March 12, 2008

"John Carpenter's They Live" DVD Review (3.5/5) - Jeremiah

Aliens have arrived on Planet Earth and disguised themselves as members of the Upper Class. The only way to see them, the subliminal messages they put out through advertising -- television et al. -- and their flying robots... are with pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses. It's helpful to start saying that out loud, so you realize what you're dealing with.

Buried deep within all this absurdity, there lies, barely breathing, a message. “The Rich get richer and the Poor get poorer. Well no more! Eat hot molten lead, Alien SCUM!” It takes the movie about half an hour before it devolves into the classic Carpenter movie. But this doesn't take away from it; it's still hella-enjoyable.

How can you hate the movie with the first-class line: “I've come to chew bubblegum and kick ass...and I'm all out of bubblegum!” The line is one thing by itself, but it's Roddy Piper's oddly syncopated delivery that immortalizes it.

On top of that, it has one of the best fight scenes ever. It's a bare knuckle fist fight between Nada (Piper) and Frank (Keith David), in an attempt to get Frank to put on the sunglasses. The fight lasts something like ten minutes. At first it's cool, then funny, then the longer it goes on the more entrancing it becomes. It's a scene where testosterone is wholly unleashed upon the screen. Never before have two men fought so hard, for so long, for so little. I mean, just put on the damn glasses.

Of course, the scene is a metaphor for how Nada only wantsFrank to wake up from his dream and see the truth... with a bitchin' body slam in the middle of it.

The glasses allow the wearer to see beyond the bombardment of subliminal messages in advertising. When Piper puts on the glasses, the screen goes to black and white. This effect is both cheap and really effective. All the billboards, and magazines say things like “Obey,” “Submit,” “Marry and Reproduce,” “Sleep.” My personal favorite was when he looked at a hand full of money with the glasses, and you see blank strips of paper that say, “This Is Your God”.

The aliens look just like you and me, until you put the glasses on, then they look like something of a medical book. They have watches that allow them to communicate with one another, and also allows them to teleport -- of course, they're Rolexes. One of the shortcomings of the movie, is that it never fully elaborates on where the Aliens came from. How do they look like us? Are they like chameleons? Are they a parasite of some sort? The movie glosses over this to get to the action. Which is mainly Piper and David hurtling one liners at people they are about to mow down in hail of shotgun shrapnel.

The idea is really cool, and sadly more relevant today than it was in 1988. Of all his movies that have been re-made, none of them cry out to be more so than “They Live.” In a society that has raised a non-entity such as Paris Hilton to it's highest echelon of celebrity, we are in desperate need of a wake up call. Our consumerism and our resilient belief that those who have more are better than us is even more outrageous than it was during the Regan era.

"They Live" is rapidly becoming one of my favorite Carpenter movies. Even his usual synthesizer music is almost non-existent. Oh it's there, let's not kid ourselves, but he decides to throw in some harmonica, giving the whole musical score a bluesy feel. It sets the mood to a pitch-perfect degree. His camera work, as per Carpenter, is taught and lax at the same time. Just watch the infamous fight scene; it's filmed and edited extremely well. You can give it all the crap you want about how it's so over the top manly it makes you wanna puke. But you can not deny the precision of the pacing of that scene.

This movie surprised me. I went in hoping I was going to be able to rip it a new one and, true to form, Carpenter won me over. He always does. The man is a bastard like that.

Yours Until Hell Freezes Over,
Jeremiah

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