The music by Bear McCreary (Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead) evoked a cinematic air in the James Bond/Indiana Jones mold, but with an underlying somberness that lent a pleasing heft to the proceedings:

Actors Mark Valley, Chi McBride, and Jackie Earle Haley all shine in their roles for various reasons — especially Haley, whose delicious politically incorrect performance as Guerrero is the most consistently entertaining tough guy I’ve seen on TV since Michael K. Williams’ Robin Hood-of-the-ghetto Omar in HBO’s The Wire (a show that ended up ruined by its nihilistic writers, but that’s a topic for another post).

But later, settling in to begin watching Season 2 of Human Target on my computer, I wondered if Fox could bring a fledgling action/adventure series into its sophomore year without their usual pattern of first screwing it up and then unceremoniously canceling it. The sad spectacle of Big Hollywood regular Adam Baldwin’s Firefly getting canned before it even had a chance to get started was the most lamentable flameout of many at that often hapless network. Sure, they gave us The X-Files, but that was a looooong time ago. They also gave us 24, but I go against the usual conservative meme by thinking the show terrible. Human Target, on the other hand, held a lot of promise — but would they be able to capitalize on it?

At first, things looked good. The opening episode of Season 2 rocked, most memorably in the startling scene when Jackie Earle Haley cold-cocks a skinny little waif in a thunderous recapitulation of his character’s essential Sam Spade ethic of never playing the sap for anybody. But by the end of the hour, it became clear that some horrendous changes were in the making. Not one but two ladies were added to the permanent weekly roster alongside the three guys — and as the second episode progressed it became clear that both were firmly stuck in the sad realm of hoary Hollywood feminist cliché. In scene after tiresome scene, both characters repeatedly dissipated every attempt at recapturing the sleek, blistering, cat-and-mouse action of the first season.

Now, whenever Jackie Earle Haley begins to quietly infuse a scene with menace, threatening to put some industrial-grade hurt on the bad guys, the same skinny little waif he cold-cocked earlier leaps in uninvited, ruins his plans, and (totally out of character for Haley’s Guerrero) is allowed to skip away without repercussion. And now, whenever the formidable assassin/cop tandem of Mark Valley and Chi McBride put one of their brutal but effective tough-love plans into motion to help a client, the other new woman (who has become the team’s boss in another of Hollywood’s painfully tired and overused feminist-fantasy plot twists) incessantly questions the heroes’ motives and actions like a harried mother chastising her bratty kids.

What a disaster. In place of the excellent female characters that wove their way in and out of the first season — Emmanuelle Vaugier’s game FBI agent, Kristin Lehman’s mobster’s daughter turned district attorney, Autumn Reeser’s spunky computer hacker, Leonor Varela’s South American guerrilla spitfire, Grace Park’s icy oddsmaker, Moon Bloodgood’s Alaskan doctor — we now have two regulars who offer nothing to the existing team except whining, complaining, nagging, bitching, moaning, and (in the case of the new boss) passive-aggressively yapping out crisp, rude orders in between bouts of mewling “Maybe I can’t handle this.”

You would think that in this day and age, hip Hollywood writers would avoid that most catastrophic of clichés, the hectoring female sidekick. The difference between Season 1 and Season 2 of Human Target is like the difference between Raiders of the Lost Ark’s Marion Ravenwood and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’s Willie Scott. As scene after mind-numbing scene degenerates into domesticated, needy, hyper-emotional neuroticism, what used to be a blissful escape from reality now feels like just another hour at work, class, or home.

Another demerit against the second season is the absence of composer Bear McCreary, whose cinematic orchestral effusions have been replaced by a techno score (punctuated by the use of contemporary pop tunes like Outkast’s “Hey Ya!”) indistinguishable from any number of other insipid modern television series. They didn’t even keep the show’s main theme, choosing instead a faux rock style for the opening credits:

Doing some research, I discovered that Human Target’s showrunner, Jonathan E. Steinberg, was dumped after Season 1 and replaced by Matt Miller. Miller hails from NBC’s Chuck, another show that started out with lots of promise before largely degenerating into a series of exhausted “will she?/won’t he?” scenes of manufactured romantic drama unworthy of a soap opera, much less a pleasantly goofy spy satire. I note that Chuck also features a harridan-as-boss dictatorially snapping out rude orders from her booster chair in the Pentagon (actress Bonita Friedericy is 5’3’’).

ZAP2It’s “TV By the Numbers” blog reports that, given the declining ratings ever since these terrible moves were made, Human Target is now “certain to be cancelled.” If so, it will be a mercy killing. I fear that conservatives won’t get the TV shows they want until technology allows for Hollywood-quality programming to be made and streamed online completely independent of the big studios and their advertisers. It is then that we’ll see shows like Human Target continue on in their original alluring vein rather than succumb to death by a thousand perfume inhalations.

With that in mind, here are five drool-worthy stocking stuffers for the cinemaphiles in your family, all of them due to be released in the next few weeks.

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1. Frank Sinatra: Concert Collection (November 2, 2010, $54.99 at Amazon)

Get hep to this, man: seven discs containing fourteen hours of TV specials and filmed concerts, with Ol’ Blue Eyes joined by Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Gene Kelly, Antonio Carlos Jobim, John Denver, Bing Crosby, and of course Dino. Four of the specials have never been released, and a host of isolated TV clips are thrown in for good measure. Top it all off with a 44-page booklet chock full of rare photos and scholarly commentary, and the Chairman of the Board is truly back in all his scotch-soaked glory.

The seventh “Bonus Disc” sounds like the perfect thing to have playing in the background while you are decorating your tree: a “Happy Holidays with Bing and Frank” color TV special.

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2. The Goonies: 25th Anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition (November 2, 2010, $34.99 at Amazon)

A story by a pre-pretentious Steven Spielberg, a script by Chris Columbus, and a typically satisfying directing job by Richard Donner in between his work on classics like Superman (1978) and Lethal Weapon (1987). The Goonies is one of those movies that instantly time-warps guys and gals of my generation back to 1985. Nestled among other films like Back to the Future, Rambo: First Blood Part II, The Breakfast Club, Real Genius, Cocoon, Rocky 4, Pale Rider, and Witness, it helped make that summer magical.

I remember first catching it on a triple-bill with Gremlins and some now-forgotten horror movie. This is one of those movies that, in hindsight, is seen to have assembled a particularly deep cast. Young Sean Astin (later to play Samwise Gamgee in the Lord of the Rings films) Josh Brolin, Eighties staple Corey Feldman, Ke Huey Quan (whose performance had been the best thing in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom the year before) the always fun Joe Pantoliano, Eighties cuties Kerri Green and Martha Plimpton, and even one of Big Hollywood’s own, The Mighty Robert Davi! I’m not sure how they managed to fit so much awesome onto only fifty gigs of Blu-ray, but that’s technology for you.

Whereas so many special DVD sets have extras that don’t impress, I dig the inclusion of a new board game in this Goonies Ultimate Edition — given the treasure hunt motif, it’s something that your kids will likely have fun playing after experiencing the movie for the first time. There’s also the requisite documentary, outtakes, Cyndi Lauper video, souvenir booklets, and even a rare commentary track that manages to reassemble all seven main actors along with the director twenty-five years later.

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3. The Night of the Hunter (The Criterion Collection) (November 16, 2010, $36.49 at Amazon)

The great actor Charles Laughton is already being represented on Blu-ray this winter via 1935’s Mutiny on the Bounty, but you’ll also want to pick up this, his sole directorial effort. François Truffaut once wrote that Laughton’s strange film feels “like a horrifying news item retold by small children,” and noted that “it makes us fall in love again with an experimental cinema that truly experiments, and a cinema of discovery that, in fact, discovers.” What did he mean by that, you ask? Buy this new edition on Blu-ray and find out.

One of the things that attracted me to this new release is the massive 2.5 hours of outtakes included in this two-disc set. It’s a rarity to be privy to so much detritus where an old classic film is concerned, and I’m wondering what sort of illumination it will cast on Laughton’s directing methods.

Another boon is a video interview with actor Simon Callow, who in addition to being a fine thespian in his own right wrote a well-received biography of Laughton some years ago. Those of you who, like me, have been patiently waiting for Callow to finish the final tome in his magisterial three-volume biographical treatment of Orson Welles can content yourselves in the meantime with hunting down his Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor (1988).

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4. The World at War (November 16, 2010, $112.49 at Amazon)

This ranks with Ken Burns’ The Civil War as one of the all-time great documentaries. Sprawling over nine discs and containing some thirty-five hours of material, it’s a must-see for all World War II buffs (and, in a better world, would be required viewing for schoolchildren). Narrated by the great Laurence Olivier and fully restored both visually (in 1080p HD) and aurally (in surround sound), each of the twenty-six episodes has never looked or sounded better — with one enormous caveat.

If you click over to this article on restoring the series for Blu-ray, you’ll note that the producers made the controversial decision to crop each disc’s image in order to make them fit comfortably onto the rectangular widescreen TVs which are commonplace in today’s living rooms. This has caused an uproar among cinema purists, who have damned the set with such ferocity that it now sports a paltry one-star ranking at Amazon despite its otherwise stellar production values.

Whether you mind losing 25% of the image in order to have it fit on your screen without black bars is an open question — I know plenty of people who hit the “zoom” button on their TVs as a matter of course, which effectively crops old movies the same way, so perhaps it’s not a big deal to many of you. But if it is, and you want the full image presented in the OAR (original aspect ratio), you’ll want to skip the Blu-ray entirely and buy the 30th anniversary DVD set released in 2009.

Either way, you’ll want to see this epic series if you haven’t yet been exposed to it.

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5. True Grit (December 11, 2010, $17.99 at Amazon)

As one commenter said on the Blu-ray.com forums when this title was announced, “Nothing makes a format viable like a large selection of John Wayne films.” Amen, brother.

This is, of course, a play at marketing synergy by Paramount, who is releasing John Wayne’s 1969 original on Blu-ray in order to coincide with the release this Christmas of the (admittedly promising) Coen Brothers remake starring Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and The Goonies’ Josh Brolin. But who cares about the excuse? It’s enough that Wayne’s Oscar-winning performance will be shining on your TV screen in high-def, with Elmer Bernstein’s wonderful score thundering through your speakers.

Don’t make ol’ Rooster Cogburn tell you twice to “Fill yer hands!” with this one.

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Is there anything else coming out on Blu-ray this Christmas that you’re particularly excited about? If so, share it with us in the comments below.

“Wax on, wax off.” “He slimed me.” “Fortune and Glory, kid.” “I’ll be back.” “Don’t get him wet. Keep him out of bright light. And never feed him after midnight.”

It’s hard to believe that a quarter century has passed since that magical movie summer of 1984. The calender year of George Orwell’s dire dystopian nightmares had arrived, but instead of a nation writhing in servitude to Big Brother, America was delighting in the prosperity engineered by Big Gipper. Throughout the summer of ‘84, the greatest president of the twentieth century was cruising to the single largest electoral total ever amassed by a presidential candidate in our history, and “It’s Morning Again in America” commercials were playing on TV’s across the land to widespread approval.

In California, a cute little R2-D2 of a machine called the Apple Macintosh had been introduced, heralding the beginnings of a technological tsunami that has yet to abate. Meanwhile, across the world, the latest in the Soviet Union’s grotesque chorus line of cadaverous leaders had croaked, presaging the collapse of the whole miserable works in just a few short years. There was still a world-full of the usual problems, failures, and challenges, yes. But for those of us who spent that summer in gloriously air-conditioned, velvet-dark theaters — and sometimes, when we were lucky, in massive outdoor parking lots flanked by titanic movie screens glowing mystically in the dying light of the setting sun — times were good in America.

There’s much to say about that year from a film perspective, and in the coming months I’m sure those of us at Big Hollywood who had our minds permanently warped by ectoplasmic entities, unstoppable crane kicks, phased-plasma rifles in the forty-watt range, and the dreaded Black Sleep of Kali Ma will be saying it. I’d like to kick things off, however, with a short shout-out to a picture that didn’t rake in blockbuster profits, or fuel a billion-dollar toy industry, or get its characters immortalized on collectible Burger King cups, or spawn an assembly line of sequels and prequels. No, this film penetrated the cultural zeitgeist through an unassuming former editor of National Lampoon, directing his first movie on a shoestring budget, from a script filled with deathless lines like:

“Whatsa happenin’, hot stuff?”

“By night’s end, I predict: me and her will interface.”

“Chronologically, you’re sixteen today. Physically? You’re still fifteen.”

“What the hell are you bitchin’ about? I’ve gotta sleep underneath some Chinaman named after a duck’s dork.”

“I can’t believe my grandmother actually felt me up!”

“I can’t believe I gave my panties to a geek.”

“Sophomore, dude, sophomore! Fully aged sophomore meat.”

“Relax, would you? We have seventy dollars and a pair of girls’ underpants. We’re safe as kittens.”

“No more yankie my wankie! The Donger need food.”

“This information cannot leave this room — it would devastate my reputation as a dude.”

“C’mon, I don’t want to see it!”

“Fresh breath is the priority of my life.”

“I’m kinda like the leader, you know? Kinda like the King of the Dipshits.”

If you got through that list without some serious laughing accompanied by a tinge of bittersweet nostalgia, then in all likelihood you were a criminally sheltered child who was locked in a closet somewhere the day a small movie called Sixteen Candles (1984) debuted in theaters twenty-five years ago. The man who etched “They f***ing forgot my birthday!” into the permanent memory banks of a whole generation of teens was John Hughes, who had cut his comedy teeth writing thousands of jokes on spec, sending them to comedy club veterans like Rodney Dangerfield and Joan Rivers and getting the princely sum of $7 whenever they condescended to buy one. He later weaseled his way onto the staff of Harvard’s National Lampoon, which left him well positioned when Hollywood eventually began looting that talent pool. His scripts for two successful pictures, National Lampoon’s Vacation and Mr. Mom (both 1983) netted him his first chance to direct.

Using a motley assortment of green unknowns, Hughes proceeded to invent an attractive new subgenre, the “teen comedy-drama,” defined by its clever whipsaws between silliness and seriousness until the audience is hard-pressed to decide whether they are supposed to be laughing or crying. And if that sounds like the perfect description of a typical teenager’s emotions, then you’re getting close to figuring out what made Hughes’ films so successful. “I’m not interested in psychotics,” he once said in a New York Times interview, “I’m interested in the person you don’t expect to have a story. I like Mr. Everyman.” In Sixteen Candles, we get not only an Everyman in the form of The Geek (Anthony Michael Hall, who out-auditioned a young Jim Carrey to land the role), but also an Everywoman in Sam, played by Molly Ringwald with the sort of effortless, winning, subdued charisma that would soon become a Hughes trademark. The kids in his films just plain acted better than the ones in other pictures, and it’s hard not to chalk that up to the instincts and human insight of Hughes, a guy who avoided the pitfalls of the Hollyweird lifestyle and stays safely secluded in the Midwest with his wife and kids, living a comparatively normal life.

The film is in many ways the closest thing that my generation has to an American Graffiti (1973). Spandau Ballet’s “True,” playing at the school dance in Candles, has since become a perennial staple on wedding and prom playlists. Little details like the Heather Thomas bikini poster seen briefly on a bedroom door will bring back memories for any man of a certain age. And like Graffiti, Sixteen Candles jump-started the careers of a number of young actors, among the most prominent the brother-sister tandem of John and Joan Cusack. It was hardly a big hit (it ended up only the 44th top-grossing film of 1984), but the budget had been small, and its relative profitability allowed Hughes to continue directing. The films that followed, and that with Sixteen Candles constitute Hughes’ entire output as a director, were The Breakfast Club (1985), Weird Science (1985), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987), She’s Having a Baby (1988), Uncle Buck (1989), and Curly Sue (1991). That last stumbled at the box office in a way that none of the previous ones ever did, after which Hughes abandoned directing and stuck to producing and writing. His notable producing successes include Pretty in Pink (1986) and Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), and by far the most profitable movie of his career in any capacity was the enormously popular Home Alone (1990). By all accounts that film and its sequels left Hughes the Writer and Producer at the very peak of his fame, power, and influence.

And then, without explanation, John Hughes retreated into an inexplicable, baffling virtual retirement, where he remains to this day. No one knows exactly what sent him into seclusion. Perhaps, like so many artists, he had burned himself out with his decade of non-stop production (over twenty scripts flowed from his imagination during those years, not counting all of the directing and producing he was doing). Maybe the death of his close friend John Candy in 1994 sent him into an emotional/artistic tailspin from which he never truly recovered. Maybe age robbed him of the connection he used to feel to teens and their particular fears, hopes, and dreams. Or maybe he sensed that the world had changed, and that films like Sixteen Candles (which was PG, with the barest smattering of obligatory nudity and swearing) were becoming relics in the face of far seamier fare like the American Pie series (1999-present) and non-stop raunch-fests like Superbad (2007).

That last film is as good a benchmark as any to use. Its producer, Judd Apatow, is widely seen in Hollywood circles as the heir to the John Hughes teen mantle. It would be more accurate to say that a movie like Superbad is to Hughes what a wannabe snuff-film like Hostel (2005) is to classic, elegant horror like The Exorcist (1973) or The Shining (1980). Hughes could certainly be fantastically juvenile when looking for that all-important next laugh (Sixteen Candles, in its blasé treatment of Asians and the disabled, is in many ways a time capsule of political incorrectness), but nothing he ever foisted on audiences comes close to the wall-to-wall, one-note crassness and vulgarity of a film like Superbad. The problem with taking the lazy way out — using mere shock value to elicit Pavlovian, knee-jerk laughter — is that next time you always need something just a little more outrageous or cruel or perverse or shocking, until eventually you’ve hit bottom with nowhere else to go. To the hardcore, open-minded filmgoer, the affront isn’t so much moral as artistic — it’s bad storytelling, bad comedy, bad filmmaking. Super-bad, you might say. And the few times that Superbad tries to be clever (see the incongruous jokes the otherwise brain-dead youngsters are able to make about such non-teenybopper cultural touchstones as Orson Welles and Waylon Jennings) it only succeeds in sounding spectacularly phony, just a Hollywood comedy writer’s uninformed view of how teens talk and how much pop culture history they would reasonably know.

I get the feeling that when John Hughes wrote his movies, he had in mind the truth that all teen films eventually become cobwebbed and dated relics of a bygone age. The cool becomes cheese and the style old-fashioned. In the real world, both the stars and the target audience get old and balding and baggy-eyed and wrinkled and gray. When that happens, all that’s left of an old movie is what is universal and timeless. The question becomes: did it truly hit the zeitgeist of a generation, or did it just fake it?

By that criterion, I’m guessing that the Apatow and American Pie films are destined to someday be filed on a dusty back shelf along with mostly forgotten movies like The Last American Virgin (1982) and Private School (1983). Along with the cream of Hughes’ output, the modern teen comedies that I think have the best chance of surviving include House Party (1990), Swingers (1996) and Napoleon Dynamite (2004), all films that earn their laughs with far more than scatology and Tourette syndrome. In any case, no matter how it all shakes out, Sixteen Candles has assured itself a place at the head of the class, by blazing the way toward a more meaningful style of teen comedy that takes the emotions of kids seriously even in those spots when it doesn’t take itself seriously at all.

“I can’t believe this — they f***ing forgot my birthday!”

Well, we here at Big Hollywood didn’t. Happy Birthday, hot stuff. Chronologically you’re twenty-five now, but at the sunswept drive-ins of our imagination you’ll always be sweet sixteen.