Tag: Film

Skynet once again uses its (apparently not all that limited) time-travel device, this time to send a far more advanced liquid metal T-1000 Terminator back to 1990s L.A., this time to kill the ten-year-old John Connor (played by the extremely annoying Edward Furlong [13], whose voice keeps cracking pubescently and who’s just clearly older than ten), and that the intrepid human Resistance has somehow captured, subdued, and “reprogrammed” an old Schwarzenegger-model Terminator – resetting its CPU’s switch from TERMINATE to PROTECT, apparently [14] – and then has somehow once again gotten one-time access to Skynet’s time-travel technology [15] and sent the Schwarzenegger Terminator back to protect young J.C. from the T-1000’s infanticidal advances. [16]

David Foster Wallace again provides a singularly descriptive sentence; this one for T2. Imagine if all capsule descriptions read like this.

Recall that it’s A.D. 2027 and that there’s been a nuclear holocaust in 1997 and that chip-driven machines now rule, and “Skynet,” the archonic diabolus ex machina, develops a limited kind of time-travel technology and dispatches the now classically cyborgian A. Schwarzenegger back to 1984’s Los Angeles to find and terminate one Sarah Connor, the mother-to-be of the future leader of the human “Resistance,” one John Connor [3]; and that apparently the Resistance itself somehow gets one-time-only access to Skynet’s time-travel technology and sends back to the same space-time coordinates a Resistance officer, the ever-sweaty but extremely tough and resourceful Kyle Reese, to try desperately to protect Ms. Sarah Connor from the Terminator’s prophylactic advances [4], and so on.

David Foster Wallace turns in the most complex single sentence that ever was or ever will be written about the film Terminator.
Source: tetw

What is The Cha-Cha?

Sylvia Fay, “Goodfellas” Extras casting director: We’ll give you a part in the movie.
Johnny “Cha Cha” Ciarcia: Read my lips. I don’t give a shit about a part in the movie. At ten bucks a head [for the extras used in the Copa scene], I figure you owe me $4,000. Just give me the $4,000 and I’ll be happy. And a casting credit.
Sylvia Fay: I can’t give you a casting credit, I can’t give you the $4,000, but I could give you a part in the movie.
Johnny “Cha Cha” Ciarcia: I says “As long as it pays $4,000, we got a deal.” Two weeks later, I get my check in the mail. It was $1800. I called up Warner Bros., I said, “My deal was for $4000. If I don’t get the balance of my money, I’ll be on set tomorrow and I’ll break all the cameras.”
Warner Brothers: Mr. Cha Cha, we apologize. You’re right! Accounting made a mistake.

As Robert Altman once told me, “If you never gave me a bad review, what would a good review mean?” He was a great man. He thought over what he had said, and added: “But all your bad reviews of my films have been wrong.”

Roger Ebert in “Ebert’s Little Rule Book” on reviews, integrity, and Robert Altman

Say Hello to the Woodman

Robert Lauder: At one point in Hannah and Her Sisters, your character, Mickey, is very disillusioned. He is thinking about becoming a Catholic and he sees Duck Soup. He seems to think, “Maybe in a world where there are the Marx Brothers and humor, maybe there is a God. Who knows.” And maybe Mickey can live with that. Am I interpreting this correctly?

Woody Allen: No. I think it should be interpreted to mean that there are these oases, and life is horrible, but it is not relentlessly black from wire to wire. You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony, or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do…. I feel that one can come up with all these rationalizations and seemingly astute observations, but I think I said it well at the end of Deconstructing Harry: we all know the same truth; our lives consist of how we choose to distort it, and that’s it. Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful.