SADDLES SOARS

Check out my column, online at Phoenix Magazine, on two cool flicks...

John Carpenter's They Live played already Saturday in Scottsdale, but you can still catch the Mel Brooks masterpiece Blazing Saddles this Tuesday night, May 23; it's the "Tuesday Night Classic" this week at Harkins Theatres...

KNIFE GOES ON

Now in theaters:

Halloween Kills--Well, it certainly seems to, at the box office, at least. The new installment in the slasher series slaughtered at the multiplexes this weekend, even though it was available to stream for free on video. This suggests that people may still want the communal experience of moviegoing, at least for certain kinds of movies, horror flicks being an obvious example. I find this a cheering thought.

Unfortunately, it's not very good. It's handsomely produced, with a look and a premise and some cast members that link it nostalgically to John Carpenter's 1978 original, and it has some good ideas. But it fumbles almost all of them, and fails to be deeply scary.

Despite being burned alive at the end of the previous sequel (2018) generic masked killer Michael Myers still is not quite dead, and he plods around Haddonfield racking up more victims. Jamie Lee Curtis is back as Laurie, hospitalized with a wound and fretted over by her daughter (Judy Greer) and granddaughter (Andi Matichak). The focus this time, cleverly, is on the characters who were little kids in the '78 movie: Anthony Michael Hall as Tommy, Robert Longstreet as Lonnie, and Kyle Richards, who returns to the role of Lindsey which she played in the original (the fact that the little girl from Halloween is now in her fifties is scarier than anything onscreen). Tommy raises an angry mob of townies to kill Michael, just like the torch-and-pitchfork-bearing gang at the end of Universal's Frankenstein.

I was irked when I saw clips of these scenes in the trailer; this does not strike me as the most auspicious moment in our history to extoll the virtues of mob uprisings. I was pleased that screenwriters Scott Teems, Danny McBride and director David Gordon Green did not, at least, fall into this trap; indeed, mindless mass rage is repudiated by the film, and Michael is described as a personification of fear, and the reckless destruction that can arise from it. The reactionary subtext of Michael's hostilities is also hinted at; his targets this time include a middle-aged gay couple and a middle-aged interracial couple.

Something really interesting could have been done with all this, but the movie is muddled and slow and clumsily structured, and--very much unlike the original--it falls back on gore. Buckets more blood are spilled, but Halloween Kills never comes close to capturing that pervasive sense of archetypical dread that Carpenter's film had.

Certainly I'm a fan of the idea of flinty old Jamie Lee Curtis, past her fear and ready to rise up and kick Michael's ass. The trouble is, they already made that movie, back in 1998. It was called Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, and while it wasn't in the same league as the original, it wasn't a bad picture. It's where the series should have ended, but of course, the prospect of the kind of box office that Halloween Kills is having is the surest way to make a masked killer rise again.

BRIAN'S SONG, & THE PER-FISH-TENCE OF MEMORY

Opening this weekend:

 

De Palma—For all the faults of his movies, even for all the supposed great faults of his character, I’ve always had a soft spot for director Brian De Palma. This isn’t always easy to defend—while the frequent charge that he’s a misogynist can’t, I think, be proven from his movies, the general smarminess and arrested adolescence that many of them give off is hard to deny.

But his filmmaking mastery is even harder to deny. There’s a lot of schlock and silliness on the list of his credits, but there are several enduring classics, too, and I find that scenes from even his worst misfires remain in my memory in a way that plenty of better movies don’t. This is because, of course, he’s a true cinema stylist, lavishing so much craft and obsessive care on even the most absurd or ugly content that it ends up charged with vivid atmosphere.

Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow apparently share this admiration. The documentary they made about him comes across, more than anything, as an act of obsessive fandom. The only talking head is the title character, sitting in front of a gray fireplace. First he talks about his background, a little, and then he talks about his films—every one of them, I think, at least briefly—and the films that influenced him. As he talks, clips and stills are mixed in. That’s pretty much the whole movie.

The austerity of Baumbach and Paltrow’s approach is shrewd, because the material on which they draw is so cinematically rich. The biographical material is fascinating—I certainly didn’t know that De Palma’s father was a famous osteopath, or that the director himself had been a science whiz as a kid—and the straightforward progression through his works gives a bird’s-eye view of his development. The clips offer some intriguing treasures, too, like the unused deus ex machina ending of 1998’s Snake Eyes that’s more interesting than anything that made it into the finished film.

As for his own psychology, the ruefully chuckling De Palma seems candid enough, in a general sort of way. But although he shares some eyebrow-raising autobiographical subtext to Dressed to Kill, overall he seems unwilling to go very deep. Unlike, say, 1994’s Crumb, this movie doesn’t strip its subject naked for us. He’s evasive about his sensibility toward women, for instance, saying only that it “always made sense” to him, in the context of the genre in which he was working. And indeed, adjusting for generational differences in the degree of graphic violence acceptable in a movie, it’s hard to see how Hitchcock, for the most obvious example, is less vulnerable to this charge than De Palma.

In any event, De Palma can lay claim, at least for me, to the highest praise a documentary about a moviemaker can earn. Like last year’s movie version of Hitchcock/Truffaut, it left me with an appetite to re-watch these movies. 

 Finding Dory—Pixar’s 2003 animated ichthyological smash Finding Nemo is one of the most beloved of all kid movies. But I think I enjoyed this sequel focusing on Dory, the cheery titular blue tang with the unreliable short-term memory who helped in the search for the title fish in the first film, even more.

This time Dory, voiced by Ellen DeGeneres, is trying to find her home and parents (Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy), from whom she was separated as a kid, and the worrywart clownfish Marlin (Albert Brooks) and his little Nemo are helping her. Once again they have to cross the ocean, this time to a marine center on the California coast. And once again they have to depend on the kindness of strangers, notably an octopus named Hank (Ed O’Neill), as well as a whale shark and a beluga. Dory is also amusingly guided by a voice from above—specifically, the voice of Sigourney Weaver.

The imperturbable, doggedly polite optimism and geniality of DeGeneres is center stage here, and deeply endearing. Her off-the-cuff, throwaway delivery, along with the mild kvetching of Brooks, is central to the movie’s balance. The theme, along with the Pixar/Disney standard of separation from loved ones, is the preciousness and vulnerability of memory, and the light touch of DeGeneres makes this moving, but not exhausting.

To Mesa Arts Center this Sunday, June 19…

 …comes a different iconic American filmmaker of the ‘70s and ‘80s: John Carpenter. The auteur plays a concert of his own music, both from his films and from a couple of recent studio albums. Check out my interview with him, on New Times blogs.

NIFTY SHADES OF GREAT

In honor of the late “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, last week’s Monster-of-the-Week was a denizen of Frogtown from 1988’s Hell Comes to Frogtown. That movie does not, however, represent Piper’s best star turn—that distinction belongs to They Live, the 1988 sci-fi satire from writer-director John Carpenter (based on Ray Nelson’s 1963 short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning”).

Phoenix FilmBar is showing They Live tomorrow evening, Friday August 21, at 9:10 p.m., in memorial to Piper. If you’ve never seen the film, I highly recommend.

So…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week’s honoree is one of the “They” of the title…

…the skull-faced, pop-eyed aliens who invaded us long ago, and now use their superior technology to conceal not only their own presence but also that of the consumerist messages they’ve embedded in ubiquitous advertising.

Our hero, a homeless guy named Nada (Piper), gets wise to the true state of the world when he tries on a pair of sunglasses he steals from a mysterious L.A. underground.

Immediately he’s able to see things as they are:

If not Carpenter’s best film, this is certainly his most ambitious and interesting, and probably my favorite; I greatly prefer it to the similarly-themed The Matrix. Following a really intriguing, atmospheric and funny beginning, alas, They Live falls apart almost completely in its final third or so, with an extended, utterly pointless (but, I understand, much beloved) fight between Nada and another guy (Keith David), likely included as a sop to the fans of Piper the wrestler, followed by a shift to silly (though entertaining) action melodrama.

But it’s tough to shake the power of the movie’s most admirable invention, those magical bebop shades, and the unnerving visions that Nada sees through them (by the way, free They Live sunglasses will given out at the FilmBar screening, according to the website). It’s just a shame that Carpenter couldn’t, so to speak, find a way to make us all look in the mirror while wearing them.

DARK STAR SEARCH

Check out the March issue of Phoenix Magazine...

...for two stories by Your Humble Narrator: On Arizona-based executive producers (page 40, or here) and on Bisbee's wonderful Warren Ballpark (page 50, or here).

Driving down to Bisbee in January for the second story, I passed through the town of Benson, Arizona. I promptly found myself singing the following, out loud in the car:

Benson, Arizona, the cool breeze in your hair
My body flies the galaxies, my heart longs to be there
Benson, Arizona, the same stars fill the skies
But they seemed so much brighter when I watched them in your eyes

I was singing—that is to say, I thought I was singing—the theme to Dark Star, John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon’s low-budget sci-fi comedy of 1979.

A few minutes online showed me that I had rewritten the lyrics of this bit of futuristic cornpone in my head; they actually go like this:

Benson, Arizona, blew warm wind through your hair
My body flies the galaxies, my heart longs to be there
Benson, Arizona, the same stars in the sky
But they seemed so much kinder when we watched them, you and I

In my defense, I last saw the movie almost thirty years ago. I remember it fondly, however.

So...

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week the nod goes to the alien from Dark Star...

...memorably played by a painted beach ball with costume monster hands glued to the bottom. You can see him/her(?), and hear “Benson, Arizona,” here.

Belated RIP to western-movie fixture Harry Carey, Jr., passed on at 91.

THE THING IS...

This week…

Monster-of-the-Week: …a classic: In honor of the recent departure of James Arness, let’s recognize one of the big SOB’s earliest movie roles, the title character in the 1951 favorite The Thing From Another World.

TTFAW is a blood-drinking humanoid vegetable from outer space who lays siege to a U.S. military/scientific outpost in the arctic. Being played by James Arness & all, he’s alarmingly big & Frankenstein-ish...

...& because the film, produced by Howard Hawks, barely gives you a glimpse of him, except in silhouette, he’s pretty creepy.

A 1983 remake by John Carpenter, titled simply The Thing, sticks much closer to the source material, John W. Campbell’s novella Who Goes There? It’s also pretty good—Rob Bottin’s shape-shifting special effects are hair-raising—but its tone is unpleasantly cynical compared to the original.