Random Thoughts

What a pretty baby!

What is friend?

What happened! They’re both in focus at the same time!!!

And now the backgrounds are in focus at the same time as the people!? WHAAA. Is this even a Carpenter movie!?

John Carpenter. Starman. 1984.

By this time in his career, Carpenter had abandoned everybody from his stable of production people and actors from his pre-studio days, apparently? At least I don’t recognise anybody from the screen or the cast list… (But that may be the beer writing…)

In any case, this is his biggest budget yet. Kinda puzzling after The Thing and Christine not exactly putting the box office on fire.

And it’s a puzzling movie. It’s not immediately obvious what kind of film this is going to be, which is the question you ask of genre film directors. Another The Man Who Fell To Earth? E.T. remade with Jeff Bridges as the alien? Alien Encounters without the mashed potatoes? The Day the Earth Stood Still with a less shiny klaatu? What?

It’s a comedy about Jeff Bridges learning human behaviour and languages, and the humour is just what you’d expect: Cringe-worthy. These things are never funny, no matter how many times it’s been attempted.

So it’s another semi-flop, commercially and critically. But not sufficiently to bar Carpenter from getting money to do another comedy.

This post is part of the A Carpenter Winter series.

Uh-oh.

Nasty boys.

You can tell that he’s evil by his leather vest.

John Carpenter. Christine. 1983.

The only thing I remember about this film is 1) I thought it was a bit meh, and 2) I had several friends that thought this was the greatest film ever. Or something.

I’m excited to determine who was right.

The first thing I notice is how grainy the film is. Carpenter likes to make his films look luxe, so that’s odd. Was it shot on the same experimental film stock as Aliens? Did something go wrong during the bluray transfer?

And… My friends were right! This film is a hoot! I love the sensitive jock/jerky nerd protagonist pair. It’s a strange kind of power fantasy, though: The jerky nerd (who I think we’re supposed to sympathise with, but who I loathed from the first frame) goes through a journey where he becomes kick-ass (and evil)… Are nerds supposed to go “yeah! so cool! he was a nerd but now he’s kick-ass! whoo!”? We’re cheering when Christine is killing those nasty boys, aren’t we?

So it’s a nerd service film, and kinda disgusting that way.

But it’s still fun, although that rant near the end is snoresville. Probably Carpenter’s most accomplished film so far, helped a lot by finally getting a cinematographer that’s not useless. He’s still totally hung up on the shallow depth of field thing, though. Probably fails the Bechdel test.

This post is part of the A Carpenter Winter series.

John Carpenter. The Thing. 1982.

Carpenter’s first major studio movie. It’s very different from all his preceding films: Instead of a cheery amateurishness, we’re into Standard 80s Sci-Fi territory.

“Competent” US actors that emote in the normal American mainstream film way, and a “professional” film score that tells us how to feel at any given second.

It looks great on bluray, though.

…

Oh, I’m watching the 2011 prequel, not the 1982 Carpenter film!

*puts the right film on*

Ahem.

This is Carpenter’s first major studio movie, but it doesn’t really look that different from his previous films. You’ve got more dolly/steadycam shots, better sets, more expensive lenses, and they’ve hired Ennio Morricone to do the soundtrack, but it’s definitely a Carpenter film.

THIS TIME.

I like the monster designs. Very disgusting. Nice bluray transfer. But… It’s not really that scary or exciting. And all the drama from everybody melting down in the face of crisis isn’t very interesting.

Let me summarise the plot through monologue: “There’s a thing here that kills people and takes over their bodies! Let’s split up! This looks like a shortcut! Aieee!”

This post is part of the A Carpenter Winter series.

That’s pretty much how cell phones looked in 1997.

John Carpenter. Escape from New York. 1981.

It’s fun watching these Carpenter films chronologically. You see how Carpenter’s cast of regulars develop. Adrienne Barbeau (who first popped up in that TV horror film) reappears, and the star is, of course, Elvis.

This is another one of those films where I’ve heard snippets of the dialogue so many times through samples on various songs, like Colourbox’ Baby I Love You So.

Anyway, for the first time Carpenter has something resembling a real budget ($6M), and it really shows. Everything looks so cool, and he’s got better special effects, set designers and focus pullers.

The premise of this film is so cool (in the “dude!” “sweet!” meaning of the word) that if this had been a modern movie, it would have been a three hour epic. Instead we’re introduced to the premise at the 25 minute mark, and the film is over in an hour fourty.

It’s a film any 14-year-old boy, of any age and gender, will find entertaining.

This post is part of the A Carpenter Winter series.

That looks so much like a real house and where you would park your car!

John Carpenter. The Fog. 1980.

The explanation for the multiple beers (or “beers”): I’ve been having this weird problem the last few weeks with some ripped Blurays. Most of them play just fine, but a handful have sound that’s 10% faster than the video. Which, as you can imagine, is rather … not very good.

But! After a couple of beers I found out that the problem was the options I’m using for mplayer: “-hardframedrop -nocorrect-pts”. I think I added those for when playing over wifi, where you want the video to really catch up to the audio when you get a network problem.

Apparently that has a very weird interaction with these Bluray rips, making the audio 10% faster than the video.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway! The film! I didn’t remember that Jamie Lee Curtis and Adrienne Barbeau was in this one. Which is an old-fashioned ghost tale. Which suits me just fine.

And it’s… OK. It’s got some good jump scares, but jump scares are so easy. It periodically loses any semblance of tension, but then returns to being entertaining.

The cinematography is as pedestrian as ever. I was thinking “without any distinguishing qualities”, but that’s not quite true: Carpenter absolutely loves a shallow depth of field (i.e., only of person is in focus at a time) and uses it incessantly.

This post is part of the A Carpenter Winter series.