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.

Proving that some things don’t change for Cameron, it was at the time the most expensive movie ever made. It cost a reported $100 million, a sum for which you can now make the first act of a summer movie. Every dollar is up on the screen in this gloriously self-aware action comedy. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s about a spy who believes that his wife is cheating on him. Taking time off from saving the world from Nazis and Muslim terrorists, he sets a trap to catch her in the act, which inadvertently drags her into the world of international espionage and terrorism.

Has it stood the test of time? I think so. The scene where Schwarzenegger, under the influence of truth serum, tells a roomful of terrorists how he’s going to dispatch each and every one of them only moments before he dispatches every single one of them is alone worth the price of a rental. The acting is solid, Curtis is great, Tom Arnold is surprisingly good, future Clooney collaborator Grant Heslov is funny, and no one can out-Ahnuld Ahnuld.

Culturally, I think it’s a relevant piece of work because of the controversy it inspired. With True Lies, Cameron came under heavy criticism for depicting Arabs as terrorists. Whenever a group complains about their depiction in a movie, I always side with the movie. At no point in True Lies did I think the as yet to be anointed King of the World was making any sort of comment on all Arabs or all Muslims. Two years earlier, Muslim terrorists had attacked the World Trade Center. Seven years later, Muslim terrorists would again attack the World Trade Center. And a year after that, Hollywood officially caved to the demands of politically correct Muslims by changing the bad guys in a Tom Clancy movie from Muslim terrorists to Nazi terrorists.

True Lies was also called misogynist at the time, due in large part to the trap set by Schwarzenegger to catch his wife cheating – he forces her to strip. All in all, Cameron got beat up pretty bad on this one, and had no rewards or box office titles to show for it. It made nearly a hundred fifty million domestically, almost four hundred million globally – but this was before anyone gave a rip about the global box office. Domestic was all that mattered, and True Lies was certainly no bomb, but it was not a humongous success, either.

Where does True Lies fit in the canon of Cameron’s work? It’s not his best movie, but it’s not his worst either – although I wouldn’t even call my least favorite of his movies a bad movie. But I think that as gifted as he certainly is, he is a cynical kid, eager for recognition and acceptance, and I believe that the criticism from the cultural elite stung him badly. The misogyny angle really had to stick in the craw of the guy who gave us badass Sarah Connor. The hero of his next movie, Titanic, was a little guy, a poor street urchin slash artist, who was paired with a female protagonist who willingly strips naked for him. The villains were greedy and rich and free of ethnicity. Result: jackpot, baby! No one that I can recall rushed to his defense in the wake of his perceived racism and misogyny in 1994. Cut to Avatar, 2009: in the wake of criticism from the right, the cultural elite had his back.

Ultimately, True Lies exists as a bridge between Cameron’s Terminator/Aliens phase, and his King of the World status. Nothing in the movie gives the impression that he feels he has anything to prove, so in that sense, it’s a pretty honest piece of work. He only means to entertain, doesn’t care about preaching to us, and that’s a good thing.

Hope you’ll come back next week for my ruminations on Hoop Dreams. I’m not sure what ruminations means, but it sounds appropriately pretentious.

Now, it’s possible that his comment to Entertainment Weekly was just some off-the-cuff nonsense that just sort of slipped out.  That’s understandable.  Everyone says something mind-numbingly stupid once in a while.  Just ask Senator Coakley (D-MA).

You want to give the benefit of the doubt to the guy who, despite the freakin’ stupid  Avatar, made great movies like The Terminator, Aliens, True Lies, Titanic and, of course, the moving Piranha 2: The Spawning.  The guy has what the hep kids today call “mad skillz.”  We really want his unbelievably dumb statement to be just an unbelievably dumb statement.

But more likely its part and parcel of the Hollywood culture of disconnected privilege and provincialism that allows its members to stay utterly detached from the human consequences of their ideology.  Just ask those union grips and teamsters hanging around the set who’ll be paying the Democrats’ 40% tax on their health-care insurance just for the privilege of having negotiated good benefits.  The big guys like Cameron rake in so much dough that they won’t notice it; only their business managers care because the tax will leave that much less in the pot to embezzle.

It’s the same culture that allows A-list stars to jump onto the crummy commie dictator circuit, swooping into Havana, Bogota, Tehran or wherever for a quick bite with the resident thug-in-chief.  Somehow they forget not only that they are eating a lot better than the locals, but that in many cases they have another advantage too – they get to leave.   Of course, before they hop back into an enviro-friendly Gulfstream for their lift back to the Santa Monica airport, they have to pose with Fidel, or Hugo or whatever other dictator du-jour for some photos and some declarations about how their host’s deep thoughts rocked them to the depths of their eighth-grade educated minds.  Lenin apocryphally called them useful idiots; well, he was half right.

Of course, radical chic morphs into self-preservation when things get dicey.  If you were around for the L.A. riots back in 1992, you might recall how everything seemed to be on fire except for the areas like Beverly Hills and Bel-Air.  That was not because the rioters particularly appreciated the noblesse oblige of the liberal Hollywoodiods living there.  It’s because the liberal Hollywoodiods living there called out their cops and brought out their guns, both in large numbers.  But, of course when the fires died down after the Army took control again, they went right back to trashing the police, privately owned firearms, and for that matter, soldiers.

The fact is that Cameron doesn’t believe in eco-terrorism – can you imagine his tantrum should some ELF twerp dynamite his high-tech Avatar soundstage for being located on the paved-over Playa Vista wetland or torch his Central California ranch?  He believes in posing.  And saying stupid things like “I believe in eco-terrorism” is just a pose. 

Come to think of it, with his track record, what Cameron should be hoping is that eco-terrorism doesn’t believe in him.   But if it does, he’s fortunate that someone he probably has nothing but contempt for will protect him.

That was the best year for movies that I can recall. That summer alone we had “Forrest Gump,” “True Lies,” “Speed,” and everyone was eagerly awaiting the arrival of Cannes winner “Pulp Fiction.” And we also had “The Lion King.” I remember the critic for my campus newspaper, The Red & Black (Go Dawgs!), panned the film, noting that the “Circle of Life” song, sung by a gay man, was really about keeping groups of people, particularly minorities, in their place. I thought this was bizarre and brought it up with some of my classmates.

I was a drama major. Hellooooo! What was I thinking!

Turns out the movie was homophobic and racist. Scar, the villain, was clearly gay, I was told. I missed that. By missing it, i.e. not having an opinion on the sexual preference of a cartoon lion, I was also a homophobe. Huh? As for the charge of racism, the hyenas, famously voiced by Cheech Marin and Whoopi Goldberg, were stereotypes of blacks and Mexicans. But, as I pointed out, James Earl Jones, a black man, voiced the role of Mufasa. The response still floors me: Yes, but he wasn’t portrayed as a black person.

Did you catch that?

Because Mufasa’s not shucking and jiving, he’s not a black person. I can’t pretend to have called my friends on this; frankly, I was stunned. The PC mindset had led my friends to charge the film with racism, and in doing so they revealed themselves to be slaves to stereotypes. Racists? Probably not. But certainly not deserving of their pious attitude toward Uncle Walt and Company.

Which brings me back to “Borat.” I happen to agree with Christopher Hitchens, who notes that the film makes Americans look more tolerant than the left seems to believe. The sequence in a “black” Atlanta neighborhood doesn’t work as humor if the viewer doesn’t have some pre-conceived notions about black street culture. The elitists were falling all over themselves to point out the rodeo audience cheering Borat’s pro-Bush, pro-War on Terror speech–guess they didn’t notice the woman rolling her eyes. I bet there were more reactions like this…on the cutting room floor, of course.

The elitists’ favorite scene, though, was the one that made fun of them intolerant southerners. The one where Borat insulted the host, crapped in a bag, and, in a move that busted up the party, invited over a prostitute. To the elites, the fact that she was OBVIOUSLY a prostitute had NOTHING to do with her presence breaking up the party. You remember, she was black. And this crowd was clearly offended to be in the presence of a black woman.

I don’t think this is the case and the reaction reveals more about the elites than the scene itself reveals about the great unwashed southern masses. In the end, the Liberal elites had to interpret the movie in this way, if only to excuse themselves for embracing a movie with wall-to-wall juvenile poop and penis jokes. With “Brüno,” they’re taking the “Lion King” approach, embracing it less than they did “Borat” and pointing out the stereotypes. I can’t wait to see what it reveals about them.