A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, April 18, 2024

Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter, 1976)

Austin Stoker, Laurie Zimmer, and Darwin Joston in Assault on Precinct 13

Cast: Austin Stoker, Darwin Joston, Laurie Zimmer, Martin West, Tony Burton, Charles Cyphers, Nancy Kyes, Peter Bruni, John J. Fox, Marc Ross, Alan Koss, Henry Brandon, Kim Richards. Screenplay: John Carpenter. Cinematography: Douglas Knapp. Art direction: Tommy Lee Wallace. Film editing: John Carpenter. Music: John Carpenter. 

Jean-François Richet's 2005 remake of Assault on Precinct 13 makes a lot more narrative sense and has a much better cast (Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, etc.), but it feels routine in comparison with the laconic, low budget original, which John Carpenter admitted was a kind of mashup of Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959) and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). Which only goes to show that when it comes to thrillers, coherence and slick production values are not the top priorities. Setting the hook is what matters, and Carpenter's movie does that early with a shocker of a scene that almost earned the film an X rating -- one of the rare instances when the ratings board was upset by violence rather than sex. In this case, the film's rough edges and unknown actors somehow add a neo-realist touch to a movie in which the bad guys might as well be zombies or space aliens for all we get to know about them. 

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