I felt like that in 1989 when I saw Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

My friends and I had been weaned on Monty Python, we could recite long passages from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, we worshiped both Time Bandits and Brazil. So we had some idea of what to expect from a new Terry Gilliam film: visual surrealism, distrust of authority, antipathy to soulless reason, and a skewed sense of humor, among (many) other things. Pure chocolate-covered chaos covered in shiny tinfoil and encased in a neat plastic wrapper.

But Baron Munchausen was something else altogether. Imagine if someone tried to film Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King – without the benefit of CGI. It’s that grand of a scale. Gilliam gives us real armored elephants, ornately carved cannons, and hundreds upon hundreds of fully costumed soldiers engaging in mock battle. He gives us baroque, lovingly crafted setpieces and clockwork monsters that look like Muppets. He gives us cameos from Sting and Robin Williams, not to mention a stark naked Uma Thurman. There’s a story within a story within a story, with allusions to everything from Greek mythology to 1001 Nights.

My friends and I watched Munchausen with jaws dropped. Some Hollywood assholes had paid tens and tens of millions of dollars to make this movie. It was, at the time, one of the most expensive films ever made. And here we sat, on a Saturday afternoon, the day after opening — in Southern California, no less, the movie capital of the world — and there were less than 20 people in the audience.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Someone had screwed up, and screwed up big time. I mean, of course if you’re running a Hollywood movie studio, you don’t give a mad genius like Terry Gilliam a blank check and virtually no adult supervision. Of course you don’t bet that an 126-minute postmodern retelling of an obscure 18th century German novel starring some British Shakespearean actor nobody’s ever heard of is going to do boffo box office.

Yet someone did. And we, a bunch of 16- and 17-year-old kids, got to reap the benefits. We left the theater giddy, feeling like we had come away from the vending machine with two candy bars for the price of one.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen became one of those Hollywood object lessons in bad producing. The Wikipedia article for the movie tells me that the film cost $46.63 million to make (twice the original budget) and only brought in around $8 million in return. If I’m reading this box office chart from the week of May 12, 1989 correctly, the movie actually debuted at #21 in the weekend’s box office. It debuted on 117 screens nationwide. Contrast that to The Return of Swamp Thing, a B-movie from Miramax with a budget of probably a few hundred thousand, which debuted the same weekend on 123 screens.

So Baron Munchausen pretty much stank up the box office. And it hasn’t really even become a huge cult hit on video either, despite what Wikipedia says. It’s not one of those films like The Princess Bride or Blade Runner that went on from modest beginnings to become an enormous word-of-mouth success. This film isn’t widely discussed and admired the way that Gilliam films like Time Bandits and Brazil still are. I seriously doubt the movie made back any significant fraction of its original budget on VHS or DVD, even when factoring in inflation.

Yet given all that, Sony decided to suddenly give Munchausen the royal 20th anniversary treatment. I bought the film on Blu-Ray last night and loved the heck out of it once again (despite the fact that the Blu-Ray player crashed halfway through and took about 10 minutes to reboot). It’s just as chaotic, just as funny, and just as barbed as I had remembered. It’s much more postmodern than I had remembered too. Like the work of John Barth, the film spends most of its 126 minutes smashing through the fourth wall, even if you don’t always realize the film’s doing it. By giving us a tale within a tale within a tale, Gilliam refuses to stick within the bounds of story — in fact, he boldly and gleefully tells us that no such bounds exist.

The real treat of the new Munchausen disc isn’t the 1080p transfer or the Dolby TrueHD sound — because, let’s face it, few movies from 1989 are really going to benefit all that much from a high-tech makeover. No, the real treat is the documentary, “The Madness and Misadventures of Munchausen,” which details for the first time all of the studio infighting and bickering and financial malfeasance that went on behind the scenes.

These making-of DVD documentaries have become Hollywood’s version of reality TV. I find them fascinating to watch, because they basically show Hollywood cannibalizing itself. In 1989, Terry Gilliam was simply a wizard and who knew how the hell he did it. But today, Hollywood no longer just sells you the spectacle — now you watch the spectacle and you watch the spectacle-makers dissecting their own spectacle-making.

What makes the Munchausen documentary so fascinating is how all the players involved let loose on one another in a big circle jerk of blame. Gilliam relates production disaster after production disaster; Eric Idle goes off on how Hollywood is full of evil shits (his words) and that’s why he doesn’t work there anymore; Robin Williams talks about how he took over the role of King of the Moon from Sean Connery (!) as a favor, and how his managers insisted he not be credited lest the sleazy producers behind Munchausen plaster Williams’ image all over everything and sully his reputation.

Everyone involved points the finger at the producer, this German guy named Thomas Schuhly, in the kind of vicious language you generally don’t see in your standard DVD documentary puff piece. Schuhly, for his part, disclaims all responsibility and blames Gilliam’s people for unprofessionalism and anti-German bias. (The documentary filmmakers give Schuhly his say, but it’s clear where their bias lies. At one point in the Schuhly interview, you can hear what sounds like someone letting out a rather loud fart in the background. Nobody bothered to edit it out in post-production, which speaks volumes.)

But only Gilliam seems to be keenly aware of the irony of the whole thing. A bunch of stodgy Hollywood accountant types arguing over who’s at fault for letting this delusional (albeit brilliant) filmmaker go off and make such a movie… when the movie itself is about a delusional (albeit brilliant) adventurer who goes off to fight the Turks over the protests of a bunch of stodgy bureaucratic accountant types.

Life really has become a Philip K. Dick novel, hasn’t it?

You’ve seen that film a thousand times before, and it’s essentially the plot of Joel and Ethan Coen’s brilliant new film, No Country for Old Men (based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name). It’s one of the standard thriller plots that crawls out of Hollywood every five years dressed up in a slick suit of violence with a little flower of moral conundrum stuck to its lapel. The Coens have entertained a few variations on the suitcase-of-money scenario themselves (see Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and The Ladykillers).

Here’s the thing. No Country for Old Men took that dandy little thriller behind the woodshed and beat its ass bloody.

That No Country for Old Men is fiercely entertaining is not really the point. Some audiences can’t see past the offbeat humor and treat the Coen Brothers’ films like hip Quentin Tarantino trifles. Critics often fail to see the point too. They’ve labeled the work of the Coens nihilistic, or misanthropic, or just plain vicious. They call the Coens’ films empty exercises in technical virtuosity without soul or subject.

These critics couldn’t be more wrong. Joel and Ethan Coen have an ongoing subject, and it’s a subject that they discuss intelligently and with compassion. Their subject? The American Dream.

You know, the American Dream: the idea that any penniless schlub born in a broken-down shack can, through grit and hard work, one day become Andrew Carnegie, or Sam Walton, or Bill Gates. It’s a free country! Opportunities unlimited! There’s supposed to be a proper moral framework propping up the whole thing, but somehow in the latter half of the twentieth century it became all about the money. Americans are obsessed with the stuff, whether in the affirmative sense (money enables you to follow your hopes and dreams) or in the negative sense (money can’t buy you happiness). Either way, material wealth always seems to be the fulcrum around which the whole American moral universe teeters. Rather appropriate when you think about it, considering that the United States was largely founded by a bunch of rich white landowners who were pissed off at the King of England because their taxes were too high.

Regardless, the American Dream is what it is, and for whatever reason Joel and Ethan Coen seem to have chosen it as their topic. In film after film, ever since 1984′s Blood Simple, the Coens have been steadily dissecting this Dream. Analyzing it, tearing it up, and stitching it back together. Charting out the ways it can corrupt us and demean us.

Witness Fargo, the story of a dumbass car salesman whose shame about his inability to provide a better life for his family leads him to fraud, extortion, and ultimately murder. Witness The Hudsucker Proxy, a cartoony take on Frank Capra in which a naive dimwit strives to reach the top of a major corporation only to find himself the puppet of his corporate masters. Or The Big Lebowski, featuring a ’60s reject with no ambition higher than getting his rug back, who is nonetheless sucked into the scheme of a corrupt self-styled philanthropist to steal a million dollars. Or The Man Who Wasn’t There, starring yet another dim bulb who’s thrust unprepared into a world of ambition by his wife’s philandering and is ultimately undone by it.

What do all the Coen protagonists have in common? They’re all ambitious schemers dissatisfied with the status quo, looking for unorthodox ways to achieve that American Dream.

And why not? You think the Carnegies, the Kennedys, and the Rockefellers got to their lofty positions by diligently punching the clock in a middle management job? You often hear the phrase these days that “well-behaved women rarely make the history books,” and it is, by and large, true. It’s certainly possible to earn a comfortable living on a middle-class salary with annual scheduled 5 percent raises. But to have Rockefeller money, or Perot money, or Gates money? The big American fortunes don’t come from middle-class salaries with 5 percent raises that are wisely invested. Some of them come from slave trading, bootlegging, war profiteering, and drug smuggling. Successful businessmen in this country often bribe law officials, extort politicians, oppress workers, and bully the competition.

The Coen Brothers protagonist sees a world that’s stacked against him. He’s stuck in a lower-middle-class rut with no upward mobility in sight. He’s not a venture capitalist or a bond trader or a software mogul. He’s (in chronological order by film) a bar manager, an ex-con factory worker, a middling Irish hood, a struggling screenwriter, a graduate of the Muncie College School of Business, a failing car salesman, an unemployed slacker, a convict sent up for practicing law without a license, a small-town barber, a high-powered attorney (okay, let’s just skip Intolerable Cruelty), and an itinerant con man.

With No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen give us another one of these would-be Andrew Carnegies in the form of Llewelyn Moss, a welder and Vietnam veteran (in an astonishingly understated performance by Josh Brolin). Llewelyn stumbles on the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong, finds a suitcase filled with two million dollars of drug money, and naturally assumes, in that uniquely American way, that he can “take on all comers” to keep it. He knows full well that there’s no pot of gold waiting for him after retirement from the welding trade; if he’s going to make a move up the ladder, if he’s going to follow the American Dream, Llewelyn has to jump into this with both feet.

Unfortunately, this opportunity leads him into the path of some unidentified cartel that’s willing to go to the mat to get back their cash. Towards that end, the cartel hires a lone assassin named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Chigurh isn’t your typical hit man. He’s kind of like the Terminator, if the Terminator wasn’t such a sentimental, weak-kneed pussy. He’s like Hannibal Lecter’s evil twin. This dude is bad, and he walks around West Texas indiscriminately killing just about everyone he crosses with a big cattle gun.

You couldn’t think up a more classic American conflict than this. A laconic cowboy taking on an assassin hired by corrupt businessmen, in Texas no less. A fight against incredible odds. A good ol’ Southern boy raised with good manners against a Godless, thoughtless Mexican killing machine. Blue-collar worker up against the men with the big money.

Now, big spoiler here. So stop reading now if you don’t want to know how this ends.

Ready?

Llewelyn Moss loses. He loses badly, in fact — gunned down in a cheap El Paso motel, possibly without even getting a shot off himself. In this he follows in the tradition of Coen Brothers Protagonists like Fargo‘s Jerry Lundegard, who whines and thrashes like a baby as the police collar him; The Ladykillers’ G.H. Dorr, who persists in his elaborate heist to the death of him and all of his co-conspirators; Raising Arizona‘s H.I. McDonnough, who sheepishly owns up to his ineptitude and returns the baby of the furniture magnate he previously stole; and The Big Lebowski‘s Jeff Lebowski, who winds up sans rug, sans one of his best friends, and sans the million dollars he was promised (but with johnson thankfully intact).

The shocking thing about the climactic ending of No Country for Old Men is that the Coen Brothers don’t even bother to show it onscreen. Why?

Well, partially they’re just being faithful to Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name. But certainly this ending appealed to Joel and Ethan for a good reason: it’s the real ending. Of course Llewelyn Moss is going to get his ass handed to him. You and I — the ones who sit in traffic on the way to work every day wishing there was a way to leave the rat race behind — we read stories about idiots like Llewelyn Moss all the time. They’re the ones who you see doing the perp walk on the evening news, the ones who thought they could beat the odds, the ones who thought they could get away with it. You and I know that there’s only one place where a stubborn Texas welder with a shotgun can outsmart, outmaneuver, and outgun a Mexican drug cartel: Hollywood.

And most Hollywood directors are there specifically to indulge these fantasies for us. That’s why we fork over ten dollars every few weeks, so we can see the story of the guy who beat the odds. To see the promise of the American Dream fulfilled. Hollywood obliges by giving us that one-man-against-an-army scenario time after time on the big screen. After the lights come on, you’re going to go back to your middle-class job with your scheduled annual 5 percent raise, but you can be comforted that somewhere out there, some underdog beat the odds.

One of the reasons I love the Coen Brothers is because they refuse to play this game. They refuse to peddle the same bullshit. They know how the world works, and with No Country for Old Men, they give us a much-needed splash of cold reality. It’s very simple. You play with fire, and you’re going to get your head blown off by a cattle gun.

Why is it a shame that nobody’s marking the occasion? Because Full Metal Jacket is one of the most meticulously crafted films of the past 20 years. I think it’s damn near perfect.

(Interesting side note: Believe it or not, this will be Full Metal Jacket‘s first home video release in widescreen. The film was originally shot in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, what you and I call “widescreen.” But if you’re an eccentric genius like Stanley Kubrick, you get to make unconventional decisions. Before his death Kubrick decided that, since 98% of the world’s TV sets back then had a 4:3 aspect ratio — i.e. “fullscreen” — henceforth and forevermore his films would be released in a 4:3 aspect ratio. None of that devil letterboxing for Stanley! It’s only now that Warner Home Video, with the collaboration of the Kubrick estate, is restoring the films to their original specs.)

Audiences have had a peculiar relationship with Full Metal Jacket since its debut on July 26, 1987. It’s much loved in some quarters, but it’s equally despised in others. Everyone seems to appreciate the taut first act set in a Parris Island Marine boot camp, yet many never get over the film’s sudden shift to Vietnam in its second half. Even so perceptive a critic as Roger Ebert famously called the latter half of Full Metal Jacket “a series of self-contained set pieces, none of them quite satisfying.”

But Full Metal Jacket is designed to be a two-part story; just about everything you see in the first half of the film has a parallel in the second. It’s a structure Kubrick has used before (cf. the apes/the astronauts in 2001, and Alex’s life before/after his treatment in A Clockwork Orange).

More than that, the film is full of dualities: Joker’s helmet with the peace symbol and “Born to Kill” inscribed on the side (“I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man… The Jungian thing, sir”). The two dramatic deaths at the end of each section. The two-mindedness of the American public about the war. Joker’s own conflicting desires to “get into the shit” and to get out of there as quickly as possible. His dual nature as Leonard’s teacher and as the one who beats Leonard the hardest. And so on.

Of course, most of the moviegoing public doesn’t want to see films about Jungian dualities, and so people often go into Full Metal Jacket with false expectations. Hollywood generally only gives us three categories of war films: (1) the anti-war film (Platoon, Kubrick’s own Paths of Glory) (2) the war-is-sordid-but-necessary-and-sometimes-ennobling film (Saving Private Ryan), and (3) the out-and-out propaganda film (John Wayne’s The Green Berets, 300). But what do you do with a Vietnam movie that not only refuses to take a stand on the Vietnam War, but actually embraces its contradictions? “Do I think America belongs in Vietnam?” Crazy Earl says in response to a question from the television interviewers in FMJ. He looks totally perplexed, like he’s never even considered the question before. “I don’t know. I belong in Vietnam, I’ll tell you that.”

So if you’re going to get the most out of Full Metal Jacket, be prepared to take the long view. The way long view, the view of an alien civilization dispassionately studying humanity under a microscope. Like those hypothetical aliens, Kubrick rarely makes moral judgments; he simply observes. Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, Joker, Animal Mother, the Vietnamese sniper, even the crazy gunner gleefully shooting down fleeing Vietnamese civilians from a moving helicopter — the film doesn’t really take anybody’s side. It doesn’t give you convenient moral labels to tell you who the good guys and who the bad guys are.

Take Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, played with vicious brio by R. Lee Ermey (you know, the guy who’s played the military drill sergeant in every fucking movie since 1987). At first blush, he seems like as good a candidate as any for a villain in this movie. A manipulative brainwasher, a callous tool of the U.S. government. But on repeated viewings, you realize that he’s not the villain at all — quite the opposite. He’s doing his best to prepare these soldiers to survive out in the field. He’s a father figure. He’s a protector and teacher. He’s Obi-wan Kenobi, if Obi-wan Kenobi called his Padawan learners “unorganized grabastic pieces of amphibian shit.”

“Because I am hard you will not like me,” says Hartman. “But the more you hate me, the more you will learn.” Didn’t Mr. Miyagi say something similar to the Karate Kid when making him paint the fence?

Put in that light, Hartman’s abuse of Leonard Lawrence (Vincent D’onofrio) becomes not just understandable; it’s necessary. Look at the scene where the platoon goes tearing through the mud in slow motion, only to have Leonard trip and pull the whole team down into the mud with him. We fat and happy civilians look at that scene and think, why doesn’t someone give that poor kid a hand? Hartman looks at that scene, and he thinks: that kid’s not just going to die in Vietnam, he’s going to get a whole shitload of other Marines killed too.

So Hartman is playing the role of the Teacher. But you know what happens to the Teacher in all these stories: he dies. In fact, he must die, because our Hero must learn to prove himself, alone.

Who’s our hero in Full Metal Jacket? He’s called the Joker (Matthew Modine). His name is never given, but if you look closely, you can see that the nametag on his shirt says “J.T. Davis.” And Full Metal Jacket is the story of his coming of age, the story of his transformation from protected child to self-actualized soldier.

At the film’s outset, he’s a gentle soul who’s trying his best to maintain an ironic detachment from the reality of the Vietnam War. He responds to Hartman’s diatribes with a mock John Wayne swagger; his “war face” is the pathetic imitation scream of a man who’s only seen death on TV; he tells the television crews that he wants to be “the first kid on my block to get a confirmed kill.” For the Joker, war is something remote. Death is something that happens to other people at a distance.

But over the course of the next 120 minutes, Joker will see the barriers between him and death slowly stripped away. Notice how the authority figures protecting Joker from the big, bad world become less and less authoritative as the film goes on. At first, we have the stern and menacing Gunnery Sergeant Hartman; then there’s the sour-faced colonel who tells Joker to “get your head and your ass wired together, or I will take a giant shit on you”; next there’s Lieutenant Touchdown, who seems competent if not particularly fearsome; then there’s Crazy Earl, who’s hardly much of an authority figure at all. By the time Cowboy takes command of the squad, you can see that he’s too green to have any sway over the anarchic Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin, now known to many as Jayne Cobb from Firefly). In the last scenes, even Cowboy is gone, leaving the Marines bereft of any real authority figure.

When we reach the last minutes of Full Metal Jacket, Joker comes face to face with death for the first time. As he faces down the Vietnamese sniper, we realize that Joker’s never really been under fire before. Nor has he ever killed another human being. Oh, he’s hunkered down in a bunker during the Tet Offensive and fired wildly at darkened figures in the distance. But to look the enemy directly in the eye and pull the trigger? No.

So Joker has reached his moment of truth, the moment that Gunnery Sergeant Hartman was trying to prepare him for. Can Joker set aside the irony, the sarcasm, the phoniness, and perform the job he signed up to perform as a Marine?

No. Joker fails, as Hartman foreshadowed way back in Parris Island. “Your rifle is only a tool,” he said. “It is the hard heart that kills. If your killer instincts are not clean and strong, you will hesitate at the moment of truth. You will not kill.” Joker hesitates, his rifle jams, and he withers under fire. He reaches for his pistol, drops it. Only by dumb luck — by the quick thinking of his buddy Rafterman, who Joker tried to leave behind — does he survive.

Earlier in the film, Joker asked the helicopter door gunner incredulously “How can you shoot women and children?” Now the question comes back to haunt him as Joker stands over an enemy sniper who is both a woman and a child (about 16, by the looks of her). The camera lingers over his face as he finally accepts the duality of man, the Jungian thing. Human beings are savage and civilized, kind and cruel, noble and deranged. Joker shoots.

Full Metal Jacket ends with Joker marching confidently alongside his brothers singing the Mickey Mouse Club theme song. “I am so happy that I am alive, in one piece and short,” Joker narrates in the end. “I’m in a world of shit… yes. But I am alive. And I am not afraid.”

This speaks less to my amazing prophetic powers than the rote predictability of the Oscars themselves. They’re growing less and less relevant, and it’s only a matter of time before they become so irrelevant that people stop paying attention. I give the Oscars fifteen more years.

In fact, in case you’ve missed this decade altogether, it’s no secret that the entire Hollywood movie industry is dying. Why? Actually, the reasons are well-documented in any number of places, but I’ll repeat them here because I’m just that way.

1. High definition television and DVDs. The obvious scapegoats. The movie theater chains made a huge tactical mistake in the ’80s and ’90s by putting an emphasis on building lots of multiplexes with smaller screens. The end result is that I’ve got a high-def TV and Surround Sound setup in my basement that rivals many of these lower end venues. It’s certainly good enough for your garden variety comedy/drama, and does a damn fine job on the mega-blockbusters too.
2. Actors’ and directors’ exorbitant salaries. It’s an interesting phenomenon that now Hollywood’s profits are teetering, the A-list stars are commanding higher prices than ever. Why? Well, the less certain you are of making back your investment on a film, the more you’re willing to spend to make sure you can get that return. Ben Stiller might not bring in nearly as large a crowd as, say, Robin Williams did back in the day, but at least he’s still bringing in a crowd.
3. Hollywood regulation. Robert Rodriguez wanted to give artist Frank Miller co-directing credit for his (brilliant, bloody) Sin City. The Director’s Guild of America wouldn’t let him. So, figured Rodriguez, who the fuck needs to be part of the Director’s Guild of America? He quit. It’s this kind of rigid bullshit that causes A-listers like George Lucas, Peter Jackson, and James Cameron to snub the system and work outside it. Look for more defectors from the Hollywood unions as their relevance plummets.
4. A globalized workforce. Similarly, who wants to deal with expensive union workers in Hollywood when you can hire some non-union worker in Fargo, or Tallahassee, or Mexico City for that matter? The spotlight creative jobs in Hollywood will stay local (for a while, at least), but filmmakers will discover that you can outsource almost everything else. Why pay x for postproduction in Hollywood when you can get the same quality for 10% of x in Bollywood?
5. Lack of edge. More multiplexes + higher salaries + union costs = more expensive films. What happens to movie studios when they need to get more and more butts in the seats to make back their investment? The same thing that happens to U.S. Presidential candidates once they make it through the primary season — they go scurrying for the middle. The studios and the movie chains start falling back on “sure bets” — sequels, popular franchises, formulaic comedies with bankable stars. Quality (which was never all that high to begin with) dips precipitously.
6. Moore’s Law (i.e. more powerful computers). Films that once required a film lab, a team of special effects gurus, and a roomful of dedicated Silicon Graphics workstations are becoming the province of some dude with a $500 camcorder and a Mac. There’s only so much gee-whiz spectacle and panache you can fit into a 90-minute film, and Moore’s Law says that desktop computers will be hitting that threshold in a few years.
7. New methods of distribution. In the old world, the only way to get your movie seen was to worm your way into the slippery network of nationwide movie chains, most of which won’t screen small, independently produced films. Festivals like Sundance made some headway in the ’90s opening film up to the smaller fish, but again it’s computer technology that’s made the difference in distribution. Why put up with the hassle of going through the traditional channels to distribute your movie when you can distribute it on the Internet via BitTorrent or YouTube, or just sell the DVD on your website?
8. New methods of marketing. Just like you couldn’t get your film seen in the olden days without studio distribution, you couldn’t get your film heard about without studio marketing money and big media tie-ins too. That’s going away. Good-bye, massive Burger King promotions — hello MySpace guerrilla marketing.
9. An unreasonable obsession with piracy that keeps the studios from trying new technologies. The MPAA has been gearing up its anti-piracy machinery in preparation for a similar onslaught that the music industry experienced. And like with the RIAA and the music biz, the studios will never win by threatening to sue the pants off their audience.

So what does a dying Hollywood movie studio industry mean for the movies themselves? Well, just because the movie industry we’ve grown up with for the past hundred years is dying doesn’t mean the movies are going away. You might be watching less of them at a cramped, overpriced, greasy theater next to the mall and watching more at home. You’ll see increasing market segmentation, more international faces, and the death of the Big, Loud, Summer Blockbuster That Pleases Everybody. You’ll see talents outside Southern California given a chance to bloom. You’ll see Hollywood itself change from the film industry’s Mecca to its mausoleum, kind of like Detroit and the auto industry.

How can Hollywood possibly reverse these trends? A few ideas:

• Interactivity. Exactly how this would work I’m not certain. Perhaps a system where you can vote for the outcome of the film in progress, a la “American Idol.” The crowd wants our protagonist to get the girl in the end? He gets the girl. They’d rather kill off the miserable fucker? He dies. (The big hurdle here is that such interactivity is likely to be expensive and much easier accomplished at home anyway.)
• Elimination of the theater release window. Hollywood is clinging desperately to the idea that major films should be given an exclusive window of opportunity to lure viewers into the theaters. Here’s a better idea — give away copies of the DVD with a ticket to the film. I guarantee if you don’t have to make that choice between paying $12 a ticket for a film you only see once, and waiting six months to pay $15 for a film you can view over and over again, you’ll spend more time in the theaters.
• Serials. We’ve gotten used to the idea that every film should be an “event.” Why not take the long-term view and build an audience gradually over time with serials that release new episodes, say, three or four times a year? Keep the production costs low and give discounts for those who buy tickets to the whole run of the series.
• One word: IMAX. You’re unlikely to be able to achieve the experience of watching an IMAX film at home until we’ve got the whole immersive virtual environment thing down, and who knows when that will be. So start putting some serious money into building IMAX theaters and financing IMAX films. I’m unclear exactly how the business model for an IMAX theater works or who owns IMAX in the first place, but Hollywood needs more IMAX theaters next to the mall and fewer multiplexes.

And if the movies do crash and burn, you could always stay home and read a book. Just a suggestion.

I hadn’t remembered that Alien is really a film about the exploitation of blue-collar workers. (Warning: there will be spoilers in this article.)

On the surface, Alien is your prototypical high concept film: a monster movie in outer space. I’m willing to bet that’s how it was pitched to 20th Century Fox. And with H.R. Giger’s gloriously macabre production design, that concept might have worked in any setting.

But screenwriters Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett chose a gritty commercial towing cruiser named the Nostromo. And they chose as their heroes a crew of ordinary blue-collar joes and janes whose situation in life can be summed up by the fact that they’re getting paid to waste months of time in a rickety ship under cryogenic suspension.

The fascinating moments of Alien don’t necessarily lie in the suspense of who’s-gonna-git-it-next (although the suspense is very nicely done). The fascinating part of Alien is watching the day-to-day interactions of the Nostromo‘s crew. Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) and Parker (the great Yaphet Kotto) lamenting the fact that none of the others ever dirty their hands by coming down into the guts of the ship. Dallas (Tom Skerritt) making brash (and as it turns out, totally wrong) managerial decisions on the spur of the moment. Ripley (Weaver) and Ash (Ian Holm) arguing over quarantine procedure and what the proper chain of command is when senior officers aren’t aboard the ship. Parker making crude come-ons to the female members of the crew even though he knows they won’t take the bait. Unlike the fake blue-collar camaraderie of so many Hollywood films — The Abyss comes to mind — the interplay between the characters in Alien is spot on.

These are miners, people who work with their hands, people who smoke cigarettes on the job and don’t bother to pack anything more than the grubby company jumpsuit as clothing. Parker wears a ratty bandana, while Brett smokes something that looks hand-rolled and might very well be something other than nicotine. We can see in one scene that someone has chosen to decorate the walls of a supply room with nudie pictures.

How much are they getting paid? A single Company share each. The movie doesn’t say how much a Company share is worth, but I’m willing to bet that you and I would be making at least three or four of them. Two of the crewmembers aren’t even making that much; Brett and Parker spend most of their screen time in the first half of the film bemoaning the fact that they’re only earning half a share.

So when the crew of the Nostromo lands on the nameless moon to track down the source of the intercepted transmission, they’re not searching for riches or glory or the mythical lost Sceptre of Mizlpaxtrzh. No, these are tired miners heading home from a long job. They’re diverted to the moon by direct order of their employer, as a clause in the fine print of their contracts. They’ve been commanded to investigate; no investigation, no pay.

Your typical horror movie shows us bratty, spoiled rich kids getting disemboweled as punishment for their innate greed. Alien shows us low-rung, end-of-the-road schlubs getting mercilessly slaughtered by a monstrous stand-in for their corporate employers.

Oh yes, the subtext here is perfectly clear. The alien is the Company. The alien sees the human crew as just a nest to implant eggs in. According to the ship’s computer, the Company regards the crew as “expendable”; Dallas and Company’s sole purpose here is to transport the Company’s new prototype weapon back to Earth. By the film’s end, the alien’s tentacles are indistinguishable from the wires and tubes of the ship’s architecture itself, signifying that this alien is just a manifestation of the forces already devouring these blue-collar workers.

Who runs this insidious Company? What is their primary line of business? What kinds of outside pressures are bearing down on them to cause their engaging in such a ruthless research project? The later Alien films shed some light on these questions, but within the scope of the original, we just don’t know.

Remember, in the end this is a Ridley Scott film. And while Ridley Scott is a master craftsman, he is simply an entertainer a heart, just another tentacle of the ruthless corporate alien that is Hollywood filmmaking.

I spent three summers waiting and imagining. The events of Empire were carefully parsed and dissected with my brother and all of my friends. I wrote several episodes of fan fiction in which I actually predicted Luke and Leia’s siblinghood and the return of the Death Star. I practically tore the covers off that Dynamite magazine preview of the last installment in the Star Wars series.

As everyone who can tell a Wookie from a Nemoidian knows, Return of the Jedi was something of a letdown. (How many people have ever told you that Jedi changed their lives? Anyone?) It’s not that Jedi was a bad movie, per se, so much as it just wasn’t a great one. It was a perfectably respectable and entertaining popcorn flick with some classic action sequences and snappy banter.

And yes, there were even some great moments in Episode VI. Think the death scene of Darth Vader, the scooter chase through the forests of Endor, the whole intercutting of action sequences in the movie’s last third. When that Force lightning started shooting out of the Emperor’s fingers, all you could hear in the theater was the sound of several hundred adolescent jaws hitting the floor.

But the troubling aspects of the movie clearly weigh Return of the Jedi down. I wasn’t so much bothered by the Ewoks — they’re overdone but they’re entertaining (which is essentially how I feel about Episode I’s Jar Jar Binks). No, what really bothered me was

• how Lando Calrissian turned overnight from a troubled scoundrel/traitor to a bland and cheerful go-to guy for the Rebels
• how Luke and Leia are clumsily revealed to be siblings (which, let’s face it, George Lucas did not have in mind from the beginning)
• how the mysterious Boba Fett is revealed to be the lamest fighter ever
• how one sudden act of rebellion completely redeems the galaxy’s Eichmann and earns him an immortal place next to Yoda and Obi-Wan
• how… well, okay, I’ll stop here. You get the point.

Remarkably enough, I don’t remember anybody being disappointed with the movie when it was released. In fact, I remember arriving at elementary school on the morning of May 26, 1983, to find the playground in an uproar as a group of kids ran around shouting plot spoilers at the top of their lungs. (“Darth Vader is Luke’s father! Yoda dies! Luke and Leia are brother and sister!”)

(Such trauma was difficult for a young adolescent to endure. A quick playground poll revealed that most of the kids — including myself — had not gone to the mid-week premiere. [Remember the days when movies actually had a theater run of longer than two weeks?] So what could a kid possibly do with such a secret? After a wretched day of inner Sturm und Drang, just dying to tell my brother all that I had learned, my sister conducted what was probably the first therapy session of her life by allowing me to spill the beans to her about Return of the Jedi.)

So it’s only in retrospect, many years later, that Return of the Jedi turned out to be such a profound letdown. Watching the first two films of the series (I’m talking about Episodes IV and V here) today, you can still see George Lucas’ vision at work. You can still overlook the cloying dialogue and the sometimes-painful plot inconsistencies.

But Jedi clearly has the stink of a commercial enterprise about it, with its constant attempts at oneupmanship, its pandering to the audience, its desperation to be adored. You can see the marketing mindset at work with the Ewoks. Looking back on the movie from adulthood, you can see the puppeteer and all the strings, and you think, I can’t believe I fell for this. Even worse, you occasionally think, I can’t believe someone would do this to me.

Now I’ll stop blogging about Star Wars for a while, lest I be accused of kicking this thing to death.

It’s a sunny morning in Orange County, California. Jimmy Carter is president of the United States, Mount St. Helens has just erupted, Richard Pryor will be setting himself on fire any day now. The Iranians have taken a number of Americans hostage in Tehran. Lots of people seem to be singing “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” though I’m not quite sure why.

My mother takes my brother, my sisters, and me to see The Empire Strikes Back. I’m nine years old.

Star Wars has become my passion, as it is my older brother’s passion, as it is the passion of just about every boy I’ve ever met or heard of. I’m a late convert to the Church of Lucas, having stubbornly insisted for many months that Battlestar Galactica was the superior fictional universe.

Now I’m making up for lost time with a vengeance. I’ve got the first dozen issues of the Marvel Star Wars comic book series, I’ve got a TIE fighter, an X-wing fighter, a landspeeder, a Millennium Falcon, an interior set from the Death Star, every action figure from Greedo to Chewbacca to Hammerhead. My brother and I have worn the plastic light sabers of our Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader figurines down to nubs from fighting with them. (Our life-size plastic light sabers, however, are still in good shape.)

A few weeks ago, I have given in to sweet temptation and bought the Empire Strikes Back comic book published in mass-market paperback form. The cover is white and red. Even though I promise myself I won’t read it all the way through, I take several tantalizing peeks at the opening pages. There’s an ice planet. Luke and Han and Chewie are there.

There’s a TV special showing a behind-the-scenes look at the battle scene on Hoth, the painstaking art of stop-motion animation. I hear something about a new character being performed by Frank Oz.

Then finally, the day arrives. Saturday, May 24th or possibly May 25th — definitely a few days after opening day. The longest days of my life.

Mom hauls four kids in a blue Ford station wagon with wood paneling over to a theater in Costa Mesa (or was it Fountain Valley? Westminster?). We’re hours early. My brother and I haul ass as quickly as we can to the back of the line, nearly crying in despair to see it winding halfway around the theater. But we soon quit our moaning as we see the line snake its way far, far behind us. Suddenly our family is back in the vanguard. We’re prudent planners.

After an hour of torpid standing-around time — the minutes are stretched thin like taut rubber bands — the line moves. We enter the theater.

And somehow we find perfect seats, no small accomplishment for a party of five. Not too close, not too far. Directly in the center of the auditorium, no six-foot jackass sitting in the next row blocking our view. There’s probably candy. There’s always candy at the movies. Mom usually picks it up for a discount at Key Market and smuggles it into the theater in her purse.

The lights go out. My brother and I are wiggling in our seats. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

A symphonic blast of trumpets. The opening crawl.

The first time Mark Hamill appears on the screen, taking off his goggles atop that TaunTaun, the crowd erupts into applause. Cheers, jubilation. Luke Skywalker is back! This is the first time most of us have seen Mark Hamill since his car accident. His face looks different… but it’s still Luke.

The audience is tense as the battle of Hoth rages onscreen. The Imperial Walkers are easily the coolest fucking thing we have ever seen. We’re ducking and diving along with the poor Rebels, who are about to get their asses handed to them by the Empire. But it’s okay — this is an anticipated setback, a planned retreat.

Han Solo & Co. blast their way out of the Rebel base at literally the last possible instant. The menacing figure of Darth Vader emerges just in time to see the exhaust on the Millennium Falcon as the ship wings away. The audience explodes: a literal standing ovation. People are cheering, yelling.

Luke Skywalker finds his way to Dagobah and begins his tutelage under the Jedi Master Yoda, whose words are sage and mysterious and challenging in a way we’ve never quite experienced before. Yoda wants Luke to unlearn? What the hell? To white suburban Orange County kids who have remained largely insulated from the hippy, trippy ’70s, this isn’t Hollywood hokum… this is the fucking Port Huron Statement. This is subversive. Does Mom realize we’re watching this? Would our teachers approve?

Harrison Ford, in the meanwhile, by cavalierly dodging the Empire through fancy maneuver after fancy maneuver, has clearly demonstrated that he is the coolest dude in the history of the universe, ever ever ever. The chase through the asteroid field makes the Imperial Walkers seem like old news, especially now that the candy’s gone and the sugar high has kicked in.

Our heroes find their way to Cloud City.

And then something happens that’s beyond my nine-year-old imagination. The heroes start to lose. The android C-3PO, blown into bits. Han Solo, frozen in carbonite and sent off with the mysterious bounty hunter Boba Fett. Luke Skywalker’s hand neatly sliced off by the blade of the Dark Lord of the Sith.

And then —

I have absolutely no idea what’s coming next. None of the comic books or Saturday morning TV shows I’ve been digesting my whole life have prepared me for this moment. Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father. Gasps echo throughout the theater. Time pauses to catch its breath. His father? Never in the darkest corners of my imagination could I have predicted this. It’s a world-shattering revelation. I’m scared, I’m elated, I want to go home, I never want to leave.

The plunge off the bridge, the rescue, the daring escape. The credits.

The rest of the afternoon is a blur. My summer agenda has now been set. I have mysteries to ponder that will occupy much of my attention during the next few years. Was Darth Vader telling the truth? How could someone so noble as Luke be the child of a villain so black as Vader? And why didn’t Ben Kenobi tell him earlier? What point was Yoda trying to make by sending Luke into the cave to confront his phantom nemesis?

One thing is clear: this is not the same world that existed before the lights went down.

It will gradually become clear to me in those next few years what George Lucas was trying to say: The menace and nightmare and calculation that had seemed like some distant, external force in Star Wars is inside of us all. Luke Skywalker is Darth Vader. We are Darth Vader, each and every one of us.

Your grandkids will yawn when you try to tell them what the world was like in those heady days right after 9/11. They will roll their eyes when you talk about how shocking and revolutionary New Wave music was, or how much of an uproar the country was in over the Clinton impeachment. You’ll say “you just had to be there.”

If you’re an American male born somewhere in the late ’60s or early ’70s, you know. You remember. The Empire Strikes Back changed things forever.

And I was there.

When will this idiotic franchise finally die?

I am gobsmacked and thunderstruck that a character with so little depth as James Bond can attract such an avid following. Here is a character with no backstory, no real distinguishing characteristics, no hint of a psyche. There’s a reason why fans so eagerly anticipate each new Bond’s performance in the famous title sequence (man in tuxedo walks onscreen, man draws gun and swivels to face camera). The reason is: that’s all there is to the character. Here’s a suave guy carrying a gun. That’s it. No, really.

(Note that I’m making a distinct separation here between the film James Bond and the literary James Bond. As anyone who has dipped into the original Ian Fleming novels can tell you — and I read about eight or nine of them many years ago — they’re two entirely different animals altogether. Fleming’s 007 was a grim and sober character with little interest in philandering or gadgets or hobnobbing at cocktail parties. See an interesting rant about film-JB-versus-book-JB posted on Ain’t It Cool News.)

After 21 films featuring the intrepid agent 007 (or 23 films, if you include the so-called “non-canonical” features like the 1967 Casino Royale), here is essentially all we know about Mr. Bond:

* He’s a white British male.
* He works for Her Majesty’s Secret Service as agent 007.
* He likes his martinis shaken but not stirred.
* He employs a lot of high-tech gadgets.
* He is a heterosexual.
* He’s cool under fire and wears lots of snappy tuxedos.

Here is just a small sampling of what we don’t know about James Bond:

* Where does he live?
* Does he have any friends or family?
* What are his hobbies, besides fighting international crime?
* What was his childhood like?
* Does he have any political or religious affiliation?
* Where did he go to school?
* What motivates him?
* Has he ever really loved anyone?
* Has anyone ever really loved him?
* Why did he join HMSS in the first place?
* Has he ever considered retirement?
* Has he ever read an entire book to completion that didn’t include pop-ups?
* Does all the killing ever get to him?
* What are his feelings towards the country he strives so hard to protect?
* Does he have any opinions whatsoever?

I’m sure James Bond fans can point me to lots of minor details that the films have revealed over the years, possibly including some of the above. But these details are written into a particular script by the screenwriter for the purposes of that particular film; they are not integral parts of the character. It’s no wonder that second-rate actors like Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan have had such an easy time filling the role, considering that there are no subtleties to convey.

Of course, one can argue that James Bond is a creation of pop culture — a cartoon character, in essence — and that we don’t need an entire Myers-Briggs workup on a pop culture film character to make him compelling.

But this response doesn’t wash with me. I’m having trouble even thinking of a cartoon character as two-dimensional as James Bond. A single viewing of even the kitschiest of the modern Batman and Superman films gives you much more information about their title characters than the entire Bond canon. We know more about Austin Powers after three films than we know about James Bond after twenty-one. Hell, we know more about Yogi Bear.

So enjoy the stunts and the big-budget effects and the offhanded quips and retorts of a James Bond film. Far be it from me to deny the pleasures of popcorn cinema. But please remember that the protagonist is as thinly sliced a caricature as they come, and don’t fucking waste headline space debating him.