Carpenter doesn’t have as strict a drop-off as a lot of the others mentioned. Memoirs Of An Invisible Man was terrible, but it’s sandwiched between They Live and In The Mouth Of Madness. I also secretly like Ghosts Of Mars, but I realize I’m in the minority on that one.
Here’s mine: Rob Reiner. It’s like switch went off in his head after Misery.
I remember Peter Bogdanovich’s name was getting thrown around with Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, etc., after What’s Up Doc, Last Picture Show, Targets, and Paper Moon. Pretty much fell off the face of the earth after that.
Yeah, his work really took a dive from American Graffiti to Star Wars.
Oh, and seriously, Richard Kelly. What the hell happened to him post Donnie Darko?
Ain’t that the truth.
Also, here are the names of directors I used to really like but now don’t see their movies anymore, so perhaps they’ve improved but perhaps they continue to…not improve.
Kevin Smith, Cameron Crowe, Alex Proyas.
Not a QT3 movie podcast goes by without someone bemoaning the career path of David Gordon Green.
It’s definitely Carpenter for me. I love pretty much everything from Dark Star to Big Trouble…, and I’ve heard good things about They Live. But in the last 20 years, I only rate Vampires, and even then just as a very silly romp.
You’re also missing out on Prince Of Darkness, which along with Christine is the most under-rated Carpenter movie.
The Boondock Saints to The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day.
That was a fluke. If you doubt that, listen to his commentary for Donnie Darko. The commentary will make you realize that the pseudo-mystic BS in the movie was actually Kelly’s focus and the film being good was just a happy accident of his ineptitude. It turns out that he intended Darko to be more like Southland Tales. It was just the audience’s good fortune that he sucks.
They Live is outstanding.
The Wachowski Brothers. From the Matrix, one of my favorite movies ever, to the sequals and then Speed Racer.
Sequels? What sequels? There were no sequels.
Sorry, I was using obtuse language to point out that the only reason John Connor exists is because Skynet tries to kill him.
If the writers had just made Sarah pregnant to some indeterminate dude on one of her drunken club nights then there would have been no issues, but noooooo, they had to be “clever.”
Good Call. Boondock Saints II was terrible.
Oh GOD yes. Such a sad, sad thing. LOVE Boondock Saints, went WTF for two hours with the sequel. Sigh.
George Lucas was making great, not just good, films before Star Wars. Then with Star Wars he reinvented the sci-fi/fantasy/sfx epic. I don’t see how anyone can plunge farther than that because aside from maybe Orson Welles I don’t think any director ever climbed that high to start with.
And even directors who ended with subpar movies(ie Alfred Hitchcock) ended with ‘meh’ movies at worst. The SW prequels are a circle of hell just as deep as the OT is a high peak.
I was going to say after your T2 bit that we lacked a common vocabulary to have this discussion, but I see that you’ve already been dogpiled over that one so let’s just move on.
Anyway, your example above is the one that gives me the most pain. Early Carpenter was a classic-generating machine, man. The Thing, Halloween, Escape from NY, Big Trouble in Little China - I don’t know how many times I’ve seen those. I’ll agree that his decline wasn’t steep but even the movies made after these that I have enjoyed were much lesser movies. And I absolutely hated Ghosts of Mars and Vampires - if I didn’t know beforehand who made them I would have guessed ‘some random hack.’ I will just stick with the good stuff and forget about the rest.
The director’s cut does an even better job
My current example of this phenomenon is David Gordon Green, who has gone from making really interesting and well-crafted films like George Washington, All The Real Girls and Snow Angels to making, in order: a mildly amusing stoner comedy, a bad medieval spoof and, last year, a really fucking horrid comedy with Jonah Hill as a babysitter.
He needs to fire his agent.
The only movie of Carpenter’s I didn’t hate from his post-In the Mouth of Madness catalog is Cigarette Burns, which while not great, was at least interesting. The Ward is the film that makes me the saddest. What an excruciating pile of crap! The acting isn’t good, the plot is dumb, (featuring the stupidest twist since Shutter Island) and the directing is listless and boring. Just an overall tragic film.
Why would you expect a serious sci-fi movie from any Terminator film? I also consider T1 the best in the series, but a serious sci-fi movie? Not by any stretch of the imagination. And people can go on and on about the time paradox stuff in T2, but that ship had already sailed in T1 when Kyle turned out to be John’s father.
I don’t like it, because of what it COULD have been. It’s “shit” because it destroyed what I consider a great franchise.
It wasn’t really a “franchise” when there was only one movie. T2 is not as mean and lean as T1, but it’s still a great action movie that follows up on the original exceptionally well. The greatest part of T2 is the fact that the characters are wrong about what they’re doing. The future is set in the Terminator films. It already happened. Nothing they do can change anything, and anything they do has already happened in John Connor’s Future War timeline. Everything in T2 always happened, they just didn’t know it.
The strange outside-of-the-time-loop situation with Skynet creating itself was weird, and turned out to be unanswered and a horrendous dangling plot thread, but that’s the fault of the godawful sequels that refused to explore that aspect (and ignored the rules of time travel established in the first two films by allowing the timeline to change), not T2.