I Hate The Film Canon: A Thread

droid

Well-known member
Droid actually found me on twitter, called me out! Tried to list the classics of Carpenter! I cut them all down, reduce them to ash. Rubbish. He has no classics. He's a man for people who still want to hang onto their Saturday Morning Cartoons. And that's why Rob Zombie's second Halloween is a better movie than the old man could ever manage.

lol. Like I said, you should...

 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
False narrative. Vampires is his nadir. Came after the awful escape from LA. laughably bad and universally derided. Its like judging Tobe Hooper on 'Crocodile'.

"Vampires" is good. Sense of humor, takes the genre and applies it to the foreign (the desert); its a superior extension of the Omega Man fantasy. James Woods pre-maniacal conspiracy theory mode finally having the dialog that Roddy Piper and Kurt Russell would smother to oblivion with their obsessive jaw clenching. Five stars. Also not good, but also great.
 

droid

Well-known member
I have defended it in the past, but its a mess. The narrative is all over the place, the visual effects, especially the mattes, are laughably bad and the editing is catastrophic. This is why Lynch himself disowned it.

That said, costumes and sets are magnificent and Baron Harkonnen is great. Ill give it that.
 

firefinga

Well-known member
Carpenter's classics is a long list of course with Escape From New york as the pinnacle. The cast alone for that is gold.
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
Like 5 months ago.

Dune is ultimately a failure as a Space Opera Money Maker because few if any people understand what Lynch recognized in the book... Much of Science Fiction loves to play with messianic protagonists, and so the film itself is a post-Bunuel (go watch Bunuel's version of "Robinson Crusoe" and then watch Dune right after that, you'll see) take on the mindset of someone becoming a prophet and leading a religious war. Lynch characterizes the families in a symbolic sense to define their culture; the Atredies become Greco-Romans and the Harkonnens Scandinavian/Germanic, but makes them redheaded rather than blonde to avoid blatantly falling into expected stereotypes with the Fremen naturally falling into the sufi/moor-like position Herbert already had them in. (The Corrinos inevitably are the British, with the particular line of "This Is Genocide" by the Emperor

He knows that in the x amount of minutes you can't communicate the ideas of these people and the lore because ffs, you have to constantly make everything a semiotic device. When De Laurentis figures Dune is going to be his Star Wars he lets Lynch spend eons making all these unnecessary visual devices but then he's also thinking its going to be his Star Wars and rather than get a hodge-podge of standard American Cinema tropes (the Red Baron dogfight, the swordfight, the wild west bar shootout) he's getting A FUCKING JIHAD. HOW DO YOU SELL THE WESTERN WORLD A JIHAD? This is all stuff from the book that is being transmitted in a way that isn't the easy kitsch of Besson or the hamming overtones of a Jodorowsky.

Its Lynch at his finest as a visualist, but without his constant sense of transference that plagues his more beloved work with his over-infatuation with Americana or the blatant "I don't deserve this" self-pity trip about his first marriage that was Eraserhead. The film is a constantly austere, unrelenting and frigid because he's disconnected to the material.

And look he actually makes Irulan relevant which the book never bothered to accomplish so fucking hell he got one over on Herbert. I imagine that if he got to Round 2 he'd actually try to be more sympathetic to her character for Dune Messiah, an irony because Dune Messiah is the folly of the escapist wayward husband with delusions of grandeur.

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droid

Well-known member
lol. I cant believe Ive found two people willing to double down on Sting in the same day.

Dune has given us this spectacle at least.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I have defended it in the past, but its a mess. The narrative is all over the place, the visual effects, especially the mattes, are laughably bad and the editing is catastrophic. This is why Lynch himself disowned it.

That said, costumes and sets are magnificent and Baron Harkonnen is great. Ill give it that.

And let's not forget Francesca Annis as Lady Jessica:

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Or Freddie Jones's eyebrows!
 
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