Out of the Darkened Corners of the Vault

Escape from New York (1981, USA, John Carpenter) AKA Blade Gunner

A favourite of every auterist (at one time or another he has written, directed, scored, acted in and even edited his own work) and horror film lover in the 70s and 80s, John Carpenter has fallen on hard times of late, failing to produce films that enjoy either popular or critical success. Escape from New York was produced during a particularly fecund period in Carpenter’s filmography, a ten year period that also included some of his finest work like Assault on Precinct 13, Hallowe’en, The Thing, Starman, Christine and Big Trouble in Little China. The sci-fi futurism of Escape helps to distinguish it some from these other films. Carpenter’s affinity for gaudy synth-based scores is a real asset here, helping establish exactly the right tone of killer kitsch. The film’s dark and seedy manliness oozes out of every frame’s pore, and Kurt Russell’s funny yet eerie Elvis-meets-The Duke impersonation in the character of Snake Plissken (giving the constant reprise of characters intoning "I though you were dead" a comic and gothic quality) is a hoot. As an anticipatory comment on the decadence and violence of the Reagan era, (Carpenter has claimed the film is his comment on Reagan’s ascent to power during the Iran hostage-taking crisis) the film is a little vague (really, there isn’t much to specifically identify this dystopian vision of a Reagan occupied White House), but Carpenter’s innate cynicism certainly reflects the period well, and some of his film’s premises, while excessive (crime rises 400% and Manhattan island is transformed into a prison that operates like a massive, open human sewer) seem nonetheless in retrospect to have anticipated the negative effects of Reagan’s conservative social program-slashing policies awfully well. As is often the case with Carpenter, it is important to recognize that his film works best when walking a tightrope between brutality and camp. Vicious scenes are often juxtaposed with comic sequences in a tap dance of contrasting tones that is both bizarre and grandly entertaining in the finest tradition of the golden age of b-movies. Some of Carpenter’s entropic futuristic vision of an urban landscape in rapid deterioration may have influence Ridley Scott’s stellar designs for Blade Runner, but while Scott’s film is essentially a film noir, and a damned fine one, Carpenter’s is a somewhat cheezy futuristic science fiction tale that doubles as a cautionary critique of the current social order.

Score: 79/100



Hope Springs (2003, USA, Mark Herman) AKA Dreadfully Yours

Egads, is this ever a dreadful piece of dreck. While Colin Firth may have been intrigued at the prospects of playing a love-sick fish out of water opposite a couple of lovely actresses (Heather Graham, hopelessly inept here, Minnie Driver, dreadfully underemployed), I cannot imagine that any thinking person would have found this script even momentarily palatable. It is hard to believe that this film arose out of the imagination of Mark Herman, the same fella who did such a good job of capturing the mood of Thatcher-era England in decline in Brassed Off! but alas, this turns out to be true. Even more baffling, he is adapting a novel by Charles Webb, the same fella who wrote The Graduate, which may tell you just how good a job Mike Nichols and Buck Henry et. al. did on that particular film. Colin Firth plays an artist who flies across the Atlantic Ocean to escape from a ruinous relationship, settling on the town of Hope because he liked the name. He meets the quirky health care-giver Mandy (Heather Graham), and her healing hands, among other things, help him recover from his heartbreak. Until the object of his English desire, Vera (Minnie Driver) arrives to win him back. This is all terribly familiar, with time-tested conventional romantic comedy plotting, and Firth, who is one of the best of the rom com actors out there, eventually crashes into the film’s shortcomings and finally resorts to unconvincing slapstick comedy when his character’s actions no longer make a whit of sense. Meanwhile, Graham, who—how shall we say this kindly?--is not graced with the most wide-ranging of thespian skills, is left totally alone to fend off the script’s tedious characterization of Mandy as a air-headed, impulsive flake. Only Driver, whose late arrival on the scene temporarily invigorates the film’s lacklustre pacing, manages to survive the script’s banality with some measure of self-respect. Sadly, she comes too late, stays only momentarily and leaves too soon. If only the same could be said of this movie.

Score: 45/100

Digging Even Deeper into the Vault


Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (2001, Japan, Shohei Imamura) AKA Golden Showers Fill My Eyes

A delightfully warm, life-embracing and most whimsical of films by master filmmaker Shohei Imamura . Imamura’s attraction to life’s fringe-dwellers is again on evidence, as his central characters are Yosuke (Koji Yakusho is here to Imamura what the puppy-eyed Tony Leung is to Wong Kar-Wai, a mournful and yearning template of angst), a sad-eyed midlife crisis waiting to happen, and Saeko (the fearless Misa Shimizu), the object of his desire a font of joy with a most peculiar way of expressing her pleasure. The transformative power of love and sex anchor the film’s embrace of the female orgasm as a life-affirming force of nature that points the way out of the deadening rigors of conventional middle-class life. Imamura’s in a playful mood here, as topics like xenophobia and racism which were once open wounds in his films, are transformed into something sweet and fragile. His concern for life’s outcasts is ever-present, and his embrace of these characters’ peculiar habits, predilections and appetites is his delicious and salacious way of celebrating their sexuality and individuality.

Score: 82/100



The Damned (1969, Italy, Luchino Visconti) AKA Sympathy for the Devil

One of the harshest critics of Communist regimes was the utopian socialist Orwell, who disguised his complaints behind the thin veil of fiction in Animal Farm. So too did the openly communist Visconti use his art in 1968 to deliver one of the left’s angriest anti-Soviet post-Czechoslovakian invasion judgements. Unfortunately, Visconti’s bilious assault lacks the restraint and sometimes overflows with self-indulgence and didacticism, weakening an otherwise and often potent critique. Yet again dealing with a milieu (wealthy aristocratics) that he knows well, Vicsconti’s study of a family of industrialists in 1930s Germany shows us how effortlessly one will abandon beliefs and principles if the situation is right, and once gone, these things cannot be resurrected. The descent of this group of German nobles into an incestuous, pedophilic lifestyle is meant allegorically, and there is something more than a little overripe about Visconti’s lurid gaze during these scenes that launches the film dangerously close to camp. Ms. Thulin is great as the Machiavellian Lady Macbeth-like pupper master, and often saves the movie from its own depravity and excess. On the other hand, Dirk Bogarde’s sweaty and hammy overacting is jarring throughout, particularly given that he is usually paired on screen with the film’s best actor. Visconti’s now-dated cinematic techniques, particularly his incessant reliance of the rapid zoom-ins, used (I imagine) to emphasize the growing sense of claustrophobia in Nazi Germany, is distracting, while his strange decision to revel in the Oedipal aspect of the tale threatens to boil everything down to a Freudian farce. When focused--which is, unfortunatetly, not quite enough--on how the disintegration of one influential and privileged family can mirror and act as harbinger for the collapse of an entire society, the film displays power and insight.

Score: 68/100