“I finally realized that the only way I was going to get my career jump-started was if I created my own project and then held onto it tenaciously, like an abalone, until somebody would put up the money for it. So I conceived a project that had the imagery I could create cost-effectively with my experience in visual effects. It had some of that imagery but not so much that the budget was proportionately large, because I knew no one would trust me with a large budget.” James Cameron interviewed by Robert J. Emery for The Directors: Take One

The Terminator (1984)
Directed by James Cameron
Written by James Cameron with Gale Ann Hurd
Produced by Gale Ann Hurd
107 minutes

By now, anyone with ears should have heard of The Terminator, a down and dirty science fiction action thriller about Adam and Eve on the run from a killer cyborg played by the future governor of California. A surprise box office hit that was championed by enough critics to qualify as a success on every level, few at the time may have realized how extraordinary it was that this movie ever got made, while those studying the DIY production techniques today might miss what a great movie it is. In Los Angeles of the year 2029, machines have risen from the nuclear apocalypse they triggered against mankind to wage what has turned into a losing war against the survivors. In a last desperate act, a cybernetic organism known as a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is sent to Los Angeles of the year 1984.

Also traveling back in time naked as the day he was born is Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn). After the Terminator visits an unlucky gunsmith (Dick Miller), it begins assassinating every “Sarah Connor” in greater Los Angeles. The next Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) realizes she’s in danger and calls police from a nightclub. The steady Lt. Traxler (Paul Winfield) urges her to stay in public until LAPD can get to her, but the Terminator displays no regard for witnesses as it attacks. Reese rescues Sarah and explains that the Terminator has targeted the young waitress to eliminate her unborn son, who’s destined to lead mankind to victory against the machines. Once captured by police, Traxler, his partner (Lance Henriksen) and a psychologist (Earl Boen) offer Sarah a rational explanation for her ordeal. Their theory lasts as long as it takes for the Terminator to track Sarah to the police station.

While on the payroll of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, James Cameron was promoted out of the fx department with battlefield speed. When his first gig as director — Piranha II: The Spawning — ended badly for all interested parties, Cameron had to create a project for himself. Mixing low cost locations with a sci-fi element that favored special effects, Cameron backed into the idea of a robotic hitman sent through time, arrived on the title Terminator and wrote most of a screenplay. A former production manager at New World named Gale Ann Hurd helped polish the script, which Cameron sold to her for one dollar in a pact that he’d direct it. Hurd spent two years struggling to raise money for that, finally cajoling Hemdale Film Corporation to finance Terminator and Orion Pictures to distribute it. Shot with a single camera, the picture caught critics and the industry by shock when it opened #1 at the U.S. box office.

The Terminator is the ultimate B-movie. Like the relentless killing machine that became the best known role of the Austrian Oak’s career, Cameron locks in on his target audience and in terms of artistry and intensity, keeps coming. Over-delivering became standard operating procedure for Cameron but in a departure from his big budget action movies, the violence here is as uncompromising as it is audacious, with police officers and even women mowed down or blown apart by gunfire. What lifts The Terminator out of the grindhouse and into the Library of Congress (where it was preserved in 2008) is its foreboding of how dependent we’ve truly become on machines and where we’re headed if we surrender our humanity completely. Unfolding over a 24-hour time frame, the cast is well picked for the nonstop physicality of the story, while the electronic score by Brad Fiedel strikes a powerful doomsday vibe.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 685,301 users: 81% for The Terminator

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

“See, I grew up as a kid watching science fiction and monster movies and it was always a guy in a suit. Or sometimes it was kind of a bad puppet, like It Conquered The World comes to mind right now, Roger Corman’s movie, this kind of vegetable monster, kind of going like this woodenly, and my fear was, they’ll laugh at us, you know, they’ll laugh at it, it’ll be a joke. I mean, even as great as the movie was – and Alien was a terrific movie – it’s still in the very end, up stood this big guy in a suit. I don’t want a suit, I want something that’s alive.” John Carpenter interviewed for Terror Takes Shape in 2002 on The Thing: Collector’s Edition [DVD]

The Thing (1982)
Directed by John Carpenter
Screenplay by Bill Lancaster, based on the short story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr.
Produced by David Foster, Lawrence Turman
109 minutes

Look up the word “doom” in the Encyclopedia Britannica and you won’t find mention of John Carpenter‘s The Thing, but a wave of barometric pressure hangs over this masterpiece of science fiction horror. Beyond the doom its characters are infected with, this remake of the 1951 classic The Thing From Another World was damned by waves of nausea, hostility and derision upon its release. It faltered at the box office, altered the career of its director and alerted studios there was a toll to pay for bankrolling movies that weren’t nice, like E.T. The Extra Terrestrial was nice. Developed by Universal Studios, The Thing was a dream car of sorts for Carpenter, who’d directed one mean, lean low budget machine after another and was offered the keys to adapt one of his favorite movies for a mass audience.

Elegant in its simplicity and overwhelming in its foreboding, The Thing takes place on an American research station isolated in Antarctica. A Norwegian chopper appears on the horizon and a sniper fires at a Siberian husky racing across the ice. When one of the Americans is wounded, the station manager Garry (Donald Moffat) returns fire, killing the Norwegians. To investigate, pilot MacReady (Kurt Russell) and physician Doc Copper (Richard Dysart) helicopter to the Norwegian camp. They encounter a last stand from hell and even more startling, something contorted in a burn pile outside. Biologist Blair (Wilford Brimley), dog handler Clark (Richard Masur), mechanic Childs (Keith David) and the nine other Americans don’t know what to make of the specimen at first, but quickly learn it isn’t dead yet.

Even more so than the 1950s monster movie he was a fan of, Carpenter was fascinated by themes creeping through the original John W. Campbell Jr. short story, published by Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1938: A hostile alien is awakened and reveals a tenacity to assume the shape and memory of anything it devours, generating rampant paranoia among the men over who is still human and who isn’t. A screenplay by Bill Lancaster ran with these ideas and to visualize them, a 20-year-old makeup effects prodigy named Rob Bottin was entrusted with delivery. Bottin hit on the concept that The Thing wasn’t one monster, but could transform into any lifeform in the universe it had imitated, with gut wrenching effect. Critics and audiences initially felt that the film had gone too far in that regard.

The irony is that Carpenter could have scaled back the violence he was heavily censured for at the time, but with unremittingly stark chords and a pulsating doomsday pace, The Thing is just a dark fucking movie, one that audiences weren’t prepared for at the time. The Thing refuses to favor good over evil, clarity over ambiguity, and that becomes what’s disturbing about it, as well what makes it great. The gothic lighting by cinematographer Dean Cundey, rich production design by John Lloyd and the ominous musical score by Ennio Morricone all feel perfectly in synch. That the special effects hold up as some of the most amazing ever captured on camera is a testament to Rob Bottin; without him, the movie would not be the nightmare it turned out to be. As for Carpenter, this represents the director at the peak of his creative energy.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 113,449 users: 80% for The Thing

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

“For me, it’s still, emotionally, falls short of total satisfaction because I just think there is an emotional logic and a sort of a narrative logic that doesn’t run as true as I feel that it should do, and in a sense I felt that what we made was an incredibly beautiful looking – as one would expect with Rid – but it’s almost like an art movie.” Ivor Powell interviewed in 2007 for Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner.

Blade Runner (1982)
Directed by Ridley Scott
Screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Produced by Michael Deeley
117 minutes

One of the most massive electric train sets ever constructed, Blade Runner doesn’t address logic or emotional depth as much as it lays down magnetic track and sails a bullet train over them. Arduously drafted, painstakingly constructed and overwhelming in scale as well as detail, it’s a marvel of science fiction engineering all right, yet climaxes with such insight into the nature of humanity that a poet dipping his toes in a pond might even give it up for the movie. With a tumultuous production history chronicled by a 3-hour documentary (Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner) and book (Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner by Paul M. Sammon), the film’s genesis was a creative storm by author Philip K. Dick, who capped a prodigious decade with the publishing of his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in 1968.

Ten years later, struggling screenwriter Hampton Fancher was urged by a friend to consider the book as something he might make some money off of. Fancher optioned the film rights and found particular empathy for Dick’s vision of overpopulation and ecological malaise. His untitled adaptation was strong enough to ultimately attract producer Michael Deeley, whose choice to direct was Ridley Scott, a U.K. commercial stylist then mixing the sound for his second feature film: Alien. Scott had sensed the seismic industry shift toward sci-fi following the public reception of Star Wars and when he was unable to decipher an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, agreed to board what was then being called Dangerous Days. Fancher didn’t care for that title and jacked one from William S. Burroughs that he preferred: Blade Runner.

In a dark narrative that screenwriter David Peoples was hired to punch into a shooting script, Los Angeles of the year 2019 is drenched in industrial pollution and overrun by those too sickly or poor to relocate to an off world colony. The Tyrell Corp has created the Replicant, a being identical to a human, superior in strength and at least equal in intelligence. Retired cop Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is summoned to hunt down four Replicants who have arrived in L.A. for reasons unknown. Deckard visits Dr. Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), who shows off his secretary Rachael (Sean Young), a Replicant implanted with memories so vivid she believes herself to be human. Rachael does not react well to news that she’s an artificial being and seeks out Deckard in an effort to cope with this. Meanwhile, the fugitive Replicants — combat model Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), laborer Leon (Brion James), assassin Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) and pleasure model Pris (Daryl Hannah) — seek reprieves on their lives and the meaning of their existence.

Dumping a wallop of psychic despair on audiences and losing critics in a labyrinth of wayward plot, Blade Runner was salvaged through midnight screenings and one of the first ever “director’s cuts” that in 1992 permitted Ridley Scott to smooth over miscues he made a decade earlier. Where the Replicants are or how Deckard finds them still seem as clumsy as they ever were, but the film dances with questions about what it means to be human and where we might be headed if we stop troubling ourselves with that question. Deliberate and dangerously close to paralyzing the viewer with sensory overload, Scott’s eye for detail and his design virtuoso are stamped in every shot, while the nighthawk cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth, electronic score by Vangelis and spellbinding visual effects work are a triumph in mood over matter.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 288,583 users: 89% for Blade Runner

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

Promoting I’m Gonna Git You Sucka in 1988, Steve James, who appeared as “Kung Fu Joe” in the blaxploitation spoof, commented: “I always hated that label ‘blaxploitation.’ I wondered, why couldn’t there just be films with black stars? You know, you’d go around the corner from a theater showing one of them, and there’d be Dirty Harry. And nobody was calling it ‘whitesploitation.’” Right on, Steve! So in February, I’ll take a look at ten films featuring black stars from a certain era.

The Spook Who Sat By The Door (1973)
Directed by Ivan Dixon
Screenplay by Sam Greenlee and Mel Clay, based on the novel by Sam Greenlee
Produced by Ivan Dixon, Sam Greenlee
102 minutes

Any trip through “blaxploitation” would be missing something without The Spook Who Sat By The Door. Written in 1966 and published in 1969, Sam Greenlee‘s political thriller notched 1.5 million copies sold. The author went into business with Ivan Dixon, an actor and television director who’d gunned his way into features with Trouble Man in 1972. Greenlee & Dixon’s plan to finance and distribute the film independently stalled when black investors proved scarce; Greenlee’s attorney put up roughly $800,000 to get cameras rolling and United Artists acquired distribution rights, contributing $200,000 in completion bonds. Yanked from release by exhibitors fearful that the movie would spark revolution in theater lobbies across America, The Spook Who Sat By The Door went underground for almost 30 years.

In 2000, actor/producers Tim and Daphne Reid offered to distribute the cult classic on DVD through their Obsidian Home Entertainment. Fitting to Greenlee’s fantasy of America’s ghetto masses mobilizing into a resistance movement, The Spook Who Sat By The Door is hard hat wearing, metal lunchbox swinging independent filmmaking at its finest, a professional piece of work that makes up for what it lacks in budget with ample amounts of backbone. The material goes easy on the sermonizing to settle into a potent blend of social drama, character study and espionage thriller. Lawrence Cook is exceptionally well cast in the lead, soft spoken and scholarly, highly motivated and lethal, a militant Jack Ryan. Herbie Hancock composed a musical score that’s as durable, spartan and means-business as the movie.

Running a tight reelection campaign, a U.S. senator opts to raise his profile among urban voters by appointing a token black agent to the Central Intelligence Agency. One promising finalist appears to be Dan Freeman (Lawrence Cook), ostracized by his classmates for studying too much and initially overlooked by management due to his habit of fading into the woodwork. But Freeman’s physical, intellectual and personal assets match what the CIA is looking for and he wins the spot. Freeman spends five dutiful years in a sub-basement toiling as a document “reproduction section chief”, growing estranged from his childhood love, a social worker (Janet League) who wants to get married and start a family. Instead, Freeman resigns his position as the first black spy to return home to Chicago, ostensibly to become a social worker.

Freeman makes contact with the leadership of a street gang he ran with as a teenager. Unimpressed with the gang’s puny resistance against the pigs, Freeman drills the hoodlums in guerilla warfare tactics, from building explosives, to organization, to how to rip off the enemy (“Remember, a black man with a mop, tray or broom in his hand can go damn near anywhere in this country, and a smiling black man is invisible.”) Freeman connects with an ex-hoodlum turned cop (J.A. Preston) he hopes to flip to their cause, as well as a D.C. prostitute Freeman dubs “Dahomey Queen” (Paula Kelly) who becomes a crucial source of information. The Black Freedom Fighters of North America find their plans for armed resistance rushed into the field when Chicago police shoot a dope peddler, striking the match for rebellion.

What do you say?

Logging in to Netflix Instant for a movie to watch is like being hungry and shown to a food replicator. It doesn’t solve my problem — it introduces one thousand new ones. Luckily, I can see which genres are rated higher in nutritional content, in this case, 4 or 4 ½ star ratings out of 5 stars. “Documentary” had a lot of those. So did “Anime & Animation”. In the month of November, I take another trip around the globe to sample recent animated feature films. Next stop: Tokyo, Japan.

Paprika (2006)
Directed by Satoshi Kon
Screenplay by Seishi Minakami & Satoshi Kon, based on the novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui
Produced by Jungo Maruta, Masao Takiyama
90 minutes

While Christopher Nolan took nine years to crack his script for Inception, a detective thriller unshackled by the limitations of live action explored the dream world with far less gravity and much more verve. Written by Yasutaka Tsutsui, Paprika was first published as a serial in the Japanese edition of women’s magazine Marie Claire in 1991. With interest from several filmmakers over the years, it was animator Satoshi Kon who impressed the author most. Kon was already a fan of the novel and counting Tsutsui as an influence, had considered adapting Paprika as a follow-up to his critically acclaimed 1998 debut feature Perfect Blue. Kon was finishing his commitment to Madhouse Ltd for the 13-episode TV series Paranoia Agent in 2004 when he learned that the Tokyo based animation studio was searching for its next project. He pitched them Paprika.

With a budget and schedule roughly that of Kon’s third film Tokyo Godfathers ($2.7 million USD), Paprika was completed in time for the 2006 Venice Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Golden Lion. In a genre that usually takes either a compass pencil to map out or multiple viewings to get straight, Paprika is drawn with soft focus and a straight arrow, injecting soulful characterization and a narrative economy more congruent to an American cops ‘n robbers thriller than Japanese anime. Its dynamic protagonist — a psychotherapist who leads a double life as a “dream detective” — not only has the ability to leap into paintings or billboards within the dreams of her patients, but duels with her own doppelgänger, each unsure who is directing the other. Its fantasy sequences blow the hinges off anything seen in a live action movie: enigmatic and whimsical, like a dream.

Detective Kogawa Toshimi (Akio Ôtsuka) scans the crowd of a circus for a suspect but soon finds himself being chased through scenes from adventure, espionage and romantic comedy movies. Guiding the cinema loving cop through this territory is enigmatic 18-year-old Paprika (Megumi Hayashibara), a “dream detective” that his college pal Dr. Shima (Katsunosuke Hori) introduced Kogawa to for help with a recurring nightmare in which the cop investigates his own murder. In the waking world, Paprika is known as Dr. Chiba Atsuko (also Megumi Hayashibara), 29-year-old therapist at the Foundation For Psychiatric Research. Chiba’s colleague — an overweight genius named Dr. Tokita Kohsaku (Tôru Furuya) — has invented a device known as the DC Mini, which allows users to share dreams and can treat mental illness by redirecting bioelectric current through the brain.

When three DC Mini devices are stolen and Dr. Shima nearly kills himself when a dream is planted into his subconscious, the dream program is shut down by the Chairman (Toru Emori), who remains wary of technology being used to manipulate the sanctity of the mind. Assisted by able-bodied researcher Osanai Morio (Kôichi Yamadera), Chiba and Tokita track down a lab assistant believed responsible for the theft and attempted murder. The thief has the ability to jump into the dreams of anyone with prolonged exposure to the DC Mini, like Dr. Chiba. Soon, psychiatric patients and the public are endangered by a collective dream in which a fanciful “parade of everything under the sun” pulls dreamers into a malaise in which they are unable to recover. Dr. Chiba/Paprika enters the dream world to find a cure.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 10,055 users: 87% for Paprika

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 81 for Paprika

What do you say?

Logging in to Netflix Instant for a movie to watch is like being hungry and shown to a food replicator. It doesn’t solve my problem — it introduces one thousand new ones. Luckily, I can see which genres are rated higher in nutritional content, in this case, 4 or 4 ½ star ratings out of 5 stars. “Documentary” had a lot of those. So did “Anime & Animation”. In the month of November, I take another trip around the globe to sample recent animated feature films.  First stop: Emeryville, California, USA.

WALL-E (2008)
Directed by Andrew Stanton
Screenplay by Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon, story by Andrew Stanton & Pete Docter
Produced by Jim Morris
98 minutes

The most visionary film by Pixar Animation Studios to date — reaching for Fantasia, surpassing Tron and marrying science fiction to romance magnificently — is WALL-E. The idea was hatched in 1994 during a session in which animators tossed out ideas for a follow-up to Toy Story. One concept was the last robot on Earth, a machine that was stuck doing the same solitary job for all eternity. Andrew Stanton, who would co-direct and co-write A Bug’s Life and Finding Nemo, thought this was the saddest character he’d ever heard of. Animator Pete Docter agreed and the pair would return to the idea in 2002. Using the screenplay for Alien as a reference, Stanton & Docter wrote a script driven by description as opposed to dialogue. At a minimum budget of $180 million, WALL-E became the most expensive project from Emeryville yet. Every cent was bankrolled by Pixar’s parent company Disney.

After development testing got underway in 2005, Stanton and the story crew watched Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton films during lunch, getting into Harold Lloyd’s work for ideas as well. The absence of singing animals in an animated film would be cause for celebration; the absence of dialogue for the first 40 minutes of this picture is a revelation. If the film has a star, it’s sound designer Ben Burtt, who pioneered the field in Star Wars and E.T. The Extra Terrestrial and for WALL-E, engineered every click, blip and pop as if was language. Loaded with as much substance as audio/visual splendor, the film offers sophisticated entertainment for anyone in the mood for diversion while illustrating that mankind cannot keep producing garbage (or Wal-Marts) faster than the ecology can sustain them. Sigourney Weaver is nearly imperceptible as the voice of the Axiom’s computer.

In the distant future, mankind has abandoned rising toxicity levels on planet Earth for destinations beyond the stars. Carrying out his program unaware of these changes is WALL-E (voiced by Ben Burtt), a robot manufactured to scoop up and compact trash. WALL-E brightens his lonely routine by saving the best pieces of refuse — cigarette lighters, utensils, a VHS tape of Hello, Dolly! — to store them in the shipping crate where he powers down at night. One day, an infared dot appears on the ground. WALL-E chases the dot oblivious to a spacecraft that roars down on him. The craft dispatches a sleek anti-gravity probe that begins scanning the ruins. WALL-E becomes instantly smitten. Risking annihilation by her state of the art defenses, WALL-E introduces himself to the probe, whose name is EVE (voiced by Elissa Knight). Taking cover from a windstorm, he invites her to his home.

EVE reveals her directive when WALL-E shows her a seedling he discovered and keeps in an old shoe. EVE confiscates the plant and powers down, but WALL-E tethers her in Christmas lights and takes her on his rounds so they can remain close. When the spacecraft returns for the dormant EVE, WALL-E hitches a ride as it blasts through the cosmos. The spacecraft docks with the Axiom, an interstellar ocean liner where mankind has resided for the last 700 years. Due to disuse atrophy in zero gravity, humans have devolved into blobs that live out their days in a perpetual beach resort, drinking their food in cups and tended to by robots. The seedling WALL-E and EVE return sets in motion a protocol by the ship’s lethargic Captain (voiced by Jeff Garlin) to return to Earth, but the computer who really runs the Axiom takes measures to stop this from happening.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 192,598 users: 89% for WALL-E

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 94 for WALL-E

What do you say?

In the month of July, I take a look at films released in my very favorite film stock and aspect ratio: black & white in anamorphic. Unless they’re being financed with credit cards, movies are rarely shot like this anymore because they’re impossible to sell to television. Yet these dreams sneak onto Turner Classic Movies every now and again …

Lonely Are the Brave (1962)
Directed by David Miller
Screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, based on the novel Brave Cowboy by Edward Abbey
Produced by Edward Lewis
107 minutes

In contrast to the cotton candy being churned out by Universal Pictures in the 1960s featuring Rock Hudson or Doris Day, few movies then or now corral craftsmanship, social awareness and entertainment as magnificently as Lonely Are the Brave. Edward Abbey’s novel Brave Cowboy was published in 1954 and optioned by Kirk Douglas four years later. The theme of a man overcoming resistance to achieve his freedom had inspired Douglas to develop Spartacus. For a fable about modern day enslavement, the actor-producer turned again to Dalton Trumbo for an adaptation and put up the completion funds to sell Universal on the project. Dumped into theaters in May 1962, Lonely Are the Brave was ignored at the box office, but landing on the year-end top ten lists of several critics, it enjoyed a successful run in art houses like the Surf Theater in Chicago and the River Oaks Theater in Houston.

Journeyman director David Miller isn’t even a blip on the radar screens of most film scholars or movie geeks, but Lonely Are the Brave represents the Hollywood studio system at its best. The stuntwork involving Douglas and his horse is amazing, while a cantina brawl ranks as one of the most creative ever staged. Gena Rowlands, Walter Matthau, George Kennedy and Carol O’Connor all show the depth and humor they’d become renowned for, while the cinematography by Philip Lathrop and musical score by Jerry Goldsmith have no equal. As with The Great Escape or Cool Hand Luke, Lonely Are the Brave begins and ends with a hero whose spirit refuses to submit even as he appears whipped by The Man. Whether interpreted as a border drama or a morality play about man seeking to retain his individuality in a fast changing world, the film remains as vital to our national debate now as it was then.

Slumbering amid the sagebrush of New Mexico, cowhand John W. Burns (Kirk Douglas) is awakened by the scream of jet aircraft overhead. Saddling up his defiant appaloosa Whiskey and steering the horse across a highway that’s been put in his way, Burns reaches the town of “Duke City”, where he drops in on Jerry Bondi (Gena Rowlands), the wife of a childhood buddy. Burns discovers that his pal has been sentenced to two years in prison for rendering aid to “wetbacks” crossing the border. Defiant of rules like the ones dictating when he can visit a friend in jail, Burns strolls into a cantina and picks a fight with a WWII veteran (Bill Raisch) who has one arm and a bad attitude. When authorities offer to drop the charges, Burns hits a deputy, earning him time to catch up with Paul Bondi (Michael Kane) behind bars.

While Paul ignores the taunts of a brutal deputy (George Kennedy), Burns tells the cop exactly where he can go and later loses a wisdom tooth for his backtalk. Once the lights go down, Burns reveals to his friend two hacksaws he’s smuggled in his boot. The men cut through a bar in their cell, but Paul elects to pay his debt to society by serving out his sentence. Burns bids farewell to his friend and then to his friend’s wife, who Burn still harbors feelings for. As Burns heads up the foothills and seeks to climb a mountain ridge that will take him into Mexico, wry Sheriff Morey Johnson (Walter Matthau) engages in a pursuit. The cowboy and his horse are able to evade the hapless deputies sent up the mountain and a helicopter on loan from an army base, but progress and conformity finally catch up with John W. Burns.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 226 users: 82% for Lonely Are the Brave

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

In the month of June, Joe Valdez “takes over” programming of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles with a series of double features on his favorite film themes.

Here’s Part 2 of a bill featuring high tech conspiracies in L.A.

Blue Thunder (1983)
Directed by John Badham
Written by Dan O’Bannon & Don Jakoby and Dean Riesner (uncredited)
Produced by Gordon Carroll
109 minutes

There haven’t been many movies about the LAPD’s Air Support Division. That might be due to logistics, or maybe the best picture you could possibly make in that milieu has already been done: Blue Thunder. Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon was so incensed by the ghetto bird buzzing his L.A. abode that he was inspired to write a thriller — with USC Film School buddy Don Jakoby — about a Travis Bickle type going AWOL in a police helicopter above the City of Angels. Columbia Pictures loved the ballistic third act, the crazed lone nut in the first and second acts not so much, prompting rewrites in which the LAPD became good guys and government spooks were invented as bad guys. O’Bannon & Jakoby at the time lambasted the finished film, a box office hit that inspired two TV series in the ‘80s; Airwolf on CBS and the short lived Blue Thunder on ABC, one even cheesier than the other.

Blue Thunder is wound like a Swiss watch and designed with almost the same level of craftsmanship, briskly introducing us to Los Angeles, the rigmarole of the Air Support Division (dubbed “Astro Division” in the film to avoid hate mail flooding the LAPD) and issues of privacy on the approach to the year 1984. The action is set up gracefully and executed tenaciously, while a post-Watergate malaise gives the film an edge. John Alonzo’s lighting and Arthur Rubenstein’s electronic score were cutting edge for their time and hold up well, while the casting is superb. It’s easy to forget how strong a leading man Roy Scheider was, while the magnificent Warren Oates — in his final movie — chews up scenery like a buzzsaw. Director John Badham shot the film back-to-back with WarGames and was in a zone, fusing high concept, high tech, compelling characters and fun without crossing over into cartoon.

Maverick police helicopter pilot Frank Murphy (Roy Scheider) breaks in a new partner, the baby faced Richard Lymangood (Daniel Stern) who’s transferred over for some supposed peace and quiet in the haze above Los Angeles. While the men spy on a yoga practitioner in Encino known to perform in the nude, a city commissioner is attacked outside her home in Brentwood and shot. Reprimanded for his flight patterns by the loquacious Captain Braddock (Warren Oates), Murphy contends that the attack on the city commissioner was no attempted rape but a stakeout. A Vietnam vet compressed with PTSD, Murphy makes up with his oddball girlfriend (Candy Clark) and returns to the crime scene, where a memo he retrieves from the commissioner’s lawn has the cryptic word THOR written on it.

Assigned a special detail, Murphy accompanies Braddock and two feds to the demonstration of a prototype helicopter designed for crowd control in the Los Angeles ’84 Summer Olympics. “Blue Thunder” is equipped with a 20mm gun turret, turbine boost, whisper mode and surveillance devices that see and hear through walls. The test pilot is Colonel Cochrane (Malcolm McDowell), a nefarious operator Murphy knew in ‘Nam. In an attempt to rub out his competition, Cochrane sabotages Murphy’s chopper. Staying alive long enough to take Blue Thunder for a test spin, Murphy and Lymangood discover the feds have big plans for THOR (Tactical Helicopter Offensive Response), instigating social unrest in L.A. to justify military expenditures. Framed by Cochrane and the feds running the project, Murphy commandeers their toy and takes to the friendly skies.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 147 users: 65% for Blue Thunder

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

Firefox (1982)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Screenplay by Alex Lasker & Wendell Wellman, based on the novel by Craig Thomas
Produced by Clint Eastwood
136 minutes

Arriving with fanfare in June 1982 and introducing Clint Eastwood to a generation of mallrats — who were either too young to get into R-rated movies or too busy pumping quarters into Q*bert to care — Firefox didn’t work then and today figures onto my list of the five biggest clunkers the screen icon ever made. Based on a novel that allegedly came to Eastwood by way of a helicopter pilot he contracted for aerial photography, it’s the exactly the type of high tech cloak and dagger business your barber might recommend. International thrillers like these can be compelling when written by Frederick Forsyth or Tom Clancy, but for starters, Craig Thomas is not in that literary weight class. His source material — as well as the adaptation and direction of the movie version — are cheaper and lazier than they have any excuse to be.

Whether or not it was conceived as Clint Eastwood’s response to the special effects extravaganzas of Lucas or Spielberg, Firefox manages one interesting conceit in a Russian Jewish underground and finds one fun moment, when Eastwood finally pilots the top secret fighter jet into the wild blue yonder. Nothing else elicits much more than a yawn. Visual effects producer John Dykstra held up his end adequately, but Eastwood’s explosiveness as an actor seems poorly suited to the spy genre or to acting in front of a blue screen. Blue Thunder — which followed Firefox into theaters by one year and would have been a classic with Clint in the lead role instead of Roy Schneider — infused excitement and an edge to a very similar storyline. Here, even composer Maurice Jarre turns in work that crashes on the test pad.

Somewhere in Alaska, U.S. Air Force major Mitchell Gant (Clint Eastwood) has his solitary jog interrupted when a young captain (David Huffman) descends on Gant and compels him to come out of retirement to pilot an experimental Mach 5 fighter jet not only invisible to radar, but equipped with a mind controlled weapons system. Known as Firefox, the jet is parked in a Soviet hangar in Bilyarsk. Fluent in Russian, Gant’s mission would be to infiltrate the base with the help of a dissident group and steal the aircraft. Traumatized by events in Vietnam — where Gant was shot down, captured and witnessed the death of a child in a napalm strike — and prone to panic attacks, he remains NATO’s best option for preventing the Cold War from tipping in favor of the Soviets.

In London, British intelligence expert Kenneth Aubrey (Freddie Jones) disguises Gant and issues him the identity of an American businessman trafficking heroin out of Russia. Proving a poor field operative, Gant bumbles into KGB checkpoints until being provoked into killing an agent in a train station restroom. His contact (Warren Clarke) manages to get Gant on the road to Bilyarsk, where the engineers who built Firefox (Nigel Hawthorne, Ronald Lacey, Dimitra Arliss) have suffered enough persecution from the KGB over their Jewish faith to sacrifice their lives to help Gant. Once in the air, Gant heads for a U.S. submarine on an ice pack in the Arctic Circle to refuel, but finds himself pursued by a prototype Firefox piloted by his Soviet counterpart.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 12 users: 42% for Firefox

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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Space Cowboys (2000)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Ken Kaufman & Howard Klausner
Produced by Clint Eastwood, Andrew Lazar
130 minutes

There’s junk orbiting Space Cowboys, an adventure comedy so good on so many different levels and so pedestrian on the same number of levels. Ken Kaufman & Howard Klausner wrote the script on spec with Paul Newman & Robert Redford as casting notions before producer Andrew Lazar helped set the project up at Warner Bros. where Clint Eastwood went for it. What’s novel here — at least in relation to disaster movies like Deep Impact or Armageddon — is how all the familiar stoic mission recruitment moments, goofy training sequences or perilous space activity is handled by guys past their retest dates, relying on stuff beyond brawn to answer challenges. The ages of these characters afford some stellar casting opportunities as well, with Eastwood and his Kelly’s Heroes pal Donald Sutherland reuniting and shining among the cast.

The special effects (by Industrial Light & Magic and by WonderWorks), not only cut glass but move at just the right velocity, allowing the grandeur of men working in earth’s upper atmosphere to dance across the eyeballs. There’s a pertinent message here about seniors being left in the scrap yard like obsolete aircraft and how that rust can be shaken off. Space Cowboys gets off to wonderful start by introducing the characters as young men and catching up with them 40 years later, but then it coasts. The NASA sequences look shoddy, Tommy Lee Jones looks lost amid an ensemble (Jeff Bridges must not have been available) and the characters are surrendered to a plot about a Russian satellite. There’s no suspense and no question where this material is headed, but it’s well intentioned and well crafted enough to work while it’s playing.

In 1958 at Edwards Air Force Base, test pilots Major William Hawkins (Eli Craig) and Frank Corvin (Toby Stephens) must eject from their X-2 after “Hawk” pushed the jet to 110,000 feet. Their dreams of reaching the moon are scuttled by their boss Bob Gerson when a new agency called NASA is formed to assume upper atmosphere testing. 40 years later, an aging Russian communications satellite begins to fall out of orbit. Now a NASA project director, Gerson (James Cromwell) and engineer Sara Holland (Marcia Gay Harden) attempt to fix the glitch on behalf of the Russians by contacting Corvin (Clint Eastwood) — now four years past retirement age — whose guidance system design not only ended up on a Soviet satellite but has become so outdated, none of NASA’s engineers understand it.

Unwilling to allow the satellite to re-enter earth’s atmosphere for reasons he prefers not to disclose, Gerson is pressed by Corvin to send him and his original team into space to capture and repair the satellite. This includes Hawk (Tommy Lee Jones) now a cropduster who hasn’t spoken to Corvin in 12 years, structural engineer Jerry O’Neill (Donald Sutherland) who’s blind as a bat but still the ladies man and Tank Sullivan (James Garner), a navigator who became a Baptist preacher. Compared to the MIT trained astronauts (Loren Dean, Courtney B. Vance) piloting the space shuttle, Team Daedalus is obsolete hardware, but Gerson’s plan to get rid of them backfires when the space cowboys become media darlings. Sent into space, the astronauts discover they’re dealing with a device far deadlier than a communications satellite.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 113 users: 79% for Space Cowboys

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 73 for Space Cowboys

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