The Carpenter odyssey continues: welp, They Live has a spectacular fistfight and... that's about it. *sigh* It has exactly one point to make and it makes it in such obvious and flat fashion that it's never within reach of being either biting and funny on the one hand or tense and dramatic on the other.

That is one hell of a fistfight, though. Go watch it on YouTube.

The weird thing is that Carpenter's scripts (under pseudonyms or otherwise) are pretty awful, and yet I just today read this fascinating article about how he completely gutted and reworked most of The Thing's middle section on a break in the shooting schedule, and it completely improved the film. I guess some people just excel as script doctors and collapse when they have to write their own stuff.

I'm resignedly coming to the conclusion that John Carpenter only had one truly great film in him.

Halloween is historically important, but it's aged incredibly badly compared to something like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Assault on Precinct 13 is a fun little bit of tension that's undermined by a poor script/performances and a frankly nonsensical enemy. Big Trouble in Little China is endearing, a better Ghostbusters, but like that film it's not something that's particularly memorable.

And then... there's this one. The premise is absolutely my shit. Gnostic mathematics reveals the existence of a Lovecraftian variant of Lucifer? Yes. It's a pity that rather than actually exploring that, it devolves into a pretty generic possessed-horde movie that, while there's undeniable tension and some solid character work present (the way Walter refuses to stop shit-talking in the midst of dire horror commands respect), is such a woeful waste of potential. This is the one where I'm really fed up with Carpenter serving as his own composer too—the 80s cheese factor works on Little China but here it actively undermines a huge chunk of dread.

So, yeah. The Thing will forever be a masterpiece and one of my all-time faves, but I'm kind of disappointed in Carpenter's body of work as a whole. However, I still need to tackle They Live, Escape from New York, and In the Mouth of Madness, which are generally considered his other career highlights.

I'll be Teague's surrogate.

Re: the songs in LA LA LAND, "Audition (The Fools Who Dream)" has grown on me a ton but otherwise I completely agree. The crowd numbers are painfully bland (and plastic to boot, you can hear the studio editing in the vocals), and "City of Stars" has a non-melody that isn't helped by the fact that Gosling, for all his charisma, can't sing to save his life. Props to Emma Stone though.

I also have a problem with the way Chazelle villainizes modern art forms, because his jazz-fusion strawman is totally right. Besides, Miles Davis was already beyond traditional jazz in the 60s and 70s, this ain't a new thing.

Y'know that custom art for Sad Max and The Formula I made a while back? Finally printed it out, along with some custom art for Lemonade and the Star Wars Despecialized Editions!

Everything except Lemonade is in a Criterion Blu-Ray case. I designed Sad Max, The Formula, and Lemonade myself—many thanks to Teague for digging up the high-res poster for the former. The exterior art and labels for the Star Wars ones were designed by a Reddit user who magnanimously posted the files online; I formatted the interior art and threw in the 2004 DVD bonus disc so I'd have Empire of Dreams as well.

Everything turned out looking really nice; I threw in a picture of Sad Max on my shelf to compare it to some actual Criterion spine art. Sad Max is wonky on the front and spine because the printer ran out of toner, but I decided to run with it and say that Max printed it out himself before his demise and the apocalypse doesn't allow for perfectionism.

In terms of bonus features, most of what's listed on the back of The Formula and Sad Max is made up for appearance's sake, but Sad Max, in addition to the film, includes the full-length Adventures in Faking This documentary and the music video for "Limp-Dick Christmas Lights".

This mirrors ROTJ for me in that it has a mildly enjoyable but fairly flawed first two acts followed by an absolute bonkers third act. The biggest flaw for me was its character work—outside of Krennic and K-2S0, none of the characters really felt like anything more than a collection of characteristics rather than a fully fleshed-out person.

Also, people can stop harping on the callbacks in TFA now, because the ones in this movie were actively obnoxious. Evazan and Ponda Baba were the nadir—absolutely no logic to their appearance. In addition to the shoehorned gags, the more substantial links to the original film really backfired in places. CG Tarkin didn't work at all for me, even though his inclusion is essential for the wonderful dramatic irony of Krennic's end, and to be honest I'm rather offended on Cushing's behalf. Vader was also a problem—the filmmakers applied too much of a good thing, dampening the impact of his big moment on the blockade runner with the earlier scene which doesn't serve much purpose save making sure the audience knows he's in the film.

Fortunately, those callback gags were the least funny moments in a film that overall had a surprisingly strong sense of humor. I do wish it hadn't felt the need to step on its own jokes at points, though—"Are you kidding me?" works perfectly well without the "I'm blind!" followup to make sure the audience got it; ditto "I can survive in space."

And as I said above, HOLY FUCK THAT THIRD ACT YOU GUYS. It's gotta be one of the greatest sequences of sustained action of the last several years, certainly the greatest of this year. Add to the thrills of the first truly climactic space battle in ages and the glory that is Vader wreaking havoc the fact that they actually fucking did that—let even the plucky lead be wiped out by an incoming nuclear shock wave—and it's undoubtedly the greatest Star Wars climax since ROTJ, even if I personally prefer the forest duel in TFA. Also, that reference footage of Red and Gold leaders is genuinely euphoria-inducing in a way that the ugly CG on Tarkin and Leia can't hope to be. And it goes without saying that every frame that doesn't have uncanny Moff in it is just gorgeous.

And as much as I think the characters were underused, the casting was pretty spot on. In addition to their acting ability, I think it is genuinely impactful and important to see a lead cast comprised entirely of a woman and people of color onscreen in the biggest blockbuster of the year, whether its implications were intended or not. Mads Mikkelsen is underused, of course, but after The Hunt and Hannibal I'm resigned to feeling that way about him whenever he appears onscreen anywhere else.

So, yeah. An uneven flick that's elevated by its genuinely insane climax. 4 out of 5 stars. Fifth in my ranked list of SW films (ESB>SW>TFA>ROTJ>R1>ROTS>TPM>AOTC), #10 of the 28 films I've seen in 2016.

For music:

Makes Led Zeppelin palatable. Who knew?

Seriously, "Never Gonna Give You Up" is a genuinely great song once you strip away the synths and drum machines and add on an acoustic backing track.

For trailers:

^Not so much a mashup as a recut, but goddamn.

Anything by Kim Stanley Robinson is probably a safe bet, if you're okay with an extrapolated near-future-speak discussion of said tech. (He said as Brian's advocate.)

*sigh*

It's not . . . bad, exactly—there are a coupla genuinely tense moments and the ending manages to raise the bar of the previous hour considerably—but what a bummer. It's like someone put this movie together as a deliberate contrast to everything that makes the original BWP so special.

Where the first one felt so believable precisely because it was so lo-fi, this one ceases to feel real almost instantly because of the number and quality of the cameras being used. Where the first one runs almost entirely on improv and is thus imbued with a wonderful and terrible organic quality, this one is scripted to a fault and allows almost no room for spontaneity. Where the first one was stark and spare, nothing but the two cameras and their often subpar audio, this one is scored in places and contains an irksome number of edit-jump sound effects. We also get jump scares galore as opposed to the original's staunch refusal to be cheap with its frights.

Add to that the fact that it has far too many characters, which means we never get a sense of anyone as a person like we did with Heather and Josh and Mike; the incredibly lame fact that the justification for going out to the woods again in the first place has next to no thematic resonance or purpose; and the general try-hard atmosphere of trying to one-up the scares of the first film (which completely misses the point), and we're left with a movie that in isolation is a meh film with some pretty good moments but as a sequel to one of the most perfect horror films ever made is headache-inducing.

Also, let the buyer beware: there are some things that happen in this film that I think will genuinely blunt some of the impact of the original for me.

Prompted by both Teague's post about it here and the fact that it leaves Netflix on September 1st, I took it upon myself to finally watch this behemoth. I'd had it in the back of my mind as something I needed to see for ages—classic movie, Obi-Wan Kenobi, so on and so forth—and I was counting on a masterpiece.

This movie makes me so sad, you guys.

Because it totally could have been a masterpiece. The story at the heart of the film—Alec Guiness determines to prove the superiority of British civilization to his captors, becomes so obsessed with this project that he ends up blurring the line between displaying dignity and aiding the enemy—is extremely compelling, and every single frame of the movie that focuses on it is Grade A stuff. Guiness' performance remains powerful even some six decades later, the cinematography is absolutely gorgeous (some dodgy day-for-night bits aside; hey, it was the fifties, I don't expect miracles), and the final sequence of

So the center of the movie isn't the problem. It's the damn other movie that keeps trying to invade it.

The other movie that's been stuffed into this movie, that of the American escapee who's conscripted by the Brits to return to the River Kwai to help demolish the bridge, is almost ruinous. We need to see bits of it—the commandos can't just pop up out of the blue near the end of the movie's runtime—but the director and the screenwriter seem to think that the American is the movie's main character. They devote what feels like a good half of the film's runtime to his recuperation in a British hospital, his hemming and hawing about going back to the River Kwai, and the subsequent journey to the bridge. The problem is a.) the American is not the main character, or at least shouldn't be—the heart of the movie is Guiness' character and his journey—b.) by spending so much time with him, the film completely undercuts the tension of what's happening back at the bridge. Even cutting back and forth between the two stories in a more even-handed manner would have mitigated this somewhat, but instead we spend interminable lengths of time with the American before briefly wandering back over to Guiness, becoming interested again, and then being snatched back to the boring part of the film.

So when I say my biggest problem with the movie is its runtime, I don't mean that all the fifties shoe leather should be stripped away. Leave it. Just cut out a good 60% of whatever parts of the film aren't focusing on Guiness and his surroundings, shoot a few more scenes that better flesh out his arc once the bridge-building begins in earnest, and move back and forth between the two plotlines with a bit more finesse. Now that would be a masterpiece.

Here I am, the asshole who's presuming to tell Bridge on the River Kwai what it got wrong. But it's because I love the parts it nails so perfectly that I'm disappointed in the rest.

Those logos are all so pretty.