They Live

Amazingly, given my mom's taste in schlock, I never saw a John Carpenter movie until I went to college. My friend Randall opened my mind in short order. I think the first Carpenter movie we watched was The Thing, though I know we screened most of his (good) oeuvre in short order - and that brilliant movie remains one of my favorites to this day.

Carpenter movies fall into three distinct categories: the simple and assuredly brilliant (The Thing, Assault on Precinct 13, Escape From New York), the terrible but still enjoyable (Village of the Damned, Prince of Darkness, Ghosts of Mars), and the unwatchable (Vampires). 

And, of course, there's They Live. It was sandwiched somewhere in my Carpenter crash course, maybe between Big Trouble in Little China and the terribly unfortunate Vampires. It's an impossibly simple premise - a man finds out that aliens are infiltrating earth, gets a big shotgun, and blows them away until he gets blown away. The burn is almost too slow - a dialogue-less into that leads into at least half an hour of inaction before any actual plot progression. And the star is a pro wrestler - "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, about as good an actor as you'd expect. 

But it all works. What you get is a tonal, atmospheric world, inhabited by the downtrodden but warmhearted, oppressed by the moneygrubs in power. Piper, a strong, silent loner (perhaps strategically silent, to capitalize on Piper's strengths?) is a classic reluctant hero - repeatedly selfish, stubborn, and crude, he is forced by circumstance to save the world and sacrifice his life. He's called Nada - literally nothing - a nobody.

Three good scenes and no bad scenes. Howard Hawks's criteria for a great movie. 

They Live's great scenes:

1. The scene when he first wears the glasses.

One thing that makes this scene great is the revelation that aliens have infiltrated the earth, and the way in which they've done it. Every billboard, advertisement, newspaper, and $20 bill is revealed to be a piece of subliminal messaging, encouraging us to OBEY, SUBMIT, CONSUME. It's a condemnation of consumer culture and an amazing, unforgettable visual feat. The aliens themselves are revealed, under their perfect perms and designer suits, to be glowing, rotting corpses.

Then there's Roddy Piper's performance. He plays the disbelief, the horror, and the humor of the scene perfectly. The simplicity of the sunglasses is perfect - they're never really explained because they don't have to be.

2. The scene at the bank.

Nada has a good heart, but he's kinda dumb. That's why, when he finds out aliens have taken over Earth, he figures the best thing to do is take a shotgun downtown and start blowing them away. It all boils down to one line: "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum."

3. The fight scene.

What was scripted as a 20-second dustup as Nada forces the glasses onto the disbelieving Frank turned into a FIVE MINUTE AND 20 SECOND brutal beating as the two of them smashed car windshields, kicked each other's knees, and practically killed each other. Supposedly, Keith David and Piper choreographed the fight on their own and Carpenter was so impressed that he kept the whole thing. It's a piece of beautiful absurdity and brutality, laced with bits of strange realism - at one point when Nada smashes Frank's car window, he apologizes, horrified, before continuing to beat him up. At another point he bursts out laughing. It's one of the best fights in film history.

Honorable mention: Holly beats Nada.

Nada, on the run from the law/aliens, kidnaps a woman, Holly (Meg Foster, owner of terrifyingly pale eyes). He forces his way into her car and then her apartment. She is terrified, but you sense that she is also intrigued by his story. You sense her warming to him, and you can see where it's going - he's going to win her to his side, she's going to help him, they're going to have a romance.

Then - nope. He stands in the wrong place, and she shoves him through a plate glass window. He falls halfway down a mountain. We don't see her again until she reappears on her own terms. It's a delightful genre-tipping moment, and illustrates one of the things that make Carpenter movies, to me, stand out from all the other small-group, survival-situation movies out there: By and large, Carpenter characters make smart, or at least understandable, decisions. They do what they would do in real life, instead of contorting in strange ways to make the plot work. Sure, some characters do stupid things - see Nada shooting up the bank in broad daylight, or Jack Burton doing any of the things Jack Burton does in Big Trouble in Little China. They do dumb things because they're dumb, though. Not because the plot requires them to be dumb just for a minute. The characters in John Carpenter movies feel like real people.

Roddy Piper, you will be missed. You'll never run out of bubblegum in heaven.

Welcome to Reel and Skein!

SKEIN

I remember the first time I picked up needles and yarn and made something. I have no idea how old I was - young enough that learning new skills was my constant state of being. I asked my mom to teach me. She kindly overlooked that I had always refused to wear her knitted creations - the sweater that was too itchy, the adorable striped hat whose Winnie the Pooh buttons embarrassed me at school - and sat me down with some nice fat size 13 needles and the stockinette stitch. I worked a few rows back and forth and then went to her, bored. "I'm done practicing, can you show me how to do it for real?" Laughing, she showed me the tiny bit of knitted fabric I'd produced. "You're doing it for real. That's it!" My boredom vanished. I'd thought I was just wasting my time - but the whole time, I was actually doing it! I was hooked.

Actually, the hooks came later. When I was a teenager, I noticed my cousin twisting up granny squares at an incredible clip, and was drawn in by their retro-ness and her speed - I'd gotten a little impatient with the tedium of knitting after producing an endless snake of scarves and one ill-fitting sweater. With the help of my cousin and my grandmother, I was soon churning out my own squares. What followed was years of obsessive practice, the growth of a terrifyingly large collection of crocheting books, and many, many projects, from afghans to doilies to a creepy Zac Efron doll.

A few years ago, I finally acted on a childhood desire to learn to spin my own wool. (Sleeping Beauty was my favorite Disney movie, and I somehow missed the underlying message that spinning = DEATH.) I took a beginner's class at the Art League school in Alexandria, VA, and another obsession was born. Within a year, I was the proud owner of a Babe Production wheel and a Country Craftsman (the second an antique store find from a friend). I've been spinning ever since, though I'm still an extreme novice.

Funnily enough, spinning brought me back to my first love: knitting. Crocheting, fast, easy, flexible, also eats quite a bit more yarn than knitting. When I wanted to start crafting with my early spinning attempts, I was too miserly to want to use them up too quickly. For the past year or so, I've been re-learning a lot of the knitting skills I'd forgotten over then past decade or so. It's been rewarding and ridiculously fun.

REEL

My parents are both film nuts, and my childhood memories are laced with moments of sharing movies, having them on in the background while cooking or eating or just hanging out. They delighted in choosing the right moments to introduce us (my brother, sister, and me) to the classics. I remember being sat down to watch the original Star Wars for the first time; my dad had to fast-forward through Dark Star, which was recorded on the tape before it.  When I was about ten, they showed us Blazing Saddles, and my mom told us how she had literally fallen out of her chair laughing when she first saw it in the theater. For my 13th birthday, they showed us Harold and Maude.
Beyond these introductions, there was a whole world of film that was as familiar to me as the music of the Beatles; I can't remember a time when I hadn't seen the best Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers collaborations, The Philadelphia Story, or The Maltese Falcon.
But lest you think we were a snobbily erudite family, my parents instilled in me a great love of schlock as well. From old classics like Ben-Hur to modern awesomeness like Congo and Damien: Omen II, we watched it all. My film education was wide, discerning, and varied.

In college, I studied film along with fine art. I met friends who shared my enthusiasms and introduced me to brilliance even my parents didn't know: John Carpenter, Bruce Campbell, and the entire horror genre in general. I had an amazing film and screenwriting teacher who put into context all the movies I had grown up loving - I learned about the evolution of musicals from Swing Time to High School Musical, and how the strictures of the Hayes Code inspired daring filmmakers to get creative with their sidesteps.

After college, a two-year stint in Los Angeles (and a one-week job on a movie set) convinced me that maybe being an active part of the movie business wasn't in my DNA - but it didn't dull my enthusiasm for watching, devouring, enjoying (or despising) movies. I try to go to the movies as much as possible, to see modern as well as classic films, and my husband and I have a truly obscene private collection that we spend a lot of our time screening.

I hope that this blog will be a mixture of my enthusiasms - movie reviews, works in progress, musings on film, techniques, and artists and craftsmen I admire. Those are the kinds of blogs I like to read. I think there's a strong connection between creating and enjoying the creations of others, across mediums and through computer screens. I hope you feel the same way!