Or does it?

Happy birthday, Michael Caine!

80 years old today

Sam Pezzo

After seeing the Vittorio Giardino exhibition in Bologna I started re-reading his books, Hungarian Rhapsody and Orient Gateway. I also got the Jonas Fink / A Jew in Communist Prague books and the Collected Sam Pezzo, his private detective strip.  It's always interesting to see a cartoonist's early work, how it changes from this 

into this, in just a couple of years. You can see some of both Jacobs and Tardi in the strips. He even has the Tardi AAAs in wordballoons, when someone is shot! I haven't read No Pasaran!, his Spanish Civil War book yet, but should get that next.

Escape from...

New York:
What is it that really ages a film? Computer graphics! And the twin towers, I suppose... It's a fun but not perfect film. Plot-wise they jump a few points. The cabbie just turns up at the end, when they need him, with the tape? And the whole tape bit is kind of silly. Ernest Borgnine is fun, though, in his part.

LA:
Ah, what happened? Carpenter and Russell can only blame themselves for this film. I don't think producers put a gun to their heads and said, make it an exact copy of the first film, just worse in every way. In the original they had a burned down city to film in, here there are obvious sets - and overlit. What ages a film? Bad mid 90s CGI, that's what. Maybe, if you're ten years old, the hangglider attack at the end is cool - for anybody else, it's hard not to make fun of. Tarantino wants to retire after his tenth film, saying directing is a young man's game. He might have a point.

Assault on Precinct 13

John Carpenter's variation on Rio Bravo. This is a pretty good movie. You can see the signs of a low budget - there's an awkwardness in some of the acting - but that also gives the film a certain freshness. Apparently it was shot in twenty days. There's an economical storytelling and leanness in the script that Carpenter got from directors like Howard Hawks.

I made the mistake of also watching the remake, starring Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne and Gabriel Byrne. The fact that they made a remake is hard to criticize, since Carpenter's The Thing is also a remake, but dammit, it's still a crappy film. The 2005 version has more action, more twists and turns, more dialogue - the script must be twice as long as the original - so why is it more boring? The characters are all pretty annoying for one thing, and visually the film is ugly, with a constant blue night tone and overuse of handheld camera. Worst of all, the film is no fun! You can say what you want about the killing of the little girl in the original, but it's an image that sticks in your mind. The remake has nothing like that, it's more depressing in its cliché-ridden mediocrity.

Sometimes an idea works

...and sometimes it doesn't.

Peanuts