Episode 153 - Escape from L.A.: LIVE!

[Cameron H. 23786]

 

... how are you, Internet Paul?

 

I'm doing well. Thank you for asking, Internet June.

[Jack Frost 252]

I shit you not, Vader and the Emperor have a heart-to-heat around a camp fire. Like, I'm talking real getting-in-touch-with-your-feelings shit. This was, like, two in the morning, and my wife and I just turn to each other and started cracking up. All I could picture was Vader, in full regalia, sitting on a log drawing circles in the dirt with a stick as he "opens up."

 

That sounds incredible! I've read a few Star Trek Next Gen books that were pretty decent. And yeah, I think that's a big part of why I got weepy about Vader having to fight Luke. I was definitely thinking about all that stuff, the whole family history thing.

[Quasar Sniffer 4174]

Heyyy, so I'm late to the Letterboxd party but I signed up under the same user name I use here but now I can't find any of you and I feel sad and alone. I am an internet user.

 

Add me if you wish!

[Cakebug Tranch 6873]

I added you QS - and everyone in my following list (except Matt Gourley) are HDTGM forum people!

[Chainsaw Starring Nic Cage 95]

Carpenter is just a curmudgeonly old bastard (and has been since he was a curmudgeonly young bastard), and I totally love him for it. If y'all haven't read Guillermo Del Toro's series of Tweets about Carpenter from last year, I highly recommend them.

 

I think my favorite part of it is when Del Toro says he told Carpenter how amazed he (Del Toro) was that The Thing had found an audience over time. And Carpenter just said, "What fucking good does that do me?"

 

Yeah, The Thing's failure really hurt Carpenter on a cellular level, as not just a filmmaker and creator, but as a fan of movies, I suspect. Because The Thing From Another World meant so much to John, it bring rejected roundly by critics and audiences hurt him both personally and professionally. But then again, it may have given him even more balls to make such earnest, freewheeling stuff like They Live and Big Trouble In Little China, that we May have been better off for that failure.

[Cameron H. 23786]

Heyyy, so I'm late to the Letterboxd party but I signed up under the same user name I use here but now I can't find any of you and I feel sad and alone. I am an internet user.

 

Add me if you wish!

 

I'm following you!

[Quasar Sniffer 4174]

Yay! I am following all you wonderful humans/Internet avatars!

[FisterRoboto 7499]

Yay! I am following all you wonderful humans/Internet avatars!

Haha. I saw you started following me. I was going to tell you just to add Cameron and then follow everyone he follows and you'd get all of us

[AbeFroman 70]

One more comment on Escape From LA itself:

 

Carpenter's output in the 90s (except for Invisible Man) suffered from really crappy cinematography. All of his films looked insanely cheap, whereas in the 70s and 80s, the films looked like 10 times their actual cost.

 

Without his go-to DP from the 80s (Dean Cundey), Carpenter's films look cheap and flat, especially LA.

 

Again, this is a master filmmaker whose earlier films actually pushed visual effects forward (The Thing, Starman). I think many of his missteps in the 90s were beyond his control.

 

 

[JohnIraEdwards 12]

AlSO, the whole power-down-the-world thing... okay so people have to go back to living without electricity... like how do the satellites control that? And wouldn't the satellites shut themselves down? But okay, let's give the benefit of the doubt, that somehow these amazing satellites are capable of shutting down energy in general... power grids, backup generators, solar, wind, and so on...

 

JammerLea. I can help with at least this concept, as one of the classes I took in college was Physics 280 "Nuclear War, Weapons, and Arms". It's called an electromagnetic pulse effect, or EMP. One nuclear weapon launched in orbit over a country will send a very strong magnetic wave which will disrupt any electric circuit not protected. It would make anything electrical not work, including cars, blenders, electric guitars, etc. It is thing they put in the plotline of "The Day After", and it's usually what experts say will precede a massive nuclear strike by either country (even though the nuclear weapons themselves are shielded from this effect).

 

:-)

 

[Let'sAllGoToTheWindow! 75]

I'm following you to, Quasar. I Like lurking there as well. I just don't have a lot of time to write about or see films as much as I like these days, but I still make time to read about movies.

[AlexSalcido 38]

Don't know if anyone's done this yet but...

 

Sha, la, la, la, la, la, la

Mmm

Uh huh

I was down at the New Amsterdam

Staring at this yellow-haired girl

Cuervo Jones strikes up a conversation

With a black-haired flamenco dancer

You know, she dances while his father plays guitar

She's suddenly beautiful

We all want something beautiful

Man, I wish I was beautiful

So come dance the silence down through the morning

Sha la, la, la, la, la, la, la

Yeah

Uh huh

Yeah

Cut up, Maria!

Show me some of that Spanish dancin'

Pass me a bottle, Cuervo Jones

Believe in me

Help me believe in anything

'Cause I want to be someone who believes

Yeah

Cuervo Jones and me

Tell each other fairy tales

And we stare at the beautiful women

She's looking at you

Ah, no, no, she's looking at me

Smilin' in the bright lights

Coming through in stereo

When everybody loves you

You can never be lonely

Well, I'm gonna paint my picture

Paint myself in blue and red and black and gray

All of the beautiful colors are very, very meaningful

Yeah, well, you know gray is my favorite color

I felt so symbolic yesterday

If I knew Picasso

I would buy myself a gray guitar and play

Cuervo Jones and me

Look into the future

Yeah, we stare at the beautiful women

She's looking at you

I don't think so

She's looking at me

Standing in the spotlight

I bought myself a gray guitar

When everybody loves me

I will never be lonely

I will never be lonely

Said I'm never gonna be

Lonely

I wanna be a lion

Yeah, everybody wants to pass as cats

We all wanna be big, big stars

Yeah, but we got different reasons for that

Believe in me

'Cause I don't believe in anything

And I wanna be someone to believe, to believe, to believe

Yeah!

Cuervo Jones and me

Stumbling through the Barrio

Yeah, we stare at the beautiful women

She's perfect for you

Man, there's got to be somebody for me

I wanna be Bob Dylan

Cuervo Jones wishes he was someone just a little more funky

When everybody love you

Oh! Son, that's just about as funky as you can be

Cuervo Jones and me

Starin' at the video

When I look at the television, I wanna see me

Staring right back at me

We all wanna be big stars

But we don't know why, and we don't know how

But when everybody loves me

I'm wanna be just about as happy as I can be

Cuervo Jones and me

We're gonna be big stars

[FisterRoboto 7499]

Wasn't that what the Second Opinions guy was going for?

 

He just didn't commit to it any more than Blake Plissken did to his joke.

[AlexSalcido 38]

I just got to Tim after posting that

[DustinDeVore_95432 0]

I'm usually on board with the takes on this podcast but man this one was tough to listen to... Feel bad for the Blake guy cause I got the joke as soon as he said it, but instead he gets lambasted. Haven't listened to the minisode but hope they mention something about it.

[Cap_Ap 0]

Holy god, the male guest on this podcast. Did you guys put out a call for someone with the annoying cackle of Pete Holmes but none of the humor? I literally had to turn it off and come back later.

[NathanGordon 1096]

Fun Fact: In the first movie they didn't have enough money for the wireframe effects of NY in the glider, so they made scale models, put reflective tape on the edges of buildings and shot it with black light. Somehow the computer generated ones in 1996 look worse and they probably spent the entire budget of the first film on it.

 

How fucking cool is that? That is god damn movie magic. I hate waxing nostalgic about the good old days of practical effects, but that is ingenious.

[Jack Frost 252]

How fucking cool is that? That is god damn movie magic. I hate waxing nostalgic about the good old days of practical effects, but that is ingenious.

 

It really is, and it looks perfect. Well, period perfect. Computer imaging wasn't really any more advanced than that at the time.

[DanEngler 5249]

Another interesting bit about early computer graphics at the end of this article from a Star Wars VFX artist:

 

Here’s one more bit of trivia about the geometry of the Death Star. Did you notice anything a little strange about the animated Death Star plans that R2-D2 successfully delivered to the Rebels?

 

The weapons array (the dish) is centered on the equator! Of course, the Death Star we see in the film has the array clearly in its northern hemisphere. Why is there a discrepancy?

[FisterRoboto 7499]

Another interesting bit about early computer graphics at the end of this article from a Star Wars VFX artist:

WHAT THE FUCK?!

[tomspanks 9039]

[FisterRoboto 7499]

I am legit angry about this. EVERYTHING I KNOW IS A LIIIIEEEEEE!

[Chainsaw Starring Nic Cage 95]

Another interesting bit about early computer graphics at the end of this article from a Star Wars VFX artist:

 

I'm sure it was just a early graphical take on the Death Star. Here's one that really baked my noodle.

 

http://io9.gizmodo.com/youve-been-wrong-about-where-the-death-star-trench-was-1791582520

[DeathToMikeyBay 130]

One more thing. I was surprised nobody on the show brought up the idea that maybe the movie was intentionally camp. I mean, JC's The Thing came out in 1982 y'all. Clearly, the man knows good--and I mean bone-chillingly good--SFX.

 

 

Maybe Carpenter was trying to do some kind of riff on the old beach blanket bingo surfer films from the 60s.

 

Not sure if anyone has already pointed out this BLASPHEMY, but that shot is not from the original 1982 The Thing, but from the awful 2011 prequel, not directed by John Carpenter.

[cruel intenstines 36]

popping back in to an extremely dead thread here to be that person and say i just got done with this one and wow as a pam grier and john carpenter fan the WILD transphobia in this movie was aggressively disappointing. i think i would have turned if off had it been earlier in the movie, but as it was i just started doing some very time consuming anagram game on my phone instead and occasionally staring daggers at the screen like netfix had personally wronged me.

i think i'm doubly disappointed too bc i 100% assumed they would slam this on the episode but nah.

sorry for still being like 18 months behind and posting lol, i'm just having a twitter break rn so i didn't have anywhere else to scream about this at quarter to 1 in the morning and I'm having some feelings about it