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…)

The storyline of the movie The Book of Eli is a cross between I Am Legend, Fahrenheit 451, and a B-movie western. In post-apocalyptic American wasteland, a strange wanderer named Eli (Denzel Washington)—who is a cross between St Francis of Assisi and Mad Max—carries the only surviving copy of the Bible. His task is to bring it to a destination (unknown even to himself) in the West where God told him to go and where the Book is most needed.

Along his lonely way, Eli stumbles into a town resembling those of the Old West. The leader of the town is a self-appointed, ruthless leader named Carnegie, played by Gary Oldman who is simultaneously a cross between Mickey Rourke from 9 ½ Weeks and Mickey Rourke from The Wrestler, as well as the whole process of evolution between the former and the latter. Carnegie is an evil megalomaniac who sends his lowlife savages in search of the Book, convinced that possession of a copy of the now-extinct Bible can help him spread his rule and establish control over degraded humanity.

In case abusing his concubine, killing some people, and treating the rest like dirt was not enough to convey that Carnegie is a bad guy, we are shown that his favorite read is Mussolini’s biography. Yet, with all the weight of culture going against him, Carnegie is the only person who had managed to forge some semblance of a settlement with brewing elements of potential civilization.   His wild town—reminiscent of an Old West settlement but surrounded with cannibals instead of Indians—is the only semi-safe and positive place in an otherwise out-of-control and collapsed world. He is assembling a hierarchical society and he needs the Book to bring, as he thinks, “all the weak and wounded” under his dominion. His intentions are sinister and self-serving, but he seems to be the only person who understands the real power of the Book and its ability to transform and civilize the brutally egotistical and animal nature of disintegrated humanity . . . while at the same time correctly assessing any man’s, including his own, inability to re-create functioning societal interactions without a binding belief system. (more…)

Late last spring, through the auspices of a mutual friend, I spent an afternoon visiting with eighty-nine-year-old author Ray Bradbury. Walking upstairs to his den, I found the genial (and, for the record, fairly conservative) writer dressed in a rumpled shirt and boxer shorts, surrounded by a sea of awards and papers and memorabilia of every description, and happily watching Turner Classic Movies on a big-screen TV. “Isn’t this channel great?” he enthused, telling me how excited he had been to guest host there a year earlier. We spent the next hour talking about films — his early days as a local boy visiting the studios on roller skates and asking stars for autographs, his long friendship with special effects maven Ray Harryhausen, his experience writing the screenplay to Moby Dick (1956) for director John Huston.

And all the while TCM played in the background, like an old friend.

I’ve since reflected on how Turner Classic Movies has grown over the years into one of the most universally admired cultural forums in America. It’s a familiar presence in households of all political persuasions. If you like old movies, you like TCM, period.

That’s why the mini-uproar here at Big Hollywood last week was so disheartening. For those of you who missed it: during an on-air introduction to the 1957 movie A Face in the Crowd, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz gave legions of conservative viewers a collective poke in the eye, by way of a not-so-veiled sneer at talk-show host Glenn Beck. You can see the sad spectacle for yourself by clicking over to the TCM website, but here are the money quotes: (more…)

Robert Avrech’s lovely paean to the patriotism of Old Hollywood reminds me, by way of contrast, of a blink-and-you-missed-it scandal from seventeen months ago. Even in a cultural arena rife with liberal outrages against military families, it marked a new low. And although it was but one small battle in the culture war, it is worth recalling in the wake of Memorial Day as a reminder of just how far our popular media has fallen from the sterling ideals of our forefathers.

What does NBC stand for again? National Broadcasters against Conservatives? No Blessings for the Corps? On December 7, 2007, as the country solemnly remembered Pearl Harbor and the timeless sacrifices of soldiers long dead, one of our major television networks decided that running ads praising today’s modern armed forces constituted a bridge too far. The two thirty-second spots had been produced by Freedom’s Watch, a now-defunct conservative action group which aspired to be the MoveOn.org of the right, using “grassroots lobbying, education and information campaigns, and issue advocacy” to fight the good fight against the legion of hippy-dippy protesters, nihilists, and ideological bullies that perpetually rage (and increasingly reign) throughout blue-state America. (more…)