Screen Vistas: CAMERON ROUNDTABLE: REACH

Loren Greenblatt: Between Aliens and The Abyss, James Cameron directed a little music video…

Max O’Connell: REACH!

LG: Yes, it’s a music video for a song called “Reach” by Martini Ranch, which was a musical collaboration between Bill Paxton and some other guy (Andrew Todd Rosenthal, but neither of us has ever heard of him).

MO: Yeah, it’s Bill Paxton’s band. That’s the only reason Cameron directed this thing, I think. He agreed to do it so long as he had no contact with the record label. It has a budget of $90,000, which sounds like a sizable budget for an 8-minute video.

LG: There’s a lot of sets and whatnot…

MO: It looks great, and you can tell Cameron directed it. The song itself is pretty mediocre, though. Wikipedia compared Martini Ranch to something Devo might do, which…

LG: No.

MO: Yeah, no.

LG: Devo’s too intricate, self-aware and intelligent to do a song like this.

MO: Yeah, no offense, Bill Paxton. We like you.

LG: But don’t quit your day job.

MO: Yeah, this is not very good. But the video is interesting. It has a very long introduction.

LG: Longest I’ve ever seen.

MO: Bill Paxton is an outlaw biker in a post-apocalyptic western future.

LG: Basically, James Cameron invented Firefly.

MO: Though…Joss Whedon’s a Cameron fan, but I can’t imagine he actually saw this.

LG: No, probably not.

MO: I don’t think anyone saw this. I had never heard of it before Loren brought it up. We found it on DailyMotion, and I had never heard of the band or anything about this. The design of the video is very interesting: Paxton is clad in biker gear that looks like a cross between the way he looked in Near Dark and the way Arnold looked in Terminator 2.

LG: There’s a lot of leather in this film. There’s a brothel with women wearing leather…which is an odd thing. He’s usually a feminist director, so you wouldn’t necessarily expect this from him, this objectification.

MO: Well, he might just be portraying a time period or something. It seems like an oppressive environment. Plus, the hero is a woman. In fact…

LG: The hero is Cameron’s future-wife/esteemed action director Kathryn Bigelow, who is gorgeous.

MO: Who’s still gorgeous. She’s sixty years old and you’d never guess it. She looks forty.

LG: But in this she’s much younger.

MO: But aside from that, she’s a great filmmaker. The year before Reach, she made Near Dark, which is the quintessential vampire movie as far as I’m concerned. She made Point Break, the goofy/wonderful action movie with Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze…

LG: Which was produced by James Cameron…

MO: She made Strange Days, a sci-fi film we both like a lot…

LG: Which was written by James Cameron, though we’re not going to cover it here.

MO: And most recently she became the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Director when she won for The Hurt Locker. It’s funny cause she actually beat her now ex-husband Cameron when he was nominated for Avatar. She also has a new film this year, Zero Dark Thirty, the “killing Osama bin Laden” movie.

LG: Perfect timing on that: bin Laden was killed days before she announced she was making it, so it got plenty of momentum.

MO: But as for Reach…

LG: Long intro, Paxton comes up to the town and terrorizes it, and a gang of women trying to catch him (led by Bigelow) that come into town wearing Sergio Leone dusters. And as if there was any doubt that Leone influenced this, the song liberally samples The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly’s score.

MO: Plus there’s images that look like they’re straight out of A Fistful of Dollars, what with the people building coffins. The film’s look is very distinctive and interesting. I wish it were just an 8-minute short, because the song is not very good.

LG: Whoever Bill Paxton’s bandmate is, I’m sure he’s behind a fast-food counter telling everyone “I once had a band with Bill Paxton, and we had a video directed by James Cameron”.

MO: And everyone responds: “…sure….”

LG: That may not be true, he might be doing something else very successfully.

MO: But we can’t remember the song ten minutes after the fact, other than them yelling “REACH!”

LG: And it always cuts to close-up of Bill Paxton, wide-angle lens, yelling it.

MO: Right out of something like Near Dark, where he’s that very imposing figure.

LG: And there’s some Near Dark actors and Cameron regulars in here.

MO: Well, there’s Lance Henrikson and Jeannette Goldstein.

LG: There’s not a lot to talk about with this film, so let’s just name some shots we liked. I like the shot of a mariachi band being dragged behind a truck, and they’re all playing.

MO: I like the close-ups on Paxton snarling “Guess this ain’t your lucky day!”

LG: So, I suppose I give this thing a general B-.

MO: B+ for the video, C for the song, B- overall.

LG: Basically: it’s a thing, it’s on the internet, it’s free. If you want to check it out…fine. We’re not gonna stop you.

Loren’s Grade: B-

Max’s Grade: B-

If you want to see what a James Cameron music video looks like, I've embedded it below. Also, don't forget to check out Max's Blog, The Film Temple.