**UPDATE: Technical issues on this post have been resolved**

#18: Near Dark (1987)

“The night has a price.”

For a time, during the late eighties, I would set an 8 hour VHS tape to record whatever was broadcast overnight on the various movie channels in the hopes of catching some unheard of gem. In those days, so many movies were produced that never saw the inside of my local Milwaukee theatres that there was just no other way to make sure I caught everything. This was also many years before Al Gore’s Internet and so if a film didn’t get some love from the MSM or those glossy foo-foo film magazines, a minor classic that ended with an explosion instead of a “Fin” could disappear without a trace. Admittedly, most of what I found on that increasingly worn out tape was utter crap, but every once in a while…

“Near Dark” was released into 262 theatres on October 2nd, 1987 and promptly flopped as though it had never existed. Hitting theatres just as another stylish vampire film was at the tail end of a wildly successful run probably didn’t help. Nonetheless, you can’t keep a great film down and thankfully I wasn’t the only one who, thanks to late-night cable, would later discover and be blown away by future Academy Award-winner Kathryn Bigelow’s sophomore directorial effort.

In the heart of yet another dull prairie town night, out walks a vision licking an ice cream cone the likes of which local cowhand Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) has never seen before. Sensual and fragile, her name is Mae (Jenny Wright) and what follows is a slow dance of seduction that will lead to Caleb being left both smitten and bit (literally). After Mae runs off just ahead of the coming dawn, Caleb finds himself getting sicker as the sun rises. As he struggles to make his way home across a dusty field, from out of nowhere (as Caleb’s young sister and father helplessly watch), a battered RV bounces onto the dirt, roars towards Caleb and without slowing down snatches him up into the alternately terrifying and alluring world of centuries old vampires who roam the West like a gang of outlaw bikers stirring up trouble to balm the boredom that comes with immortality and indiscriminately feeding on whoever they feel like taunting. (more…)

“Filmmaking is a trauma that is akin to combat,” says James Cameron. Anyone who has ever attempted to make a movie knows exactly what he is talking about. Loads of money is on the line with little guarantee of success. Dozens of personalities need to be managed, many of them with ideas and egos in conflict with the director’s vision for the picture. The hours are brutal, the conditions often cold, hot, dirty, or dangerous, and before long everyone is perpetually exhausted. On a film set, a particularly nasty strain of Murphy’s Law reigns: anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and at exactly the most inopportune moment.

The vast majority of people making movies soon find themselves happy to get any semblance of a decent shot in the can for editing later — never mind genius imagery, they’re just happy to have escaped with their lives. That genuine entertainment, never mind genuine art, is created in this environment is nothing short of a miracle. It takes a person of singular mind and indefatigable intensity, someone who refuses to accept defeat or take “no” or “impossible” for an answer, sometimes dozens of times every day for months on end.

In the documentary Superior Firepower: The Making of ‘Aliens’ (found on some DVD versions of the movie), one can see various members of the crew gingerly handling the subject of James Cameron’s reputation as a hard, unforgiving taskmaster on his sets.“He didn’t know any other way to work,” said Jenette Goldstein, who played Vasquez in Aliens. “He wasn’t going to waste anyone’s time or money. And he expected no one to waste his.” Prompted to explain the crew’s animosity towards Cameron, Sigourney Weaver deadpanned that, “They were big Ridley fans.” The late Stan Winston, special effects and creature creator extraordinaire, called Cameron’s Aliens set a “tough, demanding atmosphere,” before musing that the director was “cursed with a vision.” In the thick of war, little heed is paid to how genteelly orders are given — why would filmmaking be any different? (more…)

“And then some bulls*** happens.”

That’s how the initial treatment of Aliens (then called Alien II) tapered off after a mere twenty pages. Producers David Giler and Walter Hill had done little more than describe the basic setup: “Ripley and soldiers” versus the eponymous creatures. The rest, they decided, was for the guy who wrote The Terminator to flesh out.

Getting fired from Piranha Part Two: The Spawning, a schlocky job-for-hire, convinced James Cameron there was only one way he could make his Hollywood dreams come true. “I knew I was never going to be offered another movie,” he later explained about that time, “unless I came up with something myself. I had to write a film that made sense for me as a director. I thought it had to have effects that would justify my existence on the project, and I also had to not price myself out of the kind of budget that studios were likely to trust me with.”

So a guy who already specialized in sci-fi special effects and production art decided to add screenwriter to his list of talents. Using his fiery fever-nightmare about a killer robot as his jumping off point, and calling on many of the seminal sci-fi influences of his youth, he proceeded to write The Terminator. Each effect and action scene was thoroughly dissected on paper: Could I do this on a micro-budget? What special effect tricks could pull it off? Just like his early demo-film Xenogenesis, this would be a movie designed not just to entertain, but to show Hollywood what he could do. (more…)

Science fiction is a strange genre, liberally blending the past, present, and future into wonderful new forms. It takes a special mind to seamlessly achieve this mixture, to get an audience to truly believe that what they are seeing on the screen, fantastic as it is, is a living, breathing (and, in the case of Aliens, screaming) world. James Cameron is one part cerebral Vulcan scientist and one part wistful artistic hippie, with more than a bit of raging Scottish highlander sprinkled on top. It’s hard to imagine the movie ever coming into being without that curious makeup fueling its creation from first to last.

Cameron was the oldest child in a Canadian family of five. Born in 1954 and growing up near Niagara Falls, he was just in time to catch the tail end of the atom bomb/Sputnik hysteria and to spend his teen years watching Vietnam play out on the nightly news. “In my youth I was an absolutely rabid science fiction fan,” he says. “I read all the classics, all the old Ace paperback novels. I was really into people like Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Kurt Vonnegut. When I read science fiction I saw stuff in my head that I had never seen in films.” He also loved the films of underwater pioneer Jacques Cousteau: “I began to think of the deep ocean as outer space. This was an alien world I could actually reach.”

Dad was a quiet, thoughtful electrical engineer who gave his son a healthy interest in hard science. With his younger brother Mike playing Igor to his Dr. Frankenstein (Mike would himself become an engineer, and later developed some of the equipment his filmmaker brother used to explore the depths of the sea) Cameron regularly engaged in scientific experiments. One day saw them constructing a submersible “out of a mayonnaise jar, an erector set and a paint bucket,” complete with a live mouse as crew, and sending it to the bottom of a river on a rope (the little critter survived). Another time, they had the fire department chasing (and bystanders reporting as a UFO) a hot-air balloon constructed with dry-cleaning bags and lofted into the air by the heat generated by on-board candles. (more…)

At least as far as movies go, I believe the above headline to be accurate. The Best Picture nominees at the Oscars that year were Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Quiz Show, and The Shawshank Redemption. In this series, I will look back at the Best Year Ever, cleverly focusing on a different movie each week. Starting with…

The key to any great year at the movies is a great summer at the movies, and 1994 had that. I can’t personally decide which movie that summer was my favorite, so I’m starting with my wife’s favorite. My wife grew up in a small town in South Georgia. They didn’t have a movie theatre. Not that she was in the stone ages, but going to a movie was, to her, an event, not a regular occurrence. We had been dating for only about a month, when one Tuesday afternoon in December of 1991, I said, “Hey, let’s go to the movies.” Puzzled, she replied, “It’s Tuesday.”

As good a day as any, I replied, before whisking her off to see “The Last Boy Scout.”

Three years later, she was worse than me. We would watch two movies in an afternoon, three if they weren’t playing at the General Cinema theatre, with its uncomfortable red seats. Our tastes were not discriminating, we would see anything. On July 15, 1994, we went to see Disney’s Angels in the Outfield (co-starring Matthew McConaughey and Adrien Brody!), then ducked into the next auditorium to watch True Lies. My wife saw it at least ten times that summer. (more…)

The men and women who earn the right to wear eagle, globe and anchor of the United States Marine Corps are a special breed.   To those outside the Corps, they talk funny.  They look funny.  They are extremely impressed with themselves – and they have every right to be. 

My beloved United States Army is a blunt instrument, a magnificent club that has pummels our nation’s enemies into submission.  But the Marines are America’s rapier, a razor sharp weapon of war that has never been bested and never will be.  For over two centuries, the United States Marine Corps has been fighting our country’s battles in the air, on land and sea.  They don’t give up.  They don’t quit.  There’s no word for retreat in a Marine’s vocabulary.  And they are making history even today in the mountains of Afghanistan and elsewhere.

November 10th is the Corps’ 234th birthday.  With the indulgence of my Devil Dog brethren, here is this Army veteran’s countdown of the Top Ten Marine Corp movies: (more…)

I just cannot get behind this Star Trek rebirth.  The whole thing is just so unrealistic.  Not the warp speed or phasers or beaming about the universe – those are at least remotely plausible.  I am talking about the fact that the starship Enterprise is composed entirely of officers and yet it still seems to function.  Where are the non-commissioned officers (NCO), the petty officers and sergeants who actually make any military organization run?  No, I can suspend disbelief over Klingons and tribbles, and I actively support the notion of green alien hotties.  But the idea of a functioning military unit without sergeants is just a wormhole too far.

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Hollywood movies often focus on the commanders, the captains and colonels, but they have also managed to highlight some great sergeants as well.  When you are picking out DVDs for next weekend, remember that May 16th is Armed Forces Day and consider a few selections that show the sergeant in all his gruff and grumbling glory. 

If you have never experienced the joy of going through basic training and do not plan to, your first stop should be Full Metal Jacket, with R. Lee Ermey’s legendary portrayal of a Marine drill instructor who must have missed out on the block of instruction on sensitivity.  I saw this in the theater about a week before I reported to Basic.  That was a poor idea. (more…)