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.

BOOK TO FILM: MICHAEL CRICHTON

(Ed. Note: This one's really fucking long. Sorry.)

Back in my high school days, I read a lot and had a hard time relating to people. The two were not unrelated: I was reading people like Dostoevsky, Proust, Zola, and Kerouac, with light reading consisting mainly of either classic hard-boiled cats like Hammett, Chandler, Jim Thompson, James M. Cain, or bizarre shit like Howard Waldrop and Mark Leyner, or swashbuckling Dumas. There were, however, two writers I could share with my classmates—with the girls it was mainly Anne Rice, who is not relevant for our purposes here because the only good movie made from one of her books was Interview With the Vampire, and I can only properly channel how I feel about that movie on Oscar Wilde's birthday (so that's gonna have to wait til October 16th). With the guys, it was Michael Crichton.

Michael Crichton's most popular books were an entertaining hybrid of SF, thriller, and out-of-the-box politics. Later in life people gave him a hard time for being right-wing, but I think of him less as a rightist than as a smart guy with low tolerance for fuzzy-headed bullshit. A prevailing theme in his work is the struggle against shitheads with an improper ability to deal with money and power. Related is the frequent Frankenstein theme that keeps popping up, of people doing things because they can and then getting their fucking asses kicked by the consequences. Whether it's wiring a mentally ill man with electrodes that boost his intelligence and ruthlessness (The Terminal Man), creating dinosaurs with the intent of having them be theme park/zoo attractions (Jurassic Park, The Lost World), letting Japanese people (Rising Sun) and women (Disclosure) run corporations, or sending 20th century academics to medieval France (Timeline), people who aren't as smart as they think they are do dumb stuff in Michael Crichton books that Only One Man can fix. That one man is usually a smart guy with a doctorate in a narrative-relevant science, fitting Michael Crichton's background as an MD.

Crichton's prose style is to-the-point, and his dialogue—when not lapsing into “as you know” expository laziness or author surrogate soapboxing—is mostly utilitarian and kinda square. But his stories are page-turners, and his facility with Everyman protagonists unmatched, making his books naturals for cinematic adaptation. Not to mention, there's usually cool shit like gorillas and dinosaurs wreaking havoc, providing the opportunity for lots of flashy FX. As a result, most of Crichton's novels have been turned into movies, most of them pretty successfully. Here, then, an overview (only the ones he put out under his own name):


The Andromeda Strain

Book—1969
Movie—1971 (dir. Robert Wise)

Both Crichton's first book and first movie adaptation are kinda cool. Both are paced a little weird for modern audiences, but the antagonist—a deadly bacteria FROM OUTER SPACE—is badass. It kills, baby, and it kills fast and disgusting. The movie is a pretty good example of post-2001, pre-Star Wars SF, though it's a little long and clunky as fuck to people used to modern FX, but still, it's pretty good.


The Terminal Man

Book—1972
Movie—1974 (dir. Mike Hodges)

A much better book, this one about a guy named Harry Benson who has epileptic seizures that cause blackouts, during which he behaves violently and erratically. So, some smartass decides to treat the epilepsy with strategically placed electrodes, controlled by a tiny computer in his chest.

Here, the One Man who can Stop Things is a woman psychiatrist, Janet Ross (Michael Crichton loves the surname Ross and uses it all the goddamn time, including George Clooney on ER). Ross warns the surgeons (typical God complex big swinging dick types) that Harry might be psychotic. He doesn't differentiate between Man and Machine, and Ross thinks if they hook Harry up to a computer that it might exacerbate his psychosis. The surgeons are like, “oh, you're just a woman, what do you know” and go ahead and do it anyway. And whaddaya know, Harry escapes from the hospital, having attained some degree of control over the computer and making it cause seizures more frequently, turning him into a sex-crazed violent—and very happy—psycho. So Harry breaks into the hospital to shut down the mainframe computer (because the computers are going to kill us all; this is the clearest indication of his psychosis, sane people know that it's not computers but evil white guys in suits who are going to kill us all) and Ross, terribly upset, gets a gun and lights Harry up before he can fuck anything up too badly. Great fuckin' book, just the right hybrid of intelligent and retarded.

The movie, part of Mike Hodges' post-Get Carter, pre-Croupier two-decade fugue (that also included Flash Gordon) is kind of all right. Casting George Segal (the poor man's George Hamilton) as Harry was a stroke of genius, and for once even better than casting George Hamilton because George Segal is just sleazy enough to pull something like this off (and it's not only illegal to kill George Hamilton at the end of the movie, it constitutes division by zero and will cause the universe to turn inside out and cease to exist). Actually, in a weird way, this is one that can benefit from a remake, because the technology actually exists nowadays and we know how to shoot stupid climaxes where the girl shrink (pretty good Charlize Theron comeback part, actually) shoots the bad guy with her mascara running decoratively better now.


The Great Train Robbery

Book—1975
Movie—1979 (dir. Crichton himself)

A change of pace, The Great Train Robbery is a fictionalized take on a real-life ginormous gold heist in Victorian England. It's a little slower than most of his books, and Crichton gets a little too bogged down in trying to write Victorian, but it's a pretty cool read, even if the heist goes blooey and no one gets the gold.

The movie, however, is awesome, primarily because Donald Sutherland and Sean Connery are in it, secondarily because Lesley-Anne Down is decorative, and tertiarily (or whatever the fuck the adverb form is; if you still read this damn blog you don't care either) because Donald Sutherland and Sean Connery get away at the end. I mean, it's not gonna change your life, but it's a fun flick.


Eaters of the Dead

Book—1976
Movie—1999 (re-titled The 13th Warrior, dir. John McTiernan)

Crichton's second historical novel is pretty goddamn fantastic, in a couple different senses, the first being it rules, the second being, it's a metafictional riff on Beowulf where an Arab ambassador sent to establish contact with the Vikings ends up tagging along on a journey to go fuck up Grendel, whose hordes Crichton coyly implies might be a lost tribe of Neanderthals. Can I get a hell yes?

The book is presented as a scientific commentary on a found text, the account of a man named Ahmad ibn Fadlan who is tasked by the Caliph of Baghdad to go to what's now Russia and go talk to those crazy tall white people; ibn Fadlan jumps on the opportunity (he needs to get the hell out of town after tripping on his dick kind of epically) and heads north. After a whole bunch of fairly-well-written culture clash, ibn Fadlan joins up with this stone badass named Buliwyf (hmm . . . something very familiar about that name) and bonds with the one guy in Buliwyf's group who can speak Latin (Arabic being too much to ask for in 10th century). They then go in and do battle with the Monsters of the Mist, the Eaters of the Dead, who are so badass they scare Vikings.

(Take a second, I know that shit's deep)

Narratively, that's pretty much it. They go in and kick ass, and most of them get killed, except our hero and his buddy. Intriguingly, when ibn Fadlan finally says goodbye and goes home to file his report with the Caliph, the manuscript abruptly ends, and Commentary Guy comes back to explain that the manuscript was randomly found somewhere along ibn Fadlan's travels with pages missing or something, implying that he went on to further adventures. The best part about Eaters of the Dead being only about 160 pages is that when that happens, you're like “I wanna know what happens to ibn Fadlan next, now that he's loosened up, gotten fucked in half on mead, and banged white chicks!” Commentary Guy then goes on to advance the Neanderthal theory, which is a tasty idea. Commentary Guy's footnotes throughout the book give a whole lot of flavor and academic context, making this the perfect book for someone like me: the academic paper as thriller.

The movie is pretty special, even if it has a slightly different feel than the book. I have a lot of affection for the movie for its value in helping me talk movies with civilians, because civilians fucking love this movie. The 13th Warrior is to civilians what Nicholas Ray pictures are to French semio-Marxists, they fucking freak out. And it's easy to see why, I mean, cammmmmaaannnnnn, Antonio Banderas rides a fucking horse and fucking has a fucking sword, man. And fucking Omar Sharif is in it (another nerd/civilian bond, nerds are like, “Well, it's Omar Sharif for crissakes,” and civilians are like, “OMG LAWRENCE OF ARABIA” and nerds are like “Lawrence of Arabia fucking rules!” and much hugging and coming-together ensues and eventually Doctor Zhivago gets brought up and there's more hugging). Sure, there aren't any footnotes or Neanderthal theories, but who needs that when you've got a movie that fucking kicks ass.

Sadly, it wasn't much of a hit, because for some goddamn reason John McTiernan thought it'd be a good idea to go so far over budget (the check at the end of the night was $80 mil) that the studio would have to fire him and bring in Crichton to finish shooting, and Crichton hadn't even directed a movie since he torpedoed Tom Selleck's career in the 80s (in fairness, Michael Crichton did direct one balls-out classic in his untercareer as film director, Westworld, where Yul Brynner was deployed masterfully). But the fact that it lost $20 million in theaters is of concern only to Disney, and they'll make that $20 mil back by the tears of dying children, like they always do.


Congo

Book—1980
Movie—1995

This is the first book where the style and a lot of the tropes normally associated with Michael Crichton today are on display. There's a sinister corporation, looking to corner the market on a particular kind of boron-infused diamond that will in turn allow them to control the nascent Information Age. Cuz ya know, if you're going to be a grown-ass-man sinister corporation, world domination is the entry level position. There's an Everyman scientist, in this case a gorilla researcher who accompanies his “talking” gorilla Amy to the titular jungle because the sinister corporation has apparently had an expedition wiped out in spectacularly bloody fashion by gorillas (even though Everyman scientist guy is like, they look and act weird, there's More To This). There's rampant fucking political incorrectness, in many highly entertaining personifications—a white hunter type who on the page oozes with Sean Connery and is a little less than reverent about Africa and Africans, a good-natured, superstitious bunch of Kikuyu who actually come off kind of all right if you're not feeling too cynical (“good-natured” and “superstitious” are kinda code words), in which case they vibe a little meh, but last but not least . . . a malicious tribe of cannibals! Hell yeah, baby, Crichton's not fuckin around, he is very old school here, he even has the balls to throw in an aside about how cannibalism actually exists and so fuck you if you find it racist. So there. Take that, sensitive people. (Seriously, he totally could have cut all the cannibalism stuff and the book would have been juuuuuuust fine, though I guess when you're paying homage to H. Rider Haggard you're paying homage to H. Rider Haggard . . .)

It transpires that there's this lost city in the middle of the jungle that was always assumed to be mythical, but the talking gorilla dreams and finger-paints a dead-on match for an artist's rendition of the lost city (that was in a book the gorilla had not read). So the sinister corporation has her tag along on their follow-up expedition, and they get on a gigantic, peril-fraught adventure (economically written, well-paced, kick-ass) on their way there. When they get there they figure out that the dudes who built the city were fuckin stupid rich off the diamonds they had there—they barely even had to dig mines, the fuckin things were just laying around, practically—until the volcano that was the reason there were so many diamonds there farted, and the super-gorillas they had bred to be security guards went apeshit (zing!) and killed everyone and had been pretty much hanging around that section of jungle killing everything in sight ever since. AND THEY'RE RIGHT OUTSIDE . . .

The people go “Damn, we're in a tight spot!” but get distracted by the blue diamonds (the sinister corporation's avatar, one Dr. Ross, an emotionally remote blonde the feminists probably had a word with Crichton about) and the new species of gorilla (the Everyman scientist guy, who's kind of a whiny dipshit) and the super-gorillas kill a bunch of the Kikuyu before Dr. Ross accidentally makes the volcano erupt, which makes the super-gorillas (who are more competent and have a better sense of focus and purpose than the people) fuck off and gives our flawed heroes a chance to escape. So they do, no diamonds for the sinister corporation, no proof of the new species of gorilla for the Everyman scientist . . . sigh. The only one who has a semi-happy ending is Sean Connery Guy, who managed to pocket some diamonds on the sly.

Now. Having hopefully established that the book—some queasiness over Crichton's blend of modern and retro Africa aside—kicks ass, it would appear as though making a movie should be no problem. Well, provided that you have a good gorilla wrangler or some good FX nerds to fake one. And also provided that you're not a fucking dumbass and don't make changes for no apparent reason. And provided that you realize that in order to do it right you gotta spend a little money because a cheap, half-ass jungle movie is going to look like shit.

Well. Looks like someone at Paramount took their stupid pills, because the movie version of Congo was a larger, stinkier piece of shit, in a more spectacular shade of brown, than cinema has often seen. It's not the director's fault; Frank Marshall is a buddy of Steven Spielberg's, and he made Arachnophobia and Alive before this, but I guess he can only direct movies that start with the letter A, because wow. The cast is like either the casting director lost a bet and did pin the tail on the headshot, or checked into rehab the day after casting this movie, or some such other explanation. Deliberate sabotage? I don't know. Laura Linney's great, but she's miscast here (and she's too short, which isn't her fault, it's the goddamn casting people). Dylan Walsh is one of those generic guys who does fine on TV but doesn't have the charisma to be in a movie. Casting Ernie Hudson in the Sean Connery role gets credit for sense of humor, but Ernie Hudson's so awesome he's actually okay in spite of his not being Sean Connery. And Mr. Eko/Adebisi (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) is in it in a very early role but they even fucked THAT up because he's too tall to be the head Kikuyu guy, and he's also from the fuckin wrong part of Africa, dude, Yoruba and Kikuyu ain't the same ballpark, ain't the same league, ain't even the same fuckin' sport (speaking of a good movie people in 1995 were watching).

The next thing is more the writer's fault—and I hate saying this, since I met the guy once and he was really nice—but John Patrick Shanley fuuuuuuuuuuuuucked up, and one of the worst ways he fucked up is writing in the Tim Curry part. Tim Curry's cool, but he's not known for underplaying, and he's one of those cats who gets in a shitty movie and starts overacting like hell. Now, when people are making a shitty movie they don't usually realize they're making a shitty movie, and so they don't think stuff like, “okay, let's get actors who won't make our shitty movie shittier by overacting” and end up casting Tim Curry. (Ed. Note: see what I did there, with that meta reference to the bit in the book where the gorilla calling the scientist “shitty” over and over again in sign language? People, I know what I'm doing).

So yeah, not gonna dwell, but fucking goddamn it the movie of Congo sucks.


Sphere

Book—1987
Movie—1998 (dir. Barry Levinson)

In a world . . . where Michael Crichton has not yet whipped it out and written straight up SF . . .

One man . . . named Michael Crichton . . .

IS ABOUT TO BREAK EM OFF SOME!



Sphere.

So yeah. I first read Sphere in one sitting—which considering that it's like 400 pages long and contains several seismic mindfucks, probably explains a lot of my severe mental and emotional problems—back in like 1993 or 4 or something. It was one of those things where you pick up the book, read the book jacket, the book jacket says it's about a spaceship that crashed in the ocean 300 years ago, you go, “Tell me more,” and next thing you know it's 7 am, ya gotta be at school in an hour, you haven't slept and spend the whole day babbling about voluntary psychological lacunae and everyone gets mad at you for spoiling the ending. Oh wait, that's just me? DAMN IT.

Sphere is really kind of half-ass SF. Actual SF writers could have pulled it off better, but Michael Crichton's still Michael Crichton so it's A Michael Crichton SF Novel, which is better than nothing by damn sight. The plot starts off with The Everyman Scientist, in this case a shrink—an interesting wrinkle—being flown in by chopper to this random Navy flotilla in the middle of the South Pacific, where there's been a plane crash (not, sadly, Oceanic Flight 815). The shrink counsels plane crash survivors as part of what he does, so he's like, okay, this'll be fun.
But the Navy guy running things is like, nope, this ain't no plane crash. What this is . . . is a spaceship crash. And it crashed at least 300 years ago (maybe even 1000). Duh duh duhhhhhh. One of the other things the shrink did was write a report on the psychological effects of first contact with aliens, and the Navy guy assembled the first contact team the shrink recommended. The shrink has this “oh shit, I wrote that report to pay for a house moment” (familiar to Michael Crichton from all those pieces of shit he wrote to pay rent under the name John Lange) and goes to meet the team.

There's a bubbly astrophysicist who I mentally cast as Ron Howard (you can trust me on this shit, I'm good at casting), a moody mathematician I mentally cast as Samuel L. (and this is before Pulp Fiction, mind you), a workout-mad, tense biologist (Sharon Stone, no other options possible), and one random seasick dude they end up not bringing with them. To round out the Bowes cast, I had James Caan as the shrink and Scott Glenn as the Navy guy. In case you care.

So they go down to the bottom of the ocean to this “exotic-gas” habitat and get acclimated. They check out the spaceship, and there's a lot of bubbling from the astrophysicist about first contact . . . then they get a better look at the instrument panel by the door . . . and it's in English. Fuck! Man, that knocked me on my ass first time through.

The astrophysicist and the mathematician, who've been bitching at each other because the mathematician is grouchy and kind of playing this “I know everything three steps ahead” game, end up accidentally figuring out that the spaceship must have traveled in time, mid-bitchfest. They scribble equations and figure stuff out. Then everyone goes to explore the ship.

Most of what they find is kind of what they expected—future stuff—but they find this weird sphere. There are markings on it, and the mathematician figures out they're hiding a door. There's something inside. FUCK oh man oh man *flips pages*

After much trying to figure out how to open it up, the mathematician just does it without warning anyone. And then Weird Shit Starts Happening. People get killed (including the poor astrophysicist). Mucho drama. The “alien” from inside the sphere starts talking to them through the computer, and after a while they figure out that the mathematician is causing all the Weird Shit, so the shrink and the biologist overpower him and knock him into dreamless sleep so all the Weird Shit will stop.

But then the biologist goes into the sphere and Different, Weirder Weird Shit starts happening. The shrink soon finds himself facing mortal peril, and runs away to the spaceship and himself tries to enter the sphere. But he can't. Until he surrenders and just mentally pictures it open. Voila. Into the sphere.

Some of the worst writing of Michael Crichton's career ensues, like someone who's never done drugs trying to describe tripping and totally getting it wrong. But eventually, the shrink Figures It Out. The sphere causes one's wildest dreams to be manifested, and because the shrink is psychologically well-adjusted, no Weird Shit will happen when he comes out of the sphere. EXCEPT . . . he starts to make a run for it, abandoning the mathematician and the biologist. Whoops. He realizes his mistake, goes back to rescue them, and yay they all escape!

They get rescued by the Navy, and put their heads together to figure out what to do next. They all agree, even the “well-adjusted” shrink, that none of them handled the power granted to them by the sphere well. They don't even know what the sphere is, since as the mathematician points out, it could have some purpose that has nothing to do with granting human beings the capacity to manifest their subconscious. So they decide, as one, to forget the sphere, thus paradoxically erasing it from existence. OR DOES IT????? Shit, now you see what the fuck I had to deal with that day at school?

When the movie adaptation of Sphere was announced, I was very excited, because of all the Michael Crichton I'd yet read—and I'd read it all—Sphere always was the most cinematic of his novels to me. With a little second-act tightening, I thought it would kick ass left and right and leave bodies in its wake. When I heard who was going to be in it, I got real stoked, because I'd called Samuel L. and Sharon Stone like five years before. Dustin Hoffman? Hey, sure, not exactly what I'd pictured. Liev Schreiber? Wow, not Ron Howard. Okay, I guess. Okay, who's directing . . . Barry Levinson? For real? What the fuck are they gonna do, talk to the aliens about the fucking Baltimore Colts? Man . . . okay, okay, I'll give him a shot. But if Roy Hobbs comes out of the sphere I'm gonna be pissed.

Release date comes along. Nervous. Watch the movie. About ten minutes in, I just started going “Man, fuck you.” About halfway through, I was saying “Man, fuck you” like the Vietnamese guy in Robocop. By the time the movie ended, I just just pissed. This movie is the reason why I understand when people want to firebomb the studios, this shit was just fucking lazy. They threw $80 million bucks at it and went to the golf course. It's not even marginally redeemable due to camp value like Congo, which if you catch someone who doesn't really love the book and stick a joint in their mouth, they could have a decent time. It was this movie that made me realize if you could meet Samuel L.'s rate, he would literally do any movie, no matter how bad. And it only got worse . . .


Jurassic Park

Book—1990
Movie—1993 (dir. Steven Spielberg)

Like a lot of people, I'm sure, this was my introduction to Michael Crichton. My junior-high science teacher was raving about this book one day, and I read it, knowing I was going to be the only kid in class who would, and I figured, hey, maybe he'll think I'm less of a dipshit if I mention, hey, I read Jurassic Park too. Tried that, failed fucking miserably, he thought I was more of a dipshit for my complete lack of ass-kissing dexterity. Win some, lose some. So some junior-high science teacher who's long since forgotten me thought I was a dipshit . . . but I got to read a really fuckin good book about dinosaurs eating people.

Let's pause for a moment, and reflect on the beauty of this premise. You have man. Frail, fallible, fallacious man. Tortured by his own self-awareness, torn between his wants and his ability to obtain them, constantly reminded of his own mortality. Then, you have dinosaur. Dinosaurs kill shit. Dinosaurs kill, and then they eat, and then they kill some more, just to show mahfuckas who's gangsta. Two dominant life forms enter . . . one dominant life form leaves. Welcome to Thunderdome, motherfucker.

Jurassic Park is just fuckin perfect. It's got the poker-faced Michael Crichton fake “this is a true story” prologue, a couple chapters where he teases you with dinosaurs but doesn't call them dinosaurs. Eventually, after the Everyman Dinosaur Scientist is introduced along with his comely young assistant, the genius mathematician who Actually Knows What's Up (who fortunately has more of a sense of humor than the iteration of same in Sphere), and the eccentric billionaire who's Up To Something are all introduced, everybody heads to an island in Costa Rica. Where there are fucking dinosaurs.

Look, fucking dinosaurs fucking eat people in this fucking book. No plot recap. Fuck that. The mathematician tells the eccentric billionaire building a zoo/theme park with dinosaurs in it is a dumb idea. Wow, I hope you didn't sprain your wrist pulling that idea out your ass, doc. Of course it's a dumb idea to genetically engineer dinosaurs. You'd have to be fucking retarded to genetically engineer dinosaurs. They will fucking eat you. That is what they do. If it wasn't for that comet or whatever extinction level event that wiped them all out, dinosaurs would still be killing and eating everything. Which they do plenty of in this book, boy. And at the end, after the Everyman Scientist gets the billionaire's grandkids off the island, some dude comes up to him and basically tells him, “Dude, there are dinosaurs in Costa Rica. I don't mean that politically, like the rest of Central America, we're actually hip here. Actual fucking dinosaurs are fucking running loose. WE ARE FUCKED.” YES!

Now. I love Steven Spielberg. I don't “Armond White love” Steven Spielberg, because Charles Nelson Reilly and Liberace giving lapdances to Rock Hudson and Cary Grant with the DJ playing Judy Garland isn't that fucking gay. But I'm a big Steven Spielberg fan. Make no mistake. And I thought he was the perfect guy to make a movie of Jurassic Park, because he's just about the only guy who was around at the time who could make the dinosaurs look cool enough. But part of me always wondered . . . is Steven Spielberg really going to show as many shots of dinosaurs eating people as I require? Keep in mind, I'm the worst fucking candidate in the universe to have directed this movie: I would have made Tampopo with the dinosaurs as the truck drivers and the people as the noodles. I would have made Big Night, with Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub showing the dinosaurs into the restaurant and give them plates and plates of people to nosh on. (The ultimate fate of Messrs. Tucci and Shalhoub would have been a plot hole: wouldn't the dinosaurs eat them too . . .?)

Anyway, yeah, my problems with this movie are entirely due to my own monomaniacally misanthropic bliss at the notion of human beings being noisily and bloodily reduced to their basic elements in the large, powerful jaws of dinosaurs. Spielberg made a hell of a movie. Sure, Sam Neill was a dork, but fuck, if a scientist isn't allowed to be a dork, who is? Samuel L. was cool (and gets eaten by a dinosaur . . . SCORE ONE FOR THE OLD SCHOOL!) and Jeff Goldlbum was fun, and the only thing really wrong with this movie is that the ending is a little abrupt and convenient—suddenly there are no dinosaurs between the main building and the helipad? Meh, whatever. The rest of the movie fucking rules, even if the whole PG-13 thing meant all the people getting eaten by dinosaurs happens off-screen. But that makes it like a sex scene in a Code movie, you have to imagine it, which makes it better. And, no, I refuse to be self-conscious about the fact that I just compared dinosaurs eating people to sex.


Rising Sun

Book—1992
Movie—1993 (dir. Philip Kaufman)

Aaaaaaand we have Michael Crichton's political phase. Oh boy. The basic premise of this novel is that Japanese people are sociopathic, racist maniacs who are going to buy America and then kill us all. (Fundamental flaw, Mike, how many fucking times do I have to tell you it's evil white guys in suits who are going to kill us all . . .) Everybody in the fucking book bellyaches about “the Japanese” for pages apiece. There's kind of a cool who-done-it hidden underneath all that shit that becomes a how-done-it but Crichton pisses all that away by having the guy who actually killed the blonde white chick be a fucking Japanese guy, in full inscrutable glory.

It'd be one thing if, like he one-loved H. Rider Haggard in Congo, he was giving Sax Rohmer a scratch behind the ears here, but this isn't a self-conscious Yellow Peril homage, it's just a fucking rant about Japan buying up America. Now, in the aftermath of the skullfucking we got from Reagan, the American economy was in shitty enough shape that foreign investors came in and bought a lot of stuff for cheap, and a lot of those foreign investors were Japanese. They had money, we had shit to sell. That's global capitalism. But back in the early 90s, people were fucking losing it over this. Michael Crichton tapped into it, wrote Rising Sun, got a shitload of press, sold a lot of books, got rich(er).

Rising Sun sold enough books they decided to make a movie ASAP, giving Rising Sun Crichton's quickest turnover from book to film yet. Fortunately, Philip Kaufman is a reasonable man. He got the gig, he decided, all right, all the racist shit, bloop, gone. He cast Wesley Snipes as the protagonist, who wasn't really much of a character in the book, but as played by Wesley Snipes he was suddenly interesting (it also meant, thankfully, that the cringe-inducing line in the book where the Sean Connery character tells him, of living in Japan, “I felt like a nigger,” was cut). Sean Connery was a layup—Michael Crichton decided to make it so fucking obvious in this book, calling him John Connor, that to cast anyone else would just be tarded—and he rules, as redundant as that is to say. The killer's identity is changed; in the movie it's a white guy, proving that Philip Kaufman is a wise man indeed (need I even mention he wears a suit? Didn't think so).

The main thing the movie Rising Sun has is Eddie Sakamura. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, to me, became Eddie Sakamura after this movie, to the point where all I ever call him is Eddie Sakamura. He figures centrally in one of the funniest opening scenes ever; he's singing “Don't Fence Me In” in a karaoke bar with four Yakuza dudes with shades on and cigarettes hangin out the side as his backup singers. Eddie Sakamura is cool enough in this scene, but fuckin' hell his backup singers are awesome. They've got the perfect balance between bored cool and “hey, he's the boss, when the boss sings Don't Fence Me In, we fucking sing backup, BECAUSE THIS IS HOW MEN DO THINGS.”

Actually, if you don't have a whole lot of time, just watch the first scene. That scene alone is worth the price of admission; and the serviceable murder mystery plot that follows is okay, I mean, I have seen the movie like five times, but without all the racism there isn't a whole lot left.


Disclosure

Book—1994
Movie—1994 (dir. Barry Levinson)

Oh, so that's how Barry Levinson ended up directing Sphere. Reinforces my point about laziness, huh? Anyway, Disclosure. Disclosure is a nifty bait-and-switch; you think it's going to do for feminism what Rising Sun did for Japanese-American relations with the central premise that a guy gets sexually harassed by his female boss who then accuses him of sexually harassing her, and the boss character is enough of a raging, one-note bitch that it sure looks like Crichton wants us to think “yeah, once you start letting women out of the kitchen and into the vice-president's chair you're bound to have problems, unless she's in the chair cuz she's fuckin im! Amirite? Eh?” until you realize a ways into the book that the Everyman protagonist is being framed so his intel about his company fucking something up in Malaysia will be discredited. Problem is, the bad guys are so stupid, Everyman doesn't even realize what the damaging information is until he does some digging, so they basically went to all the trouble to have his boss sexually harass him and then sue him for sexual harassment for nothing. And, in the end, the female boss is the one who has to fall on the grenade. So, in a weird, awkward way, it's almost a statement about how women get shafted. Except she's too one-dimensional a character for you to really give a shit.

Anyway, the movie's better than the book, just because all the political horseshit everyone monologues about in the book is basically cut out, leaving a not-half-bad corporate espionage thriller, marred only by Demi Moore being, as always, godawful. Swap her out for someone who can actually act and you've got a rock-solid picture.


The Lost World

Book—1995
Movie—1997 (dir. Steven Spielberg . . . hey, shit happens)

Sequel to Jurassic Park. Piece of shit. Boring. If the sequel had picked up where the first one left off, that would have been great. Instead, there's a second island? For real? Fuck you, man.

The movie, naturally, sucks too, and is notable only for giving Vince Vaughn a (presumably) nice paycheck post-Swingers.


Timeline

Book—1999
Movie—2003 (dir. Richard Donner)

Good premise (quantum-physics based time travel), nice atmosphere (they travel to a well-researched and vividly realized medieval France), stupid fucking characters. The only memorable ones are Marek, who's there to dispense facts about the High Middle Ages and while impressively knowledgeable and adept at coping with the culture shock when they end up back in France, is kind of a dork, and Doniger, the bad guy, who's mainly memorable because he's so pointlessly assoholic to everybody. Well, there's the medieval chick Marek ends up wooing chivalrously, she's cool, she plays both sides against the middle in this really subtle way that's archaic in our day and age. And the lines in Middle English are cool. I mean, it's a good read if you've got a plane/train ride. But nothing earthshattering, and definitely not up to Crichton's previous standard.

The movie's fucking worthless. If you absolutely must see Gerry Butler in something because you just fapped that hard to 300, sure, check him out as a much-more-retarded-than-in-the-book Marek. Paul Walker shows up with his dazzling thespian skills as one of the most annoying characters in the history of literature, who in Paul Walker's hands actually becomes much less annoying, so good job, Paul. Guess those blue eyes and that modest charisma you got works in something other than a Fast and the Furious movie. If you could film a fart, you'd get Timeline.


As for Airframe, Prey, State of Fear, Next, Pirate Latitudes, and the untitled posthumous one, go to a book review site. If someone didn't film 'em, I don't give a fuck.

THE NAME IS BOND . . . JAMES BOND

And then there was Bond. Originating in print, springing forth from the mind of Ian Fleming, British spy James Bond has become the ultimate expression of a particular form of masculinity: sophisticated, lusty, ruthlessly competent, often at odds with titular superiors. The popularity of Fleming’s novels inevitably led to their being adapted into movies, and as of 2006—with the “straight” adaptation of Casino Royale, previously spoofed in 1967—all of them have now been done, with Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and Daniel Craig all playing the iconic lead (with David Niven, Fleming’s original first choice, playing him in the spoof Casino Royale).

With so many different actors, all of them quite distinct from each other, playing Bond, the canon is a difficult study. Some prefer a holistic approach: Bond is Bond, regardless of his portrayer. Some others, like me, are more selective, and simplify our study of the Bond universe by deciding, in a manner that may seem arbitrary to an outside observer, that certain entries in the series simply do not exist.

In conducting one’s study in such a manner, it certainly helps to be an asshole. Fortunately the fine philosophy of Assholism is not only subjective, but enables the practitioners thereof to happily ignore all dissent, or at the very best react to dissent with dismissive condescension. I personally take it as a point of philosophical pride to engage with a subject on its own terms, and James Bond—contain your gasps and accusations of blasphemy—is kind of an asshole. He drives way too fast, kills people, is constantly giving his bosses hypertension with his blithe disregard for proper procedure, and just about every woman who sleeps with him ends up dead within fifteen minutes. (And he never fucks poor Moneypenny . . .) However, and without any contradiction whatsoever, these are among the many reasons why Bond is so cool. He can do all this blatantly irresponsible shit because he’s fictional, and an avatar for our transgressive desires. This iconic status enables him to be the exception to the rule that the protagonist needs to be someone the audience can relate to. No one can relate to James Bond, except maybe Zeus.

Lest it appear that I’m being negative or overly PC in deconstructing Bond, I want to make one thing clear: I think James Bond is fucking awesome. There’s a very particular mood in which none other than Bond hits the spot for me, and I rewatch favorite Bond movies with high frequency. I don’t subscribe to the philosophy that heroes need to be flawless, and I have a nuanced enough intellect to compartmentalize negatives, because the human mind is never entirely one thing ever.

However, before we begin our trip through the cinema of Bond, let’s return for a second to the idea of selective existence. Some—quite a few, actually—Bond movies don’t really exist. These will, naturally, be skipped. Or, if a thing doesn’t exist, can it really be skipped? Scratch your beard to that one for a moment, why don’t you.

Dr. No (1962)—Exists

In which Bond investigates the murder of an intelligence official, discovers malfeasance perpetrated by the reclusive title villain, and ravishes the almost supernaturally gorgeous Honey Ryder. We don’t see Sean Connery earn his double-0 or in any way portray Bond as anything other than a fully-formed, complete entity, an invincible force of nature. In spite of this complete absence of character development, Connery pulls it off, because he’s Sean Connery. And he is James Bond. You best believe.

From Russia With Love (1963)—Exists

Bond does a bit more globe-hopping here, hitting up Turkey, Croatia, and Italy. The fascinating idea of a near-equal is introduced, in Robert Shaw (just about the only guy alive who could pull off something so apparently ridiculous). Bond and Robert Shaw beat the living shit out of each other in a train compartment in a really well-filmed—and long—fight scene a ways into the picture; Robert Shaw is so cool in this that you’re almost not certain Bond will win, which is particularly impressive. Lotte Lenya (hey, don’t look at me) shows up as a particularly nasty villain with knives in her shoes, and who furthermore puts moves on half-ass KGB mole Daniela Bianchi (who, while very hot, looks about as Russian as a Ferrari). Bond’s ability to turn women from evil to good through his fierce Scottish sexuality is introduced, enabling Daniela Bianchi to resist Lotte Lenya and embrace the West. Also, since 1991, has been funny because the big gadget Bond has to make sure the Commies (or SPECTRE or SMERSH who whoever the fuck they are) don’t get their hands on is called the Lektor. You know, because of Silence of the Lambs. Okay, my sense of humor is retarded sometimes. Moving on.

Goldfinger (1964)—Hell yes it exists

My personal favorite of the bunch, for a lot of occasionally idiosyncratic reasons:

--The hottest Bond girls. The tragically short-lived Masterson sisters are both stunners, and I’ve always had a thing for Pussy Galore (“My name is Pussy Galore.” “I musht be dreaming . . .”) in no small part because of her initial arctic, repressed, pantsuited impression, to which Bond naturally lays waste and pulls off the evil-to-good sex maneuver once again, even more impressively this time because Pussy Galore was more enthusiastically aligned with the bad guys than the wishy-washy KGB girl the last time around.

--Goldfinger’s motive? “There has been a masterpiece in every human endeavor . . . EXCEPT CRIME!” Fuckin-a right, Auric, do your thing, baby.

--“Do you expect me to talk, Goldfinger?”
“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”

--Goldfinger cheats at golf and Bond still kicks his ass. Golf is fucking ridiculous, and I would bulldoze every golf course in the world and put up a nature preserve or low-cost housing if given half a chance, but it’s important that Bond is good at golf, not just because Connery Bond is Scottish, but the kind of guy Bond is has to be good at golf.

--Oddjob is to henchmen what Bond is to cocksmen.

--The guy from the Gold Office or wherever who offers Bond that “rather disappointing brandy” has the coolest English accent ever. Well, until Michael Fassbender said, “Well, if this is it, old boy, I for one am going to go out speaking the King’s” in Inglourious Basterds, but records are meant to be broken.

--A very limited group of people can get away with the shit Bond talks about the Beatles right after he fucks Jill Masterson. Bond can because he’s Bond, and Sean Connery. My parents can because they liked the Stones, Kinks, Animals, and Dylan more, and it must have been mildly annoying having the Beatles on the radio all the time back then.

This whole movie has enormous balls. Goldfinger wants to rip off Fort Knox, for fuck’s sake. He’s playing in the majors. And it’s very important that at the end, Bond disarms the bomb just as the readout says “007.” Not because it’s a stupid joke and prefigures some of the more unfortunate detours into campy humor that the Bond movies would later make, but because Bond doesn’t break a sweat. What kind of cut-rate second-rater is lame enough that he has to leave it until the last second? People perspire that way. Bond has things so well in hand that he can save the day completely on his own terms. And bad jokes aren’t bad jokes when cool and/or sexy people tell them. That’s just the way it is.


Thunderball (1965)—Exists, conditionally

A lot of people love Thunderball, and Connery even remade it in 1983 as Never Say Never Again (which, although not an official Bond movie, also conditionally exists), but I find it kind of boring. I have a hard time keeping track of which Bond girl is Domino and which is the other one, and Emilio Largo is kind of cool, but not really. After Auric Goldfinger wanted to wreck the world economy basically for aesthetic reasons (god I love that guy), here’s this eye-patch wearing douchebag saying, “Hey, give me some money or I’ll totally nuke you. Seriously, I'm not kidding!” A real villain would have at least nuked Paris and then said, “Pay me or London’s next, bitch.”

It still conditionally exists, because when I’m able to compartmentalize and not compare Emilio Largo to Goldfinger, it is good. The opening sequence with the transvesto-villain was massive cool. And even though I can never sort out Domino and the other one, they are sisters, so that’s understandable, and they’re both hot.


You Only Live Twice (1967)—Exists

In which Bond goes to Japan, prevents World War III, fucks the girl from What’s Up Tiger Lily?, and first meets Blofeld. Written by Roald Dahl, which I always find funny, and is the reason I was once almost slapped for calling this “James and the Giant Budget.”

A source of great personal frustration to me for a really long time, when I was buying up all the Connery Bonds on VHS, because they weren’t selling any of them as standalones, they were all parts of six-tape sets which always included a couple of the shitty Roger Moore ones and one of the Timothy Dalton ones. Finally, after surrendering my desire and submitting to the void, I found it in a bargain bin for $5 and happily took it home. Fortunately it is pretty good, even though the series was getting overblown and borderline full of shit by this point. The action sequences are top-notch.


Casino Royale (1967)—Exists, is cool, but belongs in a different discussion entirely


On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)—Kind of exists

I mean, it’s a serviceable action picture. But it’s not Bond. George Lazenby’s good in the lead . . . but he’s not Bond. He even breaks the fourth wall and admits he’s not Sean Connery. Bond concedes alpha status to no one! Diana Rigg, on her own merits, is easily a top-three Bond Girl . . . but she marries Bond, and Bond doesn’t get married! Sure, she gets killed, but come on, man.

George Lazenby seems like a nice guy, but he doesn’t get to exist out of pity, he gets to exist because this is a pretty good movie if you can elbow the 800 lb gorilla out of the way—the one wearing the “this isn’t a real Bond movie” t-shirt—and enjoy it on its own merits. Also, Telly Savalas as Blofeld is a funny enough idea to carry one through the non-Bondness.


Diamonds are Forever (1971)—Exists, but shouldn’t push its luck

A lot of being able to enjoy this one hinges on one’s tolerance for Tiffany Case (Jill St. John) being kind of a hoi polloi Bond Girl. First of all, she’s American. Sure, she’s got attitude, and she’s got pulchritude, but still. We don’t home-grow exotic in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we import it. So, she’s got a major handicap. But there’s something about her line reading when she says, “Holy smokes, you just killed James Bond!” to James Bond that makes me unable to keep picking nits. Maybe she's not exotic, but she's got something.

There’s a lot of goofy shit in Diamonds are Forever. Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd are great. It’s got the best car chase in the Bond oeuvre (Sean Connery popping double wheelies in Vegas, as pure and good as any concept yet hatched in Western thought). Plenty O’Toole is plenty o’hot. Blofeld has hench-beauties named Bambi and Thumper, which is really stupid, but they manage to transcend the faulty nomenclature.

The climax is big, loud, and a little protracted, but ultimately exciting. Much like the movie, which in the end is worth it, but really stretches patience.


Live and Let Die (1973)—Just barely exists

Now we get to Roger Moore. Apropos of his debut, which cynically capitalizes on the then-fashionable genre of blaxploitation, I turn you over to Avon Barksdale: “You only do two days [in prison], the day you get in, and the day you get out.” Which is why the only two Roger Moore Bond movies that exist are his first, and his last.

There’s nothing empirically wrong with Roger Moore. As Roger Moore, he’s pretty cool (see Cannonball Run), and has a unique sense of style, in a square-ass kinda way. But the direction the Roger Moore Bond pictures took was sickening: Bond became a comedian under Roger Moore’s watch, which is unacceptable in itself. But Bond becoming a brutal misogynist is the last straw, and the reason why most of the Roger Moore movies don’t exist. There’s a big difference between a guy who gets laid a lot and a guy who has contempt for his conquests, and smacks them around, and basically carries on like a fucking pig. Sure, Connery smacked a couple women, but they were trying to kill him (the one by the pool in Goldfinger whose ass he playfully smacked and to whom he said, “Run along, man talk,” doesn’t count; although not the high point in the history of progressive gender relations, he was just messing around). Roger Moore’s Bond was a bloated, sybaritic gargoyle. Again, I don’t blame him. He didn’t write the scripts. He didn’t direct the movies. Then again, he didn’t seem to resist much either.

Anyway, Live and Let Die gets to exist conditionally because otherwise, Yaphet Kotto never would have gotten to be a Bond villain, and Yaphet Kotto goddamn deserves to be a Bond villain (which is probably what sustained him through putting up with Robert De Niro’s character’s bullshit in Midnight Run).


The Man With the Golden Gun (1974)—Doesn’t exist (which is a shame, because it’d have been nice to see Christopher Lee as a Bond villain in a real Bond movie)

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)—Doesn’t exist (though, oddly, its theme song does)

Moonraker (1979)—Doesn’t exist, even though the “Ben Affleck is THE MOONRAPER” joke in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back does.

For Your Eyes Only (1981)—Almost exists, they did try, but ultimately sunk by Roger Moore.

Octopussy (1983)—Can go fuck itself. Actually, it can’t go fuck itself, it doesn’t exist.

A View To A Kill (1985)—Exists, but not entirely on its merits.

Has the distinction of being the first Bond movie I actually saw. The Duran Duran theme song is stellar (though the video is fucking obnoxious even by their “good-looking broads on a yacht with cocaine and ennui bleeding out the eyeballs” standards). The only thing wrong with Christopher Walken being a Bond villain is that he was a little too young here. Frank White would have been a great Bond villain, even though Walken only had five more years of grizzle and idiosyncrasy on him at that point. Grace Jones fascinated the six-year-old me, and may be personally responsible for me being so warped sexually today; in spite of this movie being three-quarters a piece of shit, she ranks with the great Villainous Bond Girls.
Although it’s waaaaaaaay too long and really boring whenever Walken and/or Grace Jones is absent, the climactic Golden Gate bridge sequence is fairly kick-ass. Also, since this is the last Roger Moore one, it gets to exist so we can tell him not to let the door hit his ass on the way out of the series.

The Living Daylights (1987)—Doesn’t exist; the Timothy Dalton experiment, while conducted for the noble reason of washing the cyanide Roger Moore taste out of the audience’s mouth, chose the wrong antidote

License to Kill (1989)—Doesn’t exist, for the same reason.

GoldenEye (1995)—Exists!

Of all the people to restore faith in Bond . . . Pierce Brosnan? He wasn’t Connery, because no one is, but not being Roger Moore or Timothy Dalton was a big part of it. Brosnan was plausible with the ladies, acquitted himself nicely in the action scenes, and had a sense of humor that definitely held the vermouth. Interestingly, Brosnan had been the first choice of the producers when they ended up going with Timothy Dalton, but hemmed and hawed and didn’t really want to go with a damaged-goods franchise (the toxicity of Roger Moore’s impact cannot be overstated) but ultimately appeared to decide that enough time had past and the contract had enough zeroes following an appropriately high numeral that he could give it a shot this time around.

GoldenEye was the result of a couple very smart choices by the producers. The first being, get a suitable Bond, which they did, but the second was the clincher: actually make a kick-ass action movie. Don’t take it for granted that a modern audience that has forgotten how to take Bond (kind of) seriously will just go to a Bond movie unless it holds up on its own merits. At the same time, though, making an action movie where the hero just happens to be named James Bond won’t do either. We’re going to need a few things, each of which simultaneously pay tribute to the past and look forward:

--A domme villainess who crushes men to death with her thighs? Yup (Xenia Onatopp, modernizing Pussy Galore but without the ultimate redemption, since Bond’s ability to de-evil women with his dick died with Sean Connery.)
--A genuinely exotic and hot Russian ingénue played by an Italian model? Sure, why not (Izzy Scorupco, per Daniela Bianchi in From Russia With Love)
--Alan Cumming playing a greaseball computer nerd? Hell yeah. This has nothing to do with Bond history, it’s just kinda cool, and man is he slimy in this.
--Judi Dench is so good as M that Bernard Lee starts to fade from the memory, which has more to do with Judi Dench being Dame Judi than it has to do with Bernard Lee being weak.

The greatest asset GoldenEye has going for it, though, is its new-school villain: 006. First off, Sean Bean would be badass saying Merry Christmas to his grandmother. But the idea of a 00 going bad raises the interesting question: how far can Bond be pushed? And how much more of a moral exemplar will Bond appear by not cracking?

(Also, GoldenEye inspired one of the better video games of all time, and began a tradition of top-notch Bond video games, one of which inspired my biggest “if I ever have a couple hundred million bucks” filmmaking desires: to shoot a car chase without visible cuts. Sure, there’d have to be some digital compositing, but the idea of doing a car chase as a tracking shot makes me geek out nearly psychotically.)

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)—Exists

Doesn’t really hold up as well as GoldenEye, but when it came out this movie was fucking awesome. I saw this with my cousin in a freezing night in the middle of nowhere in Massachussetts and she was rendered rather weak-kneed by Jonathan Pryce’s Eurotrash lead henchman (but not so weak-kneed that she couldn’t utter a perfect summation of action cinema: “Violent movies are only cool when people are getting killed,” apropos of her calling me a nerd for liking Starship Troopers).

While I thought the Eurotrash bad guy was cool, Michelle Yeoh was more my type. Michelle Yeoh’s character in this was a tremendously risky gamble by the Bond producers: how to introduce a female equal for Bond who he still fucks senseless, but who he doesn’t have to save when the shit comes down. They kind of fucked up because she’s still all tied up and helpless at the end—horrendous bullshit considering the metric tons of ass she kicks earlier in the picture—but erring on the side of gender regressivism rather than PC is the more acceptable error for a Bond movie (since Bond movies exist in a bubble outside conventional morality).

Brosnan again is solid, and Jonathan Pryce basically plays Rupert Murdoch as Bond villain, which is brilliant since Rupert Murdoch is one of the rare real guys who basically are Bond villains. (Dick Cheney is, of course, the best: that sneer, and he actually fucking has a secret villainous lair! The next Bond movie should be Daniel Craig and some six-foot-one Brazilian model in a short skirt kicking Dick Cheney in the balls with nuclear weapons . . .) Even though this isn’t the most memorable entry in the series, it still has enough pluses to be allowed to exist, and as per the You Only Live Twice corollary, the fact that it apparently started as a treatment by Donald Westlake (??????) gives it sufficient goofball cred to ensure continued existence.

The World Is Not Enough (1999)—Doesn’t exist. In fact, the only two Denise Richards movies that exist are Starship Troopers and Wild Things, and neither owes their existence to her.

Die Another Day (2002)—Exists

The idea of 00s being pushed to the breaking point, first introduced in GoldenEye, is revisited here, with Bond getting thrown in a North Korean prison for a couple years and growing a Lebowski-esque beard in the process. Of course, Bond being Bond, he doesn't break. This leads to a glorious sequence wherein Bond, bearded and dressed in soaking-wet pajamas fresh off an escape from a yacht, strolls into the finest hotel in Hong Kong and calmly asks for a suite, a tailor, and some room service. Fuck what you heard, Brosnan pulled that off? He gets to be Bond.

The rest of the movie is largely over-the-top, with a lot of borderline blasphemous touches (Bond ordering a mojito and having “London Calling” playing as Bond touches down in the UK are both okay as far as I’m concerned, because who the fuck drinks martinis in Cuba, first of all, and second of all, Bond’s stability as a cultural icon is shaky enough due to all the hits it’s taken over the years that he needs to be diplomatic with the Clash, a disparate but similarly important cultural entity). Halle Berry fails miserably in the “hurf durf let’s give Bond a female ‘equal’ but let’s forget to three-dimensionalize her character” role, but it’s not entirely her fault, and she is sufficiently decorative. Miranda Frost, though, she’s my girl in this one—not only does she have that cold repressed thing going on (part of what makes her so sexy in that fencing outfit), but she be baaaaaad. (If you’re keeping score at home, yes, the sexiest movie of all time would feature nothing but tall, thin, emotionless women in glasses and tweed. Who chase each other in cars.)

The villain appears to be kind of a weak sister in this, when you think he’s Maggie Smith’s ginger son, but after the Scooby-Doo moment when we realize he’s really the North Korean guy, all is once again well. And he has a palace made of ice, which you really can’t fuck with, and Pierce Brosnan drives a car through it as it melts, which is pretty far out.


Casino Royale (2006)—Exists with extreme prejudice

I almost can’t sit still to write about this movie. A couple overheated, possibly ridiculous statements:

--Daniel Craig is as cool as Sean Connery. Daniel Craig is the English Steve McQueen.
--Eva Green as Vesper Lynd is on that Honey Ryder/Pussy Galore level.
--Any movie where the villain cries tears of blood is motherfucking on point.
---The Madagascar chase scene where Daniel Craig is huffing and puffing after the parkour guy is the single best foot chase scene in the history of cinema, period, point-blank, fuck off.

It’s hard to imagine a reboot being pulled off better than this. They even managed to make Bond a flawed, imperfect human being without dulling his edge as a badass in the slightest. Since this is an origin story, it’s important to see how Bond learned to be the Bond we’d previously known for 12 movies (remember, a bunch of them don’t actually exist), and part of that means he has to fuck up a couple times to learn from his mistakes.

The biggest issue I had with Casino Royale is microscopic, and so dorky I should probably be put to death. While since no one plays baccarat anymore, having Bond take down Le Chiffre at Texas Hold ‘Em instead makes sense, on the surface, since thanks to Rounders and ESPN everybody knows what turns, rivers, flops, cowboys, rockets, and the like are. But they play a lot more Omaha Hold ‘Em in Europe, so while Le Chiffre would probably be good at both, a tournament in Europe would probably have been Omaha rather than plain old Hold ‘Em. The point is this: if I’m stooping to these depths to find anything to criticize about this movie, it’s very good indeed.


Quantum of Solace (2008)—Bitch please

Goddammit, people, stop fucking shooting car chases with handheld cameras. It’s like heroin, doing it doesn’t make you cool. It makes you a fucking asshole. Mount the goddamn thing on something.

And please, for the love of Christ, don’t just cast a French guy as the villain and think that that’s enough. You’d think having a Swiss guy directing this one would have obviated that kind of silliness, but no. The bad guy isn’t doing anything all that bad in this; he’s barely even doing anything illegal. I guess Bond has to whomp on some Frogs on general principle due to producer fiat, or because the WGA strike didn’t give Paul Haggis enough time to finish the script . . . or because fucking Paul Haggis wrote the goddamn thing.

Unfortunately Quantum of Solace exists due to reasons beyond my control. As the most recent movie in the series, it’s the last one everyone saw, and we need at least a one-movie buffer before practicing our aesthetic Stalinism on the undesirables.


And Q. And Shaken Not Stirred. And the Aston Martin. And the music. And on and on til the break of dawn. Long live Bond!