Harry Dean Stanton Archives | Deep Focus Review

Christine

Brian Eggert — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 15:04:44 +0000

Few names deserve a place over the title of a Stephen King adaptation. John Carpenter’s is one of them. The director made Christine in 1983 from the source novel published earlier that year, and the resulting film balances both creative voices. The adaptation reflects some of King’s signature themes: horror rooted in high school trauma, possession (hotels, animals, and inanimate objects), and the entrenched psychology of his characters. But Carpenter’s production reimagines the book for the screen, transforming the titular killer car from a vessel for a maligned spirit into a faceless, unknowable threat—an abyss of evil that reflects and distorts its driver. When an engine revs over the opening credits, unaccompanied by music, it distills Carpenter’s ambiguous intent. The filmmaker embraces the terror of the unknown and the implication of evil, relying less on exposition than powerful images to tell his story. More than the particulars of the screenplay’s adaptation, Carpenter knows the classic car’s presence is powerful and can instill terror because it warps a familiar image from Americana into something unknowable and twisted. Blending Carpenter’s and King’s sensibilities, Christine idles at the crossroads where two horror masters converge. The full review is currently exclusive to Patreon subscribers. […]

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Paris, Texas

Brian Eggert — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 12:30:23 +0000

After walking through desolate valleys, driving across empty highways, and navigating the claustrophobic indifference of Houston’s skyscrapers, the long journey in Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas reaches its destination in a peep show called The Keyhole Club. Inside, a husband and wife, estranged for several years, sit opposite each other, separated by a one-way mirror. They talk by phone in a scene recalling a visitor to a prison. But it’s not the wife, the object of the peep show, in prison; it’s the husband, whose failure to process his wife’s autonomy sent him spiraling. Wenders shoots the husband’s distanced, third-person retelling of the marriage’s explosion in a long, eviscerating monologue, aided by the poetry of Sam Shepard’s words, exquisite compositions by cinematographer Robby Müller, and a career-best performance by Harry Dean Stanton. Part confession, part apology, the speech supplies an overwhelming emotional release after two hours of silence, pain, and searching. With the film earning Wenders notoriety that elevated his status as an international auteur, including the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1984, Paris, Texas goes beyond the wandering, existential uncertainties and unresolved tensions of the director’s career to this point. It transcends his usual road movie archetypes […]

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The Green Mile

Brian Eggert — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 03:12:56 +0000

The Green Mile finds writer-director Frank Darabont operating in two modes, that of a sentimentalist and an unyielding cynic. Darabont has given us stirring examples of each mode. In the former, he explored hopeful stories such as The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Majestic (2001), whereas his latter mode isolated and confronted his audience with The Mist (2007), an unforgettably grim horror picture. But his 1999 film, one of Darabont’s many adaptations of a Stephen King text, finds an uncommon balance between his occasional Capra-esque optimism and his capacity for bitter despair. Many have censured The Green Mile for its more earnest scenes and the limited characterization of its sole black character, and while I wrestle to defend the film against such critiques, I must acknowledge that the power of its drama is immersive and moves me. More compelling, however, is Darabont’s willingness to present the story as another feel-good prison film, but instead, he delivers a saddening tale of spiritual uncertainty. Far less uplifting than his other maudlin efforts, The Green Mile is a film of extreme poles, comfortably pleasant in one moment and appallingly cruel the next. Though it might have been reduced to a mushy, touching crowd-pleaser, […]

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Wild at Heart

Brian Eggert — Sun, 17 Jan 2016 06:00:27 +0000

David Lynch achieves combustible, grotesque poetry in Wild at Heart, the director’s highly divisive film from 1990. This Bonnie and Clyde-esque road movie and love story features Nicolas Cage as a criminal Elvis wannabe and Laura Dern as his sexpot goddess. On the run from authorities and anyone else who would stop them, the rebellious pair drives through Lynch’s fantasyland of incendiary violence, rabid sex, and references to The Wizard of Oz—the lot of it described best by Dern’s character: “This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.” A strange blend of goofy humor and frighteningly dark situations, Wild at Heart reeks with the smell of cigarettes, sexual abandon, bloody violence, bad teeth, and vomit. Based on Barry Gifford’s 1989 novel of the same name, Lynch freely adapted the film into something else entirely, a fusion of extreme light and dark put through the director’s surreal perspective. And yet, it remains one of Lynch’s most undervalued and misunderstood pictures. Before Lynch began work on Wild at Heart, he entered perhaps the highest, most commercially successful period in his career, where he was lauded as a proverbial Renaissance Man. Blue Velvet (1986) had opened to mixed reviews but instant […]

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Escape from New York

Brian Eggert — Sun, 02 Aug 2015 00:00:52 +0000

In 1981, New York City was not the beacon of hope and American unity post-9/11 society has raised it up to be; rather, violent urban dramas such as Death Wish (1974) and Taxi Driver (1976) reflected the city’s turbulence. Mob violence, street gangs, prostitution, rape, and drugs overwhelmed the troubled metropolis. Murder rates grew with each passing year. More than 120,000 robberies were committed that year, and over 2,100 murders. By comparison, there were only 328 murders in 2014. A mob-related trash strike left rotting waste on the streets, leaving refuse to fester and stink. During this year, John Carpenter released Escape from New York, an urban Western in which the island of Manhattan has been transformed into a maximum-security prison surrounded by 50-foot walls and mined bridges. New York City has always subsisted as a world unto itself, but Carpenter extends that idea into a frightening science-fiction concept. His film comments on how the New York of 1981 has isolated itself to such an extreme that walls, both metaphoric or literal, enclose its inhabitants within the crime-ridden sprawl, itself a symbol for all of America. In a bleak and nihilistic future, Carpenter explores a world in which the American Dream has […]

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The Last Stand

Brian Eggert — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 06:00:30 +0000

In The Last Stand, Sommerton Junction sits on an old forgotten Arizona road a few hundred miles south of Las Vegas, just before entering Mexico. This sleepy border town populated with quaint folk is surrounded by farms and desert. But there’s a plague on the terrain: deadly plot holes drain all plausibility from the land and its inhabitants, making suspension of disbelief all but impossible. It’s any wonder how Sommerton Junction residents survive from day to day, given that all reality, even loosely applied movie logic, seems to have been sucked into these surrounding fissures. But then, one best not look for credibility in an action flick starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Action movies and Schwarzenegger—two components that should immediately reset your expectations for something more blockheaded than your average Hollywood film. After becoming California’s governor in 2003, Schwarzenegger’s action hero career went on hiatus to serve his political ambitions. Now that his terms of office are over as of 2011, Schwarzenegger is back—as he so frequently noted in films like The Terminator and The Running Man—although not in any memorable way. He’s made cameo appearances in The Expendables and its sequel, but The Last Stand represents his first starring role in […]

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Red Dawn

Brian Eggert — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 05:00:58 +0000

Cold War paranoia and Reagan-era politics set the stage for John Milius’ Red Dawn, the Brat Pack-starrer from 1984 whose aggressive makings dream up a scenario of right-wing extremist and NRA fanfare. Much like the director and co-writer’s primitive yet strangely evocative handling of Robert E. Howard for Conan the Barbarian (1982), Milius takes macho, potentially hammy, certainly nationalist material and imbues it with grave importance. As a result, contemporary audiences may be baffled or altogether bemused by the film’s none-so-subtle political makeup and find the experience unintentionally comical at times. As a piece of film history, however, Red Dawn not only helps define the pervasive sociopolitical climate of mid-’80s but also marks the official debut of the MPAA’s restrictive PG-13 rating after a summer of questionably violent titles. Once the modern viewer transports themselves into the film’s era of origin, it’s not difficult to imagine its impact and therein grasp its staying power as a cult favorite. “NATO dissolves and the United States stands alone.” Quick titles like this one hammer out the broad strokes leading to World War III, wherein Cuba, Nicaragua, and The Soviet Union make up the communist Axis of Evil invading the U.S. in the […]

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Alien

Brian Eggert — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 04:19:13 +0000

Visionary and terrifying, Ridley Scott’s Alien hybridized the horror and science-fiction genres in 1979 to effectively launch a new subgenre, and countless clones have since borrowed from its DNA. Space-aged operatics and laser battles have no place in this imaginatively designed film, whose mounting tension still contains fearsome intensity and whose visual ambitions still evoke awe. Scott’s artistry elevates the material with his majestic frames of industrial machinery drifting through space, debris-swept planetoids, and a ruined alien ship, contrasted by a close-quarters spacecraft setting and empty corridors packed with claustrophobic fright. The film’s suspense builds with measured steps until it reaches wrenching, unbearable proportions, wrought by H.R. Giger’s alien design and its arousal of penetrative psychosexual dread. Scott’s deliberate pacing prolongs our fear of the Unknown by staving off the alien’s arrival as long as possible, while our curiosity and growing fear gradually drives us mad; and when the monster is revealed with mere hints that defy precise description, its shadowy manifestations reserve the alien an eternal place in our nightmares. Of course, Alien was not the first film about a killer creature from space, nor was it the first haunted house-type story in which characters are hunted down and […]

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Rango

Brian Eggert — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:00:49 +0000

Rango is a cineaste’s delight, a rare example of how filmmakers can take inspiration from earlier classics and still put together something that doesn’t feel derivative. After tackling swashbucklers with his Pirates of the Caribbean films, director Gore Verbinski and his production company Blind Wink rearrange another classic genre, the Western, into a creative, sometimes surreal animated adventure. The film, gorgeously realized by special FX company Industrial Light + Magic (their first full-length animated feature), has brilliant colors that are only matched by the enthusiasm of the storytelling, which could be called anything from “arty” to “completely bonkers”. But this curious and delightful mixture of movie adoration and escapist entertainment is anything but typical. Johnny Depp voices the title character, a philosophizing, nameless pet chameleon who, born to assimilate with his surroundings, embarks on an existential journey into the desert to find himself. Before long, he’s playing the role of a mysterious Western hero named Rango. He earns himself a sheriff’s badge in a dusty town called Dirt, whose water has all but dried up. The townsfolk, including a lizard love interest, named Beans (voice of Isla Fisher), look up to their new lawman to protect their remaining water reserves. […]

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