Volume 15 - Event Horizon and Being Blinded by Science

I'm not good at science, you guys. I paid a lot of money for a piece of paper that says I'm a bachelor of it, true, but the reality of the matter is that my talents more resemble another meaning for the acronym B.S. Heck, I don't even like science.

I'm not saying I don't like science like how a Republican doesn't like science; I acknowledge that it's out there. I'm just not the person to deal with it. Other people are better at science than me, and that's fine. Those people probably haven't played as much Tecmo Super Bowl as I have. Let's call it even and move on.

Despite my oppositional stance toward it, I spent a lot of time thinking about a movie with science in it this week. So, in the name of science - kind of - let's take a look at that movie and talk about how much of a non-sciencer I am.

HOW THIS WORKS
Step 1) I pick a movie.
Step 2) I tell you about the movie.
Step 3) I tell you what we're looking for in a double feature movie.
Step 4) Another movie!
Step 5) Victory!

Event Horizon

1997, Dir. by Paul W.S. Anderson

I'm not gonna say Event Horizon is an incredibly smart sci-fi movie. But it's got enough science in it to confuse me. Perhaps I should be embarrassed when I admit that, and maybe I am a little. I'm not to proud to admit it.

There are definitely people out there who understand Event Horizon much more than I do. One such person is a great writer named Elbee, who recently wrote this wonderful article celebrating the film's 20th anniversary over at the fine site Cinepunx. I've read this article, which spells out some of the film's science and some of its theory with great detail, a couple of times now. It makes me want to be a smarter person. It makes sense, which is something I gotta fight through like four edits to get to, and it even shows an understanding of the influences and themes at the heart of this deceptively tricky piece of pulp sci-fi horror. It's the kind of insight you readers deserve, yet it's not the type of insight you will get from me when we talk about Event Horizon. I have no tongue for it.

Event Horizon is the tale of a space ship named, you guessed it, the Event Horizon. It was sent to explore the edge of our solar system in 2040 - a place I thought had already been explored when the film was released in 1997, because science and I don't talk much - and disappeared. Then, in 2047, a rescue named "Lewis & Clark" (I understood that reference! It's not science!), is sent to rescue it when its distress signal appears. Accompanying the crew on their journey is the man who designed the Event Horizon, Dr. William Weir (Sam Neill, who apparently was heading to space to avoid dinosaurs), and he's there to explain exactly how much science the movie wants us to think about. My buddy Elbee makes a great point in her article that bears repeating here - you would assume that a bunch of astronauts understood something about science. But what Event Horizon presupposes is - What if they didn't?

I'm fine with that presumption, because I struggle to understand it. I like to think I'm smart, but the more technical terms Neill and friends throw at the screen the more I get a blank stare on my face. You know when your friends are all talking about that TV show you don't watch - in my case, we'll say The Bachelor, and you're not trying to be rude and just leave the party so you just sit there and nod and do one of those "huh" or "ohhh" noises every 27 seconds? That's me when dude starts talking about the physics of space travel...if that even is what he's talking about.

(Off topic, but the 27 second interval is the key to this method of polite disinterest. If you make it 20 seconds, someone else who's not paying attention is gonna be counting and they're gonna notice that it's an even number and they're gonna call you out on it. If you wait for 30 seconds you're gonna seem out of it for too long, and people will know. Trust me - 27 is the perfect number. Try it out sometime. You'll thank me.)

The things we learn when the Lewis & Clark gets to the Event Horizon are:

• Everyone on board is dead.
• The ship is creepy as hell.
• The ship has been to another dimension.

I understand the first two items there pretty well and then all of a sudden WHOA ANOTHER DIMENSION? If this was Twitter I'd throw some cutesy gif about my mind being blown into this paragraph, but this is the real world and I have to use words for my feelings. Apparently, as I understand it, The ship named Event Horizon (inside the movie Event Horizon, naturally) was just chilling out by Neptune, looking around, having a good time, when POOF IT WAS GONE TO SOME PLACE ELSE. And not some place else like Kentucky, but some place else that's not even on the same plane of existence as Kentucky. And not a plane that you fly on either.

When I put it that way it's not too hard to understand, but the more Weir and the confused crew, led by the super fantastic Laurence Fishburne as their no nonsense captain, talk about black holes and how things work with physics...the more I start to doubt myself. And then I see little details in the film that make me question the science even more. At one point a character gets jettisoned out into space and I look at all the little white lights behind him and the only thing I can think is "There's no way there's that many stars grouped so close together out there! It looks like something I would have drawn when I was five and just had my first Mountain Dew and couldn't stop putting dots on the paper so it looked like I used all the space and actually drew something!" Clearly, at this point I'm letting Event Horizon get the best of me and my science-resistant brain.

But, here's the good part. We learn pretty near the middle of the film that this other dimension the Event Horizon (the ship) went to - might just be Hell. And that's good for me. It can't be proven or quantified. I like that in my horror, and I like that in my sci-fi. That's where Event Horizon (the movie) - which has just as many creepy and gory images as it does arguments about physics and other sciences I don't get - works so well for me. 

Sure, it's basically Alien without an Alien (and with a far too spastic electronic musical score), but it does a good job of being that while freaking its characters out in unique ways. I can dig a movie like that, even if I don't feel like I'm smart enough to really understand what it thinks it is smart enough to tell me.

At this point I've said about all I can say about Event Horizon without sounding too stupid. (Well, maybe I'm already there.) So when I thought about explaining what I'm looking for in a double feature to go with it, i thought it would be best if I focus on the things I understand about Event Horizon, and how I can build off of them.

• The characters in the film and the things they are up against belong in two separate dimensions. While I don't quite understand the physics of that, I'm a big fan of movies that pit our reality and the expectations we have about it up against another place that's...to put it simply, quite different. 
• Outside of the seemingly all-seeing Weir, the characters in Event Horizon are kinda normal people who, despite being trained for the predicament they're in, are always playing catch up against the unknown forces they face. They try really hard, and I like that about them. I kind of wish they were more open to the things around them though, but they do their best.
• When things get really icky for the characters in Event Horizon, they come across some creepy black goo. There's something about horror and sci-fi movies with creepy black goo that just makes me smile, so I'm looking for another creepy black goo movie. (I probably won't talk about this again, but I felt like mentioning it here because typing "creepy black goo"is so much fun.)
• When in doubt, the crew of the Lewis & Clark have one of my favorite theories for attacking the evil they can't understand: burn it down. You can science me all you want, but most of the time fire is a great answer. Let's look for people who take on another dimension that way too.

The film I'm about to recommend to you certainly doesn't live in the same world as Event Horizon. But it's a movie that embraces the things I understand about movies like Event Horizon, and it's a movie that challenges reality while not relying on that pesky ol' science that I don't want around. We're making concessions for my inadequacies as a learner with this double feature, I admit it. 

Please stay with me. Because we're gonna have some fun doing it.

John Dies At The End

2012, Directed by Don Coscarelli

Don Coscarelli is my kind of director. When he wants to go to another dimension, he throws the science right out the window. The man made two of my very favorite horror movies - Phantasm and Bubba Ho-Tep - both of which challenge reality in playful ways. Yet his most recent film, John Dies at the End, might be the wildest thing he's ever made. Inside it, alongside two fantastic leads (Chase Williamson and Rob Mayes) and two iconic character actors (Paul Giamatti and Clancy Brown), is a character that understands the whole "other dimensions and evil" problem in a very similar manner to myself.

His name is Detective Lawrence Appleton (no one will ever convince me he's not named after Mark Linn-Baker's iconic character from Perfect Strangers), he's played by Glynn Turman (who starred in an underrated '70s gem, J.D.'s Revenge and deserves much love), and he easily gives my favorite performance in this insane, dimension-hopping, drug-induced vacation from reality. There's a moment in the middle of the film where he confronts the film's central character, David Wong (Williamson), about what's going on in this bizarre situation. His explanation of what he thinks is going on, quoted below, is pretty much the perfect representation of how a non-sciencer like myself thinks when faced with the kind of situations these two films offer up.

"You know, everybody's got a ghost story, a UFO or a Bigfoot story. Now what I think is that stuff is both real and not real at the same time. I ain't no Star Trek fan and I don't know about other dimensions and all that. But I am an old school Catholic and I do believe in Hell. I believe it ain't just rapists and murderers down there. I believe it's demons and worms and vile things; the grease trap of the universe. And the more I think of it, the more I think it's not some place 'down there' at all, that it's here, all around us. We just don't perceive it. Just like how the country music radio station is out there, in the air, even if you ain't tuned to it."

Take out the Catholic part - in the immortal words of Bob Dylan, "It ain't me, babe" - and Detective Appleton just described my understanding of other dimensions and the evils in the world to a T. Which is pretty amazing, since we've never met. I guess Detective Lawrence Appleton and I are (you guessed it) PERFECT STRANGERS.

Like Event Horizon, John Dies at the End is a movie I've seen at least a handful of times - it's a young flick, but it is incredibly rewatchable - and could not explain to you without using the phrase "AND THEN THINGS GET NUTS!" But while Event Horizon tries really hard to explain the science behind its madness, this one embraces a sort of lunatic philosopher role. As the film starts the narrator poses a conundrum, a rambling logic puzzle about undead beings and axe repair that has nothing to do with the rest of the film's plot, and this kind of logic (or lack there of?) never stops coming at the viewer as the characters face some of the most bizarre encounters you'll find in a horror film.

It would be unfair if I didn't list some of those bizarre struggles, so here's a quick run down of just a few of the things we encounter while following these characters:

• Meat monsters
• A flying insect moustache
• "Eyes Wide Shut World

If any of those things make sense to you based on any science class you ever took - God bless that teacher. If you have their number, send it on over to The Mike. I have so many questions.

Another major departure from the first film in our double feature are the two lead characters, Dave and John. Everyone on the Event Horizon - aside from the doctor, who obviously knew more about the titular ship than them - is hesitant when faced with the reality-altering visions they see throughout their film. On the other hand, Dave and John are carefree and open-minded. This horror comedy's best joke might be the presentation of how level headed these two ordinary guys are in the face of shapeshifting monsters and gateways to other worlds. There's very little fear shown by either character, and their calm approach to such a bizarre series of events keeps the viewer smiling throughout the film.

It might seem like a disservice to pair Event Horizon with a film that throws out any of the logic and science that it works very hard to incorporate, especially as I explain just how far the second film's tone deviates from the focus on terror that the first was built around. I'd argue that those departures are what makes this such a fun double feature, because Event Horizon is so effective in its use of science to create terror (even if I don't understand it) that following it up with another film with the same goals would maybe be a bit too heavy for even a horror loving viewer like me.

By the time you see the alternate dimension that John and Dave travel to late in their film, you'll understand that John Dies at the End is not interested in painting the same picture of Hell that Event Horizon did. And that's quite fine. Both of these films are nightmare scenarios that challenge reality and make things pretty gross and gory at times, but some nightmares are just weird and wacky and not as terrifying as some other nightmares. I think we've got room for both kinds of nightmares in horror cinema.

Both of these films will make you think, will make you squirm, and will surprise you. One will scare you more than the other, and one will make you laugh more than the other, even if it relies on a few too many dick jokes. If you want to see some science go wrong, but don't want to spend too much time trying to understand that science, try out this double feature and enjoy the ride through a few unique nightmare dimensions.

Volume 14 - Jackie Brown and the Inconvenient Criminal Romance

Welcome back to the Double Feature Picture Show, and a double feature that's probably the easiest one I've ever come up with. And yet - people don't really talk about these two movies together. In fact, I don't think people talk about both of these movies near enough, because they're two of my favorite movies of all-time.

So, here's two films from the late '90s, by two of the most acclaimed directors of the last 25 years. What's our common theme here, you ask? Aside from some obvious connections, I think it's that crime can be pretty romantic.

Yeah, that's a weird thing to say. But let's take a look at a couple of films and see what happens.

HOW THIS WORKS
Step 1) I pick a movie.
Step 2) I tell you about the movie.
Step 3) I tell you what we're looking for in a double feature movie.
Step 4) Another movie!
Step 5) Victory!

Jackie Brown

1997, Directed by Quentin Tarantino

There are people that think you're a snob when you say Jackie Brown is your favorite Quentin Tarantino film. It's the hipster answer to that question, they say. I don't like those people very much. I forgive them. It's not like there's a bad answer to that question. Dude is pretty talented.

That said, Jackie Brown is definitely my favorite Quentin Tarantino film. I could list a lot of reasons for that, the simplest of which is that the characters in the film are just so beautiful to me. There are a bunch of great characters played by great actors here, but the two characters at the center of the film - Pam Grier's Jackie Brown and Robert Forster's Max Cherry - are two people I truly love.

By rule, when your name is in the title you're probably the center of the film. That's true of Jackie Brown, a 44 year old stewardess for a small Mexican airline who lives in Los Angeles and moonlights as an employee for a gun-running crime lord, Ordell Robbie. Ordell is played by Samuel L. Jackson who, with all apologies to Pulp Fiction, might give his most vulgarly Samuel L. Jackson (that's the verb usage, as in "He Samuel L. Jacksoned the hell out of that profane rant") performance here. One of the major complaints about this film when it was released is how willingly Tarantino and Jackson were to fill the script with racial slurs - a criticism that would return with a vengeance when Django Unchained happened - but it's the profane portrayal of Ordell that really sets up the viewer to support Jackie. Her participation in his crime operation is never fully explained, however it's clear that she needs to take these actions to make ends meet.

Jackie is a criminal - she willingly runs money for Ordell - but she's never portrayed as a bad person. This is especially true in the eyes of Max, the bail bondsman Ordell hires to pick her up from jail after she is caught bringing in a package for him. Forster's Max is a person who seems to be in tune with everyone he meets, something of an empath who doesn't judge the people he meets while being careful about who he trusts based on his perceptions. It's clear from their first meeting that he knows Ordell is not to be trusted, and also it's clear when he sees Jackie that he's enamored with her.

Max has always appealed to me as a character because he's caught up in something he didn't really intend to join - the world of Ordell and his criminal enterprise is surely outside his professional comfort zone - yet he never really wavers in his emotions. He's a calm, introspective character, and he always keeps his emotions close to his chest. We can see by his approach that he's intrigued by Jackie, but there are no grand proclamations of love from the stoic man. When they meet in her house one morning - Max had to stop over because Jackie borrowed his gun without permission, naturally - a song she likes draws his attention. To me, that means he's in love.

The song Tarantino features here, Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time) by The Delfonics, is a soulful ballad that sounds a lot more romantic than it is. It's the kind of song you'd expect a woman who grew up in the 1970s to play, not the kind of song you'd expect a bail bondsman to be into. He asks what it is, she tells him, and he heads straight out to a music store from the '90s to buy the cassette tape for his car. (Man, that scene is a glorious time capsule when you watch it today. If you lived through the '90s like I did, you knew that store.) I can't confirm this is the only song Max listened to for the rest of the time he knew Jackie, yet every time we see Max in his car he's listening to it. And that just makes my heart smile. I like to believe he listened to that song on repeat for weeks. 

I can tell you, as a stoic hopeless romantic myself, there's nothing better than a soulful ballad that sounds a lot more romantic than it is. Especially if it reminds you of someone you can't stop thinking about. One of my favorite moments in the film is when Forster's Max tells Jackie "I'm 56 years old. I can't blame anyone for anything I do." - yet we know deep inside that he's just enamored with the opportunity to be in Jackie's life at this moment. He made the choice to follow her into a tricky con game with Ordell and the choice to buy a cassette full of soothing melodies. He never really chose to be caught up in Jackie the way he is though, that just happened when he saw her.

The heart wants what the heart wants, even if it's the heart of a 56 year old bail bondsman. Robert Forster got an Academy Award nomination for this role, and even though Burt Reynolds and Robin Williams were great that year I'd vote for him to win that statue every day. Though it's Pam Grier's movie, and a great tribute to her reign over exploitation cinema of the 1970s, the reaction she gets from Max is what gives Jackie Brown the biggest heart of any Tarantino film. Viewers might come for the catchy crime plot and the snappy dialogue that the director made famous, but for me it's the meaningful platonic relationship between the heroine and her friend that really makes this film soar.

If you know anything about Jackie Brown's cast, the source material that it was adapted from, or the time period when it came out, you've probably got an idea where I'm going with this double feature. For those that don't let's take a look at the reasons for the double feature I'm about to offer up.

• Jackie Brown is adapted from a novel, Rum Punch, by one of the great crime writers of the late 20th century, Elmore Leonard. Leonard had already been a force in Hollywood for more than 25 years by the mid '90s, with plenty of his works being adapted and several screenwriting credits. He experienced something of a reappraisal in the mid '90s, and from 1995-1998 three of his more recent novels were adapted into successful Hollywood crime flicks.
• Tarantino made Jackie Brown with Grier in the lead because he wanted to make a movie for her, despite the fact the lead character in Rum Punch was a white woman named Jackie Burke. (The name change is a nod to Foxy Brown, one of Grier's most famous roles.) The next adaptation of Leonard's work also starred a minority woman in a role that the author had written as white. Two major Hollywood productions that cast women of color in white roles? That's something we don't see every day, and it's very double feature worthy.
• And, of course, I'm looking to expand on the theme I mentioned in the introduction - the romantic aspect of crime. Jackie Brown succeeds because Jackie, a criminal, is presented as a complex individual in a complex situation. Max, who seems like he should be a straight arrow kind of guy in his line of work, is portrayed as someone who sees the bigger picture and is willing to consider multiple sides of the story. These are the kind of characters that a lot of movies and books don't understand, yet Leonard and the two fine directors working on these films were willing to blur the lines between right and wrong when feelings get involved.

So, let's jump ahead almost six months to the day from the Christmas 1997 release of Jackie Brown to June 26, 1998, and the summer release of a very different, yet very romantic, Elmore Leonard adaptation.

Out of Sight

1998, Directed by Steven Soderbergh

You're not wrong if you think the relationship between Jackie Brown and Max Cherry is sexy; they're two of the most beautiful souls I've seen in film, and the movie leaves plenty of opportunities for the mentally adventurous to write some fan fiction about their love. The next major Leonard adaptation out of the gate in Hollywood, Out of Sight, is a far more direct attempt to get your knickers in a twist. And it's a pretty good - and pretty tasteful - one at that. More on that in a minute. We can't get right down to the sexiness without setting the mood, can we?

(No. We can't. I'm not like that, you guys. KEEP YOUR EYES UP HERE.)

(Thank you.)

If Robert Forster and Max Cherry are the men I want to be when I grow up (Spoiler alert: They are.) then George Clooney and Jack Foley are the men I wish I was when I was younger. Jack's a bank robber - and not a very good one, at that - which isn't a quality I wish I had. What he lacks in criminal prowess is made up for in pure coolness. Sure, he got busted robbing a bank because his car wouldn't start. But his plan to trick the teller into thinking a random dude was an associate with a gun was pretty clever. And he walks around like he's the man, and because of that...people kind of think he's the man. You gotta respect that confidence. My dad used to say "Walk like you know where you're going!" when I asked him why we were doing things like sneaking into Lambeau Field on a Friday afternoon, and I think Jack Foley's dad - or someone else in his life - might have taught him the same thing too.

Like Jackie Brown, Jack meets someone on the other side of the law when he gets out of prison. She's Karen Sisco, played by Jennifer Lopez, and she's a U.S. Marshal who's trying her hardest to be taken seriously in the predominantly male world of law enforcement. The problem she runs into when she meets Jack is that she's not supposed to be picking him up from prison - he just happens to escape into a parking lot that she's waiting in. She becomes a hostage of Jack and his partner Buddy, played by Ving Rhames (another role the author wrote as white that was changed during casting), and ends up riding in the trunk of her own car, playing little spoon to Jack while he's still filthy from his underground prison escape.

This is an uncomfortable predicament for her, but that cool confidence that Jack has been showing us made its way into the trunk too. Too calm to fight in a no-win situation, Karen begrudgingly accepts small talk with Jack, which turns into talk about movies that parallel their situations like Bonnie & Clyde and Three Days of the Condor. The latter film, in which fugitive Robert Redford strikes up a relationship with hostage Faye Dunaway, is a clear metaphor for their predicament and an inspiration for the film's approach to it. Even though Karen knows that Jack Foley is a criminal, there's something attractive about him. Because he looks like the guy who was voted Sexiest Man Alive in 1997, and also because he's cool in the face of such a unique situation.

He's a far different person than Jackie Brown, yet Jack Foley fits into same criminal profile in many ways. He's doing what he does because he can, because he's trying to get ahead. He's not violent, and when faced with a more savage criminal (like Ordell was to Jackie) he always seems to be on the side of peace and sanity, using his wit to keep himself afloat. He's less aggressive than Jackie, but they're both cunning and easy to root for.

Karen isn't necessarily rooting for Jack - after all, she's professionally obligated to get him back behind bars - though she is willing to give him a chance. The first time she sees him after their initial split, she pauses when the chance to bring him back in arises. Jack is shocked at her inaction, and sounds dumbfounded when he tells Buddy "She just sat there, looking right at me." To the outside viewer it's almost like Karen is in a trance when she sees him, but we've seen the thoughts she's had about him since they last met. She later describes wishing that they "could take a time out," and it becomes clear that she's taking things in stride the same way Jack is.

When they meet again, in a Detroit hotel bar with a snowy view of the seemingly peaceful city behind them, the result is one of the sexiest not-really-sex scenes ever put on film. Moments of Karen and Jack explaining their feelings are intercut with what happens when they make their way to her hotel room. The scenes in the hotel room are stunning, mostly because the film chooses not to show us what happens when they get to bed. 

We see them having drinks quietly, gently touching each other, and moving into the bedroom where they watch each other undress from opposite sides of the bed. David Holmes' musical score beautifully punctuates the whole sequence, leading up to the moment when they jump in bed with gleeful looks on their faces. The camera pauses on their embrace and kiss, and that's as far as we need to go. We've seen how much excitement they have to be in this moment, showing any more than that would actually make the whole thing less sexy.

Out of Sight and Jackie Brown both do a perfect job of showing us characters who come together despite the different paths they are on, and through all the films' similarities - I haven't even mentioned the fact that Michael Keaton plays the same character, ATF/FBI agent Ray Nicollete, in both films, placing them in a shared universe - that's the tie that really brings them together for me. Max, Jackie, Karen, and Jack all seem to be living in the moment despite the odds against them - and it's their willingness to accept their place in that moment and enjoy what they have that feels so pure and romantic to me.

We don't always get to choose how and when we meet someone in life, and circumstances that are outside our control may doom a romance from the start. It's worth taking a look at the characters in each of these films and the peace and happiness they find in their situations. None of them necessarily end up where they want to be, but they each come out of their situations with a hope that was missing from their life before and experience happiness they didn't expect to find during their brief moments together.

A nice thing about the world is that you don't have to be a criminal or the person responsible for their freedom (or lack thereof) to take the same approach to your life. Crime is an easy backdrop for these relationships in Leonard's stories, yet any of us could adapt the attitude of these characters to our relationships. The best scenes between these characters are fantastic reminders of how beautiful the moments we spend together can be, as long as we're willing to take chances and challenge ourselves to be open to the opportunities. 

Maybe it's not how we all should live our lives - fortune favors the bold....patience is a virtue....it's all so confusing! - but I like watching these characters do what they do for each other. So if you feel like watching foul-mouthed crime dramas that are led by some open minded romantics, this is the pair of films for you.