Blog Notes 5/10/10: Please Give

I'm proud to announce my debut over at Venus Zine, the preeminent publication and website for which I hope to be contributing on an irregular basis. Click through to read my review of Nicole Holofcener's newest, Please Give.

The Tenuous Ultimacy of the Ultimate Edition

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Though my years-old DVD copy of Terminator 2: Judgment Day is labeled as the "Ultimate Edition", there have been countless successive home video releases of the film, including an "Extreme Edition" and one that arrives in a novelty box shaped like a Terminator's endoskull. A cursory examination of the "special" features reveals these discs are all more-or-less the same.

Three of James Cameron's films have been widely distributed in "special editions" much longer than their respective theatrical releases: Aliens, The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Allegedly Cameron's preferred version, the extended cut of Aliens was released in 1992, the same year as the seminal Director's Cut of Blade Runner. It's funny how even at the birth of the "special home video edition" phenomenon, the term 'director's cut' was being misappropriated.

In his exhaustive tome Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner, journalist/author Paul M. Sammon describes the tangled web of miscommunication that transpired between the collaborators working on the Director's Cut of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. At one point, two "Director's Cut"s were in assembly, one on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. Scott himself had written some notes out and left the project behind to work on 1492, leaving Warner Bros. and a series of editors and producers in charge of the project.

This fiasco left the door open for yet another cut, the allegedly Final one, which was released theatrically in 2007.

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One of the more egregious fallacies perpetrated on the movie-buying public is the increasingly ubiquitous notion that 'more' equals 'better', which has lead to every other film on the shelves at Best Buy sporting stickers that say things like "Extended!", "Unrated!" and "xx Minutes of Footage too hot/scary/gory for theaters!" They sound like porno buzzwords, which is more-or-less what they are (and it's only barely tangential to bring up that the pornography industry is exactly what we have to thank for every single home video market takeover, from VHS over Betamax up through Blu-ray over HD-DVD).

This leads to the carefully-edited¹theatrical cut of a film becoming devastated by the thoughtless insertion of unnecessary scenes that were originally left on the cutting room floor for a good reason. All too often, this becomes the only version of the film accessible to a collector. One great example of this is the "Unrated Director's Edition" of Miami Vice, which almost any Michael Mann fanatic will tell you travesties the smash-cut club-set opening of the theatrical cut with a lame boat race credits sequence and a spoon-feeding explanation of everything you're about to see in the former version's immersive opening set piece. This is the only version of the film available on Blu-ray.

Of course, even when the various versions of a film are available, the onus is left to the individual to slog through two cuts of a film so that he can decide for himself which is the "better"². You have to really love a movie to be able to put up with something like this; as for myself, there's more-often-than-not another movie that I haven't seen in any iteration that will take priority. For the purposes of my Cameron retrospective on this blog, however, I managed to sit through 289 minutes of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 291 minutes of Aliens, and 309 minutes of The Abyss. Were it not for the easy superiority of the Aliens extended cut, I would've found this a deeply resentful task.

Take, for example, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which exists, across three films, in lengths that can run you anywhere between 558 minutes and a superlative 682. I can tell you right now that, having experienced them in their shortest forms, I cannot imagine any future circumstance that would bring me to sit through 11 hours and 22 minutes of that bunk - especially when their creator, Peter Jackson, is on the record suggesting that the extended cuts are for fans only (my phrasing, not his³).

The Abyss' extended cut presents a good example of Jackson's "immerse them in the diegesis" school of editing. While the "killer wave" finale adds a good ten minutes to the runtime, most of the meat that gets added is comprised of small character beats and scene extensions. If you love these characters and you want to go back and watch all of them singing along to the entirety of Linda Ronstadt's "Willin'", here's your chance. But it only serves to make the piece, as a whole, bloated and over-long.

The extra scenes in the longer version of Terminator 2 are downright awful, from the soft-focus daydream sequence featuring a cameo from Michael Biehn to the "Dyson family at home" scene in which Mrs. Dyson talks her workaholic husband into turning off his computer on a Sunday to take his kids to the amusement park. The scene ends with mother, father, son and daughter embracing, shouting "Hooray!"

There are, admittedly, some nifty special effects worked into the extended cut, most notably the trick shot in which the camera peers deep inside the Terminator's metal skull while he looks on from the mirror completely naturally. But a nifty special effect is just that and doesn't make a good movie, no matter what some adolescents tell you. Special effects, increasing in 'awesome'-ness at an exponential rate (or, as the T-800 might say, a geometric rate), are troublesome. One of the stated reasons for cutting The Abyss' tidal wave sequence in the first place was that they lacked the proper amount of technology and money to finish it for the theatrical release. Rather: Cameron worked with what he had, solved problems and turned in a film much tighter than he'd written on paper.

Similarly, Cameron claims that he'd drafted Avatar as early as 1995 but took fifteen years with it because he was waiting for the technology to catch up with his vision. This, from the man who made the swarms of Aliens with just six men in black latex suits.

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George Lucas is the great criminal in terms of constructing movies around special effects rather than the other way around, and yet with every travesty of his original Star Wars trilogy, he pulls the "original vision" card. With the 1997 "Special Edition" theatrical re-releases, Lucas opened a watershed that would engulf his long-awaited prequel trilogy and result in Hayden Christensen getting digitally inserted into Return of the Jedi for the sake of some bastard continuity.

The failure of the prequel trilogy to garner much more than scorn from anyone but the most devoted (read: desperate) of Star Wars fans can be viewed in microcosm during the scene in The Phantom Menace in which Liam Neeson's Qui-Gon Jinn provides a scientific explanation of The Force. In an instant, the decades-old notion of an intangible, mysterious divinity that guided (or misguided) our heroes in a galaxy far, far away was made banal by a species of blood parasites.

This scenario is recalled in Jackson's description of the extended cuts of The Lord of the Rings. Only a person very different from me would be interested in seeking out an explanation for how Darth Vader is able to choke people from across the room - it's so much more interesting as an old-time religion, part voodoo and part martial art. Similarly, only a person very different than me is so interested in the Baggins clan that they're willing to sacrifice artistic integrity for the sake of a more-expansive mythos⁴. In most cases, the excised material serves to over-explain or corrupt one-or-more of the film's themes, as in The Phantom Menace⁵, and as in T2's "If we flip this switch in his head the machine can learn to be human" scenario and as in The Abyss' "supposedly benevolent alien intelligence becomes complicit in our cold war theatrics" finale. Perhaps you needed this stuff to think your scriptwriting to its endgame; again, you cut it from the finished product for a reason.

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Aliens provides a notable exception to this trend; for the theatrical release, all mention of Ripley's deceased daughter was excised, robbing her relationship with Newt of a crucial layer. The movie works without it, but it's better with. In the theatrical cut, the arc shared between the two girls becomes concentrated on notions of dreaming (the literal kind) - a mundanity made poignant by the image of a daughter and mother learning to sleep soundly again because they have each other. This is not to say that their surrogacy is vague or incomprehensible in the theatrical cut; rather, the mention of Ripley's daughter is a rare example of Cameron writing a realistic, layered character and not hitting us over the head with her politics or clumsy evolutions. The business of Ripley's daughter is good and deserves to be seen.

The sad fact of the matter is that for every film that is released in its writer's or director's intended form, there are ten that aren't and Aliens (in 1986) and Blade Runner (in 1982) were two of them. Those two films got recut and released in special editions in 1992, and it's telling of the Hollywood machine that it took Blade Runner an extra four years and they still got it wrong; it would take Ridley Scott another 15 to release his definitive version and he still couldn't call it that because the '92 version had become canonized as the "Director's Cut".

Frustratingly, in working for so long at so extraordinary a stature that he was afforded the right to keep editing a big budget Hollywood movie for 25 years, Scott was also allowed to go retroactively reshoot parts of his film, right down to a digital insertion of Joanna Cassidy's head over that of her obvious stunt double. On the DVD release of that "Final" cut, there is a behind-the-scenes featurette in which one of the producers of the reshoots describes the process of organizing the original release's storied errors into "Beloved Flaws" and flaws they could get away with changing. If Scott gets a pass to revisit Blade Runner because of its disastrous production, I say he shreds it when he goes in for horseshit like these reshoots.

This 2007 release is, allegedly, the intended version of Blade Runner, but what happens when Scott decides he likes another actor better than Joanna Cassidy for the role? At this moment in time, with photorealistic Na'vi and a terrifyingly computer-generated thirty-something Arnold Schwarzenegger making appearances in the multiplex last year, the onus lies squarely on the shoulder of the man with the rights to make these kinds of decisions and change or not-change his films.

Any powerful-enough director - Cameron, Lucas, Jackson, Scott, et al. - has today an all-too-easy path to meddle with previous films, and the money-back guarantee of a repackaged DVD makes this kind of thing a no-brainer for the studios and distributors. An extended edition of Avatar is already geared for a theatrical release later this year, and surely we can also count on a follow-up home video release in time for Christmas. So what of the film in the theater, man? What happens to the movie that you spent fifteen years putting together that drew America together in arguments both juvenile and philosophical not four months ago? What happens when George Lucas decides he wants to destroy every copy of the movie that generations grew up on because it doesn't have Hayden Christensen in it?

The community of a theatrical exhibition is being desecrated left and right these days, and in this case it is at the hands of the people in charge. Quit it!, already, with the bigger, badder, meaner DVD re-releases and try getting it right the first time. Put your damn film in the can and move on. The movie is an extant piece of art and once it leaves your hands, it's up to the evolving, mutating audience to judge, decry, revere or refute as they so choose. It's the audience that will breathe life into a film after it's done. If you, the director, never let go of the thing, how can we ever hold on to it? What will your film even be?

1.) We can only hope it's carefully edited. [back]

2.) Or the funnier, or more interesting, or more precise... [back]

3.) Peter Jackson, discussing the extended editions:

"For [The Fellowship of the Ring] we also had certain benchmarks that we wanted to reach in terms of the pacing. We wanted the Hobbits to leave Hobbiton within 25 minutes of the movie's beginning; we wanted them to get to Rivendell by a certain time because we wanted the decision to destroy the ring to be no more than halfway through the movie. There were certain structural things that felt like they were sort of marker posts that we wanted to work with. [...] Also what I like about putting more scenes back in the DVD is the fact that if you dig the movie, if you did like the film, and you want to sort of see more of it, if you want to learn more about who they are and what they are and learn more about their motivations, then there's these scenes that do exist that actually give you that information, that background information. So, it's nice to be able to give people an opportunity to see those if they want to."

In other words, the theatrical cut is paced like a movie should be paced and the home video cut is for die hards with a lot of time on their hands. [back]

4.) At this point, my less-than-popular opinion that the Lord of the Rings films aren't very good is more than evident. To each his own, but I believe my point stands even if you love them. Perhaps: especially if you love them. [back]

5.) I realize I'm here discussing the prequel trilogy - not actually a three-feature series of deleted scenes - as though it is little more than a series of half-baked ideas, afterthoughts and ciphers best left on the cutting room floor. Exactly. [back]

Piranha II: The Spawning (1981) & The Terminator (1984)

This is supposed to be about honesty, and specifically about confronting the action movies that I loved as a boy through the perspective of what I now humbly refer to as "adulthood". I have to engage in conversation with my younger self and try to figure out what was wrong with him and also what was working out all right. I'm not embarrassed that in the seventh grade I loved Titanic. I might be a little red-in-the-face for liking True Lies as much as I used to (but then, if Cameron's made any single film exclusively for the narrow demographic of male teenagers, it's that one).

I grew up with Cameron's movies, and the fact that, until recently, I had never seen one of them presents something of a conundrum. Cameron took a mulligan on his first feature and now we have to think of him as having two separate and distinct debut features. As a kid I actively sought out all of his work, but somehow (and I was perfectly aware of its existence) Piranha II: The Spawning got left off the list. So what's it like to revisit a beloved first film that you've seen countless times in juxtaposition to an alternate first film that you've never seen at all?

The Terminator is almost always checked as Cameron's first; most people give him the courtesy of reserving Piranha¹ for the punchline or leaving it off the list entirely. His first of three sequels to his name thus far, Piranha is inarguably Cameron's "least good" movie. The story goes that it was another in a line of special effects gigs for Cameron, who took over after the original director departed. It was a promotion and a paycheck and Cameron has since disowned the film.

I think that's too bad.

Giving him the benefit of the doubt that he didn't conceive of the thing and wasn't allowed in the editing room (another 'citation needed' urban legend tells of Cameron trying to break into the editing suite in Rome and getting ousted by security guards), is there any merit to his film as the juvenilia of a first-timer who would go on to make several of the best action movies ever made? I say there is, especially when compared to Terminator.

Cameron started his career with two movies that can easily be classified as 'horror' films. In respect to the traditional merits of that genre, both are failures; he hasn't been back to the well since. And to be completely honest: I've seen Terminator so many times that its cheese emerges now as more pungent than I'd have thought possible, while there's a novelty to Piranha that I find refreshing. These are surprisingly similar pieces by an audacious young director not yet capable of mixing his Ideas™ with his characters in any graceful fashion.

Now an icon, The Terminator was an out-of-left-field hit, the massive popularity of which far outweighed its overall quality. Though filled with great Ideas™ and cracker-jack suspense, the decades have made it far too easily conflated with its superior sequel. Piranha is little seen yet consistently the butt of jokes - it's actually underrated (albeit not severely so). The films share a hokiness that might be less intentional in Piranha but there's plenty of unintentional humor in Terminator if you're willing to go there in a movie you grew up on.


Take Michael Biehn's Kyle Reese. Cameron and Biehn would team up in three consecutive movies (four if your count his deleted scene from T2) and ultimately The Abyss' Lt. Coffey would merit an Oscar campaign from Twentieth Century Fox. But their formula for a malleable, humanized alpha male wasn't quite perfected yet in The Terminator, saddling Biehn with some really unfortunate turns of phrase. Linda Hamilton, never exactly a high-caliber actor, only helps to bog down the romance between Reese and Sarah Connor. It doesn't take long for the pair to turn into mouth breathers.

SARAH: Kyle... the women in your time. What are they like?
KYLE: Good fighters.
SARAH: That's not what I meant. Was there someone special?
KYLE: Someone...
SARAH: A girl? You know...
KYLE: No. Never.
SARAH: Never? I'm sorry. I'm so sorry ... so much pain.
KYLE: Pain can be controlled. You just disconnect it.
SARAH: So you feel nothing?
KYLE: John Connor gave me a picture of you once. I didn't know why at the time. It was very old. Torn. Faded. You were young like you are now. You seemed just ... a little sad. I used to always wonder what you were thinking at that moment. I memorized every line. Every curve. I came across time for you, Sarah. I love you. I always have.

Ouch.²

The Terminator, like Cameron's latter-day successes, works in spite of its bad performances and worse dialogue. A huge factor in making the film a hit was that nobody saw it coming; recycled into the fabric of the popular culture, decades of parody and copying have made it a little worse for the wear.

But there's a great piece of connective tissue between Piranha II and The Terminator: police officer Lance Henriksen. A Cameron repertory player up through the 1998 Martini Ranch music video "Reach"³, Henrisken delivered some of his best character work (in a career full of understated, underrated character work) in Aliens, The Terminator and, yes, Piranha. The fanboy in me has to feel a tingle in my spine during Piranha's sub-Bass opening credits wherein the actor, billed third, shows up in an emphasis-box: "Lance Henriksen as Steve".

In The Terminator, Henriksen plays garrulous Detective Hal Vukovich, teaming up with Paul Winfield's Lieutenant Ed Traxler and Earl Boen's Dr. Silberman to provide the film's only running comic relief⁴. The three men are here to provide comfort to Sarah and protect her from the two crazies (nobody believes they are actually soldiers from the future) out to get her, but of course Silberman leaves his videotape running to allow our heroine to see Kyle shouting about how she's as good as dead. Traxler and Vukovich both get a spare few character beats that stand out in the film: Traxler trying to light a cigarette only to discover he has one already going in his other hand and Vukovich telling stories and showing off scars he received in the line.

They're side characters in the film, but when Traxler gets shot during the Terminator's riveting, wrenching raid on the police station, Cameron pauses long enough to allow Vukovich a fleeting "Ed!" over Traxler's body. This gets me, partially because Henriksen is so adept at infusing melodramatic material with his grizzled, steadfast humanity. Henriksen is real, and he's equally good in Piranha, if not better. He's got the lead here: if the whole thing was made to cash in on Jaws, Henriksen is Chief Brody. Of course, the quantity of screen time here can't match the quality of his minutes in The Terminator, but to Henriksen it's all a wash.


I love how seriously he takes this preposterous scenario. Paternal towards both his son and the resort community he serves and protects, Chief Steve spends the whole film worrying. Like Chief Brody, he's the only one who grasps that anyone's lives are stake throughout most of the running time, even as bodies are piling up. Of course, why would we take this seriously? The mere suggestion of genetically-altered, man-eating piranha that can fly out of the water at you because they have wings is as ridiculous to a beachgoer as it is to a moviegoer.

But part of what I find fascinating is that these movies are, in essence, about the exact same thing - and it's the exact same thing that almost all of Cameron's movies are about: a military designed future-weapon flails out of our limited control and comes back to bite us in the ass⁵. In Aliens and Avatar, we try to gain control of a weapon that isn't ours and in The Abyss and Avatar the non-human intelligence teaches us a lesson about the weapons we desire to wield. The premise of Piranha II is so thematically in line with the rest of Cameron's ouevre, it's almost as if his entire career has been a response to the failure of this C-movie fiasco: "No, no, this is what I am interested in and I will do it better again and again just to show you I was right."

At this point in time, the familiarity of The Terminator works against the film. It's a classic, sure, but can't match Cameron's three follow-ups in terms of cast, suspense, action or theme. Really, the only of Cameron's films that it looks good against is Piranha II, which, since I tend to root for the underdog, only makes me like Piranha all the more. I may or may not ever sit through it again, but I'm glad I've finally seen it once.

1.) The full on-screen title is Piranha Part Two: The Spawning, which I greatly prefer. And in case you're wondering: no, I've never seen and cannot comment on the film's predecessor, though my impression is that they are about as disparate as two films about killer piranha could possibly be. [back]

2.) There probably ought to be several more ellipses in that transcription. [back]

3.) This eight-minute Cameron-helmed music video, stars Aliens cast members Henriksen, Bill Paxton, Jenette Goldstein and Paul Reiser. In addition, it features Academy Award Winner Kathryn Bigelow as a sexy cowgirl mercenary leading a posse of sexy cowgirl mercenaries, and resurfaced on the internet during the "non-feud" between Cameron and Bigelow that took up too much of this year's award season. It is, to borrow a term from my friend Daniel Gorman, 'essential' viewing. [back]

4.) Silberman is the only one of the three who lives to see Judgment Day; in the sequel, his character is far less exuberant, though he has made his career on the committal of Sarah Connor (as he foreshadows in the first film). Presumably, having walked out of the police station and crossed paths with the machine that would kill almost everyone left in the building, he's been traumatized into humorlessness. [back]

5.) In the case of Piranha's sublimely ridiculous underwater scuba sex cold open, they will bite us in the ass – literally!! [back]