I was going to write a post about Euclid, thinking that this site was drifting a little bit too far into the foggy territory of a tech blog, and that it would benefit from something more literary, conceptual, perhaps even elegant. But I haven't been able to generate any commentary on Elements that I have found suitably interesting for a context such as this.

So I decided to follow through on a cheaply offered "promise" dating back to the creation of the site: a movie review. Moreover, my mood has not been the best lately, so I have had plenty of time stewing at home to kill in reading books and watching movies.

Accordingly, last night I turned on John Carpenter's Escape from LA. It's playing right now on the Criterion Channel, the streaming service targeted toward movie snobs, but they don't only post stuff that goes over the heads of Marvel fans: to wit, a whole playlist of Carpenter films, i.e. the mastermind of the original Halloween and The Thing.

This is a sequel to the earlier Escape from New York, where, under very similar premises, we are introduced to the iconic cycloptic action hero, Snake Plissken, played by Kurt Russell. In both cases, it's the future, or the "near-future": we aren't in Terminator years yet, but the cities of New York and LA have been turned into open-air prison camps for the degenerates who don't meet the criteria of American moral fiber, according to standards of a Christian theocracy. Here, that form of personalist dictatorship is embodied in a presidential tyrant who looks like a youngish Reagan if you threw a pot of boiling grease at his face and dropped Donald Trump's toupée on his head.

There is much in this sequel that could be termed prescient, though Carpenter's politics have never been too opaque (often to the benefit of his work), and he's repeatedly tapped into the stridenly panicked hatred and paranoia of American culture for "the other" as a character trait and plot point. He probably wouldn't like very much to be credited with "seeing the future," either, which, as Plissken puts it on a torched and destroyed shell of the former Interstate 5: "The future is now."

Indeed, this movie, which is a heck of a lot of fun to watch, is probably too bogged down with being present, while taking place in the future. The first installment in the franchise feels like a much tighter work; it has great performances from Russell, Harry Dean Stanton, and Isaac Hayes; and it works on the level of dystopian thriller/action film. It sticks to its guns as a B genre flick, and as usual Russell elevates the grim and taciturn character of Snake to venerable territory.

Escape from LA, though still invariably buoyed by Russell's charisma and somewhat hard-to-place acting chops, suffers for being 1) a sequel to a story that deserved a single treatment, and 2) an attempt to stuff as many different genres as possible into a single screenplay.

Now, instead of the president himself under threat from the schizos and the junkies and the reds, it's the president's daughter, only she's gone native. After hijacking a presidential aircraft, she escapes to LA, where she is shacking up with a Peruvian look-alike to Che Guevara, who lacks any of the latter's apparent engagement with politics, and instead is a lunatic murderer looking to take over the world using American technology the president's daughter has stolen for him.

Needless to say, his plot is foiled by the ever-resourceful and seemingly impossible-to-kill Snake, who alternates between having people call him Snake and Plissken, depending on how wry he's feeling, and how close they are to taking him out for good.

The plot is liberally salted with tropes from just about every action genre you can think of, from a horseback chase that culminates in a sort of Mexican standoff to the spy movie gear unveiling; small tableaux that satirize various aspects of Hollywood and LA culture are spread throughout, and occasionally warrant a smirk. Steve Buscemi appears as the con man "Map to the Stars" Eddie. Pam Grier reveals herself as the transsexual Hershe, who in her former life was a one-time collaborator of Snake's evocatively named "Carjack" Malone.

When the film's 1h40m runtime expired, I was left feeling not exactly jubilant, but at least amused. Not bored, but not excited, not wanting more, as I have with other Carpenter movies like the aforementioned titles. Still, my virtual love affair with Kurt Russell continues unabated, and my utmost respect for Carpenter, who I rank very highly among living American filmmakers, is not in the least diminished.