The Collection Project: Live, Direct from Hell

There's nothing left to say about This is Spinal Tap (d. Rob Reiner), and besides, to say almost anything at all is to begin chipping away at the joke until it's all gone. But this film reaches such a high level of comedy, and has been so relentlessly quoted, that it feels like we take it for granted now. What film comedies these days are as endlessly creative as this one? Even the best of Guest's follow up films (and I actually think Waiting for Guffman might, in some ways, be better than Spinal Tap) don't have the sense of verisimilitude that Reiner captures so brilliantly here. If what we were watching wasn't so absurd, there would be no reason to believe it wasn't true.

This is going to be one of those lazy posts that I sometimes do. I just wanted to remind everyone that comedy doesn't often come with this much exuberant imagination, or even, well, comedy, as This is Spinal Tap. Cherish it! Watch it tonight! Also, remember: David St. Hubbins believes virtually everything he reads, Nigel Tufnel will rise above it, you should really check out Derek Smalls' new Jazz Odyssey, and Tucker "Smitty" Brown is just as God made him.

Neytiri Calls Me Skxawng

Yeah, so, I watched Avatar. Or as I like to call it: The John Walker Lindh Story. Ah, see, because at its heart James Cameron's insanely successful science-fiction epic is an allegory about the Iraq War, with US Marine Jake Scully (Sam Worthington) finding his sympathies shifting from US/Earth interests to those of the Na'vi, the humanoid inhabitants of Pandora. And Pandora is the planet the US/Earth Marine/mercenaries are set to plunder for natural resources, and they're willing to bomb the shit out of everything to get it, and the phrase "shock and awe" is used in relation to the military tactics used by the Earth forces. Also, this time around the US blows up the World Trade Center. It's all very confusing.
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This latter detail highlights why I won't be getting into the politics of Avatar -- or indeed any aspect of Avatar -- very deeply. The basic reason is this: while the politics are there in Cameron's film, and while I detest them, they are also completely moronic, barely thought out, and utterly toothless. They're also kind of an afterthought. Cameron has been kicking around the idea for this film for a very long time, or so I understand, and I doubt the Iraq War and Sept. 11 material was always on his mind. When he got around to actually making the film, he just threw everything in, getting so mixed up in the process that he credited his Sept. 11th allegory to those who were, in reality, the victims of it (the crumbling WTC, incidentally, is evoked in a scene where US forces launch a missile strike against the Na'vi's very best tree), but he never really cared about it that much. I mean, he meant it, but he didn't care about it, because James Cameron is essentially a gearhead, or a tech-geek; what matters to him is creating big worlds with big effects, the likes of which haven't been seen before (well, on movie screens, at least -- book, magazine, and album covers are another thing, because those can't move). Ultimately, and broadly, I'm ready and willing to give the political aspect of the film a pass, or ignore it, because it's clear so little effort was put into it. The only thing I really object to is being forced to notice the analogy, and then asked to not follow that analogy through to its logical conclusion, which should be self-explanatory to anyone who watches Avatar and makes note of the rooting interest Cameron wants us to take up.
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But anyway! So with the politics dispensed with (in a more involved fashion than I'd planned, but oh well), what's left? Top of the line special effects, occasionally stunning imagery, all to the service of a nearly three hour film, most of which time is taken up with learning how all our brains are connected to trees' brains. Avatar is a thuddingly dull film for great stretches, with no new ideas, but some pretty great technology at its disposal. The whole film is a rehash, sometimes of classic science fiction, sometimes of Cameron's own films. Giovanni Ribisi's Parker, for instance -- the casually evil corporate goon who's behind all this -- is just a less-well imagined, boiled down version of Paul Reiser's Burke from Aliens (by the way, I've heard some people criticize Ribisi's performance, but I think he does a pretty good job of playing the character as written; it's the character as written that's the problem), and Michelle Rodriquez's tough-girl pilot, and the whole space marine thing, are from Aliens, too (and, erm, from Heinlein's Starship Troopers).
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But let's not get bogged down with where Cameron's ideas came from. If he'd done anything with them, nobody would care, but there's a shocking absence of drama in all this. When things really start to heat up, a major character is killed off in one of the lamest death scenes I've ever witnessed in a film like this. It's as though Cameron took it as a given that we'd be moved, so he needn't bother. The fact that the character dies, and is then taken by our heroes to the Na'vi who are asked to save this person using their native magic, the final prognosis being, in essence, "Nope, sorry, she's too dead", signalled to me that things were edging away from the dull into the unintentionally hilarious.

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In the credit where credit is due department, I should say that Zoe Saldana's performance as Neytiri, our window into the Na'vi's world and Scully's love interest, is quite good. I don't know if this is because she threw herself into the job of motion-capture performance with an unusual amount of gusto, or if the computer whizzes who worked on her character were particularly on their game -- I don't know how this stuff works, but it's probably a bit of both. In any case, Saldana provides the story with far more life than any other element in the film. Not a hard distinction to achieve, however, since more than any other Cameron film -- and I'm generally not a fan -- Avatar feels like a jumble of technology that needed some sort of basic and self-consciously earnest story as an excuse be used.

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The Collection Project Film of the Day:

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Contrast all this with Cameron's Aliens. This is by no means a perfect film -- for one thing, God is that fucker long, and, related to that, it doesn't know when to quit -- but there's a tension to it that never lags. A good hour of the film goes by before we encounter any alien mayhem (said mayhem, by the way, when the Marines get ambushed after they've been made to give up their ammunition, is actually much thinner than I remembered it; the shit hits the fan, there's an explosion, then a bunch of fuzzy monitors and yelling), but Cameron never lets the audience's attention wander. When the film first came out, part of this effect was, no doubt, attributable to the anticipation created by Ridley Scott's original film (and the idea that Cameron's sequel is somehow better than Scott's is an objectively provable untruth that needs to die), but the fact that I still felt that tension yesterday says something. The fact that, after two hours, I was also saying "Shit, Bishop still hasn't been ripped in half?? How much longer does this thing go on!?" says something, too.

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There's also the, or some, performances in Aliens. Avatar has Saldana and, sort of, Ribisi (I'm not sold on the opinion that Stephen Lang's villainous Quaritch was anything special), and that's it. Aliens has a rock solid central performance from Sigourney Weaver, typically easy and strong work from Michael Biehn, and Paul Reiser, who, against all logic, is really good as the odious Carter Burke. The facts of his awfulness are pretty over-the-top, but Reiser really sells it well, especially when he's been found out, and is being interrogated by Weaver, Biehn and Bill Paxton. Reiser plays Burke as a skilled liar who is unsure if this talent can save him, but it's all he's got left.

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And what about those special effects? Obviously, the film was made before the CGI era, and there's a moment in Aliens when, after the shit has hit the fan, our surviving heroes are hustling to meet their command ship, which they hope will whisk them to safety. That ship has been infiltrated by aliens, and the ship crashes right in front of our heroes. I don't believe that a spaceship has ever actually crashed only a few hundred feet away from Sigourney Weaver, but you'd never know it to watch that footage. It's seamless. Meanwhile, in Avatar, even at its absolute, considerable best, you think "Man! That is only barely a cartoon!"

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I'm not anti-CGI, and defend it often. But when a film completely lives on those effects (as well as the 3D Imax presentation, which I didn't experience, so I don't now spend my nights wishing I could live in the movie), as Avatar absolutely does, it's hard not to wonder what the big deal is, and why so many people care so much. What would have been great is if, with Avatar, Cameron had created those same effects, and had attached them to a story that was engaging right off the bat, before a second of film had been shot.

A Collection Project Three-fer

Häxan (d. Benjamin Christensen) - The above still pretty much says it all, doesn't it? Christensen's 1922 documentary/sociological essay/horror phantasmagoria would find itself very lonely if you were to try and place it within a genre. Occasionally, and tediously, didactic, Häxan is nevertheless gripping for the fact that it broke all the rules of documentary filmmaking before there ever was such a thing to break, and for its deeply bizarre and unnerving horror imagery, which take the form of Black Sabbaths and devils and witches and so forth, as Christensen chronicles the history of a particular kind of supersitious thought in the Middle Ages. What's curious about these images -- which range from the plain creepy, to the ludicrous, to the darkly sexual -- is that they're filmed with such verve and creative energy that they almost convince the viewer that those witch-hunters from hundreds of years ago were maybe on to something. As a thinker, Christensen cares to teach us how not to revert back, in our own modern and self-righteous way, to old and fiendish habits; as a filmmaker, however, he was far more interested in how the world looked through those superstitious eyes.
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The Night of the Following Day (d. Hubert Cornfield) - Cornfield's DVD commentary track for this film is, for reasons it would be crass to explain, impossible to listen to. From a very shallow point of view, this is a shame, because, frankly, I'd like an explanation. For much of its length, The Night of the Following Day is a lean, precise, and vicious little crime thriller, about the kidnapping, in France, of an English heiress (Pamela Franklin) by a group of American criminals, led by Marlon Brando and Richard Boone.

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First thing's first: despite the fact that, in his parade of tight all-black get-ups, Brando looks like he's constantly on the way to, or just back from, dance class, he's absolutely terrific, playing the smartest and most moral of the kidnappers with the ease of a top-class character actor. And the role of "top-class character actor" in Night of the Following Day is filled by Richard Boone, as Satanic and horribly convincing as he's ever been (by the way, Rita Moreno, as the female kidnapper, is also excellent, and she gives one of the best stoned-out-of-her-gourd performances I've seen).

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But after a note-perfect climax (directed, I've gathered, by Boone, at Brando's insistence, due to Brando's belief that Cornfield was incompetent; in fairness the vast majority of the rest of the film doesn't bear this out), Cornfield throws in a loony-bird twist that caused my brain to silently rage "What the dick!? This was all a...wait, no, that can't be it. What? Why!?" In short, the film is like the worm Ouroboros, or the symbol for infinity, or a Moebius strip, and all that, but to no good goddamn purpose. The last few minutes of the film -- which supposedly Brando strenuously objected to -- have the strange distinction of neither ruining the ending's impact and making the viewer wish they'd been cut altogether. Narrative experimentation gone awry, is what I'm talking about, but the lion's share of the film is still well worth anyone's time.

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Paul Blart: Mall Cop (d. Steve Carr) - I implied there would be films such as this would pop up now and again. And I suppose I could pretend that my wife and I don't think Kevin James is funny, and that we didn't rent this one night because we both really wanted to see it, and that we didn't both laugh often enough at the zany antics of an overweight and socially inept mall cop who finds himself defending his turf (a mall) against a group of gun-wielding robbers (burglars?) that I eventually picked it up at a Blockbuster sale. I could do all that, but it would be a lie. I think this movie's kinda funny. Fuck you, you jerks!

Hold On to the Pain

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For a while now, I've been kicking around an idea for a new way to approach the horror novel -- not the reading of them, but the writing of them. Too often, and increasingly, horror novels tend to devolve as they go along into rote fantasy or action stories. Neither of which I have anything against in themselves, but each has a tendency to ruin, and change, the tone, mood, and significance of what has come before when they're stitched on as the last third of a horror story, and rarely is that change a positive one.
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So my idea -- and I have no idea for an actual story, just a form -- is to write a more-or-less naturalistic story about people, and their day-to-day lives, in which the horror, specifically of the supernatural variety, appears intermittently, almost as a subplot which can comment, or enhance, or color, or whatever, the more realistic story that surrounds it. Perhaps you can guess at the many pitfalls inherent in this idea, but in any case they are many, and I haven't cracked it yet.
.Conor McPherson has, though, or at least he's come awfully damn close. His new film The Eclipse (based on a story by Billy Roche, who appears in the film in a cameo role) is pretty extraordinary, in my view, in the way it uses supernatural horror as no more than one element of a story about a widower named Michael Farr (a superb Ciarán Hinds) who volunteers as a chauffer at an annual Irish literary festival. In the film, he chauffers two writers -- Lena Morelle (Iben Hjelje) and Nicholas Holden (Aidan Quinn), the latter of whom is a particularly obnoxious and self-involved American-Irish writer who is one of the festival's big "gets". Farr also has two children who he's raising by himself since his wife's passing a few years previously, and an elderly father-in-law (Jim Norton), who lives in an nursing home. This father-in-law begins appearing to Farr as a corpse, after a short period when Farr hears strange sounds in his home, and even screams, not just outside his home, but outside, or in, Lena's hotel, as well.
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These elements appear sporadically, though, and often take a back seat to Farr's relationship with the two writers. Lena is a sweet woman, a good writer who is shy of the public. Her friendship with Farr is based, in the beginning, on a shared sadness, or a haunted quality, though what specifically haunts Lena, we don't know. Lena's romantic past with Holden also comes into play, as does Holden's aggressive pursuit of her. He's married, but claims to be unhappy, and claims further that Lena brings out a kindness in him that he thought was gone, though the audience never quite notices that.
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What was startling to me as I watched The Eclipse was the realization that these various threads -- the supernatural, the love triangle, Farr's strained relationship with his children, and his continued grief over the loss of his wife -- all play out in parallel, as different facets of Farr's life that never quite intersect. Both he and Lena hear a chilling scream one night, that they both try to pass off as the cry of a bird. When Farr's father-in-law appears to him as a corpse, he initially writes it off as dreams or hallucinations, until he feels he no longer can. He does not, however, hire a paranormal investigator to solve the mystery, nor does he consult occult texts. The best he can do is make a fumbling, ultimately abortive, attempt to tell Lena about it.
.What makes this film so fascinating also occasionally works against it. McPherson uses pretty standard "jump scares" for his moments of supernatural horror, and these sometimes sit uneasily with the spare, quiet naturalistic scenes (indeed, the most effective and visceral moment of horror is not supernatural at all). But if you want the supernatural to sit back a bit more, how far back do you go before this whole approach to the genre becomes too smoothed over and beige? And then that question raises another one, which is how much do you want your new horror model to be explicitly noticed as such, rather than simply as a story about these people in these situations? I don't know. Still, if the "scare" scenes in The Eclipse don't always quite work, I'm glad McPherson chose to present them so directly. The harder to ignore they are, the better.
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In a way, The Eclipse brings horror back to its roots, which are the emotions of fear as they pertain to grief and mortality. This is often what supernatural horror is meant to represent, but most of the time the characters who face it are meant to wage war on it. The ending of The Eclipse will (and has already done so) elicit from audiences reactions like "That's it!?", but I think the film ends on just the right note. Farr deals with ghosts and hauntings the way the rest of us deal with our real-life fears: he learns to live with them.
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The Collection Project Film of the Day:

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The problem with finding a film in my DVD collection to hitch on to the back of my review of The Eclipse is that, to my mind, The Eclipse is, however subtly, a Brand New Thing, and however many horror films can be called that (more to the point, however many horror films that can be called that that I own), it's hard to think of a brief way of approaching any of them that won't come off as banal.
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So I'm not sure if Don't Look Now (d. Nicolas Roeg) can, or could have been, called a Brand New Thing when it came out in 1973, but it does have a connection with The Eclipse in that it's a horror film rooted in grief. In Roeg's film (based on a story by Daphne du Maurier), the grief is being suffered by a married couple (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) who lost their daughter. They travel to Venice in an attempt to rejuvenate themselves psychologically and emotionally, but are haunted by a small, fleeting figure in a red raincoat that resembles their daughter, and by unnerving psychics, and by Venice itself.
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The Eclipse carries with it more than a whiff of hope; Don't Look Now does not. Also unlike McPherson's film, Roeg's is relentlessly stylized, and the oppressive atmosphere of doom is close to relentless. Where Farr seems to reach some sort of level ground by not seeking answers, Sutherland and Christie's John and Laura Baxter doggedly pursue an explanation that might bring them closure, or an ability to breathe cleanly again, free of the mourning that chokes them. What it brings them instead is unimaginable horror, a fresh kind, that leaves one of them spending their final moments of life gasping and gawping like a beached fish, and both of them further away from peace than ever before.

The Collection Project: It's Here

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You're on your way home from work, or maybe to a bar to unwind. .

A guy comes running into the mostly empty street, a haggard-looking guy who forces you to stop your truck. He throws open your passenger door and gets in.
.He wants you to just drive. He has a gun, but he says he won't hurt you. Why'd you have to drive this way tonight? You don't want trouble.

You don't know what to say to this guy. Then:

You don't know what happened, but you're gone. You can't have any time to think, because there is no time. If you could, you might wonder why the guy with the gun sitting next to you gets to home tonight, but you don't.

The Coen brothers are often accused of not liking their characters, or mocking them, or any number of other related things. So why, in No Country for Old Men, when this nameless truck driver gets shredded by shotgun blasts simply because he stopped driving for a few seconds, do I feel it so deeply? In a way I can't define or describe, the Coens make these random killings in their films -- of which there are plenty -- truly hurt. Perhaps its because the worlds they create are so precisely realized that nobody you see feels like an extra, even if you never hear them speak.

If we laugh at this stuff (but who laughs at this man's death? Anyone?), as the Coens are often reprimanded for forcing us to do, whose fault is it? In Fargo, when Carl Showalter is peeling out of the parking garage after his ransom drop with Wade Gustafson has gone horribly wrong, we see the parking lot attendant asking for Carl's ticket, and we laugh. Why? Because in the midst of this monstrous behavior, this idiot is actually being polite? Because we think he's goofy looking, and we're secretly all bullies?

When Jerry Lundegaard drives by that attendant's post later in the film, and we see that the man is dead, that Carl has shot him, nobody laughs. We didn't know him, didn't even know his name, but Carl shot him, for no good reason. Whatever's wrong with us, whatever it is that makes us laugh at people who don't deserve it, the Coens have a way of bringing that out of us, and then cutting right through it.

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At least half the work that went into this post was done by Greg Ferrara, of the currently, but hopefully not permanently, idle Cinema Styles. Thanks for the screengrabs, pardner.

The Collection Project: Treat Yourself

Few scenes, from any film I've ever watched, make me as angry as those leading up to the murder of Honora Parker Rieper (Sarah Peirse) at the end of Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures. Honora is the mother of Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey), and it is Pauline, along with her special friend Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet), who will commit the murder.
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They're having a day out, the three of them. Months of deep, familial strain are easing off Honora's shoulders as she enjoys her day with her daughter. This big day includes a bus ride, which pauses at one point so the passengers can refresh, and get something to eat. Honora, her daughter, and Juliet go to a cafe, and eat from a trey of little cakes. Honora is enjoying them very much, but isn't sure she should eat more, due to a conflicting desire to watch her weight. Juliet and Pauline urge her to treat herself, because they know that her waistline could not be more irrelevant. Honora doesn't need to worry about that, or anything, anymore, because this day, that Honora has been smiling and laughing through, jubilant over finally feeling some affection from her daughter again, has been planned by the two young girls as the day that Honora will die. Which she does, by their hands. The murder itself is awful, because Jackson gets across not only Honora's fear and pain, but her confusion, as well, which is a state of mind that in some contexts can be the saddest thing in the world.
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What makes me so angry about this murder, more than pretty much any other murder I've seen in a film, is that these two monstrous girls, Pauline in particular, don't know what they're throwing away with this imperfect but still good-hearted woman whose skull they're going to crush with stones. And they don't realize how deeply cruel the kindness they think they're showing Honora in her final moments really is. The bone-deep selfishness, if that word is even anywhere strong enough, of Pauline and Juliet is breathtaking.
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I hate watching these scenes so much that I rarely want to watch Heavenly Creatures at all, as great a film as I think it is. It is, in my view, the best film Peter Jackson has ever made that isn't Lord of the Rings. I just can't bear watching that poor woman end her days like that.

Hell of a post as a lead-up to Mother's Day, isn't it? Well, I'll try to lighten things up by then.

Affinity #21

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The Collection Project Film of the Day:

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For many years, the sole draw for me of the 1986 sort-of-horror-but-mostly-suspense film The Stepfather (d. Joseph Ruben) was the fact that it was written by Donald E. Westlake, creator of the amoral thief named Parker, and author of any number of classic, brilliant crime novels. When I finally saw the film last year, after it was released, at last, on DVD to coincide with a quickly forgotten remake, I can't pretend that I wasn't let down. Though Westlake gets the lone screenwriting credit, it's no secret that Ruben sort of messed with it afterwards, and it's sort of hard not the think that the basically rote thriller elements of the last third came from Ruben, not Westlake (though maybe that's wishful thinking on my part). Not that Ruben doesn't do a good job actually directing the film -- the reveal of that massacred family at the beginning is superb, for instance -- but the more of Westlake's fiction I read, the more I can't help looking at The Stepfather and thinking "if only", "what if", and etc.

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However, the other thing that happened by the time I got around to watching the film was that I'd become a huge fan of the film's star, Terry O'Quinn, who for the past six years has been mesmerizing on a weekly basis on TV's Lost. O'Quinn is a sublime, effortless actor, and his presence in The Stepfather was almost as big an incentive to watch the film as Westlake's involvement. Unlike Westlake's work, however, O'Quinn's performance is pretty much an unqualified success. The big moment in The Stepfather is towards the end, when Jerry Blake, O'Quinn's character, makes one slip-up while talking to his wife (Shelley Hack) that brings his whole secret world -- as a man who marries into father- and husbandless families, whom he then butchers when his badly skewed, idyllic view of how that family should operate doesn't pan out -- comes crashing down around him. O'Quinn's signature line at that moment ("Waaaait a minute -- who am I here?") is so good, his delivery so beautifully tweaked to expose not only Blake's diseased brain, which we already knew about anyway, but the amount of stuff he keeps in that brain, the stuff he needs to keep straight in order to function, and also the resignation that his plans for moving on are going to have to be speeded up, that the producers of the film, or whoever, did what stupid people always do and blew their film's iconic moment by slapping it on the poster.

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Oh well. It still works like gangbusters, and represents to me one of the finest moments of writing, but primarily of acting, in the psycho-thriller genre, and further points to what The Stepfather might have been had some people not been concerned that the film as originally laid out to them, before the cameras rolled, didn't resemble closely enough all the movies they were trying to cash in on.

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Ah, I'm being cynical. Terry O'Quinn is awesome.