Good morning 🐣

Wind blows softly through the trees as an owl watches from above. A girl emerges from the darkness, “black as midnight on a moonless night.”

Composer Angelo Badalamenti, who passed away this month, was somehow able to capture all this and more in his score for the ’90s murder mystery TV show “Twin Peaks,” music that could be haunting, flippant, reverential, and cool, sometimes all at once.

A lot of the score has a jazzy edge to it, such as in “Dance of the Dream Man.” There are also pieces like “Laura Palmer’s Theme,” which starts with these long, drawn out, droning chords, suddenly pierced by a hopeful, naive piano… only to be dashed away again into dread and despair. But then there’s “Audrey’s Dance,” which plays on this composition a bit, a sort of jazzy version, a dreamy and surreal number that lets you know that you don’t actually know everything.

Badalamenti ended up collaborating with the show’s co-creator, David Lynch, on several films, including “Blue Velvet,” “Wild at Heart,” “Lost Highway,” “The Straight Story,” and “Mulholland Drive,” and also worked with artists like David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Paul McCartney, Nina Simone, Liza Minnelli, and LL Cool J.

His music always played a crucial and beautiful role in every project he worked on.

A brief intermission 🍿

RIP Albert Pyun (1953 – 2022)

Now watch this 👀

Longtime subscribers can testify, this newsletter has been an eclectic mix of genres and eras in cinema history, from the highest to the lowest art. But this week we transcend all that. This week we consider the biggest ego in the room — in the entire history of rooms — one Mr. James Cameron. He made “The Terminator” and its ginormous sequel, he made “Aliens,” “The Abyss,” “True Lies,” and “Titanic,” and then he waited over a decade, working in TV and underwater documentaries.

When “Avatar” burst onto the scene in 2009, its success was completely unexpected yet wholly unsurprising. It became the highest-grossing film in history, with another Cameron film, “Titanic,” in second place. It wasn’t until ten years after that that it was knocked from its pedestal by “Avengers: Endgame.” But you know what? Cameron would have none of it. He re-released the same damn movie earlier this year to reclaim the top spot. It now sits at nearly $3 billion. Unreal.

Cameron recounts that “the studio felt that the film should be shorter … and that’s a place where I just drew a line in the sand and said, “You know what? I made ‘Titanic.’ This building that we’re meeting in right now, this new half-billion dollar complex on your lot? ‘Titanic’ paid for that, so I get to do this.”

And by “do this” he means the nerdiest stuff you can imagine.

If it’s been a while since you last saw it (or if you somehow avoided this $3 billion phenomenon altogether), the year is 2154 and Earth has colonized Pandora, a moon rich with biodiversity and an immensely valuable mineral called I kid you not Unobtainium. The company in charge has two divisions: the military and the scientists. The military wants to wipe out the dominant form of life — the Na’vi, more commonly known as those big blue naked cat people — in order to mine the planet to death, while the scientists want to study the ecosystem while masquerading as Na’vi in these bioengineered big blue naked cat clones called avatars that are telepathically linked to their human operators.

Let’s all just take a collective breather for a sec, huh?

When our protagonist, Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington), first rolls off the spaceship in his wheelchair, a massive dump truck rumbles by, wheels bigger than any man with giant arrows sticking out of them, giving you a sense of how much bigger the Na’vi must be in comparison. And when he gets to test his avatar for the first time, you can really feel his joy in no longer being bound to his wheelchair, running and digging his toes in the dirt. We see more of this later on, when he keeps smacking plants to watch them shrivel up or glow. He really is like a child. At one point he picks at his loincloth wedgie.

And then we have Colonel Miles Quaritch (played by Stephen Lang; see a previous edition of Cinescape, “Audrey Hepburn vs. Stephen Lang SMACKDOWN!” for more info). He’s got three long scars across the side of his head and says things like, “This zero gravity’ll make you soft. You get soft, Pandora will shit you out dead with zero warning” and “The Avatar Program is a bad joke. A bunch of limp-dick science majors.” I think you get the idea.

We kind of take for granted that they created this entirely fictional environment down to the smallest fern… and it still looks good all these years later. You’ve got beautiful bioluminescent plants and floating mountains. Plants and animals can all communicate together at an electro-spiritual level; Na’vi can literally join with animals and each other using these tiny tentacles at the tips of their hair… What I’m trying to say is, this is some real Edgar Rice Burroughs, “John Carter of Mars” stuff.

It’s no surprise then that all this came to James Cameron in a dream when he was a teenager and he’s been chasing after it ever since.

Which means another decade later and we finally have part two coming out this week: “Avatar: The Way of Water.” He’s been working nonstop all this time on this and several more sequels and the first reviews coming in are largely along the lines of “finally a real blockbuster movie.” It sounds like it will be just as visually immersive and breathtaking as the original, with crisp, clean action and fun science-fictiony concepts.

It’s admittedly a huge risk, with Cameron warning that it’s “the worst business case in movie history.” In order for the film to turn a profit, he says, “you have to be the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history. That’s your threshold. That’s your break even.”

But you’ve gotta love that classic James Cameron hubris:

The trolls will have it that nobody gives a s— and they can’t remember the characters’ names or one damn thing that happened in the movie. Then they see the movie again and go, “Oh, okay, excuse me, let me just shut the f— up right now.” So I’m not worried about that.

And you know what? He ain’t wrong. Never bet against James Cameron.

Until next time! 💙