I'm biased by my love for this John Carpenter "b-movie" cult (especially for its two most memorable sequences - the spectacles and the fight) but Lethem's work is really brilliant (and I'm looking forward to keep on reading his works) and the start of this new series of books about cinema from Soft Skull is very promising. ( )

Some interesting and often hilarious insights are raised about this minor Carpenter classic. A must read for fans of the film and Carpenter devotees. ( )

Lovingly obsessive & hilarious exploration of a classic B-movie, made me want to write about all my favorite good bad films. Stay for the pun in the last sentence.

QUOTE: "'People are strange when you’re a stranger.' (No one remembers your name, Nada.) Seeing too much means glimpsing the corruptions hidden from ordinary mortals: perhaps, in that case, you’re Sherlock Holmes, uniquely competent to perceive the signs of Moriarty’s evil. The answer, then, is to become a detective. Alternately, you may be, like Miss Lonelyhearts in Nathanael West’s novel of the same name, destroyed by your knowledge of suffering. The alternative to madness, in that case, is art."
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Really, it deserves 5 stars for what it is. It made me reconsider the notorious fight scene which previously had ruined this movie for me. But it was really Zizek's thinking about the fight scene found in this lecture that Lethem just quotes from. (That that event took place at a library sort of makes my day.) Lethem basically punts on this scene, the crux of movie, but he acknowledges it is a litmus test for viewers. ( )

The first of two in a series of new books in which the publisher Soft Skull puts a bunch of film-fan writers to work on films that the film-critic establishment is less likely to spend time with. The other initial book in the series was Christopher Sorrentino's Death Wish, which I read first.

I highly recommend this book. It makes a great companion piece to Lethem's recent novel, Chronic City, as both involve conspiracy-theory-like investigation of works of pop culture that are un(der)acknowledged foundations of modern cultural life. Lethem looks at Carpenter as the auteur he is -- not the big-vision auteur who gets all the establishment-press credit, but the workaday auteur who is an auteur simply because the budget demands it.

Lethem's They Live is written as the movie unfolds, most of its substantial number of mini-chapters aligning with a specific time code (32:07, "The Mad Flaneur"; 42:28, "Not a Cop-Hater as Such"). The absence of full digestion -- it is very much a collection of individual parts -- is what marks this as a "minor" work in Lethem's expansive catalog. But in many ways, that's what makes it one of his biggest successes: (1) because it's less self-conscious of its own ambition, (2) because it's about a work that is "minor" in its own way. The movie They Live is a science fiction tirade against yuppies that uses cheap sunglasses to rip the veil off an alien-robot conspiracy that runs the world. Seriously, that's what it's about. And it stars a professional wrestler, and features one of the longest fist fights in film history. And Lethem watches it with the intensity of a border guard as his annual performance review nears.

He not only spies every little peculiar contradiction, but shows how to make sense of them, or at least how to try to. Is the wrestler character's love interest a spy or a dupe or a mole, and if so, do any of her actions make more or less sense? What does it mean that the alien-robots seem to themselves have a hierarchy -- is their lowest echelon above the humans' highest, or is there some overlap?

In the process, Lethem makes a strong case for the movie's roots in the tradition of Westerns, which here is reduced to near-comic simplicity. The Western gave us the Man with No Name. And here, the hero is simply named Nada.