While struggling to write a review of a horror movie on a painfully rare sunny day in San Francisco, I was delighted to stumble on this love note to director/writer/composer John Carpenter from Benjamin Strong for the Moving Image Source four day tribute to the B-movie auteur:
Halloween (1978), the indie $400,000 ur-slasher classic that
established Carpenter in Hollywood (and launched Jamie Lee Curtis’s
stint as a virginal scream queen) was so coolly efficient in per capita
goose bump production—it also grossed $47 million stateside—that even
the disapproving Pauline Kael had to admit that “maybe when a horror
film is stripped of everything but nightmarish dumb scariness and
sudden shocks it satisfies part of the audience in a more basic,
childish way than sophisticated horror pictures do.”
Her sneering aside, Kael’s “stripped” and “basic” are apt for Carpenter’s minimalist, unapologetically pop style. His movies almost always run between 90 and 100 minutes. They are heavy on atmosphere, but the spaces depicted are typically empty (Carpenter’s murky, underfurnished sets are the prototypes for Inland Empire’s interiors). Even the synthesizer scores, many of them written and performed by the director himself, are spartan. And yet for all their apparent simplicity and directness, the genre pictures Carpenter made during the 1980s are among the most radical readings we have of morning in America, as evidenced by BAMcinématek’s four-picture retrospective.
Her sneering aside, Kael’s “stripped” and “basic” are apt for Carpenter’s minimalist, unapologetically pop style. His movies almost always run between 90 and 100 minutes. They are heavy on atmosphere, but the spaces depicted are typically empty (Carpenter’s murky, underfurnished sets are the prototypes for Inland Empire’s interiors). Even the synthesizer scores, many of them written and performed by the director himself, are spartan. And yet for all their apparent simplicity and directness, the genre pictures Carpenter made during the 1980s are among the most radical readings we have of morning in America, as evidenced by BAMcinématek’s four-picture retrospective.
Though I was a little disappointed to see Carpenter's amazing Assault on Precinct 13 only mentioned in the context of Jean-François Richet's unfortunate 2005 re-make, it's great to see a journeyman film-maker whose work can be read as both a "smuggling" (as prescribed by Martin Scorsese) and wildly entertaining be celebrated in the last few weeks of summer.
nice :)
Posted by: openmind | September 24, 2008 at 06:04 PM
That was quite nice actually, good writing. :)
Posted by: bildekor | September 07, 2008 at 01:17 PM