THAS ANNEX

4th September 2010

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Stephen Sondheim: Songs I Wish I'd Written (At Least in Part) →

Stephen Sondheim lists brilliant musical theater he didn’t write.

It’s always nice to recognize brilliance that isn’t canonized or reputed for brilliance, like a superior B-side on a single’s EP, or the “What’s the Use of Wond’rin’” to the “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in a Richard Rogers’ Carousel, or any of those superlative songs Sondheim listed from musicals few have heard of.  It’s a bit depressing that striking works inevitably get pushed into obscurity if a reputation or an in-built command of its medium aren’t forged or perceived by the wider audience from the get-go.

But at least with movies, a covert omnipresence is always in the cards. On that note, watched Michael Wadleigh’s WOLFEN on the home video last night and it is quite the “thinking-man’s” horror film that Wadleigh professed, and as it has conjured a modest recognition for being.  More than that, it is a thoroughly Rousseauian “Discourse on Origin” and on our progressive (in both senses of the word) social destruction.

Despite neither Wadleigh nor the material having the high-art pretense and poetry-mindedness of Malick (and it shows ultimately), the film communicates almost as effectively (and perhaps more intelligently) the great divide between the state of Nature and the societies of now as THE NEW WORLD.  While Malick looks at compromised love in the face of New World sea change, WOLFEN takes a very political angle and looks at the in-reality always-compromised power of everything from the establishment, to insurgent groups and corporate (and flatfoot) dicks in the face of Old World vicious-ass super-wolves.

On Hooper: Actually, I watched this film because Hooper mentioned it as a script he turned down, along with PIRANHA.  It would be foolish to presume reasons why he would turn down directing WOLFEN, both in credit and discredit to him, but I do find it too bad Hooper never put it upon himself to direct a “message film.”  To tie this in to the Sondheim article, this is the “Film I Wish He’d Directed.”  Wadleigh and Carpenter may not have the directorial purple of Hooper, but the strength of their genre film sermons and the undeniable effect of WOLFEN’s “sense of preach” (it was like I was watching Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians all over again) did make me wish Hooper had as strongly proactive and pointed of a social consciousness.  Even The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a largely apolitical film in most senses, despite its conception as a social response made aesthetic.  Hooper’s Ministerial laffs in Lifeforce are offhand and sly, the cultural critique of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 vivid if slight, and the nuclear age critique in Spontaneous Combustion is amplified nicely by its central drama, but neither expand the social senses in the way a film like this or Carpenter’s They Live attempts.

RIGHT-ON REVIEWS: Ferdy on Films on WOLFEN, Film Freak Central on WOLFEN

Tagged: John CarpenterMichael WadleighStephen SondheimTobe HooperWolfenpotpourri