They Live!
Sep. 3rd, 2023 07:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
grinninfooleStoic and I have been taking advantage of the Fathom Events screenings of classic movies this summer to enjoy some cool films on the big screen. We've seen several Miyazaki greats (Nausicaä, Castle in the Sky, Kiki's Delivery Service, and Porco Rosso) and fun genre offerings like Conan the Barbarian (much better than it has any right to be) and Enter The Dragon (which was fine), as well as today's flick, John Carpenter's They Live, which has aged really well.
The low budget, low key action and effects still work, the famous five minute fight scene is still fun as hell, and much of the writing is still timely or even prescient. Carpenter truly made artistic mountains out of budgetary molehills, in part because of his unshowy attention to detail and willingness let important story pass at blink and you'll miss it speed. Stoic even pointed out a little dig at Sickle and Ebert that I missed at the end, probably because of how much they hated The Thing. (Which is playing at the Amherst Cinema in a couple of weeks.)
The low budget, low key action and effects still work, the famous five minute fight scene is still fun as hell, and much of the writing is still timely or even prescient. Carpenter truly made artistic mountains out of budgetary molehills, in part because of his unshowy attention to detail and willingness let important story pass at blink and you'll miss it speed. Stoic even pointed out a little dig at Sickle and Ebert that I missed at the end, probably because of how much they hated The Thing. (Which is playing at the Amherst Cinema in a couple of weeks.)
