In Which There Is Probably A Terminator In This Movie

Poorly Named Auteur

by BEN ARFMANN

Joseph McGinty Nichol directed this picture. He signed it “McG.” It makes me cringe to say it but: McG is getting interesting. It’s fashionable to hate the guy and maybe that fashion is on point, but there’s something in him that could be, might be, should be great. This film is not it. But the poorly named auteur has potential. High school track coaches search for it every season and upper level management goons comb the proles for it when promotion time rolls around, but few, very few souls in any field of human endeavor really have it. McG has it. Potential. Quote me.

How many directors can honestly marshal together all the pieces required to make a film like Terminator: Waste of Time (oops sorry: Salvation) see the light of day? The man had to: detonate a post-industrial Texaco; restrain Christian Bale’s self-importance; and convince the Governator to lend his likeness to a project that could only be called “a political liability.”

Doing these things is harder than you may think. McG has pulled together a huge, complex, and awe-inspiring-on-paper piece of movie. I really think the guy has something going for him; only maybe a half dozen other directors could have pulled off something this freaking big. It’s a damn shame the film is no good. But I suppose some people always knew that would be the case.

At the end of the film’s production, McG and the studio sent Arnold the Guv a showreel of Salvation’s juiciest parts. The man-him-self responded with doubt: “I do not know who the terminator is in this film. I do not know if there is a terminator.” Not the response McG et al were hoping for, certainly, but they should have listened.

When the truth arrives it doesn’t bring flowers; sometimes it speaks Austrian. Yes: this film lacks a terminator. “But wait. Ben. I’ve seen the trailers. There are tons of terminators. Bike terminators. Eel terminators. Huge Wild Wild West diesel powered terminators...” Right. Sure. But what Arnie and I mean is: there’s no unstoppable boo-machine in this film. The previous Terminators were sci-fi in their conceits – time travel let Cameron play fast and loose with set pieces - but their genre was always plain old Campfire Tale. Arnold in the first and Robert Patrick in the second were really just variations on The Guy With A Hook For A Hand – menacing, slow walking, deathless forces that would see our heroes terminated come hell or industrial machining accidents. Salvation has no perfect killing machine. It has no unstoppable manifestation of man’s techy hubris; just a bunch of disposable off-brand terminator knock-offs. No terminator means that it also, sadly, has no movie. (It is a movie, but it has no movie. “There’s no movie in your movie.” It makes sense. Trust me).

What does the film have instead? A long, well-rendered reference volume of terminator mythology. I suspect McG and the producers hired a 14-year-old fanboy as a script consultant – the film plays like an extended answer to every sideline question you or I might have had after seeing the first three films.

“How did John Connor gets his scar?” Oh yeah, he was cut by molten steel terminator claws. “Is there vegetation in future world?” Yep. Of the blood-red, ground clinging variety (exactly like in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds).

Do people still bother getting pregnant in the future, now that being alive basically sucks?” Um...yeah?

Bryce Dallas Howard both proves that people bang sans future-rubbers in 2018 and squanders my respect for her by flying into a detonating, war-ravaged Roboto HQ while cradling her way-preggers belly at the film’s disjointed climax. What kind of parent does that? More important: who signs up for a movie knowing her character will do that? The film is subtitled Salvation (as A. O. Scott, sage of the age, wisely put it: Salvation? really?) but it may as well have been Terminator: Appendix. There’s no rapture in this film, no religious eruption of redemption, just a lot of off-hand answers to lingering questions from the previous movies.

But damnit, they didn’t answer any of my questions. Like: do people still go to the theater in the future? Do people still laugh? I sat through the whole film and have no idea. There is absolutely zero wit in this film, and I don’t think I heard a single chuckle in the theater except for when CGI Arnold arrived rude and nude late third act.

If two good things come out of this film, they will be these: Christian Bale will only find work with feminist directors looking to study the fragility of male ego, and one of the hip New York mumblercore auteurs will get inspired by Salvation’s poster to make a post-apocalyptic My Dinner With Andre. It just tickles me to think of Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory sitting down to dine in an after-the-bombs downtown Manhattan eatery, catching up on how their respective theater careers have changed now that Übermensch Skynet has taken over Broadway, off-Broadway, and off-off-Broadway. I really think a film like that could be great.

The mumblecore style is so resolutely dedicated to slacker production aesthetics – shitty lighting, shitty framing, shitty set design – an ambitious concept (machines run the world; men live like rats) might actually become interesting and fresh in the hands of a Joe Swanberg or a Jay Duplass, instead of just rote and un-arousing, as it has so consistently been in every $200 million + Hollywood picture that’s come down the logjam since Thunderdome plopped.

No. No you should not see Terminator Salvation. It will bore you and you will feel a little bit bad afterwards for encouraging Christian Bale. McG is an interesting, promising director. He has “the potential.” But he clearly doesn’t need your encouragement to continue making films. Neither Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle nor We Are Marshall discouraged his professional ambitions.

Your dollars poured into the abyss of Terminator Salvation will have no effect on his future plans. Let’s all just let this loud, monochromatic fanboy festival pass through theaters, like a T-Rex in the night, and hope that someone – maybe McG’s niece, or his barber – starts choosing scripts for him. Joseph McGinty Nichol, if you’re reading this: a good script can make you great. Wait for your pitch, and then swing just like you’ve been swinging. You’ve got the old-school directing muscle, and when the right project comes at you, you’ll knock it clear to Mexico. But you can’t keep swinging at the trash. Trust me. I know what puts the movie into movies.

Ben Arfmann is a contributor to This Recording. This is his first appearance in these pages. He tumbls it all here.

"Left in Fragments" - Chris Tignor (mp3)

"Last Nights on Eagle Street" - Chris Tignor (mp3)

"Core Memory Unwound" - Chris Tignor (mp3)

In Which We Take A Little Time Off

His To Play Around In

by CHAD PERMAN

To understand my love of National Lampoon’s Vacation you first have to understand that my dad is Clark W. Griswald. Tone down the more extreme pratfalls and absurdly outlandish behaviors (especially in the film’s final act), strip away just a bit – and only the tiniest bit – of his enthusiasm for family adventures and traditions, and you have my father; he of the big plans and grand ideas; he of the boundless energy and optimism; he of the lists and schedules that hung like hornet’s nests over my childhood;he of the family outings, the family rituals, the family above all else; he of the big heart, and misguided grand gestures.

And, though he’s changed a good deal since my sister and I grew up and left the house nearly ten years ago – has relaxed a bit more and learned to let life happen at its own pace now and then - he is still that same man at times and, forever, in our family’s collective remembrance.

To understand my love of National Lampoon’s Vacation you also have to understand that, as a child, I would have laid down my life for Mr. Chevy Chase. Outside of my father, he was the funniest man I knew, a bumbling and hilarious presence no matter where he managed to show up.

To understand my love of Vacation you finally have to understand what it represented, what it was to a boy being raised in a sheltered, religious family and community (thank you, Seventh Day Adventism!), a world where a Rated R movie was a movie that would never be seen. Of course, we had our ways around this – we couldn’t be monitored 24/7 after all, so we managed 5-10 minute peaks at Beverly Hills Cop, Tin Men, or Flashdance, films my parents had recorded during those occasional random childhood Godsends known as “free previews” of pay cable stations.

Netflix it wasn’t, but it still allowed us to hear bad words, see some sex and violence, and feel like we’d gotten away with something. Into this mix, then, comes National Lampoon’s Vacation, a film I was sure I’d love before I’d even seen a single frame, but a film I’m ultimately kept from seeing, even on video, due to its rating.

My parents see how much this kills me, and make vague promises that we can rent it and all watch it together (a well-intentioned decision no doubt, but still an oddly premised one: that they can pause the video and put whatever possible sex and/or violence we view into some kind of context so that it doesn’t scar us as much, a pattern of logic that one day led to the enormously uncomfortable experience of my entire family trying to watch My Own Private Idaho together because it had the guy from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure in it.). So, I decided at age 10 that the very day I turned 18, I would go to a video store and rent Vacation. By the time I turned 18, of course, I had much different things on my mind.

But still - the promise and allure of Vacation! The dream of a life where I was finally grown up enough to watch a movie like Vacation whenever I damn well wanted, where I could view Christie Brinkley’s breasts simply because I felt like it (my friend and I were convinced they must have been on display at some point to garner the film it’s R rating; sadly, this turned out to be untrue), where I could spend my days doing nothing but watching forbidden movies and shoving gallons of ice cream into my face (which I also wasn’t allowed to have, due to a childhood allergy to dairy).

This vision of the future appealed to me on such a deep and basic level as a sheltered kid, played over and over in my mind so many times, that the association between Vacation and a yearned for adulthood will likely never leave me.

And then there’s Vacation itself, stripped of all the subjective meanings I bring to it, still more than standing up as a fine comedy 25 years after its release: one man’s grand quest to drive the family he loves across the country to visit a Wally World, and all the misunderstandings, crazy characters, and hilarity that they encounter along the way.

It’s hardly groundbreaking — as either a comedy or a road movie –but it works like gangbusters, largely due to the chemistry between Chase and Beverly D’Angelo (his wife in all four Vacation films, despite the rotating cast of children), as well as the strong writing and Chase’s (at the time) impeccable comedic timing. Despite memorable performances from Eugene Levy, Christie Brinkley, Randy Quaid, and John Candy, this is still every bit Chase’s show, and though he’d manage to run the character into the ground by the time he all but phoned in 1999’s Vegas Vacation, here the role was still shiny and new, his to play around in, and he dove in head first.

Griswald continually subjects himself to such hardship and humiliation for no other reason than that he loves his family and wants them to have a fun vacation, dammit. And in that sense I could relate to it endlessly, could project my own father’s noisome imperfections onto the screen and laugh as they were transformed into Chevy Chase’s exaggerated cluelessness and well-meaning mistakes. Chase’s performance became funnier because I knew my Dad, and my Dad, in turn, became a less frustrating, better-intentioned person seen through the prism of one Clark W. Griswald.

Chad Perman is the senior contributor to This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about Brewster McCloud.

The 1980s in Film

Karina Wolf on Cher

Molly on St. Elmo's Fire

Claire Howorth on Adventures In Babysitting

Jacob Sugarman on Wall Street

Brittany Julious on Do the Right Thing

Will Hubbard on Kramer vs. Kramer

Maybe a coke would get you out of this slump.

In Which You'll Never Catch Me

Dynamite, Pole Vaulting, Laughing Gas, Choppers

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Let us travel back in time to a milder, gentler, more lackadaisical time. A time when the internet hadn't seeped so deep into our pores that we electrically learnabrate in our sleep at night. When the only website I read on a regular basis was Ain't It Cool News and only Bjork fans knew who Michel Gondry was.

Ah yes, I was talking about 1999. It doesn't sound too long ago, does it? That pre-9/11 world way back when. But it was before that even, back even further to 1996 when Bottle Rocket came out and I first fell in love with Dignan. Or was it Owen Wilson?

Or was I in love with Wes Anderson and his aesthetics? It was hard to tell, we were all so young. I was in love with the movie and the characters and the dialogue and the soundtrack. Oh god, the soundtrack! Before Graduate-y indie and Scorsese seventies rock tunes permeated down into every last Garden State and Juno.

Anthony: Which part of Mexico are you from?
Inez: Paraguay.

All the stylistic markers were already there; the symmetry, the tracking and two shots, the fastidious attention to detail. The easy rapport between all three Wilson brothers had yet to be frayed by time and fame. Wes Anderson's weird colonialist fetish for ethnic girls could still be somewhat more easily explained away.

Just a beautiful film with a cinematic vocabulary of cleanliness saturated in color. Bottle Rocket rambled and breathed while remaining tight as a drum. As Anderson's films have moved increasingly away from depicting naturalism, I can't help but feel something has been lost. With bigger sets and budgets, he widened his geographic scope each time to be more spectacular.

A lot of what I loved so much about Bottle Rocket was how it dazzled with the mundane. How Wes wore his references (French New Wave! The Seventies!) on his too short sleeves while seemingly proving Godard's theory that to make a film all you needed was a girl and a gun, and barely even that.

I loved how he made Texas mini-mall parking lots look so beautiful. How he transformed a suburban neighborhood (granted an upscale one in Dallas) into a weird American paradise. How he made normal touchstones look painterly and landscapes perfect.

It recalled the work of American artists like Edward Hopper, Walker Evans, and Ansel Adams. And writers, especially poets like Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsburg and William Carlos Williams. Specifically, of W.C.W.'s poem The Red Wheelbarrow.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

I would love it if Wes made a Western. I know the Coen Brothers and P.T. Anderson threw down the gauntlet pretty hard this year but there's no reason he couldn't pick it up. But I don't think Wes will do it, at least not for a while yet. I do wish he would embrace the place he came from. There are way more than enough movies already about rich people from New York and their issues.

Hey look, I found a perfect project for Wes Anderson's Western. It's a Larry McMurtry book called Sin Killer:

A wild comedic ride with the Berrybender family in 1832. They've come over from England and are on a boat making its way up the Missouri River. There's Lord Berrybender, his wife, his mistress, 6 of his 14 legitimate children, servants, guides, tutors, artists and a couple of Indian chiefs traveling home from Washington. The family is rich and spoiled and totally clueless. They meet a variety of tragedies but the writer presents it all as a farce.

Diner Scenes were de rigeur in 90s Indie Films

Sounds ideal, huh? It has all the earmarks of an Anderson joint plus and Wes could maybe help get himself off the hook for worshipping rich white people so much if they're all killed off for transgressing borders. Kinda like Life Aquatic x Mark Twain x Aguirre The Wrath Of God = Swiss Family Tenenbaums.

Owen as Dignan, not drinking his milkshake. Awww bb.

Twenty one years earlier James Caan (Mr. Henry) and Tak Kubota (Rowboat) were both in the Sam Peckinpah film, The Killer Elite (1975).

Bottle Rocket scored the worst test screening points in the history of Columbia Pictures at the time.

Where's Bob Mapplethorpe? Why, he was in Drillbit Taylor.

Oh and how bout Inez? She's in a coming-of-age movie called El Brassier de Emma. Sounds coming of agey.

We'll get him. We'll get him. Man, dont worry about that, we'll get him. And when we do, we'll blow up his car, do something. I can guarantee you that. What makes me furious is thinking about the look on Bob's fat face, thinking he pulled one over on us. I tell you another thing. If our paths cross again, you're gonna see a side of Dignan that you havent seen before. A sick, sadistic side, cause I'm furious at Bob.

Why so melancholy Owen love? Premonitions of Drillbit Taylor?

When's that Criterion Collection edition coming out guys? I imagine the Marrakesh Express backlash will be over by then. Maybe there'll be a little to-do if Owen feels like coming out of his mole-hole. I feel about Owen Wilson the way I feel about kittens.

I love how Bob totally rolled right out of Reservoir Dogs.

Cain chasing after his brother Abel in the fields East of Eden

Little Banana, the best Bottle Rocket fansite, where all these screen caps came from. They have the original screenplay for the Bottle Rocket short, side by side comparison with the shooting script, and a transcript of Dignan's notebook.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She tumbls here.

"Black Feathers" — Ed Harcourt (mp3)

"Sour Milk, Motheaten Silk" — Ed Harcourt (mp3)

"Russian Roulette" — Ed Harcourt (mp3)

Ed Harcourt myspace

The 400 Blows? Is that like a sequel to The 300? It's bad?

"They'll never catch me........Because I'm fucking innocent!"