Hey there.
I'm gonna switch gears completely today. Instead of proselytizing about music, I thought I'd share a bit of a cinematic experience. A man can only write so much on one subject, after all. So strap in, kids - we're gonna look back at the nature of origins and rediscovering the forgotten.
I was listening to the latest installment of the Nerdist podcast yesterday, featuring the incredibly intelligent and funny Patton Oswalt. Over the course of the podcast, Hardwick and Oswalt's conversation turned to the incessant obsession with reboots and remakes in Hollywood and how frustrating it is now that the duration between iterations seems to be decreasing. For example - Spiderman 3 was barely out of the theaters before there was talk of rebooting the franchise and now Christopher Nolan has yet to film The Dark Knight Rises and the studios are setting up the rubric of a reboot. It's exasperating. What I took away from their discussion was the simple notion that I should appreciate the source material while I can, before it's mined for originality and thrown on the scrap heap due to obsolescence. One such example of the never-ending molestation by the Hollywood machine would be the Terminator franchise.
To cut to the chase - I love this series, flaws and all, but when you get down to the heart of it the first two films were never that flawed. It wasn't until further iterations of the franchise came to pass that the quality began to dip. Even then, I had the pleasure of watching the Sarah Conner Chronicles on Netflix and by the end of the second season the show had really gotten to be quite good. Shame it was cancelled right as it grew the beard. After chewing my way through the show I thought to myself "I only watched those movies years ago, I ought to go back and see what the fuss was about now that I'm a little older". I was pretty young when the blockbuster Terminator 2 came out and I remember my parents hemming and hawing about me seeing it at a friend's house. Being the young science-fiction nerds we were, we watched the movie with rapt attention, then immediately went and rented the original Terminator, which had essentially made James Cameron into the name he is today. It was a fast and furious affair, a tense and terse movie that never strays too far from the premise, much to its merit. But I had no idea at the time, not even into my teens, the impact that medium and quality would have on a viewer's experience and interpretation. So much like my post on Akira and second viewings, I went back to the beginning and started working my way through the Terminator series Blu Rays to see if they had held up to the passage of time.
Man, do they.
I don't recall, exactly, the quality of the VHS on which I watched Terminator. I just know that A) it was probably at least five years old B) it was on a tiny TV and C) I hadn't actually set out to watch the movie in its entirety since then, so it had been, what, 15+ years? Watching it again, then, on the crisp, new transfer to Blu Ray after such a long time was revelatory. It was honestly like seeing the movie for the first time. The audio was crystal clear, the scope of the shots were impressive, even for a young director like Cameron was at the time. It was apparent, even now, decades later, that this was a fantastic concept for a movie and there wasn't an ounce of fat on it. The movie is a fast paced, relentless piece of work, taking place over the course of a scant 36 hours. Arnold Schwarzenegger is intimidating and believably robotic, Michael Beihn is passionate and desperate, a great fit for the role, and Linda Hamilton serves as a credible audience proxy. I was stunned, frankly, to see how great the movie looked in the present day despite what must have been a shoe-string budget. No surprise, then, that the movie spawned not only a long-running franchise but countless knock-offs as well. This was a smart, heavily science-fiction based action movie that made evil robots somehow believable to the movie-going public, something the imitators had trouble accomplishing.
Cameron ramped up the effects and scope of the movie for a sequel six years later, making Terminator 2 (at least at the time) one of the most expensive and impressive movies put to film. Unlike the first, however, I had seen this move countless times in the intervening years, including more than once in my college apartment on a rinky-dink little TV/VHS combo I had in my kitchen. I liked to watch a movie while I did the dishes - so sue me. Anyway, as I have stated before - a larger TV and clearer format make for a substantially different experience. I never got to see these movies in the theater. At home on a widescreen was as close as I was going to get, and it was still an eye opening experience. While I would have loved to experience the novel twist of playing off of the audience's expectations of the little guy being good and Arnold being bad, I still got a fresh perspective from the new format. Once again, the movie had a renewed sense of weight and impact, the gun violence seeming more real and the details standing out just that much more. One of my favorite scenes in any movie is towards the back of this film, in which our protagonists break in to Cyberdine Research to change the future, bringing the entirety of the Los Angeles police force to the scene. The cold, desperate drama of the situation gives a heavy finality to the scenes as a young Edward Furlong replies to an insanely fit Linda Hamilton about how many cops are waiting outside. A beat, then his shaky reply: "Uh...all of 'em, I think." The sequel isn't quite as tight or novel, meandering away from the premise to examine what sentience is and how identity and self impact our actions. Predestination was more a theme of the first film but it still plays nicely in the sequel, albeit in more subtle manner.
I have to confess - I'm totally sold on this franchise. You can say what you want about diminishing returns and the less than stellar results of T3 and Terminator Salvation, but the Cameron continuity, namely the first two films and the TV series, are actually surprisingly intelligent and well done. The first two films are absolutely phenomenal, especially in the context of a fresh viewing with the latest technology. They're tight, intelligent movies that changed peoples perceptions of what science fiction could be. If you're at all curious what they're like and haven't seen them before, or just haven't seen them on Blu Ray, do yourself a favor and see what all the fuss was about - dude, it's killer robots. It's tops.
I'm gonna switch gears completely today. Instead of proselytizing about music, I thought I'd share a bit of a cinematic experience. A man can only write so much on one subject, after all. So strap in, kids - we're gonna look back at the nature of origins and rediscovering the forgotten.
I was listening to the latest installment of the Nerdist podcast yesterday, featuring the incredibly intelligent and funny Patton Oswalt. Over the course of the podcast, Hardwick and Oswalt's conversation turned to the incessant obsession with reboots and remakes in Hollywood and how frustrating it is now that the duration between iterations seems to be decreasing. For example - Spiderman 3 was barely out of the theaters before there was talk of rebooting the franchise and now Christopher Nolan has yet to film The Dark Knight Rises and the studios are setting up the rubric of a reboot. It's exasperating. What I took away from their discussion was the simple notion that I should appreciate the source material while I can, before it's mined for originality and thrown on the scrap heap due to obsolescence. One such example of the never-ending molestation by the Hollywood machine would be the Terminator franchise.
Man, do they.
I don't recall, exactly, the quality of the VHS on which I watched Terminator. I just know that A) it was probably at least five years old B) it was on a tiny TV and C) I hadn't actually set out to watch the movie in its entirety since then, so it had been, what, 15+ years? Watching it again, then, on the crisp, new transfer to Blu Ray after such a long time was revelatory. It was honestly like seeing the movie for the first time. The audio was crystal clear, the scope of the shots were impressive, even for a young director like Cameron was at the time. It was apparent, even now, decades later, that this was a fantastic concept for a movie and there wasn't an ounce of fat on it. The movie is a fast paced, relentless piece of work, taking place over the course of a scant 36 hours. Arnold Schwarzenegger is intimidating and believably robotic, Michael Beihn is passionate and desperate, a great fit for the role, and Linda Hamilton serves as a credible audience proxy. I was stunned, frankly, to see how great the movie looked in the present day despite what must have been a shoe-string budget. No surprise, then, that the movie spawned not only a long-running franchise but countless knock-offs as well. This was a smart, heavily science-fiction based action movie that made evil robots somehow believable to the movie-going public, something the imitators had trouble accomplishing.
