Posts Tagged ‘John Carpenter’

John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars (10th anniversary re-review)

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011
tn_ghostsofmars

chapter 12

logo_summer2001One thing about JOHN CARPENTER’S GHOSTS OF MARS: it’s definitely John Carpenter’s GHOSTS OF MARS.

It has plenty of elements that could be perfect for one of his movies. It’s kind of a siege movie like ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, although the simplicity of that type of setup is mired in flashbacks and narration. It’s got a western motif – even though it’s in the future and on Mars there’s a train, and colonists possessed by angry Martian spirits take the place of the Natives defending their land. It’s got a ready-made anti-hero – Ice Cube as the bad-but-not-guilty-of-the-specific-crime-he’s-accused-of prisoner-in-transfer Desolation Williams. It has a pretty good soundtrack where Carpenter melds his style with a bunch of rock n roll dudes with electric guitars and drums, playing Martian tribal rock. It has Ice Cube, Jason Statham, Joanna Cassidy and Pam Grier in the cast! This shit should be great. (more…)

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Important Book Alert #2: THEY LIVE (DEEP FOCUS #1) by Jonathan Lethem

Saturday, November 27th, 2010

tn_theyliveOne day several years ago I was waiting for a bus near a book store, and in the window there was a book about the philosophy of THE MATRIX. There’s more than one book like that, and I can’t remember which one it was that I saw that day, but it got me thinking: there should be a book like that, except it’s entirely about THEY LIVE.

There’s a long-running series of books called 33 1/3, little pocket-sized book length essays about classic albums. I have one for Stevie Wonder’s Songs In the Key of Life, for example. And I’ve long thought there should be a series like that for movies, and I should write the one about THEY LIVE.

Well, too late, buddy. Soft Skull Press is starting a series just like that, although if I understand correctly they’re all gonna be written by novelists. #2 is on DEATH WISH, #4 is gonna be LETHAL WEAPON. THE STING, HEATHERS and THE BAD NEWS BEARS IN BREAKING TRAINING are also coming up, but it all starts with THEY LIVE by Jonathan Lethem, author of the novels Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude. His approach is very different from what I would’ve done/could still do some day, but it’s an interesting, quick read and makes plenty of points that I hadn’t thought of before, making it a good first book about this particular subject.
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John Carpenter’s badass contract

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

tn_johncarpenterApparently the ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK remake is still happening. You guys know how I feel about that. In the unlikely event that somebody good was doing it this could actually be a good story to retell. The problems are

1. who the fuck you gonna get to play Snake Plissken? I mean, come on

2. that means no ESCAPE FROM EARTH, and fuck that. Kurt Russell is even cooler at this age than he was then, I want to see him play Snake again.

And of course the odds are against them choosing somebody great to direct, so I was happy when I thought this had fallen apart.

Anyway, this new article from the Vulture blog reveals some new information about the script and, most importantly that John Carpenter included a few important clauses when handing over the remake rights:

New Line had to sign a contract with John Carpenter stipulating, among other things, that Plissken “must be called ‘Snake’”; “must wear an eye patch”; and that he would — and we’re not making this up — “always be a ‘bad-ass.’”

I guess that means that keeping Snake Plissken Snake Plissken is more important to him than ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 and some of the other ones. Or maybe he learned from those remakes. (more…)

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Big Trouble in Little China

Monday, April 7th, 2008

Here’s a John Carpenter movie I somehow never reviewed before. Kurt Russell plays Jack Burton, a loudmouthed truck driver who stops in Chinatown to gamble with an old buddy, and ends up stuck in the middle of a gang war, an ancient prophecy, magic powers, monsters, etc.

The opening scene of the movie is classic. It fades in on Egg Shen, the driver of a tour bus in Chinatown, being interviewed by a lawyer about “what happened.” We know that something big and crazy happened, that a whole block erupted into “green flames,” and that people want to know where “Jack Burton and his truck” are. Shen admits that he believes in Chinese black magic and when the lawyer asks why he should believe in it Shen holds up his hands and shoots bolts of green lightning between them. “See?” he says. “That was nothing. But that’s how it always begins. Very small.” Then it cuts to a shot of a truck as the opening credits begin, and you realize “okay, a truck. This must be that Jack Burton they were so concerned about.” Classic!

So I was kind of surprised to learn from the commentary track that the scene was a concession to the studio. Barry Diller, chairman and CEO of Fox at the time, demanded and helped write the scene to make Jack Burton seem “more heroic.” Which is kind of going against the whole joke of the movie that he’s the main character but not exactly the hero. His buddy Wang (Dennis Dun) is smaller than him and seems like the sidekick, but is actually far more capable than him. This is probaly Carpenter’s most overtly comedic movie and that idea of this blowhard thinking he’s the reluctant hero when he’s actually not doing much is where alot of the laughs come from. For example during one of the big fights he fires his gun in the air causing a piece of the ceiling to break off, fall on his head and knock him out while the others do battle. Later he confidently pulls out a knife and you think “How does he know how to throw knives?” but then he throws it and in fact he doesn’t know how – it flops through the air and bounces off a gong. (more…)

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Someone’s Watching Me!

Friday, October 5th, 2007

John Carpenter is on my list of top directors. HALLOWEEN, THE THING, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, THEY LIVE – all by the same guy? Not to mention DARK STAR, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA… well, you have IMDb. Point is the guy has done a tone of what I consider classics, and most of the rest are real good or at least pretty interesting. I’ll watch any of them. I watched BODY BAGS last year. I watched MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN, and it wasn’t too bad actually. The two MASTERS OF HORROR episodes he did with my internet buds Moriarty and Scott Swan were cool as far as TV goes. Even VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, I was surprised, that was pretty good too. And CHRISTINE. The guy is good.

So a couple weeks ago I realized, shit, I’ve seen all of ‘em except ELVIS: THE MOVIE. I’d been meaning to rent that one and so that day I finally decided to do it, get everything on the John Carpenter list crossed off. It was a 3 hour TV movie originally but the VHS release is a 2 hour theatrical cut. It’s slick and well made and it’s basically every musician biopic cliche all lined up in a row: the discovery of talent, the loyalty to old friends, spending money on the naive parents, the first girlfriend who leaves him, the new love, winning over her parents, the honeymoon is over (why the fuck you gonna marry Elvis and then ask him to stop doing music!?), the fall from grace, the amazing comeback.

I’ll be damned if I know what connects this stylistically to Carpenter. It’d be funny if it had his keyboard scoring, but it doesn’t. Historically though it’s monumental because this is where Carpenter met Kurt Russell. And Russell is fucking great, scowling and gyrating and just being Elvis. To do that much Elvis impersonating without seeming ridiculous is a real feat.

I even thought wait a minute – Bruce Campbell won’t do the sequel to BUBBA HO-TEP for whatever mysterious reason. Nobody thinks they can recast it. But what if Kurt Russell would do it? Then it could be a sequel to BUBBA HO-TEP and to ELVIS: THE MOVIE. He’d probaly want too much money but they at least gotta ask. That’s the one guy who would be a step up. (more…)

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Escape from New York vs. Escape from L.A.

Thursday, September 7th, 2006

Recently some joker spread a phony story on the internet about how Kurt Russell had tricked Paramount into greenlighting ESCAPE FROM EARTH, a third Snake Plissken movie, as part of a three picture deal. I knew it was too good to be true, but I also know that Russell always says Snake is his favorite character he’s ever played, and he clearly loves working with John Carpenter. Carpenter could use a return to the big screen, and I wouldn’t be surprised if after Tarantino’s DEATH PROOF comes out next year (starring Kurt Russell as a killer stuntman and scored by Carpenter) there is a rise in popularity and nostalgia for the classic Kurt Russell badass roles. I think it would actually be smart to make a new Plissken movie right now as long as it wasn’t a huge budget and it wasn’t a rehash of the other two. So, their loss I guess. And the world’s.

Of course, reading this horse shit got ME nostalgic for the old John Carpenter badass movies, so I watched THEY LIVE again, because that’s my favorite (sorry Kurt). And then I did something I never did before, I watched ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and ESCAPE FROM L.A. in a row, to get a better comparison. It’s sort of like one of those puzzles where there’s two similar drawings and you have to pick out what’s different. Hey, wait a minute, that baseball player is holding an ear of corn instead of a bat and shit like that. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a doctor’s office, but they have Highlights there sometimes.

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK is of course a classic. It’s a good dark-future concept, the idea of Manhattan being turned into a maximum security prison where the country’s most notorious outlaws are walled in and are free to live or fight as they please (they have prisons kind of like that in some countries, see the movie CARANDIRU for example). I’m not sure it’s meant as a comment on the “hard on crime” poses politicians took in the ’80s, but there is something beautifully horrible about the Statue of Liberty being turned into the lookout tower and security headquarters of the world’s biggest prison. Poetic injustice. (more…)

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They Live

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006

THEY LIVE is one of my favorite movies ever. It is probaly the very best version of a rare type of movie I love: the badass action movie that also works as a political statement. BILLY JACK may be more political, but it seems so self important and it has no sense of humor. THEY LIVE is kind of saying the same thing THE MATRIX is saying about a society brainwashed by media and advertising, but it’s saying more than that. It’s about the America of the Reagan years, when everything was geared to help the rich at the expense of the working class. Which for some reason seems awfully familiar today. Huh. Weird.

“Rowdy” Roddy Piper plays Nada, a drifter who walks into town with tools and a sleeping bag on his back. (Hey, what happens to that sleeping bag? I think it disappears.) This is a hero who not only doesn’t drive a sports car, but doesn’t have a car at all. Or a house. Or a job, at first. The plants are closing, the jobs are drying up, that’s why he’s on the move. But he happens to get a construction job, where he meets Frank (Keith motherfuckin David from THE THING) and finds out about a homeless encampment near a church where some nice people serve food for the homeless.

The first section of the movie doesn’t have alot of dialogue. It’s all about watching. Nada watches people watching TV – an old lady in an apartment, a dude standing outside an electronics shop, even homeless people who have a TV set up outside. We can see that Nada is a little creeped out by the vapid commercials and their hypnotic effect on people. And then they get pissed off when, every once in a while, some weird old man cuts into the broadcast desperately telling people to “wake up.” And then everybody gets a headache.

Nada also starts watching the church, because he notices something odd going on. He watches a helicopter watching the church. He sneaks in and sees that it’s not a real church. The choir he hears from outside is a reel-to-reel tape and there’s some kind of rebels hatching a plan in there. He even bumps into a secret panel in the wall and sees a box inside, but he gets found out by an elderly blind priest, so he leaves. (more…)

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Ghosts of Mars

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

John Carpenter is one of the most controversial directors of our time. Not because he gets into touchy subjects, like he goes and does some movie about jesus doing somebody in the ass or whatever it is that offends people these days. But because of his actual work. Because no one can really seem to agree whether he sucks with a few brilliant exceptions, whether he used to be brilliant and now he sucks, or whether he is really one of the great masters of the horror and Badass Cinema and that some of these new ones are just an off day.

The correct answer is c.

This new one follows many of the great John Carpenter stylistic motifs and thematic type themes. For example, if you ever read an interview or listened to his dvd commentary tracks, you know that practically every movie he ever did he claims is “really a western.” So he always has some stranger walking into town, or has some prisoner being transferred from a jail or a new sherriff in town or what not. In Assault On Precinct 13 he has the gangsters doing blood rituals like evil movie indians in a John Wayne picture. In They Live Roddy Piper strolls into town, walking down the middle of the street even though it’s LA. In Escape From LA he does the old jumping from horse to horse routine, except with motorcycles. Vampires takes place in a sunny Mexican ghost town even though it’s about fuckin vampires. Even Big Trouble In Little China and if I remember right the Elvis TV movie started as western scripts but were re-written to modern settings.

Ghosts of Mars takes this updated western routine to new heights by doing a science fiction movie on Mars that has 1. a train! 2. A prisoner being transferred from a jail by the sherriff, and on a train 3. A ghost town 4. primitive martian ghosts who act like the movie indians of John Wayne movies and/or the gangsters in Assault On Precinct 13, but with piercings. (more…)

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Christine

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

I don’t know if you remember this movie, it’s about a haunted car. In other words, it’s based on a Stephen King book. And that also means it’s a 50’s car that plays old Little Richard songs and crap while it kills people. I know the filmatists today are bad, they gotta put references to all the TV shows and movies from their childhood, but Stephen King is the original. This guy has been cannibalizing his childhood for decades. And also he’s been making up stories about inanimate objects killing people. Killer laundry machines and shit like that. Remember in the TV movie version of THE SHINING, there was a haunted fire hose that killed a guy? It’s alot like that only a car.

Actually, it’s a better movie than I remember it being when I saw it back in the ’80s, and I’m going to give most of the credit to Mr. John Carpenter. I’m not saying this is HALLOWEEN or THEY LIVE but it’s a good straightforward haunted car movie. The movie stars Keith Gordon (the kid from HOME MOVIES and DRESSED TO KILL) as a nerdy kid whose jock buddy tells him he needs to get laid now that he’s a senior and who gets his ass kicked in metal shop. They stab his sack lunch to death with a switchblade and he suffers the humiliation of everybody seeing that his mom packed him yogurt.

So what he does, he finds this old piece of shit car that he buys from a crazy old coot in a shack (Roberts Blossom, who was fucking brilliant in DERANGED). The old man doesn’t tell him that his brother just died in the car but he does tell him it’s named Christine. And that’s what the kid always calls it, “Christine,” not “my car.” And everybody acts like that’s normal, for some reason.

His parents don’t approve of the car so he gets a space in a garage inside a junkyard and starts fixing Christine up. This was before the invention of Pimp My Ride, so he puts the elbow grease in himself and he gets the job done. As he does it he becomes less nerdy, more manly, wears darker clothes, slicks his hair back, even starts wearing his collar up like he thinks he’s in the ’50s. Suddenly he has a girlfriend and he has the balls to call his dad “motherfucker” but nobody can really stand him because he’s obsessed with the fucking car. I mean Christine. (more…)

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Halloween

Friday, October 29th, 1999

Okay guys I know its not monday yet but i have a new column for you – a special halloween treat for all you motherfuckers that like all the spooky shit.

what i decided to do is rent every movie i could find with the word halloween in it. This is what i got:

Halloween
Halloween 2
Halloween 3: Season of the Witch
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Meyers
Halloween 5
H20 Halloween

Now, as my regular readers know old vern has been out of the picture for a while. This is my first halloween in many years so it is a special treat. i cannot remember the last time i watched a scary movie for halloween, let alone 6 in a row. I think i have seen the first halloween movie before but this is the first time i have been able to watch the whole trilogy.

And let me say, a lot of people don’t know this but the first one is usually the best, and this is NO exception. (more…)

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