My wife Emma recently discovered Kurt Russell so now we're doing a filmography thirst tour I guess. She couldn't believe this was as old as it is, & there's a reason. With this film, Carpenter did for '80s dark-future SF action movies what he did for slashers with Halloween--created something so imitated that it feels tropey even though it made the tropes, and consequently plays as both ahead of its time & old hat.
Cf. Soylent Green
How do you approach a movie from the Calvin Coolidge administration? Many people say, as a critic, my job is to assess everything in its proper historical context. I should avoid imposing the values, standards, or politics of the present on art from the past. To do that, they say, would be to commit a fallacy called “presentism.”
If they’re right, I guess I’ll have to own being a bad critic, because (a) I don’t know how to see through…
The film that opened my eyes to Tobe Hooper's brilliance was neither The Texas Chain Saw Massacre nor Poltergeist (though I had previously seen both) but rather Toolbox Murders. I was 18 years old, living with my parents and unemployed, having withdrawn from college after a disastrous first semester. It was the beginning of a four-year spiral of depression, isolation and substance abuse: the darkest period of my life thus far.
I rented Toolbox Murders from my local Hollywood Video…
#52FilmsByPOC 2018 pt. 20.
Attention filmmakers: I don't give a fuck. I'll take all the bad dialogue, bad acting, hackneyed storytelling and lopsided editing you can throw at me, as long as you give me something I can feel. This movie is ANGRY--at white supremacy and out-of-control capitalism, at the institutions that support them, at the lengths those institutions will go to uphold it while simultaneously denying it exists. It's a primal scream of a film, and I felt every…
