The Dead Zone (1983)

Director: David Cronenberg

Cast: Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Martin Sheen

Have I Seen it Before: Yes… It’s been a number of years. I love me some Walken, Cronenberg, and don’t get me started on Martin Sheen…

But Sheen playing an evil President of the United States who brings the world gleefully to its destruction? That’s something that makes one feel unwell and relegates the film to the not often re-watched list.

Did I Like It: Prepping for an episode on the movie for <Beyond the Cabin in the Woods> I read the King novel as well as screening the film, and I’m torn about how I feel about the adaptation. On one hand, the novel is of that era in King’s work where he claimed he could work while coked out of his gills, but it wouldn’t be controversial to say the resulting book is a bit cluttered and overlong. The movie does a stellar job of paring down the story of Johnny Smith’s (Walken) into its most essential elements.

On the other hand, there are some strange choices. One can’t help but wonder if Cronenberg was less auteur than hired hand here, as aside from one errant pair of scissors there isn’t a lot to suggest the Cronenbergian motif as we have collectively come to understand it. That’s a mild complaint, at best, as the film still works despite the lack of the artists touch. Other idiosyncratic filmmakers don’t work out so well when they go off that idiosyncratic path and lend their name as brand to a film. I’m looking in your direction, 21st century Tim Burton.

What’s more, I think the casting of Walken is at best a partial success. Scenes that show him as an increasingly isolated loner are so in his wheelhouse that it almost doesn’t seem like a challenge, but early scenes where he is asked to be a romantic lead, naturally attracting the affections of Sarah (Adams) are a little giggle-worthy, as Walken is not quite able to tune down his fundamental Walken-ness. The rest of the cast is almost too well cast, though, perhaps even unintentionally*. I’m looking in your direction, Mr. Sheen.

Which reminds me. If you’ll excuse me, I now have to mainline as many West Wing episodes as I can possibly stomach to get rid of this icky feeling I’ve been having since I finished watching the film..

*Jordan Peele would one day make great hay out of quite pointedly co-opting cast members of The West Wing to keep white liberals like your humble correspondent off balance.

Babylon 5: The River of Souls (1998)

Director: Janet Greek

Cast: Jerry Doyle, Tracy Scoggins, Jeff Conaway, Martin Sheen

Have I Seen it Before: Yeah...

Did I Like It: I’ve actually tried to watch it a couple of times since it aired over twenty years ago, and I’ve never been able to really get into it, and if it failed with Martin Sheen portraying one of its central characters, then it probably would have to be the weakest of the Babylon 5 TV Movies, right? 

I’ve written before that the strength of the series has always been its ambitious over-arching storyline, and the movies they produced towards the end of the series largely eschewed that framework, aside for perhaps Babylon 5: In The Beginning (1998). This is even more removed from the main storyline, taking place some time after the fifth season concluded, and has a tendency to get weighed down by the need that the first season—before the show really became something special—had of doing stand-alone stories. Thus, we are largely left with the special effects that have infamously not aged well, even with the series best episodes.

The series also had a certain smugness (often well-earned) that it was rising above the trappings of science fiction television at the time, only to have J. Michael Straczynski try to give us what basically amounted to a holodeck episode this time out.

And yet, I couldn’t help but kind of, sort of enjoy the film this time out. Martin Sheen is Martin Sheen, and that’s usually more than enough to allow me to paper over deep flaws (see either Spawn (1997) or the fifth season of The West Wing). The ideas in the film are enough to chew on and it actually improves one of the weaker episodes for the wobbly first season of the series.

Isn’t that enough? I’m inclined to say yes. I mean, how much can we expect from a made-for-cable sci-fi movie from the 1990s?

The American President (1995)

Director: Rob Reiner

Cast: Michael Douglas, Annette Bening, Martin Sheen, Michael J. Fox

Have I Seen It Before?: My DVD copy is one of those weird half-cardboard numbers Warner Bros. put out in the world twenty years ago? Whatever happened to those? This is all to say I’ve spent several years putting it on just as regular of re-watch as my DVDs of The West Wing, which is quite a bit.

Did I like it?: Criticism of the work of Aaron Sorkin be a tricky thing. One either has no taste for him, or absolutely adores him. You’d think that this divide might exist with some correlation to political differences, but that isn’t always the case. Certainly, he has a propensity for writing women character who are by all rights intelligent and self-possessed, but somehow end up spending a great deal of time having passages of Intro to US Government explained to them by male characters. He uses certain lines* across his work so often that I’m a little worried he doesn’t remember having written them before his sobriety.

But plenty of people—yours truly included—who have tried to imitate him, so I don’t quite buy the temerity of the latter-day naysayers. At the very least, I am in the camp that lives and dies with his writing, and this was a test-bed for everything that made his greatest work as good as it was. The optimism and decency leaps from the words and lives within you. At least, it lives within me. Your mileage may vary.

Beyond that idealism that admittedly confirms my own thinking about the world, this might even work better as a pure romantic comedy than it does as a polemic. Even then, I can’t conceive of a conservative who might be warmed by the proceedings, even though Ted Cruz somehow managed to plagiarize the climatic speech President Shepherd (Douglas) uses to win Sydney Ellen Wade (Bening) and the country back when he was defending his wife from attacks by the garbage fire that eventually won that election. So, who knows?

* “All you have to do at the end of the day is come home.” “This isn’t camp. It’s not important that everyone gets to play.” “If you had invented/written/created Facebook/Whatever the hell was so goddamn important on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.” Google common Sorkin lines; there are gigabytes of articles on the subject.

Hearts of Darkness (1991)

Director: Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper, Eleanor Coppola

Cast: Eleanor Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen

Have I Seen It Before?: I have a vague memory of watching a battered VHS copy long ago. It is odd that I have stronger memories of this film than of previous viewings of Apocalypse Now (1979).

Did I like it?: Usually when I start these reviews, unless I’m seeing the movie in the theater (kids, ask your parents)—I’m typing as the film still plays out. I’ve had the damnedest time starting (to say nothing of finishing) this review, as the film is so engrossing. Most behind the scenes material is produced with the intention of promoting the eventual finished film. Much of the material here is produced with that same idea, but the work of putting that material together has created something far more honest about art and obsession. Certainly, the talking heads are still trying to maintain their, likely self-serving, version of events. But their facial expressions won’t lie. I don’t think we got all of Coppola back after this movie. I’m glad we got most of Martin Sheen back. Dennis Hopper was largely unaffected either way.

It’s sort of unrelentingly strange that the first filmmaker to kill somebody with a helicopter was John Landis and not Coppola. Whatever insanity the actual film depicts had to be harnessed from the production of the film, and there is plenty to harvest.

To talk more about the film might be to deprive you from experiencing it for yourself. As much as the scene of Willard/Martin Sheen freaking out is unsettling in the context of Apocalypse Now (1979), the uncut version depicted here is hollowing to the viewer, especially when you realize that Willard as a fictional construct barely exists. The helicopters that never fail to impress me in Apocalypse Now becomes all the more impressive when you realize they appear only via a tenuous agreement with the Philippine government, who was also a little preoccupied with a civil war of their own. It’s sort of wild to think about how other troubled productions pale in comparison to this. Somebody like Josh Trank tripping over himself to screw up Fantastic Four (2015) couldn’t possibly know trouble like this.

Community was right. It’s way better than Apocalypse Now. To my mind, it may be the best thing with which Coppola has ever been associated. That’s saying quite a bit.

Apocalypse Now (1979)

Title: Apocalypse Now (1979)

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Cast: Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper

Have I Seen It Before?: Here’s the weird thing, especially when you consider the name of my company. I think I’ve seen it before. I recently procured a deluxe blu-ray of the film that includes the original theatrical cut from 1979, the Redux version released in 2001, and Hearts of Darkness (which, if I’m being honest, is the real reason I bought the set again). The opening minutes of Redux felt like it was significantly different from the film I remember. But, as I restarted the film with the theatrical cut, it’s largely unchanged so far as the first few minutes are concerned.

I’m honestly not sure what the hell I’ve seen.

Did I like it?: Orson Welles tried to make it, and before any sizable portion of the country would be skeptical about war to make it work. George Lucas was all set to make it, before he ended up becoming an action figure salesman. Only Coppola got it done, and given his output afterwards, it probably broke him far more than we could see at the time.

I’d go into the staggering scope of the film, but that may be a topic more at home in my eventual review for Hearts of Darkness. However, I will note that in the early scenes of the film—before it really has said much about war and the madness therein—where helicopters bob and weave off the coastline is staggering. They don’t—won’t, really—make movies like that anymore. Now such terrible things will look only slightly more realistic than Mario jumping for coins.

And they are terrible things. I can’t think of another war movie that not only makes the view feel what I can only imagine is the violence of war, but the deep, unrelenting insanity of the effort as well. It’s also deeply unsettling to see Martin Sheen this upset about anything, but then again I would feel that way about any of the cast of The West Wing.