Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Hell Is Other People

À Nos Amours (1983)
directed by Maurice Pialat
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

First of all, why is the Criterion cover grey when most of the movie looks like this:



Second, "Amours" instilled all of the feeling that I've always expected but never felt from John Cassavetes - in spite of a lot of ugliness and an overriding pessimism in who we are, the capacity for gentleness with wisdom.

For B. Sweet when the Big Red won't do it:

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Mob Blog

rating: highs and lows
directors: Brewer, Tarantino, Fulci, Carpenter
in theaters and at home

I've been watching a fair amount lately - maybe less than usual - but intermittently and from all over. Partly, I think, to make people who are far away seem closer, and some for writing purposes. The site could use a change, but I don't have the wherewithal to implement my vague aesthetic scenarios; bear with me.

Black Snake Moan is terrible, both by parts and in full. I like Pulp Fiction more than ever; the movie is a tactile satisfaction for the part of the brain that registers hunger and a slow release on days that feel otherwise crowded and frazzled. One of my favorites. I'd never realized that Rolling Thunder had a hand in Anchor Bay's The Beyond release; here, the sensation is decay much more than shock: the decrepitude in old homes and bad memories.

And trying to articulate my love for cinematographer Dean Cundey, it might be best to call attention to the way that Big Trouble in Little China feels less like a fun house than a living, haunted maze, where rooms turn back on each other but gather dust, fill with light and then dark water, and still allow rest in corner kitchens beside windows, near bowls of food and half full bottles of beer. An early tracking shot especially - where Jack and Wang flee a street fight only to emerge (seemingly elsewhere) with the clatter and flash of combat still in progress on the far end of the alley - is nothing short of visionary.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

"Sometimes it's worked and sometimes it hasn't, you know?"

Masters of Horror - Cigarette Burns (2005)
directed by John Carpenter
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Udo Kier channels his best Robert Osborne for a mediocre one-hour television show. In one of the extras, we get to see Carpenter laugh while Udo and the special effects team run a link of sausage casings through a film projector. Somewhere in my head I think of a place where John Carpenter directed a comedy instead of Halloween, but that's no consolation.

Already Dead

Escape from L.A. (1996)
directed by John Carpenter
rating: 1 out of 5 cravats
on DVD (a little late) from Netflix

Quotes from "Escape from L.A." include:

- "He looks so retro. Kind of twentieth-century."
- "Sooner or later they get everybody."
- "You're about to find out this fucking city can kill anybody!"

Anyone sense a pattern? No? When Carpenter's movies fail, he finds something (or somebody) to blame, and tries something new the next time.

So Snake - who once moved through matte paintings like light through a Rembrandt - plays basketball in a gladiatorial arena for his life, hang glides into the city, and, yes, surfs his way onto the back of Steve Buscemi's car (that scene was filmed at New Braunfels' own Schlitterbahn Water Park, by the way).

It isn't funny or even entertaining because it's just too sad.

Monday, February 19, 2007

Chicken

Ghosts of Mars (2001)
directed by John Carpenter
rating: 1 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

The thin line between must-see extra and don't-see movie was never as thin as the segue from Scott Ian of Anthrax asking for a little less bass to John Carpenter smoking his eighteenth cigarette while Steve Vai and then Buckethead solo to themselves. Is it Buckethead or Carpenter beneath that KFC cap? Is it Martin Quatermass or Rip Haight behind that screenplay? Or maybe the ham-fisted ghost of Douglas MacArthur?

Djay? D-Minus

Hustle & Flow (2005)
directed by Craig Brewster
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from JL

But let's be honest, I've seen a lot worse this last week. And that low, low camera angle when Nola gets out of the car - all legs and pavement - to convince the john? Gregg Toland would be proud.

Friday, February 16, 2007

Your Old-Age Sense of Humor

Vampires (1998)
directed by John Carpenter
rating: no cravats
on DVD from Netflix

What a goddamn disaster. I'd like to have seen the look on Adrienne Barbeau's face if Carpenter had tried pawning this script off on her in 1980. But Laura fucking Palmer, John? Anyone - anyone - but our dear, sweet Laura. And Gary Kibbe, I'm sorry, but the desert is always beautiful at sunset. It's interiors that make you a great cinematographer.

So nevermind the roundtable, John. You really let me down.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Astronomy Will Have to Be Revised

The Adventures of Pete & Pete - Season One (1993, 1994)
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

It isn't just that Big Pete apes "Subterranean Homesick Blues" or that Richard Edson makes a mathematical heart for the numbers teacher he loves. When Little Pete finds the crossing guard who smokes looking lonely in the rain on New Year's Eve, he sits down beside him and they agree to agree on next year's resolutions. And they know they won't, even as they say it. Just like Big Pete when the girl from the Hoover Dam is gone forever. As romantic as a Sopranos testing ground - or almost anything - can be.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Probably not how Christopher Reeve wanted to remember using his legs

Village of the Damned (1995)
directed by John Carpenter
rating: 1 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Ugh. Pretty Inverness is good for pirates but not purple-haired tykes waltzing to a soundtrack ripped from the John Fahey playbook. And come to think of it, Blake's eyes were scarier.

Monday, February 12, 2007

Let Your Harglow Show

In the Mouth of Madness (1995)
directed by John Carpenter
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Carpenter's rural New Hampshire highways at night - yellow lines, Oz-like creeps on bicycles, red-lit faces in the rearview mirror - make me really want to set up that David Lynch roundtable I've been talking about ("When The Great Eight Ate With Nate," other participants to follow). Feels like a B-movie where "They Live" and "Prince of Darkness" just seem cheap, maybe because a good sense of humor goes a long, blue-haired way.

Thursday, February 08, 2007

"Am I going to regret meeting you?"
"You already do."

Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)
directed by John Carpenter
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

But, significantly, not "John Carpenter's Memoirs of an Invisible Man." Hard to feel like it isn't Chance himself behind those glasses and beneath that hat. Just enough tricks - Sam Neill's face in the glass of a train partition, for example - to remind you of the glory days, but when the movie makes a nod to Fletch, you realize how unhappy Carpenter probably was (and must be). I'll say this: from the perspective of effects and even the story (hero gets drunk, things go bad), it probably looks better now than it did in 1992.

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Choose Your Own Superlative

Portrait of Jennie (1948)
directed by William Dieterle
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

"There ought to be something eternal about a woman."

Monday, February 05, 2007

Mexican Middle East Standoff

Lee Van Cleef in Midas Muffler Commercial
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on YouTube from B. Sweet

Stringbean's so fast the job gets done while George Kennedy's still yapping! That fat bastard from the competition could never be a top gun. Makes you wonder why Leone didn't use cars to begin with: yellow hard hats, tri-fold receipts, even pneumatics!

Sunday, February 04, 2007

She's A Vision

Kdo chce zabít Jessii? (1966)
directed by Václav Vorlícek
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

The Czechs didn't put much thought into "Who Wants To Kill Jessie?," but they handle the implications of setting your thoughts loose on the world with an admirable nonchalance. I like that the ensuing chaos is personal - no one gets bent out of shape for this particular dreamgirl any more than they would for the next random beauty on those gray Eastern European sidewalks. The dreams are sort of ordinary, too, stand-ins for the ordinary things that our hero misses. And, nicely, there's no suggestion that his fantasies end with their transfiguration.

Sidewalk Cinema

Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)
directed by Thom Andersen
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

Annie Hall is a movie about two marquees: Messiah of Evil v. The Sorrow & The Pity. This one is how you think about directors you don't like - Cassavetes and "happiness is the only truth - so he drank himself to death" - or directors you do - Hitchcock the low tourist who only used a Los Angeles location once. The European high tourists loved the desert west of town, and Blade Runner is the great Los Angeles love letter.

Thom Andersen should hate the French, but he loves them for loving Jerry Lewis. "We live in the past" because "what surrounds us is not new." Or just how you think about the world: "A job can break your heart, too." So can a girl, and so can movies, and so does this one.

Saturday, February 03, 2007

Be A Pepper

Slither (2006)
directed by James Gunn
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

I suppose "Slither" is enjoyable for all the reasons that it isn't like Hostel or Saw II, but I'd like to tip my hat to Gunn for acknowledging - for the first time in a movie, as far as I can tell - the use of "Coke" as a catch-all for all things soda. As in a mayor on the first day of deer season in rural South Carolina cursing an absent Mr. Pibb from the ice-chest:

"It's the only goddamned Coke I like."

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Moonlight Mile

The Sopranos - Season Six, Part One (2006)
directed by Tim Van Patten, David Nutter, Jack Bender, Alan Taylor, Steve Buscemi, Danny Leiner, & Steve Shill
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Electric Light Orchestra

Each fresh face and facet - modified imaginations of antagonists and conspirators - is Tony and Tony again, in streetlight and dim diners and muted restaurants and every possible New Jersey peregrination (what a show for lighting!). I like that Tony - for all his confessions in Melfi's chair - is the most personal of public figures: a man of circumstance and accountability, without a private thought that does not affect his real world.