Shot of Jack #42: Paul Schrader's Lost Movie
Hello and welcome to the 42nd issue of my newsletter A Shot of Jack. I’m Jack Cameron. This newsletter comes out every Wednesday for free to all subscribers. On Fridays, paid subscribers get access to the latest installment of a serial crime novel.
No housekeeping this week. So we’ll just get right into it.
Bad Pennies
For the past year that novel has been A Better Lie, a novel about a group of friends working in a flower shop who start selling alibis as well as flowers. The final installment of A Better Lie will be released on March 1st.
Beginning April 5, 2024 the first installment of Bad Pennies will be released. I appreciate the feedback from the debut of the cover of Bad Pennies last week.
For those who missed it last week, I’ve included it below.
I’ve been hard at work putting together the physical copy of A Better Lie, the first serial crime novel. I’ll be sending out address confirmations and other information to paying subscribers soon.
What I’ve Been Watching - Dying of the Light vs. Dark
My girlfriend and I have different genres for nights of the week. (It helps with the choice overload of personal movie collections and the thousands of titles on streaming platforms.) Friday is ‘Spy Friday’. And so we came across a movie I’d never even heard of, 2014’s Dying of the Light. This Nicolas Cage spy thriller is written and directed by Paul Schrader, the guy who wrote Taxi Driver (and a bunch of other movies I love). With talent in front of and behind the camera, there was potential for something great.
Dying of the Light is…fine. It tells the story of a mostly retired CIA operative named Evan Lake who is dying of a brain disease and out to catch the one elusive terrorist who nearly broke him. And like I said, it’s fine. Cage is his typical bombastic self and that pretty much carries the movie with some good work from the gone-too-soon Anton Yelchin. Alexander Karim plays the bin Laden-like terrorist with as much zeal as Cage as the agent.
The major problems with the movie have to do with tone and pacing. The editing is often jarring rather than stylish. It successfully tells a straightforward story. That said, it’s a movie that has incredibly talented moving parts and yet they just don’t add up to a good movie.
It turns out there’s a reason I’d never heard of Dying of the Light and it’s not just because it’s only okay. The producers of the movie took it away from Paul Schrader and re-edited it themselves. This resulted in Schrader, Cage, et. al. pretending the movie didn’t exist and doing absolutely no publicity for it.
In 2017, Schrader decided to take DVD work prints of Dying of the Light (since he did not have access to the original footage) and some other material and created a movie much closer to the vision of the film Schrader wanted. He called it Dark.
“I had been working toward a more aggressive editing style when “Dying of the Light” was taken away. “Dark” represents the direction I was hoping to go. “Dark” was not created for exhibition or personal gain. It is for the historical record.”
- Paul Schrader
Now finding a movie that was never released in theaters, on physical media, or on a streaming platform isn’t exactly easy. Finding a movie with a one-word title like ‘Dark’ is a bit more difficult. And then it turns out that in 2017, the year that Dark was created, a Netflix show also called Dark was released. A visit to various torrent sites resulted in a hundreds of pages of torrents with the word ‘dark’ in them. None of them were Schrader’s movie. But I did find a link to it in the Internet Archive. That’d work if all else failed, but I really wanted to watch it on my television and not on a website.
Eventually I found a magnet link to a torrent on a three-year-old Reddit post. Turns out the link works. And so tonight I’m watching Dark. I’ll get back to you in the next paragraph when I’m done watching Paul Schrader’s vision.
From the opening moments of Dark to the disturbing final image, Dark is something very different from Dying of the Light. It’s also something different from the original director’s cut given he could not shoot any new material.
Where Dying of the Light is a somewhat by-the-numbers spy thriller, Dark is violent fever dream where reality is always suspect. Schrader uses color, extreme close-ups, and grainy film to get across the chaos that is CIA Agent Evan Lake’s dying brain. Events that happened in Dying of the Light are presented in such a way that it’s difficult to say for sure what’s happening and what’s happening in Lake’s head.
This makes for a very different filmgoing experience. Much like watching the two versions of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, what comparing Dying to Dark reveals more than anything is that most producers and studio executives simply are not creative people. They’ll make the obvious choice and dumb down the movie so that the dumbest 12-year-old kid won’t get lost if he watches.
The more I think about it, the more Dying of the Light symbolizes what far too many movies have become these days. The cut of the movie that is the theatrical version of Dying of the Light feels like a movie cut and edited by a committee afraid to take risks or push at all for fear of losing audience members. (If that doesn’t describe the state of a lot of comic book movies these days I don’t know what does.)
More than anything, what separates Dark from Dying of the Light is the obvious display of a creative mind at work in Dark. Paul Schrader’s Dark is what happens when a sterile, bland movie encounters a Creative.
There’s a part of me that wonders what other just okay or even bad movies might be able to be saved by a clever and imaginative filmmaker.
Dying of the Light is streaming on Max. Dark can be found on the Internet Archive and in dark corners of the web if you know where to look.
I’d Click That
One Last Thing
It’s an election year and like the last few Presidential elections, this one is the most important one yet. And like every election of my lifetime, the media is pretending that it’s a super close race between Biden and Trump. Hell, some polls show Trump ahead. And did you hear? Trump’s gonna tell Russia to attack NATO countries. And he’s going to become a dictator on Day One.
All this has people scared. Scared is good because scared is easy to manipulate.
So I’d like to reassure you that you need not be scared.
There will be no second Civil War because we already had a second Civil War. It occurred on January 6, 2021 and despite the opposition having thousands of armed people storming the Capitol, multiple sitting Congresspeople complicit in the coup, and the White House calling on local police to stand down, their attempt to steal our country failed within hours. It failed so badly that those involved literally attempted to claim they were simply protesters. It failed like Trump always fails.
Just this past week he was barred from doing business in New York for three years and fined hundreds of millions of dollars. All told he already owes over half a BILLION dollars. And he still has 91 felony charges to deal with.
Donald Trump has only lost power and money since January 6th.
And the only chance in Hell he has of being elected President again is if enough so-called ‘Progressives’ choose not to vote for Joe Biden under the stupid and delusional idea that Trump will somehow handle Israel better. People with such views might as well put on a MAGA hat.
I fully expect Biden to win reelection, but that’s simply not enough. It needs to be a blowout. It needs to be a nationwide rebuke to wannabe fascism. So vote Biden in November because we’re not done humiliating Trump.
- Jack Cameron
Free issues of Shot of Jack come out Wednesdays for all subscribers. Installments of the serial crime novel A Better Lie come out Fridays for our paid subscribers. To become a subscriber (free or paid) just click the button below.