Terminator 2: Judgment Day - 1991

"Terminator 2: Judgment Day" - 1991
Dir. by James Cameron - 2 hrs. 17 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

First off, the version of "Terminator 2" that I watched was the theatrical version.  When you crack two (or even three, heaven forbid) hours, I generally speaking am not at all interested in whatever deleted scenes are available - you can keep those, and I'm going to keep my fifteen minutes.

So this is the version of "The Terminator" that I was introduced to.  There are some pretty big differences between the first and second film, and I prefer this one to the first one.  But one of the main differences was that star Arnold Schwarzenegger was firmly cemented as a huge, huge deal, the kind of big deal that justified a leap in budget from $6.4 million (per Wikipedia) for the first installment to $94 million for the sequel.  This was an event film, completely inescapable, whatever the opposite of an underdog is.  Another huge difference: CGI.  One of the selling points of T2 was that the villain was made of liquid metal, which was one heck of a big deal.

Heh.

As with the first installment, two people are sent back in time, butt-ass naked.  One is a T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger), the other is a T-1000 (Robert Patrick).  As we've moved a number of years forward, the spawn of Kyle Reese's unholy demon seed and Sarah Connor's savior ova is now a child of ten or so.  John Connor (Edward Furlong) is a real person, living in a foster home, and is now the target of a Terminator.  But which Terminator?  The T-800 has been sent back in time from John Connor himself to protect his hide from the (liquid metal) T-1000, which confuses the hell out of Sarah (Linda Hamilton) when she is reintroduced to the T-800, inside the mental institution she's been stuck in for a considerable amount of time.  And there are a lot of things that get shot.

It would be hard to argue that James Cameron didn't put his budget to good use.  There are a number of iconic scenes (although the best of which just involves a naked Arnie strolling into a biker bar and treating it like a department store), and many impressive visuals.  The T-1000 really was something new and cool, even if it doesn't come off quite as impressively twenty-some years later.  That's special effects, baby.  The chase involving John on a dirt bike, the T-800 on a Harley, and the T-1000 in a semi through Los Angeles is as good of an idea as it sounds.  And the end battle in a smelting factory is incredible, even if there's no practical reason for them to be there, other than that's where they ended up.

One of the obvious comparisons I had in mind going in was to "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome."  The influx of cashish into a franchise fundamentally changes the film, which is hazardous when you've made your name on a gritty sci-fi film that isn't necessarily going to benefit from being slicker and more explosive.  The first two Mad Max films are incredible, the third one has a children's choir singing in the fucking forest.  The changes that occur between the first two installments here are also not entirely productive.  Yes, the T-800 comes off like a bad-ass (literally exiting the biker bar to George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone"), but they also turn him into a petulant child's play-thing (not to mention creating the dynamic for "The Iron Giant").  And maybe it was on purpose, but this Los Angeles is a very slick, clean world.  It might have been created that way to juxtapose against the horrific future that's coming, but I feel like that might be overextending credit.

The big problems that I had with T2 are ones that don't really matter to the vitality of an action film.  In a big-budget shoot-em-up, what matters first are big action sequences that are impressive and that you'll tell your friends they need to see.  T2 has those in spades.  It had a hot soundtrack (getting a couple of Guns 'n' Roses songs when that was a really big deal, instead of just a dispatch from some band people used to like and who never release anything anymore), catchphrases.  Whether or not it had a hot chick depends on what you thought of Linda Hamilton (and she was absolutely shredded here, so if you're into hardcore gym bodies, two thumbs up), but she had as iconic of a look as Arnold did.

Check out those guns!

The things that bugged me are things that drag T2 down from being an all-time classic to just something I'll watch when I'm bored and want to see things blow up.  Edward Furlong's screechy voice annoyed the hell out of me, as did the story's insistence of having a Terminator try to be non-violent (although Arnold murdered the shit out of some shins and ankles), as did the story's insistence on turning the T-800 from a nearly unstoppable killing machine into John Connor's big metal puppy.  Sarah Connor is wildly inconsistent; it's as if her time in a mental institution turned her into a crazy person (witness the scene where she goes after the inventor of Skynet).  If you like gym-rat chicks who cry all the time, this one's for you.  The dialogue still isn't any better than last time around.

So that evens out to a pretty good action film.  This is the best of the Terminator films I've seen, even if it's not perfect.  I was going to say that it was the last James Cameron film I've seen, but a quick look at his resume says that I definitely saw "True Lies," and that definitely came out after this.  I'm still not a Cameron fan, but I can deal with his work when he's blowing things up.  And he definitely blows things up in T2.

3.5 / 5 - Blu-Ray (Theatrical Version)

Lovelace - 2013

"Lovelace" - 2013
Dir. by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman - 1 hr. 33 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

"Lovelace" is the very definition of a "how the sausage got made" movie.  That doesn't have anything to do with the quality of this film, or the performances.  But it's important to know going in that this isn't a light-hearted, titillating look at how "Deep Throat" got made, or about the starlet herself.  This is a take-down of an iconic piece of '70s culture, and lays the blame at the feet of one particular person, and that might not be the sort of thing that you are up for in your choice of entertainment.  Do you enjoy portrayals of spousal abuse?  And worse?   "Lovelace" is definitely intense, particularly due to the structure of the film.

Linda (Amanda Seyfried) is a young suburban girl with a controlling family, and quickly falls for the charming Chuck (Peter Sarsgaard), a former Marine who owns a bar.  They end up getting married, and when Chuck runs afoul of the law (and money troubles), he decides to take advantage of a particular skill that Linda possess, and pushes her to be in a porno.  As it so happens, the movie in question, "Deep Throat," becomes the most successful film of it's kind (rumored to have drawn over $300 million at the box office, and that's in 1972 dollars, although much of it was cash, and thus unaccounted for), and turns Linda Lovelace (her new stage name) into a household name (and a repeated punchline for Johnny Carson).

Part of what makes "Lovelace" unique is the structure of the film, where it goes through the story once (up to a point), only hinting at the truly disturbing aspects of Linda's life.  Chuck comes off as charming and manipulative, and Linda seems wide-eyed and in over her head, but mostly game for whatever.  The second half of the film starts off with Linda taking a polygraph test on request from her publisher, because they need to be convinced that her accusations against Chuck are on the level before they'll print them.  And emotionally speaking, it's all downhill from here.  Chuck is portrayed as a drug-addled psychopath, turning Linda out for tricks whenever he's low on cash, and physically threatening and abusing her into agreeing to do "Deep Throat."  A common description of this scenario says that if you're watching "Deep Throat," you're watching Lovelace being raped over and over, which certainly colors how much one could enjoy that movie.  There's not much indication in the film that the other actors really knew what was going on, in terms of Chuck's threats and intimidation of Linda, aside from her co-star/make-up stylist noting some bruises on her thigh, but it's still a very murky situation.

A lot of this movie's merit rests on Amanda Seyfried's shoulders; she's alternately radiant and deeply tormented, but at no point can you take your eyes off of her.  This role is demanding, to say the least, and she completely nails it (even the recreations of the cheesy dialogue from "Deep Throat").  Without her performance, the material is so harrowing that I'm not sure it would be watchable, or compelling.  And this is a disturbing film.  I'm not sure that anyone really believes that the reality of making pornography is all sunshine and rainbows, at any point in history.  How far you want to argue that point is a political matter, and not one that I'm interested in delving into.  It's clear that in this instance, Linda was manipulated and coerced into doing things that she didn't want to do.  The question then becomes, what to do with the product itself?  What to do with work that was created under intimidation (or straight-up criminal conditions)?  This is the question that isn't addressed by "Lovelace," and even just to start a dialogue about the subject, I wish something had been put forth.

You don't have to go to the extreme of having someone performing non-consentual sexual acts on film to debate this point (and it's adjunct point - how much do you want to know about how your entertainment is made?), you can start with how Alfred Hitchcock treated the actresses in his films, and move sideways to works by people supposedly responsible for reprehensible acts, but there's nothing particularly criminal in how their work was made.  Or does it even matter?  Does it?  Do you care about the demands on a NFL player's health, or is that completely irrelevant to one's enjoyment of professional football?  For this film, "Lovelace" doesn't get into that.  It does tell you how "Deep Throat" got made (at least from one perspective), and if you care enough to want to know how this sausage patty got made, you're not going to finish this film in a good mood.  There is a choice each potential viewer has to make - do you want to look behind the curtain?  Deep down, each of know that it's not going to be pretty, but you've got to decide one way or another, and then decide if what you see is enough to deter you from enjoying "Deep Throat" (or anything in that genre, really) or not.  In this way, "Lovelace" is a deeply disturbing film that requires some self-examination out of it's audience, which might be as uncomfortable as enduring what Linda Lovelace did.

3 / 5 - Streaming

From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money - 1999

"From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money" - 1999
Dir. by Scott Spiegel - 1 hr. 28 min.

Trailer

I want to be as fair as possible when I write about movies, even when they do really unfair things back.  For instance, everything I've ever read about this movie mentions that Bruce Campbell is in it (and he's easily the biggest name involved), but his role is probably best classified as a cameo rather than a role.  And even though the fact that this was a straight-to-video (or straight-to-DVD, I'm not sure where the market was at in 1999) sequel should have tempered my expectations a bit, it's still a sequel to a collaboration between the two filmmakers who have the best handle on how to make trash entertaining (Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez).

As far as sequels go, this one doesn't carry over much from the original.  There are the vampires that can turn into bats, and Danny Trejo is still tending bar at the Titty Twister (he doesn't have much of a role here, either), but there's only one scene at the bar, and there's a passing mention of the Gecko brothers.  So, to be fair, I almost have to discount entirely what's come before, since "Dawn 2" doesn't make any substantial use of it.

So what's here?  Buck (Robert Patrick) is assembling a crew for a bank heist in Mexico, a haul possibly up to $5 million.  Meeting Buck in Mexico is Luther (Duane Whitaker), who runs his Jeep into a bat in the middle of the night, which starts a chain reaction of people turning into vampires.  Despite this, they still attempt the heist.  And there's a long, drawn-out gun fight that comprises pretty much the entire third act.

To be fair, this isn't a very good movie (even if I was to extend it every benefit of the doubt possible).  On it's own merits, it fails.  There's just too much bad acting (and not in an entertaining way), too many scenes that are drawn out beyond any reason (probably to fill time, and this still clocks in under 90 minutes), too many bad special effects (but again, not bad enough to be awesome like the "Evil Dead" series).  There's an inexplicable abundance of "potato-salad cam" shots (the first time I really noticed the POV shot was in some movie that had a woman walking through a dinner party with a tray of potato salad, inside of which was the camera).  There's the push-up cam, there's a safe combination dial cam, there's a Luther's head cam (when he arrives at the Titty Twister, there's a POV shot that has the brim of his hat visible), there's even a vampire's tonsils cam that's used repeatedly.  That's probably only half of the uses of that particular shot, and it's such a bizarre visual tic to decide to use over and over again.

If I was going to be unfair, I'd probably note that following up a Tarantino movie or a Rodriguez movie with your weakest sauce is a bad idea.  Granted, this kind of movie isn't going to have the benefit of George Clooney or a script by Tarantino, but there are plenty of things that were interesting in the original that could have been imitated (even badly).  Too bad they went for the vampire angle, instead.

1 / 5 - NF Streaming