This Week in the Mercury
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Books / Film David Foster Wallace: 1962-2008. (Part Two of Five.)
Posted by Erik Henriksen on Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 2:58 PM
1990s moviegoers who have sat clutching their heads in both awe and disappointment at movies like Twister and Volcano and The Lost World can thank James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day for inaugurating what's become this decade's special new genre of big-budget film: Special Effects Porn. "Porn" because, if you substitute F/X for intercourse, the parallels between the two genres become so obvious they're eerie. Just like hard-core cheapies, movies like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park aren't really "movies" in the standard sense at all. What they really are is half a dozen or so isolated, spectacular scenes--scenes comprising maybe twenty or thirty minutes of riveting, sensuous payoff--strung together via another sixty to ninety minutes of flat, dead, and often hilariously insipid narrative.
David Foster Wallace on Terminator 2: Judgment Day: F/X Porn, from Waterstone's Magazine, Winter/Spring 1998.
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