How To Make A Film Unworthy of Schwarzenegger’s Acting Skills

Posted on July 29th, 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro

Last night’s experiment in using editing to produce a performance on Netflix Disk: this year’s AFTERMATH, which features Arnold Schwarzenegger and somebody named Scoot McNairy.

What a career coup for McNairy, eh? Alas, no. Co-starring with Schwarzenegger no longer means what it once did. This film is direct-to-video, arriving without fanfare on the shelves of places like Target and Wal-Mart. And though it tries very very hard to be special, it misses the target.

Another well-meaning attempt, inferior to the 2014 art-zombie movie MAGGIE, to document that now that Schwarzenegger can no longer be a believable unstoppable action hero on screen, he can transition to character roles of nuance and depth, the movie is the story of two men beset by unimaginable grief. Arnold is a building contractor who early on heads off to the local airport to pick up his wife and imminently pregnant daughter; Scoot is the air-traffic controller who, left in the tower to handle a snarl by himself when the only other man on duty goes off to the vending machines, makes a critical error and allows two passenger planes, include the one carrying the family of Schwarzenegger’s character, to collide in mid-air.

At this point, and for some time afterward, you might be fooled into thinking you’re watching some kind of great film. Those last couple of minutes in the tower are a small masterpiece of escalating complication, a slow-motion catastrophe you can see coming but will be unable to stop. And the horror that follows is well-acted by both Arnold and Scoot. Both men are naturally destroyed emotionally by what’s happened, and the film is clearly an exercise on dramatizing the path toward their tragic eventual meeting, but the problem is that it’s all one-note, dramatized by lots and lots of tortured stares, slow-motion walking, and soulful music. It’s a significant relief when we get a title card saying, “One Year Later,” but though both characters have moved on to some degree, it is STILL dramatized the same way, with lots and lots of empty pauses and heartfelt staring.

The problem is no better with Scoot than it is with Arnold, but because Arnold’s the one-time superstar here, let us focus on him. Again, this movie is in large part an exercise in demonstrating that Arnold can be a terrific character actor, something that – surprise, surprise – I honestly don’t doubt. I take the early gratuitous lingering shot of his now somewhat flabbier ass, as he takes a shower, to be a brave statement of intent, on the part of The Terminator and those filming him, that you need to put away any expectations you have from the Arnold of old. And yes, he does manage to convey the eagerness to see his family, the growing realization that he never will, the shell-shocked trauma of a life suddenly rendered empty. What lines he has, along the way, are well-delivered, and he gets one absolutely great scene, showing rage at airline lawyers who offer a cash settlement but won’t do the one thing he requests, tell him they’re sorry for his loss. But for a long long time, his character has no arc beyond that sadness, that emptiness, not even much else in the way of spoken dialogue. It’s all great hung heads and soulful staring at family pictures and slow-motion walking and soundtrack dirges, the movie using these brute-force methods to force that one note.

Let me put it this way. When Schwarzenegger is allowed to act here, he is able to convey the emotions asked of him. But the movie uses him as a prop that can be shot from certain angles, to create that emotion without him doing much of a damn thing. Try an experiment. Take a picture of yourself, looking down at a table. Darken the room and make sure a third of your face is in shadow. Now take footage of yourself in that position. Hold that shot for several seconds. You sure as hell look like you’re going through some heavy shit. Now, add a shot of yourself walking to the mailbox, in slow motion, your face just as blank. Connect the two scenes with soulful music. Wow, you not only look like you’re going through some heavy shit, but that it’s lingering. Now put several of these scenes together in a manner that conveys the passage of an extended period of time: wow, that pain won’t go away. Do this sparingly and you can create the impression of great acting. (As happened in MAGGIE, which used many of the same techniques, and where Arnold was terrific.) But too much of it becomes distancing, and you start to wonder whether the Governator was given any direction, for long swaths of this film, beyond “Hang your head! No, lower! Okay, just hold that position! STAY THERE! Don’t bother acting!”

It’s unworthy of the subject matter and it is, in fact, unworthy of Schwarzenegger, who has never fooled anybody into thinking he’s a great thespian but who has always, always, been able to convey, at bare minimum, when his characters were in pain.

It’s hard to tell whether the moviemakers thought they were covering for an actor of limited skills, or whether they thought that this needed to be a movie of long pauses and great silences and overdid it, but either way, when his character and Scoot’s finally wind up in the same room, with tragic consequences, this audience member’s reaction was outright relief. Which is not the way I should have been feeling. Honestly.

Tags: Arnold Shwarzenegger, Bad Movies, Movies | Category Movies

The Heartwarming Detail We’re Both Happy To Say We Can’t Remember

Posted on July 25th, 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro

This is both a true story in the lives of my wife Judi and myself, and one of our most beloved memories of our time together, but it happens to be missing a key detail, a detail that we are both happy to say has faded into the mists of memory.

In 2002, the year we were married, Judi and I went on two trips. One trip came before we were married, the other afterward. We count both of them as honeymoons, by mutual agreement. The week we spent in and around Orlando after being wed need not concern us today. We consider it the not-a-big-deal trip, in the sense that we only live a few hours away and a trip to Orlando has never been the big deal for us that it may be for those of you who live elsewhere in the country.

The first honeymoon came as a surprise to us. I had received a piece of mail declaring that I’d won a four-day trip to anywhere I wanted to go in the country. Life had trained me to be skeptical of such things and so I said, “Whatever,” and let the mail sit, unattended, in a pile of other junk yet to be thrown out; it was Judi, looking through that mail and encountering that letter, who took the step of investigating the fine print and confirming what she later reported to me, that the letter was what such letters almost never are, which is to say legit. They weren’t even any time share presentations attached. I had indeed entered a drawing I no longer remembered but upon this reminder could now dimly recall, and I had indeed come up a winner. Four days of hotel accommodations, multiple free restaurant meals, plus attraction tickets at wherever we chose to go.

As it happened, we wanted to go to that year’s World Science Fiction convention in San Jose, California, and so we used this unexpected largesse to add four days of sightseeing in San Francisco to our itinerary.

I had been to the city before. Judi had not.

One of the most fascinating historical sites in the city is the legendary now-shuttered Federal Prison on Alcatraz Island.

Again, I had been there before. Judi had not.

We took the boat over and commenced the climb up the hill. If you have never been to Alcatraz, I need to explain that the prison occupies the summit of a very steep slope; shuttle rides are available, but most people attempt the walk, which many, I’m sorry, regret. There are two steep switch-backs and the road between them can be a difficult trudge for anybody not in the best of shape.

Judi and I were game as we ascended, if vocally complaining to each other, but halfway up the second segment of the climb, we saw that were gaining on a pair of very old, very frail-looking women, one white, one black, clinging to one another as they struggled to make it to the top. Hundreds of people were passing them on both sides, but no one was sparing any attention to these two determined, but very much out-of-their-element, old ladies as they struggled to reach the summit. Their difficulty was palpable.

Judi and I noticed them at the same time.

One of us said, “They’re having trouble.”

The other of us said, “Let’s go help them.”

We had been walking side by side but now we parted, putting on an extra burst of speed to gain the ground we needed to catch up with the old ladies in the distance, Judi approaching from the left, me approaching from the right.

Just before we reached them, we heard one tell the other, “I’m sorry, we’re going to have to turn back. I can’t make it.”

Judi arrived at the side of the old lady on the left. “Hello, ladies.”

I arrived at the side of the old lady on the right. “Don’t worry. We are making it our business to make sure we get you up the hill.”

We each took one of them by the arm and, proceeding at their pace, taking breaks when they needed to, got them to the prison gates.  Further, we didn’t leave them alone inside, either. The four of us took the tour together, and during that tour we got to know them. They were both in their late 80s, and had been friends since their childhoods in Georgia; always in touch, always part of each other’s lives, always dear to one another. Though they now lived apart, they still took vacations together, hence their appearance on Alcatraz on this August day, on occasion that, it went unspoken, might very well be the last time they were both up to traveling to see one another.  We helped make this last day, one that pushed the limits of their shared endurance, a success, and we both got hugs for it.  On parting, the two old ladies told us that we would have great lives together.

Judi and I still remember this as one of our best moments.

I could pass a few words about what it meant to me that one of those old ladies was white and one was black, and that they were, for all intents and purposes, sisters, even though they came from a time when that was not always possible in the region where they grew up; also, that it lasted, and that they were aunts to each other’s children and great-aunts to each other’s grandchildren. Had we stayed in touch, what stories we might have learned from them! As it is, I remember them fondly. The knowledge that they are almost certainly gone, fifteen years later, is bittersweet. I do not know whether either still lives, but can testify that they lived, in the best sense of that word.

But this is about the detail that neither Judi and I can remember.

One of us said, “They’re having trouble.”

The other said, “Let’s go help them.”

Of the hundreds of other tourists climbing that hill on that August day, we were the only two who had that conversation. The only two. The only two who acted on it, at any rate.

We remember the conversation verbatim.

But, happily,  neither of us can remember who said what.

Tags: Life Wisdom, Science Fiction Conventions, True Stories | Category Life Wisdom, True Stories

“What if I Told You” There Was Another Way to Impart Exposition?

Posted on July 21st, 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro

Thing that I am getting awfully sick of, in dramatic presentations of sf/fantasy works.

Honestly, if I ever see this again, it will be too soon.

The exposition-sentence that begins with, “What if I told you–”

Usually followed by something that sounds batshit insane to the person who’s been living a normal life until that moment.

I first became aware of this with Laurence Fishburne in THE MATRIX, but it has become the go-to form, and I just saw it with the trailer for the new TV series, THE INHUMANS. I think but cannot be sure that it was in DOCTOR STRANGE too. But it’s certainly all over the place.

Seriously. This is becoming the only way the makers of fantastic film and TV know how to impart this necessary information.

“What if I told you that there’s a lost civilization you never knew existed, a civilization of titans and warriors fighting an eternal battle against the forces of evil, and that it is in fact very small and has lived for thousands of years tucked away behind your left ear? What if I told you that if you continue using dandruff shampoo, then the Dark Lord Evillo, the Twisted One, will get his hands on the Glowing Magenta Orb of Arvillon, and use it to destroy all creation, because he’s too short-sighted to work out what would happen next? What if I told you that your mother isn’t your mother but an android designed specifically to instill in you a lifelong distaste for Prell? What would you say then, eh?”

The only possible response is, “What if I told you I’m walking away really quickly now?”

Can we find another way to do this?

Tags: Comic Book Movies, Doctor Strange, Movies, Science Fiction, The Matrix | Category Fantasy, Movies, Science Fiction, TV