No he does a lot more than just schlock horror and while hit or miss his hits are pretty good stuff.
The Thing is great bit of horror cinema in general.
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'A Torinoi Lo (The Turin Horse)'
A ‘cinema of contemplation’ masterwork and Bela Tarr’s best film. I can’t get away from this one, it’s haunting and rewards repeated viewing.
'Ponyo’
The closest I have felt to being under a spell in a cinema, an underappreciated Ghibli dream.
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I enjoyed it when it was new. I can’t say as I understood it, not fully, and certainly not the end. but that was over a decade ago, I’d need a refresher viewing if I was going to actually discuss it now.
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Omg The Conversation is sooooo good. Very underrated for sure. There was a pseudo-sequel that came out in the late 1990s called Enemy of the State, also with Hackman.
The Conversation is also notable for a brief appearance by a very young Harrison Ford.
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My all-time favourite sports movie:
Better known as Salute of the Jugger.
On the surface, it’s a standard 1980’s Mad Max-esque post-apocalyptic SF movie, albeit of slightly higher budget than most such things. The usual tropes are present, but the cheese factor is minimal.
Underneath the surface, however…it’s a classic sports film, with all of the usual clichés about sportsmanship and self-belief that you’d find in any “inspirational” high school football movie.
Mind you, this version has dog skulls for a ball, chain-wrapped spiked clubs for the linesmen, Rutger Hauer at peak badassery and a running back portrayed by Joan Chen (who takes ear-nibbling to a whole new level). One of Vincent D’Onofrio’s first roles, too.
It was written and directed by genre legend David Peoples (writer for Bladerunner, 12 Monkeys, Ladyhawke, etc). A much better film than superficial appearances might suggest.
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Carpenter has done both schlock and truly sublime horror, depending on how invested he is in the material and how much he’s allowed to spend. He can do a lot with a little, it’s true, but he can also do Dark Star, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, and a truly timewasting remake of Village of the Damned.
I think The Thing is his finest hour, but check out They Live and Escape From New York and The Fog, too. I’m quite partial to Christine as well, and Big Trouble In Little China should go without saying.
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I didn’t get on with Dark Star, to my regret. I should try it again. But don’t forget Assault on Precinct 13, either.
I just watched The Revenant. Found it a bit dull, to be honest. Have seem many a better peformance from DiCaprio, he just didn’t have a lot to do here.
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Yeah, the bear-wrasslin’ and shivering wasn’t exactly what I consider a nuanced and subtle acting performance. More like a physical endurance contest. He’s better than that. Or used to be, anyway.
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One redeeming feature, though: it inspired this.
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I realised very early on that I didn’t have the faintest interest in the plot, so I spent the next couple of hours looking at the scenery, which was very nice indeed, and well photographed.
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But but but… isn’t Dark Star practically a student movie? I mean, it seems to wear its amateurism on its sleeve, and I gotta admit I love it for it! Haven’t seen it in some time but remember finding it lovably hilarious. Pinback is one of the best ever fish-out-of-water characters for me (“I’m not even supposed to be on this mission!”). And the intelligent talking bomb that refuses to go back into the hangar after being accidentally pre-deployed… that’s some great SF comedy there, I submit.
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I remember not liking it for most of the movie and then by the end the absurdity of it all came into focus and I ended up thinking it was totally brilliant.
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I’m pretty sure it’s just one of those films I wasn’t in the right mind for at the time. I really should try it again. Has happened before (most bizarrely, I really didn’t like Grosse Point Blank the first time I saw it, and now it’s one of my favourite films…)
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Equally, I may have been, uh, a little too much “in the right mind” when I first watched Dark Star… 
ETA Thanks for reminding me of GPB! Got real rewatchability, that has.
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So, I actually had a long conversation with a friend about this yesterday and we both agreed Schindler’s List not only leaves us cold, but comes across as too manipulative and tries to manufacture emotion where it should be natural. As in, it’s the Holocaust, you don’t need to make it seem terrible, it genuinely was terrible. All of World War II was miserable, and the more I study it, the more I’m personally convinced that it was the apocalypse. Americans in particular have a weirdly heroic cultural memory of the war that makes them wax nostalgic about it in ways that I find deeply troubling. The scale and the depth of the depravity of the genocide is mind-numbing.
I feel like Spielberg trying to tug at our heartstrings with the story of a man who by all accounts was at least partially interested in the money he could earn in the process is insulting to both the history of the events and my emotional intelligence. By contrast, if you watch something like The Pianist, Polanski actually hints at the manner in which the German population as a whole was responsible for the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. There was a very real broad assent to the atrocities by the larger culture. Very few people resisted, and contrary to popular conception, resistance was not always met with punishment. People could have spoken out, or simply refused to comply with certain in ways that the Nazis couldn’t have punished. The sense you get from Schindler’s List is that it’s a child’s morality tale of Good vs. Evil, writ large.
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I thought Fury did an interesting, if problematic, job of taking that on.
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He does that far too much for my liking. It’s why he still hasn’t made a better film than Jaws.
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I haven’t seen it. I tend to recommend Come and See as a WWII film, also known by its Russian title, “Idi i Smotri.”
He did it well in Independence Day, but that was a movie whose entire appeal was that it was stupid fun.
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