Thieves' Highway

The DVD for this movie contains a ridiculously charming ten-minute interview with Jules Dassin. I watched the interview before the movie, which was maybe a mistake if I wanted to have an "unbiased" viewing or something, but it was hard not to like this movie after watching that.

The Naked City was really good, but a lot of that had to do, I think, with its central gimmick being so interesting. With Thieves' Highway, there's nothing like that that could end up being seen as a weakness. It's just a good movie, with the exception of a few scenes that seemed a little superfluous; and here the interview especially helped because it explained why those scenes ended up in the movie in the first place.

Richard Conte plays Nick Garcos, the son of a California truck driver who has just returned home at the beginning of the movie. He finds out his dad's legs were lost in a trucking accident, probably because he got screwed by a San Francisco produce mogul named Figlia. Nick vows revenge, hooks with another trucker, buys a bunch of apples and trucks them north to San Francisco, where not really everything works out quite as he'd hoped. I was thinking for a minute how it was interesting that the movie has a very noir setup, but in place of the usual criminal underworld the action all takes place in the cut-throat world of produce shipping, but then I realized that, of course, that was the point. Apparently Dassin didn't get blacklisted for nothing (I mean the whole blacklist thing was stupid, but Dassin's got his communist heart emblazoned proudly on his sleeve here). The ordinary capitalist system that leads to you finding your fruit in the supermarket is here shown to be just as underhanded and bluntly evil as the criminal underworld, full of double-crosses, exploitation, and outright physical intimidation and violence.

Which is what made the tacked climactic scenes so interesting. I mean, they just don't work if your trying to evaluate the movie from a purely aesthetic sense, since they're just not done as well as the rest of the movie and they're thematically so different. But when the cop's head is suddenly full frame and he's yelling directly at you, the viewer, "You shouldn't take the law into your own hands! That's our job!" well, that's actually really interesting, I think. It's like... well, I can't think of any really good things to say that it's like, but it's kind of awesome. It was obviously an attempt by the studio to try to undo the "damage" the rest of the movie might have done, but by making the point so clumsily and overbearingly it kind of just goes further toward undermining traditional ideas of authority. I really was annoyed when the scene happened while watching the movie, but thinking back on it I actually think it makes the movie loads better.

Also, just like in The Naked City, the villain is ultimately more compelling than any of the heroes, for whatever reason, although it's not quite so pronounced here. And the prostitute with a heart of gold gives him a run for his money. If a filmmaker wanted to see how to do subtly sexy, s/he could do worse than to watch the initial scene when she takes Nick back to her room, and when she turns away from the camera to reveal that the top buttons on the back of her blouse are undone. I've seen whole movies that were based around trying to be sexy that didn't even come close to matching that one scene.

Dark Star

Okay, if someone had said to me "John Carpenter is a great filmmaker," I would have accepted it. I mean, the guy pretty much invented the American '80s psyscho/slasher horror movie with Halloween in 1978, and on top of that he made The Thing, Assault on Precinct 13 & Escape from New York, and I'd have accepted those as enough evidence. I might not have made the argument myself. I'd have accepted, sure, but ultimately I'd have thought that he was in some important way a pretty limited filmmaker.

Dark Star is the type of movie I wouldn't have thought he was capable of--or probably more accurately, interested in--making. The movie is basically a small, slo, subtle movie a group of four guys alone on a tiny spaceship who shoot around the galaxy in search of planets to blow up. They're searching for planets with irregularities in their orbits that they blow up in order to prevent the future possibility of the planets careening off their orbits and, I guess, becoming dangerous. That's really all the explanation there is in the movie of the overall setup. Sure it's a sci-fi flick, but it's also a comedy, and the type of comedy that I guess I'd have to call existential. That said, it's also ridiculously entertaining. Nearly every scene is hilarious, and they're all funny in different ways. There's the obviously Douglas Adams influenced climax with the talking bomb that is persuaded not to explode through the use of "phenomonology", the long slapstick sequence of trying to feed the alien (hilariously just a beach ball with clawed feet), the sequence of Pinback's video confessional/journal, the conversation where Pinback explains that he's not really an astronaut but just happened to be wearing the wrong suit when the spaceship left along with the absolutely bored reactions of the other crew members, and then the brilliantly boring sequences of the three astronauts sitting together in the control room and nodding their heads to the countdown. Of any John Carpenter movie I've seen, Dark Star easily has the best screenplay for him to work with.

I think what surprised me most about this movie as John Carpenter movie was that it doesn't ever rely on anything sensational. Not that I ever think the sensational in any of his other movies is a weakness, because part of what made him so good was how all-out sensational he went, but it's particularly impressive to see him handle something so thoroughly non-sensational so deftly.

Aliens

Confession: I've hated this movie for a long time. The reason was based on some kind of resentment for Aliens not being as good a movie as Alien. But, when I saw that Aliens was the middle part of a triple feature, between Explorers and Dark Star (a movie I knew absolutely nothing about), I was sold.

I still think Aliens is nowhere near as good as its predecessor, but it's kind of a pointless observation because Aliens is not interested in being the same kind of movie much at all. Aliens just wants to be an action movie, flat-out. sci-fi action, sure, but mainly action. It might have been one of the reasons that science fiction has become mostly just a sub-genre of action movies, but it does it so well that it's hard to blame everyone from trying to copy it. (It certainly looks easier to copy than something like Alien, although I'm not sure that's true.)

The thing that really did disappoint me about the movie this time, though, was that it really looked like it was shot for TV. The framing was pretty much all set up to be easily cut in half of a square set, and so many frickin' closeups! I have no idea if the foreknowledge of the video market actually had anything to do with why it was shot this way (although it seems likely enough), but in any case I was bored enough with so much of the cinematography that I started hypothesizing reasons for why it looked that way.

What it especially excelled at, though, and probably a lot of why it was so popular, was essentially the movie version of a splash page. Watching this with a lively audience really hammered it home to me: there are so many places where the movie basically pauses for you to look at how awesome something is and for you to scream out in acknowledgment of the awesomeness. And that is just fun.

Also, I was a little put off at first by Bill Paxton gung-ho dumbass character, especially after getting so used to him on Big Love, but his performance grew on me pretty strongly after a while. He pretty much took the loudmouth dumbass as far as it could go. He was pretty much the incarnation of that archetype in this movie.

Explorers

I honestly have no idea how many times I've seen Explorers, but it actually may have only been once before last Friday. I remember going through a period where I was obsessively trying to find it to watch it again, but this was pre-Netflix, and for whatever reason I never tried to buy it off Amazon or something.

Regardless, I'm pretty sure that the last time I saw it I was like eight or nine, but I still remembered so much of it. Kind of amazing. I don't think I can think of a single other movie that I remember so much of that I watched that long ago. Watching this movie might have been the first time I ever self-identified as a nerd in a positive way. That's probably a lot to do with how well I remembered it.

And I did remember that the whole trip to meet the aliens was pretty freaky because the aliens were so frickin' weird and completely unlike what I would've expected the aliens to be like, and I definitely remember how uncomfortably sexual the female alien was, arousing all sorts of disturbing and conflicted feelings in my little pre-pubescent boner. I wasn't really prepared, though, for how genuinely great that whole sequence actually is! Whoever edited all the video for that section deserves some pretty serious kudos.

And then there's the whole pointless/pointlessly disturbing subplot with the old helicopter pilot. I think as a kid it might've made some kind of sense to me and I would've been very empathetic toward that guy--which might actually speak to how well Joe Dante knows kids, I guess--but as an adult, that guy was way beyond sad and not at all empathetic. He was frickin' creepy, especially the way he manhandles poor Ethan Hawke in his driveway. No way should that guy be flying helicopters!