OFFICE SPACE @ 25

Peter hates his tech job but feels it is absorbing him into a future of pointless time serving. One day he is taken to a therapist who hypnotises him into relaxation and dies of a heart attack before he can snap Peter out of it. Peter gets up out of his chair and walks into a new life as the most dangerous figure in all workplaces, a person who doesn't put up with his boss's bullshit.

Mike Judge's hymn of hatred for white collar work's dehumanisation is an expansion of his Liquid Television cartoon series Milton, a compressed and bullied clerical worker who has been reduced to a constant stream of mumbles about burning the building down. Milton remains a character but could not carry a whole feature film. This might have been a parade of sketches about the ironies and absurdities of this smothered area of employment and, given Judge's wit, might have got a away with that. But there's just too much more to talk about, here.

The film begins showing Peter and his two friends at work, Samir and Michael, in separate vehicles in a traffic jam on the way to work. When Peter swing into the free moving lane beside his static one the new lane stops. This happens continuously. At one point he looks to the side of the road to see an old man using a Zimmer frame going faster than the traffic. That is pure adult cartoon material but it works because adult cartoon material at its best does not need the superpowers of animation to make a joke work. Judge also created Beavis and Butthead but, most substantially King of the Hill which I enjoyed for its realistic satire and courage in including warmth.

The office is a hive of cubicles, clicking with keyboards. A receptionist has a cloying melodic phone greeting that sounds like a recording. The boss, played with sickening smoothness by go-to screen creep Gary Cole, prefaces everything he says with phrases like "I'm going to go ahead and" which end with work day sentences like unpaid overtime or even just the word disagree. When the consultants come in to tidy up the spending (mostly by cutting staff) their language is a step beyond this, acts of gravity evened out by evasive, unctuous linguistic mutation. They are charmed by Peter's candour and lack of deference and mark him for promotion at the expense of Samir and Michael.

It is to Judge's credit that when the trio hatch a plot to eke a living through a money skimming software someone points out that it was the plot of Superman III. This isn't just a nerd badge, it testifies to the vanity of the scheme and the pride its authors feel. This is counterweighted by Peter's neighbour whose a big macho oaf who does come on strong and bullish but also has credible insights. The flair issue at the restaurant where Peter's love interest (Jennifer Aniston) works is straight out of King of the Hill b ut Judge is careful to show that even the service zombies that run the place also have a non work side. They've just figured it out even if Joanna is too aloof to notice.

If anything, Office Space suffers from a deflated third act. It's written well enough but like his other live action feature Idiocracy, the satirical statements and recognition humour are so well packed into the front end that the character arcs pale. There is a clear focus on the machinery of plotting and the conclusion is a satisfying one that includes both surprise and a hint of sadness that give it the feel of a well earned ending. While a rewatch will remind you of some mid point lagging (the romance is fine if not quite compelling) you will come away from the viewing thinking very well of it.

What does work is the capture of the treadmill of office work. The salaries are higher than on assembly lines and the staff often have an idea that their education has equipped them for a deserved smart casual life while in service to minor despots who get their ideas from management seminars and speak in stiflingly evasive language. The staff singing Happy Birthday to the boss as though it's a Russian funeral dirge and the petty-crime-style assault on the never-working printer at a remote location are still hilarious. But there lies the problem. Judge's later long running series Silicon Valley about software engineers in the tech business is an exercise in sustained satire that approaches genius. It is perfectly honed and strongly observed. It's also at the end of a lot more experience and shows. That said, Office Space gives enough for what it is, a fable of the world of work with massive relatability. Not bad for an early attempt.

WHEN HARRY MET SALLY @ 35

Sally and Harry share the driving, both going to university in New York. In an extended meet cute, Harry's cynicism sparks against Sally's fastidious ambition but there's a clear attraction. The plots of rom coms are mostly minimal. Everyone knows where they're going but it's the ride that's fun. Rob Reiner's direction of Nora Ephron's screenplay disturbs this by adding documentary interviews of old couples telling how they met. When this contrasts with the tension between the pair of the title over years of acquaintance, the usual end of a rom com is awarded that smidgeon of uncertainty.

So much of this is enlivened by casting. Billy Crystal brings his rapid fire deadpan standup style to Harry. His dead-eyed assertion that there can be no genuine friendship between men and women, the proposition that fuels the plot and that uncertainty abovementioned, is handed to the audience like an entry token. Meg Ryan's explosive rejection of it takes her character from the rude keynote moment of breaking up a kiss with a barmp of a car horn to the completing antagonist role. While Bruno Kirby's idealist friend of Harry is mostly little more than a soundboard for Harry's quipping, he does emerge with some integrity (not easy, given his screen mates). 

For me, though, it's the thankless and stellar turn by Carrie Fisher as Kirby's counterpart who only ever shines. Her role is better written and might well be Ephron's autobiographical sketch. Marie is a mentor who, in those days prior to the introduction of a mini cosmos on a screen, carries a card index of eligible men (and needs, now and then, reminders to perform data clean-up while at lunch). Fisher's eyes absorb every single thing they see and calculate its value in nanoseconds. This is warmed up with some New York sass and makes me wince that she wasn't in more comedy, rising to writing like this and showing herself naturally funny in person.

As I followed the progress of this film on rewatch (the first since I saw it all them years ago) I was struck by how slow it felt. It's barely past the ninety minute mark but feels much longer. It's never less than engaging but its structure depends on the audience's tolerance of continual circling back to square one with a diminishing return. While this is appreciable as a narrative attack after the credits roll, at the time it can feel draggy. When fresh, there was little pushback when calling When Harry Met Sally Woody Allen lite. As Woody Allen had reinvented the rom com with Annie Hall over a decade before, there had been a strain of them in the interim that had attempted the same but, unless you really know what you're doing, most attempts are doomed. This works because it rolls back the harder edges of the Allen movie and keeps things soft all the way through. 

The swearing in the dialogue, while not remarkably new, is used so judiciously it lands percussively every time but then it's a cue to roll another restaged old couple moment and everything smooths back down. Seeing this again, I was reminded of another late '80s revisit in Broadcast News which got everything wrong in its attempt to rekindle the bottled lightning of Network, making what was edgy cute. Harry Met Sally doesn't fail the way that one did, but it doesn't reach further, either. It's what a lot of culture felt like in the era as the tougher and more inventive approach were absorbed into the mainstream for easy digestion. The '90s would bring disruptors like Hal Hartley whose arthouse rom coms played like punk records and Tarantino whose homages to '70s kitsch felt more violent and funny than their source points. With this filtration and the nosedive of Woody Allen's reputation, Rob Reiner's classic remains a classic in the sense that any popular karaoke number remains, defanged and subject to copying error.

When Harry Met Sally is still a fun and funny movie with a wealth of good talking points for coffee afterwards. I personally think that, although the Allenish echoes in the Louis Armstrong needledrops and authentico interviews give it a softening sense of quirk, the better comparison is the younger relationship in The Graduate which is rich with brash disruption. 1989 was not prepared to dig in to heavy fun with the genre, so we got this exercise in charm instead of a barnstormer. It's why both film and the people it characterises feel a lot older than the '60s movie. The certificate of enjoyability this movies comes with looks shiny rather than fresh ... but is that such a bad thing when it is still funny?

DARK STAR @ 50

The Dark Star, an unstable-planet disposal ship, is years into its mission into interstellar space, making way for the real estate of the future. The crew are sick of it but also resigned to their lives which might as well play out to the end like this. If they've gone so far beyond getting sick of each other, as well, there is always someone who'll rub the others the wrong way.  One day (why do they even bother with the concept of days, now?) one of the sentient bombs they use to destroy planets is accidentally activated and has to be persuaded to disarm itself and return to the bay. Does possible always mean necessary? Not on Earth but that's so far away it has become an abstraction. The cosmos beckons.

A black and white, glitchy recording from Earth opens the film, aligning it to a similar communication in Kubrick's Space Odyssey and letting us know we're in for a comedy. The news is not good and it's old. Essentially, there is no assistance on its way to The Dark Star; they're on their own. We'll be getting to-screen moments from the crew leader (in absence of the deceased commander) and the paranoid and whingey Pinback. The verité style of these recordings is largely due to the actor playing Pinback, Dan O'Bannon, who co-wrote the screenplay and went on to the impressive world building dialogue of Alien six years later. This has a lot to do with why Dark Star works: Carpenter brings the sci-fi and the spaceship as submarine/wagon train/lost patrol/etc and O'Bannon pours in the workaday realism that, both mixing it up in a comedic approach, makes this zero budget effort fly out of the gate.

Carpenter knew that intimate closeups as well as endless vistas can make an epic if your story supports it. This requires credible performances and gets them. They don't have to be Oscar winners to get the tale across but what we get is also a notch above contemporary tv acting. So, when Pinback prepares the bomb for its job, he sounds like he's calling a friendly colleague. Later, deep in the kind of frustration that acts of biology would otherwise quench, Lieutenant Doolittle gruffly orders the crew to find another planet to blow up. At the outer reaches of where humans have explored, these guys just live with it. Talby is the exception but his withdrawal to the observation bubble has turned his wonder into a formless chain of suppositions.

If you are new to this film and wince at the lo-fi effects remind yourself that apart from a tiny fraction of them, they are practical setups. If you want to know how the interior of the aircraft-shaped ship has Earthly gravity, you do not deserve this movie. If you scoff at the beach ball alien, you will never get this film. This is the story of a crew first but the convergent path of some serious sci-fi concepts bring the comedy into focus until it's revealed in all its existential details. It might look like a student film (that's how it began) but it plays like something much deeper.

Of course, this piece is overshadowed to the point of obscurity by the beginning of the Star Wars saga but for all the orchestras and dazzle of Lucas' epic I feel more cinema from Dark Star and its gaffer taped sets and home made electronic music. Lucas put a samurai quest in space but Carpenter asked us to consider space itself, its horror and the laughter that much come from sight of that. Later, when O'Bannon's screenplay for Alien had the characters talking seriously about their working conditions, it felt even more like what life in a spacecraft might be like and this early collision with a master of suspense would prove one of the most durably fruitful.

Viewing notes: I watched my old U.S. Blu-Ray of this but failed to find it on streaming or in physical form locally. Sheesh!

THE TERMINATOR @ 40

A hitman from the near future is sent back to the Los Angeles of the '80s to terminate anyone called Sarah Conner to prevent the leader of the future resistance movement. The Terminator's bosses are not more human despots but machines that rose after a nuclear war and set about curing the cause by getting rid of all the humans. Well, that's one way to stop global warming. Across town, The Terminator's nemesis Reese is similarly backported to the '80s. The Terminator is a cyborg. He's partly flesh and blood and partly machine. He's good at his job and hones in on Sarah swiftly just in time for her to be rescued by Reese. And the chase is on.

To say that the rest of this sci-action classic is just a long chase sequence would be to insult the thought that went into its creation. Themes like artificial intelligence or robots taking their jobs to disastrous conclusions is as old as E.T.A. Hoffman (but probably older). More recently, every episodic sci-fi fiction featured the thought in at least one episode. In this instance, though, the sentient machines have cast judgement that the reverse was true and humans whose entire existence was a run up to self annihilation were no longer worthy of the planet they had laid waste. It's a proto version of Roko's Basilisk with a kind of  godlike morality added.

It's also a technological marvel of its day. Some things in high definition will look a little creaky to anyone watching freshly today. I imagine these moments will be greased over in any 4K version as James Cameron, like Spielberg or Lucas, tends to update his older titles. The problem with this is that it diminishes the original achievement. The skin tearing and moving around the exposed metal skeleton as The Terminator attempts self repair looks far more like latex than human skin but, however unintended this was, it adds to the alienness of the character. His skin looks functionally designed rather than the end result of eons of evolution. See also, any of the damage sustained by the cyborg who looks near human but might as well be a mechanical shark on legs.

If The Terminator is plagued by anything that might harm it, it lies in the performances. The cast's turns feel as though they had to fend for themselves. It's not just Arnie, Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton are acceptable as the leads because of the plot. You can see they are trying but they don't have the big picture eye of an actor's director behind the camera. This is true of later Cameron films like Aliens and The Abyss. It's worth noting this shortcoming is not limited to Cameron but shared by the likes of Cronenberg and Lucas in their earlier careers. 

As for Arnie, he gets a pass as he is learning 1980s Californian on the fly and his character's capacity for smiling or archness were not about to be called upon. Interestingly, the original casting for the title role was Lance Henriksen (who plays a detective) with the idea being that his grey ordinariness might make him even scarier. Then, Arnold Schwarzenegger's career as a unique looking muscle was very much on the rise, and the similarly buff Rutger Hauer had owned the screen in the then recent Blade Runner. It was the time for icon manufacture. Subtle sci-fi was for Canadians (well, one of them). Putting the one-person spectacle of Arnold was of its time and still works a treat. Also, T2 tries out the everyday guy theory and gets away with it (with Arnie in a different role for balance, it must be said). Also, it is still as funny as intended to hear Arnie bellow things like, "Fuck you, asshole!" 

You might be aware of the accusation of plagiarism aimed at The Terminator from team Harlan Ellison and it's worth a mention. Ellison wrote two of the best Outer Limits episodes in Demon with a Glass Hand and Soldier. Both involve time travel missions with high stakes for humanity. Cameron and Co. settled, having only the dodgiest of legs to stand on. But it's a telling point. The charge of plagiarism excites the wrong people who will spring to lazily won judgement once the word is uttered. But influence is not copying. The Terminator does not deeply resemble either of Ellison's Outer Limits stories. It uses some ideas in them as a departure point but it is no more a rip off than Ridley Scott's Alien is of Planet of the Vampires (an even slighter case). That's all the space I'll give this, here.

But the humans that are meant to engage us leave us cold. They become far more like plot sleepers than Arnie does, even though they convey their emotions and communication clearly. It's only when the action calls for them to be quippy or histrionic that  we notice they are doing more than deliver exposition. Then again, just as the failed effects can suggest artificiality that benefits the film, this sense of humankind being so frail and might well convey an unintended source of empathy, that they really will need to be fought for when the computer networks rule. Am I really suggesting we celebrate this movie for its unintentional features? Isn't that more the realm for the ones we like to ridicule? Not in this case: the failure of a technical maestro to martial convention the way his better rounded colleagues could and did might itself be a poignant commentary on a film about the contest of humans and machines, however accidental. In the highly loaded popular cinema of the '80s, The Terminator stands as tall as it did when it was the massive hit it was on release. Thing is, whether you see it as a critique by distillation of toxic masculinity, a warning to the present about the future, you can always just turn all that off and get into some great action scenes ... and then start thinking about it again. So, yep, still works.

Viewing notes: For this review, I saw an HD transfer of the film which was fine. Last night I watched the recent 4K release and found it gratifying beyond expectations. I have T2 on 4K and can agree with the general dissatisfaction with the presentation. James Cameron who wants current technology to override the original to produce what he claims is a perfect image and soundtrack. The problem is that this creates the kind of waxy look that is the first thing you get rid of when you get a new tv, the soap opera effect which is so finely rendered that it feels fake to the eye used to the complexities of the film image with its grain and limitations. I happen to greatly enjoy the look of new movies at the cinema that have been shot on digital. It's not just the look of cinema now, there are clear advantages to that path like grain free shifts in deep focus and lighting. But if I'm looking at something from the 35mm celluloid era at home, I want the technology to deliver the thing as exactly as it can to match that look and feel. The difference is about respecting the past and present as they are. Happily, Terminator in 4K looks like film. The skin on Linda Hamilton's face looks humanly porous, the effects look hokey but period correct. If you were upgrading to 4K and dig this title, get it, we got the good one locally.

CUBE @ 25

A small group of people wake up in a cubic room whose walls are backlit circuit boards. This is after a prologue which shows us that there is a system of such rooms, accessible through doors in each wall, and some of them have fatal traps. None of the characters can recall why they were chosen to be there, or when they were reclothed in the prison-like overalls that bear their names. What is it? A survival game, a sadistic futuristic jail, a Hellraiser-ish afterlife? There no clues given beyond the threat of their annihilation if they chose to enter the wrong rooms. They try to reason their way to action but if they were chosen for their particular abilities they might also have been chosen for their snappiness. This is a crew that fights as easily as cooperates. Gonna be a long haul out, if out is actually possible.

Vincenzo Natali's puzzle sci-fi demonstrated how much a little imagination and a small doubled set could do at a time when mainstream genre cinema was growing so lavish that one look through the weightless early CG would reveal how insubstantial all that money could really look. At the end of the decade this reached its Olympic scale when George Lucas returned to his Star Wars realm and attempted to wipe the table of all else. The problem with that, though, was that smaller and smarter sci-fi was showing it up. If the remake of The Haunting was embarrassed by The Blair Witch Project then The Phantom Menace didn't have a patch on The Matrix. Just before that, was Cube which could have been a Twilight Zone episode from the 1960s but clocked in at a tidy ninety minutes and spoke volumes with those two joined boxes for its set.

While we aren't whisked away to galaxies far far away we are invited into the intellects of people who see patterns and meaning in what they are given. They are also, daringly, to be almost right before big mistakes guide them to develop their thinking. The conflicts that flash up like old middle European states are where the flesh, blood and nervous systems appear to threaten the progress that requires concentration and collaboration if they are to survive.

The sci-fi enters through the technology but also the possibilities of why it was created and used. Reasonable propositions only lead to fearsome conclusions and the group's conspiracy-monger freely shares her every theory whether plausible or absurd and this, as it must, lights a few emotional fuses which attack the life-affirming unity. While this is not allowed to cause the kind of incredible mass delusions as it did decades later when a pandemic infected everyone with a lot of impotent rage, an internet account and paths to echo chambers, its inclusion in the dialogue is incisive. That the abstruse claustrophobia of the situation could fuel both fanciful antagonism and physically violent self interest is part of the sadness of the story that prevents it from feeling like an old tv episode. Whether it is entertainment for the rich and powerful or a machine working well beyond its purpose in perpetual motion, the bipedal lab rats might well create their own doom.

A scenario like this is fraught with the need for rapid communication of plot points as well as pauses to examine puzzle solving as well as allow for interpersonal conflict. This gives Cube its fairly brittle, overstated performances. On the other hand, I don't know how well any of its audience would do at being kind and reflective. Maurice Dean Wint often gets mentioned as a histrionic action figure and his eye rolling and grimacing can approach parody but his provision of real threat serves to negate this response. His counterpart David Hewlett, a penpushing nihilist who might know more than he's letting on stretches our patience with his eagerness to find everything ironically hilarious. The paranoid Nicky Guadagni works probably the hardest of all to provide depth beyond her refulgent outbursts. Nicole de Boer plays young and of shifting loyalty but her intellect is believable. Once, you accept the stridently drawn roles you'll be ready to watch such development as the desperation in the story permits. 

Cube is a marvel of economy, a fistful of big ideas in a tight package, the very thing that sci-fi boasts at its most effective. The elegance of its design whereby different rooms are lighted with their own colours would impress if it were not that it is so organic to our experience of the setting from the prologue onward that we quickly accustom ourselves to it. Add a well designed audio scheme and you're there with them, locked and loaded. And this film plays out again and for as many times as you might revisit, as freshly as you first saw it.