Escape From New York (John Carpenter, 1981)

Kurt Russell in Escape From New York

Cast: Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasance, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton, Adrienne Barbeau, Tom Atkins, Charles Cyphers, Season Hubley. Screenplay: John Carpenter, Nick Castle. Cinematography: Dean Cundey. Production design: Joe Alves. Film editing: Todd C. Ramsay. Music: John Carpenter, Alan Howarth.

John Carpenter is a curious kind of auteur, best known for horror flicks and action thrillers that often feature his name before the title, as in "John Carpenter's Escape From New York." I'm not much of a fan of his work, except for his wonderful Starman (1984), which demonstrated once again what a fine actor Jeff Bridges is. Escape From New York stars Kurt Russell, making a determined attempt to escape from Walt Disney, who established him as an all-American boy type in movies and on TV in the 1960s. Here he goes to the other extreme as Snake Plissken, a once-heroic soldier turned criminal. The premise of the film is that crime in America has grown so bad that in 1988 the entire island of Manhattan was walled in as a maximum security prison -- a reflection of the bad rep that New York City got during the 1970s. In 1997, when the film takes place, Snake is arrested and sent to this prison, but at the same time Air Force One has been hijacked and though the president (Donald Pleasance? How did that happen?) bailed out in an escape pod as the plane crashed into the Manhattan prison, he has disappeared. Because of Snake's earlier exploits, he is given a chance to free himself by rescuing the president, but he's implanted with a device that will kill him if he doesn't succeed in the next 24 hours. So he pilots a glider to the top of one of the World Trade Center towers and descends into the anarchy and nightmare that the inmates have made of the city. It's all pretty entertaining slam-bang stuff, with a colorful cast: Lee Van Cleef as a tough cop, Ernest Borgnine as a cabbie who drives a beat-up taxi through what's left of the mean streets of the city-prison, Harry Dean Stanton as an inmate who lives in the public library, Isaac Hayes as the boss of the prison inmates, and Adrienne Barbeau as his mistress. There's a tight-budgeted look to the film, especially when viewed today after the CGI revolution, but it works.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (James Gunn, 2017)

Peter Quill / Star-lord: Chris Pratt
Gamora: Zoe Saldana
Drax: Dave Bautista
Baby Groot (voice): Vin Diesel
Rocket (voice): Bradley Cooper
Ego: Kurt Russell
Yondu: Michael Rooker
Nebula: Karen Gillan
Mantis: Pom Klementieff
Stakar Ogord: Sylvester Stallone
Ayesha: Elizabeth Debicki
Taserface: Chris Sullivan
Kraglin: Sean Gunn

Director: James Gunn
Screenplay: James Gunn
Cinematography: Henry Braham
Production design: Scott Chambliss
Film editing: Fred Raskin, Craig Wood
Music: Tyler Bates

What can I say? There's lots of swooping and zooming and crashing, some spectacularly weird computerized sets and characters, cameos by David Hasselhoff and Howard the Duck (voiced by Seth Green), some good jokes and some duds, some cheeky music cues (e.g., George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord"), Chris Pratt takes his shirt off, and everything moves along efficiently to set up the next sequel. The movie doesn't dally too long on its Oedipal subplot -- Peter kills his father because he (the father) killed his (Peter's) mother. There were times, as when the only characters on screen are CGI ones like Rocket and Groot, when I wondered if a new Oscar category for semi-animated film shouldn't be considered. So I had as much fun as the latent 14-year-old boy in me is capable of having. I actually enjoyed Vol. 2 more than the first film in the series (James Gunn, 2014) because I didn't have to sit through exposition about who and what these characters are and could get right to the swooping and zooming and crashing.

The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)

Keith David, Richard Dysart, T.K. Carter, Richard Masur, Donald Moffat, and Kurt Russell in The Thing

MacReady: Kurt Russell
Dr. Blair: Wilford Brimley
Nauls: T.K. Carter
Palmer: David Clennon
Childs: Keith David
Dr. Copper: Richard Dysart
Vance Norris: Charles Hallahan
George Bennings: Peter Maloney
Clark: Richard Masur
Garry: Donald Moffat
Fuchs: Joel Polis
Windows: Thomas G. Waites

Director: John Carpenter
Screenplay: Bill Lancaster
Based on a story by John W. Campbell Jr.
Cinematography: Dean Cundey
Production design: John J. Lloyd
Creature design: Rob Bottin
Music: Ennio Morricone

John Carpenter's The Thing is one of those movies that have undergone radical re-evaluation over the years since it was released to mediocre box office and mostly scathing reviews. In the New York Times, for example, Vincent Canby panned it as "foolish, depressing, overproduced" and "instant junk." Today, however, it's regarded as a classic of the horror sci-fi genre and has an 83% "fresh" ranking on Rotten Tomatoes, with a whopping 92% audience score. My own evaluation would fall somewhere in between: The Thing does what it sets out to, i.e. scare us, with efficiency, but unlike the films to which it is often compared -- the Howard Hawks-produced The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951), which was based on the same short story, and the more recent predecessor in the genre, Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) -- it lacks heart. The Thing doesn't give us characters to root for. When successive members of its all-male cast are gobbled up by the monster, we don't feel any sense of loss -- except perhaps for the dogs, there's no one we feel a connection with. Kurt Russell is a very good action hero, but Bill Lancaster's script gives him no wit, no memorable lines other than shouting, "Yeah, fuck you, too!" at the monster when it roars at him. The real star of the film is Rob Bottin's creature, all gooshy innards, tentacles, and crablike legs. But once the monster gets going, there's no let-up. In Alien, for example, Ridley Scott very smartly created pauses in the action to lull us into complacency before pulling another shocker. Carpenter, however, gives us no time to breathe, and the piling-on of attacks becomes tiresome. Ennio Morricone's score is skillfully laid on, but unless you're in the mood for a freakout, The Thing offers few other lasting rewards.

The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino, 2015)

The title, The Hateful Eight, is pretty clearly an homage of sorts to such films as The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960), The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967), and even The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969).  And it's well to remember how all of those films were once criticized for excessive violence and The Wild Bunch was once threatened with an NC-17 rating. None of them contained anything like the violence of The Hateful Eight, which is visited on all of the characters, but most memorably on the one woman among the eight: Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who is subjected to torrents of blood, vomit, and blown-out brains along with repeated blows to the face and a final drawn-out hanging. Writer-director Quentin Tarantino and his defenders excuse the excess of violence by arguing that his cinematic violence is a metaphor for racial and sexual violence in America and an expression of the revenge mentality that undermines the due administration of justice. As Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth) argues in the film, "dispassion is the very essence of justice. For justice delivered without dispassion is always in danger of not being justice." That Mobray is using this argument to forestall any actual dispassionate justice meted out to him only reinforces its irony -- a kind of postmodern irony that some will argue tends to lead us into spirals of self-defeat. That's why Tarantino's films often feel so nihilistic, despite their wit and technical prowess. At more than three hours, The Hateful Eight is about an hour too long, which I think is a fatal flaw, considering that the suspense lags as the slow revelation of its plot twists emerges. The wait for the eruptions of violence that we know are coming produces a kind of prurience, but there is no cathartic release when they arrive. The movie is well-acted by Leigh, Roth, Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Walton Goggins, Demián Bichir, Bruce Dern, and Michael Madsen as the eight, and Channing Tatum gives a remarkable performance in his late surprise appearance. The music by Ennio Morricone won a well-deserved, long overdue Oscar, and the cinematography by Robert Richardson makes the most of the shift from spectacular mountain scenery to the claustrophobic setting of the major part of the film. But Tarantino has settled into predictability, and I want him to show us something new.