To Live and Die in L.A.
It must have been easy to be cynical about William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. in 1985. After a blazing hot early 1970s, his critical and popular reputation bottomed out with four straight disappointments. So, it makes sense that someone might think Friedkin’s return to the cop-on-the-edge genre was a purely commercial decision, a hope to rekindle the fire he lit in 1971 with The French Connection. After all, that movie was both a commercial and critical smash. Continue Reading →
Smokey and the Bandit
SimilarIce Age (2002), My Own Private Idaho (1991), Poseidon (2006), Stranger Than Paradise (1984),
Hal Needham's good-old-boy romp is still as silly and dumb and charming as it was nearly a half-century ago.
I have spent the last hour or so trying to figure out a way into this piece commemorating the 45th anniversary of Smokey and the Bandit, a goofy exercise in hicksploitation that exceeded all expectations to become one of the biggest hits of 1977. On the one hand, the film is an undeniably puerile conglomeration of noisy car crashes and jokes that were on the retrograde side even back in the day. On the other, it’s a film that’s entertained me mightily over the years and still does.
That said, I would never refer to Smokey and the Bandit as a “guilty pleasure,” because that would suggest that I feel some degree of embarrassment over my admiration for it. That’s simply not true—as dumb as it is, it does have a certain charm that helps move it along while (mostly) overlooking its shortcomings. Continue Reading →
Escape from New York
Man, Escape from New York. What a picture. It's one of the standouts of director/co-writer John Carpenter's damn-near-unmatched 1976-1988 run of stupendous filmmaking, a man-on-a-mission film with a driving sense of urgency that still makes time to breathe in its mood and world. Dean Cundey’s widescreen cinematography captures the ruined prison island of New York in deep blacks and dense color and gorgeous widescreen framing. Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s score is cool and moody. The main theme alone is best described as “indelible.”The ensemble is a murderer's row of great actors with fantastic faces: Adrienne Barbeau, Isaac Hayes, Donald Pleasance, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, and the one-and-only Harry Dean Stanton. Each does unforgettable work. Continue Reading →