Carpenter's Tools: Memoirs of an Invisible Man

When I say that John Carpenter is a director who does not try too hard, I mean that as a compliment. He manages an accomplished and tightly composed visual style without indulging himself, and he scripts his films with the barest of exposition. Hell, he's so taut he typically only has time for one or two good performances per film. When he quit the studio system for a time in the late '80s, you could hardly tell these lower budget films apart from the seminal cult work he made at the start of the decade.

However, you can see a massive difference in Carpenter's 1992 return to a major studio (Warner Bros): Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Given $40 million, almost twice the highest amount he'd previously enjoyed for a project, Carpenter could take advantages of breakthroughs in digital animation, which was so cheaply rendered in his other films that it looked outdated even compared to contemporaneous releases. With this extreme (for Carpenter) cash pile, the director and his effects team crafted one of the most impressive uses of digital animation in the early '90s, not as innovative or overwhelming as the work on James Cameron's Terminator 2 but nearly as clever.

Why, then, was the film such a big failure at the box office, halting Carpenter's momentum as he broke back into the system before he truly got started? Perhaps the casting of Chevy Chase and foreknowledge of the director's penchant for goofy, light satire doomed it, because it's important to note that Memoirs is not a comedy. Oh, it gets some laughs here and there, both from the script and Carpenter's sight gags, but Dana Olsen and William Goldman's screenplay is clearly meant to be a straightforward thriller built around the effects.

As such, it succeeds admirably. Chase plays Nick Halloway, a businessman without surviving family, a partner, many friends or even a committed work ethic. He simply is, until, after a particularly hard drinking session with a beautiful friend of a friend (Daryl Hannah), he passes out at the office as an experiment in one of its labs goes horribly awry. He wakes to find the building seemingly on the edge of collapse, missing huge chunks in the structure as if a bomb went off. Yet the walls are intact, merely invisible in places, along with our hapless protagonist.

Before any potentially comic situation arises, special agents arrive on the scene, headed by the amoral David Jenkins (Sam Neill, deliciously wicked without overplaying it). Jenkins and the rest of the response crew realize that a person has been affected when they spot a hat moving back and forth and screaming for help.

Jenkins sees the immense potential of Halloway as A) the best CIA agent the world has ever (not) seen or B) a ticket to big money for another country to take advantage of Nick's possibilities. Nick overhears David's plan and manages to escape and heads out on the lam, pursued by a team of government agents operating without clearance from Langley so Jenkins can catch his prize. Carpenter manages the chase with the same skill he displayed in thrillers like Escape from New York, flagging for an odd bit of comic relief that actually serves more to examine Nick's state of mind than to wreak repetitive gags based on the premise.

Chase has never been so reserved, and as a comic actor he always excelled by projecting an aura of "I don't give a damn if you like me or not" swagger. Basing his career on this style of acting allows him to slip into the drama of the story with ease. Nothing about the story is particularly deep, but Chase almost makes you care when he off-handedly mentions in the voiceover how he'd always dreamed of being invisible as a shy kid; indeed, Jenkins looks over his profile detailing his lack of emotional connections to anyone or anything, and he remarks "He was invisible before he was invisible."

Setting aside such moments, as well as a largely unnecessary romantic subplot between Hannah and Chase that is not grating but also not relevant in any way other than to give Halloway his first real emotional tether to the world, Memoirs of an Invisible Man caters entirely to its Hawksian take on a Hitchcock wrong man thriller. It moves so quickly that it has no time for Carpenter's usual satire: vague references are made to Jenkins' involvement in a notorious operation in Iran, but such brief references are straight-faced, not peevish.

But let's go back to those effects. The opening shot, of Nick setting up a video camera to tape his titular memoirs, sets the stage for what's to come. To prove that he's not simply recording a voiceover for a shot of an empty chair, Nick unwraps a piece of bubble gum and chews it, the perfect cube of gum squishing and twisting around in the air before the outline of a tongue stretches it out and blows a bubble. It's such a simple thing, yet so striking (certainly for its time period), and it shows what might have been the start of a brilliant new phase of a career for the director of a handful of the best low-budget genre pictures of all time. Shots of Nick drinking an the liquid sloshing around where his stomach should be recall a bit of Cameron's work on The Abyss, though I did find myself wondering why Nick couldn't eat solid foods to avoid the ungainly sight of meals digesting when the average human carries several pounds of undigested meat in his intestines. I suppose anything that was in him at the time of the accident was made invisible with the rest of him, and now I find myself wondering if his first few trips to the bathroom afterward resulted in invisible waste, but let us not dwell on such matters.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man is, like most of Carpenter's films, far from a masterpiece, but it's a terrific genre picture with enough twists to liven up the rigidity of the invisible man conceit. Hannah is a dynamic actress, too dynamic for a role as underwritten as Alice's, but Sam Neill is the best human villain in a Carpenter film since Isaac Hayes nearly stole the show in Escape from New York. Plus, it's interesting to see more comically oriented actors like Chase and Michael McKean of Spinal Tap fame (in a small role) either playing their laughs as semi-sophisticated -- a premature ejaculation gag involving McKean a notable exception -- and it's a shame the film tanked and earned such lousy reviews for Chase (just before his chat show came and went), who ran for cover to mugging goofiness and never looked back, only recently finding a good outlet for it on the show Community. It also must have stuck in Carpenter's craw something fierce, having won back some fans with They Live after Big Trouble in Little China underperformed and Prince of Darkness failed to make a splash, only to lose them once more here. But for those, like me, who assumed that the '90s were nothing but excruciating failure for the director, Memoirs is a nice riposte, not in the first tier of Carpenter's corpus but a surprisingly solid companion for a double-header with a good Hitchcock chaser.

Kill Bill: Vol. 2

Just as Kill Bill: Vol. 1 closed with a reflective moment that pointed the way to its sequel, so too does Vol. 2 begin with a moment of self-reflexive peevishness to link it to its predecessor: The Bride drives in a car against a background that is clearly a rear-projection effect and speaks directly to the camera in a camp monologue that essentially proves that Tarantino can't even get to his film's title without a speech of some sort.


From there, however, Vol. 2 becomes a different beast entirely from its wacky sibling. It begins properly on the same segment that opened Vol. 1 and provides the full backstory of The Bride's near-death at the hands of her former colleagues. It's a brilliant vignette that shows a pregnant Bride rehearsing her wedding in a quaint chapel in Texas, with a gentle build-up from a nice but somewhat condescending reverend to Samuel L. Jackson's contractually guaranteed appearance in every QT film. The Bride goes outside for some fresh air and finds...Bill (David Carradine ) She doesn't seem frightened, and Bill, with his long hair and pipe flute, hardly looks intimidating. They hold a civil, even pleasant, conversation, Bill asking her why she's giving up her old life and The Bride describing how she's found happiness in this simpler life. Bill comes inside with her and she, in a misguided attempt to avoid trouble, introduces her former lover as her father. Tommy, the fiancé , asks "Dad" to give The Bride away, and immediately the scene takes a turn. Bill's tone of voice drops just enough to let us know that something's gone horribly wrong, and Tarantino pulls the camera outside the chapel in time to see the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad arrive with machine guns.

With this severe and tense opening, Tarantino balances the the pronounced Asian influence of the first film with a spaghetti western feel. Kill Bill: Vol. 2 is dusty, arid and punishing where Vol. 1 was sleek and raffish. In fact, Vol. 2's more campy moments directly involve martial arts segments, while the humor elsewhere is as dry as the desert where much of the film's action occurs. Tarantino moves from that chilling opening scene to the present, with Bill driving to a mobile home in the middle of the desert to meet with his brother Budd (Michael Madsen ), a broken-down sad-sack who works as a bouncer at a local strip club that is so empty his only task is to clean the flood-prone ladies' bathroom. The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad members we've heretofore seen had all found a certain contentment in their "retirements": Green lived the domestic life while O-Ren fought her way to the top of Japan's criminal underworld. But Budd's story has an air of tragedy, or at least would if he had any redeeming qualities. Bill hasn't spoken to his brother in years, and Budd says that he pawned his Hattori Hanzŏ sword when asked if he kept up his swordsmanship. We learn later that this is a lie, signifying two things: Budd, ragged and defeated as he is, has a fundamental threshold of dignity, and he knows that telling his brother he sold his sword signifies that their relationship is beyond repair. At last, the Tarantino gift for character re-emerges.

The influence of Westerns has of course been evident through both films primarily in the omission of The Bride's true name, going so far as to censor any spoken reference to it in Vol. 1. Tarantino slyly plays up the mystery of the (Wo)Man with No Name conceit, and by dumping the reveal of her identity -- Beatrix Kiddo -- in the middle of the film in an amusing aside, he cheekily subverts the idea that withholding a character's name makes him or her more dangerous. There are also a handful of shots that could sneak their way into a pantheon of great Western shots, such as a dissolve from a shot of the sun with perfect lens flaring into a slowly focusing profile of Beatrix, dirty and battered, shuffling her way through the desert looking sun-dried and weak but wired with pure rage, the fading sun surrounding her head like a terrifying halo.


Kill Bill in its entirety is, naturally, a personal film, given that it concerns a woman seeking her own brand of justice for crimes committed against her, but Vol. 2 feels that much more intimate. She's literally boxed-in when Budd springs a trap and buries her alive, and she reminisces about her time with cruel martial arts master Pei Mei (Gordon Liu, who also played the leader of the Crazy 88 in the last film), who pushes a younger, undisciplined Beatrix to the breaking point where up to now she was a formidable warrior. Tarantino reflects the constricted mood by constantly framing his characters inside the shot: as Beatrix sneaks into Budd's mobile home, he hears a noise and comes to the trailer's small window to scan the area. Pei Mei can punch through wood only inches away, each blow opening a new window, and a later flashback involving Beatrix realizing she's pregnant and being attack by a rival assassin group ends with the sent killer framed in a hole made by a shotgun blast before leaving.


Even the enemies have a closer connection to Kiddo. Vernita shared a mutual professional respect with Beatrix and O-Ren was likely friends with The Bride, but Budd is the brother of the lover who wronged her, while Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) is the perfect foil for Beatrix. Like Thurman, Hannah is a tall, intimidating blonde , but Elle is a sadist where Beatrix has some level of humanity. The two women clearly hate each other, but they also share a begrudging respect for one another, and Beatrix brings out the only sense of honor in Elle: Driver poisoned Pai Mei for plucking our her eyeball for insolence and she hides a black mamba in a suitcase of money to kill Budd. She does this because she cannot stomach the idea of Beatrix, "the finest woman [she] ever met," dying in such a shameful manner at the hands of an oaf. (Blade Runner fans will also get a kick out of Elle's demise, as Hannah's wild thrashing matches her death scene in that film).

Shifting the focus from the blank desire for revenge onto the genuine characteristics and humanity of Beatrix requires Thurman to stretch out a bit from simply looking gorgeous and deadly, but she rises to the task with gusto. When she finally reaches Bill and finds her daughter whom she thought dead, Tarantino exhibits the most emotion he's ever allowed to be shown in one of his films as Thurman's doe eyes fight back tears. This scene, which opens the final bit of the saga, sets the stage for a serious rumination on revenge and violence.

In the scene preceding Kiddo's reunion with Bill and B.B., Beatrix visits an old Mexican pimp in a border town who knows Bill's whereabouts. More important that Bill's location, though, is what we learn about him through this man: as Beatrix notes in her narration, a young, fatherless Bill did what all fatherless children did and sought father figures. This pimp runs the border town with a militia of his whores' bastard children and mutilates the face of any prostitute who steps out of line, but he used to take Bill to the movies, where the little kid developed his first crush on Lana Turner that shaped his obsession with blondes. If Vihalo represents the sort of men who shaped Bill's youth, it's no wonder he grew up to be an insane, possessive killer. Indeed, he seems to have passed his sociopathy onto B.B., who watches bloody samurai films alongside her educational cartoons and admits to taking her goldfish out its bowl and watching it flop around before stepping on it. But she also contains some of Beatrix's morality, confessing that, after she killed the fish, she felt remorse for the first time.

B.B.'s presence in the film shows how the cycle repeats itself: Bill, in a brilliant speech comparing Beatrix and her desire for normalcy to Superman and his alter-ego (his real costume according to Bill), reveals his knowledge of Beatrix's psyche, and he knows that she enjoyed the thrill of killing even if he didn't force the answers out of her with truth serum. While Kiddo will offer love and support for B.B., she's so fundamentally outside of typical social norms that the child will be at least partially shaped by her mother's bloodlust. Furthermore, Tarantino's recent announcement of a planned third (and possibly fourth) volume concerning the desire for those left alive but wounded in some way by Beatrix seeking revenge and a fourth presumably focusing upon B.B.'s reaction to Vol. 3's outcome demonstrates how Tarantino is setting the child up to help continue the cycle of violence and vengeance and its all-consuming nature, a theme he revisited with Inglourious Basterds.

The end of the film, featuring Beatrix locked in a bathroom crying until her sobs turn into laughter, reminds me of the last shot of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, in which De Niro's character, aged and alone, crawls fatalistically into a bed in an opium den and the film freezes on his peculiar facial expression, his drug-induced smile potentially a sign of inner contentment following a preceding flashback or a haunting reflection of that flashback's insincerity and manufactured comfort aided by the opium. Beatrix cries for Bill, whom she still loves in some way, but she laughs because she won and reclaimed her daughter. But in that laugh is a hint of madness, an indication that she will never find normalcy in life and that she and B.B. are in for a potentially rough ride ahead. For the moment, however,Tarantino is content to give Kiddo her moment.

Wall Street

Who could have guessed that Oliver Stone, a director obsessed with the past, be it the '60s or Ancient Greece, would make a film that would one day seem eerily prescient? Wall Street certainly had its fair share of current events on which to comment when it debuted in late 1987 -- what with Black Monday and the market crash occurring around the same time -- but recent events have cast the film in an entirely new light, one that only makes the excesses of the film's businessmen seem even seedier.

What struck me about the film almost immediately was its attention to detail: Stone brought aboard several business consultants to ensure his film looked just like the real stock floors and boardrooms -- right down to the ratio of women to men in higher positions. The fat cats never rest on their laurels as peons slave away for mediocre wages while they reap all the benefits: they may not be doing "real" work, but executives and brokers move faster than Olympic athletes and wrack their brains over numbers more than engineers. Only the best survive, and they devour the ones who lag behind even for a second. Yet for all its seriousness, to these men it seem little more than a game.

Into this world comes Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), a stockbroker looking for a big client to deliver a fat paycheck. He sets his sights on one of the biggest players in town, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), a corporate raider who makes no bones about his willingness to get ahead by any means necessary. Bud tries to win his favor with a box of cigars, but G.G. wants something a bit more substantial. The young broker's father, Carl (Martin Sheen), heads the union of an airline company, and so he begins to feed his potential client information about the company. Over time, Gekko takes the lad under his wing, promising wealth, women and power. He needs to stop worrying about that pesky thing called "legality," is all.

Soon, Bud flies in private jets, buys a swanky home and even scores a hot trophy blonde, the materialistic interior decorator Darien (Daryl Hannah). The sky's the limits. Bud sits in the middle of the rampant, free-market greed of Gekko and the moral compass of his father. Carl just wants his fair share for the union, joking with his son that "money is only something you need if you don't die tomorrow." By contrast, Gekko, in a fiery speech to a company resisting his buyout, coldly admits that "greed, for lack of a better word, is good." Bud only looks on with admiration.

Few directors are better suited to chart the frenetic world of trading like Oliver Stone, who nearly bounces off the wall with energy as he shuffles the corridors with the sharks. He's clearly using the camera to make a point about the pace and casualness of decisions that can put thousands out of work just to bump up profit margins, but Stone never outright condemns the system. No, he's not quite the pinko Commie we make him out to be, and a part of Gekko's infamous "Greed is good" speech isn't all evil: greed really does motivate people to do make some great breakthroughs, and there's nothing wrong with prosperity. Instead, Stone judges those who resort to insider trading and other illegal activities to fuel the unchecked excess of the '80s.

In retrospect, Wall Street reminds me of the worlds Bret Easton Ellis creates: these men aren't really prosperous, they've just buried problems under glitzy illusions. The film never treads in Ellis' dark territory, of course, but you can still practically see the cocaine dust that coats everything. Gekko's mercenary tactics are scarcely removed from the elaborate house of cards that made us all think everything was great until it suddenly collapsed.

The only real weak component of the film is Hannah as Darien: supposedly her ideology conflicted with the shallow nature of the character, but she could have always said no. Nevertheless, she can't bring down such a smartly-written, expertly paced exposé, and Wall Street ranks as one of Stone's finest achievements. Yet I can't help but look at the end, in which Bud rebels against his golden god and must face the SEC, with a certain grain of cynicism: Bud knows he's going to jail for what he's done, but we've all seen businessman after businessman walk away scot free. How strange that I thought his probable incarceration to be almost idealistic.