Cinema Spin: John Carpenter's Halloween

The opinion of a movie critic is only marginally more interesting than the gossip and lobby group marketing that crowds the entertainment pages. Any accurate observation is likely to be an obvious one, and sometimes the most banal or tedious drama can be heaped with praise merely because it will not satisfy the masses and therefore one will seem “better than” to prop it up. The reverse principle is at work when it comes to the ghetto that sci-fi, fantasy, action-adventure and horror (genres that are the genres that we call “genre fare” as a catch-all) usually find themselves in as a stigma. This is partially enforced by critics who don’t want to be caught elevating something fun and/or would rather be writing an essay on social ills and speculating on how the underclass is controlled by its entertainment. It is also enforced by actors who want to be the special effect, the element that has a disproportionate amount of focus, as opposed to the technique of the director and his/her team. If an actor is bouncing off the walls with personality (Silver Linings Playbook) or suffering drug withdrawal or falling off the wagon, it likely will be in a story that has a meandering plot but it will be forgiven because the director gave them freedom. Of course actors will talk up work that is personally satisfying, but that doesn’t mean the movie is satisfying. And if all the director needs to do is stand back and cover the acting epiphany in a two-shot, an over-shoulder, and a single on each actor that might very well be enough to earn a Best Director nomination or Best Choice of Subject Matter. I don’t begrudge Steven Spielberg his Oscars for directing Schindler’s List or Saving Private Ryan, but arguably a less talented director could have covered those scripts and snagged the Oscar; Had he won for Jaws, E.T. or Raiders of the Lost Ark, then I would have rejoiced because then it would be more clearly the director’s contribution to the impact of the movie and not the inherent gravitas of the subject matter. John Carpenter’s Halloween often plays out in masters because they didn’t have time for coverage. This is only hurt in one scene Jamie Lee Curtis notes in the DVD commentary – where a close-up of her disgust that she has the knife in her hand would have helped explain why she tosses it away, since for years audiences have grumbled about the seeming convenience and illogic of not keeping the knife handy. It wasn’t logic, it was emotion – revulsion. Close-ups can be over-used, and in small-screen the reasonable fear is that the perfect master shot will be disposed of for bland close-ups of faces and that in comedy the dialogue or sustained tension or foreground-background contrast may be lost with ham-fisted close-ups and cut-ins telling the audience what is important. Halloween gains more than it loses from having very little coverage. It is intended to be seen on as large a screen as possible, and some people can’t be bothered. On a cell-phone video, a wide image that might have been grand and epic ill seem like puny actors dwarfed by scenery. The seriousness of this is that the grammar of cinema that had evolved through Hitchcock and Spielberg has little value to some producers whose understanding is not much different than that of an average movie-goer or viewer who see a movie purely because they believe the actor is the quality control factor. I would even go so far as to say that the tradition of marking progress of a shooting day in terms of eights of a page of script covered is misleading. Just because the film team “got” the page content from one camera does not mean they can revert to it as a patch if they don’t have a beat or line or special shot from the angle the director needs. The frame is part of the communication, not merely the conveyance of it. Here is a controversial statement, but I’m not inviting debate. I know there are cinema sacred cows. I’m just going to say it as I say most things, like I am pulling the pin out of a grenade and throwing it into a room I am not in and running away: I don’t think of Robert Altman as a master, God rest his soul. His back-up director on A Prairie Home Companion Paul Thomas Anderson demonstrates more ambition and facility with the tools of directing in his own films than Altman. To the extent that when I see amusing scene transitions in Short Cuts I am not sure they came from the director. Maybe they were in the script. His more verbal and ramshackle movies, miking even the extras and keeping the coverage loose rather than “manipulating” the audience get by on charming actors, improvisation and subject matter. If you want to see what he is made of watch The Gingerbread Man, a thriller where there is no place to hide – the sort of genre that a director’s director should embrace. Or see Popeye, a movie where realism is not especially helpful. The actors are very game, but the movie is too cluttered. A pair of set-piece moments like the wrestling match and the squid-punching are amusing enough that they might have been shot by a second unit. If an award winning Robert Altman (say Gosford Park with story co-written written by Bob Balaban despite being somewhat stogie) were assigned to Robert Rodriguez to direct with the same cast and budget I have no doubt that Los Hooligan would make the better movie. Altman, however, would not have been able to direct From Dusk Til Dawn. John Carpenter’s Halloween has maintained some status and respect in comparison to the sequels, reboots, remakes and imitators. It plays as formal and elegant. But not without annoying detractors chiming in. There was a Facebook link asking if Halloween is still scary after all these years, on the authority of a screening for ten “Millennials.” If these are people born on or after the millennium, then in the year 2013 they were no older than 13, which may or may not be too young. They can’t be expected to champion their father’s favourites from when he was 13. They are likely to dismiss the shooting style of most films from the seventies and eighties, as opposed to the clean video-game graphics look of a digital movie. It is heartbreaking that some people under 20 don’t realize how inferior the Star Wars prequels are to the original trilogy. But I digress. The truth about the reputation of John Carpenter and late producer co-writer Debra Hill’s Halloween is that the first onslaught of critics got it wrong and then the Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice give the movie proper credit and recognized its Hitchcock homage and the care with which it was made and this caused the other critics to remarkably recant. I don’t want to slam a Toronto International Film Festival programmer, but Cameron Bailie published a smarticle in Now many moons ago trying to retro-spin Halloween and the career of John Carpenter with the idea that Andrew Sarris was wrong and the other critics were brainwashed by him and the movie is really not anything special. The take-away from that is “Cameron Baillie doesn’t like John Carpenter and hates Halloween.” His piece appeared to be written for smug types who have not even seen the film, the most serious cinephiles who can turn the buzz of a great flick into the doldrums of discussion. The official consensus remains that John Carpenter’s Halloween is a well made and entertaining flick. If any outstanding movie happens to occupy the genre ghetto, it has an uphill battle with the “opinions of record.” It is actually a remarkable testimony that so many critics flip-flopped after Andrew Sarris showed them the error of their ways. Halloween had been cited by alarmists and arm-chair politicians looking to scapegoat Hollywood for violence or a puritanical view of women but Carpenter and Debra Hill have repeatedly slapped those assumptions down. The victims of Michael Meyers in this movie get killed because they are not aware and are buy thinking about other distractions. And Jamie Lee Curtis has made the point that in the supposed “exploitation films” she has made in her years as horror “scream queen” her characters were smart and fought back against adversity.