The current cinema

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• Lex says:

  July 6, 2011 at 4:26 pm

  LOOOOOOK AT HER!!! YEP YEP YEP YEP YEP YEP SO HOT!!!
  I’ve seen The Ward. Eeee… John Carpenter occu­pies for me pretty much the same func­tion George Lucas or Spielberg does for every USC kid with out of state plates who “saw Star Wars in 1977 and my mind was blown and I just KNEW I wanted to do THAT!” Escape from New York and Halloween were basic­ally that for me; I’ve wor­shipped Carpenter since like half-hiding under my fam­ily couch watch­ing Halloween and The Fog scared shit­less at age 7 or 8. That whole run when he had Dean Cundey and the synth scores and Tom Atkins, Charles Cyphers, etc etc… Genius.
  Then after They Live, he sort of became Generic Carpenter, with those blues-rock whammy-bar gui­tar scores and movies that looked like a guy doing a Robert Rodriguez imit­a­tion; In the Mouth of Madness is good des­pite NOT LOOKING OR FEELING like a “real” Carpenter movie, and I still enjoy the sub­sequent ones des­pite the encroach­ing dissolve-heavy cable-ness.
  But The Ward; It’s watch­able enough, it might be bet­ter made than, say, Ghosts of Mars… but there’s almost NO Carpenter to it. He does­n’t do the score, no rack focuses, not the same mood AT ALL, oth­er than a few ran­dom shots that if you squint REAL hard might pass for a stray bit in “Mouth of Madness” or “Halloween II.” Still glad to see him dir­ect­ing, and he’s one of those guys like Hill or Milius or Dante or Landis we all root for, to hit one more out of the park, but we know damn well it’s NEVER going to happen.
  Heard is really, really good. But Mamie Gummer (aka Meryl Streep Jr) gives lit­er­ally THE WORST and most embar­rass­ing per­form­ance I’ve seen in ages. God, could­n’t her mom have taught her how to act? What a dis­taste­ful actress.

• lazarus says:

  July 6, 2011 at 8:33 pm

  Glenn, you talked a little about his dir­ec­tion and how he’s a clas­si­cist, but I’m curi­ous if he’s returned to really tak­ing advant­age of the widescreen format as he did dur­ing up to the mid-90’s. Because those deli­cious com­pos­i­tions seemed in short sup­ply after In The Mouth Of Madness. I’d have to dis­pute Lex’s claim that it did­n’t feel like real Carpenter. It was more sur­real than any­thing before and not as groun­ded in tra­di­tion, but the shots felt like they were com­ing from the same guy. If there’s any short­com­ing it’s that Carpenter did­n’t write it himself.
  Lex also men­tioned Lucas above, and whatever his faults, was still giv­ing us those type of Fordian com­pos­i­tions in the pre­quels, over­all more soph­ist­ic­ated and portent­ous than the cam­er­a­work in the ori­gin­al tri­logy, Kirschner com­ing pretty close with Empire.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  July 6, 2011 at 10:53 pm

  Lack of rack focus effects not­with­stand­ing, I did find the open­ing sequence of “The Ward” pretty char­ac­ter­ist­ic Carpenter. But yes, Lex is cor­rect in that it’s not exactly SUFFUSED with Carpenter-ness. But it isn’t exactly as if his touch is even close to entirely absent either.

• Asher says:

  July 6, 2011 at 11:14 pm

  It’s inter­est­ing, because in your review you fret over wheth­er young­er audi­ences will take to his clas­si­cism, while Slant com­plains that his cam­era has become fren­zied and excess­ively mobile, in what they see as an attempt to ape con­tem­por­ary hor­ror cinematography.

• That Fuzzy Bastard says:

  July 7, 2011 at 2:19 am

  Even when Carpenter is phoning it in, the widescreen com­pos­i­tions make it worth seeing—no one would mis­take VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED for any­thing but a third-rate cable pro­gram­ming filler, but damned if it does­n’t have one aston­ish­ingly laid out shots after the other!

• Chris O. says:

  July 7, 2011 at 11:30 am

  Speaking of hor­ror, NPR’s Fresh Air did a piece yes­ter­day on Jason Zinoman’s new book about mod­ern hor­ror influ­enced by a hand­ful of film­makers. Of course, Carpenter and HALLOWEEN were men­tioned, but it was inter­est­ing to hear Bogdanovich’s TARGETS get­ting more time in the sun – it’s how they opened the piece.

• bill says:

  July 7, 2011 at 12:19 pm

  That’s prob­ably because TARGETS is bet­ter than HALLOWEEN or TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE or any of them. And I love all those movies. But TARGETS is a really, really spe­cial film, as far as I’m concerned.

• BB says:

  July 7, 2011 at 12:52 pm

  Just want to con­cur on the mer­its of TARGETS, and add that it is incred­ibly fuck­ing creepy.

• JC says:

  July 7, 2011 at 2:13 pm

  Glenn,
  When you even­tu­ally get around to review­ing the final Harry Potter install­ment, please con­sider post­ing a pic­ture of, say, Maggie Smith, as opposed to Miss Emma Watson. For only then could we avoid the alto­geth­er pre­dict­able “LOOOOOOK AT HER!! YEP YEP YEP…” response from Lex, on account of Smith being far out­side his age range (what is it, 16 to 24?) for female “hot­ness”. Perhaps he’ll just stick to a thought­ful ana­lys­is under such conditions.
  At any rate, it might be a nice change of pace.

• jbryant says:

  July 7, 2011 at 3:01 pm

  JC: Aside from lead­ing with “LOOOOOOK AT HER,” etc., Lex’s first post above is a rather lengthy, on-point con­sid­er­a­tion of THE WARD and Carpenter, which I would say qual­i­fies as “thought­ful analysis.”
  Is pre-emptive Lex bash­ing con­sidered “a nice change of pace”?
  Now we’re OT, and I guess I’m not help­ing. Sorry, Glenn.

• Chris O. says:

  July 7, 2011 at 3:48 pm

  @bill & BB: Agreed, but you don’t expect it to be one of the first men­tioned in typ­ic­al “what influ­enced the mod­ern hor­ror film” pieces. But why not? I was pleas­antly sur­prised to see it get some props.

• JC says:

  July 7, 2011 at 4:27 pm

  jbry­ant -
  Oh, I fully agree about the major­ity of Lex’s post…but as stated, if we remove the oppor­tun­ity for him to oogle the latest star­let, we get to qual­ity stuff right away, minus the tedi­ous lead-in.
  Cheers. 🙂

• Oliver_C says:

  July 7, 2011 at 5:06 pm

  Above and bey­ond Lex’s actu­al words, might his entire post con­sti­tute a meta­phor, run in reverse, for Carpenter’s decline in both qual­ity and quantity? 😉

• edo says:

  July 9, 2011 at 2:46 pm

  Just saw this last night at the Empire 25 (*shud­der*). Besides the fact that it appears to have been pho­to­graphed in digit­al and edited after the cur­rent, jumpy fash­ion – scenes don’t so much end as get skipped over – it sure felt like Carpenter to me. I thor­oughly enjoyed it.

• jbryant says:

  July 9, 2011 at 7:15 pm

  edo: FWIW, imdb says THE WARD was shot in 35.

• Jaime says:

  July 9, 2011 at 7:51 pm

  The Empire 25 is awful, isn’t it?

• edo says:

  July 9, 2011 at 9:44 pm

  I am will­ing to bet money IMDB lies…

• jbryant says:

  July 10, 2011 at 2:02 am

  Yeah, I always take ’em with a grain of salt. But I will say if they’re wrong about this one, at least they’re wrong in great detail:
  Camera
  Moviecam Compact MK2, Zeiss Ultra Prime Lenses
  Laboratory
  Alpha Cine Labs, Seattle (WA), USA (film processing)
  Film neg­at­ive format (mm/video inches)
  35 mm
  Cinematographic process
  Digital Intermediate (2K) (mas­ter format)
  Super 35 (3‑perf) (source format)
  Printed film format
  35 mm (ana­morph­ic)
  D‑Cinema
  Aspect ratio
  2.35 : 1

• edo says:

  July 10, 2011 at 11:42 pm

  Well, looks like Alpha Cine’s own site con­firms it. I’m a bit ashamed of myself. Thought I could tell the dif­fer­ence bet­ter than that! : ) (maybe those guys went a little over­board on the intermediate…)
  I hope I get a chance to see it in a 35mm print then, because the 4K DCP that Empire showed did­n’t look so hot.

• dm494 says:

  July 11, 2011 at 4:45 pm

  Interesting that Carpenter has finally been forced to fore­go ana­morph­ic lenses and shoot a 2.35 film in Super 35.

• The Fanciful Norwegian says:

  July 13, 2011 at 9:48 am

  Hilariously, the UK video release was pushed back from May to October because Warner Bros. mis­takenly did the trans­fer at 1.78:1. Probably would­n’t have happened if Carpenter had been allowed to shoot anamorphic…