Friday, December 9, 2011
Film Pick of the Day: They Live Midnight at Belcourt
Posted by Jim Ridley on Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 5:03 AM
They Live
Where: The Belcourt
When: Midnight Friday & Saturday
Keep your Goonies, your Swayzes, your Molly Ringwalds: For those of us who endured the ’80s with gritted teeth, no movie captures the surly, is-this-shit-for-real mood of the decade like John Carpenter’s 1988 sci-fi satire — brushed off like dandruff by critics at the time, yet passed around like a secret handshake by the cinephiles at the video store where I worked.
Its premise rivals Invasion of the Body Snatchers as the movies’ greatest all-purpose metaphor for mass hypnosis and the threat of complacency: A brawny drifter (Rowdy Roddy Piper) puts on a pair of shades that lift the veil of a vast alien conspiracy — revealing everything from magazine covers (“CONFORM”) to dollar bills (“THIS IS YOUR GOD”) as weapons of subliminal consumerist indoctrination. While the rest of us sheep STAY ASLEEP and OBEY — Shepard Fairey seized upon the all-caps iconography — Piper literally battles to get others just to look through the damn glasses.
Apart from the director’s reliable widescreen panache, everything about the movie shrieks disrepute: The lead actor is a pro wrestler, the alien makeup would barely pass muster in a “Thriller” flash mob, and the movie’s centerpiece is a fistfight between Piper and skeptical blue-collar comrade Keith David that goes on for an eternal six minutes of screen time.
As always, though, trust a genre movie to kick in the doors where respectable cinema only tiptoes. In fact, consider the scare tactics and action heroics Carpenter’s own smokescreen: How else will a director get studio backing to make a movie that says the powers that be mean to roust the homeless, squelch dissent, keep races at each other’s throats and hoodwink the populace with shiny distractions? Put another way: He made an Occupy Wall Street (or Nashville) movie 23 years ahead of schedule. In the terms of Piper’s immortal catchphrase, Carpenter may be short on bubblegum — but man, does he kick ass.
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love the film. The South Park parody with the Cripple Fight episode was one if the funniest cartoon bits ever if you knew what the guys were paying homage to. This was the film that launched Keith David into the orbit that has him in every hollywood film released from 1990 to 2009. Piper is pure Shakespearean in this opus.
