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Filtering by Tag: James Cameron
When you're smiling, the whole world smiles at you. (20th Century Studios)
My Washington CIty Paper review of Alien: Romulus, the 45-year-old franchise’s first legasequel, is here. Lest anyone fear I have not had enough to say about these slimy, sweaty movies that I so love, even when they’re bad. Which this new one is not!
In space, no can hear your scream at your A.D.
No film franchise has had a more accomplished class of filmmakers explode from its womb than the ALIEN-iad. Extraterrestrial, extraterrestrial, read all about it in the Paper of Record.
Halldeckers! Merrymakers! Gay Apparel-donners! It’s been another exhausting journey, but my 2022 yulemix, The Airborne Yuletide Event, is now complete in its two-sided analog entirety. And I only cheated on the length a little.
Longtime listeners may spot nods to installments past here and there, because to neglect such a long and rich and long and storied and long history would be ungrateful, somehow. But the vast majority of these 103 minutes — 54 percent of the run-time of Avatar: The Way of Water by volume — are comprised of entirely new old material. There’re even four actually new, released-in-2022 yuletunes strategically sprinkled throughout this most festive and beguiling of sonic canvases.
Listen close, my dear ones, and listen loud. Merry Christmas.
My man Big Jim Cameron isn’t just a vegan pea protein farmer, he’s a committed recycler. Hey, at least he’s got the good taste to steal from the best.
This exhaustive-and-yet-surely-incomplete list I made of his many self-homages in the new Avatar: The Way of Water is up at Vulture.
Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, Zoe Saldaña, and Sam Worthington shooting one of the current or forthcoming Avatar sequels at some point between late 2017 and early 2020. (Fox)
James Cameron only releases a new feature film every dozen or so years, so you’ll forgive me if I’m excited. My Avatar: The Way of Water media blitz kicks off with a fun PCHH wherein Stephen Thompson, whom I’d incorrectly predicted would hate this movie, Reanna Cruz, and I talk through our reactions, and I plug my holiday mixtape.
The great Aisha Harris hosted this conversation wherein I had the good fortune once again to join my old pal Linda Holmes and my new pal Roxana Hadadi. I had a whole digression when we recorded about The Abyss, James Cameron’s first seafaring disaster romance, released only eight years before Titanic, and from which Titanic derives a lot of its technique and one or two of its sinking-ship set pieces.
Titanic was not a film anyone other than Cameron was pushing to make when he pitched it to Fox Chairman Bill Mechanic in early 1995. (He wanted a movie studio to pay for his dives to the wreckage, which constitute the first footage he shot for this movie.) It’s not a film where Fox would have simply hired another director to make it had Cameron acceded to the prevailing wisdom and decided to focus his energies on anything else. Cameron is also the person who cast Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, so the movie is a Cameron project from whatever the shipbuilding equivalent of “soup to nuts” would be. I think it makes sense to foreground Cameron in any discussion of it. Try to imagine Christopher Nolan making a movie now that adolescent girls embraced and returned to again and again. That’s what happened in in the last two weeks of 1997 and the first quarter of ‘98, when the gearhead writer/director of the first two Terminator films, and Aliens, and True Lies, and yes, The Abyss, turned in a romantic tragedy where in the big boat doesn’t hit the iceberg until an hour a forty minutes into the movie.
Gabriel Luna as the latest model Terminator, the Rev-9. (Kerry Brown/Paramount)
No amount of Terminator scholarship is too much if you're me. So just as the new Terminator: Dark Fate (which bombed over the weekend, but you people keep buying tickets for those The Fast & The Furious movies, so there's no accounting for taste) is a follow-up to 2015's Terminator: Genisys (sic) that's really a sequel to Terminator 2: Judgment Day,...
...the piece that I published on Slate tonight is a sequel to my Terminator: Dark Fate review from last week that's really a sequel to a longish T2 essay I wrote five summers ago for The Dissolve, may it rest in power. When I observed in my review of Dark Fate that the series finally got some of its old zeitgeist-surfing mojo back, this is what I meant.
Mackenzie Davis and Linda Hamilton working together are a cybernetic assassin’s worst nightmare.
As in every Terminator movie, the new Dark Fate offers no explanation for why the A.I.—SkyWho? It’s called LEGION now—dispatched only a single cyborg assassin to this time period, or why the human resistance sent only one bodyguard. The answer, of course, is that the one-on-one conceit is just more compelling and dramatic than a platoon representing each faction would be.
My NPR review of Terminator: Dark Fate, a these-were-canon-those-were-not half-reboot in the tradition of Superman Returns and Halloween (2018), is here.
