Review of The Fortune Cookie (1966) by Jerome W — 09 Jan 2005

I now have a lot more respect for John Carpenter. I've liked some of Carpenter's movies but I never cared for "Halloween"" and I never saw what made him a horror master to some people. Then this morning I saw his version of "The Thing". Now I get it.

This film was superb. It was gritty, tense and brilliantly acted. So many movies since have messed up this men-against-monster formula. They emphasized the gore too much, treated the story like a joke or did something else stupid. This baby was letter perfect, the atmosphere, Ennio Morricone's music, the use of shadows so you never saw the monster in a bright light, everythig was just right.

Now Carpenter's student film, "Dark Star", looks like the father of an entire school of horror. "The Thing"'s setting was a government camp in the Antarctic but the main motif of a tired crew chasing a monster through dark, cluttered corridors comes right out of "Star", the same motif that a more direct "Dark Star" descendant, "Alien", uses.

Other than that this weekend I saw Billy Wilder's classic comedy, "The Fortune Cookie" again, this time concentrating on Jack Lemmon's subtle, multi-faceted performance and Walter Matthau's hilarious breakout role. There was also "Northfork", a surreal but affecting mix of sprituality and weirdness revolving around the efforts to clear out the population of a town that is going to be displaced by a lake.

The last two things I read have been [u]Ocean Of Sound[/u], a wide-ranging discussion of ambient music by British musician David Toop, and one of my favorite magazines, [u]The Wire[/u] , a British mag that covers the outer reaches of music in all genres, this issue with features on the new Finnish muscal underground and a long dissertation on the power of The Riff, which to these guys comes from everyone from The Seeds and The Stooges all the way to Terry Riley, Captain Beefheart and Carla Bley. Reading all of this heady stuff reminds me how much incredible culture there is out there far beyond the cheesy crap we get flooded with by mainstream TV, film, and music.