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Well, from here on out, the movie picks become what might be referred to as “safe.” When putting together my list of favorites, I briefly struggled with the fact that the remainder of the list is made up of fairly universal favorites as far as sci-fi and fantasy films go, and that predicting the rest would probably be fairly easy. After mulling it over for awhile, I decided that the point was (and is) to compile a list of favorites, not out-obscure the next guy over… whomever that is.

And so, it was only a matter of time before our pal Star Wars came up. Of course, I did run into the obvious problem… what can I possibly say about Empire Strikes Back that hasn’t already been said many times over? Very little, as it turns out, save the very personal, which is all that really matters, anyway.

Though it (obviously) doesn’t occupy the top slot, The Empire Strikes back is, in fact, the movie that inspired this list. While watching the newly-released unaltered version on DVD and soaking in the nostalgia, I remembered how I felt when this movie first came out in theaters — in the days when I met many sequels with breathless anticipation rather than weariness and resignation — and when, hard as it may seem to believe, there was a relative paucity of Star Wars. I mean, in 1980, a few action figures and Splinter of the Mind’s Eye was about all Star Wars had going for it — not like today, with a parade of toys, collectible miniatures, role-playing games, video games, and merchandise so ubiquitous and omnipresent that it boggles the imagination. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t see a bounty of Star Wars to be in itself a bad thing, but when Empire Strikes Back hit theaters, it was a big deal… the second biggest deal in my cinematic life, to be exact.

What Came Before: Oh, a little film called Star Wars, of course. I saw Star Wars in the theater at the tender age of six years old, with several of the action figures already in my possession. Having owned the action figures before I ever saw the movie, I’d made up my own personal mythology to pass the time before seeing the real story. In my little world, Hammerhead was in charge. Greedo was his cunning nemesis, Darth Vader was his dimwitted thug, and Luke Skywalker the galactic equivalent of a water boy. All this was quickly swept away by the movie, of course, which was not so much a movie as a formative experience for my impressionable young mind, embedding a love of science fiction and fantasy so deep that decades worth of stalwart parental discouragement couldn’t dig it out.

More Powerful Than You Can Possibly Imagine: If Star Wars was a transformation, then Empire Strikes Back was a revelation, taking hold of the bold but limited scope of Star Wars and expanding it in all directions. Empire Strikes Back had more of everything — more planets, bigger ships, more spectacular battles, and a story that took the promising elements of the first film and ran with them. Much ado is made of Empire’s “darker” tone, but I actually find it to be significantly funnier than the first — the running gag of the broken-down Millennium Falcon, Han and Leia’s backbiting love affair, even Yoda’s demented antics. Certainly the dramatic scenes carry a great deal of weight, if only because the characters have been strongly established and are in the process of being fleshed out in Empire — but the narrative never descends too far into whiny despair or unnecessary sturm und drang.

Empire Strikes Back is one of the few films that met or exceeded every possible expectation I had for it. It certainly helped to be all of nine years old when it came out, but my appreciation of this film hasn’t faded with time, as it has for so many comparable things. As a kid, it had everything I wanted — glorious battles, fantastic monsters, and a cataclysmic confrontation with the undisputed king of all cinematic villainy, Darth Vader. As an adult, it still has everything I want — which, granted, is mostly still space battles and monsters and lasers and so forth, but Empire also has wonderfully iconic characters, an epic story, and one of the most unbearable cliffhanger endings of any film franchise. The Empire Strikes Back was, and is, a genuine dream come true — a kid’s simple dream of “more Star Wars.”

Twelve Days of Dimfuture Trivia Track: Notice how I didn’t mention the prequels. For a multitude of reasons, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t either.

I’ve made a resolution about doing list-type projects for this Web site. From now on, I write them all at once, and I don’t even talk about what I’m working on until they’re all finished and ready to go. This list was supposed to be a funny little December project that would be finished before Christmas, and now look at us. Despite these delays, I remain committed to finishing the goddamn thing, and so I present to you the halfway point of Twelve Days of Dimfuture: Big Trouble in Little China.

“That was not real and I want to talk to the cops. I want my truck back. Now where the hell am I?”

There are a few movies that I never get tired of watching. Many of them, of course, are on this list; a few, like The Big Lebowski, are eminently rewatchable, but don’t quite meet the genre requirements. High on the list of my most-seen movies is John Carpenter’s B-movie epic Big Trouble in Little China, which probably comes in a close third behind Raiders of the Lost Ark and various installments of the Star Wars series in my library of Films I’ve Practically Memorized. There are films I love emotionally, and films I appreciate academically. Big Trouble in Little China is more an integral part of my person.

What Came Before: The year this movie came out, I was a feckless sophomore in high school, and have fond memories of the television commercial featuring Kurt Russell firing his gun into the ceiling and being subsequently knocked out by falling rock. I knew right away that this was something I not just wanted to see, but needed to see, the way you need to go to the hospital when your appendix bursts. This notion became further cemented by my high-school French teacher, an appallingly boring woman who needlessly reported to the class one day that she’d seen Big Trouble in Little China, and made her feelings on it clear by sticking a finger in her mouth and gagging elaborately. At that moment, I knew I would not only undoubtedly love the movie that this dull, obdurate woman despised, but it would probably end up completing me as a person — because, you know, that’s the sort of thing you think when you’re in high school.

As it turns out, I was not far wrong. Twenty years later (dear God, has it really been that long?), I still quote this movie to my friends, who effortlessly quote it right back, because most of them know it as well as I do. “Son of a bitch must pay,” someone will growl while caught in traffic behind an insolent septugenarian who won’t merge properly. “It’s all in the reflexes,” says another, usually after flubbing an easy catch. I’ve lost count of the sets of driving directions that ended with “Lords of Death, down that alley!” and more than a few telephone conversations have opened with “I’m going to tell you about an accident, and I don’t want to hear ‘act of God,’ okay?” In short, without Big Trouble in Little China, many of my most basic human interactions would, at the very least, be far less amusing, and some might simply never have existed at all. If that doesn’t spell “good movie,” I don’t know what does!

While the cinematic world has broadened considerably around Big Trouble in the decades since it came out, it remains unique. Although Big Trouble’s garish, comical, over-the-top martial arts have since been technically exceeded by a thousand Tarantino-fronted wuxia offerings, there’s still not another flick out there that quite captures Big Trouble‘s exuberant alchemy of pulp, humor, and ham-fisted American brio. While it might most easily be characterized as a kung-fu action comedy, Big Trouble carries an unmistakably Western flavor, with plenty of gunfights, a quintessentially Eighties hero (the iconic Jack Burton), and a plot that centers around not only rescuing two damsels, but also a semi truck. Let’s see Wong Kar Wai beat that shit.

Why It Shakes the Pillars of Heaven: I’ve already mentioned that Big Trouble in Little China is one of the most quotable films of all time (second perhaps only to Ghostbusters, which maintain is the most quotable mainstream film ever made), and, Carpenter’s later work notwithstanding, there’s a reason for that. The writing, for all its macho simplicity, is deceptively clever, with the characters exchanging rapid-fire dialogue that drips with juicy, pulpy fun. The characters are drawn in big, bold strokes: Egg Shen, the wisecracking old sorcerer; Margo Ritzenberger, the intrepid reporter; Gracie Law (a lawyer… get it?), the fierce damsel who still manages to end up hogtied and in need of rescue. While Big Trouble undoubtedly takes a comic approach to its characters, it never stops to wink at the audience — even when uttering hoary cliches like “I was born ready!” and “come on over and fight like a man!” Russell plays his role with utter conviction.

Big Trouble in Little China also plays on one of my favorite themes, namely the interplay of magic and modernity. The movie sets up its world in the very first scene, where Egg Shen demonstrates for his lawyer, in no uncertain terms, that sorcery is real. Big Trouble‘s central villain, David Lo Pan, is by turns a menacing, ethereal figure and a hysterical, squawking old man in a wheelchair (delivering some of the film’s most memorable lines). Watching magical or mythological figures crack wise in modern vernacular is, admittedly, something I adore and rarely get tired of, and Big Trouble was pulling this off masterfully before Joss Whedon was writing for Roseanne.

Most of all, however, Big Trouble in Little China is just fun. Big, heaping portions of fried, starchy fun. It has great one-liners, marvelously cheesy special effects, and some of the most memorable pulp characters in B-movie cinema. Like China, Big Trouble is in the heart. Wherever I go, it’s with me.

Twelve Days of Dimfuture Trivia Track: If you are a fan of Big Trouble in Little China and have not had the opportunity to see the titular music video featured on the two-disc special edition, I urge you to do everything in your power to see it. A young John Carpenter sings “we better run into the mystic night” while synthesizers blare and Video Toaster effects go off in the background… it’s one of the most glorious things you’ll ever experience. As the two-disc special edition of Big Trouble is now out ot print, I would once have said that this video is probably rare and difficult to find; for good or ill, Youtube has removed all such rarity from the world. It’s available here for your viewing pleasure.