Repo Man (1984)

Director: Alex Cox

Cast: Harry Dean Stanton, Emilio Estevez, Tracey Walter, Olivia Barash

Have I Seen it Before: Never. It always existed just beyond my radar. Always felt just a little bit grungier than my tastes would normally drift toward. But, once again Circle Cinema could get me to show up for just about anything if it was being projected in 35mm.

Did I Like It: It was simultaneously a shame that I had missed it all this time, and more than a little great that I managed to first catch it in the best available format.

Rare that a movie made after the 1960s would actually serve to inspire John Carpenter and not the other way around, but They Live (1988) might have been a simple alien invasion story without this film’s influences.

And honestly? Do I really want to use this space for a confession? I think this film trucks in a lot of the same iconography and feelings, and does so far more effectively.

Estevez is a more able leading man of the movies than Roddy Piper*. The film views the world of the 80s with the same jaded eye, but manages to offer its both protagonist and the world at large something of a chance at a happy ending. In short, Carpenter’s pitch-black nihilism fills the later film, where whimsy of a sort wins the day here. Then again, there is a fundamental misanthropy here which makes it clear that the people of Earth are the real problems, whereas the aliens might not mean us any intentional harm.

*I wouldn’t take that terribly personally if I were Piper. No wrestler—for all of the skills it takes to engage in that kind of a performance—has ever offered a screen presence equal to even the most nominal of movie actors. Dwayne Johnson might want to take that assessment personally.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel, Barbara Hershey, Harry Dean Stanton

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Chalk it up to another another cinematic blind spot. As a blissful non-Christian I’m neither offended by the film’s creative liberties and abandonment of the gospels, nor am I particularly moved by the subject matter in the first place. From a distance, I feel almost the same way about the film as I would The Passion of the Christ (2004). I really have to be “in the mood” for a picture about a crucifiction, and I rarely—if ever—am. The key difference is that Scorsese on spec is much more apt to get me “in that mood” than Gibson, or even Jeffrey Hunter, for that matter.

Did I Like It: The film is clearly well made. It would be foolish in the extreme to question the bona fides of Scorsese. The beginning and the ending are undeniably fascinating. Depicting the moral grey area of Jesus (Dafoe) is a revelation that might actually invite a viewer to move beyond the ethical vacuum that Christianity can sometimes create in its followers. Faith alone is nearly worthless if you are more than willing to bring your carpentry skills to bear on a full array of crucifixes. The ending, where Jesus is given something resembling a choice in his fate makes his sacrifice have even some kind of meaning, even for this particular non believer.

The middle, however, could be counted among any other depictions of the life of Jesus one might find. The film is almost too devout at the core, that it once again becomes meaningless. It’s ultimate reverence (and, for that matter, Peter Gabriel score weighing everything down in an 80s milieu) for its subject material keeps me further from the subject matter.

Maybe it should have been more irreverent? That might have cut through my cynicism and gotten me on board. The zealots don’t know a good thing when they have it heading straight for them.

Alien (1979)

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Ian Holm, John Hurt, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, and Bolaji Badejo as himself.

Have I Seen it Before: Sure.

Did I Like It: As Brett says, “Right…” 

This is another movie that proves difficult to try and write about critically with any sort of honesty. It’s a great film. You know it’s a great film* because they’ve been trying to remake it about a thousand times in the forty years since it was unleashed. And after you see a great film several times, it’s harder still—if not downright impossible—to unpack the experience. One is more struck by the little things that one may not think about on first blush.

The performances are pitch perfect and so against what would be the obvious direction a film like this could have taken. Ash (Holm) particularly stands out on second watch. He slithers through the movie, fighting down his glee (or as much glee as a robot could muster) that things are about to go down. 

The others are no slouches, either. They don’t particularly like each other—or at the very least, have gotten sick of one another after this much time beyond the frontier—and it shows. They don’t even like being in space, which is unique in both this series, and in science fiction as a whole. 

All of this comes about as subtext as well. Never once does one character turn to another and say, “I don’t like you, and I don’t like having to work in outer space.” This, along with the occasionally insane design gives the entire world a lived-in feel that Star Wars or Trek series often reaches for and comes up wanting.

Another element that never fails to delight—although it is likely less of an intentional choice and more of a reality of the time in which it was made—is the technology that surrounds the characters. Between clicking and clacking, displaying nonsense numbers as comprehensible data, and literally everything about the Mother computer make me long for a time when every piece of tech in a film didn’t look like it was designed by Tony Stark. Eagle-eyed readers of these reviews might detect a hypocrisy in that thought, as I have often extolled the virtue of films resisting looking like they were filmed at the time in which they were, but if films still used computers like this, it’d be impossible to tell when any film is made without consulting IMDB or Wikipedia, and that would make me a very happy camper, indeed.

If a film doesn’t have these little things, maybe it is not all that great in the first place. We are lucky that this one has them in spades. They make them worth coming back to every once in a while.

*While it is a great film, it is a competitive candidate for best trailer of all time. You have to kind of imagine yourself as a person who has no idea what the film is about when watching it, but from that perspective its one of the greats.