John Carpenter is a great director, but his power harmed They Live and We Live with it to this day.
The old saying goes, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And this applies very well to film directors. Stanley Kubrick’s later films are among his weakest. I once thought Martin Scorsese escaped this when, in his middle career, he used his power to make exceptional off-brand films like Kundun and Bringing Out the Dead. But his recent work is so self-indulgent that I wish he would simply stop making films.
Fight Scene
I watch They Live every year or so. I like it a lot. But that’s really just because I like its politics. And the truth is that I know a lot of people with horrible politics who think the film justifies them. Whatever. The only problem I’ve had with the film as narrative art is that ridiculously long fight scene in the middle.
Last week, I went through all the special features on the Shout Factory Blu-ray of the film. It includes a recent interview with John Carpenter. Here’s a transcript:
Carpenter: A lot of people said at the time this is excessive, the fight was excessive, but I loved it!
Interviewer: Was there ever any concern when you finished the scene in terms of shortening it?
Carpenter: Fuck no!
But the fight scene in They Live is six and a half minutes long. That’s seven percent of the run time (credits included) of the entire film!
And here we are, four decades on, with a solid film that grinds to a halt right before the third act starts. I guess that’s what the fast-forward button is for. The truth is, no fight is even necessary but it works well enough to propel the action. But six and a half minutes? That’s a director’s blind hubris.
Collaboration Is Necessary
This is why directors shouldn’t have too much power. The fight scene works well on its own. True, it isn’t realistic or gritty — the way the film is. It’s very much a pro-wrestling kind of fight — including a piledriver. It doesn’t go too far. The problem is that the fight stops the film just as it moves into high gear.
Carpenter understands this. I’m sure he even sees it today. But his ego stops him from admitting that the fight scene is too long in the content of the film. So instead of admitting the error, he doubles down. But if he’d had a powerful enough producer, he could have been saved the public embarrassment. Larry Franco is a fine producer, but he owes his career to Carpenter. He wasn’t going to stand up to the man.
This is not to say that producers should be all-powerful. Indeed, powerful producers have destroyed many a great work. Blade Runner and Dark City come to mind as examples of producers fatally harming films because of their convictions that audiences are stupid. Clearly, there needs to be a balance.
Have you noticed that most directors’ cuts of films are longer than the release cuts — often much longer. This is ego. But it isn’t always the case. Scott’s Blade Runner cut was actually a couple of minutes shorter. And that’s while adding the unicorn dream scene! Dark City is longer, but it is in service of keeping the story mysterious.
John Carpenter Forgot About Us — Briefly
I like John Carpenter as a director. And a big reason for that is that he’s good to the audience. But this is an example of how even the best directors can fall into this trap of fluffing themselves and not working for the good of the whole film. Too bad we will never get a Franco cut of They Live “with four and a half minutes you don’t have to sit through”!
They Live (1988) poster via Wikipedia under Fair Use.
I did like Scorsese’s Silence. But that was a project he’d been trying to get made for ages. Flower Moon was just a bestselling book he wanted to get his hands on, for… I dunno what reason. Why not produce it for a skilled Native filmmaker to do? He produced The Grifters and mostly stayed outta the way.
I haven’t seen They Live in ages and now I’m kinda afraid to! Fight scenes almost never help movies.
I mean, what’s one of the coolest fight scenes in a movie? Spencer Tracy judo-chopping Borgnine in Bad Day at Black Rock. It takes what, half a minute?
Obviously I don’t include the elaborately choreographed things in stuff like kung fu movies, but that’s different — that’s like watching an Astaire dancing scene. You put up with the garbage plot to GET to those scenes.
I think Scorsese likes the idea of terrible men. That’s one reason I like Bringing Out the Dead. It’s about a broken but good man. Similarly, Kundun is about ideas. I wish he would focus more on metaphysics because his physics suck.
As for Bad Day at Black Rock, the fight is great. But it’s only a minute. And a bad guy gets defeated. In They Live, two friends fight for 6.5 minutes so that one of them will just look through some glasses. No fight was necessary at all. And it isn’t just us liberals. Pretty much everyone thinks the fight goes on way too long. And I suspect that 99% of those who would defend it do it only to defend Carpenter.
As for the Kung Fu films, I see those more as dance numbers than anything. If you want to see brutality, watch I Spit on Your Grave. None of these new action films feature much of anything like real violence. Stunt coordinators are the new choreographers!
I kinda have the same feeling about Mike Leigh — I respect his independence from studios a ton, but he generally does movies about people he thinks are awful, and it’s not stuff I wanna watch.
God help me, I did like Topsy-Turvy, though. Not that I like G&S — I think one can make a good case that Weird Al is wittier. But I do like all that backstage theater stuff.
I’m with you on Leigh. And for roughly the same reason. I actually think he’s a genius. But I find very little acceptance for his characters. I can’t write characters without thinking there is some good in them. Leigh seems to think all his characters are horrible or absurd. Mostly, I don’t want to spend two hours feeling uncomfortable, which is mostly what I get from him. I saw Abigail’s Party 30 years ago, and I still haven’t recovered. But I haven’t watched more recent stuff. I think Secrets & Lies is the last.
Leigh is a genuinely good director. He knows how to use a camera and structure a story; he’s a gifted and smart guy. But… he uses an almost entirely improvised style (he doesn’t do traditional scripts) that encourages actors to play up the most hardcore “intense” moments.
Give a gifted actor the opportunity to vividly portray a fu**ed-up person, instead of some bland non-entity written by idiot screenwriters, they will embrace the fu**ed-up role! Yet those actors’ showcases of “intense jerk” doesn’t give us any insight into why difficult people are the way they are. They’re good acting, but it’s not great art. You might as well be watching an improv rehearsal.
I do respect Leigh. I just wish his style had been put to different uses… but it’s not my business to say so. He’s skilled as hell for sure.
I was similarly uncomfortable watching Leigh’s “Naked,” and I left the theater after about 15 minutes. The other movie showing at the KOIN Cinema in Portland was “Six Degrees of Separation,” so I ducked into that one instead, right before it started. WOW was that a good choice!
To Leigh’s credit, he has a short film you might actually like, A Sense of History. Mrs. James thought it was too long, and it probably is, but I enjoyed the building insanity in it.
Okay. I was thinking of watching Topsy-Turvy too based on what you said. In general, I revisit films that I think are really good. It is rare that I want to see a great film (according to me) again. The only great film I can think of that I do is Bringing Out the Dead, but that’s just because I connect so strongly with the main character and generally see the world as he does. But I think that gets to something that is important: fuck great filmmaking. I want characters and a story. I want the filmmaking good enough that it doesn’t get in the way. Also: “great” filmmaking (according to “experts”) really only matters for a short period of time.
Breathless is generally thought to be Jean-Luc Godard’s greatest film. But no one watching it out of its historical context would think it was anywhere near his greatest film. I find it annoying. The truth is that filmmakers are focused on stealing from each other. So whenever anyone comes up with something new, it is so quickly mimicked and perfected that it hardly matters. Why can’t we just say, “Godard changed filmmaking with Breathless“? Maxwell changed physics; he’s super important; no one reads his original papers. People who followed him do a better job of explaining the concepts. No one today thinks that exactly what he wrote is more true. The main thing I noticed watching Breathless was the fluid camera movement. So people watch it why? Because no one has done it better? No one has used it better? That it is in the service of some great story or insight? No to all of that! Give Godard credit, don’t turn him into a god of cinema.
But critics are all in the business of creating gods! And it was Bazin/Godard/Truffaut who invented the notion! (More or less.)
I recently found out that Truffaut did most of his influential critical work when he was under 25. Sure! That’s an age when it’s easy to believe a director (or artist in any field) is a god. For critics over 35 who do it… that’s just silly.
I like characters and story too. If a filmmaker has a gift for composition and movement which brings these things out more, that’s a plus. But mostly what I want from a great filmmaker is taste and tone and the ability to tell a story which makes me feel the way they do about it. Where you don’t get the sense that something in their head never made it to the finished product. That’s so hard to do, and nobody, no matter how gifted, brings it off with EVERY movie. Some ideas don’t pan out. It’s no sin.
And some filmmakers only get it right once — that’s a great accomplishment! Nobody would call Brian Desmond Hurst a cinema god. His Alastair Sim A Christmas Carol gets the feelings 100% right and I don’t know anybody who’s seen it who doesn’t love it. That’s a better movie than anything latter-day Kubrick made.
The French critics made some good movies and wrote some good criticism, but they really did help create gods and monsters!
Those things are connected. If critics see one outstanding film, they want to apply it more generally. But given how collaborative film is and how much is just out of everyone’s control, flukes are more the rule. A good example of this is Carnival of Souls. I consider it the greatest horror film ever made. Herk Harvey never made another feature film. Am I sad about that? Yeah, a little. But I don’t think anything would have matched Carnival. How could it?! After watching it a dozen times, I still can’t tell you why it’s so great.
As I recall, the New Wave directors wrote about film because they wanted to make film. I don’t know how much they bought their own bullshit. But it is certainly the case that after they started making films, there was already an intellectual narrative to apply to the films. I think Breathless was loved because it allowed “respectable” people to enjoy violence. Because it’s really boring. It features two unlikable characters mostly doing nothing
And this raises a question: Why do mainstream film critics tell people to watch films like this. They are really only interesting from a historical perspective. No one watches Breathless for enjoyment. There are thousands of films that do everything it does — but better. It’s the usual thing: the critics want to act as ombudsmen but want to be seen as serious critics. But the extent of their serious criticism is reading what others have said.
There’s a film canon that all Serious Film Writers venerate. Letting people know you venerate the canon certifies you as a Serious Film Writer. It’s like being a law student passing the bar exam — you have to know certain famous cases and foreign words — but lazier. Law students have to memorize a ton of Latin phrases. For film writers, it’s easy: “auteur,” “noir,” “mise-en-scene,” now you’re a Serious Film Writer.
I get why they write this way, it’s expected. What I don’t get is, who reads it? Who reads articles about Breathless? Somebody who stumbled on the movie by accident and loved it and wants to learn more? Highly bloody unlikely.
I suppose it’s people who want to think of themselves as more educated than the average movie watcher? That can make sense when you’re very young. When you’re older, though, those are the wrong teachers to read.
I like movies that innovate technical things or are influential or whatever. But more and more, I love the ones that give me joy, or hit me emotionally without being manipulative. Because the filmmakers (or the cast) want to convey that joy, that emotion. Serious Film Writers tend to praise things which expertly, clinically achieve a desired result. So did Ray Kroc.
(Note how, in recent decades, Barry Lyndon has been added to the canon… and Gosford Park hasn’t. Which is the better movie? It’s not EVEN CLOSE.)
My perspective has changed a lot from 20+ years of watching movies with Mrs. James. When we started, I was “you must see this CINEMA CLASSIC” and she was “I like fun new ones.” She’s made me far less respectful of the canon, I can see now how many of those are shallow or mean. She can appreciate older and foreign movies more (they’re easier to grasp once you get used to the conventions of the times).
And we’ve found some goodies to enjoy… the first 20 minutes of Olivier’s Henry V, wow, is that magic. Invention For Destruction. The 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So many more (those are just names that pop into my head). I could pop in The Importance of Being Earnest tomorrow and enjoy it more than Godard. (I respect Godard as an intellectual rebel, I’m just not a huge fan of his flicks.)
The canon is worthless. It’s a cultural signifier to a tiny, tiny part of the culture, one full of bores you probably wouldn’t want to know anyways.
But if somebody tells you to watch 1961’s The Postmaster on Sunday… I’d say they are right!
I’m with you. Well, I do think Godard was a good genre filmmaker. And that is something the New Wave made a thing of: respecting genre films. Of course, they did to those films what I hate.
I don’t think I’ve seen Olivier’s Henry V. I quite like Branagh’s. I especially like what he did for the opening. Normally, I don’t especially like these long tracking shots but it works perfectly here because it is part of the play. The Chorus is talking directly to the audience — apologizing for the fact that this play about a war actually has no action in it. And, of course, it’s Derek Jacobi!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gspja5tdX4Q
There are a lot of “great” films that I love. The main thing is to not make a fetish of them. It bothers me to think that someone might watch Citizen Kane a dozen times but never watch Mr Arkadin or The Trial or F for Fake. Only recently did I watch Peter Bogdanovich’s film Targets. He’s another one. I’d also recommend Noises Off. It’s a farce about a group making a theatrical farce. It’s hilarious with an outstanding cast.
But my biggest thing is that I think we should write most about what is good. If something is horrible, why write about it? Yes, I have written about The Dead Talk Back. But just in passing. It doesn’t make you smart to write about the many ways a weak film is weak.
I will not s**t on an indie film I thought was bad, unless it got MASSIVE praise. “The Brutalist” did, it was worshipped, it was awful, and it was 215 F**KING MINUTES LONG… man, that turdburger infuriated me so bad, it was cathartic to hate on it. I don’t care if nobody reads it… I had to vent the hate.
But, generally, no. It’s fun every now and then to s**t on some pretentious stuff, mostly it’s a chore. I’d rather ask the question “why does anybody in their right mind WANT to like Fellini” and I don’t have an answer for that, so there’s no point. Because film critics say they should? I guess, whatever.
I think you would really dig the first 20 minutes of the Olivier Henry V! It’s so cool. It starts with an elaborate model shot of what 1600 London looked like! No movie with an elaborate two-minute awesome model shot can suck.
Then it’s depicting how the play *might* have been done in 1600, at the Globe, and what jokes the audience might have laughed at… it’s like seeing through a time machine! Mrs. James is NOT a Shakes fan, and she thought it was SO damn cool. It is! It’s really really great. I wish the whole movie had been done that way. (It’s not, it moves step-by-step towards “more realistic,” and I missed losing the art of the theatrical fakery.)
That Jacobi thing IS fun, the dude can bring it as an actor for sure! Incidentally, he’s one of those guys who thinks the Duke of Earl of Fartinghamshire or whoever really wrote the plays, whatever, pal, just keep reading the lines in a badass way.