In recent months, filmmaker John Carpenter came under fire from his own fans that his 1983 adaptation of Stephen King’s Christine isn’t as great as people make it out to be. Carpenter has been one of the few mainstream directors who doesn’t shy away from the fact that he does a movie for money nor that he gets a check in the mail every now and again for the original 1978 Halloween.
At 77, I think Carpenter is just being realistic. Not every movie can be meaningful and a work of art. We’ve learned from Terrence Malick that you shouldn’t hoist people up because they will eventually read their own press and believe it. Since all the hullabaloo over the over-rated The Thin Red Line, Malick has directed seven movies since that movie came out in 1998 and another one that is scheduled to be release at a later date. With the exception of The Tree of Life, they’ve come and gone with little press and a lot of criticism. And Tree of Life is only memorable for how outrageously terrible most people found it while critics were freaking out how great it was.
Now, I’m going to make a lot of people upset when I saw Christine wasn’t one of King’s best adaptation, mainly because it’s not one of King’s best novels. He wrote it during his cocaine-period where he wrote the first draft of The Running Man in 10 days and has no recollection of writing Cujo. The novel which is over 500 pages is one of the meaningless novels of this era along with The Tommyknockers.
I mean the original version of The Stand is just 300 pages more and it’s a more detailed novel with multiple characters and subplots. This is just 500 pages about a possessed car. It would make for a nice short novel, no more than 300 pages. But like a lot of King’s novels, it meanders along at a snail’s pace.
King, himself, has criticized Carpenter’s movie calling it “boring.” But then again, he wrote the source material. But he is right. It’s 110 minutes long with credits and feels like it could’ve been cut by 20-25 minutes. It might have worked as an episode of The Outer Limits. There’s a nice cast but they mostly do nothing except for one scene or two.
Carpenter made this movie and his next, Starman, because he was worried about the negative feedback he would get from the 1982 version of The Thing. Now, that movie is a far more revered movie that deserves its reassessment just on the practical specials effects alone. But in the waning days of the Cold War, it builds on the concept of not knowing who to trust in an isolated environment. And it’s still hard to believe that Wilford Brimley was just 47 when he made that movie. Since he worked on a ranch for years, he was the only one who didn’t get sick when they used real animal carcasses.
But even wine goes sour if it’s not treated well. I’ve often said existence doesn’t always mean excellence. The same goes for subject matter. Twenty years ago, Brokeback Mountain gained a lot of popularity for its depiction of two men in a same-sex relationship. But it wasn’t the first LGBTQIA movie. I mean Blake Edwards was making movies with same-sex couples when Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal were still in diapers.
Then you had the 1982 movie Making Love starring Michael Ontkean as a suburban husband who realizes he’s gay and starts a relationship with a character played by Harry Hamlin. It also starred Kate Jackson. Yet, for someone reason, you’d think it was the first movie of its kind. Now, people would be upset that neither Ledger nor Gyllenhaal are gay in real life. Yet, I’d argue that Ledger’s character was only attracted to Gyllenhaal’s character. However, Gyllenhaal’s character himself was bisexual.
Not everything deserves a second chance. Movies that are now considered classics like It’s a Wonderful Life and The Wizard of Oz only became popular because of their repeated viewings on TV. Both movies were box-office bombs on their initial release and only made money on re-releases. But in a lot of cases, I think movies, TV shows or even books that are bad are just bad. Take any five books on the curriculum in your high school alone and wonder why they’re popular – because they’re on the curriculum at other schools too.
I find very few high schoolers nowadays reacting positively to the spoiled rich brats in A Separate Peace or why things go berserk in Lord of the Flies. I mean, there’s got to be a lot of English literature instructors now who see no difference between Holden Caulfield’s whining in The Catcher in the Rye and any TikTok or social media post by someone of the same age. There’s a lot better books out there but it seems no one wants to teach anything that has been written since 1985, which was the year The Handmaid’s Tale was published and it was the most recent piece of work I studied while in college.
I’m wondering if any book published in the 21st Century, even if it was 2001 or 2002 is being studied. I think it all boils down to people rightfully criticizing something because they don’t want to seem too negative. Yet I don’t like toxic positively on the same level. Therefore, I don’t like people telling me this movie and only this movie is good while this TV show is awesome. I even feel TV is currently overblown by critics. Not every novel needs an 10 episode series adaptation. And a lot of shows critics have raved about, like The Curse, I only got through two episodes.
I’m not saying movies that you might have watched in your childhood or younger years are bad. We all have our guilty pleasures but I think that phrase shouldn’t be used. A lot of people return to these movies, TV shows and literary works because we love them and don’t care what others think. Nor should we.
I feel bad for people who are openly gay who didn’t like Brokeback Mountain or Love, Simon (which would’ve been a horrid story even if it was about a heterosexual main character). I’m sure someone has looked at them weird wondering why they didn’t like it. The same thing happened in 2004 after the release of The Passion of the Christ. It was a horrible bloody movie. I couldn’t think of anyone really liking this movie.
As I’ve said, subject matter doesn’t always equal excellence. To be honest, the fact that a movie like Bros, a same-sex romantic comedy, bombed shows that we’ve reach better equality in movies. It’s not the best. But if LGBTQIA movies can suck as bad as regular movies, we’ve reached a turning point. Tyler Perry has shown us that not all black filmmakers should be celebrated and they can be just as facetious and pedestrian as white filmmakers.
Going back to Brokeback, I don’t see why Anne Proulx was so angry, the movie probably made her a fortune. She’s probably mad that she didn’t get an honorary Oscar. Just because someone gets a lot of awards in one category doesn’t mean they deserve them in another. I mean, we only have one Bono and that’s more than enough.
And as a movie lover, I still don’t like 28 Days Later mainly because it’s a ripoff of George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead. (And they’re not zombies or the undead.) Zombies ran fast in The Return of the Living Dead released in 1985, a good 18 years before 28 Days Later. I also don’t like people constantly talking abut The Descent, which I only saw once almost 20 years ago and that was enough for me.
As for other movies the Internet won’t shut up about like Idle Hands and Mystery Men, they weren’t that great. Idle Hands tried too hard to be a Troma movie but without the extreme craziness. It was just a gross-out movie and that’s not always good. As for Mystery Men, it wasn’t that great and we should admit it. I’m so tired of people defending bad movies by saying, “It was ahead of its time.”
No, sometimes bad is bad. I know that you might like these movies and that’s cool. But I hate it when a medium tries to tell us these movies are great or underrated. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show wouldn’t have existed if Entertainment Weekly didn’t do numerous stories about it. They did the same with The Walking Dead long after most people had given up.
I guess I’m mad that during the latter 2000s and throughout the 2010s, all that was being made were blockbusters so naturally people flocked to them because they were the only thing in the theaters. So, people become more interested in movies that were streaming online and on cable. And they thought they were better just because they were different. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Zane Says 