TCM-ing

I'm going try and update my various maneuverings back here at Termite Art, which I've been painfully neglecting for months now. Perhaps decades. So unless it's too annoying, I'll be linking to my TCM posts every week back here, with valuable additional commentary. This week, I watch John Carpenter's Elvis (1979) on the new Shout Factory! DVD and admire quite a bit of it. Link......here.

The movie's worth it for Kurt Russell's athleticism and Carpenter's roving camera. The script is riddled with pop-psychology and bio-pic cliche (it is a TV-movie, after all), but its plastic beauties are formidable.

List of the week: Most Interesting Faces I've Seen This Year (TM)

1. John's craggy pockmarked visage in Sweetgrass

2. John Travolta: scrunched, goateed cue-ball in From Paris With Love

3. Anne-Laure Meury: inquisitive, radiant, edged with baby fat in The Aviator's Wife

4. Stephen Baldwin: a sagging potato-sack with a five o'clock shadow: Sharks in Venice

5. Dolph Lundgren: hatchet shaped-head, beady eyes, flesh stretched to breaking point: Command Performance

Black Moon Rising (1986)

With an experimental jet car, a craggy wisecracking anti-hero (Tommy Lee Jones as Quint), and Robert Vaughn acting creepy, Black Moon Rising has everything one could ask for in an 80s action cheapie. Released by the scrappy New World Pictures in 1986 (after Roger Corman sold his stake in the company that made Death Race 2000 and Rock 'n' Roll High School), it's a multi-tiered techno-thriller where a filched computer file ends up in the NASA designed dragster, and half of the country's black ops descend upon it, each with their own nefarious design.

Carpenter's touch can be seen in Quint's character, who maintains a preternatural calm throughout, always ready with a dry witticism in the midst of chaos. It's the kind of nihilist Hawksian lead that Carpenter perfected with his series of Kurt Russell films. Director Harley Cokliss doesn't have the same gift for eliciting nuanced performances - Jones seems a touch too distant, almost comatose, even when he's getting his head smashed into a car door or romancing professional carjacker Linda Hamilton.

The punch here isn't in the characters (although there's strong work from Bubba Smith - "Don't fuck with the government"), but in the hurtling plot lines, which contort to fit themselves into ridiculous positions, the speed of the reversals and face-to's shuffling them into some kind of dream-like coherence after a rooftop flight lands smack dab into a mafia shakedown and a nonchalant government spook intervention. As Dave Kehr asked, "Is this the first cubist thriller?"