Last weekend I had an opportunity to go out and do some shooting at Golden Hour, which is what photographers call the rough hour at sunrise or sunset. I hadn’t had an opportunity like that yet, and I am thrilled with the results. I haven’t edited them much, but I did edit this one just to give a taste of what the evening was like.
Lookin’ good, Buffalo. You’re lookin’ good.
Big version available here.
Continuing music selections from the films of James Cameron, who just turned 70 last month, we have a brief suite from True Lies. This movie answers the thought experiment of “What if James Cameron directed a James Bond movie?” Arnold Schwarzenegger plays an American spy who maintains a boring family life by day (his wife and kid don’t even know he’s a spy) but does dangerous spy-shit by night (well, kind-of, he has a boring job where the “travels a lot”). But as he enters his most dangerous mission ever, his wife and kid suddenly become a part of the story. It’s a fun movie in its first and third acts, but act two is really hard to watch because there’s a weird subplot that has Arnold becoming convinced that his wife is having an affair or something so he sets up a bizarre sting operation to make her think she’s a spy and…it’s all very weird and honestly, not very comfortable to watch, to the point that when the movie’s main villain shows back up after having disappeared for 40 minutes, it’s almost a relief.
The score is by Brad Fiedel, who did the music for the Terminator movies. He’s not my favorite composer ever, but for a certain type of 90s action movie–say, the type directed by James Cameron–he’s fine. Here’s a short suite from True Lies.
This is a repost of what I wrote on the twentieth anniversary of 9-11-01. I find myself increasingly unable to think of anything new to say about that day. Maybe it has finally become a memory best expressed in older words than new.
I thought about writing a long remembrance of that horrible day, a walk-through of the weird mix of terror and business-as-usual that played out in the office where I was working at the time. I just…don’t want to do that.
I remember that for several days after I tried listening to music, and I just…couldn’t. It took, I think, until Friday when I was finally ready to listen to something. I chose one of the most emotional pieces of music I know, a work I played in my freshman year of college. It seemed, in terms of mood and title, appropriate: Elegy, by composer Mark Camphouse.
It was the saddest day I can remember as an American, and it’s even sadder now in retrospect as we went forth from that day and proceeded to learn all the wrong lessons and undertake all the wrong responses.
We went to New York City in 2015 for Thanksgiving, and we did go to “Ground Zero”. We weren’t there long, but we did want to see the place where this thing happened. It was a damp, cloudy, cold day…and for the location, somehow very beautiful.
There is always beauty to be found, eventually. I wish America would remember that more. Americans, myself included, are too quick to respond with anger and rage to the ugliness of the world.
I eventually wrote a short story in response to the emotions I was feeling at the time, called “The City of Dead Works”, and I used to post it annually here. I don’t do that anymore, but you can read it here. And please do read Sheila O’Malley’s post about one life that was lost that day.
Sometimes I don’t want to go to work but I grit my teeth and go anyway, and the Sky Gods see this and take pity on me by giving me something amazing to look at as I arrive…like this morning when the sunrise was shrouded in mist over the creek and through the trees, creating the most wonderful shafts of golden light.
I’m always a big fan of our skies here in Buffalo. We have the best skies I’ve seen, quite frankly, outside of any place that rhymes with “onolulu”.
I like it when I get in the car and hear just a few minutes of a piece with which I am unfamiliar, and then I either do a music search using Google’s listening and “ID a song” feature, or I take a quick photo of the name of the piece on the screen of my car’s stereo system, if the name is featured there. The problem is that I usually then forget about said piece of music until much later when I’m going through the Screenshots folder on my phone, or looking through my camera roll, and by that point I have no memory of the piece I listened to. So, over the next few weeks, I’m going to feature works that I “discovered” in this way!
We’re starting with a work by composer Jonathan Leshnoff. Leshnoff, based in Baltimore, is apparently a prolific composer whose work has been featured by many orchestras and ensembles in America, and yet, until I heard a few minutes of this particular piece, I’d not heard of him, to my knowledge. From his website:
Distinguished by The New York Times as “a leader of contemporary American lyricism,” GRAMMY-nominated composer Jonathan Leshnoff is renowned for his music’s striking harmonies, structural complexity, and powerful themes. The Baltimore-based composer has been ranked among the most performed living composers in recent seasons with performances by over 100 orchestras. He has received commissions from Carnegie Hall, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the symphony orchestras of Atlanta, Baltimore, Dallas, Kansas City, Nashville, and Pittsburgh, among others. Leshnoff’s compositions have also been premiered by classical music’s most celebrated soloists, including Gil Shaham, Johannes Moser, Manuel Barrueco, Noah Bendix-Balgley and Joyce Yang.
Of this particular piece, called Elegy, Leshnoff writes:
Elegy is scored for the unusual combination of horns, harp, timpani and strings. These instruments were selected for their darker color, a natural fit for this composition which is introspective and somber. Elegy is written in memory of the thousands of nameless people who suffered under oppression.
Writing a new composition for the Harmony from Discord series, I chose to musically depict these two contrasting moods with two contrasting ideas: a somber, dark theme that dominates the beginning of the work and a hopeful, brighter theme that is heard in the middle. Elegy starts with this lonely and contemplative theme first played by the violins and then slowly spreading throughout the string section, with the harp offering a haunting echo. After a brooding cadence, the hopeful theme is introduced in the horns. Full of moving lines and sweeping harmonies the music builds to a resounding climax, accompanied by the timpani grounding the ensemble in successive strikes. After a cascading cadence, the dark opening theme again returns, but this time, the hopeful theme intertwines itself with the darker theme, symbolic of the hope that has emerged through the dark, discordant eras of history. The piece notably ends on a major chord.
The piece seems initially reminiscent of Barber’s famous Adagio for Strings, though that comparison quickly falls by the wayside. Leshnoff’s work is less brooding and, I think, more meditative than the Barber piece, blending as Leshnoff indicates hopeful passages along with the darker ones and ending on a more peaceful note. Still, it is a very compelling work, and the odd instrumentation gives it a unique sound-world and emotional life.
Ninety-three. A hell of a life, a hell of a legacy. I hope he’s finding out now just what was in that cornfield, just beyond the left field line….
Today is the 58th anniversary of Star Trek‘s first appearance on teevee. On this date in 1966, an episode called “The Man Trap” of a new science-fiction show aired, and I guess that at the time this seemed like just another airing of some new show. New shows arrive every year, most of which are completely forgotten eventually…but somehow that particular new show made enough of an impact that it lives on as a huge franchise, over half a century later. Most of the people involved with making that very first episode are gone now…but their memory endures through the legacy of this great show. This is a post that I wrote on my old blog for the occasion of Star Trek‘s fiftieth anniversary, and it seems that I am now posting it on a yearly basis. Happy birthday, Star Trek!
And you people, you’re all astronauts on…some kind of star trek?
–Zefram Cochrane, Star Trek First Contact
Wow. Star Trek made its official US debut fifty years ago today. That’s…amazing. (The show aired for the first time anywhere on September 6, 1966, in Canada.)
Star Trek came and went and was already in syndication when I was born, but my sister loved it, so I quite literally do not remember a time when Star Trek wasn’t a thing. One of my earliest teevee memories is, in fact, the brief bit at the end of the episode “Friday’s Child”, when Dr. McCoy is saying “Oochie woochie coochie coo” to a newborn baby, to Spock’s great confusion.
It’s often taken as an article of faith in the geek universe that one is either a Star Wars fan or a Star Trek fan, and I can kind of see why. It’s a Yankees-Red Sox kind of thing, I suppose. Or Bears-Packers. But for me, it’s complicated. I have to be honest: push me to answer, hold a gun to my head, and I will almost certainly choose Star Wars. But the margin of victory is not large, and in truth, there’s no way I’m the writer I am now without both of them.
“Let me help.” A hundred years or so from now, I believe, a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme. He’ll recommend those three words even over “I love you.”
–James T. Kirk, “The City on the Edge of Forever”
Star Trek shaped my view, in a lot of ways, of what the future can and should be. It should be a time when humans are not afraid to explore the universe and, in fact, do so with enthusiasm. It should be a time when the diversity of humanity should be celebrated and not resisted. It should be a time when beautiful ships fly the stars, instead of rusting dingy hulks. It should be a time of wonderful cities, not dystopic nightmares. It should not be a time of universal peace without conflict, because that’s almost certainly impossible, but it should be a time when we approach conflict from a much more mature standpoint than we do now.
Of course, when I was a kid, Star Trek was none of that. It was just a show about nifty adventures in space, a way for me to scratch that particular itch in the years between releases of Star Wars movies. It didn’t ever occur to me back then that I was supposed to like one over the other; they were different things, and I liked ‘em both. If Star Wars hit me like a bolt from the blue, Star Trek was the thing that was there, day in and day out. Star Trek was what was on during the afternoon hours after school. I’d get home and watch it and thrill to the adventures of Captain Kirk and crew on the black-and-white teevee set I had in my room. This was before the Internet, obviously, and I didn’t have any access to an episode guide, so the only way to learn the episodes was to watch and watch and rewatch them as they came. I got pretty good at recognizing the episodes by sight, usually within seconds. (Often I had to wait until the first shot after the obligatory opening shot of the Enterprise.)
I don’t know if the station had some kind of plan for airing the episodes in any particular order, but I recall that you could go upwards of a year without seeing “Mirror, Mirror” or “The Trouble with Tribbles”, but other episodes – “The Return of the Archons”, “Errand of Mercy” – would show up more frequently. A certain “This one again?!” factor crept in at times, especially with some of the crappier episodes. (I can live the rest of my life to a rich old age and never watch “The Alternative Factor” again.) But the great episodes? Those live on forever. I still laugh at “The Trouble with Tribbles”, and I live for a moment when someone near me uses the phrase “storage compartments”, so I can respond as Kirk does: “STORAGE compartments? STORAGE compartments?!” And I still feel that sense of doom slowly unfolding as “The City on the Edge of Forever” spins its tale, toward the awful moment when, in order to fix history after it has been changed, James Kirk must stand and watch as a 20th century woman with whom he has fallen in love is killed.
MCCOY: You deliberately stopped me, Jim! I could have saved her. Do you know what you just did?
SPOCK: He knows, Doctor. He knows.
–”The City on the Edge of Forever”
As a kid, I attended two Star Trek conventions with my older sister – or at least, one Trek convention and one general sci-fi convention. At the latter, “The Trouble with Tribbles” was aired, followed by 2001: A Space Odyssey. Those were fun. George Takei was the guest of honor at the first one, in 1977 or 1978. I was in first grade at the time. I remember Takei wearing a gleaming white suit. (Peter Mayhew was guest at the next one.)
I eventually lost track of daily Star Trek reruns by the mid-1980s, but also by this point, the movies were a thing. I remember being terribly excited for The Motion Picture, and even though I didn’t quite understand all of the plot, I have never – not once – disliked that often-maligned film. I recall being mildly disappointed that the Enterprise never fires its phasers once in that film, and in fact it only dispatches a single photon torpedo, and that’s at an errant asteroid that’s about to collide with the Great Bird. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think The Motion Picture is the first real science fiction story I saw on the big screen that wasn’t about a galactic war or some other action-based adventure. I wasn’t thinking in those terms, but yes, the movie primed that particular pump.
I liked all of the movies that came, and I saw every one in the theater over the next decade. This was an odd time for Trek, when a movie every couple of years was all there was. Sure, every once in a while there would be a tidbit in Starlog (the late, great SF fandom magazine) about how somebody somewhere wanted to make a new Trek teevee series, but it never amounted to much until we learned that we were finally getting The Next Generation. This was for several reasons, not the least of which was that Paramount wanted to keep making money off Trek but the original cast was starting to show its age.
Through the 1980s, as Star Wars seemed to fade away, Trek was still there, churning out a movie every couple of years and then a new teevee show. That’s what Trek always was for me. It didn’t fuel my imagination in quite the same way that Star Wars has always moved me at a very basic level of storytelling taste, but Trek has always been around. Always, always there. In fact, it was always there to such an extent that in the late 1990s, I started letting Trek go…but I’m getting ahead. During this time I read a number of Trek novels, and there was a fanzine called Trek that would annually publish a paperback book filled with its best articles. These I read with zeal, and I’ve lately started regathering them all via eBay. Maybe this winter I’ll spend some time reliving some fine old fan writing.
I loved The Next Generation, and watching it religiously formed a tradition in college among my mates and I. TNG aired reruns every weeknight, and the new episodes ran every Sunday night after the 10:00 news. That station even went so far, as TNG’s popularity grew, of including a very brief astronomy segment in its 10:00 Sunday newscast – “Tonight you can see Mars in the eastern sky!”, that sort of thing – complete with an Enterprise fly-by animation. And then, in our senior year, the next show, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, arrived. That premiere was an event, and I still think that premiere was an amazing episode.
Never trust ale from a god-fearing people, or a Starfleet Commander that has one of your relatives in jail.
–Quark, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
It took a little while for TNG to really get going, but once the writers had the chemistry down, the show was more than ready to carry on the Trek tradition, with many a fine and thought-provoking story, about love and loss and what it means to be human even as we take to the stars.
If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it’s not for the timid.
–Q, Star Trek: The Next Generation
And still the movies came. The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock, which I saw with school friends. The Voyage Home, with its goofy and infectious joy. Even the much-maligned (and mostly deservedly so) The Final Frontier had its charms for me. That poor movie may have failed, but I really give it credit for trying to be about something.
The Undiscovered Country came along in 1991, when TNG had hit its stride. We saw it in the theater the night it opened, which happened to be the same night as our annual Christmas concert performance at a big church in Cedar Falls, IA. We did the concert, quickly changed clothes, and bolted down the street to catch the show. I loved that movie, and in fact, to this day Star Trek VI is my favorite Trek film. I remember a lump in my throat at the closing scene, which boiled down to just the classic crew onscreen (minus Sulu, who finally got his promotion to Captain and got to fly away on his own ship, the Excelsior), followed by the animated signatures of the original cast. Their time was done. (Although, in classic Trek and science fiction fashion, not quite.)
CHEKOV: Course heading, Captain?
KIRK: (smiles) Second star to the right…and straight on ‘til morning.
—Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
College ended and the real world began, and there was still Star Trek, even as Star Wars started making rumblings again. The TNG crew graduated to movies, and DS9 soared in quality. Another series began, Voyager…which is when I started to lose a bit of energy with respect to Trek. For one thing, I had a lot of other interests by this time, but for another, it was pretty clear as Voyager got going that the creative folks behind Trek were starting to lose steam. I stopped watching Voyager about the fourth season, and the next series? Well, to this day, I have never watched a single episode of Enterprise.
But now Trek is coming back. Three new movies, with varying degrees of success. A new series on the way, reimagined to seasons of thirteen episodes each. The Trek continues. (I haven’t seen Star Trek Beyond yet. It came and went from the theaters too quickly this summer, and it came out during our busiest time of the summer as well, so I simply was never able to squeeze it in. Beyond and Nemesis are, to date, the only Trek films I did not see in the theaters.) Will Trek eventually reach similar heights again? Are there more stories in the offing to match tales like “The Devil in the Dark,” “The Doomsday Machine,” “A Piece of the Action,” “The Best of Both Worlds,” “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” “Tapestry,” “The Visitor”? Who knows…but I look forward to finding out.
Star Trek is, was, and has been many things. It will continue to be many things, too. I don’t know that I’ll ever have the same old investment in it that I did in the late 70s and through the 80s. I don’t know that I’ll ever feel that same enthusiasm for Star Wars either, so the two tentpoles of my science fiction life have that much in common, don’t they? But I’ll always owe a debt to Star Trek. It shone a bright light on a future that doesn’t have to be awful, and it showed beautiful space ships. It put a new light on the idea of space adventure, and it showed a military organization that was devoted truly to peace. Star Trek did time travel better than just about anybody else. Star Trek gave us amazing characters, and it let those characters do amazing things.
They used to say if man could fly, he’d have wings, but he did fly. He discovered he had to. Do you wish that the first Apollo mission hadn’t reached the moon, or that we hadn’t gone on to Mars and then to the nearest star? That’s like saying you wish that you still operated with scalpels and sewed your patients up with catgut like your great-great-great-great grandfather used to. I’m in command. I could order this, but I’m not because Doctor McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this, but I must point out that the possibilities – the potential for knowledge and advancement – is equally great. Risk! Risk is our business. That’s what this starship is all about. That’s why we’re aboard her.
–James T. Kirk, “Return to Tomorrow”
Star Trek is fifty. Amazing. Long live Star Trek.
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her ongoing mission: to explore strange, new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before.
OK, I gotta clean some of this out!
:: Two reviews of the apparently shitty new movie about Ronald Reagan, first off. Now, I haven’t seen the movie and I’ve no intention of doing so, because I make no secret of my loathing for Reagan and for everything he stood for, and my firm conviction that Reagan’s assumption of the Presidency marks an almost perfect inflection point in our nation’s history when everything just started going awry. And my generation, Generation X, grew up firmly steeped in the ongoing mythology of Reagan and his “Morning in America” bullshit, which I see as a huge reason why our nation is still holding itself back.
Anyway, this from Slate:
Like Reagan the actor and Reagan the president, Reagan the new movie has a strained relationship with reality. In director Sean McNamara’s biopic, the Gipper, played by Dennis Quaid, can do no wrong. Charming, principled, and relentlessly optimistic, McNamara’s Reagan single-handedly resuscitates the U.S. economy, brings down the Soviet Union, and returns the nation to glory. Suffice it to say, such a hagiographic treatment requires countless omissions, distortions, and outright fabrications. Worse still, perhaps, Reagan is bloated and tedious—its lack of focus and vision exacerbated only by an insulting 135-minute runtime. This is an affront to both history and cinema, to both reality and fantasy.
And this from Substack writer Nathan Rabin:
This isn’t a movie. It’s right-wing propaganda that crams canned uplift down the audience’s throat for well over two hours. The score goes overboard on soaring strings that never stop reminding us that we are watching the inspirational story of a great Christian, a great Republican, and a great man.
Only one man possessed the testicular fortitude to take on Marxists eager to use Hollywood as a propaganda arm for the Soviet Union: Ronald Reagan, AKA the greatest human being and Christian ever to bless this planet with his sublime presence.
Watching Reagan reminded me of a classic, Robert Smigel-written sketch called “Ronald Reagan: Mastermind” about how the Gipper only pretended to be a doddering lightweight happy to while away his days doing photo ops and giving speeches to friendly audiences when he’s really a ferociously driven, hands-on obsessive intimately involved with everything his administration is doing, particularly clandestine endeavors.
A team of oxen couldn’t drag me to see this movie.
:: Losers Win: Guardians of the Galaxy Turns 10.
One topic that comes up often on social media is “List your favorite Marvel movies!”, and sometimes folks are surprised when I list the first two Guardians of the Galaxy movies in my top two spots. My reason is simple: of all the movies Marvel has made in the “Golden Age” that started with Iron Man and wrapped up with Avengers: Endgame, and for my money there’s not a single bad movie in that run and quite a few really, really good ones, the first two Guardians movies come closest by far to making me feel like I’m back in my room as a kid, on a rainy day, reading comics. (I have not seen the third Guardians film yet.)
It’s a testament to the imagination and tonal control of writer-director James Gunn that impediments that might’ve stopped another trilogy in its tracks become mere speed bumps. Gunn’s as much of a pop music obsessive as a comics obsessive—the films are filled with music video-like montages and action set pieces built around specific tunes. So it makes sense to think of the main characters as a band with an evolving lineup and the three movies as albums with no bad songs on them. There’s enough individual flavor to stand the test of time, even though the trends and fads that originally brought them into existence have faded.
You could add Gunn’s name to a list of distinctive directors who should’ve made a musical by now, given their creative tendencies, but he already has three times (five if you count “The Suicide Squad” and its spinoff, the Max series “Peacemaker”). The musicality of the movies extends beyond the music-driven sequences. The banter between the characters has a pleasing, teasing rhythm, with delayed punchlines going off at unexpected moments. In each movie, the momentum and goodwill generated by the performances and the filmmaking means that the entire enterprise seems to walk with a spring in its step. Or maybe I should’ve said “power-walk,” which is what Gunn loves to have the Guardians do right before a big action sequence, like band members putting their battle faces on as they move from the wings to the stage and try to forget their egos and become part of a hive-mind.
Also, those first two Guardians movies did something else: They made me feel the way Star Wars did back when George Lucas was still running the show. In the Disney Star Wars era, the only property that has actually come closest to making me feel that way was the teevee series The Book of Boba Fett, which seems to be generally disliked by most fans. Go figure.
:: Here’s a really negative movie review. I don’t know anything about the movie at all, really, I just like to read hilariously negative movie reviews sometimes.
:: Maestro Daniel Barenboim discusses Wagner.
First of all, Wagner had a great understanding of, or intuition for (or perhaps a combination of the two), acoustics. He was the first person to have that, I think, except perhaps Berlioz, and in a certain way Liszt, although Liszt was more limited to the piano. By acoustics I mean the presence of sound in a room, the concept of time and space. Wagner really developed that concept musically. Which means that a lot of his criticism of performances of his own time, conducted by Mendelssohn and other people, was directed at what he considered a very superficial kind of interpretation, namely, an interpretation that took no risks, that didn’t go to the abyss, that tried, in other words, to find a golden path without having the extremes. Of course, this is an impossibility and can inevitably lead to superficiality. This also had an influence on the speed at which the music was performed, because if the content was poor, the speed had to be greater. Therefore Wagner complains bitterly about Mendelssohn’s tempi.
:: Buffalo’s five-term Mayor, Byron Brown, has seemingly finally managed to find a new gig, after spending most of the last few years giving off massive “GET ME THE HELL OUTTA HERE!” vibes in his current one. (The question of “Gee, Byron, why the hell did you insist in running for a fifth term, then?” doesn’t seem to get asked much, for some reason…but come to that, the answer to that is for me far less interesting than interrogating the citizens of Buffalo as to why the hell they insisted on electing five times a bumbling guy whose record as Mayor is nearly 20 years of fiscal incompetence, no problems actually getting solved, and a whole damn lot of ribbon cuttings and “keys to the city” handed out to football players.) Anyway, Alan Bedenko notes something about the political news coverage in this region.
(As for Brown heading up Off Track Betting, whatever. That organization has precisely zero impact on my daily life, so if Brown wants to go be incompetent there, fine.)
:: Anchorman Wouldn’t Have Been Nearly As Great Without Christina Applegate.
This is absolutely true. Applegate’s work in Anchorman (which may be my favorite American comedy film ever, the thing still makes me laugh to this day) is just wonderful, as she captures perfectly her blend of exasperation with, admiration for, and attraction to Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy (and Ferrell reciprocates with his own perfect blend of confusion by, disapproval of, instant lust for, and eventual admiration of Applegate’s Veronica Corningstone).
Never a prude but absolutely not tolerating Ron’s chauvinistic behavior, Veronica bewitches him from the first moment they meet at that pool party. Feeling studly in his robe and swim trunks, he walks up to her, ready to pounce, only to be disarmed by her scrutinizing stare. She doesn’t know who he is—doesn’t recognize what a big deal (in his own mind) he is—and so Ron starts to sputter, his pickup lines powerless in the face of such poise. This sort of thing doesn’t happen to him. Throughout “Anchorman,” he will try to get the upper hand, but he never succeeds. Veronica is too assured. Dumb guys are funny, but they’re never as funny as when they’re cut down to size by a smart woman.
Yup, that. Applegate has been famously struggling with MS the last few years, which has sadly put her on the sidelines of what seemed to be her prime as an actress; her work in the Netflix series Dead To Me is some amazing, wonderful work indeed. She is really, really good.
:: Finally, Sheila O’Malley writes about Gena Rowlands, an actress for whom she has expressed special appreciation over the years.
There will always be a place in Hollywood for beautiful blondes. Rowlands wasn’t a Marilyn-Monroe type. She was one of those “chilly” blondes, the kind Hitchcock loved. Rowlands was not a haughty person, but she often played characters with a whiff of standoffishness. Hollywood isn’t known for its sensitive handling of beautiful talented blondes, but it’s easy to imagine that Gena Rowlands, who loved acting (“I never wanted to do anything else. This was it.”), would have had a respectable career, with or without her husband. Cassavetes didn’t lift her out of obscurity. Nevertheless, she wasn’t being seen the way she needed to be seen. The world didn’t yet know what it was missing.
:: I will end this with a picture: a nifty Darth Vader window decal I saw on a car last week.
Continuing a few weeks of featuring music from the films of James Cameron, who just turned 70 last month, we have a selection from a score I don’t like all that much for a movie I don’t all that much care for. It’s Aliens, his mega-hit from 1986 that was a thrill-packed sequel to the Ridley Scott original horror film. I know that my reaction to these movies is deeply contrary to the geek culture in which I grew up, but hey, we all diverge from the norm sometime. For me, the original Alien is effective once, and after that it’s basically like riding Space Mountain with the lights on, when you know the gross-out stuff is coming and you can anticipate the jump-scares. It also didn’t help that I never found myself caring about the characters.
Cameron did get me caring about the people in Aliens, so that’s props to him. This film, though, is for me something else; when you give me all flow and no ebb, I eventually check out. My feelings for this movie turn out to mirror Roger Ebert’s almost perfectly, so I’ll just quote his original review of the film:
It’s here that my nerves started to fail. “Aliens” is absolutely, painfully and unremittingly intense for at least its last hour. Weaver goes into battle to save her colleagues, herself and the little girl, and the aliens drop from the ceiling, pop up out of the floor and crawl out of the ventilation shafts. (In one of the movie’s less plausible moments, one alien even seems to know how to work the elevator buttons.) I have never seen a movie that maintains such a pitch of intensity for so long; it’s like being on some kind of hair-raising carnival ride that never stops.
I don’t know how else to describe this: The movie made me feel bad. It filled me with feelings of unease and disquiet and anxiety. I walked outside and I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I was drained. I’m not sure “Aliens” is what we mean by entertainment. Yet I have to be accurate about this movie: It is a superb example of filmmaking craft.
As for James Horner’s score, it’s not marked by memorable themes much at all; there’s some moody stuff that mostly mirrors the Khachaturian ballet music used in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and then there’s a lot of very intense action music that’s mostly rhythm and not a whole lot of build. The best cue is probably the one titled “Bishop’s Countdown”, so here it is. Sorry for my lack of enthusiasm, but I don’t think any artist has ever hit ’em all out of the park for me; after all, George Lucas did make More American Graffiti.
“Concepts of a Plan”
I didn’t watch the debate the other night, but I sure heard about it, and even I had to get in on the meme fun the next day:
Apparently when asked for specifics of his plan for American healthcare once the Affordable Care Act is repealed under his next Presidency, our 45th President said, “I have the concepts of a plan.”
Which, for anyone who has ever paid more than eight seconds of attention to this guy, obviously means, “I have given it zero thought and I have no intention of doing so in the future.” And all the meme-making and joking to mock this obvious bullshit line was fun, but I think it points out another aspect of the news media’s coverage of this campaign that I find incredibly frustrating, even above the fact that they are insisting on treating this campaign and its two candidates as business-as-usual, and ignoring the utter insanity of a party nominating a former President who tried to engineer to a coup to stay in power and who has promised to pretty much follow every authoritarian instinct in his bones. The error here is in treating 45 as if he’s just a mere candidate for the Presidency, instead of treating him as what he is: a former President who served a full term and has a very real record that might just be instructive, if we looked at it once in a while.
Take the healthcare question: “Do you have a plan?” was the question. But that shouldn’t have been the question! He was President already! The question shouldn’t be “What is the plan?” but rather, “You already had four years and no plan was ever proposed. Why should we believe that you have a plan now?” And it would be true. During 45’s first term, at no point did he offer up any proposal or legislative agenda even pointing at a healthcare plan. He never made a single policy suggestion about it. So why on Earth should anybody be giving him any benefit of the doubt here that he’s going to come up with a plan this time?
He has already shown us who he is, so why is our media insisting on treating him as if he’s something totally new?
The best statement about this came, I think, from President Biden, who noted in his speech to the Democratic National Convention that 45 kept promising “Infrastructure Week”, and yet, in Biden’s words, “He never built a damned thing.”
That should be the response every time he says what he wants to do in the second term: “Why didn’t you do that in the first?” When he says we’re not going to have deficits, ask why he exploded them in the first term. When he says we’re going to have great healthcare, ask him why he didn’t touch healthcare in the first term. The man was already President, and his record of terrible policy, horrible court-packing, an economy managed solely for the rich, and eventually a bungled pandemic response and a disastrous economy exists. Let’s stop pretending that those are just things that happened, because the damned guy who made them happen wants another shot.