Repo Man (Alex Cox, 1984)

I've come to Repo Man surprisingly late, given how it contains so many elements I cannot help but love: anti-Reagan social commentary, a cultural snapshot soundtrack (coupled with a willingness to critique the bands it comprises), and a free-for-all style that finds touchstones in the bleakest of noirs, the strangest of '50s-'60s sci-fi and even a bit of Grease. I'm not quite sure it congeals in the final stretch, but then even if all these traits fell into place, the resulting mix would be so strange it might not look cohesive anyway. So many movies these days chase cult film status by also unloading what they can on the screen, but Repo Man has an attitude of ingenuity and self-challenge, not narcissistic promotion. I wish there were more films like it, but I suppose if there were, the lightning-in-a-bottle quality of this curio would be lost.

You can read my longer thoughts on the film at Spectrum Culture.

Rango

When the Rango trailer met with near-unanimous derision and dismissal among critics and, seemingly, audiences, I wonder if Gore Verbinski sat back and knowingly thought to himself, "To hell with it. They'll come crawling back when the time comes." If he did, he was right: Rango wastes no time announcing itself the first major mainstream release of the year, driven by a visual design unseen in any recent animated film that comes to mind and laced with a humor that never feels cheap or easy.

From its opening moments, Rango carries a mild sense of Dadaist whimsy, a mariachi band addressing the audience directly and introducing a character "who has yet to enter his own story." Cut to a flower-shirted chameleon going stir-crazy in a terrarium, organizing plays with the plastic objects littering his boxed home and even holding conversations with such props as a wind-up fish and a mock tree. Just as the lizard hits upon a new idea requiring an ironic twist for his protagonist, his masters' car lurches in traffic and sends the terrarium out of the foolishly open back window, stranding the domesticated creature in the middle of a harsh desert highway with a sun so hot a drop of water sizzles and evaporates on the tongue before it can even offer the tease of a quenched thirst. The poor beast shrivels up and partially crumbles twice in the rays.

At this point, the metafictional devices employed with the mariachi band and self-reflexive acting of the protagonist among his props gives way to outright surrealism, from a squashed armadillo carrying on a cryptic conversation with the lizard and sun-baked hallucinations allowing for some truly breathtaking yet hilarious animation. At last, our hero finds his way to a parched town called Dirt where he avoids a swift beating by taking the name Rango and putting his acting chops to the test with fanciful tales of gunslinging prowess.

Amazingly, Rango sidesteps the lazy appropriation of winking clichés seen in recent animated films, even as it eschews putting a toe into the Western genre pool for splashing in with a cannonball. This is the closest anyone has come to making a CGI Tarantino movie. Rango does not simply regurgitate pop culture, it embraces it, honoring conventions even as it pokes fun and adds new dimensions to them. Leone references dominate the landscape, from the use of a Morricone-esque score by Hans Zimmer to a likeness of the Man with No Name. The film also incorporates the work of Chuck Jones in its chaotic yet carefully composed animation, ensuring strict adherence of spatial relationships and perspective so that the sudden breaks are even more clanging, hilarious and daring. Verbinski even throws in a Fear and Loathing nod, recalling not only Hunter's own mad, hallucinogenic ride through the desert but Terry Gilliam, whose influence can be seen all over Rango's visual originality rooted in the work of others.

To even get into how gorgeous, how memorable and how singular the animation of Rango is would send this review down a dead-end street of superlatives. Who on Earth could have guessed from Rango's unalluring teaser that the primary influence on its visual scheme, even above classical Western imagery, would be the work of Salvador Dalí? To be fair, the animators left a hefty clue for the audience in the unimpressive frame of the protagonist. Rango, too weird to appeal in a trailer, works brilliantly in context: set against the startlingly realistic animation of the other animals, Rango visually clashes. His askew, pencil-thin neck supports his vast head like a glacial till holding up a balancing rock, and his slightly uneven eye sockets with narrowed nipples for peepers subtly resemble breasts. Only Rattlesnake Jake, a massive, coiling psychopath who comes to town to pop the bubble of Rango's inflated persona, matches Rango's off-kilter animation, what with his seemingly endless body and his machine-gun rattler.

The backdrops offer even more chances for innovative rendering. Hallucinations of terrifyingly symmetrical cactus configurations, slow-motion shots of a desert highway illuminates overhead by cars passing over the hero, and a transparently fake (and thus disgustingly recognizable) Las Vegas are but some of the masterful background animations in which Verbinski places his characters. Where Wes Anderson's inexperience with animation did not preclude him from dictating style and movement to his supposedly tortured team on Fantastic Mr. Fox, the less-mannered Verbinski appears to have reacted to his own unfamiliarity with the medium with humility, ceding artistic control to his animators. Amazingly, Rango fails to fall into the trap that entangled infamous examples of competing visions in animation (Disney's 1951 Alice in Wonderland comes swiftly to mind), maintaining a cohesive juxtaposition between surprising realism and the most brazen use of Dada in children's entertainment since the early brilliance of Spongebob Squarepants.

Of course, to say that assumes Rango could conceivably be seen as a kid's film, which it most emphatically is not. Though it sidesteps Tarantino's vulgarity, the sheer amount of adult-oriented pop culture references and film history on display offers nothing for a child, and most of the dialogue plays at, at the least, a teenage level. Only the slapstick could fully appeal to a child, but then physical comedy, when done well, is universal, and the comedy here is dynamite. And if the sophistication of the writing does not turn off the children, the sight of Rattlesnake Jake surely will, each lunge of his bared fangs or constricting coil around heroes terrifying enough to shake an adult. Those dismissing Rango for not being palatable to children (or praising it in spite of this "shortcoming") have grown too accustomed to the idea of animation being something that must appeal to children. Rango has just enough to keep a kid entertained -- and for the love of God, parents, let your kids get scared; it does 'em good -- but it clearly aims for an older audience.

Part of Rango's promotional package highlighted Verbinski's staging of the voice cast as if they were actually on-screen, filming them acting together in what seemed a desperate gimmick. Yet the move paid off, and Rango sports one of the voice casts of major stars to sound as if the actors did more than simply speak into the microphone. Bill Nighy properly sinks into his role as Jake, adding menace to his speech and not just his movement. An unrecognizable Isla Fisher plays Beans, the unfortunately named love interest who chatters in a contradictory mile-a-minute drawl shockingly familiar to those of us who have heard the slowed-down Southern accent as sped up by inflamed passions. And what a weird niche in which Ned Beatty has found himself, playing a crippled authority figure exuding false comfort and harboring ulterior motives in an animated film only a year after....well, you know.

Casting Rango, a delusional pet with aspirations of being a thespian, as a chameleon was a sly gag, and one Johnny Depp undoubtedly got. After the last two Pirates movies, the relationship between Depp and Verbinski went stale, to the point one could not easily recall how incandescent their first pairing was (and on a film preemptively dismissed as derivative and money-grabbing). They capture lightning in a bottle once more here, letting Depp exercise his most exuberant techniques without the setbacks of watching the actual man contort himself into buffoonish shapes for a laugh. Never appearing on-screen, Depp hasn't been so watchable in years.

Stuffed with allusions and surprises, Rango occasionally goes so far as to recontextualize its references and make something else out of them. A massive canyon chase not only combines elements of the podcast race and Death Star trench run of Episodes I and IV, respectively, it also adds a dash of the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz, albeit with bats. Three superb sequences combine into one visual tour-de-force that borrows the best aspects from all of them and plays around in the white space left over. At the other end of the spectrum, the film pokes fun at the stereotypes of Native Americans, the somber raven to whom Rango incessantly condescends always subverting expectations based on genre clichés (a reference to Depp's involvement in the thoroughly anti-cliché, anti-Western Dead Man, perhaps?). I also enjoyed the idea of a town so literally dry that, when the locals laugh at the naïve city slicker asking for water, they do so because they'd all love nothing more than a sip of the stuff instead of alcohol.

In a year where Pixar already seems to be planning a working vacation with Cars 2, Rango might survive in the public consciousness through the year and win some accolades come the next awards season. One can only hope; Rango is one of the few animated films to ignore Pixar entirely, either as competition or influence. The makers focused only on telling a good story in the way they saw it, and the results freely leap off the screen despite staying in obsolete ol' 2D. Intelligent, witty, original films of any stripe do not come along often, and to see something this bold come from the seemingly dessicated corpse of Nickelodeon Studios proves one should never count anyone out. The film circles around the idea that anyone can be a hero given the right circumstances and sense of perseverance and duty; Rango itself proves how dedication turns a decent concept into great art.

Alien

Alien sits in the middle between the opposing styles of my two favorite horror films, the two films I believe represent the pinnacle of the genre. On one end is John Carpenter's Halloween, an elegantly composed film so meticulous that it has no jump scares but instead creates a deliberate and well-sustained atmosphere of unsettling discontent. You're waiting for something to jump out at you, but for the most part it never does. That film is about the inevitability of an unstoppable force. At the other pole is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a film made by an equally gifted filmmaker who nevertheless has a sloppier style than Carpenter's immaculate perceptions. Yet that messiness works in Tobe Hooper's favor, allowing him to make a horror film that works, time and again, on a feeling of spontaneity. Even when you're watching it for the second, or fifth, time, it has the power to startle you because everything happens in the moment.

Alien certainly has the atmosphere and directorial sophistication of Halloween down pat. Its sets are complex while looking well-worn, with H.R. Giger's legendary monster instantly announcing itself as one of cinema's most ingeniously designed creatures. With a nuanced soundtrack and an equally delicate and haunting score, the grace and intelligence of the direction has lent itself to endless analysis over the sexual imagery of the film and the themes elicited from a creature with broadly phallic and vaginal physical characteristics, a debate that compounds when you consider the status of the franchise's heroine as perhaps the great feminist icon of popular cinema.

What so few critics do, sadly, is talk about how magnificently terrifying it is. Inevitably dated by the homages, the spoofs and the outright plagiarism, Alien nevertheless continues to hold a power over this viewer after a number of viewings, its pacing setting the mood in the first act, only to mingle with the more unpredictable action in the next acts that keep the film fresh. For as much as Giger's Xenomorph attracts attention for what it symbolizes, attention should also be paid to the simple fact that the creature's constant evolution, combined with Scott's wise decision to only show the barest glimpses of the monster, allow the monster to take on a greater psychic weight in the audience's mind instead of giving it away. Even with Spielberg's Jaws, the audience had a rough idea of the shape of the shark, if not the size. Here, it's all up to guess work, and that make it all the more scary.

Alien exists in a world where space travel has become banal. Where Star Wars kicked off a host of space opera imitators, Scott's film, working off Dan O'Bannon's script (itself a horror version of his comedic Dark Star, made by John Carpenter) presents the average Joe in space. Despite the humongous size of the Nostromo, the ship in which a crew far too small for its cavernous interior resides, the ship is a towing vessel, and its crew, with the exception of a science officer, would not seem out of place on any working class job on Earth. They bitch about paychecks, grumble over the food and worry about fixing the rundown ship. They are not presented as some facile family, but they do come off as relatable people, giving the film's upcoming fantasy a realistic foundation.

Awoken from their cryogenic sleep, the crew is surprised to find they've not returned to Earth's solar system but have been redirected after intercepting a distress signal in another part of the galaxy. Immediately, the crew voices their protest, asking if they're going to get more money and threatening to simply continue back home after a long haul. Only when Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the warrant officer, tells them that company policy dictates all ships must respond to any distress calls under threat of forfeiting payment altogether does the crew stifle their grumbles.

This first act suggests no impending doom, no sense of disquiet. Its halcyon inactivity allows Ridley Scott to probe the main areas of the Nostromo with a fluid intelligence, using each shot to establish key sections of the ship while framing them in ways that flirt with the careful compositions of 2001 while still adhering to the fast pace of commercial sci-fi like Star Wars. Scott is a notably inconsistent filmmaker, but when he's on, he has an uncanny ability to suffuse artistic mise-en-scène, even a certain amount of grace, into shots that never lose their more direct, mainstream appeal.

When the tow ship arrives in the orbit of an uninhabitable planet and a search party lands a shuttle on the barren rock in adverse conditions, the noose gently tightens around the throat, more so when the crew happens upon a massive, derelict alien ship. Jerry Goldsmith's already subtle score steps back further to let the ambient sounds of howling wind and the creaking of the decaying spaceship. Compared to the almost pedestrian spin on interstellar magnificence of the Nostromo, the alien ship is more lavish, more intricately designed and ornate, clearly the result of bioengineering compared to the obsolete industrial construction of the Nostromo. Scott's talents have never been more evident than they are when the search crew stumbles across a gigantic fossil of an alien corpse. The "space jockey" instantly changes the dynamic of the film: where the enormous derelict suggested something bizarre, this humongous corpse, frozen forever at what could be a giant cannon, one last futile gesture of defense, inspires awe and fear in equal measure. What is this thing? Are there more of him in the sector? And why does he have a gaping hole in his chest?

One of the crew finds a section in the depths of the ship filled with large, leathery eggs and, well, you know the rest. Where Alien previously existed as a realistic depiction of working class slobs in space, suddenly the film explodes into surreal, hypersexualized energy. Poor Kane (John Hurt) looks into an open ovum, gets attacked by a clawed, acidic vagina from hell, which stays on his face for a day before everything seems to return to normal. Then, a penis with a mouth bursts through his chest. So it goes.

As if the attacks weren't frightening enough, Giger's Freudian construction of the alien plays on subtle fears, most of the actually masculine, concerning rape. The "facehugger" invades Kane's mouth and, in a sense, impregnates him -- even the science officer, Ash (Ian Holm), refers to the beast as "Kane's son." Later, when Ash is revealed to be with the crew solely to ensure that the company they work for can get a hold of the alien specimen for their weapons division, he attempts to kill Ripley by choking her with a rolled-up newspaper. The surviving crew finds them and literally knock off Ash's head, revealing him to be an android. And the milky substance that runs through his wires is blatantly reminiscent of semen.

This is all well and good, but the manner in which Scott never places the focus on Giger's interpretive imagery, allowing the audience to consider it on their own terms while he gets down to the business of crafting a thriller. The use of Jonesy the cat as a miscue seems dated today mainly because the "It's Only a Cat" cliché, which had existed in bare forms before but exploded after this film. Yet Scott slyly uses the cat as a means to warn the characters, who never figure out that the cat hisses when the alien is nearby because anyone who might have put two and two together subsequently met a gruesome end. The cat's hiss, in a way, becomes the alien's "theme." Elsewhere, Scott sets up the ingenious chase through the air ducts, in which the ship captain (Tom Skerritt, proving that not even faster-than-light travel and cryostasis could propel humans far enough away from '70s hair) crawls through the vents attempting to lure the alien to the airlock. We process most of the action via the rest of the crew, who monitor movement in the ducts on a scanner that shows a second dot coming at the captain impossibly fast, disappearing and re-appearing again. Veronica Cartwright had the thankless role of being the sobbing, hysterical mess, but you empathize with her terror as she watches some unknown monster closing in on her friend.

In the climax, Scott mounts a sensory overload as Ripley sets the ship to self-destruct. Klaxons blare, lights flash and steam hisses through every leaking hole in the Nostromo. It's a bewilderingly executed segment, taking the well-defined structure of the ship's interior and throwing everything into chaos. When Ripley runs back to get the cat, there's no telling how far away she is from Jones, where the alien is, and how she can get back to the escape shuttle. Naturally, she makes it, and we get one last scare when the alien guesses ahead of Ripley and stows away on the escape pod.

In those final moments, Ripley becomes a hero for the ages, even if she managed to save no one else (well, except the damn cat). One of the enduring draws of Alien is that it's nearly impossible until the end to tell who will live. Ripley immediately projects a hardline approach in the movie, lecturing the engineers on company policy, refusing to let the search crew back because Kane's condition places them all in quarantine (our first taste of Ash's ulterior motives comes from him letting them in). But that severity is often costly in the movies, and usually the most focused one ends up dying. As Roger Ebert astutely noted in his "Great Movies" entry on the film, the cast is, for the most part, skewed to middle age. The youngest two, Cartwright and Weaver, were 29 and 30, respectively. The rest vary from mid-'30s all the way into the early '50s. These are people who just want to go home: would a fresh-faced Luke Skywalker ignore a distress call? Of course not. Hell, even Han Solo wouldn't, though he'd make a big show of ignoring it before his conscience nagged at him. Even with ship ranks, there's no real leader here, no clear social strata. They have enough of a bond with each other that each death affects them on a slightly personal level, but they're distinct enough that the driving impulse is simply fear that they'll be next. Also, their separation allows them to turn on each other that much more easily.

Not until James Cameron resurrected the franchise nearly a decade later and developed the tendrils of Ripley's personality would she become a screen icon, but what Alien lacks in its protagonist's distinction, it more than makes up for with an atmosphere and a sophistication that none of the sequels could even approach. Cameron worked magic with the material but nevertheless had to wrench it almost entirely from its horror roots into more direct action territory. Scott's film lives on as the most nuanced of the four films -- let us count those Alien vs. Predator movies as some separate, not at all equal, property -- gently laying the framework for the ideas other movies would handle more explicitly, such as the third and fourth films playing with the idea of the alien's host dictating its evolutionary outcome, the brilliant anti-corporate thread involving Weyland-Yutani's constant interference with lives simply to get a weapon they could never control, the ruthlessness but also the humanity of its heroine.

Alien revolves around these topics with the same fluid tracking shots that it uses to move through the Nostromo, and as much as I admire Scott's decision to leave science fiction after this and Blade Runner after guessing he could go no farther in the genre -- and thus far, no one else has really exceeded what he did with those two films -- I do so wish he'd made more space films. Rarely have I felt a chill run down my spine so disturbingly as I have when watching the captain, just before going to his death, asking the ship supercomputer, MU-TH-UR, "What are my chances?" After a brief moment, the screen returns with its reply: "Does not compute." In the intervening decades, Scott has proven himself to be anything but a master, connecting only occasionally, and often only with alternate cuts that never even hit theaters. Yet Alien is undeniably a masterpiece, one of those films that meets neatly at the nexus of genre entertainment and artistic endeavor, and whether those who enjoy it today do so for its ambition and vision or for the simply glee of its lasting scares, they're not missing the point.




*Addendum: I wanted to work this into the review proper, but I have such love for the marketing campaign that went into this film that I feel it should be its own separate thread. Today, the film's trailer is almost universally recognized as the greatest preview of all time. In the late '70s, films still often came packaged in the old-school way that went obsessively into detail in trailers, not so much about plot -- that came later when audiences seemed to react so viscerally against being surprised that the industry catered to their wishes to basically know the movie before seeing it -- but in the endless parade of sales pitches. Watch the original Star Wars trailer and listen to a flat voice drone endlessly about "a big, sprawling space opera of rebellion and romance," speaking about a raucous adventure with all the conviction of a police officer reading aloud the traffic report in court. The Alien trailer has no voiceover, not even dialogue from the film. This is old-hat today (the Coen brothers even did a funny version to advertise A Serious Man), but the crafting of the preview solely through the diegetic sounds of the film's atmosphere -- the echoing klaxon, the hissing stem, the shrieking cat -- gradually mounting until it becomes a horror film in miniature, is savagely brilliant and deeply ahead of its time. Then, of course, there is the matter of the tagline, "In space, no one can hear you scream." I would give that tagline the Nobel Prize for Literature. I am the sort of person who hates marketing. I hate trailers that give too much away, or that contain the distillation of a great idea that excites me for a full product that doesn't deliver (oh, Watchmen trailer, how you lied to me), but every now and then someone puts some thought behind how they sell a movie, and the results can be as engaging as the final product. Alien is one of a handful to get it completely right.

Wise Blood

[This post written for the John Huston Blog-A-Thon at Icebox Movies]

When Adam Zanzie over at Icebox Movies commissioned his blogathon for John Huston, my unfamiliarity with the director's work both compelled me to join in for the purposes of education and to refrain in order to leave analysis to those who had actually analyzed the director. Indeed, Adam's entire retrospective hinges on the question of Huston's status as either an auteur or a studio hand, someone who moved from project to project and was simply damn good at handling whatever landed on his desk. I cannot say whether Huston was an auteur, for I have seen few of the director's films, and the ones that I have were seen so long ago as to be a faint memory, only The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre sticking in my mind with clarity.

But to play along with the overall conceit of Adam's blogathon, and to give myself a springboard, I mulled over the overarching question almost immediately by considering the subject of his 1979 film, Wise Blood. Huston started in the industry as a screenwriter, yet a closer look at his credits reveals that many of his directed films were adaptations. He sorted out the twists and turns of The Maltese Falcon, Huston's first time behind the camera, into a sharply defined portrait that brought out the core of the Sam Spade character and then matched that character so perfectly to Humphrey Bogart that the actor built his career off the role. But that was only the start: Huston would direct numerous other adaptations, some he reworked himself, others refashioned by hired screenwriters. A number of these adaptations came from hit novels of fleeting popularity, but look at some of the authors Huston reworked: Dashiell Hammett. Melville. Joyce. Arthur Miller. Flannery O'Connor. These are not ordinary writers but some of the finest of the last two centuries.

I bring this up because there occasionally rises the question of whether an artist can stake claim to being an auteur by working with the products of auteurs in other media. As Hitchcock told Truffaut, he would never adapt a literary masterpiece because he could not improve upon a work that was already a magnum opus, and furthermore that all great works of art are great because they cannot be separated from their medium. Now, plenty of accepted auteurs, including Hitch, didn't write their own movies, but they also left identifiable stamps on their work and carried pet themes with them, turning the written words of others into finished products that looked and sounded like artistic trademarks. It has long been my belief that such an effect, reliant entirely upon the execution of the film, demonstrates that a great film can be made from a great book, provided the director brings his or her own creative stamp to the material.

Watching Wise Blood, Huston's adaptation of O'Connor's first novel, I knew immediately that, whether an auteur or not, the director clearly envisioned the source material in his own way. The Gothic surreality of O'Connor, incidentally my favorite writer, does not inform the aesthetic of Huston's film. Instead, he delivers her grotesquerie in stark, realistic terms, colored in dusty yellows and rusted reds. O'Connor's occurs in the beginning of the 1950s as everyone returns home from Korea and lingering assignments to new Army bases in Germany and Japan, but as can be plainly seen in her passage, the economic recovery wasn't as complete as simplified history would have us believe. Deep in the South, faded billboards and broken-down cars litter towns populated by impoverished zombies; you would think from looking at such sights that America had lost the war and the Axis had nuked us instead.

Huston, on the other hand, sets the story in contemporary late-'70s America, choosing to shoot the film in Macon, Ga., mere miles from O'Connor's hometown in Baldwin County yet completely overhauling the setting. The effect, however, remains much the same: the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America is if anything more intimidating and lost than in the economic boom of the '50s. O'Connor's novel questions the commercialization of religion, making the time of Huston's choosing, just before the Me Generation would vote for Reagan and spend the next decade in pure capitalist bliss, all the more appropriate for the subject material.

Following an opening set of black-and-white still photos of perfunctory evangelical messages pasted on signs across the South (including one on a Dairy Queen marquee), Huston begins the film proper with a shot of Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif), freshly returned from serving in the Army, standing in the middle of a barren street in a small town and hitches a ride with the first (and only) car that passes. Hazel remembers a dirt road in the place of this interstate highway they ride on, and the driver informs him that it's just been paved, and that it's been there just long enough for everyone in town to have driven away on it. Upon reaching his old family home, Motes finds it deserted and heads out back to see a headstone bearing the name of his grandfather, a tent revival preacher who raised him. Suddenly, Hazel's demeanor changes completely.

Rather than give himself to grief, Hazel looks liberated but also unhinged. He buys a train ticket to the nearest city, Taulkinham, and he tells several people, "I'm gonna do some things I ain't done before" with dark conviction. The first sign of what might be motivating Motes comes in the form of a flashback to his grandfather's fiery sermons, but his true state of mind starts to clarify when he buys a suit and hat that make him look like a preacher, only to viciously lash out at those who mistake him for one. "I ain't no preacher," he tells a cab driver with such force that you worry Hazel might strike the man, who unwisely continues to press the point until Dourif draws his mouth so tight that he's nearly hissing through closed lips that "I don't believe in anything."

To this the cabbie wryly responds, "That's the problem with preachers. They've all gotten too good to believe in anything." It's a sharp line, but it perfectly sets up the city into which Hazel wades. Populous but spare, Taulkinham is dotted with churches and those religious billboards, yet no one in town seems to care anything for Jesus. A blind man, Asa Hawks (Harry Dean Stanton), wades into a crowd gathered by a salesman and starts begging for "dollars for Jesus." But the salesman is simply enraged that someone else would try to steal his crowd, though the gathered people are just as uninterested in giving to charity as they are buying the vendor's unimpressive potato peeler. Surrounded by rusted entreaties to the Lord, no one in town actually cares enough about religion to contribute to a blind preacher. This apathy is recalled throughout the film, particularly in a scene where Hazel stops in the middle of the road to glare at a "Jesus saves!" message on a rock until traffic builds behind him. When a man gets out of his car to ask Motes to move, the young man can only seethe at the rock and tell the man of his religious hatred. The other driver doesn't react at all, only repeating his request. Even in the Bible Belt, where people always talk of their religion and constantly air grievances over breaches of their delicate sensibilities, no one seems to mind outright atheism.

Yet Jesus still holds a certain draw over people, and Motes cannot abide to see Him lingering in the minds of others as He does in the man's own. So, Hazel elects to form his own religion, the "Church Without Christ," one that promises not to burden mankind with ideas of original sin, thus circumventing the need for a Christ figure to save us. For Hazel, raised by his fire-and-brimstone grandfather to have such fear for original sin -- which the old man illustrated by hiring a stripper to play Eve -- that he often wet himself in sermons and placed rocks in his shoes as a means of constant punishment and atonement, Jesus has become representative of sin. If Jesus existed in order to die for sin, than a denial of his existence allows one to believe that humanity does not have to atone for damnation.


It sounds optimistic, but O'Connor, possibly the most openly religious great author of the modern age, would never allow such a sunny view of atheism to hold sway. In her novel, as it is in the film, Hazel's crusade against Christ brings him closer to Him than ever, albeit in the most horrific manner possible. For the author, atheism cannot work because Jesus acts as the balancing act for the world's evils; without him, mankind has no guide outside of the sins of the flesh, sins that Hazel ironically embraces for all of his preaching against their existence. He shacks up with a prostitute, a bloated mess whose seductive pull over Hazel and several others may be the result of her gluttony appealing to their sense of greed. Sabbath Lily, Asa's daughter, appears virtuous and plain, but this is just an act, and she reveals her true nature to Motes by writhing on the ground in unbound sexuality like an unsaved Mary Magdalene, or perhaps the snake in the Garden of Eden.

Yet where Hazel cannot see his own sin, those around him commit various transgressions knowingly. Asa only pretends that he cannot see, having promised to blind himself with lye to win converts and donations years earlier. Sabbath Lily uses her virginal look merely to heighten her sexual appeal. Even Enoch Emory, the young, lonely man who follows Hazel out of loneliness, has a darker side to him, pursuing a human connection to the point of desperation (though Huston replaces Enoch's creepy isolation with comic relief in the film's most glaring flaw). People pay as much attention to Hazel's sermons as they do of proper Christian services, but a preacher named Hoover Shoats (Ned Beatty) spots Motes railing from his car hood and decides to promote the man. Part of Hazel's new religion stresses that you don't need to donate money, and Shoats demonstrates why the young man feels so strongly about this when he jumps in front of Motes and starts working the crowd into giving him money. This preacher sees dollar signs, commercializing Hazel's deeply personal attempt to purge himself of his childhood trauma and tainting this new religion the same way that Shoats and people like him ruined Christianity.

Here the lines between O'Connor, the deeply committed Catholic, and Huston, an equally adamant atheist, meet. Huston attempts to define Motes through existential terms: first he dresses like a preacher, then adopts the role to fit the suit. Later, he begins to morph into a new Christ and changes accordingly. For O'Connor, atheism may be a flawed state of being, maybe even irreconcilable with the nature of metaphysics and the supernatural, but she paints men like Hawks and Shoats as no less vile than Hazel, and even a great deal worse. These snake oil salesmen make their living not by rejecting God but by redefining Him to sell a product. As Hoover says in the book regarding Motes' Church Without Christ, "It's based on your own personal interpitation [sic] of the Bible, friends. You can sit at home and interpit your own Bible however you feel in your heart it ought to be interpited." By denying God, Hazel at least has a clear idea of what the deity supposedly is, while Shoats encourages people to convert by sacrificing nothing and forcing God to bend to the rules set by each individual. (Could O'Connor's outlook in 1952 have been any more prescient to the age of the televangelist, of Bible outlets of various translations and of marketed salvation?) When Hazel attempts to cast off the man, Shoats rallies and tells him that he'll simply find someone to play Motes' prophet and run him out of "business." "What you need is a little competition."

Every O'Connor story contains a moment of "grace" -- in a loose, violent, Catholic sense -- and her fury toward Shoats is adroitly conveyed when she hinges Hazel's own moment, or one of them, on the murder of the man Shoats dresses up like Motes. A horrific play on the Cleansing of the Temple, Hazel may well be acting as God's agent in destroying the man, purging the world of a false prophet and setting the man on his path to becoming a perverted vision of Christ before Jesus, in Huston's own, direct terms, "wins."

Working in his more sober style, Huston cannot possibly see the event as graceful even by O'Connor's definition. The hired man, played by William Hickey, is a worn-down, penniless drunk who takes Shoats' money because he needs what he can get. When he speaks, he does so in a halting mumble, suggesting brain damage of some sort. When Hazel catches up to the man alone, however, he rams the impostor's car off the road, forces him to remove his preacher's clothes, and then runs the man over in quick succession. With only a minute or two of screentime, Hickey makes his character so sympathetic and ignorant that to see him murdered so brutally does not spark reminders of Christ's righteous purge but merely disgust. Huston commits to making Hazel into a Christ figure, but he gets the last laugh by portraying this turn as darker than anything in the man's previous character. After running him over, Motes gets out to insult the dying man, who begins to repent for his sins and even begs, "Jesus, help me" while looking right at Hazel, who is so consumed by hate that he leaves the man to die without another word. If Jesus must win, contrary to Huston's own wishes, then the director can at least make it a Pyrrhic victory.


Despite preaching for a new Jesus, Hazel had previously rejected replacements for Christ, going so far as to bash a mummified body Enoch stole to use as Motes' "mascot" against the wall and toss it out the window when Sabbath Lily brings it to him in swaddling clothes as if the Virgin Mary presenting her newborn son. Yet the sickening, chilling interlude with the impostor marks a change in Hazel that causes him to rapidly adjust to the role of the new Jesus he called for earlier. He actually blinds himself with lye, scaring off both Asa and Sabbath Lily by confronting them with true belief, returns to filling his shoes with rocks and screws and even wraps his torso in barbed wire. In a world where no one cares about Jesus, this upstart icon cannot even find someone who hates him enough to make him into a martyr, forcing him to do all the torture himself.

I realize that I have used all these words yet devoted none to Brad Dourif's performance. Dourif's presence alone challenges any preconceived notions of Huston's style. One of the embodiments of the old studio system, Huston would be one of the last people I would think to direct a film with Dourif in the lead. Dourif, who came to prominence as the stuttering, infantile yet intense Billy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, is one of the symbols of the more daring edge of New Hollywood, an actor so dedicated to his craft that he actually went back to acting school after being nominated for an Oscar. Where contemporaries like Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper portrayed intense madness on the screen with a subtle layer of drug-addled mania, Dourif communicated pure insanity, an instability that seemed to come directly from him (speaking of which, how wonderful was it to see Werner Herzog play Dourif against his clearest mainstream descendant, Nicolas Cage, in Bad Lieutenant?). Dourif admits that he was not Huston's first choice and only got the part because Tommy Lee Jones was not free, but he brings his frightful dedication fully to bear: his icy blue eyes can barely hold back decades of Hazel's pent-up rage and pain, his frame shaking just as violently as his terrified childhood self. Every inch of him bristles as if connected to a live wire, and the venom in his voice seeps into your pores. My only previous connection of Huston to the New Hollywood movement was his performance in Chinatown, but his appearance was itself a reference and -- when examined in the context of his character in the film -- a commentary on Old Hollywood style and the darker implications of Hays Code films now brought out for all to see.

Reportedly, he and Dourif clashed at several points during the production, from the actor's presumptuous pursuit of the lead role to his protests over a scene Huston loved that Dourif felt killed the flow (the scene was later cut). Yet they find a beautiful, unexpected harmony together, Huston's workmanlike direction gaining an edge from capturing Dourif's fury even as it places us just far enough from Hazel's thoughts to allow us to be repulsed by him just as Huston and O'Connor want us to be.


"Jesus is a fact!" screamed Asa to Hazel in his first encounter, a loopy, stereotypically fundamentalist proclamation of hollow piety, yet one O'Connor agrees with on some level. Even at the beginning, she sows the seeds for Motes' transformation, eying a woman on the train who looks too intently at the price tag on his suit and asking her, "I bet you think you've been redeemed, don't you?" like the vengeful Christ who haunts Hazel's thoughts. By the end of the film, Huston has built upon such moments to turn Hazel into a Jesus who seems to only bring pain to others, not deliver them from it, though even that is giving him too much credit. Only the spinster landlady takes any interest in the mutilated Hazel, and her romantic feelings for him are tinged by budding religious need; when she declares her love for the Stoic, disinterested man, she phrases her statement as if preparing for a baptism, saying, "I've got a place in my heart for you." Motes balks at the suggestion and leaves without a word, but his wounds get the best of him and he dies in a ditch a few days later. Police cart him back to the landlady, believing him unconscious and demanding that he pay her owed rent, and the film closes with her entreating Hazel once more, only for him to lie on the bed sprawled and immobile as she tries to stir him.

O'Connor plays this moment as Hazel's relief from torment, a reunion with the God he hated so long -- O'Connor always forced her characters to die to know full salvation, death of course being a necessity for the afterlife. Huston, however, hints that this may be the start of the new religion, with one person, the one person who loved him, no less, taking up the charge for Hazel's Church Without Christ and using him as the martyr necessary to win converts. Naturally, she will speak glowingly of her idealized vision of Hazel, and if word can take root, Hazel may morph through the generations into a vision of purity to guide humanity. Ergo, Huston darkly and ingeniously postulates that this is the story of Jesus himself. No other figure suffered so terribly to fulfill the strict wishes of his patriarch, and who's to say that Christ wasn't a madman who gripped passers-by and screamed against the current state of spiritual being, heeded by only a small group before his death. It took centuries for word-of-mouth to make Christianity such a force that persecution could not hold them back, and the ending of Huston's Wise Blood turns the entire story on its head: what if Hazel didn't refashion himself into a Christ figure so much as Jesus once grew out of a man like Hazel? Auteur or no, find me another man in his seventies who would make such a film for his 33rd feature.

Paris, Texas

The wilderness through which Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) wanders at the start of Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas is alternately beautiful and hauntingly empty. Like the siren's song, it is enticing and seductive but also foreboding and lethal. Sporting jeans and a baseball cap, traditional American wear, Travis could be any healthy American male. In the middle of a desert, however, shuffling aimlessly and aged prematurely by a wild beard and sunken eyes, this vision of the American male becomes something ominous: even in the endless expanse of the Americas, a man might be unable to find a home.

Severely dehydrated, Travis passes out in a gas station and is taken to a hospital. The doctor, a German, looks through the man's possessions and calls Travis' brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) to come get him. By the time Walt gets down to the US/Mexico border, though, Travis has set out again, and Walt must routinely find his brother on the side of a road, put him in his car, lose Travis when his back is turned, and so on. I'm so used to seeing Stockwell as the off-kilter, often evil character (Blue Velvet, Battlestar Galactica), that to watch him try to nurse this silent, traumatized man back to life was initially jarring.

Wenders' film unfolds with minimal plot. We learn that Travis has been gone four years, that he lost his wife and son, Hunter (Hunter Carson), though why we're not told -- Travis has been walking the desert so long that he's lost his memory. Walt and his wife, Anne (Aurore Clément), took Hunter in when Travis left as did the boy's mother, and the first half of the movie generally deals with Travis' slow re-acclamation with his brother and son. Hunter, only 3 when his father left, understandably has few memories of him, so father and son must essentially start over from scratch. Carson must play the typical child role, the one that positions the kid as both realistic brat and unconsciously profound savant, yet he does so with a greater balance than I've seen in 99% of all other child performers.

Wenders does not bring Travis and Hunter together with your typical exchange of child's outrage at abandonment and parent's tearful expressions of regret and pleas for forgiveness. Hunter is at the age where potentially life-altering occurrences can pass largely without comment (when I was 6-7, my mom remarried and I was adopted to change my surname, and I never thought anything of that decision until years later), so he just starts calling Travis "Dad" even as he continues to do the same to Walt. Travis doesn't waste time apologizing because he cannot remember what he did that requires an apology; instead, he attempts to reconnect with his son with as little turbulence as possible. In a dry moment of comedy, Travis heads to a clothing store to try to dress like a dad, and he models the sort of goofy get-ups that dads stereotypically wear in a manner not unlike all those montages of gorgeous teens searching for the perfect outfit.

Eventually, the two bond enough that Travis takes Hunter with him to Houston to search for his wife, Jane. Travis learned from Anne that Jane sends a check to Hunter once a month, so he and Hunter stake out her bank, eventually giving cautious chase to a red Chevy that Hunter believes contains a woman who looks the one in the photo Travis gave him. Wenders manages to eke an impressive amount of tension out of this scene, as Travis attempts to tail a car that may or may not contain his wife, especially after he catches up to the car only to find another, identical red Chevy next to it and must choose which one to follow.

I've long been a fan of Stanton; a prolific character actor, his seemingly effortless control of emotions through body language and his ability to fit in naturally in a working-class sci-fi nightmare (Alien) as well as he does in a ludicrous, flag-waving blockbuster (Red Dawn) adds an extra dimension to his projects. Paris, Texas contains what is perhaps his finest performance: Travis does not walk the desert because he's insane but because he has been destroyed by grief. Without saying a word for the first ten minutes or so, he manages to establish his character with the saddest eyes I have ever seen. Before Walt even asks the futile question, "What happened?" we know that this man's life has gone wholly and catastrophically wrong. When Travis heads to Hunter's school the first time to walk his son home, the look on his face when the boy rebuffs his dad to ride home with a friend -- more out of laziness than rejection -- is devastating.

But Stanton makes these earlier moments look like pantomime compared to what he pulls off when Travis is at last reunited with Jane, only to discover she works in an adult theater where men sit in a room with a two-way mirror watching women strip. Stanton, who had so few lines for the entire first half, engages in long conversations with Nastassja Kinski, who also puts in an incredible performance as the broken Jane. His first conversation is, understandably, awkward: stunned at the revelation, he can barely contain his tears as he talks to an unknowing Jane, though we sense even in this moment that he's planning something. Jane seems to catch on rather quickly, glancing at the mirror though she cannot see who's behind it. Travis returns, determined to reunite mother and son, and he delivers one of the finest monologues written for the screen: at last aware of what happened between them, Travis weaves a tale of youthful romance that turned into jealousy and drunken spite. With the marriage in shambles and Jane and Hunter already gone, Travis woke up one night to find their trailer on fire. He stumbled out and simply began to run away, never looking back. He concludes by telling Jane where her son is, and that the boy wants and needs her.

Paris, Texas draws a number of parallels to John Ford's seminal The Searchers, which is apparently the de facto choice for roundabout remakes (don't forget that Scorsese and Paul Schrader based Taxi Driver upon it as well). One could certainly compare Travis --also the name of Taxi Driver's protagonist -- to John Wayne's Ethan Edwards; at the end of the film, Travis stands on a roof watching the child reunited with his mother, and like Ethan he rides off into the distance. Where Ford's film positioned Ethan as your typical Western, indomitable hero, Wenders, working with Sam Shepard's no-nonsense script, suggests that Travis simply can't exist within a normal family.

One could certainly argue that Travis' interactions with the child and his evident love for his wife demonstrate a healthy potential for reconciliation, but Wenders uses the film to set up a sort of fable concerning the lengths one will go to for love. Having driven the three of them apart with his behavior four years earlier, he's simply too scared of doing it again, and so he sacrifices his chance to be with his wife and child to ensure their happiness together. It's an excruciating decision, though it's hard to imagine the character acting any other way: Ry Cooder's sparse acoustic guitar soundtrack is as spacious as the visuals, but it also doubles as a representation for the mixture of immeasurably deep agony and the belying sense of detachment within Travis. It meshes beautifully with the visuals (photographed by Robby Müller who, incidentally, would capture the same dichotomy of beauty and doom in the American West ten years later when he served as the cinematographer on Dead Man), which often cast close-ups of Stanton's masterpiece of a face against a massive background of wide open spaces, littered with rusting metal and fading billboards. It suggests, in a not altogether hopeless way, that some of us can never attain our vision of happiness, but perhaps we can find a certain solace in letting our dreams die.

Carpenter's Tools: Christine

The marriage of the horror kings of two media, film and literature, must have seemed a sure-fire hit back in 1983. Fresh off the disappointing receipts for The Thing, John Carpenter, perhaps looking to recover a bit, came aboard an adaptation of Stephen King's Christine. The Thing was the first Carpenter film that the director didn't at least co-write, but it at least felt like a Carpenter work. Christine, despite a few flashes of Carpenter's brilliance, looks and feels like the workman project that it is.

Christine sends Carpenter back to the suburbs after expanding his scope with Escape From New York and The Thing, which only adds to the promising quality of the film. As the film opens on a bookish nerd, Arnie (Keith Gordon), and his jock friend Dennis (John Stockwell), it's hard not to think excitedly of Halloween. Buddies since childhood, Dennis is the most popular (and also the nicest) stud in school, while Arnie is the tag-along who only holds any sort of conversation with Dennis.

Life changes for Arnie when, on the way home with Dennis, they stop at a junkyard and Arnie stumbles upon the decrepit shell of an old '58 Plymouth Fury. Inexplicably attached to the rusted shell, Arnie agrees to pay the creepy junkyard owner enough money to buy a new, working car, and proceeds to use his shop skills to fix the thing up. As repairing "Christine" consumes more and more of Arnie's time, he begins to change. He ditches the glasses, slicks back his hair and by all accounts becomes a bit of a jerk. Suddenly he's so confident he can even woo the new girl, Leigh (Alexandra Paul), the immediate crush object of every boy.

Meanwhile, the car takes on a certain sentience. Its radio, which plays only old '50s rock 'n' roll, plays at will, and it picks its songs to fit the mood. It displays an open jealousy toward Leigh, which even Leigh notices. When Dennis confronts the old man who sold Arnie the car, the vendor tells the kid how the car drove his brother insane. Some gangbangers take sledgehammers and knives to Christine as retribution for Arnie squealing on them earlier, and Christine responds by fixing itself and hunting down each of her attackers by "herself."

The problem here is that it takes some effort, not simply in direction but in design, to make an inanimate object vaguely anthropomorphic and especially scary. The smoke-belching semi in Spielberg's Duel is a good example. But Christine never really pops off the screen. There's nothing particularly creepy about the car itself, and it acts as little more than dead weight dragging down tension. Carpenter manages to make a few scenes work, though; Christine using the gang leader Buddy's car to trap people in a gas station and blow it up, then chasing Buddy down while on fire is just terrific.

But not even Carpenter can coax good performances out of this cast. Gordon does well enough as Arnie, but he never conveys obsession so much as oily snark. Paul and Stockwell turn every one of their scenes into soap-level melodrama, and let's not even start on William Ostrander's performance as Buddy. Even Shatner would have told him to be a little bit more subtle. Harry Dean Stanton livens up the proceedings as a cop investigating all of the mysterious deaths occurring in the small town, but he gets too little time to boost the cast.

On the plus side, Carpenter's score is one of his best, and if Christine wasn't such a tension zapper he could have used it to generate a nail-biter. Sadly, the weak script and nonthreatening villain, mixed with some cringe-worthy performances under the direction from someone who normally got the best out of his actors, sideline the director's work, which admittedly is far from his most effective. Christine is, to me, a metaphor for puberty, of the draw of your first car and of the ways that teens can go crazy just because they're teens. It's pretty thin, but it rarely appears on lists of King's best novels. It doesn't lend itself to a particularly chilling story though, and maybe that's why Christine feels more like a good TV movie and it's by far the weakest entry in his late '70s-late '80s gold run.

Carpenter's Tools: Escape From New York

I still can't believe how well I responded to Halloween, but for my money Carpenter hit his stride in the '80s. After the fun but staid Halloween follow-up The Fog, Carpenter broke out of the horror pigeonhole for a post-apocalyptic popcorn movie, one that married the talent for suspense he'd worked up over his previous two features with the bizarro shootout of Assault on Precinct 13. It's not exactly a Hawks-like genre leap, but it is one of the finest action flicks to come out of that testosterone- and cocaine-tinged haze of the '80s.

From the start, you can tell that Carpenter isn't taking himself too seriously. Set in the then-near future 1997, Escape From New York stinks to high heaven of '80s. Working, naturally, with a tight budget, Carpenter does not even attempt to make his New York look at all futuristic: the most discernible change in this city (which is actually bombed out and fetid) from its contemporary depictions in '70s cinema is the presence of large concrete walls around Manhattan.

In gloriously over-the-top fashion, Carpenter sets the film at the tail end of World War III; both America and the Soviets teeter on the edge after years of vicious warfare, and America must deal with massive civil turbulence. To deal with the massive spike in crime, the government coverts the wrecked New York into a giant prison: anyone sent there automatically receives life imprisonment, and various prisoner gangs have established controls over various sectors of the metropolis. On his way to a peace summit to end the war, the president (Donald Pleasence) ejects over New York in a pod when an American insurgent group hijacks Air Force One.

The government cannot move into the city without inadvertently killing the president, so police commissioner Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) deputizes Snake Plissken, an infamous ex-special forces operative now on his way to New York. Hauk instructs the laconic, venomous prisoner to find and extract the president before the planned summit meets. If he succeeds, he wins a pardon; if he fails to protect the president or to get him out before the summit, tiny charges injected into his carotid arteries will explode.

Had nothing else gone right in Escape From New York, the casting would likely have ensured it a long shelf life. Van Cleef excels in the role Pleasence played in Halloween, that of the primary source of exposition. His deep-voiced growl and stoicism give an air of credence to what easily could have been absurd lines. Pleasence himself doesn't have much to do, but in his one or two scenes of any substantive dialogue he shapes his terrified president into an uncaring, selfish man who seems so surprised by the horrors of New York likely because he never wasted his time learning the conditions of the prison. Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton and Adrienne Barbeau all play characters wacky enough to live in this strange world, but they all just manage to keep their feet on the ground while their heads move through the clouds.

Above all else, though, stands one man: Kurt Russell. Then a fading star who'd known success throughout the '70s as one of Disney's more bankable young talents, Russell met Carpenter through the made-for-television film Elvis (which I shall review along with Someone's Watching Me! when I can get my hands on them). Carpenter went to bat for Russell, a has-been up against studio recommendations such as Charles Bronson or Tommy Lee Jones, and he cemented the B-movie equivalent of the Scorsese-De Niro match-up (or perhaps one of them alongside the Raimi-Campbell pairing). Russell crafts an iconic anti-hero, one who rasps his lines because he can't stand to speak to anyone: nearly all of his lines contain some angry dismissal of the person speaking to him. Russell plays the part to perfection, making Snake sufficiently intimidating and believably unstoppable while constantly placing his tongue firmly in cheek. The Russell-Carpenter pairing gave way to some shamelessly campy fare, but it worked because Russell knew how to toe the line like a master.

But the world Carpenter constructs around Russell and the other actors is equally captivating. Comparisons between New York and jungles have existed for decades, but Carpenter's dystopian iteration not only feels like one but looks the part. The various gangs pitted against Snake recall that familiar Carpenter trope, the one where the enemies of the film possess vaguely supernatural qualities. The residents of the prison have lived there so long that some devised means of generating power, re-fitting cars, even creating their own weapons, and each carry certain traits. The most memorable, of course, are the subway-dwelling "Crazies," zombie-like madmen who burst out of the ground and slice their way through all in their path.

Snake's adventures through this hell reflect both Carpenter's firm grasp on tension as well as his surprising gift for comedy: in the scene that introduces Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine's goofy grin is already enough to get you smiling), he cuts to show what's entertaining our friendly driver so: a crude musical theater performed by male inmates in drag. As Snake moves into the backrooms of the theater tracking the president's beacon, the scene changes to one of mounting unease and horror, only to end with another comic note. Snake must eventually face the "Duke" of New York (Isaac Hayes), only for him to pull up in a Cadillac with actual chandeliers as hood ornaments. It's just a fun gag, but I'd like to think that Carpenter was poking fun at the ostentatious glamor of late-'70s/early-'80s life, and I've never not laughed when the Duke pulls up in that ridiculous vehicle.

Carpenter uses tracking shots far more than in his previous efforts, presumably because a bigger budget ($6 million must have seemed a fortune to the low-budget auteur who made the most successful independent movie in history three years earlier) allowed him the use of a Steadicam. The moving shots contain all of the composition and unsettling quality of his prolonged static shots, and they add a level of thrill that his previous action flick, Assault on Precinct 13, never had.

Carpenter actually wrote the script for Escape From New York in 1976. Its pitch-black, violent take on post-Nixon distrust, however, didn't sell with the studios (and these are the people who financed Taxi Driver, for God's sake), especially when the only film he had under his belt was Dark Star. Perhaps the weirdness of the script threw the executives, as the political undertones of the film are not nearly as pronounced as countless films of the mid-'70s. Its ending does carry a tinge of anarchy, but one I find far funnier than it is political. I still think it's interesting that Carpenter wrote it (along with Nick Castle, who would play Michael Myers in Halloween) in 1976, as I can now understand why Escape feels so much like a bridge between his first three features -- it's got the strange, comic sci-fi of Dark Star, the pulse-pounding action of Assault and the heart-stopping suspense of Halloween.

I really don't know what to say about Escape From New York: a threadbare plot, goofy characters, absurd black comedy and bizarre science fiction elements could distract a casual moviegoer separately, and when Carpenter throws them all together it's a wonder he didn't alienate everyone. But, for me, it's a classic, one that contains all the film quotations you'd expect from a film school student (everyone telling Snake, "I heard you were dead" is a straight lift from the John Wayne vehicle Big Jake) as well as the formalist composition. The director gets marvelous performances from his actors because he gets all of them on the same page before shooting: everyone hams it up, but in a perversely plausible manner. The film also boasts Carpenter's finest score, tense but often playful without losing its edge moving between the two moods, and his finest direction.

Why would anyone attempt to remake this? I can sort of understand the desire to go back to Assault on Precinct 13 or The Fog (Carpenter himself helped the latter get off the ground, as he was dissatisfied with the low production values of the original). Those films are dated, if still readily enjoyable, and in the case of Assault it's hard to cite unoriginality when Carpenter so heavily mined Rio Bravo in the first place. I can even understand Rob Zombie's Halloween, as Carpenter's version is such a landmark that it's only natural that some young pup would put his spin on it. (And Zombie's Halloween is such an interesting take on a psycho that it likely would have been a great modern horror film if he didn't have to eventually get to the plot points of the original). Escape From New York, on the other hand, really hasn't dated, despite its '97 setting and its depiction of a hellish future as only slightly different aesthetically than the present. Its madcap combination of various moods and genres, combined with its crazy characters, do not present an easy opportunity for franchising -- case in point, watch the critically panned, commercial bomb Escape From L.A. (which I haven't seen and am currently dreading). I cannot pretend to be unbiased though; Escape From New York made me a John Carpenter fan, and I've yet to tire revisiting it nearly a dozen viewings later.