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The Washington City Paper's Fringeworthy Action News & Commentary Sqaud
As it has every year since 2010, overseeing the Washington City Paper's coverage of the Capital Fringe Festival here in DC claimed most of my July. Here's my wrap-up of the festival from this week's WCP.
The "mimetic pollyalloy" T-1000 in its natural habitat.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day originally had a sunlit coda set on the National Mall in the no-longer-grim future of 2029 with Linda Hamilton in unconvincing old age makeup. Director James Cameron was right to cut it.
My essay about the movie's villain that ran on The Dissolve last week originally had a rambling 500-word introduction. My editor, Keith Phipps, was right to cut it.
So here it is!
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Sixty-one minutes into the theatrical cut of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, there’s a shot so hokey that only the unrelenting intensity of the preceding hour could keep the audience from laughing.
Sarah Connor and her son John — future Che Guevara of the resistance against SkyNet, the artificial intelligence network destined to nuke the Northern Hemisphere and then hunt the human vermin scurrying among its ashes — speed away from the insane asylum from which Sarah has just pulled off a desperate jailbreak. They’re in a commandeered police car driven by the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger model) Terminator, their ally.
In the rearview mirror, we see the advanced T-1000 Terminator, which wants nothing on Earth but to kill them, in an awkward foot pursuit with two swords/dredging hooks for hands. He is played by Robert Patrick, a 32-year-old former Bowling Green University linebacker who trained himself to sprint full speed with his mouth closed, the way no human being runs, for the role. He looks graceful, fast, and lethal every time he runs in the movie except this one.
Where he looks ridiculous.
Terminator Scissorhands.
Sent from the future by the malevolent supercomputer StruwwelpeterNet to snip the heads off bad little boys and girls.
Is what he looks like.
We know by this point the T-1000 is made from a “mimetic polyalloy” that can rearrange itself into stabby metal objects, and that can at least temporarily alter his appearance to make him an perfect visual doppelganger of any person he touches. We even bought the shot just a moment ago, when the T-800 fired his shotgun point blank into the T-1000’s face — well, “face” — and the thing’s bubbling metal head (just infer the quotation marks around all future references to specific body parts and gender, please) burst open like a tin of Jiffy Pop before zipping itself back together.
But that goofy shot of him running in the mirror is the last time the T-1000 will menace our heroes for 34 minutes — a perilously long chunk of a kinetic thriller like this one. T2’s roughly $100 million cost was a record high when the film went into production in 1990, but this shot wouldn’t have looked any different if it had been a penny-pinching guerilla action movie, like 1984’s The Terminator — the film that earned cowriter/director James Cameron a career.
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Read the final version of this essay at The Dissolve, which jettisoned this looooooong setup to cut to the still-quite-lengthy chase. Thanks again to Keith for his smart, patient, improving edit.
I want you to think of this picture the next time you reach for a cigarette. Cabin Fever: Patent Zero.
If a giant, irradiated lizard can be the star of a long-running franchise, why not a flesh-eating virus? Many reasons, actually.I still haven't managed to see Boyhood or Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, but I reviewed Cabin Fever: Patient Zero for The Dissolve.
It's Lucy star Scarlett Johannson's year.
My NPR review of Luc Besson's wiggedy-wack but truly, madly, deeply watchable Lucy.
I'm still feeling pretty good about the summer movies I recommended (then) unseen in the Village Voice back in May, though Dawn of the Planet of the Apes -- which I still haven't caught with -- probably should've made the list. And I arbitrarily excluded documentaries, even though Life Itself is the only film that's made me cry so far this year. Though I haven't seen Boyhood yet, either.
Robert Patrick's "mimetic pollyalloy" T-1000 could look like anyone. For most of T2, he looks like an LAPD patrolman.
I've very proud to have contributed the concluding essay of The Dissolve's Movie of the Week coverage of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, long one of my sentimental favorites. My piece examines how cowriter-director James Cameron's decision to disguise the film's mysterious villain, the advanced T-1000 Terminator played (mostly) by Robert Patrick, as a uniformed Los Angeles police officer anticipated our growing discomfort with police in general and the L.A.P.D. in particular at the start of the 90s. It also explores the film's ironic connection to the tragic beating of Rodney King by four L.A.P.D. officers near one of T2's key locations while the film was in production. Read it here.
What's in a name? Twinnie Lee Moore (!) as Crazy Mary (!!) in Ironclad: Battle for Blood.
Look, I'm not sorry for likening Predator to The Seven Samurai in my Dissolve review of Ironclad: Battle for Blood. And compared to this thing, Predator may as well be The Seven Samurai.
And this episode of The FringeCasting Couch was recorded lst Tuesday afternoon, during a brief interval between a depressing visit to my doctor's office and the two fitness classes I had to teach that evening; one boxing and one boot camp. This were necessarily verbal-instruction-only editions of said classes for me; doctor's orders. Nothing feels worse.
Anyway, I'm a big fan of Live Action Theatre. Their show in the 2013 Capital Fringe Festival, The Continuing Adventures of John Blade, Super Spy, was my favorite last year. I liked their new one, The Tournament, so much that I'm leaving to see it for a second time right now. Here's the original Fringeworthy post.
I had them on the podcast last year, too.
For the fifth consecutive year, I'm running the Washington City Paper's coverage of the Capital Fringe Festival here in DC, manifest mainly through a blog previously known as Fringe & Purge that we decided this year to rename Fringeworthy. In 2012, I started The Fringe & PurgeCast to accompany that blog; its rebranding this summer forced me to rethink the podcast's name, too. The Fringe & PurgeCast is dead; long live The FringeCasiting Couch.
I'm not cross-posting most of the stuff I'm doing for Fringeworthy, but I'm going to put up a couple of recent episodes of the podcast that I thought were particularly fun. This one, which I recorded last night with Twanna A. Hines, whose show is called I Füçkèð Your Country, is one of those. The original post is here.
