I have come to chew bubblegum, and kick ass

I love this: starting on Labor Day Monday, BAM is screening four cult classics by the director John Carpenter. He's probably still best known for the original Halloween, but the four films at BAM are from the 80s, and for Carpenter buffs and lovers of old school bad-ass-motherfucker movies, the kind that aren't made nowadays without a heavy dose of irony mixed in, these are beloved modern classics. Carpenter is from the last age of independent filmmakers who made true b-movies: this set of sci-fi action flicks, "gotcha!" monster movies and westerns remade in modern times all have a genuine social message hidden behind the bloody fist fights and sneering catch phrases--well, all of them except Big Trouble in Little China, that's just trashy good fun. Please, go see at least one of these: three of them starring Kurt Russell, the DeNiro to Carpenter's Scorsese (or, if you're really pretentious, the Mifune to his Kurosawa): Escape From New York (absolutely, my favorite New York movie that, as far as I know, has no actual footage shot in the city), The Thing (still fucking scary) and the aforementioned Big Trouble. The fourth, They Live, stars Rowdy Roddy Piper, (and he's great) and if you don't know the rest of his classic line in the title of this post, I don't want to ruin it for you.