SOMETIMES A REALLY UN-GREAT NOTION

This might happen. Is it too late to start blogging about knitting or Maldives presidential politics?

OH, ARNOLD, NEVER EVER CHANGE . . .

Via Gizmodo, a reminder that this exists . . . to call this a commentary track is just a touch prosaic. Those who've followed Arnold's career over the years know that whenever you let him talk for more than a couple seconds without a script, some seriously, seriously goofy shit is going to come out of his mouth. Divinely goofy shit.

Though, far be it from me to criticize the fine folks at Gizmodo, but they totally buried the fuckin' lede here: Arnold and Paul Verhoeven did a fucking commentary track for fucking Total Recall. Together. This is a massively important piece of information. Each, crazier than the other. Each's accent goofier. For an hour and forty-five minutes. Kurt Russell and John Carpenter (to say nothing of Method Man and Redman) can rest easy, but still. Arnold and Paul Verhoeven. Eursocrazy . . .

3D: THREAT OR MENACE?

Consider this: there have been a total of three movies that have even justified the existence of 3D. They are Avatar (which, a couple nice visuals aside, sucked elongated hippie Smurf dick), Tron: Legacy (which was barely more than something to smoke a joint to), and Transformers: Dark of the Moon (which I covered in all its shamefully entertaining glory over at Tor). None of these, if suddenly removed in one of those Stalin-era proto-PhotoShop “nah, fuck that guy, he never existed, who are you talking about?” maneuvers, would be missed in the slightest. And yet, 3D persists.

Yesterday I went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. I did this because I wanted to see the movie, as one usually does when going to see a movie. Note the repetition of the word “see.” So I'd heard that David Yates had shot this one in 3D because . . . well, I never found that part out. It was being shown in 3D but also 2D, so I was hoping the Pavilion, my local neighborhood movie theater, was offering the choice. But they weren't, so the ticket lady handed me my 3D glasses and I sighed and said, “well, let's hope for the best.” (It should be noted that they didn't charge me a marked-up price, they charged the plain old bargain matinee rate, so I won't be ranting about the expense. This time.)

You know how back in the day, when they'd project a movie onto a screen, they'd use . . . what was that shit called . . . oh, right, “light”? None of that faggotry for our friends the 3D Borg, they use some sort of ooze distilled from the blackened, avaricious hearts of executives. The result is, there is no fucking light in the fucking movie theater at all. So when I walked into the theater in which Harry was playing, I had no idea where to sit, because they'd started the coming attractions ten minutes early and so the dim projection was giving off no light at all. The result was, I almost sat on some poor woman before hastily repairing to the row behind her. So I missed the Dark Knight Rises trailer, if they even showed it (whatever, it's not like Chris Nolan would reveal anything from one of his pictures, he doesn't even give out a plot synopsis until the fucking thing comes out on DVD, practically). And then I spent the next couple hours holding the stupid glasses on my face, dropping them once, missing the occasional scene because THERE WAS NO FUCKING LIGHT, and failing to be moved by a single one of the 3D effects in the movie. (The movie itself was fucking awesome, let's be clear, I just wish I could have watched it in 2D with actual light).

What's the 3D experience? It's like when you were in college and the good drug dealers were all at Burning Man or a Phish concert or something and you had to cop a couple tabs from that one skeevy little child molester looking townie motherfucker and you took them and realized “shit, either this isn't acid or it's fucking weak as fuck” and then you decided for reasons of sheer perversity to watch a bad movie underwater with your sunglasses on, just as a fuck you to the universe for giving you this shitty acid that had all the skin griminess and none of the “holy shit the color red is my friend” fun stuff.

If the previous paragraph is something you can't really relate to and you think it's kind of dumb and pointless and not all that funny, then congratu-fuckin-lations my perceptive friend, you've found the hidden meaning: 3D is something no one can relate to because of the biological process by which the eye sees things and passes them along to the brain, it's extremely dumb and fucking pointless, and it's no fun. If we were on a spaceship and you gave me the choice to airlock James Cameron, Rupert Murdoch, or The Alien, I'd have a long moment of deep moral dilemma before using Murdoch as bait to lure The Alien over to the airlock door, because fuck man, Jim Cameron really fucked us up with this 3D thing this time around. It sure would be nice if it just fucking went away.

But no plague just goes away without doing something proactive. I propose that we think of 3D as a physical villain, or at least the diabolical plot of a villain. And you know what happens when you got a villain running around. You need a hero to show up and dispense ownage. So here's a list of possible ways I'd like to violently murder the very notion of 3D, and the avatars (BOOM! Take it and like it, Cameron!) of said ownage:

John Matrix, Commando

Method: Explosions, machine guns, impalement, wit.

Why this among all the plethora of classic Arnold performances? Because you don't want to waste one of Arnold's better movies on something as retarded as vanquishing 3D, and because frankly, in his entire filmography, Commando is the one picture that exists entirely to have Arnold strut around owning bad guys. There's no other purpose to that movie whatsoever. And it is a fucking classic. John Matrix would kill 3D dead and then Austrianly say something demeaning and the universe would right itself once more.

James Bond, Any Bond Movie That Actually Exists

Method: English/Scottishness, sex, everything in Arnold's arsenal.

James Bond's bread and butter is going after villains with dumb, diabolical ideas for world domination, which certainly describes 3D. James Bond could go in wearing a tux, order a really cool cocktail, beat 3D at cards, fuck 3D's wife, garrot 3D's henchmen with the wife's underwear, have a showdown with 3D on top of the Golden Gate bridge or Seattle space needle, and then sail off into the sunset with 3D's widow, her sister, Moneypenny, and Helen Mirren.

The Doctor, Doctor Who

Method: English/Scottishness, pure positivity.

3D is, let's face it, the kind of thing only a Dalek could think was a good idea: “YOU HUMANS HAVE BEEN ENJOYING MOVIES FOR TOO LONG! WE MUST EXTEEERMINAAAAAAAATE!”Also, the Doctor is so cool playing him turned David Tennant into a sex symbol (though if anyone who knows more about being attracted to dudes wants to argue that this is a chicken-and-egg thing I'd probably have to concede, but much like Doctor Who there's a lot I don't know about that).

Andy Garcia, The Untouchables

Method: “I got him.”

Cuz Andy Garcia's got this motherfucker. Believe.

Harry Potter, Harry Potter

Method: magic, lots of redheads and nerds on his side.

Bringing things full circle, Harry beat Voldemort (SPOILER ALERT!) and 3D is some shit Voldemort would come up with after establishing his National Socialist Wizard's Party and having Dumbledore whacked and so forth. “We will force the Mudbloods to watch movies in a pointless, stupid, often expensive format; soon their will to live will escape them, much like a Dementor's Kiss only even more cruel.” Voldemort's not the type to punctuate that with a villainous laugh, but maybe he'd arbitrarily kill one of his subordinates just because he could (that was one of my favorite moments in Deathly Hallows 2; after Harry destroyed one of the last Horcruxes—the repositories in which Voldemort keeps parts of his soul in order to ensure immortality—Voldemort turned to the first flunky he saw and just straight dropped his ass with a Killing Curse . . . now that's a fucking villain, by Christ).


I know there isn't anything we can do about it. 3D is here until it stops making money. My position is basically, until we have direct-to-brain, all-senses virtual reality, we do not need bullshit half-measures that serve only to pull moviegoers out of the experience. Granted, once direct-to-brain VR is introduced, that's a whole new can of worms, but we'll cross that bridge in about 25 years. Until then, if Roger Ebert is the Don Corleone of this shit, I'll be Luca Brasi: let's make 3D an offer they can't refuse. In the back of the fucking head.

ARNOLD RETURNS TO ENTERTAINMENT BIZ, SKYNET BECOMES SELF-AWARE....COINCIDENCE? HELL, NO.

Well, we're pretty much fucked. Skynet's self-aware. All those namby-pamby motherfuckers who say "oh, maybe AI isn't inherently hostile, maybe it could lead to all kinds of good things" are advised to go suck a lollipop and fap to pictures of unicorns. I'm acquiring arms and canned goods and small, insane muscular women and going to California to find Arnold and I am fucking digging in. Because the War Against The Machines is coming, y'all. Believe.

Revisit last summer's warning, on these very pages, here.

THE GOVERNATOR IS NOT WELL

What the flipping fuck. Did Arnold ever exhale off that joint he toked in Pumping Iron? Did the Botox eat his fucking brain? Is Stan Lee the Earthly manifestation of Xenu? And, most importantly, we need to petition President Obama to sign a bill into law permitting us to hunt down and exterminate the Black Eyed Peas before they release any more music. However, if that's the premise of the cartoon, all protests about the crappy, sub-80s-midnight-stonervision-level animation and Arnold's alarmingly addled mind are moot. I would watch Arnold violently murder the Black Eyed Peas no matter how bad the animation is.

ALEX IS: A SOPHISTICATED CINEASTE

Well, so much for writing a blog post about Commando. There's no way I can do a better job than this kid. Seriously, if Gina Gershon movies ever get distribution in Tanzania I'm going to have to turn my whole blog over to this little guy.

DON'T DISTURB MY FRIEND, HE'S DEAD TIRED

Over the course of this week, the Batman reviews I've been mentioning are going to be posted on Tor. I've very much enjoyed—and am pretty sure I'll continue to enjoy—writing shorter form pieces without being allowed to curse. I probably never would have written on the Batman movies to such an extent otherwise, but it was a cool experience, and I'm pretty sure I didn't fuck anything up too badly.

That's it for now. I'll be back in a day or two with my thoughts on Tony Jaa, who's been blowing my fucking mind of late. Also, at some point soon I'll share my thoughts on a poignant, thoughtful meditation on duty and family which I recently saw (and had, bizarrely, not yet seen), a picture of the highest artistry and sensitivity, which evoked some of the strongest emotions of any motion picture I've yet seen. Here's a brief preview of said stunning work of cinematic art:

COME WITH ME IF YOU WANT TO LIVE

The Terminator movies have loomed large in many ways since the first picture's release in 1984. They made Arnold such a big star that he's now the governor of California (and even then cats call him the Governator). They gave Jim Cameron a running start on his path to become one of the most commercially successful movie directors of all time. The second movie gave Hollywood such a long-lasting boner for CGI that one hopes a physician was consulted. And the last movie gave us the marvelously entertaining mp3 of Christian Bale verbally sandblasting his DP for fidgeting during a take.

Like any SF franchise worth its salt, it's spawned a totally retarded mythology, spinoffs, abundant chances for actors like Paul Winfield, Xander Berkeley, Joe Morton, Jane Alexander, and Michael Ironside to pay the rent and chip teeth on scenery, and of course led to lots and lots of shit getting blown up. Its best lines have become permanent parts of the pop culture lexicon. And last but certainly not least, the Terminator cycle provides fertile ground for me to sustain my doomed and fucktarded quest to champion Arnold Schwarzenegger's acting ability. Fortunately this will not be lasting legacy of the Terminator series.


The Terminator (1984) dir. James Cameron

Where it all started. Jim Cameron, having previously directed some piece of shit called Piranha 2 that everyone diplomatically agrees no longer exists, was unable to secure a terribly large budget, and so for the last time in his career had to find creative solutions to the problem of modest means. But holy mother of fuck did he ever. Let us count the ways:

1) Hiring Stan Winston
The late Stan Winston was one of the great geniuses of the noble art of special effects. At the time Jim Cameron hired him to scare the shit out of everyone with the Terminator, Winston was still affordable (his greatest prior achievement was uncredited work on the effects in John Carpenter's The Thing, which were stellar), but after those glowing red eyes and malevolently gleaming metal endoskeleton, he never would be again.

Winston would go on to the only principal creative to be around—actively (explication forthcoming when we get to Terminator Salvation)—for all four movies, as well as lending his talents to Aliens, Predator (the crossover was not a Stan shoutout), Jurassic Park, the first Iron Man, and Avatar (if he was still alive I'd make fun of him about Inspector Gadget, Lake Placid, The Relic, and End of Days, but it'd be mean now, and anyway working on shitty movies is where effects dudes get all their good stories, and in F/X, shitty movies are where Bryan Brown gets all the toys he uses to take down the bad guys).

Stan Winston died way too soon in June 2008 after a years-long battle with a really nasty kind of cancer, but he was still puttin in work while he had cancer, thus (and I mean this a lot more respectfully than it sounds) making Stan Winston the dark horse candidate for biggest badass in the Terminatorverse.


2) Arnold

Another good example of catching a soon-to-be-expensive talent before his rate got massive (and being the driving force behind that rate getting so massive). This was a perfect example of actor and role meeting serendipitously—Arnold, of course, did not come to the cinema through the world of conservatories, Stella Adler, and the stage. Arnold was in movies because he took a lotta fuckin steroids and had really big muscles (and refused to take no for an answer when people pooh-poohed his ambitions due to his goofy accent and, to be kind, stylized approach to written text). He was also blessed with a face that made him look really intimidating when he was pissed (which made the x-ray scene in Total Recall really funny: “Holy shit, Arnold has got some fuckin jaw, boy!”) But, there were the parenthetically mentioned goofy accent and—you will not get me to call it shitty under penalty of death—unconventional (there we go) acting. What to do? Civilians, were the problem left to them, may have spent years and sacrificed millions of lives arriving at a solution, but James Cameron pulled Occam's Razor and cut that fuckin Gordian knot in twain: “I'm casting Arnold as a robot.” Boosh.

3) Shoot the whole picture at night

Because a) it'll look cool, and b) cheap stuff looks less cheap in the dark. Did you just have an epiphany about the visual aesthetic of film noir and its semiotic representation of the protagonists' psychology and the entire holistic ethos of the genre being derived from fiscal practicality? You're welcome.


That leads us to exactly what makes The Terminator such a great movie. Even though it cost considerably more ($6.4 million) than the amount my dad always told me it was ($1 million; source, his ass), $6.4 million isn't a ton of fucking money in movie dollars, and the craft services on Avatar probably cost more than that. So, speaking of Avatar, instead of Jim Cameron being able to fuck around forever showing off his flashy special effects he was forced to strip everything to the bone and just tell a fucking story.

And what a story it is: in a post-apocalyptic future in which self-aware robots are trying to destroy the last of the dwindling human resistance, they send a humanoid cyborg (Arnold) back to 1984 to kill a woman named Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) before she can give birth to her son John, who grows up to be Victor Laszlo. John Connor and the resistance (off-screen) seize the time machine the robots used to send Arnold back to send sinewy solider Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) back to protect Sarah Connor at all costs. That's the whole movie. Keep her alive. (Well, and inadvertently get her pregnant at the end of act two).

What makes this so suspenseful is, in retrospect, obvious: when Arnold wants to kill you, your motherfucking ass is dead. The fact that Kyle Reese doesn't die until the end of the movie is, completely independent of all the other mindbogglingly badass things he does in the movie, one of the most impressive achievements ever captured on celluloid. Robots may be big and strong and indestructible and afflicted with incongruous Austrian accents even though their voice software enables them to sound like any person they want to, but human beings have balls. Note the gender neutrality there, because Sarah Connor has 'em too. She not only survives. SHE KILLS THE FUCKING TERMINATOR. WITH A BROKEN LEG. WHILE PREGNANT. Fuck the sequel, read that chain of accomplishments again. God, I love that woman. J. Cameron and I clearly have similar taste (Sarah Connor, Vazquez, Kathryn Bigelow . . .)

The Terminator, completely aside from being the lost cyberpunk classic of cinema (lost as in people forgot it was cyberpunk until nerds' due dilligence set the historical record straight), is executed with complete sincerity, is ferociously suspenseful, and has a fucking great cast. Arnold is legendary (“I'll be back,” “Fuckyou assHOOOOLE,” the eye-razor scene), Linda Hamilton progresses from airhead waitress to Mother Of The Resistance without missing a beat, Michael Biehn was so fucking awesome that if he hadn't also been Johnny Ringo his tombstone (ba dump bump) would have read: “Kyle Reese: 2002-1984,”and the supporting players all get a chance to be on point until they get killed by Arnold. Rick Rossovich gets in a couple nice moments in a nice pre-Slider turn before Arnold fricasees him with his bare hands, Paul Winfield and Lance Henriksen are great as a couple world-weary cops, making it particularly sad when Arnold lights them up like Blade Runner, but it's Bill Paxton who wins Man of the Match in the supporting cast, for establishing the template for the retarded Bill Paxton performance (also known as Bill Paxton appearing in a movie). With but two lines (“I think he's a couple cans short of a six pack!” about Arnold, and “Fuck you, asshole!” to Arnold, the latter an invaluable service as Arnold adds it to his memory bank for later classic use) Bill Paxton launched a storied career as cinema's pre-eminent shithead.

And, oh, when Arnold uses that line later . . . when he's loading his guns in his fleabag apartment and he's been shot up a bit and his flesh casing is probably not smelling too good, and the cigar-chomping landlord knocks on the door and goes, “Ey, buddy, ya got a dead cat in there or what?” That Arnold POV shot where he scrolls through possible responses: “Yes/No, Go Away, Fuck You, Fuck You Asshole,” before deciding on the last, and the way he says it, is one of the funniest things that ever has been and ever will be.


Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) dir. James Cameron

James Cameron's first Most Expensive Movie Ever Made! (Ed. Note: each subsequent entry in the Terminator series would continue to be the most expensive movie yet released, and James Cameron's last two pictures have similarly been the most expensive movies ever at the time of their release)

If it hadn't been spoiled way in advance, and it wasn't totally obvious from the scene in the biker bar where a naked Arnold beats the shit out of everyone but doesn't kill anyone, the revelation that Arnold was the good guy would have been one of the greatest twists ever.

At the same time, it kind of lowers the stakes. As does the fact that thanks to all the intel Kyle Reese apparently gave Sarah Connor off-screen in the first movie, Sarah and John (such a mensch in this picture he's already going through puberty and riding motorcycles at age 10) know what's going on, and the confusion was part of what made the first movie so scary. But make no mistake, Terminator 2 rules. With extreme prejudice.

The deal here: Sarah Connor is in a mental institution. John is being raised by asshat foster parents Xander Berkeley and Jenette Goldstein. Arnold beams in and swaggers naked into a biker bar to show off his post-steroidal physique and get some clothes and a ride, stylishly fucks everybody up, and in one of cinema's most regrettably obligatory needle-drops, rides off with his cool new threads on his cool new bike to George Thorogood's “Bad to the Bone.” (Another way Arnold being the good guy is telegraphed).

Robert Patrick beams in and, despite not appearing to be armed, apparently knifes a cop in the guts (another way Arnold being the good guy is telegraphed) and steals his threads and car, complete with a cop computer on which he looks up John Connor's record.

Young John (president of the Future Crackheads of America, Edward Furlong esq.) and his buddy, the immortal Danny Cooksey of Dukes of Hazzard and Diff'rent Strokes fame, go to play some video games, where Arnold and Robert Patrick converge. But it's Arnold who tells Eddie Furlong:

“Git dawn.”

Fortunately, Eddie Furlong has heard all about Terminators and their Austrian ways from mom, so he's able to decipher this command, just in time to see Arnold empty a fucking shotgun into Robert Patrick . . . but instead of bloody viscera spraying everywhere, there are these ripply metal Silver Surfer looking things. Which heal almost immediately. We're gonna need a bigger boat.

While Arnold and Robert Patrick destroy the mall in their robot male-bonding ritual, Eddie Furlong gets his bike and rides off. Arnold's bike goes faster, so Arnold catches up to him, transfers him to his bike, and they try to outrun Robert Patrick, who has caught up to a giant truck on foot and commandeered it.

What ensues is one of the finest chase scenes ever, with brilliant camerawork and editing, the iconic shot of the truck plowing through the barrier and nosediving into the L.A. River that ushers in the climactic act of the chase, and the only way Arnold and his young ward are able to elude Robert Patrick is by blowing his truck the fuck up (a feat that singlehandedly won T2 the Oscar for Best Sound Effects; the sound of the spark that blows up the gas tank is the greatest thing to happen to sound since the Wilhelm Scream). But Arnold's no dummy, he knows Robert Patrick's probably not dead, so he hightails it the hell out of there so they can have some peace and quiet for the exposition scene.

Arnold explains that Robert Patrick is a T-1000, a prototype terminator made out of a “mimetic poly-alloy,” (you people have no fucking idea how many times I had to watch this fucking movie to make sense of that phrase through Arnold's accent . . . my liver hurts just thinking about the frustration). What “mimetic poly-alloy” means is that Robert Patrick can take on the physical appearance of any object of comparable size by touching it (mimetic) and he's able to seamlessly do so because he's made out of liquid metal (poly-alloy). Arnold explains that he was sent back by the future John Connor to protect the kid John Connor, and that he was to obey every order the little brat gives him (clearly future John Connor forgot what an impulsive, scatterbrained twathead he was as a kid, like so many do . . .) This is put to the test immediately when a bunch of dudes try and save him from Arnold—he'd been shrieking—and Arnold immediately goes to kill them, before Eddie Furlong squeaks at him to stop. The dudes run away.

Eddie: Jesus, you were gonna kill that guy!
Arnold: Of coo-ahss. I'm a tuhmeenatuh.

This, of course, will not do in polite society. Eddie decides to order not to kill anyone. Then he decides to make sure the order took.

Eddie: Swear?
Arnold: Whut?
Eddie: Okay, put up your right hand and say “I swear I won't kill anyone, okay?”
Arnold: (puts up right hand): I swea-uh I will naaat keel enna-wun.
Eddie: Okay, let's go.

Since the T-1000's next probable move is to find Sarah Connor and emulate her to lure young Eddie in for the kill, Eddie Furlong starts squeaking at Arnold that they have to go save her. Arnold, being rational, protests that this is retarded, but wouldn't ya know those orders get in the way and Arnold is forced to accompany Eddie on his doomed rescue mission.

Meanwhile, while the above shit was going on, we've been introduced to the new, improved Sarah Connor—muscular, distrustful of institutional psychiatry, and fucking crazy. Earl Boen, the shrink from the first movie, gets in a bit of exposition leading a group of med students around the facility talking about Sarah's “intricately constructed delusion” (ain't nothin crazy like the truth, baby), and we see that her life in the institution basically consists of them shooting her up with John Belushi-overdose shots of Thorazine and sexually molesting her. That last—a creepy orderly licks her face while she's asleep—led to one of the funniest overheard conversations ever, in the theater the second or third time I saw T2:

Little girl (about 6) to her mother: Ewww, he licked her face. (With cold disdain) His name is Licky-Face.
Mother: Don't worry, honey, the Terminator will get him.
Little girl: Yay!

That lady's precognitive abilities were slightly off: when Linda Hamilton picks the lock on her restraints, she's the one who nails the dude, with a purloined nightstick, in one of those classic George Miller splice-in-a-frame-of-white moves to make the hit seem even harder (accompanied, as well, by those dope Oscar-winning sound FX). And she begins to make good her escape.

But Robert Patrick, as Arnold predicted, is also on the scene, transforming into the floor and then into a cop who walks on him. Linda Hamilton's escape draws the attention of the orderlies, but she's almost gotten away from them . . . when Arnold comes out of the elevator. She shits a brick—this is no failure of courage, anyone with a working nervous system would shit themselves if Arnold swaggered up with a shotgun, especially after going through what she did in the first movie—and runs right back into the arms of the orderlies.

Cue Robert Patrick. In a landmark FX shot, the T-1000 melts through the bars of a locked door, only to have his gun clank against the bars; he turns his wrist slightly and gets it through. Earl Boen, watching, just checks the fuck out.

Eddie is able to convince Linda Hamilton that Arnold is okay, since at least Arnold is shooting at that crazy metal thing. Another long chase scene, in which our heroes get away.

This time they get out to the desert, following the Hunter S. Thompson model for stressful situations—not “When the going gets tough, the tough get weird,” the one about going out to the desert and arming yourselves to the teeth. With no T-1000 about, Arnold relays the exact timeline of how Skynet came to take over, and mother and son Connor get a chance to bond emotionally, as do Connor fils and the Terminator (this last bonding led, through a series of events entirely beyond my control, to my cat Mickey briefly answering to the name “dickwad.”)

Eventually, Sarah gets it in her head that if she kills the guy who invents the thing that turns Skynet smart, she can undo the whole future (which would negate the existence of her son, but whatever, she's pissed, she hasn't thought it through to level two yet).

Young John is not pleased by this development, and he insists to Arnold that they go save the scientist. And a damn good thing, too, because the scientist is Joe Morton, and Joe Morton deserves better than to be assassinated by some crazy white lady in military fatigues in the middle of the night while he's typing on his computer. She gives it a good try, and scares the crap out of him, his wife, and kids, but Arnold intervenes, and everyone has a nice little chat.

Once Arnold explains to Joe Morton what will inevitably happen if he continues researching the chip and CPU from the first Terminator that his company hid the existence of after the first movie, Joe Morton realizes, yeah, let's go to the office and destroy any evidence that the shit ever existed. And we're off!

Of course, the cops know someone who looks like Arnold killed a bunch of cops in 1984, and a guy who looks like Arnold sprung Sarah Connor from the bug house, and when they break into the office, the security guard drops a dime.

Eddie: We've got company.
Joe Morton: Police?
Linda Hamilton: How many?
Eddie: Uh, all of 'em, I think.

Everything goes apeshit. To top it all off, the T-1000 catches up with them again. So the whole fucking building blows up (Joe Morton martyrs himself for the cause) and the last chase scene of the movie takes our heroes to a conveniently located steel mill, where their conveniently stolen tanker truck full of liquid nitrogen conveniently tips over and cracks open, and Robert Patrick conveniently T-1000s his stupid ass right through the middle of it and freezes solid. Arnold pulls some heat, and, as per a conversation he had with young master Furlong about “the way people talk,” composes an epigram for the occasion.

“Hasta la vista . . . bey be.”

BANG. T-1000 shatters into a zillion tiny pieces. Ya know, Arnold's lucky he's Arnold, because there may not be a single other human fucking being on this entire fucking planet who can get away with saying the stupid shit Arnold says in movies. “I'll be back” worked in the first movie because it was simple, ironically understated, deadpan, all kinds of wonderful minimalist things in keeping with the first movie's lower budget, smaller scale, all that jazz. Bizarrely enough, “Hasta la vista, baby” works in the sequel because it's bigger, gaudier, stupider, and because Arnold's trademark was saying stupid shit (still is, too, if you watch one of his gubernatorial addresses).

Anyway, the final showdown in the steel mill is great, and manages to survive the multiple false climaxes, the first being when the liquid nitrogen evaporates and the place warms up enough for the T-1000 to liquify and re-assume ass-kicking mode. The second, after some truly spectacular special effects, the T-1000 “kills” Arnold. The third is when Arnold's eye is flickering out, we cut to a POV shot and the phrase “ALTERNATE POWER” starts flashing—which caused the audience to cheer like fuck in the theater—and Arnold limping after the T-1000 to settle his metal hash. The fourth is when Linda Hamilton, with one arm, pumps about eight shots from a semi-auto shotgun through the T-1000, but right before the last shot that would drop him into the vat of molten steel below, runs out of bullets.

Fortunately, this sets up the actual climax, when Arnold shoots the T-1000 with a grenade, which explodes and tips ol' T-1000 down into melty oblivion. (Cue my dad, after taking a rather large hit off a joint: “You know . . . metallurgically . . . he'd just integrate into the surrounding . . . [exhale] yeah, that mill would be pumpin' out some strange steel.”) But that's not all. Arnold explains to a crying Eddie Furlong that in order to set things right, Arnold has to go down into the molten steel as well. So he does, but not before one last godawfully cheesy bit where Arnold gives them a thumbs up as he melts.

Cue my dad again, so pissed off that he's forgotten he's holding the joint:

Dad: “If the two of them are still standing there . . . by . . . by the internal logic of this movie . . . it didn't work! They're clearly setting it up for a sequel!”
Me: “You're telling me you're not going to go see another Terminator movie?”
Dad: “Well . . . yeah, I'm gonna go see it. . . As long as Arnold is still in it, though. Though that reminds me, Arnold should make another Conan movie!”
[three hour monologue about the Conan movies and comics redacted]

Terminator 2 is often cited by people as one of the rare sequels that betters its predecessor. I'm a little reluctant to make that claim, partly because what I liked about the first one—the leanness, the simplicity, the literal inability to figure out how the fuck the good guys were going to win until the third act—was exactly the opposite of the sequel. Terminator 2 is a Big Movie with a lot of talking about complicated shit in between action scenes, where Arnold is the good guy. As cool as the T-1000 is, it's just . . . he's going up against Arnold, dude. Arnold's going to win. Therein lie the only flaws with Terminator 2, though. It's the most popular movie in the series for a reason, and that reason is, it's really fucking good.


Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) dir. Jonathan Mostow

Yeah, this is one of my least favorite things about Titanic. Fuck the stupid dialogue, the reductive “poor people good, rich people bad” bullshit, all the other stupid things about that movie, my least favorite thing about it was that suddenly Jim Cameron came down with George Lucas disease, whose symptoms include getting trapped underneath a huge pile of money and are unable to make it to the set to direct a movie anymore. Suddenly that Spider-Man movie he was talking about making? Gone. The Terminator 3 treatment he wrote and was idly fucking around with? Bloop.

This meant that when Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna suddenly found themselves short of cash and in need of a new Terminator movie, Jim Cameron was at the bottom of the Pacific inventing 3D cameras and shit and so they had to go get the guy who directed the unfortunate Kurt Russell vs. J.T. Walsh snoozefest Breakdown but also one of the most hilarious comedies of our era, the wacky submarine farce U-571.

To make Terminator 3, Arnold was necessary. And Arnold, having not made a good movie since True Lies (The Sixth Day was fun but minor) was leaning toward running for governor, and wasn't about to make a Terminator movie without Jim Cameron. Kassar and Vajna were pleading, though, which led to Arnold having a sitdown with Jim Cameron, paraphrased thus:

Arnold: I dun want to make a Tuhmeenaduh moofie unless you duhrect it, Jim.
J. Cameron: Fuck 'em. Tell 'em you'll do it for 30 mil.
Arnold: Thurdy meel? Dat's CRAZY. I dun eefen mek thurdy meel.
J. Cameron: Think of it as a way of telling them to go fuck themselves.
Arnold: Tail dem to go fuck thumsailves. I like eet.
J. Cameron: No, problem, babe, don't say I never did nothin' for you.

So Arnold told them to cough up $30 million ha ha ha. But Kassar and Vajna called his bluff and said sure, we'll give you 29 and a quarter of first dollar gross. I'm sorry, artistic integrity is cool and everything, but if somebody offered me $29 million and points that basically amount to $100 million more (perspective: that's what Terminator 2, the most expensive movie of all time when it was released, cost), I'm going to do it. And Arnold—all my goofing on his accent aside—is smarter than me. So he did it.

The resulting movie actually wasn't all that bad. It shat on series continuity right and left but somehow managed to turn that into a narrative asset. Arnold gets to carry a coffin full of machine guns and blow a bunch of stuff up; the action scenes are by and large quite good if lacking that Cameron pizazz. Nick Stahl does a decent job playing John Connor (Edward Furlong being unavailable due to personal—coughcoughheroincoughcough—issues). Kristanna Loken plays a new-school Terminator, and being a model, is similarly suited to playing a robot as Arnold was/is.

The one really inspired aspect to T3 is the ending. Even the first movie, where Sarah Connor rides off into the desert with storm clouds brewing overhead, at least had the heroine getting away, large with child, safe for the time being. T3 literally ends with the end of the civilized world, with John Connor and his girlfriend hiding in a bomb shelter while Skynet nukes the whole planet. And it turns out there's nothing anyone could possibly have done to prevent it. Any movie with the balls to end like that gets at least a mild tip of the cap.


Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008-9)

I never saw it, but my mom did: “Lena Headey is really good as Sarah Connor. And the girl Terminator [Summer Glau] is too. Oh, and Brian Austin Green. It's fun, I like it.” That may sound dismissive, but my mom watching an SF television show every week until it got canceled and not talking about how retarded it is all the time, in mom shorthand basically means it must have been pretty good. Even if it wasn't, any enterprise that endeavored to keep Lena Headey and Summer Glau employed and in the public eye is all right by me.


Terminator Salvation (2009) dir. McG

Billed not as a sequel in the classic mode but as the terribly trendy “reboot,” Terminator Salvation is the first movie in the series to not involve robots travelling through time to kill any members of the Connor family. It was, again, the most expensive movie ever at the time of its release (though it would be only months before J. Cameron dropped Avatar and raised that bar once again). And it was, once again, directed by a guy with a heretofore questionable resume.

McG had previously directed the Charlie's Angels movies, which were the aesthetic equivalent of that slightly sick feeling in one's stomach that comes from eating too much candy in one sitting, and We Are Marshall, which consisted of Matthew McConaughey practicing his serious face and Matthew Fox pretending not to be looking at his watch and wondering when he could get back to Hawaii to shoot Lost. But McG got himself the Terminator gig, issued some confusing statements in the press involving the phrase “gritty realism” and invoked Children of Men by way of explanation (which only deepened the confusion), then went out to New Mexico with Christian Bale and $200 million.

This one started out with a pretty interesting script, which told the tale of a death-row inmate named Marcus Wright who donates his body to science. He gets “executed” but then wakes up fifteen years later in a bombed-out wasteland with surprising physical skills and resistance to pain. He runs across a scruffball teenager named Kyle Reese who tells him about the war against the machines and the resistance, and John Connor. They do battle with some machines, Kyle Reese gets abducted, Marcus meets a cute girl resistance fighter pilot who introduces him to John Connor, who discovers Marcus is some kind of hybrid human/cyborg and ties him up, intending to kill him, but does the dumb movie thing of not doing it right away. The fighter pilot springs Marcus and he goes out into the desert, seeking both Kyle Reese and the truth about his new identity.

In the middle of a heavily-nuked zone where a human being would drop dead of radiation poisoning in like five minutes, Marcus finds an idyllic suburban community filled with golf courses and Midwesterners; in a beautifully strange sequence, this guy welcomes Marcus with open arms and takes him to meet some of the other people. But, it turns out these aren't “people” per se, they're hybrids like Marcus. They feed him this whole song and dance about how Skynet lets them be in exchange for something or other, and they fit Marcus with this chip that regulates his mood, at which time it's revealed that these fuckers run Skynet, and basically are Skynet.

After a while, Marcus rebels, rips the chip out of his head, and gets in touch with John Connor, telling him Kyle Reese—in whose safety Connor is, obviously, interested—is in this complex, which he is. John Connor and the resistance come in guns blazing and kick ass, saving Kyle Reese. But John Connor catches one. And John Connor dies. The end sees Marcus assuming John Connor's identity, and giving a monologue about how it's the idea of John Connor that's important, and all the better if the guy pretending to be him is basically unkillable by normal means.

Pretty good fuckin script, all things considered. A couple stupid lines of dialogue aside, it's a page turner, and in the right director's hands, with sufficient money to make the robots look cool, could have made a Terminator sequel at least on par in terms of quality with T3 (which itself wasn't as bad as it could have been), maybe even better.

So. Kassar and Vajna offered Christian Bale the part of Marcus. But Christian Bale decided he wanted to play John Connor, and The Dark Knight was a big enough hit that they indulged him and rewrote the script with Connor as the lead and Marcus as a supporting character. In so doing, they turned what was a pretty solid SF/SFX script with a really bold and surprising ending into a marginally solid SF/SFX picture with a really stupid ending, in which Marcus (without checking his or John Connor's blood type) gives his heart to save John Connor.

But, $200 million buys a lot of bells and whistles, and there certainly are bells and whistles in Terminator Salvation. Sam Worthington (Avatar, the Clash of the Titans remake), as Marcus, is basically a slightly butcher Orlando Bloom, which gives me the idea: reboot The Producers with Sam Worthington as Bialystock, Orlando Bloom as Bloom, and they're producing a movie about two blandly handsome dudes who can't really act, in a movie with a shitload of special effects but nothing else to really recommend it, thinking that everyone will be like “What the fuck? I like good, well-written movies with people who can act” and the movie will flop. Except it breaks box office records and they become massive stars who keep getting cast in movies. And they go to jail. And then the sequel is about them breaking out of jail with a massive special effects budget etc etc.

Even so, Terminator Salvation doesn't suck. It still has just enough of that earlier script (the stuff with Marcus and Kyle, the fighter pilot breaking Marcus out of resistance HQ) to be interesting, and the $200 million bells and whistles make the action scenes watchable—McG, bad as he is, is still a cut above Joel-Michael Schubay in that you can actually see what's happening in those action scenes—but the ending is fucking stupid, and there are way too many unnecessary homages to the first two movies all over the place, because the director of Charlie's Angels just can't stop winking and being clever. Still, the part when the T-800 walks into frame and he's got 1984 Arnold's face CG'd on is pretty cool.


Terminator 5 is being talked about, but unlikely. Even though Terminator Salvation made a fair bit of money, it got dreadful reviews, and the best I ever heard anyone say about it is basically what I did, that it didn't totally suck. I think that's because it's just good enough to be something to watch and enjoy in the middle of the night on cable when you have insomnia, but people want more out of a $200 million sequel to two movies (the first two) that people really liked that doesn't even have Arnold in it. And really, the thing that the ball rolling in the first place was that Arnold was awesome and Jim Cameron once upon a time was a good God almighty action director, before he became so rich that God can't even get a membership at his country club anymore. Also, lest we forget, any Terminator 5 will have to be made without Stan Winston. To which I say, fuck that.

All right, all right, all right. I gotta do this:

I'll be back.

THE TRINITY

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action.”
—Auric Goldfinger

The vast majority of artists spend their entire lives without a major success. Or, since “success” is a relative term (I personally consider my play where I adapted the Madison scene from Bande A Parte, set it to “The Amazing Sounds of Orgy” by Radiohead, and danced with two women with none of us wearing anything other than sunglasses, a success; even though that play lost money, just go back and read that sentence again and tell me I don't fucking rule) I should probably say, the vast majority of artists spend their entire lives without enjoying major critical and commercial success. One artist in the select minority in this regard is movie director John McTiernan.

As of this writing, John McTiernan is in gigantic fucking legal trouble. In the criminal trial of performance artist Anthony Pellicano (nominally a private investigator but actually a metatheatrical auteur attempting to attain such a level of sleaziness as to stain the very fabric of the universe) it was revealed that McTiernan lied to the FBI about his dealings with Pellicano. Whoops. A kerfuffle (technical legal term) ensued, and federal prosecutors are sharpening their knives and muttering with unshaven, gruff malice, looking to do McTiernan jurisprudent harm. With all this mess, it kinda looks like McTiernan's directing career is done, which kinda sucks. But it sucks because it's a shame to have to go out like that, rather than due to unrealized potential, because whoa baby did McTiernan's pre-perjury body of work kick ass.

The quote from cinema's greatest villain that opens this epistlet refers to the second through fourth feature motion pictures of John McTiernan's career. These three movies, done consecutively, constitute one of the most consistently impressive one-two-threes in the history of cinema, and without question the most masculine. They are:

Predator
Die Hard
The Hunt For Red October

Bow heads in reverence.

Now think about that for a second. If someone directed one of those pictures, his career would be complete and he'd never have to pay for a drink the rest of his life. If a guy directed two of those pictures, it'd be fucking silly. But all three? These are quantum levels of badassness. Fucking John McTiernan in the late 80s was a massively parallel, five-dimensional being with sentient testicles capable of exploding universes with the power of thought.

Success, as mentioned above, is a fleeting thing, as much dependent on serendipity as it is on talent. After The Hunt For Red October, McTiernan, having danced for four years and three pictures, found himself having to pay the fiddler, which he did with the hideously awful Medicine Man (Sean Connery is Sean Connery, but remember, for every Man Who Would Be King, there's a Zardoz, and for every Untouchables there's some fucking piece of shit paycheck picture . . .) and the truly staggering The Last Action Hero. Before we get to the subject of this post, we need to digress briefly, with copious profanity.

Okay. The fucking problem with The fucking Last Action Hero is that postmodernism is something that should require a license to operate. I love Arnold more than any ten of you put together, but putting Arnold in a movie whose premise requires the intellectual level to process the interaction between observer and observed to be anything other than a stupid fucking joke, is fucking unfair. Arnold is not up to that task; he's smart, but he ain't that fuckin' smart. Casting aside the problem of Hollywood making a mockery out of an intellectually interesting premise (best case scenario, you get, what, The Purple Rose of Cairo with car chases and a couple oil tankers blowing up? What has two thumbs and wants to be signed the fuck up? Yours truly.) the rhetorical question needs to be posed: do they have some fucking factory in southern California where they manufacture retarded kids to put in movies? Listen, I know all kids are retards to some degree or other, but come on, man, the kids in my acting class in junior high (who were all there cuz we couldn't sing and didn't like the smell of photographic chemicals) were better than these dipshits who end up in movies all the time. The single most retarded kid in the history of retarded movie kids is the little Last Action Hero one. Granted, he doesn't have much to work with—the extremely expensive and highly touted spec script it began as rapidly devolved into “fuck, I gotta get these rewrites done so I can get another 8-ball from my dealer” bullshit—but man that kid is fucking annoying. Arnold spends the whole movie looking like a cue card guy is holding up The Wall Street Journal so he can check his portfolio while he acts. Arnold would only go on to make one more good movie, and that was more Jim Cameron's doing.

But anyway. That's enough of that. McTiernan, after that massive flop, was forced back to the Die Hard franchise after being too big to direct the first sequel, and did a fairly decent job (the only real flaw with Die Hard 3 was the single worst assortment of New York accents ever heard on film, despite being shot on location in New York, the rest of the movie fuckin rules ass) then did a competent if uninspired job remaking The Thomas Crown Affair, directed three-quarters of an awesome movie in The 13th Warrior before getting fired, but then crashed and burned spectacularly with the remake of Rollerball (even more retarded than The Last Action Hero) and the too-generic-for-anyone-to-give-a-shit Basic. Then he started lying to the Feds, only the problem, as he soon found, is that when you lie to the Feds in real life, your sidekick doesn't come in with a machine gun and bust you out, the Feds take out their J. Edgar Hoover model dildo and do to you what Clyde Tolson used to do to J. Edgar.

Anyway. Now that we got all the inconsistent directorial output (I didn't mention his first movie, the one before Predator, Nomads, but you didn't miss anything) and legal troubles out of the way. Let's talk about the three-sided-star and the apex of testicular cinema:


Predator (1987)

Ah ha ha, god DAMN it this is such a good movie. Arnold was still on steroids, you could still be politically incorrect in a major studio movie, Carl Weathers, Bill Duke . . . AHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Okay. Deep breaths. We open with a space ship in near-Earth orbit putting on the parking brake, the Club on the steering wheel, and launching a little one-alien sized spaceship back down to Earth. This, we can correctly assume, is the Predator. Or . . . is it?

We can chew on that later. First things first. A helicopter lands somewhere in the middle of the jungle, and probably the single most we will fucking kill you bunch of MEN ever assembled gets out: Bill Duke, Billy from 48 Hrs, Jesse fuckin Ventura and his chewing tobacco, and two little guys—one of whom is Shane Black—whose presence is even scarier, because if these little fuckers are allowed to hang around with Bill, Billy, and Jesse, they must be fuckin fierce.

The best part about this intro is that the team all gets out and hops to, and Arnold just sits there in the fuckin chopper smokin a cigar like he's too fuckin bored to even scratch his balls. This is why Arnold rules.

Finally, Arnold summons the desire to move, and he heads inside to be briefed by this military guy, only the mission seems a little ho-hum for Arnold's boys:

Arnold: So why dun you yoos de reggala Army? Whut de yoooo need us foah?
Carl Weathers (off-screen): CUZ SOME DAMN FOOL ACCUSED YOU OF BEIN THE BEST.

Introduce Carl Weathers, old friend of Arnold's, now with the Central Intelligence Agency of Langley, VA, 22101.

Arnold: Whut is dees fockeeng tie beeznus?
Carl Weathers: Man, forget about the tie.

But Arnold can't forget about the tie. Carl Weathers leads Arnold and his guys out into the middle of fuckin nowhere to go ventilate some Commies, but he's a little stingy with details and motivation. They head on out, and Jesse Ventura offers chewing tobacco to the chopper but is rejected by everyone:

Jesse Ventura: Buncha slack-jawed faggots. This stuff'll turn you into a goddam sexual Tyrannosaurus, just like me.

As if their mere appearance weren't enough, there's some terse discussion of past missions, referred to only by the country (Afghanistan, Cambodia, etc) to establish these motherfuckers as serious. They make short work of a much-better-armed-than-anticipated bunch of rebels, and it turns out that Carl Weathers mildly bullshitted Arnold about the purpose of the mission, which pisses Arnold off, but there isn't much they can do—they're on the wrong side of the border so they have to go through some pretty unforgiving jungle to, as Arnold later says, “Geet to da choppa.”

It's at this point that some unseen entity with heat vision and garbled, digitized hearing takes notice of our protagonists. When Bill Duke knifes a scorpion on Carl Weathers' back and leaves its corpse on a log, the unseen entity regards the expired scorpion and can be seen to ruminate . . .

Bill Duke and Carl Weathers bond:

Bill Duke: You're ghostin' us, motherfucker. I don't care who you are back in the world, you give away our position one more time, I'll bleed ya, real quiet. Leave ya here. Got that?

Then something invisible starts killing Arnold's dudes! This bit is not for the faint of heart—Jesse Ventura gets his whole abdomen blown out, Bill Duke loses three-quarters of his skull, Carl Weathers loses his arm—and in short order the only people who are left are Arnold and the local chick who has warned them that in the heat of the summer, something comes out of the jungle and fucks people up. Arnold has astutely noted some glowing green shit on a leaf and come to the following conclusion:

“If eet blids . . . ve can keel it.”

Once everybody else is dead and Arnold has taken an alien rocket launcher to the shoulder at point blank range (which actually produced some blood) Arnold tells the local chick “GOOOO! GEET TO DA CHOPPA!” the line that has become half of the sole basis of any good Arnold impersonation.

The dialogue dries up for a bit as Arnold uses his wits and testicles to evade the alien hunter through the jungle. Eventually, Arnold realizes stuff like if he covers his body in cold mud the hunter can't see him, and he builds flaming arrows and booby traps and all kinds of awesome shit. He lures the hunter into a trap.

Arnold: “Camman! Keel me! Dooo eeet! Doo eet NOOOOW!”

Eventually, Arnold actually fucks the hunter's shit up. The hunter, though, has one final trick up its sleeve—a nuclear explosion, that Arnold manages to escape by jumping far enough. However, this does mean that Arnold cannot geet to da choppa, da choppa has to come to him, and it hauls his tired ass away as the closing credits roll.

Now. You'll notice one thing—I never referred to the alien as “the Predator.” The reason is this: the alien hunter only hunts things that can fight back. Arnold notices this and tells the local chick not to pick up a gun, figuring—correctly—that if she's unarmed, she's safe. Arnold, however, is so clearly dangerous and on so much steroids that even without a gun he's still trouble. I maintain, in spite of the stupid sequel and the fucking truly retarded Alien-tie-in, that the real predator in this movie . . . is man.


Die Hard (1988)

As great as Predator was, it did mainly appeal to nerds, Arnold cultists, and the kind of woefully damaged people who love gruesome cinematic violence (and yes, I'm all of the above, but I still realize Predator's a tough sell to some). Die Hard had no such problem. A number of lazy critical overviews of 80s action cinema tend to carelessly lump Die Hard in with Arnold movies and Sly movies—and, in a slightly different way, Eddie movies (he's invincible in Beverly Hills Cop)—without taking the time to notice that Die Hard is a whole different animal.

It's easy to forget now, after he's bestrode the earth for two decades as one of the biggest movie stars in the known universe, but Bruce Willis was primarily known as a TV actor before Die Hard. He was not really a name (Moonlighting cultists aside), and as John McClane he was, until you'd seen his subsequent movies, a regular guy. I mean, he's kind of a regular guy. He's a regular guy with ridiculous amounts of self-assurance and charisma, but he's a regular guy nonetheless.

To save his failing (some would even say already-failed) marriage, New York cop John McClane flies out to LA, gets picked up by a chatty limo driver, and heads out to the Nakatomi building, his once and future bride's place of employment, hosting their Christmas office party. The limo driver, like every supporting character in the picture, is written and acted to be remembered. Instead of seeming forced, he just comes across like a really nice kid, and McClane likes him immediately.

The office party introduces Mrs. McClane (irritatingly going by her maiden name Gennero at work), the yuppie cokehead who's trying to get in her pants (an excellent Hart Bochner, taking in all the sins of yuppiedom like stigmata as he bleeds the cocaine of the sinners on his thousand-dollar suit) and the avuncular Japanese dude who runs the place, Joe Takagi. (note to Michael Crichton: how can you think this guy's taking over the country? He's a fuckin sweetheart).

The McClanes have a tiff. John stays behind in the wife's office and—fortuitously—takes the advice of the guy sitting next to him on the plane to make fists with your toes barefoot on the carpet. Just as he's realizing, hey, it works, a whole bunch of well-dressed men very efficiently seize control of the building and take the office party hostage.

This leaves . . . ONE MAN . . . to foil their nefarious plans. That one man is a jet-lagged, lovesick rank-and-file cop from thousands of miles away who has to scamper away barefoot in his undershirt. And he's up against one serious adversary:

This is the one man who can challenge Auric Goldfinger. Hans Gruber. Sophisticated as the day is long. A voice you can listen to forever. And hooooooly shit is this man dangerous.

Joe Takagi: I don't know [the password] . . . you're just going to have to kill me.
Hans Gruber: Okay.
Bang. RIP Joe.

McClane sees this and shits his ass. He sets out to pick off as many of the bad guys as he can; unfortunately the first one he picks off is Alexander Godunov's brother. Alexander Godunov is Hans Gruber's right hand man, and holy fuckin shit is he scary when he gets pissed.

“I WANT BLOOD!”

He even makes Hans Gruber nervous for a second before he formulates his reply: “And you'll have it.” The complication is, McClane has a whole bunch of their C4 and the detonators, so they need to get that back before just killing his ass. But McClane is smart enough to play this to his advantage, and he recovers a walkie-talkie from Godunov's brother, with which he talks shit to Hans Gruber pretty much non-stop. Hans Gruber tries to talk shit back.

Hans: “You know my name, but who are you? Just another American who saw too many movies as a child? A product of a bankrupt culture who thinks he's John Wayne? Rambo? Marshall Dillon?” (Ed. Note: nice fuckin' reference, Hans)
McClane: “I was always kinda partial to Roy Rogers, actually. I really liked those sequined shirts.”
Hans: “Do you really think you have a chance against us, Mr. Cowboy?”
McClane: “Yippie-ki-ay, motherfucker.”

Oh, man. John McClane makes me proud to be from New York. We know how to talk shit here.

A brilliantly constructed game of cat and mouse ensues. McClane manages to establish contact with the LAPD, in the person of affable, overweight prole Al Powell, and the two bond over the radio, with Powell being McClane's one link to sanity, especially when fuckface suit cop Paul Gleason shows up and gives the typical awesome Paul Gleason performance as a belligerently stupid authority figure. As McClane kills more bad guys, Paul Gleason grows more antagonistic and insists that McClane let the impotent shitheads outside run things.

Hans Gruber kills Hart Bochner, which McClane takes hard (and Paul Gleason totally blames him for), because the poor naïve yuppie was only trying to help things in his dipshit yuppie way. So, as McClane is clinging to survival by a thread, the FBI comes in, in the form of Special Agent Johnson (Robert Davi, white, ugly) and Special Agent Johnson (Grand L. Bush, black, not ugly, also tangentially one of the only actors to be in both this and Lethal Weapon, the other landmark of 80s cop cinema) and insitutes their hostage protocol, which leads to exactly what Hans Gruber et al want: the power to get cut off so that the Nakatomi vault with gajillions of dollars in bearer bonds inside opens up. So the FBI sucks each other's dicks about a job well done while the remaining bad guys McClane hasn't killed yet count money.

After a whole bunch more bullshit—including McClane coming (at first unknowingly) in contact with Hans Gruber, who does a pretty spiffy American accent for a couple minutes, while noticing McClane is barefoot, and after the jig is up and McClane recognizes him for the Hans Gruber he really is, Hans Gruber has Alexander Godunov shoot a whole bunch of windows so McClane will cut his feet—the fuckin building blows up twice without collapsing or killing anyone except extras (good architecture). McClane works himself up into a psychotic rage and “kills” Alexander Godunov, and Hans Gruber takes Mrs. McClane hostage. After a dramatic showdown, McClane shoots Hans, who clings to Mrs. McClane's expensive, yuppie-given watch. Mrs. McClane symbolically removes the watch, and by her snipping that link to her non-McClane love life, kills Hans. Happily ever after . . .

. . . until Alexander Godunov shows up outta nowhere and Al Powell has to save the McClanes' lives by drawing his gun for the first time since he accidentally shot a kid and putting six in the crazed Godunov, which actually does kill him. Okay. Now we can live happily ever after. Oh, but Mrs. McClane has to punch William Atherton first, the asshole TV reporter who in a subplot was the one responsible for Hans Gruber knowing she was McClane's wife. Okay, goddammit, now can we live happily ever after? Yes. As the wisecracking limo driver drives the once-more-happy couple away, he says, “Man, this is your idea of Christmas, I gotta be here for New Year's.” Fuckin' a, sir. Fuckin. A.

Die Hard almost shouldn't work. It's long, it's got tons of subplots that don't really seem like they're going anywhere, but they all do. A guy who wasn't a movie star yet in the lead: that's dead risky. Fortunately that guy who wasn't a movie star yet was Bruce Willis. Oh, Die Hard. At this point it's almost redundant to say Die Hard rules, since for twenty-plus years now when something rules, we say “that rules almost as much as Die Hard.” But holy shit Die Hard is fucking awesome. Letting yourself get jaded about Die Hard just because you've seen it ten times is a dark fucking feeling, and I do not envy anyone with that cold dark canker in their heart where a warm blossom of love for Die Hard should be.


The Hunt For Red October (1990)

And so we come to the climax of the trilogy, the grace note, the single greatest submarine movie ever made (Das Boot can eat my schnitzel). Based on Tom Clancy's right-wing horseshit bestseller, The Hunt For Red October is that rare movie, like The Godfather, that transcends its origins as airport paperback crap to become cinematic genius. And, like Die Hard, a lot of that hinges on a guy nobody really knew was awesome yet in the lead role: Alec Baldwin's in the midst of a career reappraisal that has everyone pretending that they always loved him, but he had a loooooong stretch there where no one took him seriously as an actor. This stretch was unfair, he was always fucking great, he just needed good material. And, as far up his ass as Tom Clancy keeps his head, Jack Ryan is a fairly decent Everyman hero once you judiciously edit a lot of the right-wing fucktardery. Fairly decent Everyman hero part, meet highly skilled actor in his young and handsome days.

But, lest we forget, Sean Connery is the second lead. Actually, deciding which one of them is the lead is hard; it's kinda like the days when bands would put out a single as a double-A side. Sean Connery plays a Soviet submarine captain from the Scottish part of Lithuania (just like in The Untouchables he played a guy from the Scottish part of Ireland) who, having been given charge of a new sub with a nearly-silent propulsion system, decides to whack his political officer and defect to the US, bringing his sweet new ride with him.

The great thing the story does, is that even though by the end you know Sean Connery is going to defect, the Soviets can't let that happen, so they tell the Americans he's planning to start World War III by launching his nuclear warheads at New York and Washington. And so the audience isn't quite sure whether he's defecting or pulling some kamikaze first strike stunt. Alec Baldwin knows he's defecting, but shit, you try telling the Joint Chiefs the Russkies aren't acting the fool. So with CIA head James Earl Jones (good fucking GOD James Earl Jones is cool in this movie) pulling strings for him, Alec Baldwin goes out to the middle of nowhere in the North Atlantic to try to establish contact with Sean Connery.

MEANWHILE. One seriously awesome submarine full of US Naval officers is hot on Sean Connery's tail, due to the amazing ears—honed on fine classical music—of sonar operator Courtney B. Vance. Captain Scott Glenn grouches at him for “chasing an earthquake” but he's no dummy, he knows to trust Courtney B. Vance. They embark on (irony and such fail me) a thrilling, white-knuckle pursuit.

The sequence where Sean Connery captains the sub through this twisty underwater canyon is just terrific, but in spite of his best efforts to shake the Americans and the other Soviets, captained by the one and only Stellan Skarsgard—

“THESE ORDERS ARE SEVEN BLOODY HOURS OLD! Sitting on the bottom like an addled schoolboy . . .”

—Courtney B. Vance still picks him up the second they get out of the canyon. Ah, hell. At a very tense moment, Sean Connery and right-hand-man Sam Neill sit down and have a conversation about what they'll do when they get to America. And Sam Neill, who's heretofore been the paragon of rectitude, yes sir, you heard the captain, hop to itness, opens up and has this fucking AMAZING monologue about wanting to live in Montana and raise rabbits and have a pickup truck and “drive state to state . . . do they let you do that? No papers?” Fuckin' scene kills me. Then poor Sean Connery talks about his bleak life, his wife dying at sea, his whole life comprising a war with no monuments, only casualties, capping it by sighing that his wife died while he was at sea. This scene . . . man, it's good.

Right when Scott Glenn's sub has Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin's chopper shows up. He had to nag aircraft carrier boss Fred Thompson (later senator, at the time still the best character actor in the business at playing powerful Southern dudes) to let him have a chopper, and finally did, only to arrive, near frozen to death and terrified due to his fear of flying, to find a very cranky Scott Glenn, pissed that he had to break off from tracking Sean Connery. When some orders come in, courtesy of Soviet ambassador Joss Ackland (awesome as always) that the Red October needs to get blasted to kingdom come, like, five minutes ago, Alec Baldwin has to do some very fast talking to get Scott Glenn to entertain the notion that Sean Connery's defecting. Turns out . . . he is. Whaddaya know?

So a selected bunch of Scott Glenn's dudes join Alec Baldwin and they board the Red October after Sean Connery gets the crew off with a fake nuclear reactor accident. Sean Connery officially announces his intention to defect. But fuck it, there's a KGB mole or somebody who starts blasting away, shoots poor Sam Neill, who dies saying “I would like to have seen Montana . . .”and so Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery have to go chase the fucker before he causes a real reactor accident and blows up the sub (Alec Baldwin shoots him just in time). Not to mention goddamn Stellan Skarsgard is still out there fucking things up, so Scott Glenn and Courtney B. Vance have to take evasive maneuvers, the guy on Scott Glenn's actual sub has to pull this awesome risky maneuver to keep the Red October from getting blown up, and GODDAMMIT PEOPLE STOP THIS SHIT AND SETTLE DOWN!

Eventually Stellan Skarsgard blows himself up and Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery sail the Red October into a river in Maine to hide it out. Sean Connery quotes Christopher Columbus. Alec Baldwin says, “Welcome to the New World, sir.” The final shot is of Alec Baldwin, sleeping like a baby on the plane on his way back home, a new teddy bear for his daughter in the next seat.


And thus concluded the truly transcendent part of John McTiernan's career. Everything that came after, sure, it was rocky, parts of it even tragic. But over that four year period, Predator, Die Hard, The Hunt For Red October, he had one of the finest bursts of any movie director ever. Sure, others came close. Some may have even surpassed. But that period was truly special.

A NEW DAY

Ladies and gentlemen, this is my 50th post. Until now I've resisted the urge to codify my particular warped perspective into anything so bourgeois as a manifesto, but the time has come to cross that Rubicon and declare this site, and my critical perspective, to be About Something. Careful readers of this blog will hopefully not be terribly shocked at this shift and formalization of the guiding aesthetic behind the shenanigans contained herein. I do hope you're sitting down. The central principle, and that shall heretofore serve as the mission statement of this website is, as follows:

RED HEAT FUCKING RULES. I MEAN, RED HEAT REALLY, REALLY FUCKING RULES.


There we go. That wasn't so hard, was it? And yes, as a central principle, that's both kind of “well, duh, dipshit, how many days did it take me to finish reading your Tony Scott post? I kind of figured that one beforehand” and “wait, that's not a unifying aesthetic principle, fuckface, why the hell are you trolling me on a gorgeous spring day?” I believe in opaque statements where a phrase carries several different meanings and requires multiple interpretations to properly unpack. So, what appears to be a reductive, sophomoric sentiment with gratuitous f-bombs about one particular movie is, in fact a statement about cinema in general, semiotically aggressively unpretentious, and expressed with an enthusiasm that permeates not only my view of cinema but of life. BOOOM, motherfucker, you do not want a piece of this intellect.

So, anyway. Red Heat is a landmark of several different careers.

For Arnold, following directly on the heels of Predator, and not long after his Terminator days, which immediately followed his Conan days, Red Heat marked one of his first forays into playing a quasi-real guy. What raises Red Heat above the level of Raw Deal and Commando is, in large part, to the grittiness and, while not exactly realism, the realism-esque directorial style of Walter Hill, who also co-scripted.

Walter Hill's career has been interesting, if maddeningly inconsistent—there's awesomeness like The Warriors, 48 Hrs, and The Driver on one hand, bizarre shit like Streets of Fire and Johnny Handsome on the other, and pictures like Brewster's Millions and Supernova on my dick. Amazingly, Red Heat hits the triple crown, managing to exist in all three categories at once, the only time Walter Hill ever achieved this kind of synergy. The only—apparent—debit Red Heat has against it is the presence of this guy:

Jim Belushi has the misfortune of being the younger brother of one of the great geniuses in the history of the performing arts. When he was on—and he was on a shockingly high percentage of the time—there was no one funnier than John Belushi. You could be as funny as him (if your name was/is Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, or Tommy Wiseau) but never surpass. Jim, sadly, will never be able to escape that, but he hasn't helped matters by crafting a career consisting 99.9% of the worst fucking shit ever. The .1 % is, of course, Red Heat. Jim Belushi is actually really goddamn good in this movie, which I attribute to Arnold, who pulls off this kind of alchemy with co-stars often enough that we really need to start giving Arnold more thespian credit (Tom Arnold in True Lies actually seemed like a mammal, for example).

Last but not least, mention must be made of the great unheralded goddess of the cinema, the Semitic Siren, the olive-skinned Aphrodite of B-cinema, the one and only:

If I ever met Gina Gershon, I'd probably blush, not be able to make eye contact, and then meekly ask her if we could hold hands. Maybe see if she wanted to get ice cream. The first thing I remember ever seeing her in was Red Heat, and she made such an impression that I paid very close attention to the credits at the end—I needed to know who that woman was. My fucking God she was gorgeous back then. She still is, too, but she evolved from that kind of coltish, deep-voiced tomboy type into a much more mature vintage, in every sense of the word.

*daydreams about Gina Gershon for about an hour*

Ahem. Anyway. Red Heat. Red Heat was the first western movie to get permission to shoot in Red Square, which was kind of a big deal, and provoked a lot of tut tutting from the kind of people who tut tut at things (“Why couldn't it have been a more politically significant film?” etc.) It reflects a particular sentiment in the American consciousness; worn down as we were by 40+ years of the Cold War, a lot of people were like, “Ya know, the Russians are probably guys just like you and me. Fuck governments, people are people.” Unlike movies from the earlier, pre-Gorbachev era (like 2010), which projected their spirit of togetherness in the sense of a bunch of sensitive progressives sitting around a cocktail party sipping wine and talking yearningly of a day when all could get along, Red Heat is sitting next to you in the bar at 4am, invading your personal space a little, telling you things it shouldn't, but ultimately not saying anything you disagree with (of course, you're drunk and tired, and the goddamn bartender keeps buying you every third drink so you can barely see, but that's another matter).

Of course, talking about the political relevance of Red Heat is going to get you some funny looks, because Red Heat is a proudly disreputable buddy cop movie. The high concept, of course: a foul-mouthed, retrogressive American cop is, through contrived circumstances, partnered with an inscrutable, mysterious Russian cop.

We start by jumping headfirst into awesome—a Russian bath house, with lots of well-built people walking around naked and nearly naked, lifting weights, swimming around. After a couple establishing shots, in walks Arnold, the most well-built of all. He heads over to a sinister-looking Tartar, who looks at his hands and makes a growled observation in stilted Russian about Arnold's hands being soft, so his buddies drop a glowing-hot rock into Arnold's hand. Of course it takes more than that to faze Arnold, so he takes the fist with the rock and punches the Tartar, and he beats the shit out of a few guys (note, courtesy of noted Walter Hill scholar Bryan Enk: the punch sound effects were made by Walter Hill smashing a gigantic bag of ice with a two-by-four. This, of course, makes the punches in this movie sound fucking AWESOME), crashing through the wall into the snow. So a bunch of nearly-naked dudes try to kick Arnold's ass in the snow, but Arnold (also nearly-naked) stomps em all before grabbing the last one and asking the whereabouts of one Viktor Rosta. The guy gives up the location and Arnold knocks his ass the fuck out. Roll credits.

The titles contain a lot of dumb fake Russian letters. My dad, who spoke not half-bad Russian, took particular delight in telling me how backwards r's would change the pronunciation of people's names. Arnold's was pretty funny, I recall; it sounded like a French cabbie having a seizure while choking on a baguette. There are a lot of cool shots of Red Square (this, and the closing titles, being the only place where the Red Square footage was used, the rest of the Russia stuff was shot in Budapest, which you can kind of tell but not really) and some good Russian choral music, something that makes the titles of Red Heat awesome in the same way The Hunt For Red October's were (even though The Hunt For Red October is a better movie, but you shut the fuck up about that, you).

So Arnold and his partner banter in Russian, and we get to hear Arnold's Austrian accent be just as thick in Russian as it is in English (man I love his accent . . . he's like fucking Henry Kissinger, he could be undead for five hundred years and still sound like Peter Lorre on HGH). Once they've finished bantering—and exchanging some worldly and cynical views about the West—they roll into the cafe where Viktor Rosta is waiting.

This cafe is the coolest place ever. It's kind of like if Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Raymond Chandler went on a bender together and got so fucked up they rewrote the Mos Eisley scene in Star Wars. Words cannot do this scene justice, so take a couple minutes and watch it.

From there, Arnold chases Viktor Rosta through the streets of “Moscow” and kills Viktor Rosta's brother (the guy who's all like, “What's this country coming to? This is just like the old days!”) but Viktor Rosta kills Arnold's partner; as Bogart said, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship. At Arnold's partner's funeral, another cop tells him Viktor Rosta's nowhere to be found, headed for the States.

Chicago is introduced with a lot of loud fusion jazz-rock (per the 48 Hrs score), and a cryptic scene with Viktor Rosta tearing a hundred-dollar bill in half and giving the other half to a smooth-talking black guy who's kind of a shitty actor. Said smooth talker is then pursued by Jim Belushi, Laurence Fishburne back when he was still Larry (who looks so much like Malcolm X in this movie I was kind of bummed when Spike Lee cast Denzel until I saw how fucking awesome Denzel was despite looking nothing like him), and Neri from The Godfather.

Jim Belushi quickly establishes himself as politically incorrect, immature, and pretty funny. Larry Fishburne gives him a hard time. The smooth talking black guy, it transpires, is a member of a gang called the Cleanheads, who shave their heads as allegiance to their imprisoned leader. So our policemen heroes swagger on in and trade shots with the Cleanheads before successfully arresting them all (including the guy with Viktor Rosta's hundred-dollar bill half), after which Jim Belushi makes a joke about Marvin Hagler that never would be allowed in today's politically correct climate.

(Editorial aside: if you get touchy about racial stereotypes, this really, really isn't your kind of movie.)

So Viktor Rosta's drug deal is on hold for a second, and he gets arrested. This leads to the great scene back in Russia where a rookie gives one of Arnold's superiors gets a teletype saying Viktor Rosta's specific location:

Superior (rolling the word around on his tongue): Ameerrrrrrrica.
Rookie: America, da. CheeKAgo. GANGstair.
The superior pretends to hold a tommy gun and makes machine gun noises before dismissing the kid.

There ya go, one scene, ten seconds of screen time, and you can't help but like these dudes. It's a little classier than a bunch of American cops calling each other comrade and making cracks about vodka and Siberia (which we see later, and isn't nearly as cool). So Arnold is sent to the big, bad West on a quest of justice and revenge.

Arnold touches down in America with kind of a shit attitude. He's under orders to say nothing about Viktor Rosta to the Americans, to avoid embarassment, so he immediately rubs Jim Belushi the wrong way. They go to pick up Viktor Rosta, who mortally insults Jim Belushi, and it looks like everything's hunky dory. Until . . . the Cleanheads (out of jail on a technicality) and a couple Russians ambush Arnold, kill Jim Belushi's partner, and fuck off with Viktor. Arnold, however, fights through a concussion to grab a key Viktor drops before passing out.

So now the Russians are pissed at Arnold. Jim Belushi's pissed at Arnold for being unfriendly. Jim Belushi's bosses (Peter Boyle, Larry Fishburne) are pissed at both Jim Belushi and Arnold. Everybody's pissed. Viktor's pissed because his key is gone. Progressives are pissed off at the racism. It's a goddamn mess.

Jim Belushi decides to take some action, and brings Arnold to talk to Brion James, the imprisoned scumbag who tipped Belushi's partner to the whole Cleanhead mischegoss. Jim Belushi bribes Brion James for info, but Brion James smugly tells him nothing. Jim Belushi then goes into Brion James' pocket and finds, voila, a bag of drugs hidden in the cash roll, threatening him with a possession with intent to distribute bust, but Brion James retaliatates by saying “you're fired, asshole, my lawyer makes the ACLU look like fucking Nazis.” And, to Arnold, as punctuation: “And I ain't tellin you shit.”

Arnold introduces Brion James to Russian interrogation techniques, to wit, breaking one of his fingers. Brion James, sobbing, gives up the Cleanheads' deal with Viktor, but without any specifics. Arnold breaks a second finger, which reveals that Brion James isn't giving up the specifics because he doesn't have any. Arnold remarks on the superior efficacy of Soviet interrogation and leaves.

Belushi harangues Arnold about the necessity of respecting a suspect's Miranda rights, and Arnold points out that Belushi isn't exactly a Boy Scout himself. They then head over to talk to Gina Gershon, who Viktor called from jail when he was arrested. Belushi gives her a hard time, she tells him shit, except that . . . she's Viktor's wife so he can get a visa. Dum dum dum dummmmm.

A bunch of shit happens next, and I don't really remember what order it all happens in, but there's a shootout at the hospital where one of the Russians who sprung Viktor—who Jim Belushi shot—is killed by Viktor's other Russian, in drag, who is subsequently killed by Arnold. This leads to Peter Boyle confiscating Arnold's Russian gun, after which Jim Belushi loans Arnold a .44 (“come on, that's the gun Dirty Harry uses!” “Whoo ees Derty Herry?”) Then there's this underground parking garage meeting Gina Gershon sets up where Jim Belushi is held at gunpoint so Arnold and Viktor Rosta can have a conversation in English, because I guess the subtitle budget was running low. Then Jim Belushi and Arnold go to prison to talk with the leader of the Cleanheads, who talks a lot of prison library Marxism to Arnold, who gets so bored he threatens to cut the guy's balls off, before King Cleanhead voices his racist nightmare desire to sell drugs to every white person in America. Then Gina Gershon gets killed. Then a bunch of Cleanheads try to kill Arnold in his fleabag motel but kill a hooker's john and scare the shit out of the hooker instead. Viktor gets away with the key.

And Arnold and Jim Belushi gradually bond. There's this nice scene in a coffee shop where Jim Belushi orders tea for Arnold, just the right way, surprising Arnold. Jim Belushi says, “I saw Doctor Zhivago.” They talk about how they became cops, about their families, and so forth. Arnold's life, it's revealed, is kind of lonely and bleak, giving Jim Belushi some sympathy for him for the first time.

Eventually, our heroes figure out where Viktor's key is from: the bus station. Just as Viktor pulls off his deal, and treacherously shoots the last Cleanhead, Jim Belushi and Arnold close in to bust him. When Jim Belushi tries to arrest him, Arnold gets pissed, insisting that he take Viktor back to Russia, and as they argue, Viktor escapes. Our heroes give pursuit and get into a fucking sweet bus chase, destroying a bunch of stuff, including “a fucking Chicago landmark.” Eventually, they crash, with a train locomotive (hey, I didn't write the fucking script) broadsiding Viktor's bus.

Our heroes close in. Arnold draws down on Viktor Rosta and just motherfuckin smokes him. Jim Belushi walks up, compliments Arnold on the grouping of his shots, Arnold thanks him, hands him the .44, says something rude about the Russian gun being better, and walks off.

Arnold heads back home. In the airport, he and Jim Belushi watch a baseball game and discuss the possibility of America and Russia playing each other (“Be a hell of a World Series,” says Jim Belushi.) Arnold mentions a “tradition in my country” where friends exchange gifts, and he gives Jim Belushi his watch. Jim Belushi, touched by the gesture, gives Arnold his Rolex, explaining the back story and sentimental attachment . . . before realizing Arnold's is “a $20 East German watch.” Arnold smiles, and they bid each other farewell.

Now, let's not mistake my jumbled chronology for a lack of respect for this movie's quality. We are most certainly in the presence of greatness here. Arnold, as a leading man, has this stupid, baseless reputation among civilians for not being a good actor just because he's got a goofy accent. I'm sorry, folks, this motherfucker can hold it down. His comic timing is superb; just because the writing in a lot of his movies is stupid and they just give him wisecracks and stuff doesn't mean the man can't deliver a fucking line. His humor in Red Heat is deliciously dry, totally deadpan, and good God he's fucking funny at places.

Jim Belushi: “That suit's not going to explode or anything, is it?”
Arnold: “I think you're safe.”

Dude, seriously. If you want to piss on Arnold, this is what you can do:

Jim Belushi, of all people. Really good in this. The best part about his character in this is that he's supposed to be kind of annoying and not always that funny. In spite of his yammering, his casual racism, his stubborn ignorance . . . he's kind of an all right guy, definitely has a sentimental side, and despite busting Arnold's balls, genuinely wants to get along with him.

The actual best performance in Red Heat, though, is Ed O'Ross as Viktor Rosta. In real life, he sounds like he does in The Hidden or Lethal Weapon, a normal-voiced dude with a really thick Chicago accent. He sounds like he's been gargling vodka and broken glass as Viktor Rosta. It fuckin kills me listening to him talk, knowing how much it must hurt (in one play I was in one time, I did the Viktor Rosta voice as an homage and had a sore throat after every performance; my voice teacher threatened to kill me when she came to the show). But man is he bad. He is menacing. He fucks anybody over, and kills almost everybody. His stubble. His constant “who farted” Russian face. Viktor Rosta is sort of the Third World man's Hans Gruber: one of the great villains of all time.

When all is said and done, Red Heat is, if you want to be a reductive asshole, “just” a cop movie. But Red Heat is “just” a cop movie in the same way that Let it Bleed is “just” a rock 'n' roll record or Jameson is “just” a winter beverage or tits are “just” fatty tissue over the pectoral muscles. There's no benefit in being a reductive asshole. Red Heat is a pleasure in the same way the Stones, whiskey, and tits are. It's that essential to human happiness. If you have not sipped of its nectar, do.