcoming Star Wars-related TV show, movie and online games — very cool indeed."

He added: "I'm not a huge fan myself but it sounds like Mr Lucas has got his head into a good place. I met him several times when I was working on a movie in the 80s called [name suppressed to protect credibility!] and he's a decent chap, but I could have done without the last three SW movies."

According to these comments, there is no question that Lucas is planning a new "Star Wars" movie and apparently it was a big secret since Dolby has updated his blog again in order to retract his statement. He claims it was all a big misunderstanding and that his friend is "very professional and discrete, and would never leak confidential secrets, even to a close friend."