#17: I'm experiencing James Cameron derangement syndrome
Death By Consumption
8/26/24 - 9/2/24
No, this is not a day late! Here at DBC HQ, we have decided to experiment with Tuesday releases rather than Mondays, because the holiday weekend (plus plans for next weekend) have reminded us of the concept of a Long Weekend, which can occasionally make the issuing of a Monday newsletter much more difficult and annoying. So, moving forward we will send these out on Tuesdays and let's just see what that feels like, okay?
Tuesday is famously the worst day of the week, the day when your work problems and duties have fully piled up but the escape of the weekend is still aeons away, so you have nothing to do but muddle through the notifications from Outlook and Slack and Teams and/or the in-person questions or requests from colleagues whom you fantasize about telling what you really think of them. Tuesday is also, of course, the day of the week 9/11 happened on. It's a bad day.
Even more depressing, today's Tuesday is maybe the worst Tuesday of all — the dreaded end-of-summer, back-to-school Tuesday. Where did summer go? Have you started shopping for Christmas yet? What are your New Years plans? Sorry, sorry. Anyway, hopefully receiving these stupid little emails will make future Tuesdays less painful. If they make them more painful, though, please don't tell me, I simply can't take that knowledge on at the moment.
The Abyss (1989) — at The Paris Theater
This was a transcendent experience. I had never seen The Abyss, the psychotic film James Cameron made after Aliens and The Terminator, nor had I been to the Paris Theater (a NYC crime, I know!), so when my dear friend Nora suggested this showing, I couldn't have been happier. I had no idea my life was about to change.
Have you seen The Abyss? You should watch The Abyss. There is so much going on in this movie! The first 90 or so minutes are an incredibly intense underwater thriller movie of the highest caliber, the kind where something goes wrong and then things just get steadily and steadily worse, until the characters are trapped on the ocean floor in a half-destroyed structure that's on the verge of imploding. I felt surprisingly claustrophobic watching parts of it! And then the story takes a hard swerve into trippy sci-fi, with underwater glowing aliens and a moralistic ending that only kind of makes sense. It's essentially every single James Cameron movie, past and future, all combined into one film. Who needs seven Avatars when we already have The Abyss?
This is by no means a perfect movie, but it is a wildly enthralling one. The special effects are genuinely stunning, even 30 years later. It does not feel like a movie from the 1980s! (We saw the new 4K restoration, which may have helped bump things up just a little, but even without that, what James could do with practical effects back then is truly incredible. We desperately need more megalomaniacal working directors!) When we stumbled out into the daylight 3 hours later, we were at a true loss for words. Another friend met us for drinks afterward and we kept having to apologize for how addled we were. Our brains felt altered, as if we had also spent several days underwater. They should have depressurization chambers for when you come out of a showing of The Abyss.
"Under Pressure: The Making of The Abyss" (1993) — on YouTube
In some ways, I am still mentally in the Abyss (part of me might never get out of the Abyss), so we absolutely had to watch the hourlong making-of documentary, which we could only find on YouTube, subtitled in Spanish. It details the true horror show that was making this film, as told by the actors, James Cameron, and his wife at the time, producer Gale Ann Hurd (they broke up during filming lol). The short version is: James Cameron lost his damn mind, burned through tens of millions of dollars, and forced cast and crew to spend full days and nights in scuba gear on an underwater set built inside an abandoned nuclear reactor in increasingly life-threatening conditions.
Ed Harris came dangerously close to drowning, as did a few of the other actors. In the documentary, Ed is still visibly seething about how risky it was, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio refuses to even speak about it (she reportedly still won't talk about it). You can see why Jim prefers making Avatar films now, which let him do his favorite things — invent new technologies, obsess about the ocean, spend producers' money, create trippy LSD aliens — without worrying about pesky actors whining about trivial details like how they need oxygen to survive. Grow up!
At the end of the documentary, Ed Harris is delivering one of his many dead-eyed PTSD monologues hinting at the horrors they endured on set, and then it cuts to James Cameron who, instead of addressing any of it, simply says, "The irony is Ed Harris has probably got hundreds of hours underwater, but it was all in a tank. He learned in a lake, he's probably never been in the ocean. Which is really a shame, because the ocean is really beautiful." James Cameron remains the best and worst PR person the ocean has ever had.
The Watchers (2024) — on MAX
The M. Night Shyamalan nepotism industrial complex has got to stop. It was cute how he featured his daughter's music career in Trap, but helping his other daughter make this, her first feature film (which she directed and wrote!) is a step too far. This was unbearably awful, the kind of movie where the first thing we said after it was over was, "I can't believe we watched all of that."
My girl Dakota Fanning tries her best with the material, but Ishana Night Shyamalan (I love that she uses the "Night" in her name as well, worried that we might not pick up on the "Shyamalan" name recognition without that clue — we know who your dad is, girl, don't worry!) gave Dakota such a clunky script to work with, so there's really no hope. There were moments where I thought, okay, Ishana could maybe turn into a good director, but as for writing... she needs to close whatever Google Doc she's typing in right now.
I have just discovered there are actually three Night Shyamalan daughters, not just the two. I can't wait to see what career the third one chooses! Maybe she'll just become a gaffer or something.
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert Caro (1974) — paperback
Please clap — Robert Moses August is over! This was a major accomplishment, and a truly exhausting endeavor. I do not think it's a coincidence that I spent the month hauling this 1300-page book around, only to throw my back out last week.
Overall, what did we learn? Well: not much has changed in American politics over the last 100 years! If you have money, you can basically do whatever you want, especially if what you want to do is ruin the lives of poor POC. It's extremely depressing that the only reason Moses finally fell out of power was because a fucking Rockefeller became governor of NY and then leaned on his brother to use the power of all of fucking Chase Bank to finally destroy him. So the lesson is: the next time one man gets more power over human lives than anyone is supposed to have in a democracy, let's just hope that the banks are on our side and not his!
Reading it on the rapidly disintegrating subway (Governor Kathy Hochul is desperate to finish what Robert Moses started — hate her so much!!!!!!!!!!) was a uniquely depressing experience, except for one fun interaction. A man exiting the train said, "How's the book?" and I replied, "Infuriating!" As he got off he yelled back at me, "Finished it last month. It gets worse, enjoy!" and the doors closed. These are the types of life-affirming NYC interactions you can't get sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on a parkway, Robert. Anyway, I'm glad he's dead, and I wonder how long it'll take before I stop pointing out everything in the city we can blame Robert Moses for.
"Industry" seasons 2 and 3 — on MAX
We burned through this show, getting caught up in time for Sunday's new episode. It remains a very fun, very stressful, very confusing show! The financial language is only getting more complex, but as long as my girl Yasmin keeps sexually humiliating men and my boy Robert keeps getting the absolute shit kicked out of him by life, I'll keep watching. Kit Harington has joined the current season, so it's really funny to see Jon Snow, like, wear bluetooth headphones and baseball caps. He's such a little guy! They must have made him stand on boxes to look like a big tall hero for all of Game of Thrones, huh? Anyway, I finally get the hype around Industry, and I'm having a great time with it. I wish bankers were real, they seem fun.
Lobster roll — on the North River Lobster Company boat
A group of us decided to be tourists mid-week and take the lobster boat, which was a surprisingly delightful experience. You pay $20 to board, which takes off from the piers at 41st street for a few daily sailings: the earlier trips are just an hour long, but the 7pm, which we took, is a 2-hour sunset cruise to the Statue of Liberty and back. On board, you eat mediocre lobster rolls and drink cocktails so sugary your teeth start falling out before you get back to land, and you just get pleasantly drunk while enjoying the merciful breeze and saying stuff like, "New Jersey has some beautiful cliffs, huh?"
If you're going to do it, the sunset cruise is definitely the way to go. Whether you've seen her a zillion times or you're an actual tourist here for the first time, it's always nice to check up on dear old Lady Liberty. And by the time you turn around for home you should be good and tipsy, which is probably why they switched the music to only songs that involve an organized dance. I'm not joking: they played the Macarena, followed by the Cha Cha Slide, followed by the Cupid Shuffle. A storm was heading towards us over New Jersey, but everyone on board was sloppy and becoming friends as people danced and we all oohed and aahed at the lightning getting closer and closer, and the rain didn't hit until the moment we all got back to land. Why is it so easy to forget we live on an island?! We should go on boats more often, you guys.
French onion soup – at La Bonne Soupe
After The Abyss rearranged our brains at the Paris Theater, we needed to be cured by the generic comfort of a French bistro, and La Bonne Soupe could not have been a better sanctuary to process everything James Cameron had put us through. This was, I say without exaggeration, the best French onion soup I've had in the city — the broth was as dark as the water at the bottom of the ocean, with thick chunks of bread and onions surprising you like a secret race of aliens who live at the bottom of the ocean. All of it was covered in a nearly half-inch layer of cheese, the whole thing overflowing the second you stuck your spoon in. More restaurants should just put in their name exactly what their best dish is!