lefthandedframis

I remember my brother renting it just after it came out on video. I still carry vivid memories, both of the flick itself and of how it affected me. It was then (and is still to this day) one of the most unsettling, frightening movies I've ever watched. I got so overwrought that I got sick to my stomach and had to leave the room for a walk in the fresh air. I came back just before the end. For years I had dreams of sitting with my back against the wall holding a blowtorch or a gun on my best friend and saying "Now we wait a while". I get the creeping willies just writing about it even after all this time. Gazooks what a film.

When it came out, I heard rumblings of "What has Carpenter done to this classic!?!?!" Well, what Carpenter did to this classic was make it into the living breathing definition of the term "horror movie". It's not that it was so gory or unpleasant to look at (tho it was that), but it imparts that gut-wrenching feeling of abject inescapable spirit-crushing doom that you feel by the end of the flick - really rivets it to your soul and then leaves you sitting there on the ice floe too freaked-out to blink.

I've heard that one of the marks of a truly good movie is how long it stays with you; by that measure, this is an all-time cinematic success.

Right up front, let me confess to having been a World War II nut since early childhood. You may thus understand the depths of my disappointment with this movie. I believe Roger Ebert said it best: "The Japanese attack an American love triangle." I find it inexcusable that such a pivotal event in history, and one as well documented from just about all angles, can come in for such slipshod treatment at the hands of moviemakers, but I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. Just let down.

If the producers can expend so much time, money and effort to make everything look big and splashy, why not go the extra 1/4 mile and make it look *right*? Spielberg managed it for Saving Private Ryan, even with the somewhat far-fetched plot device. Flaws abound, and have been pointed out in great depth elsewhere (the most glaring are the guided missile frigates in the harbor, the off-scale appearance of the Oklahoma as she capsizes (with an impossible torpedo hole in her starboard side, which was shielded by the Maryland *and* Ford Island), no mention of Nevada's dramatic attempt to get underway and subsequent beaching, etc).

To my legion of fellow critics I say, "read your history before trashing the 'token black' Dorie Miller subplot". Ship's Cook 3rd Miller did, in fact, give aid and comfort to West Virginia's dying captain, did, in fact, man a machine gun for 15 minutes (during which he believed he shot down a Japanese plane) and was, in fact, the first black recipient of the Navy Cross (awarded in early 1942 by Admiral Nimitz). Aside from the mistaken coffee-service bit (he was actually bagging laundry at the time) that was one of the things the producers got *right*.

Focusing on the Dolittle Raid, I saw only lost opportunities - how Dolittle convinced his superiors to let him fly, the fates of the crews (who flew solo rather than in formation and were scattered all over the place afterwards) and Dolittle's dejection at the "failed" raid and his subsequent accolades... all of this was jettisoned as the producers got out the Ritz crackers and Velveeta and went for the cheesy, contrived, convenient resolution of the *important* part of the movie, that cockamamie love triangle.

In sum, so many opportunities, so little follow through. Rent "In Harm's Way" for schmaltz, and "Tora Tora Tora" for the attack itself. Better yet, snag a copy of "At Dawn We Slept", and read up on the historical tapestry that this movie never really touched.

Short (20 min or so), very moving little drama about a woman in French colonial Montreal awaiting her execution, and the friendship that grows between her and an incarcerated soldier who inhabits an adjacent jail cell. If you can find it, it's well worth watching. Based on a true story.

I saw this in the mid 80s when my brother was busy amassing Beta tapes of everything strange ever filmed, and by golly this was about the oddest flick in the collection. It made a great doublefeature with Repo Man.

Not much to say about it, but to an impressionable teenager it was perfect: necrophiliac lesbian punk singers, drug-addled gender-bending fashion models *AND* endorphin-sucking miniature space aliens, all crowded into a flat on the Upper East Side. How can you possibly go wrong?

Obviously it's low-grade schlock, but I'll always have a weak spot for Liquid Sky. I'd never seen anything remotely like it before, and you never forget your first time!