John Carpenter

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Maltic
Joined: Sat Oct 10, 2020 1:36 am

Re: John Carpenter

#51 Post by Maltic » Fri Jun 24, 2022 8:08 am

Image
the title effects sequence was made using an animation cell with "The Thing" written on it placed behind a smoke filled fish tank which was then covered with a plastic garbage bag. The burning effect was created once the bag ignited.
Same in The Thing from Another World

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colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: John Carpenter

#52 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Jun 25, 2022 7:14 am

Maltic wrote:
Fri Jun 24, 2022 7:57 am
B) is undoubtedly true. What's weird is, the Fangoria crowd seem to have disliked it too.

Incredibly, 1982 was also the summer of Poltergeist, TRON, Blade Runner, Rocky III, The Wrath of Khan, Friday the 13th pt III, Mad Max 2, The Secret of Nimh, Conan the Barbarian, Firefox, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Also the same year as Paul Schrader's remake of Cat People.

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The Curious Sofa
Joined: Fri Sep 13, 2019 6:18 am

Re: John Carpenter

#53 Post by The Curious Sofa » Sat Jun 25, 2022 9:15 am

I saw The Thing when it came out and will out myself as someone for whom it took me a while to come round to it. The first time I saw it, I was genuinely disappointed and I had been a huge Carpenter fan till then, watching his films as the came out from Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13 onwards (Assault on Precinct 13 only got a release in Germany after the success of Halloween)

Alien was my favourite movie at the time and The Thing struck me as a lesser version of "a bunch of people stuck in a hostile place with a homicidal alien". What I liked the least about it was its minimalist characterisation, I found the characters pretty much interchangeable. While Alien had a groundbreaking female heroine, MacReady was too much of the expected stock character for that type of thing. Kurt Russel carried over his stoic Clint Eastwood impersonation from Escape From New York and I didn't feel scared or really anything for him, while Ripley managed to keep her wits together despite being obviously terrified. Her fear translated to me. The effects of The Thing were the most ambitious use of animatronics and bladder effects, which were the big innovation in fx back then (The Howling and American Werewolf paved the way) but out in the bright lights, they looked like effects, while the covert way in which the creature Alien was shot, I was never sure what I was looking at and that played on my imagination in a way the slightly latexy effects of The Thing didn't.

Movies started to change though and by the mid/late 80s the next itineration of the concept was Predator and we got wisecracks on steroids at the centre of the film and an alien with dreadlocks. In retrospect The Thing's pared down minimalism started to look good. Characters weren't required to be relatable and human anymore, they became aspirational figures whose main function was to be cool.

Now I've watched The Thing many times and I love it for its chilly atmosphere, sense of paranoia, cinematography (Dean Cundey's best work), the brooding score and it's true and the effects have a physicality to them so much of modern CGI lacks. It's still not quite up there with Alien for me but I now also think its Carpenter's last true masterpiece.

A lot of how one feels about films has to do with discovering them as they were released or watching them many years later. Maybe I would have liked The Thing far better, had I discovered it before Alien. Having fallen in love with film in the 70s and its more naturalistic approach to characterisation, I couldn't get with the broader characterisations of 80s/90s action cinema, which many of my slightly younger friends are nostalgic about. In that regard, The Thing feels like a transitional film, not that the characters are broad but MacReady definitely is meant to be cool.

Incidentally I watched Big Trouble in Little China for the first time in its entirety a week ago and feel vindicated for having avoided it all these decades. It struck me as horribly misconceived and there was nothing I liked about it, even Carpenter's score for this was bad.

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DarkImbecile
Ask me about my visible cat breasts
Joined: Mon Dec 09, 2013 6:24 pm
Location: Albuquerque, NM

Re: John Carpenter

#54 Post by DarkImbecile » Sun Aug 28, 2022 10:21 am


beamish14
Joined: Fri May 18, 2018 3:07 pm

Re: John Carpenter

#55 Post by beamish14 » Sun Aug 28, 2022 12:06 pm


It’s interesting that he doesn’t have much to say about USC when he co-wrote the only student film from the school to ever win an Oscar

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therewillbeblus
Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: John Carpenter

#56 Post by therewillbeblus » Fri Dec 16, 2022 3:00 am

As I make my way through Tobe Hooper's work, I inevitably came across the omnibus collab Body Bags, with the first two segments directed by Carpenter and the last by Hooper. What I was completely unprepared for is how wildly mismatched Carpenter's back-to-back shorts are. The first, "The Gas Station." is one of the worst horror shorts: boring, devoid of tension, poorly acted and directed, the kind that feels like a full feature despite being barely a sitcom length.. nothing about it is interesting or deserves a lick of attention, and it's all the worse for taking itself so seriously and tripling down on the horror components that just aren't there. But then... we have "Hair." Even before David Warner shows up to enact the sci-fi device to drive the ludicrous plot forward, we get Stacy Keach in full deadpan comedy mode, and Carpenter committing hard to this satire bordering on farce. In the opening dinner scene, Keach is obsessively preoccupied with his receding hair line to the point of having a monotonous tantrum, and gives the greatest and funniest response to the Wife Calling You a Baby gentle provocation I've ever seen. Other highlights include a hysterically dry 'melodramatic slo-mo music montage' post-barbershop exit. This film is so highly pitched into surreal territory that it mirrors its target in tone: exposing a heightened anxiety that for many men prompts a crippling crises of immature denial (I can speak to this, not that I'm unique there). The reflexive energy is as erratic, silly, and superfluous as Keach's myopic stages of a midlife crisis that resembles less of a descent into vanity than a narcissistic quality Americans all have, ready to amplify at the first sign of minor stress. Alien invasion is pretty easy when we're all so sensitive! I knew Carpenter could be funny, but not in this mode and to this octave. Fans of Lanthimos' antisocial dramedies should check this portion out

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