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 think part of it might be that there's very little sense of atmosphere to a lot of his work. The Thing is the outlier by necessity; shooting mostly at night in the middle of a frozen wasteland is gonna give you a sense of cold dread no matter how hard you might try otherwise. That one also had Morricone for its score, so the music was by someone who knew what he was doing and worked to augment that dread. Whereas every single one of his other films is shot in that ugly, flat 80s lighting style and looks like every other movie from that decade, and has Carpenter plinking away at his synthesizer trying to whallop tension into you instead of letting it leak in organically.

I haven't seen They Live, but In The Mouth Of Maddness is really fun. Not spectacular by any means, but c'mon Sam Neill going crazy in a Lovecraftian horror is ALWAYS fun.

In *why the fuck did it take me this long to get around to this one* news....... John Wick. Hoooooooooooooooooooooly yesness. I knew I'd like it, but damn, was not expecting that. Ridiculously psyched for the sequel (And possibly TV show?!).

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.

Agreed.

In fact, on another level, Passion of the Christ bugged me for that reason.
I mean, sure, the process of flogging and crucifixion was brutal, but the movie made it seem like the physical suffering was the point. Like LOOK AT THIS! DOESN'T THAT SUCK? DON'T YOU LOVE JESUS!!!???

Sure dude, but the physical violence wasn't 1% of what the suffering was, so stop it.

Anywho, I agree with Praxus, if for slightly different reasons.

Last edited by Writhyn (2017-02-04 18:25:03)

And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

The unholy spawn of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" (yes I know I used a different Poe story for the epigraph, deal with it), Lovecraft's "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family", and King's The Shining, A Cure for Wellness is not a movie a major studio should have greenlit and given a substantial budget to, especially coming off the heels of a disaster as infamous as The Lone Ranger. That it exists is a minor miracle, and even if I didn't care for it I'd respect the hell out of Verbinski for getting it made (much the way I felt for Crimson Peak).

Fortunately, I did care for it, quite a bit. I'm not one who often says "Ignore the critics!" when something gets panned, but . . . this movie is kind of fucking awesome? It's not in the league of recent genuinely horrifying masterpieces such as The Babadook or The Witch, but it's not trying to accomplish the same things they were—its goal isn't to get under your skin but to stage a lavish masque of neo-Gothic melodrama complete with dubious sexual arrangements and medieval family embarrassments, and it does so with flair. It's surprising, not in that we couldn't see certain plot elements coming, but that we don't see them coming simply because there's no fucking way Verbinski could get away with that in a major motion picture, is there? But he does, and does, and does.

Is it great cinema? Well, not in one sense. But it's a hell of a lot of fun, and unlike Verbinski's latter-day Pirates films isn't at all negatively impacted by its sprawling length. My one major complaint is the digital photography—unless one is careful, the shiny, plastic sheen digital tends to lend to images can leak the atmosphere out of a shot like nothing else. Some horror films avoid it—The Babadook was shot on digital and remains steeped in German Impressionist charcoal ambience—but alas, A Cure is occasionally neutered by this artificial gloss, particularly in its first half. Ah well, no great matter. It's a mere quibble with a Gothic fevre dream that's otherwise a corker of a ride, never allowing its ambitions to drag down the melodramatic flair that carries it along.

I've not watched any of the John Wicks yet, but I don't see how that description applies to Road Warrior though - it's a completely different movie compared to Mad Max, in premise, tone, style and pretty much everything else; even Max' personality is entirely different.

There's a loose continuity connecting the two, but they're essentially two standalones with entirely different high concepts; I guess the biker villains are somewhat similar.

Like it/they did in ANH and Empire

Anyway this isn't a discussion thread from the looks of it and I've not seen the new movies, so who knows really..

Short Term 12

I avoided this movie for a couple years, despite being told to watch it, because for some reason [the poster] it seemed likely to be a little think-piece-y indie sci-fi movie — a la Primer, maybe — and I'd just never be in the mood to watch a movie like that when I'd come across it again on Netflix, so "maybe later" it stayed.

Anyway. Total recommend, outstanding movie. (And for the record, it's not a sci-fi movie at all.)

Me and Mrs Faldor loved it, no one else mind.

Arrival - so if you learn to read circular alien logograms, you can suddenly see into the future? It's touted as "hard-SF" (and it exudes that vibe), but that makes as much sense as a genetic mutation giving you psychokinesis.
Love the tone, the score, the long helicopter approach sequence, and the lack of a one-on-one punch-up next to a ticking bomb.
Didn't like the time-travel aspect, which always has paradoxes - if the aliens know the future, why did they risk their plan fucking up with the bomb and attack from China? why did they hover off the coast of NW Australia? Why did they act all enigmatic - just give everyone all the information they need.
Thinking about it afterwards - the short story it's based on is simply "would you have a kid if you knew it was going to die young?" which a thousand gynecologists asks pregnant women after standard chorionic villus sampling every day.

Arrival is an imaginative, if roundabout way, of asking the same question. Enjoyed it overall. Something different.

re: Arrival — I started drifting when things began to get less not-disappointing, so I can't remember specifics about what was annoying me right at the end, but yeah. Was having a blast for the first three quarters or so.

I don't think the marketing department had much choice. It's a magic bean movie where the most important part of the magic bean defines the ending. Revealing the prophetic aspect in the trailers would've spoiled too much.

The very presence of aliens already excludes the movie from the "hardest sci-fi" (e.g. The Martian) category. If you show how they look like, it opens a whole new can of worms and the movie becomes even softer (2001 didn't show them to avoid just that). Arrival went a step further, and, IMHO, pulled that off very nicely.