nicholas meyer's TIME AFTER TIME (1979)

sam raimi's EVIL DEAD 2: DEAD BY DAWN (1987)

two things stick out returning to Raimi's rough masterpiece, which i've been on hiatus from after wearing out my VHS copy in high school. first, Evil Dead 2 is still every bit as inspiring to me as a filmmaker as it was the first, second, and twentieth time i saw it; there's a freshness, wit and ingenuity to nearly every element that does an astounding job of obscuring the production's limitations, and it's no exaggeration to suggest it as the Citizen Kane of low-budget horror. secondly, and more specifically, the film's pacing is very nearly flawless; one of the curses of extreme familiarity with a work (even after several years i found myself anticipating favorite edits and minute sound cues) is that wasted scenes and poor sequence choices can become downright interminable, but Evil Dead 2 sails along briskly from the first frame to the last, never faltering in tone or energy.

richard kelly's SOUTHLAND TALES (2006)

"evacuate the atrium, move to the rear of the mega-zeppelin."
- Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson (as Boxer Santoros), delivering the best line of his storied career

finally released on DVD after years of tweaking and an embarrassingly minor theatrical run, Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales is the story of a dimwitted porn star, an amnesiac conservative actor, an alternative energy baron, the head of a national surveillance agency, a ice-cream truck driving arms dealer, bong-huffing neo-Marxist extortionists, a southern senator, a soldier slinging a drug called Liquid Karma, and two suspiciously identical policemen, among many others. an attempted summary of the film’s story would turn into a list twice as long, as full of tangents and halfbaked notions as genuine plot points. Southland Tales is a movie of Ideas, and it wants you to know that. it’s cerebral, but also deadly silly and stupid.

more than anything, though, the key descriptor for Kelly’s follow-up to his much-loved, much-puzzled-over Donnie Darko is audacity. for the first twenty minutes, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the whole thing’s just a big joke, as a scarred-up Iraq veteran (Justin Timberlake) introduces us to a present-day post-apocalypse California, our primary players, and leagues of paranoiac backstory set to a series of glossy, over-designed effects. considering Kelly cut forty minutes out of the film following a positively disastrous Cannes screening, it’s hard to begrudge him the unfortunate Band-Aid of awkward exposition, but the scope of what he introduces, the obviously non-chewable bites he takes right off the bat, still leave you primed for the biggest cinematic goof since Freddy Got Fingered. (or at the very least Lady In The Water…that one was a joke, right?) and for an hour afterwards, it just plods forward without particular drive or interest.

then a funny thing happens: everything starts falling together. not in the way Kelly probably envisioned as this bloated clown originally emerged from his word processor, mind you, but falling together nonetheless. throughout Southland Tales’ running time it pretends pathetically to the thrones of Vonnegut, Robert Altman and Philip K Dick, but when it’s honest with itself there’s really quite a lot to be said for the film as a sort of slick, maximalist heir to Repo Man. it’s a shaggy dog story full of metaphysical lunacy and infuriatingly dense storytelling, with none of the patient, melancholy character work that make Donnie Darko so beguiling. but whether it deserves it or not, it redeems itself in small ways amid the mess, and ends up working unexpectedly well on its own terms, which is all you can really ask of it. it’s not hard to see why so many have tossed Southland Tales aside as a disaster, but the curious shouldn’t be dissuaded.

(from the KNOXVILLE VOICE)

james cameron's THE TERMINATOR (1984) and TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991)

i hope when James Cameron sits back and reflects proudly on his career (which he probably does on an hourly basis or so) the Terminator movies get their proper due; though i'd probably say Aliens is his best work, Judgment Day creeps closely behind, and part of the latter's success is the full embrace of a rich mythology hinted at in the first film, a mythology that continues to fuel the brand 25 years later. (that the original now seems a bit tedious is only further credit to its sequel's wall-to-wall spectacle; it's a pretty accomplished lowish-budget piece of sci-fi.) the one thing that still troubles me, though, is that such a fully, arguably unnecessarily realized backstory relies so heavily on an obvious (and, thanks to persistent oversight, irreconcilable) paradox within its time-bending premise: if Sarah Connor were ever to find true, lasting success in her campaign to stop SkyNet, her beloved son would surely blink out of existence, and she would once again find herself a sadder, older version of the vapid clubrat we meet at the beginning of the first film...which would once again leave SkyNet unprevented and unopposed. (this is all, of course, assuming that space/time doesn't rupture and destroy everything post-1984, though if that were the true nature of Terminator's time travel philosophy, it probably would have happened eight times over by Judgment Day's climax.) the only other explanation is that all the holes and folds in time throughout the films are already accounted for in a grander timeline, which means that there's no changing or stopping mankind's fate, no matter how many picnic tables are etched up with facile assertions of free will.